“Ah, Helen, you are so good to me.” He was talking now with a mouth full of the juicy pink meat. “You must of course keep my alpenstock.”
After cleaning the kitchen, she laid out carefully for him the clothing he had worn when he first appeared. She tucked him in for the night.
“Helen, my lovely goddess,” he murmured, half asleep. “I will miss you.”
“Sleep well, my sweet. You have a difficult journey tomorrow.”
At dawn they struck out together on the fire road. At the top of the hill near the oak tree, they started down the overgrown path. They trampled through the brush arm-inarm. She steadied her steps with the alpenstock clasped in her right hand.
Halfway down the hill, they were enveloped in whirling fog. She laid the alpenstock on the ground, removed the box from the pocket of her khakis, and gave it to him.
“Goodbye, Franz. I love you. I release you. Go in peace, and compose your exquisite music.” She kissed him on his cheek.
“Goodbye, Helen, and God bless you. You have been a marvelous cousin to me.” But his voice was already breaking off. He had turned away, and was peering into the distance. She clutched his arm. Then, in an instant, she realized there was only empty air in her hand. He was no longer there. Where was he?
She remained behind alone in that waste and welter of which she was so terrified. The fog was so thick that she could see only inches in front of her. Was that a mountain lion crashing behind her in the brush? She grabbed the alpenstock and ran, panic-stricken, up the hill. Thistles stung her ankles. Why hadn’t she thought to ask the rebbe for protection from wild animals? Would this adventure end in her own death scream?
The sun appeared, and she could see the top of the hill. She sprinted up the slope. At the summit along the edge of the fire road, she paused, panting. Her legs wobbled under her, and she collapsed on the ground. She wailed, a long and heartrending “Ahhhh, Franz, Franz,” as disconsolate as a keener at an Irish wake. Her lament reverberated in the canyon, until it was sucked into the muffling fog below, and died out.
She laid the alpenstock on her lap, and fingered its handle carved with an intricate design of oak leaves. The next moment, she spotted an athletic man probably in his fifties, with a barbered gray beard, walking briskly on the fire road. He was dressed in black sweats and New Balance running shoes. Waving his hand, he hallooed.
“Good morning. Do you live in this neck of the woods? My name is Russ Massoth. I just bought that house over there”—he pointed toward the main road.
She stood up, balancing on the alpenstock.
“Why, yes, I do,” she managed to reply, although the words were halting and inarticulate. She wondered if her face was wrinkled and puffy.
“That’s an interesting walking stick. It reminds me of a curio handed down in my own family.”
“It’s an antique, from Vienna, I think.”
“Well then, we have two things in common already. Could you introduce me to this incredible scenery? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Helen Bramer. Yes, I can show you a beautiful trail.”
She set off by his side, and their talk was slow and cautious, places they had been, seas they wished to sail.
Perhaps Reb Mendel had included extra Hebrew letters in his blessing, just for her.
“Thank you, rebbe,” she whispered under her breath.
GaGa’s Piano
I
THREE IN THE MORNING, in mid-June. Patricia startled awake. Two-and-half-year-old Kayla, the daughter of Patricia’s niece, Jessica, was screaming, “GaGa, GaGa!” Patricia had put the child down for the night in the crib installed by her husband Scott in a corner of the guest bedroom adjacent to their own. This room was already furnished with a twin bed, and there had been long discussions of whether the child was ready to sleep in it. So far she had not climbed out of the crib. Patricia stumbled out of bed, hurried into the guest room, and switched on the light.
“GaGa, scary bear get Kay-ya.” The child was standing up, gripping the bars of the crib. “Where’s the bear, honey?” Sobbing, Kayla pointed to the bed. Patricia tiptoed over and grunted as she pretended to pick up a heavy object.
“OK, sweetheart, I’ve caught him, I’ll take him outside, where he can sleep with his bear family.” She stepped into the hallway and walked to the front door, making a great noise of opening and closing it. She doubled back to Kayla’s room. The child was now sitting up, her back wedged against the bars of the crib. She sucked her thumb and whimpered.
“All gone,” Patricia cooed, as she petted the child’s head, laid her gently on her back, and covered her with a pink polka-dot plush blanket. Kayla sank immediately into the serene slumber of toddlerhood.
Patricia returned to the four-poster marital bed. Scott lay awake under the star-pattern Amish quilt. He cuddled next to her, and after a few moments, murmured,
“Patti darling, I know we’ve talked about this before, but honestly you seem to love this kid more than anyone else, maybe even more than you love me. You know she’s not your responsibility. You’re not her mother or her grandmother.”
Patricia blinked back tears. “I think it’s that I always wanted children, and it never happened. And she just seems to love me the most. I feel so close to this child, whose sweet mother wanted me to see her baby born.”
Scott fondled her hair and kissed her on the lips. “I love you more than my life. But I’m telling you to be careful not to cross an emotional line. It’s not your job to raise her. She may as well live here, the amount of time we baby-sit.”
She trusted his judgment, and sensed his concern, or was it a tinge of anger? She wanted to please him, to be a good wife—it had been so long before God had blessed her with a good husband, through the intercession, she was convinced, of her favorite saint, Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things. Of course Scott must come first in her affections, in her life. She wondered if he was right, if she was too involved in Kayla’s upbringing.
II
As the mythical Mother Goose clucked over her brood, so the fifty-five-year-old childless Patricia fussed over her piano students. On three days a week during the school year, after finishing her day-job in a county government office, she gave half-hour piano lessons to children from four to seven o’clock in the spacious prairie-style home she shared with Scott in a new development in Spencerville, Illinois. The last census had reported a population of one hundred thousand, the largest township in downstate farm country.
A typical scene would unfold. A seventh-grade girl trudged along the sidewalk on an April afternoon, reaching Patricia’s driveway ten minutes before the five o’clock lesson time. The girl would open the unlocked side door, tiptoe inside, and sit on the floral damask sofa in the living room. In the music room, a boy, age nine, hunched over the keys of the 1922 Steinway grand. Patricia’s encouraging words floated over the halting notes, many of them botched, of a Clementi sonatina. “Better than last week but you need to practice more.”
The girl might leaf through her assigned score, a movement from a Mozart sonata, or stare out the window at the piebald cat stalking a sparrow near the bird feeder. She would repeat to herself the excuses for why she had not practiced enough that week. Her mother constantly pointed out that the charming Taiwanese girl who lived down the block had more discipline, and why couldn’t her daughter do as well? And then it was the girl’s turn to enter the sanctum of the music room. Thank goodness this section was adagio because her fingers were not nearly agile enough for the passages marked allegro. When the half hour was over, she stared at the ivory keys of the piano, too flustered to look at her teacher.
Patricia smiled. She removed her bifocals, letting them dangle from a red neck cord.
“For next week, sight read the third movement very slowly. Set the metronome at sixty. And promise you’ll practice at least a half hour every day.”
The girl, studying the planks of the oak floor, mumbled, “Yes, ma’am.”
/>
“Good, and don’t forget, the final recital is only six weeks away. You are progressing splendidly. You’ll be a star performer.”
Patricia had the magic touch with all her pupils, especially the shy ones. Year after year, her students won honors at Festival, the annual Illinois state piano competition. In some way she articulated only vaguely, imparting European classical music to new generations had become an all-absorbing vocation.
The oxymoronic phrase “pop culture” irritated her. This deluge of inane images and sounds resembled a toxic sludge surging toward a pristine sanctuary, smashing through doors and windows and burying the interior in mud and offal. She constructed a sturdy barricade to keep undisturbed her tidy corner of the tradition, and she looked forward to her scheduled retirement in five years, a modest pension, and the leisure to expand her roster of students.
III
Both sides of Patricia’s family, the Hills and the Browns, had settled in Spencerville generations ago. There were no frills in her childhood home. Her mother was a devout daily-rosary Catholic who shepherded her two daughters to Saturday confession and Sunday Mass, and placed them in the parish grade school. Little Patti had obvious musical ability, and there had been piano lessons with a woman who had a music degree from Sacred Heart, the local Catholic liberal arts college. At the request of this woman, the college allowed the girl access to a practice room, as the family could not afford to buy even a bargain-priced used spinet. At twelve, she already could play from memory and with strong technique the Beethoven Appassionata and Pathetique sonatas. Two years later, the lessons were abruptly dropped. Her father was floundering in his job selling plumbing supplies over a tri-state territory, and money was tight. Patricia graduated from her parish grade school, but then her parents enrolled her in the tuition-free public high school, a middling place catering to average students. Her sister Linda, four years younger, was yanked out of the Catholic school after the fourth grade, and the next eight years she attended public school.
For those four high school years Patricia wandered in a wasteland, dreaming about music, humming the polyphonic melodies, fluttering her fingers in the air pretending to play. The college practice room was still available, but without a teacher her former strict daily regimen atrophied to an occasional half-hour of haphazard sight-reading. At the end of her senior year, as if through a miracle of St. Anthony, she found her lost music. On the strong recommendation of that early piano teacher, Sacred Heart gave her a full scholarship to study piano, though she had bungled the audition.
IV
Mother Beata, a Benedictine nun, the head of the music department of ten instructors and forty students, took Patricia in hand. No tender mercies, but a rigorous gladiatorial boot camp. The teenager was thrown immediately into the arena, daily piano lessons, accompanist to the choral students, and public solo recital performances.
“You must practice, practice, practice, no excuses, my dear, your talent is a gift from God, use it for His glory.” The martinet nun could have been a twelfth-century Hildegard exhorting a postulant.
At the Easter recital in the college concert hall, filigreed with Baroque marble cupid heads and furnished with maroon velvet chairs, two minutes into the ten-minute Chopin Scherzo Number 2, Patricia flubbed an intricate arpeggio run. She panicked, stood up, and almost tripping over the Jansen bench, wobbled backstage. A frowning Mother Beata barred her way.
“I can’t remember it,” said Patricia, gasps convulsing her chest.
No coddling from the fierce nun, who barked at her, “You must remember it. Now pull yourself together, go back out there, and play it.”
As if in a trance, Patricia glided back to the Steinway grand, sat down, began over again, and played the piece all the way through.
As a seemingly dead plant, its leaves brittle and brown from drought, can spring forth green and lush when finally the gentle rains come, so Patricia flourished. There was another reason, too, for throwing herself into practice. Things at home were awry. Linda, only sixteen, was pregnant and had disappeared for four months to give birth at a Catholic unwed mothers’ home in the countryside. The baby boy had been spirited into the labyrinth of sealed secret adoptions, no questions asked, no information given. Patricia’s mother was more obsessed than ever with Catholicism, and her father simply stayed away, supposedly working his sales routes, though his commissions were minuscule.
After three years, Mother Beata’s frown brightened into the beatific smile implied by her name. She sent her protégée to Chicago to audition for entrance into the American Conservatory of Music. Patricia was awarded a full scholarship, and her instructor was to be Miss Florence Abbott, a Juilliard graduate who had studied with a world-famous Russian-Jewish émigré. Patricia’s stipend included full room and board at the Three Arts Club, an all-female rooming house catering to young women studying the arts, an easy ten-minute ride on the “L” to the Conservatory.
And now Patricia’s professional training began. Piano lessons took place in a bare room furnished with a Steinway vertical under a fluorescent-lit ten-foot ceiling, on the far side a milk-glass tilt turn window looking out on an alleyway, a steam radiator clanking out heat on the wall near the door. The muffled sounds of students drilling scales in a maze of identical practice rooms permeated the air. To her the place seemed a humanist villa in Fiesole, the walls frescoed with scenes of the Muses, the windows revealing a landscape of cypress trees and olive groves.
Patricia would sit rigidly on the piano bench, with Miss Abbott sitting just behind. Sometimes the older woman would stand up and splay her own lined and blue-veined virtuoso hands over the young woman’s smooth pink apprentice hands. Then she would step to the side. Meeting Patricia’s eyes and touching her gray hair braided into a bun, and then her heart, her arms and her fingertips, she coaxed her protégée in a soft hypnotic voice, as from some virginal ethereal realm.
“My sweet, pay close attention, music comes from God, to our intellect, thence to our heart, to our arms, to our hands, out to our fingertips, to the keys of this sublime instrument.”
Then she raised her thin arms, palms outward, in a priestly blessing. “You must engage your mind fully, you must concentrate, you must practice daily many, many hours. Learn one Bach fugue, analyze it thoroughly, note by note, each note exactly as the great man composed it, as God dictated the notes to him.”
The pupil sat with rapt attention, absorbing every precious word from this God-sent mentor. Miss Abbott continued her homily.
“The master crafted each piece with meticulous workmanship, in perfect Pythagorean ratios, the music of the spheres. If you unriddle a single Bach fugue, you will internalize its structure. You will learn easily all the rest of Bach, and all the rest of Music. Commit every detail to memory and then play spontaneously.”
Patricia was determined to please this woman, who was somehow more than mortal, who seemed a fairy godmother with a white-magic wand of protection and guidance. She wished this idyll never to end: thrice-weekly morning lessons with Miss Abbott, choral conducting class on the other two weekday mornings, every afternoon the cocoon of focused practice, on Sunday afternoons a private piano recital to perform or a ten-voice chorus to conduct.
The occasional brief trips home to Spencerville alarmed her. At dinner, her mother obsessively catalogued her objections to the Vatican II changes, and complained about the naughty grade school children to whom she attempted to teach catechism on Saturday mornings. Her father was silent, his mouth set in numb fury. Linda’s permanent expression was a noncommittal smirk. Her necklines were low, revealing D-cup cleavage, and her miniskirts exposed her thighs all the way up to her panties. Everyone was relieved because she had landed a secure secretarial job with the county, but there were inklings that she was bar-hopping and hanging out with a wild crowd.
Patricia graduated with a bachelor’s degree, a piano major and choral conducting minor. Her family did not attend the ceremony as the trip was too expensive, what wi
th the high price of gas and the prohibitive cost of a Chicago hotel. The dean’s office found her a one-room walkup in a greystone in Lincoln Park.
V
Now Patricia cobbled together a frugal bohemian life for seven years, teaching music in a Catholic girls’ elementary school and finding ad-hoc venues in which to perform for pittance fees, a small-town girl struggling to make good in the metropolis.
At a chamber music recital at the Chicago Cultural Center, the program Mozart and Brahms piano quartets, a man twenty years older introduced himself and asked her out. He was a junior partner in a family investment firm, already an income beneficiary of a grandfather’s trust. His was a world of chef-prepared and servant-ministered formal sit-down dinners in Gold Coast high-rises, opening nights at the Lyric Opera, and charity galas at the Art Institute. In spite of his family’s opposition, he proposed marriage, promising to finance Patricia’s musical career. She accepted, though the ceremony would not be officiated by a priest. It was all so much a fairy tale, and she the Cinderella. Two weeks after her beau placed a five-carat diamond on the ring finger of her left hand, an anonymous unstamped letter slid under her front door revealed his ongoing dalliances with two other women. She returned the ring and backed out of the wedding. In the confessional an elderly Irish priest told her in an oracular brogue that God had rescued her, that this unblessed union would have consigned her to Hell, certainly in this life, and very possibly in the next. Though she realized the priest was right, still she wept into her pillow every night.
Four months later Patricia’s father was incapacitated by a stroke. In Spencerville it was expected that unmarried daughters would live with and nurse their parents in old age. Linda had married and established a home with her husband Reese. So Patricia moved back to Spencerville and settled into her old attic bedroom.
Curious Affairs Page 13