The Mozart Season

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Her voice,” David said. “She can’t do her eeee-eeee-eeee if there’s any residual fat in the air.” He made loud, high sounds, like a giant mouse.

  “David, that’s exactly what your father meant,” Mommy said. She looked at me, partly as if she wanted me to help, and partly as if she wanted to prevent something from coming loose.

  * * *

  Mr. Kaplan was pleased with the way the concerto was going. He got out his violin a few times and we played parts of the concerto together. We listened to the copy he’d kept of the tape we’d made in the winter. “Already in February you were in teamwork with the music,” he said. “That was wonderful. For the preliminaries. Now we’re ready to begin the hard part. It’s no longer just the right notes in the right dynamics at the right time, Allegra,” he said. He turned sideways on the piano bench. “It’s time to start making the concerto your own song.”

  I looked at him. I didn’t even have all the notes exactly memorized.

  “It’s like this, Allegra,” he said. He held up both hands, about a foot apart. “Here’s Mozart, over here. He has his concerto with him. And here you are, over here. See the distance between you? It’s a fact. There are more than two hundred years. And there’s all that ocean. And his mind and your mind. We’re going to start moving them closer together. See?” He started moving his hands very, very slowly through the air. “We’re going to bring them as close together as we can.” He put his hands down on his knees. “That’s what we’re gonna do.”

  I looked at the places where his hands had been. Music poured out of Mozart. It wasn’t automatic or anything, nobody’s mind does it automatically. He had to find the notes in his mind and put them in order, but he just poured them out.

  Mr. Kaplan put his hands up again. This time he brought them so close there wasn’t even an inch between them. “We’re going to get to the point where there’s just an edge. The place where you and Mozart and his concerto meet. That’s the edge we want. As little air space as we can manage. We’re gonna try to close the distance.” He looked at the little space between his hands. Then he put them down again and looked up at me. “How’re you holding up?”

  “I’m holding up fine,” I said. Joel Smirnoff was smiling in the photograph on the desk.

  “Good. Because we’ve just begun. Do you like this concerto?”

  I decided to come right out with the question that had bothered me. “Mr. Kaplan, why didn’t you tell me sooner that I’d made the finals?” I was maybe even angry. “In fact, when you first gave me the concerto. At the very beginning. You knew there was this competition. I want to know why I was the last person to find out.”

  “So. You have been concerned, haven’t you?”

  I nodded my head. “When did you find out I was a finalist?”

  He looked at me over his half-glasses and waited for a little while. “Not so long before I told you. Not so very long, Allegra.”

  Not so very long. It was getting through to me. “My parents knew and everything, then. A long time before I found out.”

  “Allegra, you had school to finish up. The softball team … Those play-offs you were in…”

  For the whole last six weeks of school I’d been mostly a walking softball uniform. The school was counting on us, and in the mornings the intercom kept reciting the results of our games into all the rooms, and they made it seem like the most important thing in the world. And there were final exams. Jessica and Sarah and I had very hard ones in our classes. “But even at the beginning. You didn’t say, ‘If you choose the Fourth Concerto you’ll be entering the Bloch Competition—but if you choose the Third, you won’t, because the Competition concerto is Number Four.’”

  “Indeed. Yes.” He folded his hands together, then spread them out flat on his lap. “I didn’t tell you you might make the Bloch play-offs.” He waited for me to laugh, and I did, just a little bit. “My dear, it’s this way. First, I know too much about what happens when young musicians are forced into competition. Imagine how you’d have felt, trying to prepare this concerto for the finals if you were all the time wishing you were playing a different concerto. And second, once you selected this concerto, if I’d told you right then about the competition, you’d have learned it differently. Don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I want you first to love the music. Then compete.”

  “But it’s the same concerto.”

  “No. If I’d given it to you and said, ‘Listen, Allegra, you will play this concerto in competition in exactly so-and-so months,’ it would not be the same concerto in your hands.”

  I looked at him and thumbed the strings of my violin with my right hand. It’s a sort of nervous habit I have.

  “And your softball is very important to you, too, is it not?”

  I glimpsed myself a few weeks before, running to practice, running from practice, studying geography and English and math and everything else for finals, and my parents making me sit down and eat dinner with the whole family almost every single night “because we are a family, we’re not just four random people running in and out of the same house,” as my father said. And I glimpsed myself stretching to catch a fly in one game that made the winning out and hearing everybody yelling “Shapiro!” over and over again, and I remembered half the time having dust everywhere on me, in my ears and my hair, and the other half taking showers and hearing my whole body getting squeaky clean, and always being so tired. Tired. All the time. “It was important. It was important then.”

  “Indeed. And Mozart was resting then. Now he’s getting his turn. Things in their seasons, Allegra.” His eyebrows arched. “This is the Mozart season.”

  I nodded my head a little bit.

  “I want you and the concerto to be in partnership first. Only then can we bring you close to Mozart. A general partnership of good feeling first. Then we close the distance. Is that clear?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well,” he laughed, “good. Because I’m not convinced it’s clear to me. These things are hard to explain, you know.”

  “I know.” I laughed.

  “Remember what somebody said: Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Let’s play. Which movement?”

  “Let’s do the first,” I said. I wanted to try this Closing the Distance from the beginning.

  He stopped me at letter E. “Allegra, I want you to try something this week. I want you to play this whole movement just as boldly as you can. I want you to say, ‘ME: Allegra Shapiro. I’M playing this concerto.’ I want you to jump right into it. Let’s see what that accomplishes.”

  “Okay,” I said. We started it again.

  At the end of my lesson, Mrs. Kaplan brought in chocolate-chip cookies. She calls the treats Endorphin Therapy. “These are to give you the strength to get home, dear,” she said. She has gray hair and a soft double chin. The Endorphin Therapy was a joke, of course, but I was glad to have the extra strength, even if it would just be for the cadenzas.

  * * *

  I changed the sheets on my bed for Deirdre. I put on the ones with the music notation. You can read parts of The Magic Flute on them. Mommy and Daddy gave them to me for my eleventh birthday, last year. I dusted everything I could reach, the lampshades and everything, because Deirdre is allergic. Jessica had brought me a Chinese doll all the way from Hong Kong when we were nine years old, and I even dusted that. And I took a box of things to the music room. My pajamas and my clipboard and things.

  Deirdre’s airplane was late. She was coming from Aspen, Colorado. She was singing there at a festival. While we waited, Daddy kept us occupied by making us guess things he already knew. How many daily newspapers are published in New York? Twenty-three. How many of them aren’t in English? Thirteen. Both Mommy and I guessed way wrong. What Tibetan product does the British army use in its helmets? Yak hair. We both guessed way wrong again. What species has nerve fiber a thousand times
wider than humans’? The squid. My mother got hilarious and said Daddy could ask everybody in the entire airport and nobody would know that one.

  I went to the bathroom. In the Portland airport, you have to step on a button on the floor to turn on any water at all. There was a middle-aged lady standing in front of a washbasin, feeling around. She had a white cane with a red tip hanging on her arm, and she was wearing sunglasses. She obviously wanted to turn the water on. There was nobody else in the bathroom. I said, “You have to step on a button.”

  She felt around with her right foot. Water spurted out of the faucet. “Oh—thanks,” she said. It’s always kind of surprising when you hit the button for the first time.

  “It’s the same with the toilet,” I said. “To get it to flush.” I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing or not.

  She turned sideways toward me but I knew she couldn’t see me. “What an interesting system,” she said. Then she laughed. “It’s a secret code.”

  “Yep,” I said. I laughed, too.

  I pretended to be washing my hands but I was just running the water and watching her. How would you know how to turn on the water if somebody didn’t tell you, if you couldn’t see it? It could take you hours to figure it out. You’d be feeling around in your brain for the right question to ask, and you’d be wondering why the water wouldn’t go on. You’d hear it going on at the other basins. You wouldn’t have the information you need.

  It was a little bit—very much—like trying to get over the gap to the Mozart concerto. I could hear it played beautifully on the records, and I was feeling around in my brain for the information I had to have to play it the way I needed to play it.

  Deirdre was carrying about six bags, and she had a huge suitcase checked. She has a whole lot of big blond hair all around in curls, and she has great big loopy earrings. An Ear Lady. And she has big lips that look almost strange when she sings. It’s a very dramatic mouth.

  “Allegra. I knew you when you were an ovary. Let me look at you.” She and I were squinched in the backseat of Daddy’s car, with some of her bags, and the rest of her luggage was behind us, in the place where his cello rides. She has huge dark brown eyes that stare. “Ah, the gene pool,” she said, and laughed. “You’re so much like your mommy when she was younger. And there’s that black, black hair! Fleur, did anybody in your family ever have black hair?”

  Mommy laughed. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “It’s not really black,” I said. “Just very dark brown.”

  “Do you know what I mean when I say ‘gene pool’?” she said.

  “Yep. It’s the way you get things from both parents. In your genes.”

  “And from their parents, and their grandparents. Oh—Raisa sends hugs and kisses to everybody. She was going to send a cake—but I couldn’t keep it in a bag for five days. How’s the violin going?” she asked me.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “What’re you playing now?”

  I shuffled music around in my mind, avoiding Mozart. I wasn’t ready to tell her about the competition.

  “She’s playing page turner this summer,” Daddy said. “Earning money. By the way, Allegra, can you turn for a pianist on Saturday? Two o’clock?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Ah, blessed are the Oregon breezes,” Deirdre said. “What’ve you turned?”

  I told her all the pieces I could think of.

  We put all Deirdre’s bags and things in my room. She said she just wanted to be alone for a few minutes “to try to find some coherence.”

  * * *

  With Deirdre staying with us, arranging practice times could get complicated. Bro David hung a sign-up sheet on the music-room door. It was divided into half-hour blocks, and you could sign up for as many as you wanted, as long as you weren’t selfish about it. The sign-up sheet had a picture on it that he drew. It was somebody with lots of arms, like that Hindu god Siva, and the person was playing two violins and a cello and singing at the same time.

  I was just about asleep in the music room that first night and I was watching this painting we have. It’s by Marc Chagall and it’s called The Green Violinist. The man has a green face, and he’s playing a violin. He’s wearing a purple hat and coat, and things are flying through the painting. The violinist is up in the air above some buildings, and there’s a small gray man flying in the sky and another man, even smaller, holding up his arms to catch the flying one. I’ve always liked that painting. You can think that the man playing the violin is sending flying music into the air and that’s why everything flies, or you can think there’s some other reason why they fly. We don’t have the real painting, we have a print of it. We saw the real one in New York once when we went to visit my grandmother Raisa.

  There’s a streetlight near the corner of our house, and it shines through the windows of the music room at night, so you can see things kind of in a gray color. And there are sort of trapezoids of light on the carpet from the French doors.

  Somebody knocked on the door. “Am I bothering you, Allegra?” It was Deirdre.

  I told her she wasn’t.

  “I won’t stay long.” She was in a balloony white nightgown with lace, and bare feet, the nightgown made a cottony sound when she walked. Her hair was hanging all down her back. She still had long, dangly earrings on, and you could hear them tinkling when she walked. She had a big glass of milk in one hand.

  “Want me to turn on the lamp?” I asked.

  “No, I just want to sit here with you in the half-light.”

  She sat down in the chair the second violinist uses when there are quartets. She put the glass of milk on the floor and stretched both arms above her head and then out to the sides, the way you do in the breaststroke. Then she folded her hands in her lap. “I’m stupid with exhaustion. And I can’t sleep. Does that ever happen to you?” she said.

  “I think so,” I said. I was thinking of the final exams we had to take at the end of school. Jessica and Sarah and I spent the whole night just sitting in front of the TV set, watching old movies. We were at Sarah’s house. We’d taken the history exam that day. All on Egypt and ancient China.

  “It was Aspen that did it to me. The altitude. And rehearsal’s at nine tomorrow morning. This is terrible.”

  I hunched up on my left elbow and bunched up the pillows. “Do you get nervous when you sing?” I asked her.

  “Do I get nervous?” She didn’t say anything for about a minute. “Allegra, I throw up before I go onstage.”

  “Deirdre, that’s awful,” I said.

  “I know. It is awful. The first thing I find when I’m singing anyplace new is the bathroom. That’s more important than where the stage is or who’s accompanying me or anything else. It’s ghastly.”

  “But once you get started singing it’s all right?”

  “Yes. It gets all right. I could take a beta blocker, but I don’t like drugs.”

  “What’s a beta blocker?”

  “It’s a drug. It slows your heart, makes it less excitable. It helps keep you steady. Great for stage fright. Juilliard kids take them all the time. They walk in and play their hearts out. It’s crazy.”

  “It doesn’t sound crazy to me.” I was thinking about the competition, of course. I didn’t know there was a drug for stage fright.

  “Oh, I know somebody who hallucinated when she took it. Very good flutist. She won a prize and she saw donkeys in the auditorium. I don’t think it’s a very good trade-off.”

  She got up and walked over to the photograph of Einstein as an old man playing the violin. He has that white hair you always see in pictures of him. She hummed around the photographs of Fritz Kreisler, Pablo Casals, and the other musicians on the wall. She walked over to the French doors and looked out. “Your roses are wonderful. Do you know that?”

  “Yep,” I said. I thought of the dancing man, without any roses. We probably have more than our share.

  She walked back to the chair and sat down. She almost di
dn’t make any noise when she moved. “What are the big things in your life these days, Allegra?” she said. “Now that school’s out and everything.”

  I moved a little bit and pushed the pillows around and sat up straighter. I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t told anybody in person, except my parents and Bro David, about the competition. I’d told Sarah and Jessica by postcard.

  She hit her forehead with her fist. “Oh—I completely forgot. This guy your mommy and I used to know is coming here. It’s a guy we knew at school. In fact, he’s already here. Teaching at some college. Or university. He’s a biologist. He’s got a son, a violinist. Older than you. I haven’t seen the kid since he was tiny. I heard about him in Aspen, though; he’s supposed to be very good. Somebody who knows somebody who knows him told me. I wrote it all down on an envelope. He’ll probably turn up in your orchestra—what’s it called?”

  “The Portland Youth Orchestra,” I said.

  “He’ll probably turn up here. Do you like playing in it?” she asked.

  “Sure. I like it a lot.”

  “Are you the youngest?”

  “No. There are a couple of really little kids.”

  “But you’re one of the youngest?”

  “I guess so. Yep. I am. You know what somebody did once?”

  “What?” She took a big swig of milk.

  “This guy, he’s a cellist, he had the repeat section memorized, and he didn’t turn the page back, so the girl playing on the outside just went ahead and didn’t play the repeat. It was only in rehearsal, but still.”

  Deirdre laughed, just a little bit. “That’s a very dirty trick, Allegra.”

  “I know it. He got in trouble for it.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “He didn’t get to play the whole next concert. Not even rehearsals. He was kicked out for the whole time. Three months.”

  She was laughing again. “Good for him, he deserved it. I get the impression you really love the violin, Allegra. Am I right?”

  “Yep. I do.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No. I don’t think I know. It feels good.”