The Mozart Season

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  “Can you imagine not playing it?”

  “No!” It came out surprisingly loud.

  Deirdre nodded her head. “Then you’re stuck with it, aren’t you?”

  “I guess so. I guess I am.”

  She looked at me for quite a while with her intense eyes. “Allegra, here’s something about doing music—or painting a picture or anything. When you’re doing it, you have to remember everything you’ve ever learned, and simultaneously forget all of it and do something totally new.” She was silent for a while more. “Because if you do the first part and not the second, you’re making music or art just like everybody else’s. It’s not your own.”

  I was asking myself silently if I could ever do that, remember and forget at the same time.

  “When I lived in Boston, I used to watch the Celtics a lot. They do the same exact thing—when they’re at their best. It’s the same with your Trail Blazers in Portland. You watch one of those beautiful shots go exploding down through the basket and that’s what’s going on. That guy has in his memory every basket he’s ever shot—and at the same instant he’s making up a new one. The divine inspiration of the NBA.”

  “Deirdre, I never heard anybody say that before.”

  “Well, that’s the way it is.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “Yes, that’s part of it. When I’m at my best.”

  I imagined her bent over throwing up. “And you still throw up?”

  “Sure. That’s why, in fact. Or that’s part of it. I’m afraid I won’t be able to get that simultaneity.” She clenched and unclenched both her hands on the lap of her white nightgown. “There are all kinds of static just waiting up there,” she pointed to her head, “to sabotage things.”

  I reached for the clipboard. “How do you spell those?”

  “What? ‘Sabotage’?” She spelled it for me. “It means ‘to ruin completely.’ You have to learn new words for school, or for yourself?”

  “Well, both, I guess. A list for school, but I’ll need them anyway. And simultan—”

  She spelled “simultaneity.” I wrote them down.

  “You could wear a raincoat,” I said. “For throwing up.”

  She was stretching her arms again. “That’s exactly what I do.”

  “Good,” I said. “What’s this violinist like, this boy?”

  “Oh, Steve? I don’t know. When he was a little kid, he was darling. He had a sixteenth-size violin. Curly hair and huge eyes. Long eyelashes. And Lego blocks. He built the most amazing things, he must’ve been three years old. Big towers. He had phenomenal concentration.” I was watching Deirdre take her long, dangly earrings out of her ears. They tinkled when she had them both out and was holding them in her hand. “He’ll probably end up being your boyfriend, Allegra.”

  “I don’t think so. You said he’s old.”

  “Oh, not so old. Probably about Bro David’s age, I should think. That’s not old. I can tell you lots about old.” She got up and went over to a photograph of Ernest Bloch. It’s kind of low on the wall, and you have to bend over to look at it. I kept not telling her about the Bloch Competition.

  I heard a clinking of metal on wood. Two clinkings. She knelt down, her balloony nightgown spreading kind of like a white swan around her.

  “I dropped an earring.” She was bending over Daddy’s cello, which he’d left out of the case, lying on its side. “I can’t find it. Turn on the light, will you?” she said.

  I got up and turned it on. It was too bright; my eyes hurt. She was feeling around. Then she took hold of the cello by the neck. You could hear something rattle inside.

  She looked at me. She looked panicked. “Allegra. It fell through the f-hole,” she said in a frightened voice. She put the cello back on its side. “Oh, Allegra. What have I done?” She was whispering.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered back, as I walked over to where she was squatting on the floor. “We’ll shake it out. Look. You pick up the neck, I’ll pick up this end, we’ll just turn it over—” I started to pick up the body.

  “No! I couldn’t pick up a thing. I’m shattered. Allegra, it’s always like this. Every single place I go I do something hideous.…” She put both hands up over her face, one fisted up with the other earring in it. Her hands were shaking.

  I squatted down beside her and put my hand on her shoulder. I whispered, “No, really, Daddy won’t be mad. It’s all right. We’ll just let it fall out the f-hole where it went in.… Or the other one…”

  She was letting out very strange sounds, part sighing and part crying, I couldn’t tell which was the main part. And she was shaking all over.

  “Well, we can do it in the morning then. Really, it’s gonna be all right. Daddy won’t be upset. Do you want me to do it by myself?”

  She shook her head hard. “No. Don’t—don’t do anything.…” She still had both hands over her face. Her hair was hanging down partly covering her face, too. I couldn’t see her eyes; her teeth were clenched tight and even her feet were shaking. Seeing her so almost paralyzed was getting me shaky, too. I kept wishing for a first-aid kit, even though I knew it wouldn’t have anything in it that would help.

  “Maybe we’d better go to sleep, Deirdre. Maybe you’re just tired. From Aspen … It’s late.…”

  She just stayed there squatted on the floor, shaking. I brought the rest of the glass of milk to her. I nudged the sleeve of her nightgown with it. She pushed the milk away without looking at it.

  “Deirdre,” I whispered, “do you want an aspirin?” I put my hand on her shoulder again.

  “No! No drugs!” She was almost shouting but still in a whisper.

  “Do you want to lie here on the sofa then? Just till you feel better?”

  “Oh, Allegra, I can’t believe I’ve done this terrible thing—”

  I started to laugh. “It’s not so terrible. Just an earring in a cello—”

  “Stop it! I’ve ruined everything—” She let her hands slide down her face and looked up at me, almost like a little tiny kid playing peekaboo. Her eyes looked terrified.

  “You haven’t either. Come on, stand up, come over and sit on the sofa. Tell me what you’re gonna sing at the concert. Please?”

  She let her hands slide down to the floor and looked at me. Her face got smoother. She pushed herself up and stood looking around the music room. Suddenly she was talking in her normal voice. “Oh, Allegra, it’s beautiful. It’s an all-French program, and—just beautiful. Lovely songs…”

  She opened her hand and looked at the earring in it. It had three gold circles and inside the smallest one were three tiny bells. She bounced it in her hand and walked over to the sofa and sat down on the down sleeping bag I was using for covers. Her nightgown looked as beautiful as a wedding dress. She stared at the earring in her hand and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she whispered, “Allegra, I am a disaster.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I could say, No you’re not, but she was being quite strange, and I didn’t think I could convince her.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  I looked at the clock. It was after midnight. I told her.

  “Oooooohhhhh,” she said in a long sigh.

  “Let’s get some sleep, Deirdre?”

  She stared at me the way she’d been staring at the earring in her hand.

  “Daddy won’t be mad. Promise.”

  “How can you say that when men are so unpredictable?” she asked.

  “He’s my father,” I said.

  She walked over to the metronome and turned it on at a slow tempo. Then she walked around the room, staying far away from Daddy’s cello. The metronome was ticking, she was walking, almost like dancing, very slowly, but not exactly with the metronome’s rhythm. “I love coming here. To Portland. Your house. It’s so peaceful,” she said. Then she picked up the glass of milk, drank what was left in it, said good night to me and walked out, pulling the back of her long white nightgown to her when she closed
the door. I turned off the metronome and the light and lay down under the down sleeping bag. I knew I should be writing a word or two on my clipboard. I didn’t know what the words were, though.

  4

  I woke up in the middle of the night and remembered Daddy’s cello. I turned on the light and wrote him a note on the clipboard paper: Talk to me before you do anything else in the morning. I went upstairs in the dark and slipped the note under my parents’ bedroom door. The whole house was quiet; I could see the windows and chairs and things just standing there in their shapes, like something waiting to begin.

  Mommy came into the music room early in the morning to water the plants. Daddy came along with her. I was just waking up and thinking about practicing. I’d signed up for the 7:00 A.M. practice slot, but I was worried about waking Deirdre.

  “What’s this note about, honey?” Daddy said. He stood at the end of the sofa in front of my feet. Mommy was humming around the Swedish ivy with her watering spritzer.

  I looked at him. “Deirdre’s all upset.” I sat up.

  Mommy stopped spritzing and Daddy gave her a look—just a look, no real expression on his face—as if he were listening to her, except that she wasn’t talking.

  “Well, last night she came to talk to me, she couldn’t go to sleep, she was wearing this gorgeous, long white nightgown—and she accidentally dropped one of her earrings and it fell through the f-hole in your cello.”

  Daddy kind of smiled. “The things that have fallen through f-holes could fill a small museum,” he said.

  “And then she had a sort of fit. She—she said she’d ruined things, and she always does this.… I couldn’t even talk to her.” Looking back on it, I realized I’d actually been afraid.

  Daddy looked at me and then over at Mommy. “Fleur, you decide.”

  Mommy stood with the spritzing can in her hand. “Decide what?”

  He kept looking at her. “Decide what’s to be done about Deirdre. What time was all this, Allegra?”

  “Kind of midnight,” I said.

  Mommy took a big breath and said, “What’s going to be done is get her fed, get her to rehearsal, make sure she takes a nap, give her all the love and safety we can, get her to the Commons, and hear her sing. That shouldn’t be so difficult for reasonable human beings to accomplish.”

  “Mommy, do you know she throws up before she sings?”

  “Yes, sweetheart, I know,” Mommy said. “Do you want breakfast?”

  I watched my mother. She picked up a bug from a begonia leaf and closed her hand lightly over it, carried it to the French doors and opened one of them with the hand that was holding the watering can, and sent the bug out into the air. “What a lovely morning,” she said to the yard. “Is it all right if I leave the door partly open? The air smells beautiful,” she said.

  If she left the door open, more bugs would come in, and if she saw them she’d pick them up and put them outdoors again. When they’re bees, she talks to them, nudging them toward an open door with her voice until they leave. That’s the way to get bees to go away, she says.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Do you think Deirdre had a right to get strange with Allegra?” Daddy said.

  She turned around. “The world is so full of a number of things…” She didn’t finish it. The rest of it says, We should be happy as kings. She kissed him on the neck and went out of the room.

  Daddy was trying to protect me. And Mommy was pretending everything was normal. Both of them were being kind of unrealistic.

  Daddy went over to the cello. “Allegra, lift the neck, will you? Let’s get this thing out and minimize the trauma around here.”

  “Okay,” I said. I climbed out from under the sleeping bag. My blue pajamas were really dull, compared to Deirdre’s nightgown. We shook the cello gently and in a few minutes the earring dropped out. Daddy spelled “trauma” for me and I wrote it on the clipboard. He said it means something terrible happening and getting whatever it happens to all upset. When people get in car accidents they have traumas. Being born is a trauma, he said. It takes you out of what you’re used to and puts you somewhere else, and you don’t understand anything that’s going on.

  Daddy put his cello in its case, “where it should’ve been, anyway,” as he said. “Peace of Mind requires eternal vigilance,” he said. We laughed. Daddy’s big on Peace of Mind, and that thing about eternal vigilance is sort of his slogan.

  It was past seven, and I hadn’t even picked up my violin yet. I took it out, put rosin on the bow, and did some nasty Kreutzer for a few minutes.

  Everybody except Bro David was at breakfast. He had to work early at Safeway; they kept changing his shifts. The breakfast conversation was about the concert, and old friends, and Deirdre was just fine. She spilled cream when she poured it on the peaches and cereal, and she just laughed. She was wearing shorts and a huge sweater. Her hair was up on her head, in a scarf, with some long, curly hairs hanging down out of it. She said she couldn’t get over the luxury of eating breakfast in an authentic dining room. “Breakfast in a dining room—can you imagine that in New York?” she said. “With trees and birds outside?” Mommy and Daddy laughed. I was thinking about her throwing up peaches and cereal that night before she sang.

  “What about that friend of yours, the one coming to Portland—with the son?” I asked her. “You were gonna tell Mommy.”

  Her eyes got big. “Fleur! Remember Sam Landauer?”

  Mommy laughed. “Sure. With his thick glasses. I wonder what he looks like now.”

  “You’re about to find out. He’s got an appointment to do research here, I don’t know. He has wife number four now. His little tiny son is a great big son, plays violin.”

  “Number four. Number four?” my mother said.

  Deirdre nodded her head and held up four fingers.

  “How’d you find out?”

  “In Aspen. Some people were talking about this kid who’d been studying there, and his name was Landauer, and I just asked. It turns out to be little Stevie Landauer who used to build towers with Lego blocks.”

  Mommy looked at the ceiling. “Little Stevie Landauer is … I think he’s—something like fifteen now? Seventeen?”

  “Probably. And I have a rehearsal.”

  “I’ll drive you. It’s only about ten minutes. We’ll leave at eight-thirty, do you want the practice room?” Mommy said.

  Nobody mentioned anything about the earring in the cello. Daddy was gathering his briefcase and things, getting ready to teach his class across the Willamette River from where we live, on the same side of the city with Pioneer Square. It’s a music theory class, even in the summer.

  Everybody left and I practiced. I was working on “ME: Allegra Shapiro. I’M playing this concerto.” It wasn’t completely a matter of playing it louder. In some places, it was a matter of playing it softer. Like this part, the fifth and sixth measures after letter B in the second movement:

  Right there, between the third and fourth notes, I decided I could get so soft you could hear a bunny rabbit sleeping, as Mr. Kaplan said once, a long time ago, when I was a little kid and he was trying to teach me what pianissimo really was. And this ME: Allegra Shapiro–thing was a matter sometimes of landing on a note and staying there almost too long, so if you were listening, you’d almost wonder if I was ever going to leave that note.

  Mommy and Deirdre got back from the rehearsal and Deirdre wanted to be on the move. Mommy had to wait for the piano tuner to arrive. The piano tuner is a very hard-faced old lady, and she won’t tune our piano any other time than exactly noon, and she’d made the appointment two months ago, and she won’t change her schedule for anybody. She used to scare me when I was a little kid. I was afraid of the noise her teeth made, a clack-clacking sound.

  “I want to go to that place, that rose garden, the one way high up on the hill. You’ll go with me, Allegra?” Deirdre said.

  Mommy thought the Rose Garden was a great idea; Deirdre could drive Mommy’s c
ar, and I’d guide her there. We’d be back in time for Deirdre to take a nap before the concert. She wanted to have lunch at our house first so she could eat in a real dining room again, so we did. We made tuna fish and tomato sandwiches. Deirdre changed from her sweater to a big white shirt and she took the scarf off and let her hair hang down. I already had shorts on. The day was getting hot. We took some old bread to feed the Rose Garden squirrels.

  “I never drive a car in New York,” Deirdre said as she backed Mommy’s car out of the garage. “In fact, I haven’t driven in a year or so.” She laughed. I made sure I gave her directions way ahead of time, so she could change lanes and things without getting upset.

  We parked Mommy’s car by the tennis courts, where some very old people were playing tennis on one court and some younger ones were playing on the other, and we walked down the stone steps. Deirdre kept saying how wonderful Portland was. “People here just park their cars and play tennis on a summer afternoon. They just do it. It’s so simple. Do you have any idea what you’d have to go through in New York just to play a game of tennis? Allegra, it’s absurd.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Subways. Sports club membership fees. Crowds. Reserved courts. It takes more effort than it’s worth, sometimes. Everything in that whole city does.”

  “Then why do you live there?” I asked.

  “Allegra, there are more concerts in New York every year than a single person could go to in a lifetime. An embarrassment of riches. Come visit me there, will you?” She reached down and held my hand. I looked sideways at her. “I’ll take you to hear such music. Such music.”

  We were kind of bouncing along down the steps into the roses, holding hands.

  “Look at this—millions of roses. Millions.” She stood still and looked very slowly all the way to the left and then all the way to the right. “Millions,” she said again. The sun was really bright and she was squinting. “Allegra, smell that smell!”

  We walked around. The roses are in more different colors than you can believe at first. After you’ve been there a lot of times you just go along with it, but if it’s your first time there, it’s hard to imagine so many different kinds of roses.