The Mozart Season

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  “Crimson, fire engine, fuchsia, peach, sunshine, sunset, sunrise, cream, ivory, milk, blood, pearl, mustard, canary, saffron, lemon…” she said. I laughed. “You could spend your life here, couldn’t you?” she said, and let my hand go.

  “I guess so,” I said. I took her over to the hill on one side of the Rose Garden where they have concerts sometimes. There’s a big concrete stage, and the audience sits on steps carved into the hill.

  We went down to the stone wall at the bottom of the garden. It’s where you look out over the city, and where the squirrels live. They grabbed the bread right out of our hands. I watched her feeding them. They looked intensely at her hand and she looked intensely back at them.

  We went up the hill to the place where the sculpture is. It’s made of silvery aluminum, and it has three tall columns, connected with thick arches at the top. There are two smaller columns; they’re not connected to the rest of the sculpture. They come up to about my chin and they have water coming down them. Under the sculpture is shallow water in a squared-off pool, and over it there are walkways, little bridges, in a kind of cross. People drop coins in the water, and you can jump across parts of the pool if you get a good start.

  Deirdre knocked with her knuckles on one of the big thick columns and it made a nice drummy sound, echoing in the hollowness. Then she went to another one and did the same thing. The tone was different. She hit the third one, and I hit one of the small columns and then ran across to the other one and hit it. We had five different tones. It was like metal kettle drums with splashing added. Then we walked on the bridges around the columns, hitting each side, and the tones were all different. We had twenty different tones, and that didn’t even include what you’d have if you played them as high as you could reach and then way down to the level of your feet.

  It was Deirdre who started the song.

  She began slowly, BONG bong Bong bong with her knuckles on the three big columns, walking between them. Then she reached up high and down low, faster, and I hit one of the two small columns when she left a silent spot. The rhythm was slow, we were just bonging around. Pretty soon, I started moving back and forth across the little bridge between the two small columns; I had eight different sides to bong on. Deirdre accelerated the tempo, and I had to start running. Then she changed the rhythm to groups of threes, and moved into my small-column territory. I moved into hers, the big columns. We were getting a little bit faster, and a little girl in a yellow dress started bonging with us. She couldn’t reach very high, so her tones were different. Now there were six hands bonging and six legs traveling across the bridges.

  Then two little boys came to play tunes. They stayed on one of the watery columns for a few beats before they started to move around. One had brown shorts and one had jeans. They were a little taller than the girl in the yellow dress, so their tones were between hers and ours.

  Deirdre began to hit harder, and pretty soon everyone else did, too. A teenage boy and girl in sunglasses joined in, running around the outside of the sculpture. Some other people appeared. It was getting really loud, with slow beats and fast beats and lots of different rhythms, and drops of water flying. BONG. BONG. BONG. And Bong-bong, Bong-bong, Bong-bong. And Bonnnnnggggg, Bonnnnnggggg, Bonnnnnggggg. And Bongbongbong, Bongbongbong, Bongbongbong. And ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping. And pingBONG pingBONG. Somebody, I don’t know who, found a way to go Bommmmmphphph. And I kept hearing a little plink plink plink. I think it was the lady with the long fingernails and the big sun hat. I don’t know where she came from. Maybe she came with the man in the Trail Blazers T-shirt.

  A strange symphony was going on, all made of drumbeats and water.

  We all had to go carefully when we wanted to move to a different column, because the little boys kept moving all the time and everybody else had to be careful not to run into them.

  We couldn’t see each other when we were playing; the columns were in the way, or we had our backs to the others if we were on the inside of the sculpture. We just played. Once when I turned around, I saw that an old man had joined in, bonging on one of the columns and checking a big gold pocket watch each time, staying out of the way of the water drops.

  I never figured out how everybody stopped almost at the same time. Maybe we all just got tired. All I remember is stopping and looking around and finding out that there was no more music going on except that the old man bonged twice more and checked his watch. There was just a very soft hum in the air for a few seconds, and then it faded away.

  Everybody started to walk away, but a lady with a camera put her arm out right in front of the teenage girl’s face and said, “No, wait. Just one. Just wait for one?”

  The girl and her friend laughed and shook water out of their hair. The man in the Trail Blazers T-shirt grinned and made the “okay” sign with his thumb and index finger. Deirdre started gathering everybody else together, bringing the little girl in the yellow dress along by the hand. A lady, the little girl’s mother, I guess, motioned to her to stay with Deirdre, and she pulled a camera out of her shoulder bag. The two little boys had taken off their shoes to wade in the water under the sculpture and some grown-ups made them get out and stand with the rest of us to have their picture taken. The lady with the big sun hat ran after the old man, who was walking away, and brought him back. He had a big white mustache, and he was wearing a vest and a black hat. He stood still and stared at the camera.

  Four more picture takers lined up. We just stood there crowded together and waited. Somebody said, “What’s the name of your group?”

  The teenage boy said, “Very Heavy Metal.”

  The girl with him said, “No, it’s Knock Knock Who’s There.”

  “How about Good Vibrations?” somebody said.

  The lady with the big sun hat said, in a foreign accent, “A Curious Group of the People?” Cameras were clicking.

  “Musical Anarchy?” Deirdre asked. She bent down and asked the little girl in the yellow dress what she thought. “That’s a good idea,” she said to the little girl. “Say it louder. Get quiet, everybody. Listen.”

  There were eleven of us to get quiet. “Rose Music,” the little girl said.

  She had a little chirpy voice and several people nodded their heads, and the teenage boy said, “Yeah, that’s our name.” More cameras clicked, and then everybody drifted off in different directions.

  A crumpled old lady in a wheelchair, being pushed by somebody, said in a creaky little voice as she went past me, “Wonderful. Wonderful…” She had on a green sun visor and her head was shaking. She and her pusher wheeled on to look at more roses.

  Deirdre leaned into my ear and said in a soft voice, “She’s right. That’s why we’re here. On this planet. To make music. It’s probably the oldest art form. You know, people hopping around in caves, singing their stories, singing their prayers, banging on things, making rhythm … It’s all the same thing. Sending messages.”

  We stood there, staring down the slope of roses for a while, not saying anything. The smell of millions of roses was so great, a crowded smell, of almost too many roses, if there is such a thing. I squatted down and watched a big ant pushing a grain of dirt along through the grass. It went around a giant blade of grass, made a turn, kept pushing the grain of dirt, came to another giant blade of grass, made another turn, and kept pushing. I watched it move about an inch before Deirdre squatted down beside me. Her blond hair hung down to the top of the grass.

  “Look at that. All that work,” she said.

  “It’s gone about an inch,” I said.

  “So have we all,” she said. A drop of water slid off her elbow onto the grass.

  I didn’t say anything. We watched the ant move about another two inches. Then Deirdre said, “I have to take a nap. You ready, Allegra?”

  “Sure. Let’s go.” We went up the steps to Mommy’s car.

  “Life, my little friend, is a terrible, terrible thing sometimes,” she said. I didn’t say anything.


  As we were on the bridge going across the Willamette River, Deirdre said, “Did you notice the way the music was happening, back there in the Rose Garden? That percussion symphony?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In a way, nobody was making any music. Really, it was just a matter of letting the music out. Out of the sculpture.”

  “You mean it’s in there all the time?”

  “Sure. Same with your violin. Same with my body. Whatever your instrument is.”

  I’d never heard anybody actually say it. I looked at her, driving along across a bridge, just like anybody else. “Deirdre?” I said.

  “What, Allegra?”

  Even knowing that Deirdre wasn’t a normal, stable, regular person, I told her a private thing from my childhood. “That’s what I thought when I was a little tiny kid. I thought Mommy had music inside her violin—and Daddy had it inside his cello—and they moved their bows and it just came out. When I first picked up a violin, I was so shocked that there was no music coming out of it, I hid under their bed and cried and cried. There were just these screeches.”

  Deirdre looked across the car at me. Nobody said anything the rest of the way home.

  5

  I practiced with the mute on while Deirdre took her nap. A violin mute is a little black thing you hook on the bridge to make the sound softer.

  Mr. Kaplan, of course, didn’t know anything about the music living inside a thing and waiting to be let out; I wasn’t sure I wanted him or anybody else to know what Deirdre and I’d said about it. And I didn’t know what he’d think about simultaneously remembering and forgetting everything you know. But just three days before, he’d said more about closing the distance between Mozart and me. “The concerto is already there. It’s not static—look at all the different ways people can play it. But it’s there. It exists. On these paper pages.” He put his hand flat on the first page of the third movement. “This concerto is what it is. You’re the one doing the moving. Moving toward the center of it.” He patted his stomach. “That’s what you’re doing. Everybody has a different relationship with it. Everybody moves into the center of it differently. You can’t have Perlman’s relationship with it, or Mutter’s, or mine. You have your own. You have this concerto in your own way.” He looked hard at me. “It’s a very fragile thing, Allegra,” he said, his eyes not blinking, staring straight into my face, “almost dangerous, getting to know something that intimately.” Then he laughed. “Talking about it is ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  Mozart composed so much music, and he did it so fast, and when he died the pieces weren’t in any order. Somebody named Köchel came along after Mozart had died and made a list of all his compositions. Every Mozart piece has a Köchel number. The Fourth Concerto is K. 218, and the highest Köchel number is 626.

  I was spending my summer with a Köchel number.

  Deirdre didn’t want dinner. She did warm-up exercises in the music room for about fifteen minutes before we went to the college for her concert. She did sound kind of like the way David did when he was imitating her. I put on a yellow-and-white striped skirt and blouse and put my hair in a braid down my back.

  Her hair was all down and golden, her dress was pale blue, long and swishy, with balloony sleeves, and the material was kind of gold-flecked. She was wearing skinny gold sandals with little heels. And long dangly gold earrings with little blue stones in them. She had her raincoat on.

  Mommy drove her to the college early and I went along. It’s called Reed College. Daddy was coming later. We usually sit on the cushions they have all over the floor for front seating. People sit in chairs behind. The concert was going to be in the Commons, the dining hall of the college, not a real concert hall.

  While we were in the car, Deirdre stared straight ahead, saying something over and over again. I didn’t hear exactly what it was. I was sitting in the backseat on the other side of the car, behind Mommy, so I could look at Deirdre. It sounded like “Horrible wonderful horrible wonderful horrible horrible horrible wonderful horrible…” Mommy reached over while she was driving and held Deirdre’s hand; I saw her do it in the space between the seats. Then she let it go when she had to shift gears to go into the parking lot.

  We walked around the Stem People having their picnics on the lawn outside the Commons. They eat first and then go to the concert. Deirdre whispered, “I love being in plaid-shirt country again. Fleur, this is a wonderful place.”

  I looked around. There were several men in plaid shirts. Mommy was laughing and doing that big embarrassing wave at some people she knew, the one where she puts her hands up to her ears and grins. Some people were staring at Deirdre.

  “Remember where the bathroom is, it’s around the corner on the right,” I whispered and pointed for Deirdre on our way in.

  She gave me a sideways hug. “Thanks. Wish me love,” she said.

  “Love,” I said back to her.

  Mommy said “Love,” too, and Deirdre walked to the place they use as backstage in the Commons.

  “Didn’t she mean ‘Wish me luck’?” I asked Mommy.

  “We used to say ‘Wish me love’ when we were in school.” She took hold of my hand for just a second and then let it go.

  We walked around, picked up programs, and put sweaters across three cushions to save them, including one for Daddy when he got there. You almost always take a sweater or jacket when you go to a summer concert in Oregon, because the nights usually get cold.

  We walked outside again, and somebody came dashing over to us. It was a red-haired lady Mommy and Daddy know. “Allegra,” she said, “would you consider turning pages for me next Thursday? I’ve seen you with your dad, and with Charley Horner? I need a page turner badly?”

  I couldn’t even remember what instrument she played. I just remembered her face and her hair, and I remembered she talked in questions.

  Mommy looked at me. I looked at her and then back at the lady. “Sure. I can do it,” I said. “Where?”

  “The Community Music Center? Can you be there by six-thirty? I’ll show you the fast turns?” She looked at Mommy and said, “It’s the Mendelssohn C minor?” and rolled her eyes.

  I looked at my mother again. “We’ll have her there,” she said.

  “Thanks, Allegra. You’ve bailed me out?” the lady said, and walked away.

  “My daughter the rich woman,” Mommy whispered, and then did that big ear-hello thing to some more people.

  I wasn’t rich, and I was trying to picture Deirdre throwing up on that beautiful blue dress while people ate their food and drank their drinks on the lawn getting ready to hear her sing. Daddy got there and we went inside to our cushions. I sat between him and Mommy. He sat down on his with a thud. He has a back problem; he says ninety percent of American men have some kind of back problem. He opened his program and said, “Let’s see what’s on the menu,” and started reading it.

  Mommy explained that the red-haired lady was a pianist with a trio. The other two instruments are violin and cello. I wanted her to explain about Deirdre in the car, but I didn’t actually ask.

  Daddy was muttering, “Oh. The Queen of the Night’s going to sing all in French.” Mommy reached behind me and put her hand on his elbow and said, “Alan, please.” He was making fun of Deirdre for what she’d done in the music room the night before. The Queen of the Night is a character in Mozart’s Magic Flute, the opera on my bed sheets. It’s a soprano part that goes very high and gets very dramatic.

  Deirdre sang songs by Saint-Saëns and Chausson and Debussy, and a string quartet and pianist played with her. I don’t know much about soprano singing, and I didn’t know any of the songs before, and I didn’t know enough French to understand many of her words, but several times I had goose bumps on my legs, all the way up to the top.

  While we were clapping, Daddy said to me, “That’s what’s really inside her—Deirdre. Not all this strangeness. That wonderful voice is what’s really in her.”

  Mommy looked across
me at him and shook her head slowly and smiled kind of sadly and said, “Men.” We all kept clapping. She leaned over to me and said, “You had to know her before. Before she got afraid of things.” We went on clapping.

  After the concert, lots of people came around to stare at Deirdre and some of them shook her hand and a few people kissed her. People kept handing her their programs and pens for her to sign autographs. Then she put on her raincoat. It looked just fine and it didn’t smell bad, so she must have made it to the bathroom in time.

  At home, Bro David had bought a whole bunch of fruit at Safeway. It was on the kitchen table. A honeydew melon and peaches and cherries and plums and things. He handed a note to Deirdre that said she’d sung for her supper; it had fruit-shaped notes dancing up and down the treble clef. She threw her arms around him and he looked as if he wanted to disappear. He pulled backward and asked her how the concert had gone, and she said, “All right, I think. I think. Oh, I don’t know…”

  He looked at her and said, “Then how can I congratulate you—or what?”

  “It was a wonderful concert,” my mother said. She put her arm around Deirdre. “She was fabulous.”

  “Then congratulations,” Bro David said.

  “Thank you,” said Deirdre.

  Daddy went to bed and Mommy and Deirdre and I took some fruit and plates and a whole pile of paper napkins into the music room. Deirdre flopped on the sofa and spread her arms and legs out like an x. Mommy laughed. “Well, Deirdre, what’s cooking?” she said. Then she sat down on the piano bench.

  “Rule number one, Allegra my girl,” Deirdre said. “Talk after the concert. Never before.” She breathed out hard and took off her shoes. She was in bare feet.

  I sat on the floor in front of the platter of fruit and looked at her. “Do you want the long, grimy version or the short, grimy version?” she asked.

  “Whichever one you want to tell,” Mommy said.

  “Let’s begin with the basics,” Deirdre said. “Allegra, you know what happens when you fall in love, don’t you?”