The Mozart Season

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  I looked at her. I thought the world ought to turn into one big red heart, but I wasn’t going to say so. “What happens?” I said.

  “Well, you go to dirty little restaurants and you love the awful food, and you ride on carousels and you hold hands when his horse goes up and yours goes down. And you feed sea gulls together and you go ooh-ooh-ooh over dewy spiderwebs on bushes. It empties your brain. Those are the basics.”

  I picked up a peach and about four napkins.

  “So,” she said to Mommy, “this one was the same exact thing, of course; different exercises. Penobscot Bay—that’s in Maine, Allegra. Lobster and seaweed, and sand in the toasted marshmallows. And ooh-ooh over the beautiful mussel shells. The whole google-eyed thing.”

  “What happened?” Mommy asked.

  “Well. He suddenly remembered another Ph.D. he wanted to get and took off for somewhere. Geneva or somewhere. I don’t know.” Deirdre slid down from the sofa onto the floor across from me. She picked up a bunch of grapes. Her shiny blue dress was getting all crinkled. She stared with her great big eyes at the grapes in her hand.

  My mother folded her hands like somebody in an old-fashioned painting and said, “Well, so much for romantic love.”

  “Chapter dozen,” Deirdre said. She ate some grapes. Nobody said anything. Then she said, “Well? Fleur?”

  My mother got up and picked up a piece of honeydew and a napkin and went back to the piano bench. “What do you mean, ‘Well? Fleur?’” she said.

  “You know exactly what. You. And Alan. The floor doesn’t keep sliding out from under you without warning. What is it?”

  “You mean what holds us together?” Mommy said.

  “Of course. I mean, I know: you fell in love that day in Morningside Heights, and you have David and Allegra, and here you are. But what is it?” Mommy was chewing melon. She was just a mother sitting on a piano bench chewing her food. “What would happen if Alan refused to go to a concert of yours?”

  Mommy looked at her. “Deirdre, he hasn’t gone to lots of them. The season is terribly long. He doesn’t always have time, he…”

  “Would you care to hear this one? ‘Bruce, I’m singing a concert on Sunday, I have a ticket for you.…’” Her voice went baritone: “‘Deirdre, I can’t imagine how that could possibly benefit me.’” Her natural voice came back. “Did you ever hear one like that?”

  Nobody said anything. Then Mommy said, “Possibly benefit me?” She said it again. “Deirdre, was that a human being talking?”

  “No, it was Bruce in Rochester. But I’m a human being, and I had to listen to it.”

  I was thinking about how my friends Sarah and Jessica come to my orchestra’s concerts. They like them. I don’t even play solos or anything, I just play. And Jessica and I go to Sarah’s dance recitals. We clap like mad. And when Jessica gets to be an architect, Sarah and I are going to stand outside her buildings and applaud; we’ve already agreed on that.

  Deirdre was braiding the fringe on the rug.

  Mommy said, kind of slowly, “What is it about Alan and me? Hmmm. It’s hard to put in words. You know. Well, there was that handed-down instrument thing in both our childhoods.”

  “Right,” Deirdre said. “I love that part. I tell it to lots of people.”

  It’s a funny coincidence. When Mommy was a little kid in Kansas, somebody died and left a violin to her parents. Nobody knew what to do with it and Mommy picked it up. She wanted to play it, but it was too big. At the school where she went, some teacher arranged to get her a half-size. Then they found her a violin teacher, and she had to go on a Greyhound bus to her lessons sixty-five miles away every Saturday. She kept playing and she grew into the full-size. That was how she started.

  And when Daddy was a little kid in New York, somebody died and left a cello to his parents. Same thing: nobody knew what to do with it and Daddy tried to play it. Same thing at his school: somebody found him a smaller cello and he started that way. He took a subway to his lessons. His teacher was a really old man who used to play in the New York Philharmonic but he was too old to do it anymore. Daddy started playing klezmer music in high school, that’s a Jewish kind of jazz, and he just kept playing.

  Then Daddy and Mommy met each other when they went to Juilliard and they told each other about the dead people and the instruments and they fell in love.

  Deirdre stopped braiding and looked up from the floor at Mommy. They looked at each other for a long time, a look of trying to figure something out. Deirdre had her big long skirt hunched up above her knees and she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She got a peach from the platter and spread napkins all over her lap. “You’ve got it all, Fleur. House, symphony job, kids, flowers. Parking places. A husband who’s not a jerk.”

  “Well, it’s hard work sometimes,” Mommy said. “I mean, what’s a jerk? Everybody’s a jerk sometimes.” I wondered if she was thinking about Daddy calling Deirdre the Queen of the Night. But he was right, in a way: this was the second late night in a row that Deirdre was sitting in the music room where I was supposed to be asleep.

  Suddenly Deirdre screamed: “YYEEAAAGGGHHEEE!” Like that. Everybody jumped. She had her hands over her head the same way she’d had them the night before. Mommy flew down off the piano bench and I felt my arms fly up and out, and we were both making surprised noises and Deirdre’s hair was hanging down the front of her face and she was moaning the way she’d done the night before.

  Somehow, Mommy got inside Deirdre’s hair and put her arms around her and held her. She just held her and rocked her. She was on her knees, holding Deirdre and rocking her back and forth, and I stared at them. I couldn’t see any faces, just hair and shoulders and arms. And Deirdre was making that moaning-sighing sound.

  “It’s done, it’s over,” Mommy kept saying. She was almost humming it. I stared at them. They were like a dance, just there on the floor, rocking, with their faces in each other’s hair. You could have set a metronome by them, rocking back and forth. I didn’t know if I should leave the room, or sit there, or what. I ate some grapes.

  They stayed like that for a long time. Deirdre gradually stopped making the strange sound, and Mommy still kept holding her and rocking her and sort of humming. I looked at the braided rug fringe. In a few minutes they stopped hugging and pulled back and looked at each other for a long time. Mommy said, “Want to go to bed now?” in a very soft voice. Deirdre nodded her head. She picked up her shoes and Mommy leaned over and kissed me good night on my forehead and they went out and closed the door. I took the fruit stuff back to the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator and went to bed on the sofa.

  I watched the leafy shadows on the wall while I tried to fall asleep. I couldn’t get rid of the sight of my mother and Deirdre hugging on the floor and rocking back and forth. Forward and back. Forward and back. A steady rhythm. Not even scary. In fact, the opposite. My mother humming and the sound of both of them breathing.

  Of course I wanted to know what it was about. But at the same time I didn’t. It was like a secret ritual, where they both knew exactly what to do.

  * * *

  At breakfast, everybody had closed faces about the night before. They were reading the review of the concert in The Oregonian. Daddy was repeating, “Ms. Moreau’s melt-in-the-mouth vowels” and Deirdre and Mommy were laughing. I read the review. It said, “Deirdre Moreau exerted formidable control and enchanting lyricism.… She wrapped herself around the Saint-Saëns with a bold intimacy that made one humbly grateful to have ears.… She is a genius.”

  I wasn’t sure about the “bold intimacy” part, but it had something to do with the music coming up from inside, and it also had something to do with Mr. Kaplan and Mozart and closing the gap. I said it over several times in my mind. It was connected with what Mr. Kaplan said about danger, but I didn’t know how.

  Deirdre smiled at me. “We haven’t told them about the Rose Music, Allegra. How many people were there in our band?”

  We told them a
bout the people coming to play on the sculpture with us, and Deirdre imitated the accent of the lady with the big hat. I told them about the old lady in the green visor being wheeled away and saying, “Wonderful … Wonderful…” in her little craggly voice.

  Then Daddy got a phone call to fill in for a missing cellist the next night at Waterfront Park, a concert by the West Coast Chamber Orchestra, and Mommy and Deirdre went off to pick raspberries in the country, and I practiced. Deirdre would sing her next concert, the same program as before but at a different place with a different bathroom, and she’d stay another day and we’d take a picnic and go to the concert and hear Daddy play music.

  I went to Deirdre’s second concert, too. She was perfectly fine; she didn’t get strange at all. Just before she went upstairs to bed that night, she said, “Do you know what Martin Luther said he’d do if he thought the end of the world was coming soon? He said he’d plant apple trees.”

  I looked at her, standing on the bottom step with her hand on the banister, holding both tiny sandals by their straps. Her big eyes were all shiny from the adrenaline of the concert.

  Bro David was standing at the top of the stairs looking down at us. “Deirdre, if the end of the world was coming, how would there be time for any apples to grow?” he said. He said it in a voice that showed he wasn’t expecting an answer.

  Deirdre looked up at him. “Just to have them there, you see? Not for them to be of any use—there wouldn’t be time. Just to have apple trees. Just growing up out of the earth…” She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and we said good night. Her dress floated up the stairs behind her.

  I listened up the stairs. Bro David said, “That was in the fourteenth century. What did he know?”

  “Well, sixteenth, actually,” Deirdre said. “But it’s a pretty idea.…”

  “Doesn’t sound too bright to me,” he said.

  Deirdre said exasperatedly, “Bro David, you are such a realist.”

  Immediately the family was laughing. Daddy and Mommy from their bedroom, me from the bottom of the stairs. I think we were all laughing at different things, though.

  * * *

  At the Waterfront Concerts, thousands of people come and sit on the grass to hear the music. Charley Horner was playing in the orchestra, and I saw him walk over to Daddy’s chair and say something that made Daddy laugh. Daddy has a nice reasonable laugh, where his face breaks open and then shuts itself up again.

  The park has food booths all lined up along the sides. Somebody on the radio called the Waterfront Concerts “the best-smelling concerts west of the Hudson.”

  When the orchestra started to play the second half of the concert, the same dancing man from before started dancing. He had his same clothes on. He danced the same dance, forward and back and around, and he had the same concentrating look on his face. Some people just watched him, some people pointed at him, some people didn’t pay any attention to him at all. Just like before.

  Deirdre stared at him and let out a loud whisper, “Aaaahhhh.” Then she whispered, “Why on earth doesn’t somebody dance with that man?”

  Nobody said anything. My mother and two of her friends and I just sat there.

  “Well, why doesn’t somebody?” she said.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I said. I looked across Deirdre at Mommy, who was just listening to the music.

  Deirdre stood up and started walking around people. She had raspberry stains on her big, swingy blue-and-white-striped skirt, at the side. Everybody had blankets or sleeping bags spread out, and she had to be careful not to step right on them. I watched her stepping around people, almost doing a kind of dance in her skinny sandals. She had to go around about six blankets covered with people to get to the open space in front of the stage.

  When she got to the bare grass, she stopped for just a beat of the music, and then went right over to the dancing man and started dancing with him. I think she caught him by surprise. He sort of stopped for a moment, then he bowed a little and smiled a little smile, like How do you do, and went on dancing. She danced, following his steps, keeping about three feet of space between them. When he turned, she turned. When he kicked his foot out to the side, she did the same thing. They danced.

  The music was by Handel.

  I’d seen an old-fashioned music box in Kansas once when I went with my mother to visit an old lady who lived with a lot of doilies. The lady was somebody we’re related to in some way. Her house smelled like dried-up flowers. When the old lady wound the music-box key, the two little dolls on top, a man and a lady, went around in a circle, and you could imagine a whole ballroom full of people watching them turning and turning. They had smiles painted on their faces and the smiles just kept turning around as the music played. The lady doll was built with a long pink dress on, and the man was built wearing a black suit. While Mommy and the old lady talked, I sat on the floor and watched the dancers on the music box, which was on a little table. The dancers were just at the level where I could see their faces. The old lady showed me how to wind the key when the music ran down; you had to be very careful because it was very old. The lady said I could touch the dancers if I’d “be careful like you would with eggs, the little bitty things could break.”

  Watching Deirdre and the dancing man, I thought of the music box and being a little kid sitting on the floor watching the pink dress and the black suit and the painted smiles go round and round, and listening to the music run down, and then winding the key to make them dance again. I could almost get the dried-flower smell back again.

  Deirdre and the dancing man just danced, the whole last half of the concert. It was a pretty sight.

  At the end, they made little bows to each other. Deirdre curtsied, the dancing man moved off into the crowd, Daddy put his cello in its case, and we got the car and went home.

  “Portland, Oregon, land of parking places,” Deirdre said in the car. “Nice concert, Alan. Really, more people ought to be dancing to Handel and Brahms and Mozart. Don’t you think so, Fleur?” My mother smiled and ran her hand through her hair. “Well, Allegra, don’t you think so?”

  I was thinking about the little music box. The music was inside, and you had to wind the key just right and it came out, and the dancing man and lady went round and round, smiling. How to get close enough to the Mozart concerto so that— How to move so close to it that there would be just that edge Mr. Kaplan talked about— How to get something strung just right in me so I’d be balancing right exactly on that edge— How to remember everything I know and forget it at the same time and invent a new thing. And that would be the way to let the music out of me. ME: Allegra Shapiro. I’M playing this concerto.

  “Yes, I think so, Deirdre.”

  But that still didn’t explain how.

  Practice.

  Listen for the feel of getting closer to it. Would I recognize it?

  I went to sleep looking at the Green Violin man. His green face is distorted; his nose is twisted downhill to the left, his smiling mouth twists uphill to the right. Something is happening to make the music lift out of his instrument. I wondered if there was any word for it.

  6

  I was the one to run with Deirdre to her plane, because she’d forgotten one of her bags in my bedroom and we had to go back for it when we were almost halfway to the airport. Already when we got there, they were announcing that the plane was ready for takeoff.

  “You’re wonderful, Allegra,” Deirdre said while we were running. “Promise you’ll come see me in New York?” She’s a very fast runner, even with luggage.

  I was carrying two of her bags and trying to keep up with her. People were scooting aside to let us by. “I’ll try,” I said. “Hey, Deirdre?”

  “Yes, my sweet one?”

  “I’m gonna play a competition in September. That Mozart you’ve kept hearing me practicing.” I was huffing.

  Her head swung toward me, her earrings flashing. “Allegra! Really!”

  “It’s
the Ernest Bloch. I’m a finalist,” I said. I had to stop and change the bags to opposite sides and then run to catch up with her.

  “I’ve heard of that one—Allegra, I’m so excited—why didn’t you—”

  “I just couldn’t find the right time—”

  “Here’s the gate— Hey, wait, here I am—don’t leave—” She flung her ticket envelope at the uniformed woman standing at the doorway. “Allegra!” She burst down on me and put her arms and bags around me.

  “It’s on Labor Day,” I said. The woman at the doorway was taking the two bags from me. “I wish you love,” Deirdre whispered into my hair, and she was gone to Boston to sing two concerts.

  I watched her running down the ramp, with bags flying out from her sides. Even in her fluster and haste, she was beautiful.

  I moved back into my bedroom. It still smelled like her, perfumy.

  The concert review had said she was a genius.

  The weather was getting so much hotter that I’d gotten used to beginning to practice before 7:00 A.M. That way, I could work for three hours before it got really hot, and I’d save the rest of the practicing for later.

  Jessica was due back from Hong Kong in a few days, and Sarah was due back from ballet camp in a week.

  I took breaks from the Mozart project to play the Vitali now and then, and some Dancla études. And the awful, nasty, torturing Kreutzer. Sometimes even Kreutzer felt like a break. I couldn’t do Mozart forever.

  When I was a really little kid, Mr. Kaplan used to have me walk and play at the same time. You take four steps to the measure if the piece is in four, or three steps if it’s in three. Or eight steps if it’s in very slow four, six steps if it’s in very slow three. It helps little kids learn to count and be regular. I suppose it looks hilarious: this little kid, marching around a room playing a violin. Because when you make a mistake, your feet get mixed up and you can end up standing off-balance with one foot hanging in the air while you find the right note. I used to back up to the place on the rug where I’d been a few measures before I got lost, and start again from there. I think it was a way of getting my little brain organized.