The Mozart Season

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Lots.”

  “I’ve only seen him once,” she said. “But I’m Neek ’cause I danced with him. You should’ve been doing it, not me,” she said to Sarah.

  “I’m Neek because Andy liked me for eight whole classes last year before he went on to somebody else. He’s such a jerk he only likes somebody for three or four classes usually,” Sarah said.

  Jessica and I’d had to listen to how wonderful Andy was after all eight classes too. “I’m Neek ’cause I knew he was a jerk before you did,” I said.

  “No, you’re not,” Jessica said. “We both did at the same time, so you’re not Neek that way. Remember when he told her he’d never look at another girl? That was when, and we both knew. He was already a jerk then.”

  Sarah sat quietly with her legs in a complete lotus position and said, “It sounds like you’re both trying to make me feel stupid at the same time.” I felt terrible. The three of us are friends because we don’t usually do that. We all know which buttons not to push with each other. With Jessica, we don’t push the button about her mother going to the cemetery every single day and making Jessica or one of her sisters or brothers go with her to see her dead husband’s grave. With Sarah, we don’t push the Nutcracker Victim button; we don’t give her a hard time about how crazy and intense dancers are, especially dancing boys. And with me, they don’t push the button about never having a single boyfriend since Teddy in kindergarten or the one about being a maniac for practicing. And we never ever argue about who’s pretty or who’s ugly on which day.

  Jessica said, “We’re not trying to make you feel stupid, Sarah. Nobody can tell if a guy’s a jerk close up. Not at first when he’s all friendly and whispery. It’s only if you’re away from him. Then you can tell. You have to get perspective.” She looked extremely serious. I thought of Deirdre and the man who suddenly remembered another Ph.D. he wanted to get.

  Sarah looked at her and thought about it and then she laughed. “Thank you, dear Abby,” she said, and we all put our arms around each other and swore our friendship “in thunder, lightning, or in rain” again, from Shakespeare about the Weird Sisters.

  The music started and the dancing man appeared, as usual, out of the air.

  He was wearing his same brown clothes, or ones just like them. But he had a different shoe on; it didn’t flap open. It didn’t match his other shoe. He did his same dance from before. We watched him, and Jessica and I partly watched Sarah watching him. She was fascinated. He turned, and half turned, and moved in his sort of circles, and he looked that same stiff way but his dancing still had a nice feeling in it, and he had his same kind of part smile on his face, and his same dance went on and on until the piece was over. Then he bowed to the orchestra.

  During the applause, Sarah said, “He’s got no stage fright at all. Absolutely zero. That’s a fox-trot he’s doing. Kind of a waltz–fox-trot.”

  “I want to know who he is,” I said.

  Sure enough, Sarah wanted to dance with him. “I’m gonna do it,” she said. She hopped around people’s blankets just as the music was getting ready to start, and took a position right near him but not too near.

  At first, it was just two people moving in a sort of parallel way, the way it had been with Deirdre and with Jessica. But pretty soon Sarah started moving around him and he started following her, and her lavender skirt was sliding back and forth in the air, and she made their dancing area bigger by slowly stepping farther to both sides. Eventually, they were using the whole front of the grass, coming very close to some Stem People and just missing stepping on people’s blankets but never once doing it.

  The sun was going down and the bright, almost orangy light from the stage was on them, and for a little while it was like the old lady’s music box in Kansas again, and the whole world could be happy if those little minutes could go on and on, music and dancing on the grass everywhere in the world and everyone would stop fighting each other and people could just listen and watch.

  It even made the concert a better one. I secretly think they gave the audience a better show.

  After the concert, people were getting up to leave, and calling to little kids, “Stay right here. Don’t you go one step away,” while Jessica and Sarah and I grabbed our blanket and picnic stuff and followed him.

  He was already slipping around to the back of the stage but Sarah caught him. She put her hand on one of his arms.

  “Is your name really Trouble?” she said.

  He turned around and looked at all of us. Up close, with the lights from the stage, the little holes in his face were very big. Looking at his face felt a little bit like looking close up at Heavenly’s whiskers and mouth. Different and fascinating. “Yeah,” he said. He really had almost no teeth that I could see, just two in the front, one up and one down. “They know me on the block.”

  I heard all three of us breathe in at the same time. He started to duck around the side of the stage. There was a smell of dirty laundry. Of fried food and dirty laundry together. People were coming down the steps from the stage, carrying flutes and oboes and violins and horns.

  “Wait a minute,” Sarah said to him. He looked back at her without turning all the way around. Part of him was in the dark where the side of the stage cut off the light. “I never had a dancing partner just disappear before,” she said. He kept looking at her. His face began to open up and then it closed again. We must have looked to him like a committee.

  Jessica said, “You’re a very good dancer.” He turned around to face us.

  He looked in a strange way like the man in Chagall’s The Green Violinist in the music room at home. It was hard to tell what he was thinking, in the same way it’s hard to tell in the painting. You know the face is saying something, but it’s hiding it from you.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “Me, I like to dance.”

  “Me, too,” Sarah said.

  “I gotta get my gear,” he said. Then he darted behind the stage. Sarah followed him, and Jessica and I looked at each other and then followed her.

  He went around to the very back of the stage, where the grass was worn away and the ground was hard dirt. He knelt down kind of stiffly and reached underneath some broken boards in the base of the stage and pulled out a big plastic garbage bag partly full of clinking cans. He shook the bag to get the dust off, making the cans clank together inside, and stood looking around for a few seconds, as if he were alone.

  “You dance at lots of concerts, don’t you?” Jessica said.

  I said, “You even went to Trout Creek Ridge.”

  “I danced with you there,” Jessica said.

  “I saw you at Pioneer Square. And Laurelhurst,” I said.

  “You must’ve been dancing for years,” Sarah said. He was down on his knees in the dirt, reaching under the stage again. He pulled out a plastic bag with a notebook in it. He stood up. “My name’s Sarah,” she said.

  “Pleased, Sarah,” he said. He glanced very fast at Jessica and me and then off into the shadowy park. He held the notebook in its bag tight under one arm.

  Horns were honking in the traffic jam that always happens after a park concert, and people were lugging blankets and picnic coolers and little kids across the grass.

  Jessica was standing between Sarah and me. I was kind of behind her, and she poked me by sliding her arm around to the side and back so that her elbow went right into my stomach. I didn’t know what she meant.

  “You’re the fiddler one,” he said, looking straight at me and then looking away.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That there’s a pretty song you played,” he said. He was looking sideways, not quite at anything. “Upriver.”

  “Do you live there? In Trout Creek Ridge?” Jessica asked him.

  He looked at her. “Me, no. Catch a train,” he said. He ignored us and took the notebook out of the plastic bag and took a stubby pencil out of his pants pocket. We stood absolutely still and watched him clutch t
he plastic bag under one arm, open the notebook, turn the pages, move his lips as if he were reading, and then write on a clean page. Sarah was closest to him, and she stood on her tiptoes to peer very sneakily over his writing arm. It took him a long time. Then he closed the notebook, put it back in the plastic bag, picked up the bag of cans, and saw us still standing there. All three of us backed up abruptly.

  “Good night, ladies,” he said, and moved away across the grass, clutching the notebook and clanking his bag of cans. He just clanked away into the crowd.

  Sarah turned to us and said in a soft voice, “He wrote the date in his notebook.”

  “That’s all?” Jessica said.

  Sarah nodded her head slowly, over and over again. “And he misspelled ‘July.’”

  We were all completely silent for a moment. Then Jessica said, “He’s an American man and he keeps a diary and he can’t spell ‘July.’”

  We just looked at each other.

  “He has to pick up cans for money,” Jessica said. That was what she’d poked me about. Of course. At a nickel a can, you could easily make several dollars at a concert.

  “That’s the most fascinating person I’ve met all summer,” Sarah said. “He supports his dancing habit by can refunds, and he…”

  “… is a good dancer,” Jessica said.

  “And something more than that,” I said. “His face. While he dances.”

  “Yeah.” They both agreed.

  Then we were all quiet. A couple of people, friends of my parents, walked past us with instruments and said hi and we said hi back, and then we went to where my mother and father were standing with their instruments, looking impatient. “You took too long to get here,” Daddy said. “This isn’t the safest place in the world for three kids to go waltzing around after dark.” We went to where my mother’s car was parked and crowded in and my parents took us all home.

  * * *

  The next morning I took my day off. I left my parents a note, and I rode the bus downtown and got off at the park. The sun was bright, not hot yet. I walked around feeling how it felt not to be practicing on a summer morning. I watched some kids skateboarding on the sidewalk. I watched two police cars slowly driving past the park. I watched pigeons and squirrels. Maybe I was really looking for the dancing man because there he was, with his bag of cans, going through the garbage containers.

  I stood and watched him for a few minutes. Then he looked at me. He straightened up, letting the bag rest on the grass. “You play fiddle real good,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I try hard. My name’s Allegra.”

  “Me, I got the brain damage. I lost my song Waltz Tree, Miss Allegra,” he said. He changed his grip on the bag and some of the cans rattled.

  “You what?” I said. The sun was reflecting off the cans.

  “Lead poison, ruint Rome. Can’t remember. My song it was Waltz Tree back then. Nobody done play it a long time. Waltz in Three.”

  I put my hand up like a sun visor. “You had a song. It was called Waltz in Three. Right?”

  “That’s it. Waltz Three. In form school.”

  “What’s form school?”

  “Where they put the bad boys. Form school. I come to find the Waltz Tree.”

  “What did you do that was so bad?”

  “Didn’t set no fire. Farmer set the fire. My dad, he said I set it. The Pression. I was Trouble.”

  “Somebody set a fire and your dad said you set it?”

  “The Pression. My dad, he had a Kodak he give me; I hid it with my valuables in them branches on the pasture edge. I didn’t set no fire there. Nineteen and thirty-three, the Pression.” He picked up the bag of cans and walked away. I followed along behind him.

  “You had a camera, a Kodak, you hid it in a tree.”

  “Nope. In them branches piled. They was on the ground. Nineteen and thirty-three. Farmer set the fire; he had brush to burn. My dad’s Kodak, it burned, never a sight to see of it. Whole pasture burned. Put me in form school. It was filberts and that.” He was still walking. I was following him.

  “Who put you in form school?”

  “Them farmers. My dad’s Kodak. I was Trouble. Said I et paint, the docs. Lead poison. Same with the Roman Umpire, it fell. They was poisoned.”

  “The farmer thought you set the fire, but you didn’t? Why didn’t the farmer just say he set the fire?”

  He stopped and rested his big bag beside the next garbage container. He looked at me. “He don’t say nothing. They said it was my lead poison; I was Trouble. Them Romans they had it in their jugs, brain damage with their wine. Don’t drink no wine, Miss Allegra.”

  “I won’t, Mr. Trouble.”

  He rummaged through the trash for a few minutes, pulling out cans and putting them in the bag. I picked up three cans from the ground a few feet from the trash container. One Pepsi and two Seven-Ups. I held them out in my hands, he pointed to the bag, and I dropped them in. “They found it when they dig ’em up. Them bony remains. They had their lead stored up. It was a burden in the bones. Them Gyptians had it. Them Jews, too.”

  “Lead poison?”

  “That’s what, Miss Allegra. It makes you imbecile. Them docs said I et paint. Thought I’d kick my bucket. I’m still here. I got a life span.” He went on rummaging through the trash and putting cans in the bag.

  I went on scavenging with him. We moved along to another garbage container. “And your song, Waltz in Three. Did you sing it in form school?”

  “Nope. It gots no words. It’s a song. Them violins. Waltz Tree. You know that song? It’s a record on the player.” He straightened up and looked straight at me, and stayed that way, staring.

  “No. I don’t know a Waltz Tree song. Can you hum it?”

  “Me, no. I lost it.” He looked up to the right, at the trees. “I worked sanitation, they blame me a dog gets poison. I didn’t do no poison; they fired me.” He set the bag down on the ground and bent over the trash container.

  “Why?” I picked up some cans and put them in the bag.

  “I fed them dogs. So they don’t bite you. But I didn’t carry no poison for no dog. They fired me, I was Trouble.” He stood up straight and looked at me. “You can’t play Waltz Tree?”

  I looked at him. If you lose a song you can stay awake all night wanting it to come back. It’s a desolate thing all inside you, a terrible empty thing. It hypnotizes you. And he’d been looking for his song for more years than I’d been alive. “I wish I could, Mr. Trouble,” I said.

  “Me, I don’t want to never die without I find it. Waltz in Three.”

  “I’ll try to help you find your lost song,” I said.

  He looked at me, then away. “Nobody done that,” he said. Then he carried the bag of cans off to the other side of the park. I picked up about eight cans on the way and put them in the bag when he set it down near a dumpster.

  “Me, I could use the Kodak. Wished I had it.”

  I looked at him. He looked away. “Put it right up there on the table. Right up there.” He was looking off into space.

  “What table?” I asked. My parents would have a fit if they heard me prying into his private life.

  “The Gospel gots a table.”

  “The Gospel?”

  “Mission yonder.” He pointed with his thumb sideways into the air. “They don’t gots no violins. No Waltz Tree.” He opened the lid of the dumpster and began hunting around in it. I watched him for a while.

  Two police on horses came riding toward us in that slow walk they have, the kind of picture that makes being a cop look so easy. They were a man and a woman. They stopped near us. “Morning, Mr. T.,” the man said. “Found yourself a friend?” Both horses were handsome in the sun and one of them puffed air through its nostrils.

  Mr. Trouble lifted his head. “This here violin,” he said, pointing me out. The police and I said hi to each other. I looked at the horses and listened to the clanking of Mr. Trouble’s cans and said to myself that this might be the
only time in my life I’d ever be called a violin.

  “He telling you his Roman Empire story?” the man asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. The horse breathed heavily, and the man smiled.

  “You don’t want to be late for lunch, Mr. T.,” said the woman cop. “Meat loaf today. Smells good.”

  Mr. Trouble kept his head in the dumpster.

  “You have a half hour till lunch, Mr. T.,” said the man.

  “I be there, I be there,” came from the dumpster.

  The cops both said good-bye and rode on through the park.

  My parents would have had a complete fit. I asked anyway, “Where’s lunch, Mr. Trouble?”

  “Gospel. Meat loaf Thursday. Maggie and them.” He clanked some cans into his bag. “You find a Waltz Tree?” He straightened up and looked straight at me and didn’t look away.

  “No. Not yet.” His mouth stirred itself up in a wrinkled motion. “But I’ll try. I haven’t had time yet. I haven’t even gotten started.” I sounded like someone making an excuse to a teacher. He bent his head back down into the garbage.

  “I have to go now,” I said. He was rummaging in the dumpster. He didn’t turn his head or say anything, and I left.

  Gospel. Maggie and them. I could have jumped up and down right in Waterfront Park. He wasn’t homeless. He lived somewhere. Somebody fed him. Maggie and them.

  I rode the bus home, back across the Willamette River, and started looking through waltz books. No Waltz Tree. No Waltz Three. No Waltz in Three.

  Daddy came home from teaching his class and saw me on the floor in the music room with piles of music around me. I told him. About the police being there and everything. I especially emphasized the police, and I described their horses very carefully, the way they stood. Daddy said he didn’t know how I was going to find a song that had at least three titles, but he said I should call the reference librarian at the university where he teaches. My father looked down at me with my sprawl of music all over the floor and said, “Poor old guy. Poor old guy.”

  The reference librarian told me she’d look it up. “But every waltz is in three, Allegra,” she said. She had a tone that was like “But all cucumbers are green, Allegra.”