The Mozart Season

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  He nodded hello at the other people, and said, “Well, Allegra.” And then he bent over to put his case down and get his violin out.

  The added violinist, a very exciting young player, about to play the splendid Brahms, was Steve Landauer.

  The pianist said, “You know each other?”

  “She’s a hot page turner,” Steve Landauer said, and stood up, tuning his D string as he moved.

  “Oh, I know that?” she said, and laughed. “She’s a professional?”

  As a matter of fact, Steve Landauer didn’t really know what he was talking about. He’d seen me turn with my right hand, but not with my left. You don’t use your right hand in front of a pianist’s face. And in an orchestra you turn from the bottom of the page; when you’re only a page turner you turn from the top. All the same, it’s timing. I looked at him and then turned around.

  While they played, I thought about playing chamber music. Of all the fun things to do sitting down, it must be near the top of the list. Of course I’d played duets and trios and some quartets; Mr. Kaplan gets his students together with other kids to do it once in a while, and sometimes kids from the Youth Orchestra get together and play. But to do it for your whole life, like the Juilliard Quartet, to play chamber music as a career—the way somebody else might play basketball or work in a bank—I sat and wondered how that life would be.

  When they got to the quintet I heard Steve Landauer play. He was better than I’d even thought before. Second violin isn’t as hard a part as first, but in a quartet of all professional people it has to sound perfect. As far as I could hear, it did. The page turner isn’t supposed to turn around and watch people play, so I just listened. Steve Landauer’s notes came humming over my shoulder, and they sounded smooth and round and like little waves of water.

  While they bowed to the audience, I tried to be invisible, of course.

  When I got home, in one way I didn’t want to go near my violin: I was horrified by the idea of upstaging Mozart. And in another way, I wanted to spend the whole night playing. I was in bursts of energy, and I played through two or three Dancla études, seeing pictures of my life go by in layers: going to lessons; watching rain drip on leaves outside the music-room window when I was a little kid playing little songs; seeing the hand-prints of everybody in my whole first grade on the classroom wall and laughing and splashing at a big white sink with the other kids as we washed off the paint we’d dipped our hands in. I played Kreutzer no. 38 and remembered a picnic we’d had when Bubbe Raisa visited us. I remembered skipping along a trail holding her hand.

  I spent about an hour on the third-movement cadenza of the Mozart before I went to bed. When it’s going well, it can sound like beads falling down a string.

  While I was waiting to go to sleep, I told Elter Bubbe Leah I’d be playing the Mozart for her in a few days. Anybody walking by on the street could have told me I was doing an insane thing, lying in my bed promising a corpse I’d play a Mozart concerto for her. They could tell me the last thing this great-grandmother needed—alive or dead—was a Mozart violin concerto. They could say I was being disrespectful of the dead, and they could say I was being impractical, and they could tell me I was trying to rely on something supernatural to help me win. They could accuse me of trying to bribe the spirits.

  In the incomplete dark I lay and looked at the outlined hump of the purse on top of my bureau and talked to Elter Bubbe Leah. If I kept it to myself, nobody could tell me I was crazy or impractical or immoral.

  The Leah I was talking to was the one in the picture, the one with the goose and broom.

  And I kept seeing Steve Landauer sitting behind me and to the right on the stage, his fingers going like hummingbirds on the strings, his sound in some places like rough silk, the kind Jessica has in her family from being partly Chinese.

  And I saw, too, Mr. Trouble’s feet dancing, pointed outward, away from each other, in unmatched shoes. I looked at the hump of Elter Bubbe’s purse against the wall and listened to Heavenly giving herself a bath.

  I set the alarm clock for 6:00 A.M. and went to sleep.

  12

  I woke up two minutes before the alarm was due to bleep. I was ready to talk to my grandmother. I went to the kitchen phone. It was 9:00 A.M. in New York.

  “Hello.” Already I missed her. Her voice has a tone that says, This Is the Way Things Should Be Done, Trust Me. “My Allegra Leah! You’ve had your breakfast so early?”

  “No, Bubbe—”

  “The strawberries are blooming already in Auragon? I saw on TV you had eighty-three degrees yesterday; it will be hot today, too.”

  “Strawberries are past now, Bubbe. Peaches are on. I got Elter Bubbe Leah’s purse, I want to … I want to say thank you.…”

  “You’ll take good care?”

  “Oh, yes—of course. I’m. In fact, it’s—Well, it’s—Oh, Bubbe—”

  “You’re telling me something?”

  “Yes. I am. Bubbe, I’m playing a violin competition. And the purse is—Well, I’m thinking of Elter Bubbe Leah when she had her goose and her broom and her purse. In the picture. And that’s the way I’ll play the competition.”

  “Such a tragedy, there’s no word. My Allegra Leah, you’ll play with other children? In a contest?” She wasn’t listening completely.

  “Well, not exactly children. It’s a Mozart concerto.”

  “And there is a prize?”

  “Bubbe, the others are all older than I am. I’m the youngest. Yes, there’s a prize. But I’m not thinking about that. It’s to get through the competition—Elter Bubbe Leah’s purse. I decided to play the Mozart for her.”

  There wasn’t any sound on the other end of the phone.

  “Don’t tell anybody, Bubbe?”

  Another silence.

  “This is your offering, Allegra Leah.”

  “Yes. That’s what I mean.”

  More silence.

  “This is your kaddish. Yom Hashoah.”

  I didn’t understand. I didn’t say anything.

  “Such a goyishe family. Your prayer for the dead, your remembrance for her.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Say it again?”

  “Kaddish. Yom Hashoah. When will you come to see me, Allegra Leah? Such a big girl, I hardly know you.”

  “Are you inviting me, Bubbe?”

  “We’ll go to the museums, we’ll go in Central Park, of course I’m inviting you. Rosh Hashanah?”

  Vaguely, I thought it was sort of in October. “I’ll ask my parents.”

  “They’ll find excuses. School. ‘She should be playing her Mozart.’ Childhood is short, you could skip Mozart a little, tell them that, Allegra Leah. Come see your bubbe. We’ll bake kugel, I’ll tell you the stories—I’ll tell you the stories of who you are.”

  “I’ll ask, Bubbe. Thank you for inviting me.”

  “Oy, thank you for calling me and saying thanks. You made my day, Allegra Leah.”

  “And mine,” I said.

  “Keep cool, the television says it’s hot where you are. Eat your breakfast.”

  “I will, Bubbe.”

  “You’re being a good girl?”

  “I think so. I love you, Bubbe.”

  “I love you. You carry her name, Allegra Leah.”

  “I know, Bubbe.”

  “Come see me. We’ll do the town. We’ll be grand ladies on Fifth Avenue.”

  “I’ll do it, Bubbe.”

  “Such a girl. Good-bye, Allegra Leah. Kiss the others for me.”

  “Of course. Good-bye, Bubbe.”

  With most people, you end a conversation and there’s something you should have said or they should have said, it’s not a complete conversation, there’s more, and you walk away with things left not finished. With Bubbe Raisa, there were thousands of things we both could have said, but we almost didn’t have to. I had the feeling she could understand without everything being said.

  I took toast and orange juice to the music room. Outside the French do
ors a brand-new spiderweb hung swaying on a rosebush, all glistening with water drops. I went to the living room and got my mother’s magnifying lens from the dead-bug collection and looked at the web through it, moving the lens back and forth as it swayed. Suddenly I wanted to be a little kid again, just thinking a spiderweb is so pretty, just thinking about the designs of the little thready lines in it. I wanted to go back down inside my childhood and not know the things I knew now. I stood there looking at the web for a long time, watching it sway back and forth.

  I had to practice the Youth Orchestra music, and I went straight through the program, then went back and worked on the parts I’d marked with x’s.

  My parents were almost reverent about the purse. They acted as if it were a museum piece. My father kept nodding his head, and my mother kept saying “Oh, my. Oh, my.”

  My mother and father said you could fill a book with stories about stand partners, and my mother mumbled something about inviting Sam Landauer and his fourth wife to dinner “sometime.”

  When I took Bro David into my room to show him the purse, he recognized it immediately from when he’d visited Bubbe Raisa. “She had it under glass. She kept it in a dark corner where the sun wouldn’t fade it,” he said. “She told me about finding it packed in her suitcase when she was already on the boat—She almost worships it. Under glass.”

  “Is Bubbe Raisa trying to make me all Jewish?” I asked.

  “That’s impossible,” he said. “But if you want a yes-or-no answer, yes. She tried it with me too. You know—it’s the half-and-half she doesn’t like. Religious Jews feel sorry for us; Gentiles think we’re Very Interesting. We’re outsiders to all of them.”

  Maybe it’s because David’s so much older than I am that he can see these things I don’t even get a hint of. Evidence that you can’t be half Jewish. “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “The way her friends looked at me. I can’t explain it. But she always kept that purse under glass.”

  * * *

  I turned pages for four more concerts, tried to unlearn the concerto and learn it again, which of course I couldn’t do; and Jessica and Sarah and I started going swimming in the pool at the university where my father teaches, where it didn’t cost us any money because we go in on my father’s card. When we were in the pool, we played being the three Rhine Maidens from the opera by Wagner where they sing underwater, trying to protect their precious gold. We went singing and gurgling underwater being Rhine Maidens for four afternoons before we got tired of it.

  I didn’t tell anybody exactly about my conversation with Bubbe Raisa. I just said I’d called her to say thank-you.

  My parents went away for three days, and Bro David and I were in charge of each other. I mainly practiced, and he had two of his friends over one day and they worked on the comic book they’re drawing together. My parents had said I could invite Jessica and Sarah in self-defense, and everybody except Sarah ate so much pizza we felt sick.

  I went to two more Youth Orchestra rehearsals, and I turned pages for people, and I practiced. I watched the days go by, and I knew I was going to honor my agreement with Elter Bubbe Leah, and I knew it might be an insane thing to do.

  And most of the time, even sometimes when I was swimming with my friends, what was walking along through my mind was the terrible way I was playing the concerto.

  While my mother and father were away, a thing happened. It was late afternoon after I’d practiced for hours, and I was sitting in a slanted sprawl at the dining-room table holding Heavenly on my stomach, feeling her just begin to dig me with her claws and then pull back. Dig, retreat, dig, retreat. I was sort of counting out the rhythm of her claws, and she was kind of humming along in an in-and-out purr. I was tired from practicing, and we were just hanging out on a summer afternoon not doing anything. My eyes closed.

  I don’t know what made me open them. In the middle of Bro David’s mess on the table was a cartoon of me, playing my violin like some kind of madwoman and wearing an animal skin slung around me, and my feet were wheels. Sweat was pouring off me, and I had an insane look on my face. None of that was so strange, David is a cartoonist. What was extremely weird was that I was huge, like an Amazon, and the violin was so tiny it looked as if I’d break it any instant. And an auto mechanic was standing there with a wrench in his hand saying, “When your violin overheats, check your head gasket. You may need your whole head replaced.”

  It was an insulting picture. And at the same time a bell was ringing in my head. That was what Mr. Kaplan meant. Very slowly, I began to put some pieces together. An Amazon on wheels, wearing an animal skin—she could crush the tiny violin. She was in a frenzy.

  I heard again in my mind, “Don’t upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto.”

  I stared at the cartoon. It was horrible.

  I stood up, Heavenly leaped down, I went to the music room and got my violin and bow, I took them to the downstairs bathroom where there’s a big mirror, and I started playing. Little sections of the concerto. Bits from the third movement, a longer bit from the second, part of the cadenza from the first. I watched myself.

  And I remembered a thing that Jessica thinks is so ridiculous at school: the athletic coaches talk about how the team is going to give 110 percent. I watched my arms. Mr. Kaplan has always told me I have to be in partnership with the violin. I’d gone beyond that. Way, way beyond. David was right. That was what Mr. Kaplan meant. Almost on top of Mozart.

  I was a combination of angry and relieved. I stood in the bathroom and let the tears spurt right out onto the counter. I’d been trying too hard. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, holding my violin and bow. I would play the Bloch finals for Elter Bubbe Leah, just the way I’d promised. But I’d make changes. I had to. When you think about it, it’s the most obvious thing, and I should have realized it weeks before: trying too hard to play Mozart well would be like driving a car through a rose garden, or ironing a silk dress with a very hot iron, or cutting a lace doily with a chain saw, or—or like having a marching band play Brahms’s “Lullaby.”

  After that afternoon, every time I went to the music room, I could feel the changes. The concerto didn’t get any easier. The notes were still the same notes, but I gave myself permission to—this was the most surprising thing: I gave myself permission, down way deep in me, not to try to be Steve Landauer.

  And I didn’t tell anybody about it. Not anybody.

  With the finals three weeks away, Mr. Kaplan turned sideways on the piano bench and said to me, looking in his over-the-glasses look, “I think our work together is getting somewhere. I think you’re finding your way. When was the last time you listened to a recording of this concerto?”

  “Maybe a week ago,” I said. “I just simply stopped, I’m not sure why.” I realized that I’d silently given myself permission not to try to be Anne-Sophie Mutter or David Oistrakh too.

  “Good. I wouldn’t advise you to listen to anyone else until after the finals, Allegra.”

  “Is there ever going to be an after-the-finals?”

  He laughed. “I understand. Yes, and your school will begin again, and you’ll be an eighth-grader. And we’ll have only one lesson each week again. And we’ll do a different concerto.… Indeed.”

  It was hard to imagine, but I knew it was true.

  “And this week you should have new strings. They’ll have just about the right amount of time to adjust before Labor Day.”

  I don’t think I would have admitted to anybody that the practicing was getting easier. It would seem as if I were cheating. If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not doing any good: that seems to be what we’re supposed to believe.

  I almost laughed as I tuned and retuned and retuned my new strings, listening to them getting used to being played.

  I turned pages for two more concerts, both pianists.

  * * *

  Labor Day weekend meant I was supposed to be on TV. I watched the show a couple of times to find out wha
t it was. A man talked to people and made jokes. It was like other shows.

  Jessica and Sarah helped me decide what to wear. It included a shirt of Sarah’s and Jessica’s socks.

  My mother took me to the studio very early in the morning and said she’d pick me up at 10:05 A.M., after it was over. “Don’t worry about being on TV,” she said. “It’ll be all right.” I gave her a look. She said, “I’m a mother. I’m supposed to tell you it’ll be all right.”

  She got berserk when I went bike riding but a television interview in front of thousands of people was going to be all right. I got out of the car and went into the building. Somebody told me to take the elevator to the sixth floor. I pushed the button and waited for it. Then a man come rushing down the hall and said to take the other elevator, they’d had some trouble with this one. Then he said No, take this one after all. There was a tall lady in a lace collar standing just outside the elevator. I told her who I was. She shook my hand and said, “Congratulations.” I didn’t know what for.

  She said, “You’re a bit—no, I guess you’re not late, we don’t have everybody quite yet.” We were walking down a narrow hallway. She turned left suddenly, into a doorway. I followed her. It was a big room with couches and chairs and a vending machine and bright fluorescent lights, no windows. “Just have a seat,” she said, and walked out.

  An Asian girl was sitting on a leather couch, and Christine was on a chair next to her, and a very freckled boy wearing serious glasses and a white shirt was across from her. Steve Landauer was sitting on the corner of a table, away from the others, flipping the pages of a magazine. I stood in the doorway. The room smelled like paint thinner.

  Christine didn’t look surprised to see me. She said, “Hi, Allegra. I had a feeling you’d be here.” Her eyes shifted instantly to Steve Landauer and back. She almost didn’t look at him at all, it was so fast.

  “Hi,” I said. I started to say hi to Steve Landauer, but he was staring into the magazine. I walked over and sat on the couch.

  “This is Ezra,” she said, pointing to the boy in the white shirt. “He’s from Culver. And this is Myra Nakamura. She’s from Roseburg. This is Allegra. She’s from Portland.”