The Mozart Season

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

  I wasn’t exactly fine. I was tired, and I was disappointed, and I was happy for Karen, and I knew that I knew my Elter Bubbe Leah better than anybody would ever believe, and what I said was almost true: I would be fine. I just wasn’t exactly all fine yet.

  I ran upstairs to put on my Youth Orchestra dress and had a one-minute hug with Heavenly. My mother tied a big apron on me so I wouldn’t spill spaghetti sauce on my dress and we had dinner in a hurry. Everybody was in a good mood, or seemed to be. Something was over. School would start tomorrow. Bro David and I would be running around early in the morning arguing over the bathroom. I looked at him across the dining-room table, and I thought about what an amazing coincidence it was that Kansas and Poland had come together to get us hybrids, shoveling spaghetti into our mouths.

  For a moment during dinner, I stopped and closed my eyes and listened. Garlic bread being crunched, little clinks of forks on plates, the sound of somebody wiping a hand on a napkin. Slurps of marinara sauce going into mouths. I opened my eyes. Daddy was holding the basket of garlic bread toward me and he was staring at me. Little Leah with her braids spread out on the pillow in her bed in Suprasl appeared for an instant, and Daddy and I looked at each other, not interrupted by anything, and I said inside my head that this was my father, and then I took the basket from him and we continued our dinner.

  * * *

  Sarah and Jessica had saved a place for my parents on a big blanket with exactly three rows of blankets in front of them. Even though my mother and father were full of spaghetti, I could see them munching on Sarah’s Healthy Nut Things.

  Word had gotten around about the Bloch finals, and people backstage were calling Christine “Christine Moments,” and I saw three people, two violinists and a clarinet player, try to congratulate Steve Landauer on winning second place. Every single time, he pretended he was looking for something in his violin case or his pocket. He barely said thank-you.

  Mr. Kaplan came around the end of the stage, with his sort of stooped-over walk, and we spotted each other and he put his left hand up like a sign. He came close and put both his hands on my shoulders. “Did you enjoy this afternoon?” he asked.

  “Yep. I did.”

  “The judges were quite taken with you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I spoke with one of them.” He put on a quoting voice, very bass and harrumphing: “‘That Allegra Shapiro. She’s Fleur’s child?’ I said ‘Yes, and Alan’s as well.’ ‘Quite remarkable, Kaplan. But quite young.’” He leaned toward my left ear, and went on in a softer harrumphing voice: “‘A most inspirational performance, Kaplan. Most inspirational.’” His right hand applied a bit of extra pressure to my left shoulder, and he said, in his own voice, “Almost as exciting as the softball play-offs, eh?” He stepped back to see my reaction.

  A big, face-breaking smile came up out of me. I would never in the world tell him about the pictures of Elter Bubbe Leah’s childhood that I saw through the notes while I was playing the concerto. I might tell Bubbe Raisa.

  “I’m very, very proud,” he said. “I’m going to sit with your parents now. Have a good show.”

  Somebody came by and bumped my elbow on the way to the stage. I said, “Yes. Sure. Thanks, Mr. Kaplan.”

  He lifted his hand in his flat-handed wave and walked away. I walked up the steps onto the stage.

  Steve Landauer’s chair was missing its little rubber thing on the bottom of one leg and didn’t sit squarely on the platform. He tore off a corner of the music folder and folded it up and stuck it under the uneven leg. The chair still didn’t balance. He got very frustrated with it and sat and muttered while we tuned up.

  After some speeches about how wonderful it was that the Youth Orchestra could fill in while the Symphony musicians were locked out in the labor conflict, we started playing.

  As usual, Mr. Trouble was dancing. The concert went along. People clapped hard, the breeze lifted the pages just enough off the stand so that I was using four clothespins. I put the Sibelius Valse Triste up and Steve Landauer shook out his left hand, hanging it down beside his chair. He was still annoyed that the chair sat crooked on the stage, and he jiggled it forward and back a bit to get a firmer grip.

  I slid my mute up and put it on the bridge. The instructions say “con sordino” and that means put your mute on. Steve Landauer didn’t put his on. I guess he’d forgotten. I pointed with the end of my bow to the words. He put his mute on instantly, without looking at it. He kept his eyes concentrating straight on the conductor. Steve Landauer has very good peripheral vision.

  The conductor stood very straight and still so that to the audience it looked as if he was just waiting, and he held up two fingers and turned them back and forth, and made happy and sad faces, to remind us of the double meaning, and we began.

  I saw Mr. Trouble out of the corner of my right eye, and he was wondering how to dance with those first low plucked notes in the basses. He was waiting. I thought about how he was so good at waiting. In a way, he’d been spending his whole life waiting.

  When we start playing the melody, using our bows, the suspense begins. Then there’s a rallentando, a slowing down, and then at letter C there’s an a tempo and the very strange silences begin. I don’t know any other piece, of all the pieces I’ve ever heard, that has a silence like that. It’s between the second and third beat of the waltz rhythm, and it makes you hold everything up in the air for a moment. Absolutely nothing happens. Like a huge question mark but nobody tells you what the question is. You have to figure it out by yourself.

  That moment lets you think so much, your mind can go so fast in that little instant of no sound. You can imagine every question you’ve ever thought about: Why did Deirdre’s baby die? Why did Elter Bubbe Leah get annihilated at Treblinka? Why did Jessica’s father die in the volcano? How did Mr. Trouble get the way he is? Will anybody ever be in love with me? You can let it get your mind very overwhelmed.

  What I began to notice was that Mr. Trouble got absorbed, too. He started dancing, then I saw him stop and stare at the conductor. His head was going up and down, in rhythm with the conductor’s arms. Then he started dancing again.

  But he kept stopping. Dancing then stopping, dancing then stopping. He stopped and looked up at us playing, then danced again, his same dance. Then he stopped and looked down at the ground, and then danced again. He kept doing that.

  We finished playing the piece and people clapped and we stood up. I very fast put the next music on top. Out of the side of my eye I saw Steve Landauer’s leg jerk a little bit, then he almost backed into me. I looked down. Mr. Trouble was standing right below us. He had his veiny hands up on the edge of the boards of the stage. “Miss Allegra,” he said.

  I bent down in front of Steve Landauer’s legs to hear him.

  “That there Waltz Tree,” said Mr. Trouble in his croaky voice. Even in his old watery eyes I could see he had such happiness. They were shiny in the stage lights. “That there Waltz Tree.”

  “That’s Waltz Tree?” I didn’t take it all in at first.

  “Yes sir, Miss Allegra, that there song,” he said. He nodded his head up and down and kept doing it. “That song. Waltz in Three. That’s the one.”

  Valse Triste. Waltz Tree. Of course. I didn’t know what to say. I just hung there, bent over with my violin hanging down. Suddenly there were tears stinging my eye sockets. I tried to smile at him, and then I realized everybody had stopped clapping and the orchestra had sat down again and we were supposed to play the next piece. I scooted backward across Steve Landauer into my chair.

  We finished the concert and stood up for the applause. Steve Landauer said, without turning directly to me, “That guy grabbed my pants. He actually grabbed them. Is he missing some marbles?”

  I breathed in and out slowly before I answered him. “Not really,” I said.

  * * *

  My parents and Bro David and Jessica and Sarah were all standing beside my violin case on the platform b
ackstage. When I walked around the corner they all started singing, to the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”:

  “A Most Inspirational Play-er

  A Most Inspirational Play-er

  A Most Inspirational Play-errrrr

  Which nobody can deny.…”

  Except that Bro David just held up his fingers making ditto marks instead of repeating the words three times.

  While Jessica and Sarah were hugging me, I said, “I’ll tell you the incredible Trouble story tomorrow. It’ll be something to do during lunch.”

  “Is it the kind of thing eighth-graders talk about?” Sarah asked.

  “Trust me,” I said.

  * * *

  My mother wanted to come into my room and brush my hair before I went to bed. Even with school starting the next day. “Just a few minutes,” she said. I was in my pajamas. We sat down on my bed, with my back to her. She began brushing.

  It felt good, the sound and the feel of the long strokes down from my scalp all the way to the ends. “I’ve always loved the smell of my children’s hair,” she said.

  “I probably smell like a crowded park full of greasy chicken,” I said.

  “You smell wonderful,” she said.

  “Deirdre called me this morning,” I said. I told her about it, but not completely everything. Not exactly. I said she’d wished me love.

  “Allegra,” my mother said, “Deirdre is one of the finest, most profoundly loyal and loving people you’ll ever want to meet.”

  We sat on my bed feeling sorry for Deirdre for some minutes, listening to the sound of the brush going through my hair. Then she said, “You know what would make almost all the difference with Deirdre?”

  “What would?”

  “Now, I don’t mean anybody ever saves you—don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean somebody swoops down and lets you out of your own unhappy life. Not at all, not ever.” She breathed in and out slowly. “That doesn’t happen. But. Sometimes somebody can be a connection.” I was carrying the secret of the velvet purse connection with Poland and Suprasl and New York and the shiny, dusted radio for the opera, and Mr. Trouble and his found song and his happy old eyes shiny in the stage lights, and my mother and Deirdre hugging each other on the floor, and my head was full of tumbling pictures of people doing things all invisibly connected with other people.

  “Are you talking about Deirdre or what?” I said.

  “I’m talking about Deirdre, yes. What would really help her would be one good man. A man of principles and fairness and— Not the kind that suddenly takes a hike when the going gets sticky. A persister. That’s what I mean.”

  The most persistent person I could think of was Mr. Trouble. He must have been looking for Valse Triste for more years than I’d been alive. In fact, he was exactly what Jessica said, about China, about the bamboo. Bending without breaking.

  “Somebody who’d appreciate her. Help her hold her pain. Allegra, her pain’s too much to hold all by herself.” I could hear tears coming into my mother’s throat. “Do you know, every time she sings she’s asking—maybe asking the universe—oh, I can’t say it exactly— Every single time she sings, she’s giving her pain a voice, and she’s asking what it means.”

  “Do you think pain means anything?” I said.

  The brush strokes slowed down but they stayed steady. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “What happened to the husband she had?”

  My mother sighed a middle-aged sigh. “Oh, he was—I suppose you could say the grief was too much for him. It made him into a not-nice person. He ended up walking away.”

  I remembered Deirdre in her elegant blue dress, screaming.

  “Well, what do you think pain’s supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. She brushed rhythmically, not missing a beat. “I do know it connects the whole human species.” More brushing. “I just don’t know why.”

  We were silent again for a few strokes. “Allegra, what in the world was your buddy Mr. Trouble up to when he leaned on the stage? What was he saying to you?”

  For a moment, I had a feeling of the world so full of millions of people, all of them with their own secrets, and they were all so important. Everybody. “Remember he lost his Waltz Tree?” I said.

  “Right. His lost song.”

  “Well, think. Isn’t it obvious?”

  “What? Isn’t what obvious?”

  And suddenly it was funny. “Mommy, think. What were we playing?” And I got started laughing. My mother stopped brushing. Everybody and their secrets. Nobody could translate anybody else’s secrets, they’d all sound meaningless if they tried. I was laughing harder and harder. It was a song about Death, about dreaming you weren’t going to die, it was so tragic, and I was thinking of all the millions of secrets and everybody going along not knowing anybody else’s.

  I turned around on my bed to look at her. “Mommy, what was on the program?”

  She scrunched up her face, thinking. I bet people do that on the tundra, and in Africa, and in Siberia, as much as we do it in an electrified place like Portland. Face-scrunching. A human sport. I watched her. The scrunches were moving around her face. Then her mouth opened wide. She said it really slowly, even with a little bit of the silence between the beats. “Valse Triste. Waltz Tree. Oh, Allegra.” Tears came into her voice. “Oh…”

  My mother was crying and I was laughing. I thought it was very strange for a moment, and then I realized it couldn’t be the other way around.

  “Allegra,” she said, “I admire you.”

  “You do?”

  “I do. You’re a person of empathy and drive and—” she thought for a second, “and courage.”

  “What’s empathy?”

  “Oh,” she turned my head away from her and started brushing again. “It’s not sympathy, that’s different, but they’re close. Empathy is when you can feel for somebody—not because you think you should, not because it’ll make you a better person—but when you can feel somebody’s feelings because you haven’t closed yourself off from them. From those feelings in yourself. E-m-p-a-t-h-y.”

  “Mom, can I go visit Bubbe Raisa for Rosh Hashana?” I said.

  She sniffled. “What an inspired idea! Sure, why not?”

  “And Deirdre too, at the same time?”

  “Yes.” This was the woman who wouldn’t let me ride my bike in the neighborhood park, and she was going to let me fly to New York. We got up off my bed, and she put my hairbrush on a chair. We kissed good night. She called me her Most Inspirational Daughter and left my room.

  I wrote “empathy” on the clipboard. And I looked at my list.

  tenacity

  annihilate

  ambivalence

  sabotage

  simultaneity

  trauma

  hinterland

  pernicious

  flippant

  ominous

  arrogant

  empathy

  I imagined that the first assignment I’d get in English class the next day would be to write an essay or make a collage demonstrating “mastery” of all the words on the list. They’re always talking about mastery at my school. I put the clipboard on the floor.

  Way last June, on the day Mr. Kaplan had told me about the Bloch finals, when he’d looked at me in a way I couldn’t describe, it was empathy. That’s what it was. And then later, he’d said people talk too much about mastering a song, but what’s more important is to merge with it—I sat on my bed and told myself I finally understood what he meant.

  I turned down the covers.

  You can be half Jewish. Maybe whole Jews or whole Gentiles wouldn’t understand. But you can be. I am.

  Under my pillow was a cartoon from Bro David. It was a tree, and on every single branch was hanging a violin. The caption said, “Martin Luther gets a better idea.” And in neat small letters, “Congratulations to the Most Inspirational Player in the Ernest Bloch Competition,” and there was a figure of me playi
ng the violin with my softball uniform on. This time he’d made me my normal size.

  I turned off the light and turned on the radio.

  I tried to visualize the Juilliard String Quartet in the picture in Mr. Kaplan’s studio. I thought of their second violinist, the one who’d tipped me over the edge to be willing to play the Bloch finals. I couldn’t remember his name.

  It was because of the Oregon Symphony lockout that Mr. Trouble had found his Waltz Tree. If Jessica hadn’t danced with him upriver in the hinterland, we wouldn’t have known his name. If Sarah hadn’t gotten the courage to ask him questions, I wouldn’t ever have heard about his lost song.

  But it had started with Deirdre: “Why on earth doesn’t somebody dance with that man?”

  If my bow had landed with the hair toward me, I’d have ended up learning a completely different Mozart concerto, way last year. I wouldn’t have ever met Myra and Karen Karen and Ezra, and Steve Landauer would have been just a stand partner who treated me like his servant.

  Somebody else would have been a finalist in the competition, maybe might have won it. Somebody was right now probably angry and upset, not being in the finals. I wondered who it was. Boy or girl. Old or young.

  I lay down and pulled Heavenly under the covers. School would begin the next morning and I’d be exhausted. Somebody had requested “So What” by Miles Davis on the radio, the same record I have.

  Karen Karen and Deirdre and Mr. Trouble were all related, too. There was something between them, a thread. And Myra Nakamura and Mr. Kaplan and Jessica and Sarah and Ezra. There wasn’t a single person I could think of who wasn’t connected to a whole bunch of other people I could think of. I thought of the blind woman in the airport bathroom trying to turn the water on and not knowing the secret code. If she knew it, she could be more connected with everybody else. But she was connected anyway.