by Frank Conroy
"Did you talk to him?" she asked.
"No. The people from Washington."
"The FBI?"
Burdick shook his head. He put his container of coffee on the table, sat down, rested his elbows on his knees, and folded his hands. "I know you haven't asked my advice, Mrs. Rawlings, and even though I'm just a messenger boy in all this, I hope you'll give it some thought." He spoke in firm, quiet tones, looking straight at her. "Don't fool with these people. They are powerful. They have their own investigators, their own files, their own sources, and you just can't take the risk of second guessing them. Between you, me, and the lamppost, I don't care for their methods, but they are a fact of life. They can crush people. They do it every day."
"What are you saying?" She was surprised.
"I'm saying they're dangerous."
"So you're not with them?" Claude broke in.
"They do stuff like this and they just get away with it?" She shook her head slowly.
"This is nothing." Burdick got up and went to the door. "At least they lifted the suspension. You can go to work. Next time they won't do that." He opened the door, ducked his head, and was gone.
"Sight-reading," Weisfeld had said, "is not a big deal. Mechanical. Eye-hand coordination. It requires no thought, no emotion, no sensitivity. It is like typing. Like typing on a typewriter. A monkey practically could do it. A chimpanzee." He had shaken his head. "So here's what we're going to do. We're going to separate things. Don't listen, just play. Listening you can do later. We can put it back together later, you see what I mean?"
"I think so," Claude had said.
"Don't get involved is what I'm saying. Just play whatever it is and don't think about it."
"Even if it's—"
"Yes! Yes!" Weisfeld interrupted. "Particularly if it's. Especially if it's, because that's when you'll start to get involved. Play like a machine. Don't stop, don't think, and don't feel. Just play. Play the notes."
"Really?"
Weisfeld had nodded.
"It doesn't sound like fun."
"Fun will only take you so far." He paused, stroking his mustache. "There are deeper pleasures than fun. Fun is good, it helps things, helps to forget things. But it isn't everything."
Claude had gone to work, and for the first few months his inability to make his hands the slaves of his eyes—exclusively of his eyes—made for slow going and flares of temper. At the white piano in his room he would explode in frustration, sweep the music aside, and play boogie-woogie until his hands ached. He would stand at the keyboard and pound away, lost in sound and the beat. Then he'd go out, walk around the block, and come back to try again.
One day, on a whim, he'd turned on the radio, tuned to a news program, left the volume up, and sat down to sight-read an early section from Bach's Art of Fugue. Almost immediately he realized he'd made a valuable discovery. He was able to divert much of his ear to the radio, with enough left over to monitor the piano. With his attention thus fragmented, it was much easier to follow Weisfeld's instructions. His progress in sight-reading accelerated rapidly, and after another six months he only rarely used the radio.
The critical age, as far as the movie theater people were concerned, was twelve. At twelve you were supposed to pay full price for your ticket, but you no longer had to sit in the children's section. This policy was common to the theaters clustered on Eighty-sixth Street: the RKO, Loew's Orpheum, Loew's Eighty-sixth Street, and the Grande (which showed foreign films and didn't really have a children's section). Claude exploited his small size and baby face at the box office, but once inside he sat wherever he wanted. The constant chatter and restlessness of the children's section was no longer tolerable, since the whole point was to find some quiet seat in the dark and sink completely and utterly into the dream.
He forgot himself as he watched the other worlds, entering them not as a character but as elements of those worlds—the scrublands through which the wagons moved, the ocean bearing up the pirate ships, the sunlight on the side of a white house. He became the air, the sky, the light in which the dramas occurred. He was himself without boundaries as he watched the people in the films. Bodiless in the dark cathedral, he absorbed the parables of good and evil that linked the movies together—a kind of grand arc through cowboys, gangsters, cops, moms and dads, factories, armies, lovers, thieves, angels, cities and towns, animals, kings and queens, cab drivers, gamblers, priests, detectives, the devil (Claude Rains: "What in my domain is that?" The boy the only person in the theater to laugh), beauties, beasts, comics, and ghosts. It was nothing less than the infinite story of life, and he attended.
If he was nothing, or almost nothing, with no idea of where he had come from or where he was going, why he was living or what he was supposed to be doing (the piano only an elusive hint), and if, further, he was buffeted by forces he could not name but which were loneliness, sadness, longing, anger, fear, and spiritual nausea, would he not deeply attend the infinite story of life? Would he not pay the fucking twenty-five cents to get into the cathedral and see the light?
6
HIS FINGERS no longer carried the stain of shoe polish. He no longer collected bottles, although he sometimes went over to the building on Park Avenue for a game of gin with Al. Now he wore a white shirt and tie, black Florsheim shoes, and worked in the music store. Weisfeld paid him by the hour, and it was enough for food, the movies, and incidental expenses.
They sat side by side on stools behind the main counter. Weisfeld read a German newspaper, folding it neatly in thirds as people did in the subway. Claude, having swept up, was polishing a Cohn trumpet from the front window with a soft cloth.
"Take out the valves," Weisfeld said.
Claude, handling the instrument gingerly, stared down at it.
"Under the keys," Weisfeld said. "Unscrew the rings and lift them out."
Claude did so, placing each piece on the glass. The valves were about three inches long, gleaming with a faint sheen of fine oil. Three steel tubes with holes at irregular intervals. Each tube made a little click so he'd know which went where when he'd put them back.
"Brass instruments are really all the same." Weisfeld put down the paper. "From the mouthpiece, a flow of vibrating air. It goes through the tube"—he traced the curved lines with his finger—"and comes out the horn. Two factors influence the pitch. How hard you blow, which allows you to climb the overtone series, and how long the tube is, which allows you to break it down into tones and half tones. Every brass instrument works that way." While Claude looked at the trumpet, Weisfeld got off the stool and took an old, somewhat battered trombone off the wall. He extended the slide fully, blew a low note, and then without moving the slide blew a note an octave higher, and then a fourth higher than that. "You see? That's by blowing. How am I going to get the notes in between?"
"The length?"
"Correct. If I pull up the slide, what am I doing to the length?"
"Shorter. It makes the tube shorter."
"Thus higher." He began with the slide fully extended, blew, pulled the slide in bit by bit and played a major scale. Then he pushed the slide out without stopping and smeared down to the original note. Claude laughed. Weisfeld put the trombone back. "So," he said over his shoulder, "how does the trumpet work? Look at it carefully."
Claude placed the instrument on the glass, just below the valves. He traced the tubing with his eyes. He turned the valves and looked at the holes. After half a minute or so he said, "It must be ... I think..."
"Yes? What?"
"When you press the key, then the air can go through different holes, and then through a different tube. It looks like three different tubes. This little one here, then this one, and this one. It's those holes. They must line up like that inside."
"Stick your finger inside and see if they do."
The boy did so. "That's it!" he said. "That's nifty."
"It's good to know these things," Weisfeld said. "All instruments are similar. A long string on the pi
ano, a long column of air on a wind instrument. Vibrations. Overtones. Stops. Keys. Fingerboards. All alike." He swept his arm to indicate the whole store. "All the instruments in this room are variations on a single idea. Now use a little oil wherever you touched the metal."
Claude reassembled the trumpet and laid it in the felt depressions of its case. He carried it back to the front window and placed it, lid open, for display. As he straightened up he saw a black limousine pull up in front of the shop. The rear door opened and a girl stepped out, her black patent-leather shoes catching the sun, the buttons of her blue coat gleaming like coins. As she raised her head he felt a shock. (Not as strong as, but curiously similar to, the sensation he'd felt once on the Madison Avenue bus when he'd looked up from his book to see a soldier with a badly scarred face sitting across from him.) Black hair, fair skin with a hint of pink over the cheekbones, large eyes, the nose and mouth exquisite, as if carved from marble.
Now he could see what surely must be her mother trailing on behind, both of them making for the shop, and he began to back up. By the time the bell tinkled he had ducked behind a bookcase to retreat to the back of the room. He fussed with some sheet music without knowing what he was doing.
"Mrs. Fisk," he heard Weisfeld say. "A pleasure to see you again. How can I help you?"
He heard the soft murmur of voices, and then Weisfeld called out. "Claude? Could you bring a chair for Mrs. Fisk, please?"
Weisfeld had moved from behind the counter and stood in the aisle beside the woman. The girl was out of sight, somewhere in the front of the store. Claude unfolded the wooden chair. Weisfeld took out a handkerchief and flicked the seat twice. She sat down, Weisfeld's hand under her elbow, and the boy suddenly realized something was wrong with her. A faint, continuous tremor affected the upper half of her body—her hands, arms, and head were vibrating slowly. She was extremely thin, her face handsome but pallid, the lips compressed and slightly twisted. Her eyes, which rested on him briefly, burned with such intensity he felt himself start as if she had touched him.
"I'll see the flute," she said, and Weisfeld gave a little bow.
Claude retreated to the back and sat down at the Steinway, his hands clasped between his knees. When he heard a faint rustle behind him he leaned forward and began going through sheet music as if looking for something. In a flash of blue, the girl was standing next to him, casually turning the display carousel of show tunes and popular music. No more than two feet away, she did not even glance at him. He remained motionless, staring at the lid of the piano, aware now of a faint scent, a mysterious, warm perfume like nothing he could name. His hands rested on the music stand. The carousel creaked every now and then.
She lifted some music and held it out, still without looking at him. "Play this." He saw her neck, the smooth, curved black wing of hair just below her jaw, her lips, the sharper curve of her eyelashes. He took the music, put it on the piano, and began to play. E-flat minor. A ballad called "Tenderly." As he approached the second ending, she had already chosen something else.
"An insipid piece of music," she said when he'd finished. Her voice was light, not yet fully mature, with diction clear as crystal. "This one."
As he closed his hand on the music she looked at him briefly, without expression. She had given him a piece called "Cow Cow Boogie." He tore through it happily, and played it a second time, adding some decorative figures of his own.
"Barbaric," she said.
The third tune was "Love for Sale," by Cole Porter, in a fairly complicated arrangement. He almost stopped playing at the shock of her nearness when she bent over his left shoulder and extended her arm to turn the page.
"I'll take that," she said when he'd finished. He felt a ridiculous thrill of pleasure that he had finally pleased her. She walked away as abruptly as she had arrived. He folded the music and followed her to the counter. Mrs. Fisk was writing a check on her lap. Claude handed the music to Weisfeld.
"Can he sight-read Mozart?" Mrs. Fisk asked.
"Yes," Weisfeld said.
"Catherine," she said, "take the flute, please."
The girl received the thin black case from Weisfeld. At a sign from him, Claude moved forward to assist Mrs. Fisk as she rose from the chair, but she did not give him her arm, so he simply hovered there. Weisfeld escorted them to the front of the shop, the bell tinkled, and they were gone.
"Who are they?"
"Old customers. Good customers," Weisfeld said. "Rich customers. She wants Catherine to try the flute, so what does she get her? A Cohn, a Selmer? No. She gets her a hundred-year-old solid-silver Zabretti for sixteen hundred dollars."
"What?" Claude was astonished.
Weisfeld waved the check. "She just bought the most expensive instrument in our inventory." He rang open the cash register and slipped the check under the front drawer. "In fact, she got a good price."
"Can she play? Catherine?"
Weisfeld shrugged. "She started on recorders years ago. Mrs. Fisk and the son play violins. I don't know how many instruments I've sold that family."
"Where do they live?"
Weisfeld looked at him quickly. "She's very pretty, isn't she, that girl," he said, as if thinking aloud. "They live on Fifth Avenue. A mansion. Mrs. Fisk is the daughter of Senator Barnes."
"What's wrong with her? The way she shakes like that?"
"It's a shame. She and her sister were famous beauties. They were in the social columns all the time back when I first came over. A very important family."
Claude detected the slightest touch of irony in his tone, but didn't know what to make of it.
"When we close up," Weisfeld said, "I'll take you to dinner at the Rathskeller. A little celebration."
"Can I have a Wiener schnitzel?"
"Absolutely."
Ever since the gold stars in The Blue Book for Beginners, Claude had considered Mr. Weisfeld his teacher, his real teacher, the teacher behind all the other teachers with whom, one after another, he had studied. Weisfeld, with the approval of Mr. Larkin, the lawyer, had sent him to various people, and while Weisfeld did not discuss matters of pedagogy with the boy, seemed in fact almost laconic about what the teachers were asking Claude to do, he nevertheless monitored the boy's progress, coming down to the basement once or twice a week to sit on a folding chair and listen. And it was Weisfeld who decided, with only the minimum of discussion with Claude, when it was time to leave one teacher and get another. The effect of this was to create a certain distance between the boy and those instructing him. In varying degrees, he was not so much interested in pleasing them as he was in pleasing Weisfeld through them.
The first, when Claude had been quite young, was Professor Menti, a slender man with a large nose, heavy lips, and a high, prematurely balding forehead. Claude took the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown bus to Riverside Drive and then walked downtown to Menti's sparsely furnished apartment on the ground floor of an old subdivided townhouse. The man always opened the door in a daze of absent-mindedness, taking a moment or two to recognize his pupil, finally ushering him into the dim interior and the Steinway. There he would place a special raised seat on the piano bench, forcing Claude to play from a much higher position than he was used to.
They had started with a C major scale in the right hand.
"So," Menu had said. "Everything is wrong." He spoke softly, with an Italian accent and a twinge of sadness. "Get ready to do it again. I will show you."
Claude placed his hand on the keys, and Menti reached into the pocket of his tattered dressing gown and withdrew a penny, which he placed on the back of the boy's hand. He nodded, and Claude began the scale. Middle C with the thumb, D with the index finger, E with the third finger, and then, as he passed his thumb under his palm toward F, the coin fell off his hand.
"Eccolà," whispered Menti.
Claude had expected the coin to fall, although he'd tried to keep it there. He had no idea why it mattered one way or the other, but he didn't ask, feeling that it might be i
mpertinent. Throughout his time with Professor Menti he simply did what he was told.
"Hold your hand like so." The wrist up, the hand arched, the last joint of the fingers pointing straight down. "Play the keys like so." Lift the finger high, the rest of the hand motionless, and strike straight down, pressing into the key.
It felt odd to the boy. It was as if each finger existed independently, each finger isolated, like wooden soldiers hopping up and down one after the other. For the first few weeks he could not play this way for more than five minutes without a break. His hands and wrists would grow increasingly tight and stiff, subordinated as they were to the fingers. As he grew tired, he would unconsciously move his wrists, and even his arms.
One day Menti brought out an odd-looking contraption—two long metal bars with springs, screws, and plates at each end. He fastened it to the Steinway so that the rods hung horizontally above and in front of the keyboard.
"Put your wrists on the lower bar," Menti said.
The boy obeyed.
Menti knelt down, glanced at the boy's hands, gauged distances, and made a few adjustments to the rods.
"Play the C major scale. Both hands. Contrary motion."
Claude did so, sliding his wrists across the rod without losing contact, his fingers going up and down like pistons.
"Now the B-flat major scale."
This time his wrists lost contact with the rod. Menti, still kneeling, noticed it immediately.
"Aha!" he said, lowering the second bar over the top of the boy's wrists. It was now impossible for Claude to raise, lower, or twist his wrists. He could only slide them sideways.
"This," Menti said, "is how you will practice scales. Two hours a day. Take it with you and put it on your piano. All keys."
Claude had fitted the device, which was adjustable, to the small white piano in his room, and practiced scales as directed, playing through pain. Menti also gave him various short exercises—trills, mordants, arpeggios, turns, and phrases—to play over and over again, fifty times, a hundred times. Menti acknowledged that exercises became boring quite rapidly, and advised him to place a book or a magazine on the piano and read while his fingers worked. Claude preferred to listen, or to daydream.