My mother had a story that I liked as much as I liked Ingrid’s Trans-Siberian story. It was the story of Herschel.
Herschel was a high school classmate and suitor of my mother’s. She had many. My father was the main and perpetual suitor; he’d been on the job since second grade. Now and then he was supplanted. He’d wait, it would blow over, and he’d be back at the head of the line. They were all about sixteen. Herschel had been having a fair amount of success with my mother, enough to worry Herschel’s violin teacher and probably my father as well. The violin teacher was always scolding Herschel: You’re going to ruin your bow arm if you keep necking with that girl! Herschel had the brilliant idea to take my mother to his lesson so she could play something on the teacher’s Steinway. She played a Bach partita with a Chopin chaser. The violin teacher rescinded his objections.
“And what about Daddy?” I asked.
“Well, in the end …” My mother would never finish that sentence.
They’d married a month after graduating from Penn. A photo of my mother in her mortarboard stood next to a photo of my newlywed mother and father on the upright in Philadelphia. They moved to New York and then the war started, and then and then. A photo of my father in uniform with a cocked triangular cap completed the piano-top album.
My mother’s talent for the decoration of houses didn’t need practice. It was innate. When something needed to change at home, or when she got in the mood for a change, she changed things and it was always right. She had aesthetic perfect pitch. It was a very specific aesthetic. Richard Neutra had become famous as the architect who domesticated the International Style, putting Bauhaus ideas into private houses rather than public buildings. He learned that from my mother.
The piano was a different story. It demanded a great deal of attention—more than I did, or perhaps its demands were louder. Every day by one o’clock, after the shopping and the minimal housecleaning, after feeding me some sort of lunch if I was home sick or on vacation, my mother sat down at the piano. She put her coffee cup and her ashtray next to the music on the ridged shelf above the keyboard, lit a cigarette she was going to forget to smoke, and got to work. Two hours, three hours, four hours: Often she was still at it when my father came home in the evening. In the delicious interludes of illness when I had a not-too-terrible stomachache or a scratchy throat but no fever and had cajoled her into letting me skip school, I spent my dreamy day off reading to the accompaniment of the Beethoven sonata she was working on or the syncopations of Debussy’s “Golliwog’s Cakewalk.” Brahms, Ravel, the Mikrokosmos of Bartók, the Schubert Impromptus, miles of Mozart, the wrenching Partita in E Minor, one of her favorites, which she played with a frightening attack: I had a lifetime subscription to Carnegie Hall. So much for my grandmother’s dismissal of my mother as no Horowitz fifteen years earlier.
But it was practice, not a seamless, straight-through performance. Circle back, start again from measure ten, take it from the repeat, too fast, too slow, with more feeling, less legato, missed that phrase, missed that transition, take it from the beginning.
And that was maddening if I was truly sick, which now and then I was. My fever rose with each repetition, and the hammer blows of the piano nailed my head at each stroke, until I was in a noisy nightmare of a phrase repeated over and over. The fever was the same as—maybe the result of—my mother’s dissatisfaction with her playing. Edgy and hot, tangled in my dank sheets, I’d get stuck in the moment, convinced the rest of my life would be a repetition of now, right now, this phrase banged out again and again in my hot head and trembly pulse. In my fever-state I’d believe that if only she would play the thing all the way through, I would get better.
I never felt this way about the practice aspect when I was just malingering with my “tummy ache.”
Some evenings she gave a concert for my father. He would lean into the sofa and conduct the back cushions with one arm, singing along in his atonal way. It was remarkable that a man of such musical ineptitude could be married to a woman of such ability. He couldn’t keep time, he couldn’t carry a tune, he didn’t seem even to realize when a phrase had ended, but none of this diminished his pleasure in her playing. He knew her repertoire as well as she did. Dum dum, dah dum, dum, dum, dum dum, dada dum dum, he’d squawk as she launched into the Italian Concerto, and he’d croak and sigh in a sort of unison with the long, sad, sweeping measures of Opus 109, the Beethoven sonata to which my mother devoted more than three years of constant study. She wanted to get it right. She did. I have never heard a performance better than those she gave for the neighborhood cats and sparrows every afternoon while first one then another cigarette burned down to a ghostly black tube in the ashtray beside the music she didn’t need to read anymore.
A bit of this talent passed on to me. I could sing a melody after hearing it once. I could also pick it out, with my middle and index fingers, on the piano. Therefore I was sent to solfège on Saturday mornings down the street at the Longy School of Music. As usual, I hated it. And I wasn’t good at it either. Roger was there too, and as usual, he excelled. He could sight-sing with all the correct syllables, do re do fa, whatever it was. But since he didn’t have much feeling for music, he didn’t sing the tune right. He didn’t care; he was having fun. My objection to solfège was predictable: Why did I have to say these foolish syllables? These syllables weren’t really part of music. Nobody used these stupid syllables to play music with. My mother was willing to grant that the note names were just a convenience (inconvenience, I muttered), but, like my father insisting on the utility of arithmetic, she insisted that sight-reading was fundamental and that if I couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to do it, I couldn’t learn music.
My ear was good enough for me to sneak my way through several months of music school relying on my ability to mimic what I heard. But I couldn’t read worth a damn. I never got the note names straight. And, having decided that the bass clef was sinister, I refused to learn it.
So the evidence of my talent was spotty. Nevertheless, my mother was determined to teach me to play the piano. Once a week we sat together on the bench. It never ended well, and sometimes it went badly from the start. One terrible fight was over the word impromptu.
The fight was really about practicing, something I didn’t do much. This was in part because my mother was usually occupying the piano bench when I got home from school. Also, I didn’t want her—my teacher—to hear just how badly I played. In the tradition of piano students the world over, I practiced the night before my lesson and only then.
Probably it was a little Bach piece. Possibly it was a Chopin prelude, though that seems a bit advanced for an eight-year-old of my meager abilities. I liked it, whatever it was, and walked around humming it all week. I could hum it up and down, treble and bass. What I couldn’t do was play it on a piano.
My technique was to stumble through again and again in an unmusical manner, trying to memorize hand positions that would make the noises I heard in my head. I hoped if I did that enough times I’d get it into my fingers. I had no concept of structure, movement, variations or elaborations of themes. I was trying to produce an effect, not to learn a piece of music.
My mother couldn’t help pointing this out.
“You don’t understand it,” she said. “You wouldn’t make those mistakes if you thought about it. That chord couldn’t possibly come next—it just doesn’t make sense.”
“I know that,” I said. “I can hear it.”
“Just because you can hear it doesn’t mean you can play it.”
That was stating the obvious. “Why not?” I asked. “I don’t see why not.”
“One thing you’re not doing,” she said, “is paying attention to the key. It’s E minor, right? So there can’t be an E-sharp unless it’s marked.”
I sighed, a dramatic, long-suffering child-sigh.
“I want to be able to sit down and just play it, the way I can sing it,” I said. “Like, like …” I fumbled around for a moment. �
�Like those Schubert things you play, the one that goes”—and here I burst into a pretty good rendition of the descending glissando opening of the Impromptu No. 2 in E-flat Major. “An impromptu,” I finished, pleased that I had remembered the name.
“Hah,” said my mother. “You think Schubert just sat down and wrote that thing? That’s what you think, isn’t it? You think because it’s called an impromptu, he didn’t have to think about it or work on it.”
“That’s not what I think.” It was exactly what I thought. Why else had he called it an impromptu?
“It’s exactly what you think,” said my mother. She always knew what I was thinking. “Well, you’re wrong.”
“I don’t care what you say,” I said.
Then she did the thing I hated most.
“This is how it goes,” she said, and she played it, my Bach or my Chopin, beautifully, even better than I could hear it in my head.
That was a specially bad day, but they were all bad. What drove me crazy was I couldn’t play as well as she did. It was absurd to think I could, and yet I did think that. Instead of being an example to me or even a spur, she was an impediment. She made me feel hopeless. Even though I knew the only way to become like her was to practice—even though I heard her practice every day—I felt she had a magic capacity to transform squiggles on a stave into glory out of a keyboard, and that I didn’t have that magic and never would.
I gave up. I would sit at the piano and do nothing.
“Aren’t you going to practice?” she’d ask.
“I am practicing,” I’d say. And I’d keep sitting there with my hands in my lap.
I’d gone on strike, my inevitable reaction to defeat or any kind of setback.
Sometimes, in order to drive her crazy, I’d play one measure over and over, imitating her, but, unlike her, never getting it right.
“Move on,” she’d say, emerging from the kitchen looking grim.
“I don’t have it yet,” I’d say, and torture the piano some more.
It took a few months to convince my mother to retire as my piano teacher. She didn’t say she was retiring. She said things like, “Let’s skip the lesson this week,” and, “I don’t think there’s any point, since you haven’t been practicing.” When she said these things, part of me would curl up into a furious, rejected, desperate ball that wanted only to please her and was tight with regret and worry, while another part puffed itself into an equally furious, gleeful, flailing, shapeless enormousness, amazed at its ability to inflict the pain I saw in her face.
All this went on during the terrible third grade fall in which school was also no good. Then, diagramming sentences appeared, and piano lessons disappeared. Solfège went away too. I could spend chilly November Saturday mornings on my bike while Roger sang sol la ti sol at Longy. I’d ride past the school, a sprawling brownstone on Garden Street, and feel happy and free. A little needle of worry jabbed me now and then: Why had my mother given up on me so easily? How come she’d decided I was a lost cause? I made her do it, I’d remind myself, asserting my power. But feeling the power also made me feel uneasy. In the natural order of things, the parents had the power. Which would circle me back to Why had she given up on me so easily.
Winter: no more bike, no more music. Spring: Frederika.
Shortly after Frederika arrived, Vishwa arrived. Vishwa was supposed to be the solution to my music problem.
Vishwa was a small person, about five feet five, in his early twenties. His arms and ankles were bony and stringy and brown. He was brown in a caramel way, like bull’s-eye candy—the perfect simile because his eyes, bright white, popped out of his head a little too far, giving the impression that he was fascinated and astonished by everything you (meaning me) said. He had very peculiar hair. It was coarse and thin, partly curly and partly straight. It looked like a wig. He had big hands with long, flat fingers and beautiful tapered nails. The flesh beneath his nails was nearly purple and the little moons at the base were a lovely pale pink.
Frederika talked like a crow, and Vishwa talked like a sandpiper. In fact, Vishwa was a sandpiper, skittering about on his stringy legs and peeping when he spoke. He had the sandpiper ability to suddenly be somewhere else. He was here beside me at the piano, and then, without seeming to move, he was over there at the door, where he’d left his black legal-size briefcase full of music.
“I have it, I have it!” he’d say, brandishing the score he’d been talking about above his tufted head.
Vishwa was the greatest.
Another good thing about him was how he smelled. Special Indian oils must have gone onto his mysterious hair every day in an effort to rationalize it. He smelled of cedar or teak—some kind of wood that was dark and dry and resonant with sap.
Vishwa’s approach to the piano was different from my mother’s.
“I will teach you music,” he said. He didn’t mention the piano.
The piano was in a glassed-in annex off the living room, which had probably been a conservatory, in the botanical sense, when the house was in its Victorian prime. It shared the room with a couple of straggly geraniums and a rubber plant my mother had picked up in the Star Market for $1.99. The geraniums were pathetic, but the rubber plant was happy, and over the course of several years it had become a giant, flapping its big dusty leaves out to touch the top of the piano. My mother said it liked music; she said all plants liked music. This didn’t account for the geraniums.
The record player was the instrument with which Vishwa began my music lessons. It lived on the bookshelf that filled one whole wall of the living room.
We sat on the sofa, where my father would lounge and listen to my mother play. It was not a place I spent much time. The sofa was for grownups.
“Brahms’s Third,” said Vishwa. He pulled a record and a score out of the briefcase, put the record on, and settled down beside me. “Let’s listen,” he said.
“What about the music?” I reached for the score.
“This is the music,” said Vishwa.
We sat and listened to the symphony together. A lot of it was sad, I thought. When it was over, Vishwa asked, “What’s your favorite part?”
“The swooping,” I said. “About halfway in, where it starts swooping and dipping.”
“The third movement,” he said. He put that on again. When it was over, he asked, “Can you sing it?”
I did.
“Good,” he said. “That’s the theme. Can you remember any of the other parts?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Let’s listen again.”
It was nice, sitting on the sofa together listening to the sad music.
“It’s strange,” I said. “Even though parts of it are going up and other parts are going down or maybe sideways, they’re all doing the same thing, basically.”
“That’s true,” said Vishwa.
“It fills my head up,” I said. I wasn’t used to orchestral music. I was used to the piano. Most of my mother’s records were piano works as well, with a bit of chamber music thrown in. The density and complexity of an orchestra was almost too much for me.
“Poco allegretto,” Vishwa said. “That means a little, little bit fast.” He laughed. “That’s funny, isn’t it? I like all the ways to say how fast. They have one that says, Fast, but not too fast. Allegro ma non troppo.”
“How do you know how fast too fast is?”
“Exactly!” Vishwa said. “That’s just the question, isn’t it?”
“But how do you know?” I hadn’t thought about it before.
“You have to decide. You decide how fast you like it—or maybe how fast you can play it.”
“But what about when there are all those different people in an orchestra?”
“That’s where I come in. The conductor decides.” Vishwa looked happy.
“You’re the conductor?” I looked at skinny Vishwa nestled beside me in the cushions. He’d taken off his shoes—penny loafers—and curled his sock feet up under
himself just as I had; neither of us had legs long enough to reach the floor while sitting back on the sofa. “Do you have a conductor suit?”
“I do,” he said. “It’s a used one, though.”
“Will you wear it next time you come?”
“No,” said Vishwa.
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s for conducting,” he explained.
“Would it be bad luck?”
He considered this. “The suit is like magic,” he said. “I put it on, and I’m the conductor. I don’t want to use up the magic if I’m not conducting.”
That made sense to me. On the other hand, I wanted to see him in it. “Where do you conduct? Can I come?”
He put his head down and looked embarrassed. “So far, I don’t have a spot for conducting,” he said. “There’s a tiny orchestra—it’s only about fifteen people—at Kirkland House. You can’t really call it an orchestra. Sometimes I conduct them.”
“But can I come?”
“We’ll see,” said Vishwa.
This was the first time Vishwa had sounded like a regular grownup. I didn’t like it.
“Let’s go back to Brahms,” he said, in his usual cheery voice.
This time when we listened to the symphony, Vishwa put the score on his lap so we could follow along.
“Don’t worry about the notes,” he said. “Just follow the different lines, all the instruments, each with a line, each doing its own song, and try to see the patterns. The horns are doing this, the strings are doing that. Try to feel it all at once, like a thick, thick forest.”
Before we got to the third movement, Frederika came in.
“Oops,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be disturbing.”
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