Saturday's Child (20 page)

Fortunately, Mrs. Cordes did not teach me piano. My piano teacher was Mr. Edwin Jones, who was young, gay, closeted, handsome, talented,
and wretchedly unhappy to be teaching piano to Mount Vernon children instead of touring the world in the concert career he had envisioned for himself. Sometimes he appeared with a black eye that, with hindsight, I suspect was caused by his church-organist battering-lover “roommate,” though he would explain it away as having been caused by various falls, open cabinets, and unseen doorjambs. But he was a fine teacher, and I made my way fairly rapidly up to “Für Elise” and then “Solfegietto.” He was also sharp enough to see that (a) I loved playing the piano, (b) I was a fast enough learner to fudge practicing technique and sight-reading, (c) I had been raised to be a killer competitor, and (d) my aunt and mother were enamored of prizes and awards. Consequently, after studying for only three years, I was informed that, with my aunt's permission, I'd been entered in the New York State Music Association Festival, competing at the five-year level, playing Mozart's “Fantasia I in D Minor.” I was about ten.

I distinctly recall those weeks of fervent practice (while, of course, the show, and school, and other lessons continued as usual). I remember that period building up to the competition as the first time during which I consciously resented being put on display, particularly since I felt I'd been forced to exchange what had been a private pleasure in making music for yet another kind of performing, this time under intense pressure. When the day arrived, I twice threw up from nerves, but managed to get through the piece clinker-free, despite what one judge noticed as “somewhat uneven pedaling.” In fact, I felt a shooting pain in my right foot every time I pressed the pedal, but was too scared to dare stop and investigate what was wrong. Only afterward did I see that a thumbtack had got stuck into the thin sole of my Capezio slipper, and was puncturing the ball of my foot with every pedal press. Ever the pro, I'd dutifully won my medal, and then endured a tetanus shot for my pains. But afterward, I deliberately let my music drop. I knew that was the only way to keep it from getting processed into more performances. Content with their medal, and not seeing piano as necessary for my career as singing, accents, and dancing might be, Sally and Faith agreed that I could stop playing. I've wondered if Mr. Jones didn't actually understand, because that last day, as we were saying our goodbyes, he whispered in my ear, “It's a pity,” and then he bent and gallantly kissed my hand as if I were a grown woman. I learned years later that he'd been found dead of a gunshot wound. A pity, indeed. As for all
his work with me and my music, it would take well over a decade, until early in my marriage, for me to allow myself the luxury of sitting alone at a piano to rediscover the satisfaction of playing simply for one's self.

Meanwhile, once I'd turned twelve and Faith had ditched Sally, moving herself and me to East 57th Street, the tutors began to come and go, talking of Michelangelo—because I was now already doing the equivalency of high-school work. They were a varied and peculiar mix.

The absolute worst was Mr. Margolies. Tall, lanky, dour, droning Mr. Margolies—I never learned his first name; perhaps he never had one—carried a two-dimensional effect about him: Flatman. He was even slightly concave in the chest. Though he was only in his early thirties, his flesh was a library greenish-taupe color. His voice sounded as if it had been disguise-enhanced or was being played at the wrong speed—too low, too drawn-out. He moved slowly. He wrote slowly. He thought and talked slowly. He even blinked slowly, his lids drifting closed and then rising again with supreme effort in the long, almost expressionless face. The effect was soporific. Mr. Margolies was the Sominex of teachers. Even now, writing about him, I find myself yawning. He had taught me math during my brief stint at the Tutoring School, immediately after Faith and I settled in Manhattan, and he must have spotted a golden opportunity, because he somehow ingratiated himself with my mother. The next thing I knew, he was my sole tutor, arriving four times a week at our apartment.

I despised him. I cannot be fair to him even now. I cannot remember a single thing I learned from this man, and since his specialty was supposedly math, his teaching methods bear testimony to my now sharing the math anxiety of most of my female contemporaries. Did he actually “track” me away from math, which I'd enjoyed and at which I'd been good back at Miss Wetter's? I don't know. But I do know that after a year of Faith's insisting, “Give it a
try
, Robin,” I managed to communicate the intensity of my loathing for Mr. Margolies to her with sufficient pathos. Besides, the loathing was showing up in my grades. So he was let go. There were one or two others, staying a few months at a time, leaving no impressions but those of mediocrity, opportunism, and insultingly low, stereotypical expectations about the intellectual capacity of a child star.

But then there was that one teacher who changes your life.

There was Jean Distler Tafti.

In the early 1990s, I gave a poetry reading up near Columbia University, when a new-and-selected volume of my poems had just been published. After the reading, a man in his mid-thirties came up and introduced himself to me as the son of Jean Tafti, who had always “spoken highly of you.” I was so glad to have the chance to communicate to him the enormity of what his mother's gift had meant to me, what a quietly brilliant, generous teacher she had been.

That first session after Faith had hired her as my tutor, Jean studied me across the coffee table in the living room. She'd asked whether we should work in my room, and raised her eyebrows slightly when told I shared the one bedroom in our posh 57th Street apartment with my mother (so much for any hoped-for change
there
). She leaned toward me and suggested we use the first session to get to know each other. Then she asked me who I really was, and I knew she did not mean my name, rank, and Employed Minor registration number.

I remember I said I was a labyrinth, a maze. I was thirteen, and eager to show off how much Greek and Norse mythology I'd read. I said the labyrinth had a starting place and a center, but between these two lay an enigma. I heard myself telling her I wanted to be a writer. I'd never said that aloud before. Then I started to talk about my acting career—but she went directly back to the writing.

“What kind of writer?” she asked.

We were off from there. I exploded about how words were mystical, living things. Then I think I babbled that I wanted to make people laugh and cry and think and change, to move people the way I'd sometimes been able to as an actor, but with my own words and thoughts instead of someone else's; that as an actor one could interpret multiple lives but as a writer one could
invent
and
inhabit
multiple lives. Jean sat, silent, nodding. She was one of those perceptive educators who actually listen, who then can sum up a pupil's inarticulate gurglings in a few succinct words so the student feels totally understood.

“I think,” she smiled at me, “you want to be of use.”

“Oh yes and even worse,” I heard myself blurt out. “I want to change the world. I know that sounds hopelessly thirteen.”

“
Or
, hope
fully
, a sign of positive evolutionary mutancy,” she shot back. “I believe you, Robin.”

I thought I'd perish with gratitude.

For the next four years, from 1955 to 1959, Jean Tafti was for me a life raft. Severely challenging in content but mild in style, she had a wry sense of humor and an unpatronizing respect for the people she taught—mostly foreign students at Columbia Teachers College, which was her real job. A white woman from a southern border state (Kentucky, I think), she'd married a Parsi from India. She was a small woman with a heart-shaped face and a gentle, grainy-gravel voice, and she fed my voracious hunger to learn things as if I were a starving beggar and she the teacher right out of
The Corn Is Green
. She never treated me like an adolescent performer dabbling in intellectual pursuits. And the woman knew how to teach.

We discussed writers and language and human rights and politics and comparative religions and psychology. She introduced me to the work of Karen Horney, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Edith Hamilton, explained the differences between socialism and communism, helped me understand how the Korean War was complicated, taught me about apartheid and South Africa. It was impossible to do science without a lab (though she managed to devise some experiments we could perform in the kitchen), so she announced that if I couldn't quite have a well-rounded education I could at least have a well-focused one, possibly of greater value, she added, since I already knew what I wanted to do: write. So we studied Latin and French and German, moved swiftly past high-school English into the college-level and soon graduate-level English curriculum. Because of Jean's grace and skill, I felt free of self-consciousness and competitiveness, unembarrassed by my failures and my ignorance. I remember one occasion in particular. She'd given me a
Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
as a Christmas gift; I still have it, dated 1956, inscribed “with deep affection.” She must have assumed (accurately) that I'd fall under the triple spell of Yeatsian myth, politics, and verbal music. At our next meeting, I raved on about Yeats—but since I'd never before heard his name pronounced aloud, I uttered it as if it rhymed with Keats—the sort of error that, once realized, normally would have mortified me. As Jean offhandedly corrected my pronunciation, she also praised my assumption which, although wrong, made perfect sense, she said, since the two names were spelled similarly.

With and for Jean, I read Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and (in Latin) Virgil;
Goethe and Schiller and Thomas Mann (in German); Danton, Baudelaire and Verlaine, Sartre, Gide, Camus, and de Beauvoir (in French). My lifelong love of Kafka (especially in the Muir translation) began with her, in no small part because she encouraged me in my opinion that his writing wasn't merely “surreal” or “spooky” but darkly hilarious. Through Jean I also met Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Turgenev. She was the annunciating angel who first brought Donne, Marvell, and the other seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets into my life, as well as more of the Romantics—Blake and Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron, Barrett and Browning—on up through Eliot, Pound, Auden, and what was termed the Moderns. We read Austen and both Georges—Eliot and Sand—the latter in the original French, along with Balzac, Colette, and Malraux. I'd got myself addicted to the entire Bronte family on my own, but Hardy, Forster, Woolf, Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce now broke over my awareness, as did Cervantes, Lady Murasaki, Neruda, and Lagerkvist. By the time I was fifteen, under Jean's urging and aegis, I was starting to take nonmatriculated classes at Columbia, sitting in on (and sometimes even daring to pipe up in) Gilbert Highet's graduate courses on Virgil and Dante, auditing Moses Hadas's survey of classical Greek drama, Mark Van Doren's lectures on Shakespeare and the Jacobeans, Maurice Valency's course on Provençal poetry, and workshops on contemporary poetry with Van Doren, Babette Deutsch, and Louise Bogan.

I was drunk with joy.

My mother, glad to see me happy (and having little idea what I was really reading—particularly the Baudelaire-Gide-Joyce-Lawrence-Colette axis), was proud of what Jean termed my “exceptionally high degree of proficiency” in the subjects she was teaching me. My career was proceeding: I'd left the
Mama
show and was doing guest-star stints on various dramas. All was well. The problem set in when Jean took a stand supporting my desire to attend college formally.

Faith, as might have been expected, balked. I was too young; I was too well-known to act like or be treated like a regular student; I might attend sporadic classes but going full-time would harm my career. Especially and repeatedly, I was just too
young
. Jean Tafti somehow managed to apply on my behalf to the University of Chicago, where a program pioneered under the progressive educator and former chancellor Robert Maynard
Hutchins was admitting students as young as fourteen so long as they could do the work required. I was sixteen. I was accepted.

It blew up in my face. The notion of my going to another city—alone!—to college was unthinkable to my mother. Not all Jean's persuasive calm nor all my tearful pleas would make a difference. On the contrary, Faith—who actually snarled at me, “A little learning
is
a dangerous thing, I see!”—now regarded Jean as a traitorous viper in our midst, and the Tafti tutorial came to an end. But the emancipating damage had been done.

For some years after, into my twenties, I considered going to college. Then, as I came to realize how superficially educated most college graduates, as well as many with graduate degrees, are, I began to distrust the pedantry of formal academia. As it turned out, Jean was right: a well-focused education, plus the knowledge of how to expand it by research on my own, would best equip me for my chosen work. To this day I've never dissected a frog or lit a bunsen burner, and I miss neither (though I enjoy reading physics and biology). It's true that some of the emotional and social experiences of being in college might have been helpful and fun. Then again, I've not been overly impressed by the social ambience on the hundreds of college campuses where I've guest-lectured or read poetry, or on the four at which I've been a “distinguished” visiting scholar or guest professor (New College in Sarasota, Florida; Rutgers University; the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand; and the University of Denver in Colorado). To this day, I have no B.A., although, ironically, some of my books have been adopted as basic texts in a variety of disciplines, from international affairs to literature and women's studies, and although I've been the recipient of an occasional honorary doctoral degree—the bestowal of which is a kindly ritual only sometimes bound up with a university's connivance to wring a free commencement speech from you while you trip over your gown and the funny hat with the tassel keeps sliding off your head.