The Mozart Season (10 page)

Mommy said “Love,” too, and Deirdre walked to the place they use as backstage in the Commons.

“Didn't she mean ‘Wish me luck'?” I asked Mommy.

“We used to say ‘Wish me love' when we were in school.” She took hold of my hand for just a second and then let it go.

We walked around, picked up programs, and put sweaters across three cushions to save them, including one for Daddy when he got there. You almost always take a sweater or jacket when you go to a summer concert in Oregon, because the nights usually get cold.

We walked outside again, and somebody came dashing over to us. It was a red-haired lady Mommy and Daddy know. “Allegra,” she said, “would you consider turning pages for me next Thursday? I've seen you with your dad, and with Charley Horner? I need a page turner badly?”

I couldn't even remember what instrument she played. I just remembered her face and her hair, and I remembered she talked in questions.

Mommy looked at me. I looked at her and then back at the lady. “Sure. I can do it,” I said. “Where?”

“The Community Music Center? Can you be there by six-thirty? I'll show you the fast turns?” She looked at Mommy and said, “It's the Mendelssohn C minor?” and rolled her eyes.

I looked at my mother again. “We'll have her there,” she said.

“Thanks, Allegra. You've bailed me out?” the lady said, and walked away.

“My daughter the rich woman,” Mommy whispered, and then did that big ear-hello thing to some more people.

I wasn't rich, and I was trying to picture Deirdre throwing up on that beautiful blue dress while people ate their food and drank their drinks on the lawn getting ready to hear her sing. Daddy got there and we went inside to our cushions. I sat between him and Mommy. He sat down on his with a thud. He has a back problem; he says ninety percent of American men have some kind of back problem. He opened his program and said, “Let's see what's on the menu,” and started reading it.

Mommy explained that the red-haired lady was a pianist with a trio. The other two instruments are violin and cello. I wanted her to explain about Deirdre in the car, but I didn't actually ask.

Daddy was muttering, “Oh. The Queen of the Night's going to sing all in French.” Mommy reached behind me and put her hand on his elbow and said, “Alan, please.” He was making fun of Deirdre for what she'd done in the music room the night before. The Queen of the Night is a character in Mozart's
Magic Flute,
the opera on my bed sheets. It's a soprano part that goes very high and gets very dramatic.

Deirdre sang songs by Saint-Saëns and Chausson and Debussy, and a string quartet and pianist played with her. I don't know much about soprano singing, and I didn't know any of the songs before, and I didn't know enough French to understand many of her words, but several times I had goose bumps on my legs, all the way up to the top.

While we were clapping, Daddy said to me, “That's what's really inside her—Deirdre. Not all this strangeness. That wonderful voice is what's really in her.”

Mommy looked across me at him and shook her head slowly and smiled kind of sadly and said, “Men.” We all kept clapping. She leaned over to me and said, “You had to know her before. Before she got afraid of things.” We went on clapping.

After the concert, lots of people came around to stare at Deirdre and some of them shook her hand and a few people kissed her. People kept handing her their programs and pens for her to sign autographs. Then she put on her raincoat. It looked just fine and it didn't smell bad, so she must have made it to the bathroom in time.

At home, Bro David had bought a whole bunch of fruit at Safeway. It was on the kitchen table. A honeydew melon and peaches and cherries and plums and things. He handed a note to Deirdre that said she'd sung for her supper; it had fruit-shaped notes dancing up and down the treble clef. She threw her arms around him and he looked as if he wanted to disappear. He pulled backward and asked her how the concert had gone, and she said, “All right, I think. I think. Oh, I don't know…”

He looked at her and said, “Then how can I congratulate you—or what?”

“It was a wonderful concert,” my mother said. She put her arm around Deirdre. “She was fabulous.”

“Then congratulations,” Bro David said.

“Thank you,” said Deirdre.

Daddy went to bed and Mommy and Deirdre and I took some fruit and plates and a whole pile of paper napkins into the music room. Deirdre flopped on the sofa and spread her arms and legs out like an
x.
Mommy laughed. “Well, Deirdre, what's cooking?” she said. Then she sat down on the piano bench.

“Rule number one, Allegra my girl,” Deirdre said. “Talk
after
the concert. Never before.” She breathed out hard and took off her shoes. She was in bare feet.

I sat on the floor in front of the platter of fruit and looked at her. “Do you want the long, grimy version or the short, grimy version?” she asked.

“Whichever one you want to tell,” Mommy said.

“Let's begin with the basics,” Deirdre said. “Allegra, you know what happens when you fall in love, don't you?”

I looked at her. I thought the world ought to turn into one big red heart, but I wasn't going to say so. “What happens?” I said.

“Well, you go to dirty little restaurants and you love the awful food, and you ride on carousels and you hold hands when his horse goes up and yours goes down. And you feed sea gulls together and you go
ooh-ooh-ooh
over dewy spiderwebs on bushes. It empties your brain. Those are the basics.”

I picked up a peach and about four napkins.

“So,” she said to Mommy, “this one was the same exact thing, of course; different exercises. Penobscot Bay—that's in Maine, Allegra. Lobster and seaweed, and sand in the toasted marshmallows. And
ooh-ooh
over the beautiful mussel shells. The whole google-eyed thing.”

“What happened?” Mommy asked.

“Well. He suddenly remembered another Ph.D. he wanted to get and took off for somewhere. Geneva or somewhere. I don't know.” Deirdre slid down from the sofa onto the floor across from me. She picked up a bunch of grapes. Her shiny blue dress was getting all crinkled. She stared with her great big eyes at the grapes in her hand.

My mother folded her hands like somebody in an old-fashioned painting and said, “Well, so much for romantic love.”

“Chapter dozen,” Deirdre said. She ate some grapes. Nobody said anything. Then she said, “Well? Fleur?”

My mother got up and picked up a piece of honeydew and a napkin and went back to the piano bench. “What do you mean, ‘Well? Fleur?'” she said.

“You know exactly what. You. And Alan. The floor doesn't keep sliding out from under you without warning. What is it?”

“You mean what holds us together?” Mommy said.

“Of course. I mean, I know: you fell in love that day in Morningside Heights, and you have David and Allegra, and here you are. But what is it?” Mommy was chewing melon. She was just a mother sitting on a piano bench chewing her food. “What would happen if Alan refused to go to a concert of yours?”

Mommy looked at her. “Deirdre, he hasn't gone to lots of them. The season is terribly long. He doesn't always have time, he…”

“Would you care to hear this one? ‘Bruce, I'm singing a concert on Sunday, I have a ticket for you.…'” Her voice went baritone: “‘Deirdre, I can't imagine how that could possibly benefit me.'” Her natural voice came back. “Did you ever hear one like that?”

Nobody said anything. Then Mommy said, “Possibly
ben
efit me?” She said it again. “Deirdre, was that a human being talking?”

“No, it was Bruce in Rochester. But
I'm
a human being, and I had to listen to it.”

I was thinking about how my friends Sarah and Jessica come to my orchestra's concerts. They like them. I don't even play solos or anything, I just play. And Jessica and I go to Sarah's dance recitals. We clap like mad. And when Jessica gets to be an architect, Sarah and I are going to stand outside her buildings and applaud; we've already agreed on that.

Deirdre was braiding the fringe on the rug.

Mommy said, kind of slowly, “What is it about Alan and me? Hmmm. It's hard to put in words. You know. Well, there was that handed-down instrument thing in both our childhoods.”

“Right,” Deirdre said. “I love that part. I tell it to lots of people.”

It's a funny coincidence. When Mommy was a little kid in Kansas, somebody died and left a violin to her parents. Nobody knew what to do with it and Mommy picked it up. She wanted to play it, but it was too big. At the school where she went, some teacher arranged to get her a half-size. Then they found her a violin teacher, and she had to go on a Greyhound bus to her lessons sixty-five miles away every Saturday. She kept playing and she grew into the full-size. That was how she started.

And when Daddy was a little kid in New York, somebody died and left a cello to his parents. Same thing: nobody knew what to do with it and Daddy tried to play it. Same thing at his school: somebody found him a smaller cello and he started that way. He took a subway to his lessons. His teacher was a really old man who used to play in the New York Philharmonic but he was too old to do it anymore. Daddy started playing klezmer music in high school, that's a Jewish kind of jazz, and he just kept playing.

Then Daddy and Mommy met each other when they went to Juilliard and they told each other about the dead people and the instruments and they fell in love.

Deirdre stopped braiding and looked up from the floor at Mommy. They looked at each other for a long time, a look of trying to figure something out. Deirdre had her big long skirt hunched up above her knees and she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She got a peach from the platter and spread napkins all over her lap. “You've got it all, Fleur. House, symphony job, kids, flowers. Parking places. A husband who's not a jerk.”

“Well, it's hard work sometimes,” Mommy said. “I mean, what's a jerk? Everybody's a jerk sometimes.” I wondered if she was thinking about Daddy calling Deirdre the Queen of the Night. But he was right, in a way: this was the second late night in a row that Deirdre was sitting in the music room where I was supposed to be asleep.

Suddenly Deirdre screamed:
“YYEEAAAGGGHHEEE!”
Like that. Everybody jumped. She had her hands over her head the same way she'd had them the night before. Mommy flew down off the piano bench and I felt my arms fly up and out, and we were both making surprised noises and Deirdre's hair was hanging down the front of her face and she was moaning the way she'd done the night before.

Somehow, Mommy got inside Deirdre's hair and put her arms around her and held her. She just held her and rocked her. She was on her knees, holding Deirdre and rocking her back and forth, and I stared at them. I couldn't see any faces, just hair and shoulders and arms. And Deirdre was making that moaning-sighing sound.

“It's done, it's over,” Mommy kept saying. She was almost humming it. I stared at them. They were like a dance, just there on the floor, rocking, with their faces in each other's hair. You could have set a metronome by them, rocking back and forth. I didn't know if I should leave the room, or sit there, or what. I ate some grapes.

They stayed like that for a long time. Deirdre gradually stopped making the strange sound, and Mommy still kept holding her and rocking her and sort of humming. I looked at the braided rug fringe. In a few minutes they stopped hugging and pulled back and looked at each other for a long time. Mommy said, “Want to go to bed now?” in a very soft voice. Deirdre nodded her head. She picked up her shoes and Mommy leaned over and kissed me good night on my forehead and they went out and closed the door. I took the fruit stuff back to the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator and went to bed on the sofa.

I watched the leafy shadows on the wall while I tried to fall asleep. I couldn't get rid of the sight of my mother and Deirdre hugging on the floor and rocking back and forth. Forward and back. Forward and back. A steady rhythm. Not even scary. In fact, the opposite. My mother humming and the sound of both of them breathing.

Of course I wanted to know what it was about. But at the same time I didn't. It was like a secret ritual, where they both knew exactly what to do.

*   *   *

At breakfast, everybody had closed faces about the night before. They were reading the review of the concert in
The Oregonian.
Daddy was repeating, “Ms. Moreau's melt-in-the-mouth vowels” and Deirdre and Mommy were laughing. I read the review. It said, “Deirdre Moreau exerted formidable control and enchanting lyricism.… She wrapped herself around the Saint-Saëns with a bold intimacy that made one humbly grateful to have ears.… She is a genius.”

I wasn't sure about the “bold intimacy” part, but it had something to do with the music coming up from inside, and it also had something to do with Mr. Kaplan and Mozart and closing the gap. I said it over several times in my mind. It was connected with what Mr. Kaplan said about danger, but I didn't know how.

Deirdre smiled at me. “We haven't told them about the Rose Music, Allegra. How many people were there in our band?”

We told them about the people coming to play on the sculpture with us, and Deirdre imitated the accent of the lady with the big hat. I told them about the old lady in the green visor being wheeled away and saying, “Wonderful … Wonderful…” in her little craggly voice.

Then Daddy got a phone call to fill in for a missing cellist the next night at Waterfront Park, a concert by the West Coast Chamber Orchestra, and Mommy and Deirdre went off to pick raspberries in the country, and I practiced. Deirdre would sing her next concert, the same program as before but at a different place with a different bathroom, and she'd stay another day and we'd take a picnic and go to the concert and hear Daddy play music.