The Mozart Season (21 page)

*   *   *

When I got to my lesson, Mr. Kaplan was wearing a sweatshirt that had Alfred E. Newman from
Mad
magazine sitting at a harpsichord and saying, “I'm into nuances.”

He said, “Good morning, Allegra. My conscience tells me I was not as nice with you yesterday as I might have been. Are you angry with me?”

“No,” I said. I put my violin case on the floor and started to open it. I was squatted on the floor, and I realized that wasn't true. I looked down at the latch under the handle of the case and then I looked up at him. “Yes, a little bit,” I said.

And then of course I felt terrible. Mr. Kaplan stoops a little bit, his posture is kind of slumped; and his teeth aren't perfect, they have gaps between them. And I guess Mrs. Kaplan doesn't tell him he's got little hairs growing out of his ears, and he doesn't know they're there. And one long hair was coming out of his right eyebrow, almost blondish; it had been there all summer, sticking out over the top of his glasses. If you look closely at his eyes you can see a kind of old sadness; maybe it's just the way old people's eyelids come around their eyes.

From the floor, I looked up at that eyebrow with the long hair coming out of it and remembered that he probably had somebody at one of the death camps, too. Maybe a whole family.

“Tell me,” he said. He was standing right above me.

I turned around and got the rosin out of the violin case. I unfolded the felt cover, looked at the ridges in the rosin, and got my bow out. I heard him moving away, and out of the side of my eye I saw his shoes walking backward. I stayed in the squatting position and rubbed my bow back and forth across the rosin.

“Beware the boomerang,” he said.

I folded the rosin cover closed, put it in the violin case, and picked up my violin. I stood up. I still had my back to him. I thumbed the strings.

I turned around. He was sitting sideways on the piano bench, facing me. “Remember ‘ME: Allegra Shapiro. I'M playing this concerto'?” I said.

“Indeed.”

“Well.” I didn't want to say the rest of it. It would be accusing him of something.

“Indeed,” he said again. He nodded his head three times.

I had the urge to shrug my shoulders, and I resisted it.

“Do you feel that that—announcement of yourself—do you feel it's affected your relationship with the concerto in any way?”

“Of course. It's obvious,” I said.

“Tell me what things you feel have been affected.”

“My notes are clearer.”

“Indeed. I would say that almost every note in your Mozart is utterly cloudless. Good, Allegra. In some cases, ruthlessly clear.”

I suddenly saw the back of Steve Landauer's head in the corner of the rehearsal room, and his shoulders, and I heard the same notes again. “In fact, that's what's wrong,” I said. “Probably. I was so determined to get unscared, and I went around doing what you said—announcing myself—and I went over the top. I upstaged Mozart. Like you said. And—I should've been saying, ‘HIM: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. HE wrote this concerto.'
Not
‘ME, I'M playing it.'”

Mr. Kaplan kept looking at me. “Anything else, Allegra?”

I saw the Landauer shoulders and arms and back of the head all moving again, with the corner of the rehearsal room behind them. I saw him playing facing the cinder-block wall. “And I think somebody should've told me. I'm surrounded by musicians, and nobody tells me anything.”

“Told you what?” I could almost see Mr. Kaplan's face and the Landauer bowing arm at the same time.

“Well, told me I was getting too—‘ruthlessly clear,' you said. Maybe it happened as far back as the concert with Margaret in Trout Creek Ridge. Maybe even before that.”

He just kept looking at me. No change on his face.

“And I think somebody should've told me about the finals long before June. If I was to have this—this huge—responsi
bil
ity, somebody should've told me.” A little glimpse of Elter Bubbe's embroidered flowers came into my head and then went out again.

He looked at me, still listening. He was concentrating, I could tell his mind wasn't wandering. He scratched the back of his head, the hairy part. He said, “And where would we be, today, if—one—someone had told you about the finals right in the middle of your softball season? And, two—if someone had been able to use a seventh sense or something of that sort—and told you you were getting just the smallest bit—this much”— he held up his left thumb and index finger, about a centimeter apart—“just
this much
more aggressive than was necessary—perhaps just one eyelash out of place in the portrait of the concerto…”

I saw in my mind the newspaper review of Deirdre's concert, “bold intimacy.”

I tuned my A string and kept on looking at him. Nobody ever tells you when you're just beginning to make your mistakes. Nobody ever warns you that early.

“Do you know somebody named Steve Landauer?” I said. The words felt strange coming out of my mouth in Mr. Kaplan's house.

A little light bulb went on in his face. “New in town. Yes…”

Then Steve Landauer was taking lessons from Mr. Kaplan. He stood there in that same room and played for Mr. Kaplan and listened to Mr. Kaplan encourage him and analyze him and criticize him and— They made jokes together in that same room. Mrs. Kaplan fed him popovers and peach jam. He came straight from Aspen into their house, by radar. Every time I walked in, I was moving through the same air Steve Landauer had breathed out. He had the pattern on the rug memorized the same way I did. And he'd win the competition, of course.

“… Yes, yes … He played for me once.…” Mr. Kaplan said.

Steve Landauer didn't take lessons from Mr. Kaplan. He didn't have the rug memorized. He went back out of the room, sucked right out the keyhole.

Mr. Kaplan and I stared at each other.

“Is there anything else?” he said.

Steve Landauer played for Mr. Kaplan once, auditioning for lessons. Mr. Kaplan didn't take him. I saw Steve Landauer's back and shoulders; I saw his bowing arm moving in the corner of the rehearsal room.

“And my grandmother sent me my elter bubbe's purse from Poland, she disappeared to Treblinka and her daughter, that's my grandmother, her name's Raisa—” I'd opened my mouth and it had started coming out. “She wants me to be the connection with—” It was ridiculous, the embroidered flowers on the velvet purse when Hitler was a boy trying to get into art school … “I'm named after her, Leah, she was a child in a shtetl and she was annihilated—and I have her name and now I have her purse and I'm supposed to be a symbol of something—” There was no earthly reason for me to tell my violin teacher my family history. “And Bubbe Raisa, that's the daughter she sent away to New York—” I saw the wind blowing on the boat dock and Leah knowing she'd never see her daughter again. “She was eighteen years old and she found the purse tucked in her satchel when she was already out to sea, her mother sent it along with her—” I saw the hands unpacking the satchel. “Maybe it was like a code symbol, maybe Raisa knew it and maybe she didn't—” I saw hands in gray mist waving at a boat leaving a dock. “And she never saw her mother again. They
think
she went to Treblinka, nobody knows for sure. Her mother. Leah.” I heard my voice get very soft. “And I have her velvet purse with embroidered flowers in my bedroom. It came in the mail yesterday.”

I remembered Bro David saying everything doesn't have to be a matter of life or death and my mother saying everything does have to be.

Mr. Kaplan was leaning forward on the piano bench as if he was watching a movie. “Yes,” he said. “Hmmm. Indeed.” He nodded his head slowly up and down.

I looked down at my violin. “And when I got the velvet purse in the mail I already felt guilty—I already felt terrible about what I'd done to the concerto, and— Now…”

Over the top of his glasses he looked at me with his middle-aged eyes, the strange single long hair coming out of his eyebrow. He raised both eyebrows and his bald head looked rounder, and the odd hair looked like an antenna. “Yes,” he said. “This is the great horror. Indeed.”

I felt my own eyebrows go up.

“The things,” he said. He turned his head, looked at the piano keyboard, then looked back up at me. “A purse. A razor. Sometimes a picture. A button. A teaspoon.” He nodded his head slowly. “This is what it is.”

And I suddenly remembered Mr. Trouble dancing, the first time I saw him, when Daddy's quartet was playing, and the wind was blowing a little bit, and Mr. Trouble was moving in the small circles. I just saw him for an instant in my mind.

Mr. Kaplan and I looked at each other. Between us I saw Deirdre and my mother rocking back and forth on the music-room floor, my mother humming into her hair. And there was Steve Landauer in a corner, playing with his face to a wall. And Elter Bubbe Leah waving her arms at a boat in gray fog.

My mind gets too busy sometimes, and I have to put everything back in the places they came from, Deirdre and Trouble and my brother and everybody. You don't have time for everything. You just have to push things back out of the center so you can do what you're supposed to do. I switched my bow over to my right hand where my violin was and ran my left hand through the top of my hair.

“Allegra Leah Shapiro, we are going back to this concerto,” Mr. Kaplan said. “And we are going to hold it in our hands and care gently for it, knowing what we know.” He looked at me, breathed in and out, and turned to face the keyboard.

I wiped both hands on my skirt and got ready to play. We stopped about a dozen times and at the end Mr. Kaplan sat silent. Then he said, “Indeed. Two youngsters. Each with so much locked inside.”

He looked at me for almost a minute. The last three notes were still going in my head. “Allegra, have I told you the story about the hammer and the stone?”

“No.”

“One day in Italy, a man was hammering and hammering on a piece of marble. A young boy sitting on a wall asked him, ‘Why do you keep hammering on that stone?' And Michelangelo said, ‘There's an angel inside this stone, and I'm trying to let it out.'”

I looked at him and nodded my head, trying to keep my face partly closed. It was exactly Deirdre and the Rose Music in the Rose Garden.

“Perhaps we need to hammer a little more lightly on this concerto; perhaps the angel will come out more willingly if we use your most personal touch.”

*   *   *

Four days later I answered the phone early in the morning.

“Allegra, I'm glad you're home. I need you to turn pages? I mean tonight? I'm terribly sorry, dear—so little notice, you know? Things happened. You'll do it, I hope?”

It was the red-haired woman, the pianist who talked in questions. “Indoors this time, eight o'clock in Lincoln Hall? Will you be there by seven-fifteen?”

I said I would.

“Besides the trio, we're adding a violin and viola for a quintet? We have a new violinist, a very exciting young player. We'll do that splendid Brahms, and a Mozart and a new piece?”

I told her I'd be there.

I lay on the floor in the music room, looking at the Green Violin painting. All the people and the animals in the painting are reaching toward the music. And there's that flying man at the top, with the smaller man waiting to catch him when he falls. And the green man just keeps on playing. His feet are kind of tapping. And his shoes don't match. I hadn't noticed that before. Or maybe I'd noticed it but I hadn't thought about it. Like Mr. Trouble's shoes.

I got my bike and went out riding. Ten thirty-eight in the morning, nobody could complain that I was going to be kidnapped.

I went toward Crystal Springs Park, which has rhododendrons and ducks. Did I want to win the competition? Did I even want to play it? Steve Landauer would win it. What about Christine from the Youth Orchestra? And Karen Karen? And the other people, whoever they were? What did the judges want?

The main path in the park leads downhill and across a bridge. As you pedal over the bridge you hear the boards making a sort of low drum sound. When I was little, we used to come here for picnics. Once I rode my tricycle across the bridge and the boards said, “Tug-a-lug, tug-a-lug,” and the whole family called the park Tug-a-lug Park for a long time. That was years ago. Bro David was a beginning Boy Scout and he was wearing his uniform.

I got off my bike and stood and watched the ducks, in groups, in families, scooting across the pond, going somewhere, all of them on their way to something. Probably just more food. Maybe adventures. If you're a duck, just swimming around a log is probably an adventure. They were just going places, the same places over and over again, places on the pond. They seemed to be going so smoothly but all the time their feet were paddling hard underneath. They were going where they had to go. For who knew what reason. Just going and going places.

On the far side of the bridge, I put my bike against a tree and sat on the edge of the grass and looked at the water.

All the questions in my mind suddenly seemed like a quiz.

Do you want to win the competition?

Yes

No

Maybe

Why did you select the answer above?

Do you want to lose the competition?

Yes

No

Maybe

Why did you select the answer above?

Why did you say yes to playing the competition in the first place?

To please Joel Smirnoff

To please Mr. Kaplan

To please your parents

To prove that you're good

Other—if so, what?

Are you sure?

Do you really love Mozart enough to go through all this torture?

Is it really torture?

Are you doing it for Elter Bubbe Leah even though she's already dead?