The Mozart Season (24 page)

“Christine Estler's played the violin since she was six, she teaches violin students herself, she's concertmaster of the Portland Youth Orchestra. She's nineteen years old and enjoys tennis and video games.… Tell us, Christine, which do you like more: video games or playing the violin?”

Christine looked surprised. “Well, the violin, of course.”

“Of course. Next to Christine is Karen Coleman, also nineteen. Karen broke two fingers on her right hand windsurfing not long ago. Karen, even a musical dunce like me knows that wasn't a very good break.”

“Well, it was a pretty stupid thing to do. I had a concert to play and everything. But Allegra stepped in and played the concert for me.”

Larry Ladley looked blank.

“I think Mozart helped my fingers heal,” she said.

Larry Ladley laughed. “Could you explain to the folks at home just what you mean?”

She looked at him. “Could you explain just why you laughed when I said that?”

His left eye twitched. I've seen lots of people do that. It's the bottom eyelid; the skin of it jerks and you can tell it's something they can't control. He said, “People that aren't musical need to have it explained.”

“Well, when you think about how he made such great music out of his pain—like the worse the pain, sometimes the better the music. Sometimes if you just sit still and let music heal you, you'll be—I don't know—you'll be okay.” She looked around at all of us. “Help me, you guys,” she said.

Myra said, “It's true. It's always true.” Christine nodded. Steve Landauer was staring at Karen. I knew I could say something but my throat closed up, my larynx just eclipsed. TV makes a very big difference in what you can do. Ezra whispered to me, “The
Requiem.
” I sat staring straight ahead. Mozart was working on his
Requiem
when he died, and it's very great music. It's a set of prayers for the dead, all in music.

Larry Ladley nodded his head at Karen. “And sitting next to Karen is sixteen-year-old Steve Landauer. Tell me, Steve, how do you see yourself ten years from now?”

Steve Landauer stared at Larry Ladley. Larry Ladley's eyelid twitched again. Then Steve Landauer stared straight ahead at the camera and held perfectly still and said, “I see myself playing in Carnegie Hall. I can't tell you what concerto I'm playing. I can't see what it is.” He looked back at Larry Ladley. I could see his shoulders get relaxed.

Larry Ladley smiled again. There was something mean in the way he smiled. “Tell me, Steve, how do you know that's where you'll be?” He winked at Steve Landauer.

Steve Landauer got rigid and looked straight ahead at the camera again. “Because. Because I can't see myself doing anything else.”

I could feel everybody looking at Steve Landauer and then looking away from him.

“Well, that's determination for you. We can all say we knew him when, can't we?” Larry Ladley's eyes went very fast down to the sheet of paper in front of him and up again. “Next is Myra Nakamura. She plays the koto. Myra, what's a koto?”

She looked as if she was always having to explain it to people. “It's a Japanese instrument with thirteen strings, it's kind of like a lute. You hold the string down with one hand and pluck it with the other.”

Larry Ladley asked, “And how many koto teachers are there in Roseburg?”

“One. My grandmother.”

“So. The koto is a family affair.”

“Well, sort of,” she said.

Larry Ladley said, “Ezra Jones is fourteen. His favorite composers are—well, one of them—I've never heard of—I hope I get this right—Giovanni Battista Fontana. Who was he, Ezra?”

Ezra's eyes got very big and then settled down. He crossed his arms. “Fontana was a seventeenth-century composer. He wrote a violin sonata and some other works. It's not certain when he was born. He died in 1630.”

“That's very interesting, Ezra. Now, I believe you live in Culver, Oregon. Refresh us: Just where is Culver, Oregon?”

“It's ten miles south of Madras, and it's one mile west of Highway 97 on Highway 361.”

Larry Ladley said, “And how would I get to Culver to hear you play your violin all by yourself on one highway a mile west of another highway?” He winked at Ezra.

Ezra looked back at him. “You'd take a Trailways bus. It'd let you off in Madras. Then we'd come and pick you up.” His glasses were sliding down his nose. He pushed them back up with his left hand, and then crossed his arms again.

“And your other favorite composer is Ernest Bloch. Tell me, Ezra, is that the same one this competition is named for?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us a little bit about Ernest Bloch, Ezra. Don't make it too complicated.”

Ezra uncrossed his arms, looked down at his shoes, and then up again. “Bloch lived the last years of his life in Oregon, at Agate Beach. He was Swiss, a Swiss Jew. His music has kind of dark tones that come from somewhere, kind of mysterious.… And religious too. He wrote some concerto grossos, and…”

Steve Landauer said, “And some unaccompanied violin suites.”

“Right,” said Ezra. “And he was working on a viola suite when he died.”

“Which was—?” said Larry Ladley.

“On July 15, 1959,” said Ezra.

“Is that so? And right here in Oregon, and I didn't know anything about him. Just shows how we oftentimes don't pay attention to what's in our own backyard.” He looked down at the pages. “And our youngest fiddler today is Allegra Shapiro, who's twelve. Allegra, I believe you have a pet with an interesting name. Tell everybody your cat's name.”

“Heavenly Days,” I said.

“Does Heavenly Days like to listen to you practice?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

Larry Ladley looked around at all of us. “Kids, I'm going to admit something. The only thing I play is the radio. I never learned to read music. How would I learn to do it?” Nobody said anything. “I mean, all those little black dots, they're like a secret code—” He chuckled.

“Did you ever want to?” Christine asked. A camera moved very fast toward her.

“It's best if you do it when you're little,” Karen said.

“I bet you're right,” he said. “Well, tomorrow one of these fine fiddlers will be the winner of the Louis Bloch Competition, and I want to wish all of you good luck. Stay with us. We'll be right back.”

We got up to leave. Larry Ladley stood up and said, “Thanks, guys. Good luck. See you in Carnegie Hall.” He was talking to all of us in general.

The tall woman from the very beginning, the one with the questionnaires, walked along with us to the elevator and said thank-you several times and good-luck several times. The elevator door opened and we all got in. It closed. We started down, nobody talking.

“What an incredible jerk. Jerk. JERK,” Christine said. She was in the back of the elevator. Everybody turned around.

“Oh, not completely,” said Myra. “When he asked about learning to read music—he was like a helpless little kid.”

“That doesn't excuse him for being a jerk,” said Karen.

“It helps,” Ezra said.

We laughed. The elevator stopped. The door didn't open. Ezra pushed the “Open door” button. Nothing happened. He pushed it again. Nothing happened again.

“You think Larry Ladley's in charge of elevator maintenance too?” Karen said.

We waited for something to happen. Karen Karen banged with her fist on the elevator wall. Ezra said that wouldn't help. Then she pressed the alarm button. We stood around looking at each other. I got the idea that the elevator was really stuck.

“Do you get the feeling nothing works around here?” said Karen. “This is a very disorganized place.”

Nobody said anything.

“The whole world might get blown up and we'd never know,” Myra said.

Nobody said anything. We all got quiet, and we stayed that way for a long time. We took turns leaning against walls. Only two people could sit on the floor at once. It wasn't a very big elevator.

Ezra looked around and said, “My teacher says, ‘Is not moost be rooshing rooshing rooshing zeez notes because is coming an earthquake.…'” He said it very fast, accenting the words with a kind of sideways movement of his jaw. We burst out laughing, all except Steve Landauer. He looked around at us very fast and then looked back down at his shoes. “She's Romanian,” Ezra said.

I suddenly realized we could be playing I'm Neek. We could play it if I didn't mention the name of it. “My teacher wears sweatshirts with things on them,” I said. I told them about “Dvořák alive! Terrorizes couple in Tampa!” and “The
What
Quintet?”

Christine said, “I have this little tiny student, he says, ‘All you make me play is E-flats, I'm gonna fwow up E-flats.'”

“My violin teacher doesn't trust anybody,” Myra said. “She thinks people steal things out of her house. One day she couldn't find this old wool skirt, and she said her maid stole it. And then once it was a kitchen pan.”

We laughed and then got quiet again.

“Once she thought somebody'd stolen her toothbrush.”

Ezra said, “Hercules got so mad at his music teacher he brained him with his lute.” Everybody looked at Ezra. “Killed him,” he said. We laughed and then we were all quiet.

Steve Landauer kept himself away from us by not looking at any of us, not laughing, not doing anything but looking at the ceiling and the floor. He kept his hands hanging down at his sides. Once in a while his hands fisted and then unfisted. I'm not sure he even knew they were doing it.

After a few minutes Karen said, “I don't see a single scared face in this whole elevator. Isn't anybody afraid we're gonna go crashing to the bottom?”

“That'd take care of practicing for today,” Ezra said. “But we can't, really. There's a safety brake at the top.”

“What do you mean?” asked Myra.

“Well, an elevator works by a system of counterweights. They're supposed to regulate the operation, but in case there's a malfunction or an accident, the heavy-duty brake grabs ahold at the top and holds everything still. It's mounted on the shaft of the main lifting motor.”

“What if there's a power failure?” Myra asked.

“The elevator has its own generator,” Ezra said. “It's driven by an AC motor; the lifting motor is on direct current; so is the generator.”

“I bet you get A's in science,” Christine said.

“Or ride in lots of elevators,” said Myra.

“Nope. Never rode on one before,” Ezra said. He looked up at the ceiling. Everybody looked at him. He shrugged his shoulders.

We were quiet again. “I wonder if they know it's not running,” Myra said. “Do you think anybody even knows we're here?”

Christine said, “Who could care about six people stuck in an elevator with all the big important things going on in the world?”

Ezra said, “Somebody whined at Beethoven that one of his quartets was too hard to play. And Beethoven said, ‘Do you think I care about your lousy fiddle when the spirit moves me?'”

“The spirit around here has moved them to get on with their business. They'll figure out something's wrong when they want to go home,” Karen said.

“I wonder if Daddy's getting upset,” Myra said.

“And my mother,” I said.

“My car's probably towed away by now,” said Karen.

Everybody got quiet again. I looked around and tried to picture all of them playing the violin. Christine and Steve Landauer were easy; I'd seen them. But the others. I looked at the violin bruise on the left side of their necks and tried to build a mental picture from there. Myra had a kind of way of standing that made a little bit of space around her. As if she was wearing some kind of perfume that sent waves out to separate her from unperfumed people, but I don't think she was wearing any. Ezra had huge, dangling, bony hands, and his brain was filled with all those different things, as if there were so many rooms up there—a room for elevator workings, a room for things Beethoven said to people, a room for composers most people have never heard of, a room for what Hercules did to his music teacher. Karen Karen was maybe the most mysterious; the way she was on TV, asking Larry Ladley why he'd laughed at her. I looked at her hands, which she was holding folded in front of the flowered dress; I couldn't picture her playing the violin any more than I could picture her windsurfing or driving a car or dancing.

“You know, what's going to happen is, they're going to find us in about five thousand years,” Karen said.

Ezra nodded. “We'll look like the Easter Island statues.”

Myra said, “They'll wonder what these six sacred figures represented.”

“—in a curious box that seemed to go up and down,” said Christine.

Myra said, “I haven't even made a will. I wonder who'll get my gerbils.”

Everybody laughed and shifted position except Steve Landauer. The elevator was getting really warm.

Karen pushed herself slightly toward him and said, “How come you don't talk to any of us?”

He closed his face and said, “I do.” Then he looked past her at the elevator wall.

“No, you don't. We're all in this together—we're all supposed to compete against each other tomorrow, and we're all wondering what's going on, and we're all being very good sports about whatever it is—and you're hunkering over there like a cucumber—”

She stopped. She looked surprised. So did he. I think I held my breath. I think some other people did, too. She and he stared at each other.

“A cucumber?” he said. It was a question.

Myra laughed first. Then Ezra. Then Christine and I. I think we shook the elevator. I'd never be able to describe to Jessica and Sarah the look on Steve Landauer's face. If he really had been a cucumber, his skin would have wrinkled up for just a second and then smoothed out again. He looked as if he was hunting inside his brain for something he couldn't remember. He looked as if the word “cucumber” was going around and around in his head. The whole elevator was filled with laughter, and he was looking up at a corner where the ceiling and wall came together.