The Mozart Season Read online

  I walked home. I had to talk to somebody. My brother David was in the dining room making a cartoon. He was sitting in the chair he sits in for dinner. He’s sixteen, and he’s basically called Bro David. He makes a lot of cartoons. Last year he sold one of them to the New Yorker magazine by lying about his age. It had tragic, starving Africans opening up big boxes and saying, “Yeccchhh—not more spinach and rutabagas from the children of America!” He got some money for it.

  When Bro David was thirteen, Bubbe Raisa paid for him to go to New York and visit her, and they went to eleven museums. Ever since then, he’s been sort of Mr. Superior.

  I stood in the dining room looking at him. I had to talk to somebody. Daddy was at work at the university where he teaches, and Mommy was at an all-day committee meeting, trying to make a playing contract so the Symphony wouldn’t go on strike. “David, I did something today,” I said.

  “Good, Legs.” He went on drawing. Some people think “Legs” is a decent nickname for Allegra.

  “I mean, I made a decision today.”

  “Good.”

  He’s exasperating. “Listen to me, David. You have to listen.”

  “Okay, I’m listening. Talk.” He looked bored.

  I told him, “I’m gonna play a competition. Maybe I’m crazy.”

  He didn’t pay attention; he thought I meant an audition.

  “A competition, David. You’re not listening. There’ll be about ten people. Do you know I sent in a Mozart tape way last February? To a competition?” The whole thing began to look in on me. The competition wasn’t a thing I was looking at, it was looking at me, as if it had lots of eyes.

  “What do you mean?” David asked.

  I told him. I stood there in the dining room, with my violin case on the floor and my arms hanging all floppy at my sides, and told him the whole thing. How I’d have to play the concerto perfectly and be suddenly brilliant. I’d be the youngest. The cadenzas are very hard. The idea sounded insane.

  David didn’t see the point. “I don’t see the point,” he said. “If you win, you just get up out of your chair and you walk up front, and you stand there and you play it. If you lose, you sit there in your place and play your part. Look: you’ve won one spelling championship thing and you’ve lost one. That didn’t annihilate your whole head or anything; you didn’t go around looking for razor blades. You’re a lousy twelve years old. Winning won’t make you queen of the world. And losing isn’t gonna terminate you. It’s a concerto; it’s not the future of the universe.”

  Sometimes I can be very frustrated and very quiet at the same time. I sat down in the chair I sit in for dinner, across the table from him, and I folded my hands. “I didn’t say the Youth Orchestra, I said the Symphony.” I said it very slowly.

  He looked at me. “You mean Mom’s symphony. Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  I tried to remember what Joel Smirnoff looked like, but I could only picture his mouth and his hair.

  “That’s different.”

  “Right.”

  He rolled his eyes around, thinking. “What’s it gonna do to you? Is it gonna make you a crazoid?” David thinks the world is a big insane asylum anyway. We’re all inmates, just in different wards.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, look at you right now.”

  “Maybe that’s because I just this morning found out.”

  “You don’t want to end up like that Deeder person.”

  “Who?”

  “You know. Mom’s friend, the one that sings.”

  “Which one?”

  “She sings concerts, and she’s strange.”

  I couldn’t remember anybody like that. “I wonder if I’ll get strange,” I said.

  “Do you want to change your mind? You know, not do it?”

  I thought of the way Joel Smirnoff held his violin in the picture: high up, kind of like a flag. Sometimes I feel my violin is out to get me—an enemy or something—and sometimes it feels like my best and only friend.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  He rolled a ball of Elmer’s glue around on the table. “Do you think you can win?”

  I looked at a cartoon he was making. It had a chimpanzee playing a piano. It was upside down from where I was sitting. “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably not. I don’t know. Eighty-five people sent tapes.”

  He picked up the glue bottle and started squeezing it lightly—just to hear the tiny little pffft it makes. “Well, you ought to go ahead and do it. But remember what I said. It’s just a concerto.”

  Easy for him to say.

  “I think I’m going to,” I said. I had to hear myself say it out loud again.

  He looked at me and pffft-ed the glue bottle four times. Then he put it down and said, “Look, Legs, I have to go to work in a little while. Nobody’s home for dinner tonight. Dad has that park concert; Mom’s gonna go hear him after her meeting.”

  “David, I’m afraid.”

  “Try not to think about it.” He started cleaning up the paper and pens and glue mess.

  “Yep. Try not to think about elephants.” Somebody said that when Bro David was in a little kids’ art class at the art museum a long time ago, and he said it all the time for a while. I looked at my violin case on the floor, and at my briefcase with the Mozart and Vitali and Prokofiev and Kreutzer and all the other music inside it. “What does that word mean, the one with ‘nigh’ in it?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know. What word?”

  “You said it. You said when I lost the spelling thing it didn’t nigh-something my whole head.”

  He was sweeping scraps off the table with the edge of a magazine. “I don’t know. Nigh-something. I don’t remember.”

  “You said it.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to go to work. Will you make me a salami sandwich?”

  I went to the kitchen and made sandwiches for both of us. A breeze was coming up, blowing the hummingbird feeder around outside the kitchen window. David picked up his sandwich and put it in a bag and left for Safeway. I sat and ate mine. Mozart was nineteen when he wrote that concerto, plus the four other ones in the same year. I wonder if he thought they were the future of the universe. I wonder if he thought they’d make any difference to anybody. I wish somebody had saved his brain.

  I was just taking out the Mozart, to look at the third-movement cadenza, when the phone rang. It was David. “It’s ‘annihilate.’ Comes from Latin, nihil, n-i-h-i-l, means ‘nothing.’ It means ‘destroy.’ Bye.”

  It was time to start my list of new words. Summer goes very fast and you can end up with no list at all in September if you’re not careful. I’ve seen it happen. I went upstairs and wrote it down on the clipboard beside the bed. Bro David hadn’t spelled it for me, so I did my best. A-n-i-h-i-l-a-t-e. I put “tenacity” from Mr. Kaplan before it.

  A long time ago, I’d thought I didn’t even like David. He got to go to special art classes at the art museum every Saturday, and his paintings and collages and clay sculptures were all over the house. We had them not only on the refrigerator, but stuck to walls and doors and sitting on tables and chairs. I complained that I didn’t get to go to any special classes, and I said Mommy and Daddy probably loved David more than they loved me, and that was when they began to figure out that I might be wanting music lessons. And my grandmother Raisa bought me the violin. So it turns out that here I was with a Mozart concerto to spend my summer with, all because when I was a little kid I’d whined with envy.

  Later, when Bro David’s art got to be all cartoons, they still were all over the walls and refrigerator, but by then I wasn’t whining anymore.

  I cleaned up the sandwich mess and went to the music room and practiced. I worked on Kreutzer no. 34, which is a good way to insult yourself if you haven’t worked on it lately. I played it for almost an hour. It can torture your fingers, and it’s good for you.

  It’s also very useful in distracting you from your problems,
because you can’t even think about them while you’re playing it. Kind of like skiing: you keep your mind totally on what you’re doing and give your mental problems a rest. You keep your mind right where your body is. I don’t understand it all totally, but that’s what you do. You keep doing it till you get convinced.

  And after the Kreutzer, I went straight to the first-to-fourth-finger shift in the first movement of the concerto. I did it over and over and over again. Just that one shift; I did it maybe fifty times, and then I played a couple of Dancla études, which are different from Kreutzer’s, and sometimes more fun.

  Daddy came in late in the afternoon and said it was going to be windy for the concert, and he wanted me to turn pages. They don’t always use page turners; only when there’s a chance of wind. It was his quartet, the Multnomah Quartet, that was playing. They’re named after an Indian chief. The same one Multnomah Falls is named for. And they weren’t playing in a park; they were playing in a place called Pioneer Square, which is in downtown Portland. So sometimes there are lots of cars going past while the concert is having a really soft part, pianissimo. People make jokes about it.

  I’d never turned pages for anybody in public before. You have to clamp the pages down with clothespins, and then unclamp a page at exactly the right moment and turn it at exactly the right instant so the person can go on playing, and then you reclamp everything and keep watching the music so you know when the next turn is coming up. There’s another way to do it, too: with a sheet of Plexiglas laid on top of the music to hold it down when the wind blows. It can be as complicated as the clothespins.

  “Daddy, I have to tell you something,” I said. He was putting his cello case on the floor against the dining-room wall.

  “Right. You have to tell me if you’ll turn pages.”

  “No, I have to tell you something important—”

  “Listen, if you won’t do it I’ll have to get somebody else. The concert’s at seven.”

  “Daddy, this is important!” I heard myself sounding like a little kid.

  He walked straight to me, looking confused. He put both arms around me, tight, and I put my head on his T-shirt.

  “My tape got in the Bloch finals.”

  His arms got kind of rigid, as if he were bracing himself for something.

  “And I’m gonna do it,” I said. Just like that.

  He didn’t say anything. He just held me, and he found my left hand and kissed every finger on it. It’s a joke he used to do when I was little and couldn’t stand how badly I played. He kissed each finger to make it all better. He’s always had a mustache, and the mustache kisses are hairy.

  “I’ll turn your pages tonight,” I said to his T-shirt.

  He laughed. “Pages aren’t important. You’re important. You’re really going to play that competition. Allegra Leah Shapiro.” He kind of sighed and just held me. Then he backed away and said, “Mommy knows you’re going to play, does she?”

  “Nope. I just found out at my lesson. Then I decided. I told David.”

  “Good. We get to surprise her. I’ll heat up the chicken; you find something to wear. Something dark, okay? We have to leave in an hour. I’ll show you the worst page turn. You’ll have to be really nimble with the clothespins.”

  I was up the stairs. I put on a navy blue skirt and a grayish sort of shirt with little skinny white stripes. I guessed I looked dark enough.

  “Set the table, will you, Allegra? Please?” Daddy called from the kitchen.

  I brushed my hair first. It’s kind of long. And thick and really dark. I’ve got blue eyes and dark hair, which is kind of an odd combination. Maybe it’s from being half Jewish and half not. My friend Jessica has straight black hair to her waist, and she has really dark eyes and her skin is a perfect gold; it’s because her dad was black and her mother is Chinese. Her father is dead; he was a geologist when Mount St. Helens erupted and he died there. Imagine having your father die that way. Jessica is gorgeous, the most beautiful girl I know. She’s going to be an architect. While I was brushing my hair, Jessica was in Hong Kong with her mother and her sisters and brothers. They go there every summer, and she has to practice drawing Chinese characters so she doesn’t end up all American and no Chinese.

  And my other best friend, Sarah, was at ballet camp in California. Until that morning, I’d been the one with the dull summer ahead. I looked in the mirror at the bruise on the left side of my neck from the chin rest on the violin. It’s a sort of rubbed place on my skin. Almost all violinists have them, just below the jawbone. That’s how you can pick out a violinist in a crowd. I put my hair in a braid because of the wind and went downstairs to set the table.

  When Daddy brought our plates to the dining-room table, my piece of chicken had a toothpick standing in it with a little tag that said “Allegra the Brave.” He showed me the worst page turn. It was in a quartet by Dvořák. He said I should probably turn three measures early.

  In Pioneer Square, the audience sits up above the players. It’s like a Greek theater. Daddy said in the car on the way to the square, “Did I tell you I pay my page turners?”

  “Nope,” I said. For some reason, I felt all happy and not bothered by anything much. The competition was months away. It was summer, and it was windy but nice, with pretty evening light that happens in Portland. Maybe it was doing the Kreutzer no. 34 that made me feel good. “How much?”

  “It depends. For you, I’d say a quarter for every easy turn, and a dollar for the hard ones. You have to keep track of the wind. That’s your job, not mine.”

  “Okay,” I said. Portland is built on both sides of a river, the Willamette, that flows north into the Columbia. We were going over one of the bridges. “Daddy?” I said, “will you not tell anybody about the competition?”

  He looked at me and then back at the bridge he was driving over. “No, I won’t tell anybody. Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t want people to know.”

  We left the bridge and were on the west side of the city. “That’s fair, Allegra. It’s understandable,” he said.

  We parked the car and went to the square. Everybody else had adult page turners. They were their students or their husbands or something. Only one other page turner had a chin-rest bruise. Daddy and everyone else in the quartet were wearing their usual black stuff, but with white jackets for the men. Those are for summer concerts. A string quartet has two violinists, a violist, and a cellist. Daddy’s quartet has three men and a woman; she’s the violist. You hold a viola almost the same way you hold a violin, but it’s a little bit bigger and has a lower voice. A violist usually has a chin-rest bruise, too.

  I looked at the program. It was the Dvořák and Mozart and Gershwin and Glazounov, he was a Russian composer. I sat back and got ready to turn pages.

  And that’s how I found the dancing man.

  2

  Portland is supposed to be one of America’s most livable cities. It has lots of free outdoor concerts in the summer. Some people bring picnics to the concerts; others wander in and listen for a couple of minutes and then leave. Sometimes in the square people roller-skate around while the concert is going on. At the jazz concerts lots of people dance, especially little kids.

  Mommy got there late. The quartet was already playing the first piece. I’d have to wait till after the concert to talk to her. I couldn’t tell from looking at her face if she knew I’d found out about the Bloch Competition. She waved to me and made this big, silly hello-thing she does with her hands. It’s what people did in the Charleston dance a long time ago. She puts her hands up at the sides of her head and wiggles them and opens her mouth wide and grins. Even though it’s perfectly silent it feels very loud. It’s embarrassing. I looked up at her and made a very little smile, and I abruptly remembered the strange singer Bro David had meant. Her name is Deirdre, and she’s beautiful.

  While I was watching the first violinist and thinking about judges watching me, I saw somebody dancing in front of the audienc
e, just a few feet to my left. He had his elbows held out to the sides, as if he had sore armpits. His head was going up and down, and he was taking steps in rhythm with his head, sort of in syncopation to the music. He went forward and back, forward and back, kind of in an oval. He was stiff, the way old men get stiff when their bones get creaky.

  He was just dancing. A dancing man.

  He had on old clothes. His pants were too big; he was kind of skinny, and his belt made them fold all around. They were brown and so was his shirt. It had short sleeves so you could see how bony and blistery his elbows were. One of his shoes was torn, down at the place where you start to lace them up. I could see it when his foot danced forward. Even though he looked as if he had arthritis or one of those creaky diseases, his dancing was kind of musical. It was formal dancing, the kind they do in old-fashioned movies.

  His face was a little bit like another face I saw when I was little. When somebody’s father came to pick up his kid from a rehearsal—it was the Oregon Prep Orchestra—he had little holes in his face. On his forehead and everyplace.

  The dancing man had them. It must be a sorrowful thing to go through your whole life with holes in your face. People probably stare at you; they can’t help it. He wasn’t exactly smiling, but he looked happy.

  He reminded me of something, or of somebody. I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Some of the Stem People were staring at him. Those are the people who bring picnics to concerts and wine or champagne or something, and they bring real glasses from their cupboards, ones that have stems. They pay a lot of attention to their glasses not falling; they’re very careful of the stems. And high up on the steps, almost in the last row, a man pointed at him and the lady beside him nodded her head and went on listening to the music. She was an Ear Lady. Those are the ones with dangly earrings that bounce in time to the music. The Symphony where Mommy and Mr. Kaplan play used to have an Ear Lady, but she took them off.

  I made another page turn. You have to take off both bottom clothespins, then reach across and under the music to do the pin on the right, stand up, take off the top two pins, turn the page with your left hand at just exactly the right instant—two or three measures before the end of the page or sometimes the player nods at you exactly when to do it—then attach the top two pins, sit down, attach the bottom left one first because that’s the page he’s on, and then reach under and across again and attach the bottom right one. While you’re standing up you’re holding two clothespins in each hand. And while you’re doing all that you can’t get between the player and the music; he has to see the notes.