The Mozart Season Read online

  After I sat down I turned to watch the man dancing again. He was facing the quartet, and he looked at me watching him and he smiled at me. It was the way my mother smiled at some sheep one time in a field when we were driving along in the Columbia Gorge. My dad saw her do it and said we weren’t taking a sheep home for a pet. My mother said she didn’t want to take one home: they were perfectly fine where they were; she just liked to know they were there and she was smiling at them.

  That was the way the man smiled at me, I think. I was surprised. I smiled back at him. He kept dancing. He seemed to have hardly any teeth. It looked like one tooth in a whole lot of darkness.

  The last movement ended and everybody clapped. The Stem People usually put their stem glasses down to clap; sometimes they hold them in one hand and clap the other against the glass. Some people lean over and talk to their friends while they clap. Some people don’t clap at all. They just watch the quartet standing up and bowing; they just stare.

  The man danced right to the end of the Glazounov. He left when everybody else did. The quartet packed up their stuff and people came around to talk to them, and Mommy met us. I rode home with her.

  “I get paid for turning tonight. I think I’ll do it again,” I said when we were in the car. My mother has short, very curly, kind of medium brownish hair. It vibrates when she moves her head fast.

  “You did really well, honey. I watched you,” she said.

  “Thanks. Did you see the dancing man?”

  “Of course. I’ve seen him at concerts before.”

  “Dancing?”

  “I’ve never seen him not dancing,” she said. We were stopped at a traffic light, and lots of people were leaving the square. I watched her thinking. “You know,” she said, “it’s a joy to see him dancing as spontaneously as the little children always do.”

  “What do you mean, ‘always’?”

  “Oh, I’m remembering you and Bro David, dancing your little hearts out one summer. You both had blue T-shirts. I think they said ‘Symphony Kid’ on them. You were tiny.”

  I tried to remember doing that; all I could see was bare feet in grass, moving up and down.

  “That dancing man reminds me of somebody. Or something,” I said.

  “Maybe you’ve seen him before.”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe I dreamed him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  What we really had to talk about was the competition. Mommy was purposely not talking about it. She knew I’d been to my lesson that morning, and since it was the first lesson after the end of school, it was probably all planned that Mr. Kaplan would pick that day to tell me. Evidently I was supposed to bring it up.

  We were on the bridge crossing the river. Portland has its bridges lit up at night. My mother’s orchestra played in the park for the lighting ceremony of one of them. “Mr. Kaplan told me about the Bloch finals,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything. I listened to the hum of the steel grating. “And what do you think about it?” she finally asked.

  “I think somebody could’ve told me about it before.”

  “Why?”

  “So I’d be ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Why did everybody wait so long to tell me?”

  “So you could concentrate on finishing the school year, get your projects and things finished. So you could give your energy to the softball play-offs. How much readier would you be if somebody’d told you before? How long before?”

  “I don’t know. But I wouldn’t’ve ignored the concerto for so long.”

  She kind of sighed. A Mother Sigh. “Hurry up and study for your spelling test, hurry up and practice the Kreutzer, hurry up and make your bed.…” she said. She looked at me and then back at the road.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

  “What kind of hurry-ups are those?” she asked.

  “Mother Hurry-ups,” I said.

  “Exactly. And what’re they really for?”

  I knew what she was getting at. When we went to see my friend in a horse show when I was about eight years old, we saw some parents leaning on the rail yelling at their kids: “Wrong lead, Sally, wrong lead!” and “Heels down!” and other things. It’s called getting Parents’ Trophies.

  “Do you want me to play the finals?” I asked.

  “I won’t touch that one,” she said, not looking at me.

  Nobody said anything for another couple of minutes. “How scary will it get, Mommy?”

  She looked hard at the road. “Well, darling, if you want to know, it’ll get very, very scary. That’s all I can say.”

  “I’m going to do it anyway,” I said.

  She nodded her head at the road ahead. “I thought you would.”

  My cat, Heavenly Days, was on my bed. Cats spend eighty percent of their lives sleeping. She’s called Heavenly Days because that’s what my mother said when she saw her in the shoe box I brought her home in. Some people in front of a fruit stand were giving away kittens, and they had shoe boxes for them. They were a huge fat lady and a little girl; they were both wearing shorts. They had the kittens in a big cardboard carton. Daddy and I looked at the kittens, all cluttering each other and reaching with their big feet, and squeaking and blinking. There were two gray-striped ones and a calico and a completely black one. On the cardboard box there was a Magic Marker sign: Do You Need Somebody To Love? Kittens Free.

  Daddy and I just stood there looking down into the carton. The completely black one looked at me and yawned and its eyes looked surprised at the yawn, as if it were sending an SOS. I reached down into the carton and put my hand on its back. The lady said, “That one’s a male. Had his shots, they all had their shots. See? He likes you.”

  I picked him up, and he felt very warm and good to hold. I looked at him up close. He was absolutely, completely black. And his eyes were very big and blue. I put him against my chest, and he tried to climb up me; I could feel his heart beating very fast.

  I looked at Daddy. He looked at the cat. He laughed. The fat lady, who had extremely fat fingers, put the kitten in one of the shoe boxes and we all came home together.

  Heavenly turned out to be a girl. We had her spayed because my mother wouldn’t let her have kittens. And her eyes turned yellow; they look like moons.

  When I got into bed with Heavenly after the concert, there was a note on the clipboard on the floor:

  Do I have to rent a tux if you win?

  You spelled annihilate wrong. I fixed it.

  Two n’s. He’d corrected it on the clipboard.

  I opened my window about six inches. There’s a nice sound that comes in. It’s tree frogs, and little mutters of bushes settling down. Heavenly settled herself between my feet.

  It’s always hard to go to sleep after a concert. It’s your adrenaline. I kept seeing the dancing man with his torn shoe, moving slowly around and around, the brownness of all of him, and the music making him smile. Maybe such a man was a little bit crazy. But you couldn’t be too crazy if you liked to dance to string quartet music.

  That morning, all I’d had in my head was having a fun lesson and learning new words for September and missing my friends who’d gone away to do things for the summer. A few hours later, along had come the competition and the strange dancing man, and I’d turned the pages in public for money, and I’d learned “tenacity” and “annihilate.” In South Africa they annihilate people. You could let nervousness annihilate your chances of playing Mozart the way you wanted to. Hitler tried to annihilate the Jews.

  On our dining-room wall we have a photograph from Poland of a little girl standing in a field of flowers, holding a purse in her hand. There’s a white goose standing beside her, and she’s holding a homemade straw broom; it was what she used to tend her flock of geese with. The purse is velvet with some embroidery on it. She was my great-grandmother, and she was Jewish, and her name was Leah. My middle name.

  My mother’s grandmother was going to be a
dancer. She was in Kansas, and she wasn’t at all Jewish. She kept a diary of the things she did on the farm, milking goats and churning butter and rubbing medicine on the cow’s udder. And she didn’t get smallpox when it came. She didn’t turn out to be a dancer, she turned out to be a farmer with her husband. Her diary went on for sixty-six years, and then she got senile and lay in bed asking for horses. She kept waving her arms in the air and asking for horses and then she died with her whole family looking at her in her bed with the quilt she made on top of it.

  My mother came from Kansas. The same quilt my great-grandmother died under was on my mother’s bed when she was my age, and now it’s on my bed. They lived so far out in the country, they had several people on the same telephone line. It was called a party line. My mother and her girlfriend Alice, who lived two miles away, could pick up the phone and listen to the neighbors’ conversations. In fact, on the day my mother knew she’d find out if Juilliard had accepted her, she was sixty-five miles away at her violin lesson, and the postmistress called to say it was a thick envelope from Juilliard, not a thin one. But nobody was home, and Alice picked up the phone when she heard the three rings for my mother’s house, and she took the message. So Alice found out before my mother did that she was going to go to New York to go to music school. My mother and Alice were each other’s answering machines. They still phone each other on New Year’s Day every single year and talk for a long time. Alice still lives in Kansas. My mother can cook both Kansas food and Jewish food. She makes Kansas corn cakes and eggplant pudding, and she also makes latkes and pecan haroset the way Bubbe Raisa taught her.

  The reason why Bro David got to go to New York was that Bubbe Raisa gave him that trip because my parents weren’t giving him a bar mitzvah. She thought it was a shame he wouldn’t have any ceremony of his Jewishness for his thirteenth birthday, she said. And she sent him the airplane tickets. My parents were surprised but there wasn’t anything they could do when he had the tickets in his hand except let him go. Besides the eleven museums, they went to see the Yankees play and he got to eat anything he wanted. He came back wanting latkes and blintzes all the time.

  We had to do family trees last year at school. John Muir Middle School in Portland, Oregon. Jessica’s tree had to reach from Chicago to Hong Kong, and she couldn’t find the slavery parts. Maybe her father’s ancestors weren’t even slaves. It’s a whole unknown part of her. You had to say something about yourself when you did your oral presentation of your family tree, and Jessica did hers with mirrors. She told everybody the day before that they had to have mirrors for her presentation. So she had us look in the mirrors we’d brought from home, and she had us imagine a place several generations back, to see ourselves in some place completely different. Her point was that maybe a great-grandparent who looked a little bit like us, maybe in the jaw structure or around the eyes, looked out on a river or lived near a mountain or maybe drove a horse and carriage. She explained that she knows about the Chinese side of her family—they came from Hunan—but her black side is a mystery before her father’s grandparents.

  Sarah’s family tree went all the way back to when Leningrad was called St. Petersburg, in Russia. Sarah said Russia was where she got the beginnings of her dancing, even though she’s never been there and it was six generations back that somebody was a dancer. She said she dances for all the dead people in her past. Some kids thought that was stupid. It made Sarah feel terrible.

  Mine was three countries. Poland and Finland and the United States. I was supposed to include everything I could find, every name and every date in my family history. I’d always seen the girl with the goose and the broom in the dining room, but there was something that made me not ask questions about her. For school I had to ask.

  “It’s when. That’s part of it,” my father said. We were at the dinner table. Dinner was over, and I had my notebook and pencil out. “I can’t tell you when she died. Somewhere in Poland, sometime after 1939. Isn’t that enough?”

  I remember the way Daddy looked at the pencil in my hand and then away from me. He was making a miniature pile of crumbs on the tablecloth with his thumbnails.

  “But was it one of the death camps?” I asked.

  He looked at the pile of crumbs on the tablecloth, little brown fragments of bread on white cloth, then up at me and then back down at the pile. “Yes.” He got up and left the table.

  My mother said, very softly, “T-R-E-B-L-I-N-K-A. And her husband’s name was Herschel.” I wrote down the words.

  That was what had made me never ask before. The way my father turned away from the pencil in my hand.

  When I did my oral presentation I said I was half Jewish and half Gentile, and that has advantages and disadvantages. One, if you’re half-and-half, you’re lucky because each kind has some really good things about it. Gentiles are good at building things, cathedrals and huge barns and things. Jews have courage, to wander all around the world getting abused and killed and still go on having the Torah. It must be a terrible courage. Two, if you’re half-and-half, you’re the thing that can’t be. You can’t be half Jewish. So you go through your life being something that can’t be.

  And now I was still the thing that can’t be, and I was going to play a competition with people all older, and they probably knew everything Mozart ever wrote down. It would get very, very scary, Mommy said.

  Play the concerto one thousand times by September. My friend Sarah would probably do more than one thousand pliés by September. She changed ballet teachers last year, and all of a sudden she had a boyfriend in her ballet class. Still, a plié isn’t a whole concerto.

  Would that be what might make me end up like Deirdre, as Bro David had warned me? How could I end up like her? She’s a very famous singer. She and my mother sometimes stay on the phone for hours; she times her phone calls for when Mommy gets home from playing a concert, and by then it’s after 2:00 A.M. in New York, where Deirdre lives.

  My mother told me once that when she got to New York from Kansas and met the other students at Juilliard and heard them play, she wanted to turn around and go home. “I felt like Dorothy in Oz,” she said. “Take me back to Kansas, please.”

  On our dining-room wall, on the opposite side from the photograph of Leah and her goose and her broom and her purse, there are two embroidered linen pictures in frames. Bubbe Raisa in New York made one when Bro David was born and one when I was born. They have our names in Hebrew, and pomegranates, figs, dates, wheat, barley, grapes, and olives all in colored thread. Those are the seven fruits in the Bible. Bubbe Raisa met my grandfather Jacob when they were both standing in line to get standing-room tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. They went inside and stood together to see La Bohème. It was very sad, and he gave her his handkerchief when she cried. She forgot to return it to him and she ended up with it at home. She washed it and starched it and ironed it and carried it with her to the standing-room lines of four more operas before she saw him again. When she finally saw him and returned the handkerchief to him, he bought her a glass of tea after the opera and they ended up getting married and having my father.

  Zayde Jacob is dead now. They always listened to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays on the radio. Bubbe Raisa still dusts the living room every Friday afternoon for the Saturday opera. “You wouldn’t want to be slovenly when people are falling in love and dying with their hearts broken; you can dust up a little,” she used to say. My father can do a perfect imitation of her saying it.

  When I was in kindergarten I had a boyfriend, I think. Teddy. We could both fit on one swing on the playground. He shared his graham crackers with me, and he taught me how to put my parka on upside down. You lay your parka on the floor with the collar toward you and the lining facing up. You lean over and put your arms in the armholes and then you straighten up and flip the parka over your back. It’s good for little kids because then they don’t get their arms all mixed up in the sleeves and wonder where the other side of the parka is. Sometimes I
still put on my parka that way.

  Teddy built a castle of blocks one day and said I could live in it. Another kid came and knocked it down, and Teddy hit him. They had a fight right there on the floor until one of the teachers got hold of them and started chanting a peace song over and over again. They calmed down.

  On Valentine’s Day, Teddy made me a big, red, gooey Valentine; the glue oozed out all around the edges. He and I held hands at story time. Then he moved away, while one of the teachers was reading The Trumpet of the Swan to us. He never even found out how it ended, I guess.

  Teddy was the first and last boyfriend I’d ever had.

  Heavenly paced up the bed and curled up on my pillow, leaning her back against my head.

  I listened to the crickets and tree frogs outside in their little breeze and started fingering the Allegro ma non troppo part of the last movement of the Mozart concerto on my chest. It’s in six-eight, and it’s a cheerful thing to play. It’s the part that comes back at the very end of the concerto, but then it’s played pianissimo.

  3

  It was very important for nobody to tell the whole world I was going to play the Bloch Competition finals in September. I wasn’t sure why; I just knew I didn’t want it broadcast. And I didn’t want to know who the other finalists were either. It was bad enough imagining these very tall people with computer memories and fingers like willow branches walking in and playing the Mozart as if they were brushing their teeth. I didn’t want to know what they looked like.