The Mozart Season Read online

  I told everybody in my family that was the way I wanted it. They said okay. My mother was standing at the kitchen sink when I told her, early on the morning after the day I’d found out. She’d just found a fly struggling in the soapsuds and was scooping it up to take it outside and saying to it, “Oh, you poor dear…” I’d already practiced two hours that morning.

  “I understand, dear. We wouldn’t dream of telling people. You’re supposed to call Charley Horner this morning.”

  “Charley Horner who?”

  “Charley Horner the horn player. He called late last night. Woke us up, in fact. His number’s by the phone.” I looked at her. “Daddy’s friend,” she said.

  “Why am I supposed to call him?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you find out?”

  He had a recording on his phone. “Do you know the one about Ravel and the pianist who played the ‘Pavane’ too slowly? He told her, ‘I wrote a “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” not a “Dead Pavane for a Princess.”’ He said it in French, of course. Leave your name and number at the beep and I’ll call you back.” It was a musicians’ joke.

  “This is Allegra Shapiro,” I said. “I think you know my number. I don’t know what you want to talk—”

  “Hi, Allegra. I don’t pick up the phone for just anybody. Listen, Allegra, I saw you turning pages for your pop last night. I want to reserve you for next Sunday in Laurelhurst Park. We’ve got a blowing date, my wind quintet. I don’t know what you charge. Will you save the date—if you’re not busy? I don’t know what the weather’ll be. Maybe we’ll turn out to be a windy quintet.”

  “You mean you want me to turn pages for you?”

  “That’s exactly what I want you to do. Can you be there by one forty-five? How much do you charge?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’ll never get rich that way, Allegra. Let me know when you find out. You’ll schlep your own clothespins, or shall I?”

  “I can bring mine,” I said.

  “We’re partners, then,” he said. “You’ll put the date in your little black book?”

  “I don’t have a little black book,” I said.

  “You’ll want to get one,” he said.

  And he hung up.

  Mommy was listening. I looked at her. She laughed. “Mommy, I think he’s strange,” I said.

  “You’re a businesswoman suddenly,” she said.

  “I said I think he’s strange.”

  “Honey, he’s no stranger than the rest of the human race. He’s a good musician. When’s this page-turning event?”

  “Sunday afternoon. Laurelhurst.” That’s near where we live. It’s kind of our neighborhood park. It has great tall evergreen trees and holly trees and rhododendron and camelia bushes all over the place. People walk their dogs there; it’s a friendly place.

  She rolled her eyes up toward the place where the wall and the ceiling come together. “That’s right. Glad you reminded me. I promised him long ago I’d be there. We’ll go together, all right?”

  “I have to take clothespins,” I said. She was putting some plates away. “Mommy, why should I have a little black book?”

  “That’s the way men talk,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Daddy doesn’t talk that way.”

  “Right. And I’m married to him, not to Charley. Did you eat breakfast?”

  “Yep.” I’d eaten an oatmeal recipe I’d made up. I suppose it’s called Oatmeal Shapiro. Here’s how I make it:

  1⁄3 cup rolled oats

  2⁄3 + cup water

  about 2 dozen raisins

  a small handful of nuts

  (almonds or walnuts)

  1 apple

  a sprinkling of cinnamon

  a smaller sprinkling of nutmeg

  ½ + cup plain yogurt

  a very small spoonful of honey

  Cut the apple into very small bits, but don’t peel it. Put the apple bits, raisins, and water in a saucepan on medium heat. Cover the pan, bring it to a boil, and then boil it for a minute or two. Poke some of the apple pieces with a sharp knife; when the knife goes through them easily, add the rolled oats. Follow the stirring and timing instructions on the rolled-oats box. When they’re almost cooked, add the cinnamon, nutmeg, and nuts. Cover the pan and set it aside for the time the instructions say to. Then put the whole thing in a bowl, add the honey and the yogurt. Mix it all up and enjoy.

  You can use a pear or a peach instead of the apple; the cooking time will be less. You can use a big spoonful of honey, or even brown sugar, if you want to. You can use any flavor of yogurt you want.

  The music room is at the back of our house, like Mr. Kaplan’s, but it’s different. It has French doors to the outside, and lots of plants in pots because it faces south, and it’s cluttered. It’s got eight shelves of music, and a piano, and three music stands, and paintings of people playing music. And some photographs. There’s room for people to play quartets or quintets here. There’s even a sofa. And people are always leaving things when they take lessons from my dad. There’s a Lost & Found Chair. That morning it had a green rain slicker on it, and a tan sweater, a cello sonata by Fauré with “Hoyt” scrawled on it, a pair of sunglasses, and a blue comb.

  I was looking at the third movement of the concerto, the Rondeau. It’s kind of like a body with all its different parts, and if you took the arms and legs and everything apart you could still match them up, because they really do all go together, kind of parallel parts. I was thinking that when you play the third Andante grazioso it feels as if you’re at the heart of the movement.

  “Playing Mozart isn’t hard, but to play him well is what you can die trying to do.” That’s what people always say.

  My mother came in with her spritzing watering can. “Allegra, how would you feel about sleeping in here for a few nights?”

  “When?”

  “Deirdre’s coming. Chamber Music Northwest. She gets here next Tuesday.” She climbed on a chair and spritzed some water on a Swedish ivy that hangs down from the ceiling. “She suddenly decided she couldn’t stand to stay in a hotel.”

  My mother looked down at me with the spritzing can hanging in the air. “Well, she has more than her share of ambivalences about her life.” I looked up at my mother in a question mark. “‘Ambivalence’ means you could go either one way or the other and you’re not sure which. She thought she’d stay in a hotel, but she’s just gotten rave reviews in both Boston and New York and they’ve unsettled her. Well, scared her, really. She doesn’t want to be alone. So,” my mother stepped down off the chair, “she’ll stay with us. All right?”

  I looked at my mother and tried to imagine being scared by rave reviews.

  “Besides, she keeps an eye on Bubbe Raisa, visits her. They go to lunch together,” my mother said.

  I didn’t remember Deirdre clearly. She hadn’t stayed with us when she came to Portland to sing the year before; she just came for dinner and we went to her concert. She travels around singing all over the place. She was the first person to see Bro David’s cartoon about the starving Africans in the magazine. He’d signed it “B. David Shapiro” and she called him on the telephone to congratulate him. He didn’t remember to tell Mommy and Daddy about her phone call for about three weeks, and Mommy got very upset.

  “I don’t know what kind of mood she’ll be in. She may want to sleep in here herself. Sometimes she gets frightened of everyday things.”

  “Everyday things?”

  “Yes, sometimes. She got frightened of staying in a hotel. Maybe she’ll be frightened about being selfish if she takes your room, I don’t know.”

  “Is she weird?”

  Mommy walked over to a plant called Bro David’s Plant, I don’t know its other name, and she walked around it, bending down to look under its leaves. “Deirdre’s had a troubled life, sweetheart. And she’s our friend.”

  “Is she weird?” I asked.

  She straightened up and went to
an auralia. She turned its pot clockwise a bit and spritzed. “I don’t know, honey. What is weird? If she feels all right about sleeping in your room, do you feel all right about it?”

  “I guess so.” Actually, sleeping in the music room is kind of fun. All the paintings and photographs are right there, it’s a kind of social feeling. Heavenly and I sleep on the sofa.

  My mother picked up a dead daddy longlegs from a table and held it in her hand, the way you’d hold an egg that fell from a birds’ nest. She took it out of the room. She’d add it to the little collection of bugs that have died in the house. She keeps them on a table in the living room, in an antique dish, with a magnifying lens beside it. She thinks it’s interesting to look at all their parts. She says they’re Splendid Creatures, So Magnificently Made. When the bugs get dusty and fall apart, she takes the little pile outside, and then she starts a new collection.

  The first thing to do was get the concerto clearly and completely memorized, so it would be loud and clear in my mind. I’d lost some parts in the back of my mind since February. When we’d made the tape, I hadn’t imagined making the finals. For a tape, the concerto didn’t have to be memorized. For the finals, it had to be played from memory.

  In fact, when Mr. Kaplan had given me both the third and fourth concertos and I’d played through them and then spun my bow to decide, I’d been completely ambivalent. If my bow had landed the other way, I wouldn’t have ended up playing the Bloch Competition at all. The competition concerto was Number Four.

  When the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma was little, he memorized two measures of a Bach cello suite each day. The suites are unaccompanied, no piano. In a year he knew three of them, how they were built, how the notes worked in patterns. Not everybody works that way. You have to find the way you work best. That’s your method.

  Different violinists play differently, of course. Anne-Sophie Mutter, who’s German, plays the third movement of this concerto in seven minutes and twenty-one seconds. She was invited to play a solo with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic when she was fourteen. David Oistrakh took seven minutes and fifty-four seconds to play the same movement. He was Russian. And Itzhak Perlman plays it in seven minutes flat. And he wrote his own cadenzas. He’s American. Those were the only three recordings of it we had in our house. I didn’t know which one was what you’d call Best; I don’t know how you even decide those things. What’s Best? Faster isn’t necessarily better. All I know is that I listened to all three of them quite a bit for several weeks.

  I played the recordings in my room, on the old stereo that my parents had given me when their CD player arrived. They won the CD player from the radio by sending in a question to the opera quiz that happens between the acts of the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast on Saturdays. If the Met quiz uses your question on the radio, you get prizes. My parents had sat at the dining-room table for a lot of nights thinking up questions and throwing them away; it took them a long time to come up with a good one. The one that got used was “How many operas can you name that take place on islands? And which of these islands are real and which are imaginary?” And for that we got a CD player. It almost didn’t seem fair.

  Now, we all have our own sound systems. Bro David had already bought his with Safeway money, so he didn’t need the one my parents were giving away. He plays mostly African music on his. My father was right when he said, “Anybody who didn’t like music would go berserk in this house.”

  Summer was turning out to be a whole lot of practicing and not very much else. One day I got three postcards: one from Jessica with Chinese characters on it, one from Sarah saying that dance camp was harder than the, year before, and one from my stand partner in the Youth Orchestra who was suddenly moving to Los Angeles. It felt as if everybody was going away.

  My stand partner was seventeen years old, her name was Lois, and her parents got transferred and she had to go along. “They want me to go to UCLA next year anyway,” her postcard said.

  A stand partner is very important. In the string sections of an orchestra, two people share a music stand. Usually the outside person is the better player. Christine, the concertmaster of the Youth Orchestra, says, “It’s important how you occupy your space.” The outside player can’t just let the scroll of her violin hang out in the middle of the space and get in the way of the inside player’s line of vision. The one on the inside, away from the audience, turns pages while the outside player keeps on playing. Of course you have to turn at just the right moment. You also have to listen to instructions together, and once Lois explained something I didn’t understand.

  Stand partners also have to agree on what things they want written in pencil on the pages, and who’s going to write them. Lois and I’d agreed that we could use my music, with my writing, things like “Don’t drag,” and with difficult sections circled.

  At the bottom of the postcard she wrote, “Don’t forget me, Little Buddy. Remember the time we played the wrong note together in the Shostakovich?”

  I tried to imagine somebody else sitting in her chair. I missed her already. Just remembering the way she called me “Little Buddy” made me lonely.

  When I turned pages for Charley Horner at Laurelhurst Park, there was just a little breeze, so I didn’t need the clothespins on every turn. And my mother let me borrow these very long clamps that she uses for outdoor concerts. She wasn’t going to need them until Labor Day, for the Oregon Symphony concert in Waterfront Park. Mostly, I got to listen to the wind quintet. Daddy and Mommy and Mr. Kaplan and everybody were willing not to tell about the competition, so I didn’t have to hear people wishing me luck, or looking at me and deciding whether I was going to win or lose it.

  The quintet had a flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon. Charley Horner announced all the pieces. During the second song, a horn honked loudly and burst into the music. At the end of the song, he said, “That was our sixth member. He always comes in late.”

  They were just beginning the second half of the concert, and the sun was streaming through the trees, making the bushes and everything gorgeous, and people were sitting around on their blankets with their food, when the dancing man got there.

  He was wearing his same clothes. And he danced the same dance. If the music got faster or slower, he didn’t change his dance. I watched him a lot. He was holding his arms out in sideways v’s like crescendo markings, the same way he’d done in the square, and he moved his feet in a sort of oval; it was his dancing method. He still had his torn shoe.

  At the end of the concert, the dancing man made a little bow to Charley Horner’s quintet. He did it while they were bowing to the audience and everybody was clapping.

  I earned $3.75 that day.

  Daddy stayed to talk to some friends, and my mother and I walked home together, through the park and up the hill and along the sidewalk where some little kids were jumping rope. Mommy was swinging the canvas shoulder bag she carries, and I was holding my plastic bag of music clamps and jingling my money in my skirt pocket. It was a nice summer afternoon, and you could smell people’s gardens.

  “I love Portland,” Mommy said. “If you have a little bit of ground, you can have roses. Anybody in the city can—if they have dirt.”

  Portland is called the City of Roses. It’s because of the long growing season. Roses bloom from early spring to late fall. We have eight rosebushes. In a park there’s a huge Rose Garden on a hill where you can see thousands of roses and look down on the city. The squirrels there are so tame they come and grab food from your hand.

  “I wonder if the dancing man has any,” I said.

  She reached in my pocket and took my hand out. We walked along holding hands. My money jingled. “Honey, I don’t know.”

  We walked along. You could hear our sandals flapping. Then she said again, “I don’t know.” We walked along some more. “He’s a victim. Probably,” she said.

  “Of what? What do you think a victim of?” We were on our block, and you could hear sp
rinklers on people’s lawns.

  “I don’t know. It could be a hundred different things,” she said.

  * * *

  From Charley Horner’s concert I got two more page-turning jobs in the same week. Turning for pianists makes the most money by far; they have the most page turns.

  “Only two more days till we get Deirdre’s Doldrums,” Daddy said a few mornings later when everybody was home for breakfast.

  “Deirdre’s Delirium is more like it,” Bro David said.

  Mommy said, “I think you’re both being stinkers. I don’t want this to turn into Women versus Boys. Listen, she has to sing, and it’d be inhuman for us to do anything even slightly…”

  Nobody said anything.

  “And besides, if it gets cold or rainy or something, she could get sick, and it’s our responsibility to…” She didn’t finish that sentence either.

  It’s kind of a sad joke how singers get sick when they come to Portland from other places. In summer it’s not so bad, but mostly, Oregon weather is hard on them. Lots of rain. Once a baritone lost his voice for an opera and he had to stand on the stage acting out the singing while another man stood way down in the orchestra pit, right where Daddy plays, doing the voice part. If you were there watching, it looked ridiculous.

  “Fleur, word of honor. I won’t do anything even slightly. Promise,” Daddy said.

  Mommy laughed. “You, David?” she said. “Be a sweetheart.”

  “How do you be that?” he said.

  “For one thing, you could try not imitating her when she practices,” Daddy said.

  “She’s gonna practice here?” I asked.

  Mommy looked at me. “Where else? Do you think it’d be better if she didn’t practice here? What if somebody told you you couldn’t—”

  “Okay,” I said. I was looking forward to having her come to stay. It would bring some variety into the house.

  “Well, enjoy your nearly last French toast for a while,” Daddy said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “No fried foods when Deirdre’s in the house,” Mommy said.