The Last Holiday (11 page)

“Okay, I guess,” I said. “It seemed like they were asking me stuff they already knew, either from Professor Heller or from the long questionnaire you filled out.”

“Just wanted to see if you remembered what lies you told?” he said, trying to crack a smile.

I wouldn’t have been the only one in that room who’d told lies. Or the first one, or even the main one. Sitting in that room with the committee I’d felt like I was at one of
those theaters where the actors hold the face of the part they’re playing in front of themselves on a stick. It’s a play that’s not even like a play. You’re not even asked
to suspend your disbelief like in an ordinary movie or play. They’re holding the masks in front of them. That’s what the committee hearing had felt like, I realized. I’m sure
somebody reviewed all prospective students, but I was willing to bet they didn’t have meetings like mine for the students paying full tuition, meetings where you sat there like a bug under a
microscope, pushed and poked, taken like a joke.

When B.B. and I got home, I heard him talking to his sisters and other relatives, bringing everyone up to date. I stayed in my room and he stayed in his, as normal. I could tell he wanted to
keep things as close to normal as possible, not making any radical declarations.

Then, around 7 p.m., the phone rang. It was Professor Heller. The first question he asked was about my mother, and the second was about how I was doing.

“Very well, thank you,” I said. “But a hell of a day.”

“I wanted you to know that you’re to be granted a full scholarship.”

Evidently my silence said a great deal to him.

“I really believe that your handling of that call and the way you spoke to everyone before you left was crucial. You handled that very well, with decisiveness and maturity, with the proper
attitude concerning priorities.”

My mother quickly adjusted to being a full-fledged diabetic and went back to work. She had been moved to a desk job in the Housing Authority and spent her days at the Amsterdam
Houses on 61st Street. She claimed it was not a bad change.

Our refrigerator held a tray of insulin. She had learned how to measure out her doses and inject herself with a needle. She made me watch the process one day, from how to jab yourself in a
fingertip with a short silver needle and put a drop of blood on this paper that turned colors to tell you how much medication to take, to shooting herself in the hip and swabbing the injection
point with alcohol. Then she came over to me with an orange and a fresh needle.

“You need to know how to do this,” she said half-seriously.

She knew that when it came to being brave the world did not turn to me. I declined the opportunity to squirt some water into an orange right then. I told her I appreciated the vote of
confidence, but that I was concentrating on her not needing me to do any injecting. She laughed and told me that even her brother would do it and he was definitely an old scaredy-cat. I told her
that my fear took precedence because it was young and had to be nurtured. We laughed some more. My mother knew good and damn well there was no chance of my using the works. I had a thorough needle
phobia.

By the time I started at Fieldston that fall, in September 1964, my mother and I had also moved to the Robert Fulton Houses—in other words, the projects—down in Chelsea, living on
our own in a two-bedroom place on West 17th Street between Ninth and Tenth avenues. The project buildings covered five square blocks and were the center of a regeneration of that section of Ninth
Avenue, with a small town’s worth of barber shops, bodegas, pizza shops, record stores, and clothing stores. I quickly learned I was a minority within a minority—the neighborhood seemed
to be 85 percent Puerto Rican, 15 percent white, and me. I did what I could to blend into Little San Juan without trading in my connection to Black America or the Temptations.

The good news was that the rent for our new apartment was seventy-three dollars per month; the bad news was that what would have been a twenty minute ride from our old place to Fieldston would
now take at least an hour each way and involve switching trains. I had to take the train two hundred and thirty blocks uptown to reach school.

One look around the campus was enough to remind me how expensive the school was. The classroom buildings seemed to be held together with interlocking stones, like medieval castle walls. The
green lawns looked as though they were trimmed with scissors. There was a new gym with glass backboards and room for two full-court games side-by-side. There was also a well-kept quarter-mile oval
track and a manicured football field separated by a fence from a soccer pitch. The stage in the auditorium could handle full-scale productions for five hundred viewers. There was a split-level art
building for painting beneath skylights that always let in a lot of natural light.

Music classes were taught in a cozy tower room you reached by climbing a spiral stone staircase above the auditorium and the student recreation room with its vending machines and ping-pong
tables. There were three pianos in the building: an upright for the theater stage that was available only when there was no class being held, another one in the music room up in the tower, and, in
a separate room next to the auditorium, a beautiful Steinway. It was an absolutely marvelous instrument. And not only was it the best piano around, it was the one that was almost always free and
thoroughly accessible. Unfortunately, it was also the one the music teacher, Mr. Worthman, had established a rule against playing. Since I was the main one playing the kind of music Mr. Worthman
objected to, I felt he might as well have called it “the no Gil rule.”

Mr. Worthman headed the music department and the glee club. He reminded me of one of the villains from the
Spiderman
comics I read. He had the same hooked beak, the same pale complexion,
and most of all, the same horseshoe of white hair around a light bulb shaped bald spot. We were opposites in appearance and in musical taste. But while I would never have tried to shut down his
choral group, he showed more than mild disapproval of my music. He hated it.

The first time I played the Temptations on the Steinway, when I had just arrived on campus, the wild dancing made enough noise to raise professor Worthman from his crypt. He arrived in the music
room to see it looking like a dance hall. I was just starting into a Stevie Wonder tune when I got busted.

I felt like there was something personal going on between Mr. Worthman and me. Nobody could remember exactly when the “hands off the Steinway” rule had been posted, but I somehow
connected it to something unreasonable and attributed the whole fabrication to Mr. Worthman. Maybe it had something to do with the songs I was writing; maybe it was because I performed around
school with other students but never joined the glee club. If all else failed, I could always play the it’s-’cause-I-come-from-the-ghetto card, though that didn’t seem to apply to
Mr. Worthman—he didn’t seem to care that I was from the ghetto.

You have options when you decide something is unfair. You can say to hell with it and play anytime and anywhere you see fit in open defiance of the rules. You can challenge it legally and carry
it all the way to the Supreme Court—or the high school equivalent. Or you can pick and choose your times, hit and run, try to avoid a showdown. I did that.

I opted for a melodic form of guerilla warfare, floating in and out with stealth and style. I mixed in a little black magic so that my fingers would be quicker than Mr. Worthman’s eyes. I
used clock management, and stopped playing just before and just after lunch, when my classmates had a few minutes to watch me get in trouble. I stopped doing all the flamboyant finger snappers from
the radio. I stopped playing requests for the latest top ten tunes by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, any of which would bring in a dozen unwanted singers. I stopped doing tunes that would inspire
kids to unreasonable facsimiles of the dances from the new TV shows like
Shindig
and
Hullabaloo
.

I didn’t love confrontation, and I had been frequently warned that Mr. Worthman really enjoyed confrontation, that at times he was known to say it was one of his most effective teaching
tools. There were times I would have challenged the professor if I’d gotten caught, times when I was working on my own songs. I had adopted a New York attitude since starting at Fieldston,
and I had certain spaces that I didn’t want rolled over anymore. But my scholarship also depended on being able not to react to personal injury, to getting pushed around, to personal
restriction and harassment. Not that the scholarship was a big deal to me, but it was a big deal to someone who was a big deal to me: my mother.

Still, I was in a good writing groove and Mr. Worthman was in my way. He might snatch all the younger students sneaking in to play “Stand By Me,” but I planned to be the guerilla he
missed. I was successful for a while. Months, in fact.

Then in April, I was sitting alone at the keyboard during a free period of mine that I often spent playing ping-pong. I’d had a sudden creative inspiration. I often heard tunes in my head.
But this one arrived with words attached like bright bulbs on a Christmas tree. No sooner had I sat down to play than Mr. Worthman arrived with a short, pudgy gentleman in overalls with a handlebar
mustache and a tool box.

The mustached man ignored me and slid a metal box beneath the Steinway, walked gingerly to the side, and pushed up the flat top. He propped it open at a forty-five-degree angle, exposing the
mechanics of the piano’s wires and pads. There are few things more beautiful than the strings of a Steinway. I watched every little move the piano tuner made under the hood.

Mr. Worthman, meanwhile, was making sweeping motions with both hands, directing me toward the door, too distracted for a protracted lecture.

“Heron, you know the rule!” he barked.

He was also talking to the other man about what needed to be done. “Total A-440, with a pad that needs to be changed on the F-sharp in the third octave. It sounds like it got damp or
something.”

Then again to me: “I’ll deal with you later.”

He was sweeping again, like “Out, out, damn Scott.”

I wanted to stay and watch the piano tuner, but I left—and forgot the song I had been just about to capture. If I was able to play a song once, I would have it; this one had gotten
away.

Things were still cool for a while. I didn’t see Mr. Worthman at all for a few weeks, and his not seeing me kept anything from triggering his memory.

I should have left well enough alone. I should have left the piano alone. But not having been able to remember the song pushed me toward a point where I thought I wouldn’t mind a
confrontation. So I did what I wanted to do. I had a plan. The choral group had their big spring recital coming up on the quadrangle, and there would be extra rehearsals after school; meetings
during class time would be scuttled. The piano would be sitting there all day every day without anybody coming in to play it. That was almost obscene.

My strategy seemed to work. For the next three weeks I stopped by the Steinway every day for a few chords or a verse or two of my latest song. I was starting to get comfortable. One afternoon at
the end of April, Mr. Worthman landed in the Steinway room as if he’d leapt from the tower in a parachute. I was too astonished even to show surprise.

When he caught his breath and his face started to regain its natural pallor, he said, “You’re in a lot of trouble this time, young man. I hope you know that. I’ve got a good
mind to have them take you up before the disciplinary committee. We’ll have your parents in.”

When the letter arrived at home a few days later from the disciplinary committee at Fieldston, I had forgotten Mr. Worthman’s threat. I expected it to raise my mother’s blood
pressure and her voice, but that wasn’t her way. When she called me into the kitchen, I didn’t know what to expect. But her flat tone of voice raised the hairs along the length of my
arms.

“You want to tell me what this letter’s all about?” she asked, holding it in front of her face like a fan.

“What does it say?” I said, taking a seat at the kitchen table opposite her.

“It says that I need to appear with you in front of the discipline committee next Monday for a 9 a.m. meeting.”

I took a breath.

“I played a piano,” I said quietly.

“That’s what this is about? You played a piano and I’m supposed to come up to your school about it?”

 “Yeah. This music teacher said they might call you up there but I swear I thought he was joking.”

She paused for a beat.

“So you played a piano and then what?”

“Then nothing. That’s all I did was play the piano.”

“You usually tell the truth,” she said, “but I don’t hear it.”

She sat for another moment.

“Did you hit someone—like the music teacher?”

“No, ma’am.”

I had heard from other students that Fieldston had a “no suspension” policy. They believed that suspension gave the students a vacation from classes. I had told my mother about
that.

“We’ll see about this,” my mother finally said, as though she were really exhausted. “I don’t need to be going up there and getting a surprise. You may as well tell
me the whole thing.”

The next Monday we trudged up the hill after the long subway journey I had told her about many times. She was surprised but pleased to see the cookies and tea service and coffee pot and the
discipline folks engaged in pleasant conversation and sipping coffee from good china and munching on dainty cookies. I didn’t have much of an appetite.

The face-off was called to order and my mother and I sat side-by-side facing a similar semicircle to the one I’d met a year prior when she was ill and I left early.

“Mrs. Heron,” the principal began, “we’re facing something of a problem here and we need your input. You see, Mr. Worthman here caught Gil playing the piano.”

My mother’s reaction was almost imperceptible. She relaxed her shoulders and recrossed her legs. Her expression was pleasant enough, a little smile. And she looked critically from face to
face as though waiting for the punch line of a joke.