The Mozart Season (11 page)

I went to Deirdre's second concert, too. She was perfectly fine; she didn't get strange at all. Just before she went upstairs to bed that night, she said, “Do you know what Martin Luther said he'd do if he thought the end of the world was coming soon? He said he'd plant apple trees.”

I looked at her, standing on the bottom step with her hand on the banister, holding both tiny sandals by their straps. Her big eyes were all shiny from the adrenaline of the concert.

Bro David was standing at the top of the stairs looking down at us. “Deirdre, if the end of the world was coming, how would there be time for any apples to grow?” he said. He said it in a voice that showed he wasn't expecting an answer.

Deirdre looked up at him. “Just to have them there, you see? Not for them to be of any use—there wouldn't be time. Just to have apple trees. Just growing up out of the earth…” She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and we said good night. Her dress floated up the stairs behind her.

I listened up the stairs. Bro David said, “That was in the fourteenth century. What did he know?”

“Well, sixteenth, actually,” Deirdre said. “But it's a pretty idea.…”

“Doesn't sound too bright to me,” he said.

Deirdre said exasperatedly, “Bro David, you are such a
realist.
”

Immediately the family was laughing. Daddy and Mommy from their bedroom, me from the bottom of the stairs. I think we were all laughing at different things, though.

*   *   *

At the Waterfront Concerts, thousands of people come and sit on the grass to hear the music. Charley Horner was playing in the orchestra, and I saw him walk over to Daddy's chair and say something that made Daddy laugh. Daddy has a nice reasonable laugh, where his face breaks open and then shuts itself up again.

The park has food booths all lined up along the sides. Somebody on the radio called the Waterfront Concerts “the best-smelling concerts west of the Hudson.”

When the orchestra started to play the second half of the concert, the same dancing man from before started dancing. He had his same clothes on. He danced the same dance, forward and back and around, and he had the same concentrating look on his face. Some people just watched him, some people pointed at him, some people didn't pay any attention to him at all. Just like before.

Deirdre stared at him and let out a loud whisper, “Aaaahhhh.” Then she whispered, “Why on earth doesn't somebody dance with that man?”

Nobody said anything. My mother and two of her friends and I just sat there.

“Well, why doesn't somebody?” she said.

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don't know,” I said. I looked across Deirdre at Mommy, who was just listening to the music.

Deirdre stood up and started walking around people. She had raspberry stains on her big, swingy blue-and-white-striped skirt, at the side. Everybody had blankets or sleeping bags spread out, and she had to be careful not to step right on them. I watched her stepping around people, almost doing a kind of dance in her skinny sandals. She had to go around about six blankets covered with people to get to the open space in front of the stage.

When she got to the bare grass, she stopped for just a beat of the music, and then went right over to the dancing man and started dancing with him. I think she caught him by surprise. He sort of stopped for a moment, then he bowed a little and smiled a little smile, like How do you do, and went on dancing. She danced, following his steps, keeping about three feet of space between them. When he turned, she turned. When he kicked his foot out to the side, she did the same thing. They danced.

The music was by Handel.

I'd seen an old-fashioned music box in Kansas once when I went with my mother to visit an old lady who lived with a lot of doilies. The lady was somebody we're related to in some way. Her house smelled like dried-up flowers. When the old lady wound the music-box key, the two little dolls on top, a man and a lady, went around in a circle, and you could imagine a whole ballroom full of people watching them turning and turning. They had smiles painted on their faces and the smiles just kept turning around as the music played. The lady doll was built with a long pink dress on, and the man was built wearing a black suit. While Mommy and the old lady talked, I sat on the floor and watched the dancers on the music box, which was on a little table. The dancers were just at the level where I could see their faces. The old lady showed me how to wind the key when the music ran down; you had to be very careful because it was very old. The lady said I could touch the dancers if I'd “be careful like you would with eggs, the little bitty things could break.”

Watching Deirdre and the dancing man, I thought of the music box and being a little kid sitting on the floor watching the pink dress and the black suit and the painted smiles go round and round, and listening to the music run down, and then winding the key to make them dance again. I could almost get the dried-flower smell back again.

Deirdre and the dancing man just danced, the whole last half of the concert. It was a pretty sight.

At the end, they made little bows to each other. Deirdre curtsied, the dancing man moved off into the crowd, Daddy put his cello in its case, and we got the car and went home.

“Portland, Oregon, land of parking places,” Deirdre said in the car. “Nice concert, Alan. Really, more people ought to be dancing to Handel and Brahms and Mozart. Don't you think so, Fleur?” My mother smiled and ran her hand through her hair. “Well, Allegra, don't you think so?”

I was thinking about the little music box. The music was inside, and you had to wind the key just right and it came out, and the dancing man and lady went round and round, smiling. How to get close enough to the Mozart concerto so that— How to move so close to it that there would be just that edge Mr. Kaplan talked about— How to get something strung just right in me so I'd be balancing right exactly on that edge— How to remember everything I know and forget it at the same time and invent a new thing. And that would be the way to let the music out of me. ME: Allegra Shapiro. I'M playing this concerto.

“Yes, I think so, Deirdre.”

But that still didn't explain
how.

Practice.

Listen for the feel of getting closer to it. Would I recognize it?

I went to sleep looking at the Green Violin man. His green face is distorted; his nose is twisted downhill to the left, his smiling mouth twists uphill to the right. Something is happening to make the music lift out of his instrument. I wondered if there was any word for it.

6

I was the one to run with Deirdre to her plane, because she'd forgotten one of her bags in my bedroom and we had to go back for it when we were almost halfway to the airport. Already when we got there, they were announcing that the plane was ready for takeoff.

“You're wonderful, Allegra,” Deirdre said while we were running. “Promise you'll come see me in New York?” She's a very fast runner, even with luggage.

I was carrying two of her bags and trying to keep up with her. People were scooting aside to let us by. “I'll try,” I said. “Hey, Deirdre?”

“Yes, my sweet one?”

“I'm gonna play a competition in September. That Mozart you've kept hearing me practicing.” I was huffing.

Her head swung toward me, her earrings flashing. “Allegra! Really!”

“It's the Ernest Bloch. I'm a finalist,” I said. I had to stop and change the bags to opposite sides and then run to catch up with her.

“I've heard of that one—Allegra, I'm so excited—why didn't you—”

“I just couldn't find the right time—”

“Here's the gate— Hey, wait, here I am—don't leave—” She flung her ticket envelope at the uniformed woman standing at the doorway. “Allegra!” She burst down on me and put her arms and bags around me.

“It's on Labor Day,” I said. The woman at the doorway was taking the two bags from me. “I wish you love,” Deirdre whispered into my hair, and she was gone to Boston to sing two concerts.

I watched her running down the ramp, with bags flying out from her sides. Even in her fluster and haste, she was beautiful.

I moved back into my bedroom. It still smelled like her, perfumy.

The concert review had said she was a genius.

The weather was getting so much hotter that I'd gotten used to beginning to practice before 7:00
A.M.
That way, I could work for three hours before it got really hot, and I'd save the rest of the practicing for later.

Jessica was due back from Hong Kong in a few days, and Sarah was due back from ballet camp in a week.

I took breaks from the Mozart project to play the Vitali now and then, and some Dancla études. And the awful, nasty, torturing Kreutzer. Sometimes even Kreutzer felt like a break. I couldn't do Mozart forever.

When I was a really little kid, Mr. Kaplan used to have me walk and play at the same time. You take four steps to the measure if the piece is in four, or three steps if it's in three. Or eight steps if it's in very slow four, six steps if it's in very slow three. It helps little kids learn to count and be regular. I suppose it looks hilarious: this little kid, marching around a room playing a violin. Because when you make a mistake, your feet get mixed up and you can end up standing off-balance with one foot hanging in the air while you find the right note. I used to back up to the place on the rug where I'd been a few measures before I got lost, and start again from there. I think it was a way of getting my little brain organized.

It's kind of like the way little kids always know the first few measures of a piece really well, because they're always starting over again from the beginning.

I went back to pacing sometimes with Mozart. It was about nine thirty one morning when Mommy came in and said Mr. Kaplan was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. She smiled at me pacing.

“I feel like a little kid,” I said, and put my violin in the open violin case.

She laughed. “It works, doesn't it?”

I looked at her and nodded my head.

“Then pace your heart out, sweetheart,” she said.

I went to the kitchen phone.

“Good morning, Allegra. How would you like to play the Mozart in public next week?” Mr. Kaplan asked.

“What do you mean, in public?” I said.

“I mean there's a little town up the Columbia Gorge, and the little town has a little orchestra, and their soloist has broken two fingers of her right hand windsurfing on the river, and they need somebody to come and play it. Outdoors. In their park.”

“This concerto?” I asked.

“This very one. The orchestra's spent two months learning the accompaniment. I owe the conductor a favor, and you'd have fun doing it. Are you interested?”

I didn't say anything. Next week. In public. Mozart and Mr. Kaplan and an actual orchestra and a whole bunch of people in a park. And me.

“I hear your wheels turning, Allegra. The concert's on Thursday night in Trout Creek Ridge. One rehearsal, Tuesday at seven, indoors. I'll drive you there.”

“
One
rehearsal?”

“That's all. If she'd broken her fingers two weeks earlier, there would've been more. What do you think?”

I looked around the kitchen. Mommy wasn't in sight. Nine weeks until the competition. “Is it a kids' orchestra?”

“No. A community orchestra. Pharmacists, Sunday school teachers, farmers, some kids. You know, amateur. A woman conductor. She's very good,” he said. He wasn't actually pleading.

Why not? Why in the world not do it?

“Can you think of a good reason not to do it, Allegra?”

I laughed. He was looking right into my head over the phone. “No. I think I will.”

“Good girl, Allegra. We'll talk about it tomorrow morning. You'll tell your parents?”

“Of course.”

Of course I knew from records how the orchestral accompaniment sounded. Of course I knew I could close my eyes if looking out at the audience began to scare me. Of course I knew this would be a concert for practice. Of course I knew I wouldn't have to throw up the way Deirdre does.

What I had never in my life done was perform three movements and three cadenzas completely from memory with a conductor and a whole bunch of players following me. I was supposed to lead them and entertain the audience and bring Mozart into a park somewhere. With one rehearsal.

Oh. Oh. Oh.

Mommy and Daddy were “surprised and very much delighted.” That was what Mommy said. And “profoundly proud too,” said Daddy. Bro David said, “Maybe the other one broke her fingers on purpose so she wouldn't have to play with that bunch; maybe there's something you don't know yet.”

By the next morning, at my lesson, Mr. Kaplan had his one-rehearsal rules and advice to give me.

One: First time through, if you feel something wrong in the tempo or in the dynamics, play to the end of the movement and
then
stop and tell the conductor the problem. The conductor's name is Margaret, and she'll listen to you. If the same thing is still wrong when you're playing it the second time, stop exactly where it begins to be wrong. Don't wait. You may get to play the concerto through three times, or you may not. It depends on how much time the conductor has allotted for your part of the rehearsal.

Two: With amateur orchestras, one big problem is usually that they rush the sixteenth-notes. They see a lot of black on the page and they get urgent about it. They tend to try to pull the conductor along with them; they don't know they're doing it, they just do it. You may have to make a choice on the instant: follow Mozart or follow the orchestra behind you.

Three: There'll be some out-of-tune playing in the orchestra. You can't do anything about that, and, as a guest, it's not your place to say anything about it. The conductor has ears, and she deals with it as well as she can. You know a good conductor can make you play better than you can play sometimes—right? Well, she can't do that
all
the time.