The Mozart Season (18 page)

“Mr. Wisdom has now been heard from,” my mother said after a few seconds. “And I for one think he's wrong. Everything does have to be a matter of life or death. Everything is.” She stared at the place where David had just been standing. I looked at her hands.

A sudden thought hit me. My mother saved insects' lives and then saved their carcasses for the exact same reason she rocked Deirdre in the music room, years after Deirdre's daughter was dead. It was because something is alive one minute and dead the next. Like my great-grandmother Leah. Or my other great-grandmother in Kansas, lying on her deathbed waving her arms in the air asking for horses and then she stopped breathing. Bro David was right: my parents were terrified.

And I remembered the way my mother had acted when Bro David got off the airplane when he came back from New York, as if it was some miracle that he was alive. She even cried with happiness.

And maybe when my mother made that silly wave at people, she was saying, Hey, everybody here is alive, let's celebrate! Like a little kid, waving and looking silly, but underneath she had that terrible reason to be happy.

I looked at my father. Maybe I was his grandmother Leah in some strange way. I had her name. That wasn't so strange. And I thought of Jessica: she couldn't save her father from the eruption of the mountain. And Sarah, who thinks she dances for all those dead people.

“Daddy,” I said, “is everything a matter of life or death?”

He looked at me, and he looked around the living room, at the chairs and the sofa and the lamps. “I don't know, Allegra,” he said.

I went to the music room and practiced. I'd been at it for about an hour when Daddy came in. “Listen, Allegra,” he said, walking across the room. “Put down your violin a minute.” I put it on a table. “And your bow.” I did. He put his arms around me. I was listening to his heart beating against the right side of my head. “Whether everything has to be a matter of life and death.” He cleared his throat. “The evidence is right here, right now. Suffering and joy. That's all there is. There isn't anything else. And they're so close together—” He was talking very softly. “They're so close, it strikes terror into the human soul.” He backed up and looked at me. I tried to imagine him as a little boy, watching his mother dust the living room before the opera came on the radio.

“Oh, Daddy,” I said.

*   *   *

That night was the first rehearsal of the Youth Orchestra for the Waterfront Concert. I'd be on the inside chair, third stand, first violins, and somebody completely different would be on the outside; I'd be turning pages for a stranger. When I walked into the rehearsal hall, sitting in Lois's chair was a boy I'd never seen. I saw his very dark curly hair first, from across the room. I got to my chair and didn't know what to say to him. He didn't look at me. I tuned up, and he tuned up, and we sat there. I pretended I was looking at the music and the Xeroxed list. For a Waterfront Concert there isn't a whole symphony, the audience can't listen that long at a time. We play short things. We were going to play Respighi's
Fountains of Rome,
the
William Tell
Overture, and short pieces by Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and Samuel Barber. We'd played them all before in the two years I'd been in the orchestra.

I sat in my chair and remembered how funny Lois had been about the
William Tell,
which she'd called “the Billy Tell.” There's a section in it where the strings sound like buzzing insects, and she said we were the flies buzzing around the apple on Billy's son's head.

I looked at my new stand partner. He was obviously in high school. I've never gotten to sit beside anybody my own age in an orchestra. Somebody had to start the conversation. “Hi,” I said.

He said hi. Under the curly hair he had a sort of roundish face, with a mole on the right side, below his mouth. And very long fingers. He looked at the music and said, “Do you always play this easy stuff?”

“No,” I said. “Just for a park concert.” This music wasn't necessarily easy stuff. And in March we'd played a Shostakovich symphony; it was very hard. It was the one where Lois and I'd played the wrong note together. She'd said the Wrong Note Police were going to come and get us. I didn't mention it to my new stand partner.

He was very good-looking. We still had a few minutes before rehearsal began, and he said to me, “Put the
Fountains
up, will you?” I shuffled the music and put it in front. He found a place he wanted, and played it a couple of times. He played very, very well. He rested his violin on his left leg and looked at me sideways. “What's your name?” he said.

I said Allegra.

“Allegra what?”

“Allegra Shapiro.”

He looked back at the music and worked on tuning his D string. “My parents know your parents. I mean my dad. I'm Landauer. Steve.” That was all he said.

Little Stevie Landauer with the Lego blocks and the sixteenth-size violin and the phenomenal concentration.

“I've heard of you,” I said.

“Yeah, I was at Aspen.”

I didn't say that wasn't where I'd heard of him. Rehearsal began.

I love playing in the Youth Orchestra. It's more fun than the softball team, although they're both hard work. In softball there's a lot of waiting around for the fun parts. In the orchestra the fun parts come more often. It also has more different kinds of people, more different ages. The little kids usually have tense mouths, and they move their eyes in quick sideways looks to see if anybody's watching them. On almost everybody in the whole band you can see a combination of the urge to play and the fear of playing badly. In the older kids, the fear isn't so obvious, of course. Christine, the concertmaster, has this little speech she makes sometimes. She says, “Make your fear work for you, not against you. Let it push those fingers into place; think of it as just one part of what you do. Let it be part of the force of your music. May the force be with you.” It cracks people up, the first time they hear it.

But in both music and softball you work to be as good as you can, you get breathless with effort, you surprise yourself sometimes, and you know everybody in the whole bunch is feeling sort of the same way.

Lois and I'd been like teammates. We'd had a rhythm of sitting together: I knew just when to turn the page, and once she'd shown me a whole new way to braid my hair.

I was definitely not Steve Landauer's Little Buddy.

At intermission, I was standing with some of the wind players, listening to a girl tell about getting her driver's license and getting the braces off her teeth on the same day, and in the middle of it I heard somebody playing part of the first movement of Mozart's Fourth Violin Concerto very fast. I had a momentary shiver. My reflexes turned me around to see where it was coming from, even though I didn't want to find out. It was coming from a corner of the rehearsal hall, and it was as if a thread was pulling my ears to it. I saw Christine whirling around to look, too. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her puff her cheeks out and blow hard out of her mouth. Steve Landauer was in the corner with his back turned to everybody, and I watched his bowing, not wanting to watch at all. His arm moved smoothly and hard; the notes were perfect. I caught Christine's face watching him closely.

Christine and Steve Landauer would both be playing the Bloch finals.

I closed my face and turned back around, and everybody was laughing at the driver's license and orthodontist story. I didn't let my face show anything. I tucked my shirt into my jeans and scratched my chin. We all went back to our places. I looked between the heads of the second-stand players at Christine's back. Christine is in college, a nice girl with very fast fingers. I knew her mainly from when she turned around to tell the section a different bowing; that's part of her job. She was listening to the conductor tell her something.

Steve Landauer came back to his chair. I didn't look at him. I got out the next music, the Sibelius, and put it in front of everything else.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” the conductor said, “we remember, don't we, that in this piece the happiness of the dance is only one side of the music. The music ends in death. We play it knowing that. It has a double meaning, perfect for the kind of piece it is.” He looked over the orchestra, stopping his eyes at some of the little kids. “We all understand ‘double meaning,' don't we?” he said, and some of the big kids laughed. I noticed a little boy in the cello section looking scared; he only joined last year. “This music has a profound yearning and a profound lament—at the same time. Like life. Let's play.” He raised his baton. “Be ominous,” he said.

I heard Steve Landauer mutter, “… waste of time.” We began.

We stopped just after letter C. “I'll remind you,” the conductor said to everybody. “Remember—when we played this before? The pause between the second and third beats in this section—
that's
where the question of great happiness or great sadness of the heart arises. The audience doesn't have to know what you know. But they deserve to hear that pause in all its silence. We suspend
ev
erything for that moment. That means we have to get off the second beat precisely and together. No split-second errors. In this case, the precision of the silence will equal poetry.” He raised his baton again.

Steve Landauer let out his breath in a whispered way that he maybe meant for me to hear. It was a whispered
Aaawwwffffffff.

We began again.

At the end of rehearsal, Steve Landauer said to me, without exactly looking at me, “You're the best page turner I've ever had.” And he walked off to put his violin away while I was feeling three things. One, I was a professional—a paid page turner—so I ought to be good. Two, that was a nice compliment. Three, he said it as if that was my job in the orchestra, to be his page turner.

When David picked me up from rehearsal, I said to him, “Don't ask.” He hadn't even said anything yet.

“Hello, grump,” he said. I put my violin case upright between my knees and we started home. “Look, Legs, I'm not gonna ask what's wrong. But just maybe you're taking yourself too seriously. Maybe.”

I watched cars going past, traffic lights changing, Bro David shifting gears, a dog running along the sidewalk. Isn't that what you're supposed to do? Take yourself seriously? How else do you get anything done? “If I didn't take myself seriously, wouldn't I be just a joke?” I said.

“Everybody's a joke,” he said.

When we got home, Daddy and Mommy were in the music room playing duets. I had another memory: being a little tiny kid, walking in the door and hearing Mommy and Daddy playing together. All of a sudden it was a feeling of safety, with the smell of hot chocolate and marshmallows in a little yellow mug I used to have.

The mug had gotten broken years ago.

David and I went up the stairs together. At the top, I whispered to him, “That's not a joke, is it? Mommy and Daddy playing duets after they got so upset this morning?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “No. Not really. Borderline.”

I couldn't go bike riding, of course. I sat in my room and played with Heavenly Days. I went over my list of words, with “pernicious” and “flippant” and “ominous” added. I kept seeing violinists lined up at the competition. Steve Landauer, Christine the concertmaster, probably Karen Karen, if her hand was healed. Me. That made four. Some others, and I didn't want to know who they were. I just saw violins and hands, all lined up.

I put on my pajamas and brushed my hair.

Steve Landauer was very good-looking. And he played very, very well. And he'd given me that compliment. I didn't want to like him. But I did. Even his neck was good-looking. He had four mothers, one real and three step. He had good-looking eyes, too. But I didn't see them much; he didn't look straight at me. They were brown, and he had long eyelashes.

“Put up the
Fountains,
will you?” Lois never ordered me around that way. And she was probably older than Steve Landauer.

How could anybody have four mothers?

Waltz and Three. Why couldn't the music librarian find it at the college? Waltz Tree. Probably because there were so many pieces listed under just plain Waltz. There must be thousands. And I didn't know the exact name of it. Maybe she'd call back the next day and say she'd found it.

I wondered what had happened to the husband Deirdre used to have.

I remembered the clinking of her earring going into Daddy's cello. And how she got so delirious. It must have been because she wasn't paying attention and suddenly things went wrong. Poor Deirdre.

Abruptly I realized something: It was almost like Daddy. His thing about Vigilance and Peace of Mind. Daddy and Deirdre were exactly alike in that way and they didn't even know it.

It was almost midnight. I pulled Heavenly's ear and woke her up. “Hey, Heavenly, it's midnight and I need someone to talk to.” She stretched.

Why are you yelling at me? Because I love you! Maybe David was right. The world is crazy, and they were terrified.

Mall Babies from the black lagoon. I wanted to call Sarah and Jessica and tell them both. I put Miles Davis on the turntable and listened to “All Blues.”

10

I was in the music room the next morning practicing the first movement before I was even very much awake. The sun was just coming up, and I still had my pajamas on. My lesson wasn't for three hours yet.

I even hit two wrong notes. And the actual notes in this concerto aren't even hard ones. When you hit a wrong note, you're likely to hit another one pretty soon because your concentration is interrupted: You can't help hearing the wrong note you've just played. It echoes in your head, and it jostles things around inside you.