The Mozart Season (19 page)

ME: Allegra Shapiro. I'M playing this concerto. Maybe it was watching Steve Landauer's arm that pushed me out of bed so abnormally early in the morning. Or maybe it was that I was so glad to see yesterday end.

No matter what I did with the concerto that morning, no matter where I was in it or what kind of bowing I was using or anything, there was Steve Landauer right in my way, with his perfect bowing arm and his notes:

When I walked into the Kaplans' house, Mrs. Kaplan gave me popovers and peach jam. “We had a kitchen full of peaches from my brother, and the only thing to do was make jam. Take some home with you, Allegra. Sit down for a minute and eat one, won't you, dear?”

I like her double-chin look. I may be way off in my judgment, but I never met a double-chinned person I didn't like. I put my violin case and music case on one chair and sat on another one. She pushed everything about an inch closer to me than it already was: popovers on a plate, jam, butter knife, napkin. I spread jam on one of the popovers.

“Well, I'm on my way to work. Have a good lesson, Allegra,” she said. “Oh, and by the way, dear. Remember the French composer Chausson? Your friend Deirdre sang such a lovely song of his at the concert.… He died of a skull fracture from riding his bicycle into a stone wall, poor man.” And she walked out of the room.

Their kitchen has wallpaper on the ceiling with grapes and leaves. I ate two popovers and jam and looked up at it. It's as if the Kaplans have a permanent harvest canopy like the one religious Jews build for Succoth. I couldn't make my mother and Mrs. Kaplan not be friends, and I couldn't make them not talk about me when I wasn't looking, but I could be Very Irritated when they did. Chausson probably died way back in the nineteenth century when they hadn't invented bicycle lights yet.

I got my hands washed and went to the music room. Mr. Kaplan's sweatshirt was a really old one, and the words on it were almost faded away. They said “The
What
Quintet?”

He wanted to hear some scales first, the ones with seven sharps and seven flats. And Kreutzer no. 40, a whole page of trills. Then the concerto, start to finish. As usual, he played the piano version of the orchestra part. During the cadenzas, he turned around and watched me.

Like skiing, you're doing two things at once: the thing you're doing right that instant and the thing you'll be doing in the next instant. You look at the face of somebody who's just finished a ski race and you can see how all those instant events have been going on, overlapping each other. It's adrenaline. And other things.

It's a kind of alertness that comes on you, as if somebody has turned on all your lights inside. Sometimes it can get almost too bright in there.

At the end, he turned sideways on the piano bench. “Allegra, I'm concerned,” he said. He folded his hands in his lap. Then he unfolded them and spread them on his legs. Then he scratched the back of his head where he still has lots of curly blondish-grayish hair, then he put his hand back on his knee. He was silent long enough to give me time to think, and I didn't know what to think about. I didn't know any question to ask in my mind, so I didn't know what answer I was supposed to be looking for. I'd just played the concerto without a kink, without missing a note, and I had the good tired feeling of finishing it well, and he was concerned.

“Have you any idea what I'm concerned about?” he asked, looking up at me. And not smiling. He evidently meant he was Concerned.

I hung my violin and bow down straight in my hands. “No.”

“I'm wondering if you're remembering whose concerto this is,” he said, and looked at the piano keyboard, then back at me. He took a deep breath. “I'm wondering if you remember that a young boy— a teenager—in 1775 … Allegra, I'm wondering if you—I sense an aggressiveness—” He stopped. “Not that we don't want
any
aggressiveness—” He stopped again. “It's a fine line, Allegra, you know that. But I think I hear coming into your performance a spirit more of attack than— You're beginning to sound like a string tuned too tightly.…” He looked straight up in the air. “What is it I mean?” he asked the ceiling. He looked back at me for a long time. “The word is ‘embrace,'” he said, finally. “In moving ever closer to Mozart—which you're doing very well—
very
well, Allegra— In moving closer, you're beginning to—I don't like saying this—” He stopped again. “You're almost on top of him.” He looked at my feet, and then said in a very soft voice, almost hard to hear, “Don't upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto.”

He leaned his elbow on the keyboard, on G and A and B above middle C, forcing them to play together, and leaned his forehead on his hand. As if somebody'd hurt him. G and A and B hummed.

I was worse than afraid. Worse than shocked. Worse than horrified. What must Mozart have felt? There was some terrible thing I couldn't name whistling inside me. I felt my eyes bug out, and I tried to look at nothing but air in the room. I saw rosin dust in it. The tip of my bow was on the floor, holding me still.

Upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto.

“Look at me, Allegra,” Mr. Kaplan said.

I didn't even try to. I looked at the edge of a music stand across the room. Things that had been so arranged in me a minute ago were clashing into each other. I suddenly understood what Deirdre meant—the floor sliding out from under you without warning.

“Allegra, I think this is the first time I've ever hurt you?”

I didn't know the answer. It didn't matter.

“Come here,” he said.

I stood with my eyes on the corner of the music stand. Stainless steel. There are millions like it. In China they wouldn't let anyone play Mozart or Beethoven for years when the government changed; they put people in closets and took away their instruments.

“Please come here, Allegra.”

I lifted my bow tip and took two steps forward.

He took hold of my right hand, around the frog of the bow. He held it loosely. Over the top of his glasses his blue eyes were steady and serious, as if they wanted to keep me company. “The heart of the matter is…” He looked down at his hand around mine and the frog of my bow. “Is … is tenacity. We'll change our direction slightly, take what might be called a detour. We'll move in on the center of this concerto … in a slightly different way.”

His eyes were very middle-aged. Sometimes I just trust him because he's old. “Brahms's ‘Lullaby.' Any key you like. Just play it for me. Play it exactly the way you feel right now.”

I backed away from him. I closed my eyes and looked at what I saw inside my eyelids. What I saw was a little baby, sick and terrified and whimpering. It was in a corner of a room, wrapped in a dirty little blanket in a box or a basket, and the paint was chipped off the walls. I played the “Lullaby” with my eyes closed.

When I opened my eyes, Mr. Kaplan had his closed. He was nodding his head slowly. “Yes,” he said. “There it is. There is what you can do when you are inside your instrument, Allegra. Indeed.”

I didn't say anything. I wondered who the baby was. I was perplexed and ashamed. Doing something good with Brahms and doing something so horrible with Mozart was closing my head in. A question kept putting itself in me: How? Just that one word. How?

“We aren't going to have any more conversation with Mr. Mozart this morning,” he said. “Instead, come tomorrow morning, an extra lesson—” He reached up and picked up his little brown schedule notebook from the top of the piano. He looked at it, moving his mouth around. “Yes, tomorrow morning, ten o'clock.” He snapped the notebook shut. “We're not going to undo anything. We can't.” He laughed. “That's a proven historical fact.” I kept looking at him. “We'll—well, we'll take a detour.…”

*   *   *

I stood on the Kaplans' porch. Mr. Kaplan said, “Don't punish yourself, Allegra. I mean,” he looked out at the lawn in front of their house, “not any more than you have to. You need both hands free for the work we have to do; and you won't, if you have a birch rod in one of them.”

I tried to smile at him. It wasn't much of a joke, and he knew it.

He said, “And part of the fault here—a great part of it—” He looked past me, over my shoulder. “It's mine. We talk too much about ‘mastering' music. Every time you turn around, someone is concerned with mastering a piece. I do it myself.” He lowered his voice and looked straight at my face. “Great music isn't something we master; it's something we try all our lives to merge with. Indeed.”

I didn't really see Mr. Kaplan's face. I saw Deirdre as she sang the low, soft notes in her concert, and I saw Mr. Trouble as he danced his old-fashioned dance on the grass. Then I looked out past them, and Mr. Kaplan was saying good-bye. I said good-bye and went down the steps.

I walked home. My violin case banged against my leg in regular rhythm. Some leaves were turning yellowish. My skin felt bad, all over me. Don't upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto. What a horrifying thing. Unthinkable. Don't think about it. Elephants. I tried walking with my eyes closed, but I slipped off the edge of the sidewalk, so I opened them again.

Merge with. Not master. It felt so absolutely strange, because I knew that anyway. I'd always known it, in my stomach. I'd committed a crime by forgetting it.

I thought of the thing I'd told Deirdre about: crying under Daddy and Mommy's bed when I was a little kid and found out that the music wouldn't just automatically come out of the eighth-size violin.

On the kitchen table was a package addressed to me from New York. It had all kinds of post office stickers on it, Express Mail and Insured. My grandmother Raisa gets my birthday mixed up with somebody else's. I didn't want a gift. Didn't deserve a gift. Nobody was home. I put my violin case and music case on the floor and sat down and stared at the brown wrapping paper.

Then I stared at my violin case on the floor. Then I stared out the window at a hummingbird on the feeder. Heavenly rubbed the side of her head against my leg and walked to her water dish and began drinking. I listened to her tongue going in and out and picking up water, reflexively.

When you think about how many millions of words old people have written, it's no wonder their handwriting gets a little bit jerky. I looked at my grandmother's.

Don't upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto.

The package was soft, maybe she was sending me a sweater, for the birthday that was somebody else's. I didn't want a sweater; I wanted to undo my crime against Mozart. I got a pair of scissors and cut the tape on the package.

There were several layers of wrapping, then pink tissue paper with a pink envelope that said
READ FIRST.
The flap wasn't sealed, it was tucked in. I opened it.

Dear Allegra Leah,

The gift I am sending you would have been for your bat mitzvah, and I hope you would carry it proudly on that occasion but you have a liberated family who have forgotten already in one generation. We are lucky to have a connection, to break such a thing is not understandable. Your mother I forgive, she wouldn't know. She happened on a Gentile background from Kansas, not her fault.

I am nervous for you, and your brother David too. You would have to understand such nervousness by going to synagogue. Here is your gift from my love for you so far away 3,000 miles.

Your great-grandmother Leah was born in the turn of the century, 1900, in Suprasl. This was a shtetl I saw once. There are stories from this place. Poor people, tailors, bakers, and animals all went back and forth on the roadway. Her rabbi was the son and also the grandson of a rabbi. When she was a child she had geese to tend and there is the picture of her with her straw broom and her favorite goose. You know the picture. Where her family lived the field went up on a hill and the morning light came into their house, a blessing.

Then she married and became my mother and soon my father took her to Bialystok. I was born in 1921, and my sister in 1925 who died in childhood. My father played a wooden flute and my mother sang to us. She tried to sing the fever out of my sister and was unsuccessful. I remember her voice. She could sing like leaves falling from off a tree. She also made rich breads and cakes, and even today the smell of some certain kugels makes me unable to speak.

I saw black armbands when I was 13 years old. I asked what they were and my father replied they were a tribal symbol. I didn't know from tribal symbols, I wanted a pink dress for my birthday which I did not get. There was hunger and disease and we as well as our neighbors were frightened. Punishments for being Jewish were meted, small ridicules and then larger ridicules. My father's partner in business had his beard cut off by a soldier's bayonet. It was this savagery in joking that frightened us all.