The Mozart Season (2 page)

“I've never—Mr. Kaplan, I've never played a…”

“I know, Allegra.” His voice was full of—I didn't know what to call it. It wasn't pity. I had to have my own list of new words by September for school, and whatever it was in his voice would be one of them. I'd find it. It was something like pity, but not the kind that makes you feel bad.

“Does my mother know about this? When did you find out? Find out I'd made the finals?”

“Yes, she does. We've talked about it. Not long ago.”

“What does she think? Why didn't somebody tell me?”

He sort of laughed but not really. “She thinks it's your decision. Naturally. We wanted to wait till after school was out—and your softball—so you could more accurately gauge how you want to spend your summer.”

“Does my dad know?”

“I'm sure he does.” Daddy doesn't play in the Symphony; he plays in the opera orchestra. And he teaches at a university and plays in a quartet. He's a cellist.

“What does he think?”

“That, I don't know. I have a hunch he agrees with your mother.”

I loosened my bow. “What's it like? You don't have to play in front of a lot of people, do you? I mean, not the whole orchestra?” I looked down at the rug design on my left, where the blue and red come together. “Do you get more than one try?”

“This is the way it goes, Allegra. There'll be three, maybe four judges. They're the jury. Every contestant will play the entire concerto. Once. Without accompaniment. The judges listen and decide. Somebody will win. And there'll be a second prize, an alternate. The others will get a whopper of an experience. Then it'll be over for all the competitors except one. That one will play the concerto in January. With the Symphony, at a Sunday concert. If the winner should get sick, the alternate winner will perform.”

Suddenly the idea of winning was the worst thing I could imagine. I'd be out there exposed to everybody. I'd rather lose.

Or would I?

“How many people are gonna be in the competition?”

“I'm not exactly sure. Fewer than ten, I think. The finalists have come from a field of eighty-five.”

Eighty-five. “Are they adults or something? In college, I mean.”

“There is no minimum age, just as in the Youth Orchestra. The maximum age is twenty-one. I expect the mean age to be about seventeen.”

“I was twelve in February.”

“I know, Allegra. Do you want to think about it for a few days?”

“I don't know. Maybe I'd better think … I don't…”

“Well. Then we have unfinished business, you and I. Let's do the Vitali for fun now.”

My music says Vitali was born in 1660 and never died. It says, “Tomaso Vitali, 1660– .” It just has that blank. He wrote a ciaccona in G minor that I love. That was what I'd been practicing. It has a lot of trickery of crossing strings in it, and you have to play faster than your mind can think when you play the trickery parts. Automatic pilot is one way to describe it. It's a kind of automated finger memory. You let your mind go away and not interfere with your fingers. It's kind of like the way you write your name or ride a bike. First you learn how, and then you just go ahead and do it without thinking about how you do it. I love the ciaccona he wrote.

But when we got to four measures after letter M, I botched some trickery notes. And I stopped. I don't usually do that; I usually go right on.

“This section is still your Waterloo, isn't it?” Mr. Kaplan said. Somebody lost a battle at Waterloo; I don't remember who.

“Yes. I don't know if I can play any competition, ever, Mr. Kaplan. I…”

“Oh, come now. Don't start that. It doesn't do any good.” He looked at me. “Remember, this competition is in memory of Mr. Bloch.”

“Yes.” Ernest Bloch was a Swiss-Jewish composer who came to Oregon and lived at the beach. Last year the Youth Orchestra played a concerto grosso he wrote, and it was so beautiful it made some people in the orchestra cry.

“And we're going to remember, you and I, that Mr. Bloch had tenacity and fearlessness and a great, great soul.”

I looked at him in a question mark.

“Tenacity. Holding on when it would be more comfortable to let go.”

I nodded.

While I was putting my violin away, I saw on Mr. Kaplan's desk a photograph of a string quartet I hadn't seen before. It had the most gorgeous guy holding a violin, with messy curly hair and an incredibly handsome roundish face, sort of smiling.

“Who's this?” I asked.

“That's the Juilliard Quartet. You must hear them in person someday.”

“I mean who's
this?
” I pointed to the gorgeous one.

“Oh. That's Joel Smirnoff. Their second violinist. Excellent musician.”

Instant crush. Lightning love. Allegra and Joel. Joel and Allegra. Duets.

“You'll think about the competition, won't you, Allegra?” he said as I was going out the door.

“Of
course.
Thanks. For the lesson. And…”

“You're welcome. Always. And do the Kreutzer double-stops this week?”

The terrible, nasty, tormenting Kreutzer double-stops. Kreutzer lived in the same time as Beethoven. He wrote a whole book of violin exercises, called études, and his idea of double-stops was to get you going good and fast and then throw one at you that your fingers can't possibly reach and make you keep going. Good old number 34.

I was just crossing the Kaplans' lawn when a catastrophe struck me: if I didn't at least
try
to play the competition, I'd be just one more boring violin student and Joel Smirnoff would never even think of looking for me in Portland, Oregon. He wouldn't even ever find out I was alive.

I turned around and ran back and knocked on the studio door. Mr. Kaplan opened it, and I told him, “Yes. I want to play the competition.”

He looked a bit surprised, but not totally. “Good girl, Allegra. It's a deal.
Kreut
zer.” He almost growled the last word, and smiled. I said good-bye again and he put his hand up in his flat-handed wave.

I walked home. I had to talk to somebody. My brother David was in the dining room making a cartoon. He was sitting in the chair he sits in for dinner. He's sixteen, and he's basically called Bro David. He makes a lot of cartoons. Last year he sold one of them to the
New Yorker
magazine by lying about his age. It had tragic, starving Africans opening up big boxes and saying, “Yeccchhh—not
more
spinach and rutabagas from the children of America!” He got some money for it.

When Bro David was thirteen, Bubbe Raisa paid for him to go to New York and visit her, and they went to eleven museums. Ever since then, he's been sort of Mr. Superior.

I stood in the dining room looking at him. I had to talk to somebody. Daddy was at work at the university where he teaches, and Mommy was at an all-day committee meeting, trying to make a playing contract so the Symphony wouldn't go on strike. “David, I did something today,” I said.

“Good, Legs.” He went on drawing. Some people think “Legs” is a decent nickname for Allegra.

“I mean, I made a decision today.”

“Good.”

He's exasperating. “Listen to me, David. You have to listen.”

“Okay, I'm listening. Talk.” He looked bored.

I told him, “I'm gonna play a competition. Maybe I'm crazy.”

He didn't pay attention; he thought I meant an audition.

“A competition, David. You're not listening. There'll be about ten people. Do you know I sent in a Mozart tape way last February? To a competition?” The whole thing began to look in on me. The competition wasn't a thing I was looking at, it was looking at me, as if it had lots of eyes.

“What do you mean?” David asked.

I told him. I stood there in the dining room, with my violin case on the floor and my arms hanging all floppy at my sides, and told him the whole thing. How I'd have to play the concerto perfectly and be suddenly brilliant. I'd be the youngest. The cadenzas are very hard. The idea sounded insane.

David didn't see the point. “I don't see the point,” he said. “If you win, you just get up out of your chair and you walk up front, and you stand there and you play it. If you lose, you sit there in your place and play your part. Look: you've won one spelling championship thing and you've lost one. That didn't annihilate your whole head or anything; you didn't go around looking for razor blades. You're a lousy twelve years old. Winning won't make you queen of the world. And losing isn't gonna terminate you. It's a concerto; it's not the future of the universe.”

Sometimes I can be very frustrated and very quiet at the same time. I sat down in the chair I sit in for dinner, across the table from him, and I folded my hands. “I didn't say the Youth Orchestra, I said the Symphony.” I said it very slowly.

He looked at me. “You mean Mom's symphony. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes.”

I tried to remember what Joel Smirnoff looked like, but I could only picture his mouth and his hair.

“That's different.”

“Right.”

He rolled his eyes around, thinking. “What's it gonna do to you? Is it gonna make you a crazoid?” David thinks the world is a big insane asylum anyway. We're all inmates, just in different wards.

“I don't know.”

“Well, look at you right now.”

“Maybe that's because I just this morning found out.”

“You don't want to end up like that Deeder person.”

“Who?”

“You know. Mom's friend, the one that sings.”

“Which one?”

“She sings concerts, and she's strange.”

I couldn't remember anybody like that. “I wonder if I'll get strange,” I said.

“Do you want to change your mind? You know, not do it?”

I thought of the way Joel Smirnoff held his violin in the picture: high up, kind of like a flag. Sometimes I feel my violin is out to get me—an enemy or something—and sometimes it feels like my best and only friend.

“I don't think so,” I said.

He rolled a ball of Elmer's glue around on the table. “Do you think you can win?”

I looked at a cartoon he was making. It had a chimpanzee playing a piano. It was upside down from where I was sitting. “I don't know. Maybe. Probably not. I don't know. Eighty-five people sent tapes.”

He picked up the glue bottle and started squeezing it lightly—just to hear the tiny little
pffft
it makes. “Well, you ought to go ahead and do it. But remember what I said. It's just a concerto.”

Easy for him to say.

“I think I'm going to,” I said. I had to hear myself say it out loud again.

He looked at me and
pffft
-ed the glue bottle four times. Then he put it down and said, “Look, Legs, I have to go to work in a little while. Nobody's home for dinner tonight. Dad has that park concert; Mom's gonna go hear him after her meeting.”

“David, I'm afraid.”

“Try not to think about it.” He started cleaning up the paper and pens and glue mess.

“Yep. Try not to think about elephants.” Somebody said that when Bro David was in a little kids' art class at the art museum a long time ago, and he said it all the time for a while. I looked at my violin case on the floor, and at my briefcase with the Mozart and Vitali and Prokofiev and Kreutzer and all the other music inside it. “What does that word mean, the one with ‘nigh' in it?” I asked him.

“I don't know. What word?”

“You said it. You said when I lost the spelling thing it didn't nigh-something my whole head.”

He was sweeping scraps off the table with the edge of a magazine. “I don't know. Nigh-something. I don't remember.”

“You
said
it.”

“I don't know. I've got to go to work. Will you make me a salami sandwich?”

I went to the kitchen and made sandwiches for both of us. A breeze was coming up, blowing the hummingbird feeder around outside the kitchen window. David picked up his sandwich and put it in a bag and left for Safeway. I sat and ate mine. Mozart was nineteen when he wrote that concerto, plus the four other ones in the same year. I wonder if he thought they were the future of the universe. I wonder if he thought they'd make any difference to anybody. I wish somebody had saved his brain.

I was just taking out the Mozart, to look at the third-movement cadenza, when the phone rang. It was David. “It's ‘annihilate.' Comes from Latin,
nihil,
n-i-h-i-l, means ‘nothing.' It means ‘destroy.' Bye.”

It was time to start my list of new words. Summer goes very fast and you can end up with no list at all in September if you're not careful. I've seen it happen. I went upstairs and wrote it down on the clipboard beside the bed. Bro David hadn't spelled it for me, so I did my best. A-n-i-h-i-l-a-t-e. I put “tenacity” from Mr. Kaplan before it.

A long time ago, I'd thought I didn't even like David. He got to go to special art classes at the art museum every Saturday, and his paintings and collages and clay sculptures were all over the house. We had them not only on the refrigerator, but stuck to walls and doors and sitting on tables and chairs. I complained that I didn't get to go to any special classes, and I said Mommy and Daddy probably loved David more than they loved me, and that was when they began to figure out that I might be wanting music lessons. And my grandmother Raisa bought me the violin. So it turns out that here I was with a Mozart concerto to spend my summer with, all because when I was a little kid I'd whined with envy.

Later, when Bro David's art got to be all cartoons, they still were all over the walls and refrigerator, but by then I wasn't whining anymore.

I cleaned up the sandwich mess and went to the music room and practiced. I worked on Kreutzer no. 34, which is a good way to insult yourself if you haven't worked on it lately. I played it for almost an hour. It can torture your fingers, and it's good for you.