The Mozart Season (22 page)

And what's
wrong with that?

I jumped. I'd said that last thing out loud—very loud—and a little girl ran away and hid behind somebody, maybe her mother. I saw her red socks jump across the grass and I heard my echoes in the air. I turned around. She was hanging on her mother, staring at me. I stared back at her. I could see just part of her face. She was holding a piece of torn bread for the ducks, holding it in her fist. She wasn't even three feet tall.

I said it again, inside my head: What's wrong with that? What's wrong with doing it for Elter Bubbe Leah who had a goose and a broom and a purse and went to the gas chamber? I was still staring at the little girl with the red socks. I looked at her hand with the torn bread in it. Would Elter Bubbe even care? She and I were named the same name and would she have any way of knowing about the Mozart, and if she knew, would she care?

I stopped staring at the little girl and looked down in front of me at the dirt. An ant was walking along with all its legs busy. I could smush that ant and just quietly go on sitting there. The little girl in the red socks could walk right over and put her foot down hard on the ant and kill it.

Nothing matters,
I heard myself say in my head.

And I instantly saw in my head Mozart sitting down with his quill pen writing the middle part of the second movement. And I saw Deirdre with her mouth open just slightly, singing the softest of her soft notes at the concert, her blue dress quivering, and I saw Mr. Trouble dancing with Sarah and their feet swinging and kicking on the ground.

I looked out across the pond, all dotted with ducks, like notes on a page. I said in my head,
Everything matters.

The little kid and her mother walked on to another part of the shore. I watched the ant move about an inch before I stood up and got on my bike and rode the long way home.

On the kitchen table was a note from my mother saying station KORV had called and wanted to know if I'd be willing to be interviewed as one of the Bloch finalists on the Saturday morning of Labor Day weekend, the day before the competition. On TV. It was the show “Hello, Oregon,” and the producer said all the finalists were being invited. I was supposed to call her back and tell her whether I would or not.

My mother purposely hadn't given her opinion on the message.

It would mean I'd find out who the other finalists were a whole day before I had to play.

I opened the refrigerator door, took out a peach, rolled it over and over and over in my hand, leaned over the kitchen sink, looked out the window at a hummingbird at the feeder, bit into the peach, felt the juice dribble down my left arm, and decided I would go to the TV studio and be interviewed.

I got to Lincoln Hall to turn pages just when the pianist was walking in the door. She showed me the fastest turns, and then I went backstage to wait. The cellist, a man I'd seen in the Symphony but didn't know, came in and started tuning up. We said hi to each other. And then the violinist from before came, with a violist. I'd just sat down on a wooden crate when in walked Steve Landauer all dressed in black-and-white concert costume, with a violin case.

He nodded hello at the other people, and said, “Well, Al
leg
ra.” And then he bent over to put his case down and get his violin out.

The added violinist, a very exciting young player, about to play the splendid Brahms, was Steve Landauer.

The pianist said, “You know each other?”

“She's a hot page turner,” Steve Landauer said, and stood up, tuning his D string as he moved.

“Oh, I know that?” she said, and laughed. “She's a professional?”

As a matter of fact, Steve Landauer didn't really know what he was talking about. He'd seen me turn with my right hand, but not with my left. You don't use your right hand in front of a pianist's face. And in an orchestra you turn from the bottom of the page; when you're only a page turner you turn from the top. All the same, it's timing. I looked at him and then turned around.

While they played, I thought about playing chamber music. Of all the fun things to do sitting down, it must be near the top of the list. Of course I'd played duets and trios and some quartets; Mr. Kaplan gets his students together with other kids to do it once in a while, and sometimes kids from the Youth Orchestra get together and play. But to do it for your whole life, like the Juilliard Quartet, to play chamber music as a career—the way somebody else might play basketball or work in a bank—I sat and wondered how that life would be.

When they got to the quintet I heard Steve Landauer play. He was better than I'd even thought before. Second violin isn't as hard a part as first, but in a quartet of all professional people it has to sound perfect. As far as I could hear, it did. The page turner isn't supposed to turn around and watch people play, so I just listened. Steve Landauer's notes came humming over my shoulder, and they sounded smooth and round and like little waves of water.

While they bowed to the audience, I tried to be invisible, of course.

When I got home, in one way I didn't want to go near my violin: I was horrified by the idea of upstaging Mozart. And in another way, I wanted to spend the whole night playing. I was in bursts of energy, and I played through two or three Dancla études, seeing pictures of my life go by in layers: going to lessons; watching rain drip on leaves outside the music-room window when I was a little kid playing little songs; seeing the hand-prints of everybody in my whole first grade on the classroom wall and laughing and splashing at a big white sink with the other kids as we washed off the paint we'd dipped our hands in. I played Kreutzer no. 38 and remembered a picnic we'd had when Bubbe Raisa visited us. I remembered skipping along a trail holding her hand.

I spent about an hour on the third-movement cadenza of the Mozart before I went to bed. When it's going well, it can sound like beads falling down a string.

While I was waiting to go to sleep, I told Elter Bubbe Leah I'd be playing the Mozart for her in a few days. Anybody walking by on the street could have told me I was doing an insane thing, lying in my bed promising a corpse I'd play a Mozart concerto for her. They could tell me the last thing this great-grandmother needed—alive or dead—was a Mozart violin concerto. They could say I was being disrespectful of the dead, and they could say I was being impractical, and they could tell me I was trying to rely on something supernatural to help me win. They could accuse me of trying to bribe the spirits.

In the incomplete dark I lay and looked at the outlined hump of the purse on top of my bureau and talked to Elter Bubbe Leah. If I kept it to myself, nobody could tell me I was crazy or impractical or immoral.

The Leah I was talking to was the one in the picture, the one with the goose and broom.

And I kept seeing Steve Landauer sitting behind me and to the right on the stage, his fingers going like hummingbirds on the strings, his sound in some places like rough silk, the kind Jessica has in her family from being partly Chinese.

And I saw, too, Mr. Trouble's feet dancing, pointed outward, away from each other, in unmatched shoes. I looked at the hump of Elter Bubbe's purse against the wall and listened to Heavenly giving herself a bath.

I set the alarm clock for 6:00
A.M.
and went to sleep.

12

I woke up two minutes before the alarm was due to bleep. I was ready to talk to my grandmother. I went to the kitchen phone. It was 9:00
A.M.
in New York.

“Hello.” Already I missed her. Her voice has a tone that says, This Is the Way Things Should Be Done, Trust Me. “My Allegra Leah! You've had your breakfast so early?”

“No, Bubbe—”

“The strawberries are blooming already in Auragon? I saw on TV you had eighty-three degrees yesterday; it will be hot today, too.”

“Strawberries are past now, Bubbe. Peaches are on. I got Elter Bubbe Leah's purse, I want to … I want to say thank you.…”

“You'll take good care?”

“Oh, yes—of course. I'm. In fact, it's—Well, it's—Oh, Bubbe—”

“You're telling me something?”

“Yes. I am. Bubbe, I'm playing a violin competition. And the purse is—Well, I'm thinking of Elter Bubbe Leah when she had her goose and her broom and her purse. In the picture. And that's the way I'll play the competition.”

“Such a tragedy, there's no word. My Allegra Leah, you'll play with other children? In a contest?” She wasn't listening completely.

“Well, not exactly children. It's a Mozart concerto.”

“And there is a prize?”

“Bubbe, the others are all older than I am. I'm the youngest. Yes, there's a prize. But I'm not thinking about that. It's to get through the competition—Elter Bubbe Leah's purse. I decided to play the Mozart for her.”

There wasn't any sound on the other end of the phone.

“Don't tell anybody, Bubbe?”

Another silence.

“This is your offering, Allegra Leah.”

“Yes. That's what I mean.”

More silence.

“This is your kaddish. Yom Hashoah.”

I didn't understand. I didn't say anything.

“Such a goyishe family. Your prayer for the dead, your remembrance for her.”

“Yes,” I said. “Say it again?”

“Kaddish. Yom Hashoah. When will you come to see me, Allegra Leah? Such a big girl, I hardly know you.”

“Are you inviting me, Bubbe?”

“We'll go to the museums, we'll go in Central Park, of course I'm inviting you. Rosh Hashanah?”

Vaguely, I thought it was sort of in October. “I'll ask my parents.”

“They'll find excuses. School. ‘She should be playing her Mozart.' Childhood is short, you could skip Mozart a little, tell them that, Allegra Leah. Come see your bubbe. We'll bake kugel, I'll tell you the stories—I'll tell you the stories of who you are.”

“I'll ask, Bubbe. Thank you for inviting me.”

“Oy, thank you for calling me and saying thanks. You made my day, Allegra Leah.”

“And mine,” I said.

“Keep cool, the television says it's hot where you are. Eat your breakfast.”

“I will, Bubbe.”

“You're being a good girl?”

“I think so. I love you, Bubbe.”

“I love you. You carry her name, Allegra Leah.”

“I know, Bubbe.”

“Come see me. We'll do the town. We'll be grand ladies on Fifth Avenue.”

“I'll do it, Bubbe.”

“Such a girl. Good-bye, Allegra Leah. Kiss the others for me.”

“Of course. Good-bye, Bubbe.”

With most people, you end a conversation and there's something you should have said or they should have said, it's not a complete conversation, there's more, and you walk away with things left not finished. With Bubbe Raisa, there were thousands of things we both could have said, but we almost didn't have to. I had the feeling she could understand without everything being said.

I took toast and orange juice to the music room. Outside the French doors a brand-new spiderweb hung swaying on a rosebush, all glistening with water drops. I went to the living room and got my mother's magnifying lens from the dead-bug collection and looked at the web through it, moving the lens back and forth as it swayed. Suddenly I wanted to be a little kid again, just thinking a spiderweb is so pretty, just thinking about the designs of the little thready lines in it. I wanted to go back down inside my childhood and not know the things I knew now. I stood there looking at the web for a long time, watching it sway back and forth.

I had to practice the Youth Orchestra music, and I went straight through the program, then went back and worked on the parts I'd marked with
x
's.

My parents were almost reverent about the purse. They acted as if it were a museum piece. My father kept nodding his head, and my mother kept saying “Oh, my. Oh, my.”

My mother and father said you could fill a book with stories about stand partners, and my mother mumbled something about inviting Sam Landauer and his fourth wife to dinner “sometime.”

When I took Bro David into my room to show him the purse, he recognized it immediately from when he'd visited Bubbe Raisa. “She had it under glass. She kept it in a dark corner where the sun wouldn't fade it,” he said. “She told me about finding it packed in her suitcase when she was already on the boat—She almost worships it. Under glass.”

“Is Bubbe Raisa trying to make me all Jewish?” I asked.

“That's impossible,” he said. “But if you want a yes-or-no answer, yes. She tried it with me too. You know—it's the half-and-half she doesn't like. Religious Jews feel sorry for us; Gentiles think we're Very Interesting. We're outsiders to all of them.”

Maybe it's because David's so much older than I am that he can see these things I don't even get a hint of. Evidence that you can't be half Jewish. “How do you know that?” I asked.

“The way her friends looked at me. I can't explain it. But she always kept that purse under glass.”

*   *   *

I turned pages for four more concerts, tried to unlearn the concerto and learn it again, which of course I couldn't do; and Jessica and Sarah and I started going swimming in the pool at the university where my father teaches, where it didn't cost us any money because we go in on my father's card. When we were in the pool, we played being the three Rhine Maidens from the opera by Wagner where they sing underwater, trying to protect their precious gold. We went singing and gurgling underwater being Rhine Maidens for four afternoons before we got tired of it.

I didn't tell anybody exactly about my conversation with Bubbe Raisa. I just said I'd called her to say thank-you.

My parents went away for three days, and Bro David and I were in charge of each other. I mainly practiced, and he had two of his friends over one day and they worked on the comic book they're drawing together. My parents had said I could invite Jessica and Sarah in self-defense, and everybody except Sarah ate so much pizza we felt sick.