The Mozart Season (28 page)

“That there Waltz Tree,” said Mr. Trouble in his croaky voice. Even in his old watery eyes I could see he had such happiness. They were shiny in the stage lights. “That there Waltz Tree.”

“
That
's Waltz Tree?” I didn't take it all in at first.

“Yes sir, Miss Allegra, that there song,” he said. He nodded his head up and down and kept doing it. “That song. Waltz in Three. That's the one.”

Valse Triste.
Waltz Tree. Of course. I didn't know what to say. I just hung there, bent over with my violin hanging down. Suddenly there were tears stinging my eye sockets. I tried to smile at him, and then I realized everybody had stopped clapping and the orchestra had sat down again and we were supposed to play the next piece. I scooted backward across Steve Landauer into my chair.

We finished the concert and stood up for the applause. Steve Landauer said, without turning directly to me, “That guy grabbed my pants. He actually grabbed them. Is he missing some marbles?”

I breathed in and out slowly before I answered him. “Not really,” I said.

*   *   *

My parents and Bro David and Jessica and Sarah were all standing beside my violin case on the platform backstage. When I walked around the corner they all started singing, to the tune of “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow”:

“A Most Inspirational Play-er

A Most Inspirational Play-er

A Most Inspirational Play-errrrr

Which nobody can deny.…”

Except that Bro David just held up his fingers making ditto marks instead of repeating the words three times.

While Jessica and Sarah were hugging me, I said, “I'll tell you the incredible Trouble story tomorrow. It'll be something to do during lunch.”

“Is it the kind of thing eighth-graders talk about?” Sarah asked.

“Trust me,” I said.

*   *   *

My mother wanted to come into my room and brush my hair before I went to bed. Even with school starting the next day. “Just a few minutes,” she said. I was in my pajamas. We sat down on my bed, with my back to her. She began brushing.

It felt good, the sound and the feel of the long strokes down from my scalp all the way to the ends. “I've always loved the smell of my children's hair,” she said.

“I probably smell like a crowded park full of greasy chicken,” I said.

“You smell wonderful,” she said.

“Deirdre called me this morning,” I said. I told her about it, but not completely everything. Not exactly. I said she'd wished me love.

“Allegra,” my mother said, “Deirdre is one of the finest, most profoundly loyal and loving people you'll ever want to meet.”

We sat on my bed feeling sorry for Deirdre for some minutes, listening to the sound of the brush going through my hair. Then she said, “You know what would make almost all the difference with Deirdre?”

“What would?”

“Now, I don't mean anybody ever saves you—don't get me wrong. I don't mean somebody swoops down and lets you out of your own unhappy life. Not at all, not ever.” She breathed in and out slowly. “That doesn't happen. But. Sometimes somebody can be a connection.” I was carrying the secret of the velvet purse connection with Poland and Suprasl and New York and the shiny, dusted radio for the opera, and Mr. Trouble and his found song and his happy old eyes shiny in the stage lights, and my mother and Deirdre hugging each other on the floor, and my head was full of tumbling pictures of people doing things all invisibly connected with other people.

“Are you talking about Deirdre or what?” I said.

“I'm talking about Deirdre, yes. What would really help her would be one good man. A man of principles and fairness and— Not the kind that suddenly takes a hike when the going gets sticky. A persister. That's what I mean.”

The most persistent person I could think of was Mr. Trouble. He must have been looking for
Valse Triste
for more years than I'd been alive. In fact, he was exactly what Jessica said, about China, about the bamboo. Bending without breaking.

“Somebody who'd appreciate her. Help her hold her pain. Allegra, her pain's too much to hold all by herself.” I could hear tears coming into my mother's throat. “Do you know, every time she sings she's asking—maybe asking the universe—oh, I can't say it exactly— Every single time she sings, she's giving her pain a voice, and she's asking what it means.”

“Do you think pain
means
anything?” I said.

The brush strokes slowed down but they stayed steady. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“What happened to the husband she had?”

My mother sighed a middle-aged sigh. “Oh, he was—I suppose you could say the grief was too much for him. It made him into a not-nice person. He ended up walking away.”

I remembered Deirdre in her elegant blue dress, screaming.

“Well, what do you think pain's supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't know,” she said. She brushed rhythmically, not missing a beat. “I do know it connects the whole human species.” More brushing. “I just don't know why.”

We were silent again for a few strokes. “Allegra, what in the world was your buddy Mr. Trouble up to when he leaned on the stage? What was he saying to you?”

For a moment, I had a feeling of the world so full of millions of people, all of them with their own secrets, and they were all so important. Everybody. “Remember he lost his Waltz Tree?” I said.

“Right. His lost song.”

“Well, think. Isn't it obvious?”

“What? Isn't what obvious?”

And suddenly it was funny. “Mommy, think. What were we playing?” And I got started laughing. My mother stopped brushing. Everybody and their secrets. Nobody could translate anybody else's secrets, they'd all sound meaningless if they tried. I was laughing harder and harder. It was a song about Death, about dreaming you weren't going to die, it was so tragic, and I was thinking of all the millions of secrets and everybody going along not knowing anybody else's.

I turned around on my bed to look at her. “Mommy, what was on the program?”

She scrunched up her face, thinking. I bet people do that on the tundra, and in Africa, and in Siberia, as much as we do it in an electrified place like Portland. Face-scrunching. A human sport. I watched her. The scrunches were moving around her face. Then her mouth opened wide. She said it really slowly, even with a little bit of the silence between the beats. “
Valse Triste.
Waltz Tree. Oh, Allegra.” Tears came into her voice. “Oh…”

My mother was crying and I was laughing. I thought it was very strange for a moment, and then I realized it couldn't be the other way around.

“Allegra,” she said, “I admire you.”

“You do?”

“I do. You're a person of empathy and drive and—” she thought for a second, “and courage.”

“What's empathy?”

“Oh,” she turned my head away from her and started brushing again. “It's not sympathy, that's different, but they're close. Empathy is when you can feel for somebody—not because you think you should, not because it'll make you a better person—but when you can feel somebody's feelings because you haven't closed yourself off from them. From those feelings in yourself. E-m-p-a-t-h-y.”

“Mom, can I go visit Bubbe Raisa for Rosh Hashana?” I said.

She sniffled. “What an inspired idea! Sure, why not?”

“And Deirdre too, at the same time?”

“Yes.” This was the woman who wouldn't let me ride my bike in the neighborhood park, and she was going to let me fly to New York. We got up off my bed, and she put my hairbrush on a chair. We kissed good night. She called me her Most Inspirational Daughter and left my room.

I wrote “empathy” on the clipboard. And I looked at my list.

tenacity

annihilate

ambivalence

sabotage

simultaneity

trauma

hinterland

pernicious

flippant

ominous

arrogant

empathy

I imagined that the first assignment I'd get in English class the next day would be to write an essay or make a collage demonstrating “mastery” of all the words on the list. They're always talking about mastery at my school. I put the clipboard on the floor.

Way last June, on the day Mr. Kaplan had told me about the Bloch finals, when he'd looked at me in a way I couldn't describe, it was empathy. That's what it was. And then later, he'd said people talk too much about mastering a song, but what's more important is to merge with it—I sat on my bed and told myself I finally understood what he meant.

I turned down the covers.

You can be half Jewish. Maybe whole Jews or whole Gentiles wouldn't understand. But you can be. I am.

Under my pillow was a cartoon from Bro David. It was a tree, and on every single branch was hanging a violin. The caption said, “Martin Luther gets a better idea.” And in neat small letters, “Congratulations to the Most Inspirational Player in the Ernest Bloch Competition,” and there was a figure of me playing the violin with my softball uniform on. This time he'd made me my normal size.

I turned off the light and turned on the radio.

I tried to visualize the Juilliard String Quartet in the picture in Mr. Kaplan's studio. I thought of their second violinist, the one who'd tipped me over the edge to be willing to play the Bloch finals. I couldn't remember his name.

It was because of the Oregon Symphony lockout that Mr. Trouble had found his Waltz Tree. If Jessica hadn't danced with him upriver in the hinterland, we wouldn't have known his name. If Sarah hadn't gotten the courage to ask him questions, I wouldn't ever have heard about his lost song.

But it had started with Deirdre: “Why on earth doesn't somebody dance with that man?”

If my bow had landed with the hair toward me, I'd have ended up learning a completely different Mozart concerto, way last year. I wouldn't have ever met Myra and Karen Karen and Ezra, and Steve Landauer would have been just a stand partner who treated me like his servant.

Somebody else would have been a finalist in the competition, maybe might have won it. Somebody was right now probably angry and upset, not being in the finals. I wondered who it was. Boy or girl. Old or young.

I lay down and pulled Heavenly under the covers. School would begin the next morning and I'd be exhausted. Somebody had requested “So What” by Miles Davis on the radio, the same record I have.

Karen Karen and Deirdre and Mr. Trouble were all related, too. There was something between them, a thread. And Myra Nakamura and Mr. Kaplan and Jessica and Sarah and Ezra. There wasn't a single person I could think of who wasn't connected to a whole bunch of other people I could think of. I thought of the blind woman in the airport bathroom trying to turn the water on and not knowing the secret code. If she knew it, she could be more connected with everybody else. But she was connected anyway.

I looked at the green light on the radio.

“So What” ended and the announcer started to talk. “The next tune is a request all the way from Culver, Oregon, for Allegra from Ezra, George Gershwin's ‘Embraceable You.'” My head went alert on the pillow and Heavenly jumped. The song started to play. I sat up, like sounding some kind of alarm, and Heavenly dove off my bed. The song went on playing, just a regular request by a regular person for another regular person. The music just played, right on the radio in the middle of the night, from a studio somewhere, and I was sitting up straight in my bed, and I discovered that my whole body, all my cells and everything, jumped open and stayed that way long enough for me to know it was happening, and then everything closed, my lungs and everything went back to the way they were, and I got out of bed and danced in my bedroom to “Embraceable You,” and I smiled in the dark, and I was very proud. I put my hand on my heart and it was jumpity-jumping along, just a regular heart all excited.

“Embraceable You” is a very beautiful song.

It ended. And I suddenly knew why Mr. Trouble had reminded me of something vaguely, the very first time I saw him: the Green Violinist in the painting. Mr. Trouble didn't have a violin, he had a song inside, needing to come out, and his face was twisted, and he was raggedy and his shoes didn't match, and he was all alone in the open air, dancing and dancing and dancing.

Ezra. Requested a song for me. Such a beautiful song. In the middle of the night. It was romantic, a romantic thing to do, and I wasn't even embarrassed. At all. I stood in my dark bedroom and looked at the little green light on the radio and I smiled. I curtsied in the middle of my room and got back into bed.

Of course I would want to tell him first of all my real name, Allegra Leah Shapiro.

GOFISH

questions for the author

VIRGINIA EUWER WOLFF