The Mozart Season (6 page)

Stand partners also have to agree on what things they want written in pencil on the pages, and who's going to write them. Lois and I'd agreed that we could use my music, with my writing, things like “Don't drag,” and with difficult sections circled.

At the bottom of the postcard she wrote, “Don't forget me, Little Buddy. Remember the time we played the wrong note together in the Shostakovich?”

I tried to imagine somebody else sitting in her chair. I missed her already. Just remembering the way she called me “Little Buddy” made me lonely.

When I turned pages for Charley Horner at Laurelhurst Park, there was just a little breeze, so I didn't need the clothespins on every turn. And my mother let me borrow these very long clamps that she uses for outdoor concerts. She wasn't going to need them until Labor Day, for the Oregon Symphony concert in Waterfront Park. Mostly, I got to listen to the wind quintet. Daddy and Mommy and Mr. Kaplan and everybody were willing not to tell about the competition, so I didn't have to hear people wishing me luck, or looking at me and deciding whether I was going to win or lose it.

The quintet had a flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon. Charley Horner announced all the pieces. During the second song, a horn honked loudly and burst into the music. At the end of the song, he said, “That was our sixth member. He always comes in late.”

They were just beginning the second half of the concert, and the sun was streaming through the trees, making the bushes and everything gorgeous, and people were sitting around on their blankets with their food, when the dancing man got there.

He was wearing his same clothes. And he danced the same dance. If the music got faster or slower, he didn't change his dance. I watched him a lot. He was holding his arms out in sideways
v
's like crescendo markings, the same way he'd done in the square, and he moved his feet in a sort of oval; it was his dancing method. He still had his torn shoe.

At the end of the concert, the dancing man made a little bow to Charley Horner's quintet. He did it while they were bowing to the audience and everybody was clapping.

I earned $3.75 that day.

Daddy stayed to talk to some friends, and my mother and I walked home together, through the park and up the hill and along the sidewalk where some little kids were jumping rope. Mommy was swinging the canvas shoulder bag she carries, and I was holding my plastic bag of music clamps and jingling my money in my skirt pocket. It was a nice summer afternoon, and you could smell people's gardens.

“I love Portland,” Mommy said. “If you have a little bit of ground, you can have roses. Anybody in the city can—if they have dirt.”

Portland is called the City of Roses. It's because of the long growing season. Roses bloom from early spring to late fall. We have eight rosebushes. In a park there's a huge Rose Garden on a hill where you can see thousands of roses and look down on the city. The squirrels there are so tame they come and grab food from your hand.

“I wonder if the dancing man has any,” I said.

She reached in my pocket and took my hand out. We walked along holding hands. My money jingled. “Honey, I don't know.”

We walked along. You could hear our sandals flapping. Then she said again, “I don't know.” We walked along some more. “He's a victim. Probably,” she said.

“Of what? What do you think a victim of?” We were on our block, and you could hear sprinklers on people's lawns.

“I don't know. It could be a hundred different things,” she said.

*   *   *

From Charley Horner's concert I got two more page-turning jobs in the same week. Turning for pianists makes the most money by far; they have the most page turns.

“Only two more days till we get Deirdre's Doldrums,” Daddy said a few mornings later when everybody was home for breakfast.

“Deirdre's Delirium is more like it,” Bro David said.

Mommy said, “I think you're both being stinkers. I don't want this to turn into Women versus Boys. Listen, she has to sing, and it'd be inhuman for us to do anything even slightly…”

Nobody said anything.

“And besides, if it gets cold or rainy or something, she could get sick, and it's our responsibility to…” She didn't finish that sentence either.

It's kind of a sad joke how singers get sick when they come to Portland from other places. In summer it's not so bad, but mostly, Oregon weather is hard on them. Lots of rain. Once a baritone lost his voice for an opera and he had to stand on the stage acting out the singing while another man stood way down in the orchestra pit, right where Daddy plays, doing the voice part. If you were there watching, it looked ridiculous.

“Fleur, word of honor. I won't do anything even slightly. Promise,” Daddy said.

Mommy laughed. “You, David?” she said. “Be a sweetheart.”

“How do you be that?” he said.

“For one thing, you could try not imitating her when she practices,” Daddy said.

“She's gonna practice here?” I asked.

Mommy looked at me. “Where else? Do you think it'd be better if she
didn't
practice here? What if somebody told you you couldn't—”

“Okay,” I said. I was looking forward to having her come to stay. It would bring some variety into the house.

“Well, enjoy your nearly last French toast for a while,” Daddy said.

“Why?” I asked.

“No fried foods when Deirdre's in the house,” Mommy said.

“Why not?” I said.

“Her voice,” David said. “She can't do her
eeee-eeee-eeee
if there's any residual fat in the air.” He made loud, high sounds, like a giant mouse.

“David, that's exactly what your father meant,” Mommy said. She looked at me, partly as if she wanted me to help, and partly as if she wanted to prevent something from coming loose.

*   *   *

Mr. Kaplan was pleased with the way the concerto was going. He got out his violin a few times and we played parts of the concerto together. We listened to the copy he'd kept of the tape we'd made in the winter. “Already in February you were in teamwork with the music,” he said. “That was wonderful. For the preliminaries. Now we're ready to begin the hard part. It's no longer just the right notes in the right dynamics at the right time, Allegra,” he said. He turned sideways on the piano bench. “It's time to start making the concerto your own song.”

I looked at him. I didn't even have all the notes exactly memorized.

“It's like this, Allegra,” he said. He held up both hands, about a foot apart. “Here's Mozart, over here. He has his concerto with him. And here you are, over here. See the distance between you? It's a fact. There are more than two hundred years. And there's all that ocean. And his mind and your mind. We're going to start moving them closer together. See?” He started moving his hands very, very slowly through the air. “We're going to bring them as close together as we can.” He put his hands down on his knees. “That's what we're gonna do.”

I looked at the places where his hands had been. Music poured out of Mozart. It wasn't automatic or anything, nobody's mind does it automatically. He had to find the notes in his mind and put them in order, but he just poured them out.

Mr. Kaplan put his hands up again. This time he brought them so close there wasn't even an inch between them. “We're going to get to the point where there's just an edge. The place where you and Mozart and his concerto meet. That's the edge we want. As little air space as we can manage. We're gonna try to close the distance.” He looked at the little space between his hands. Then he put them down again and looked up at me. “How're you holding up?”

“I'm holding up fine,” I said. Joel Smirnoff was smiling in the photograph on the desk.

“Good. Because we've just begun. Do you like this concerto?”

I decided to come right out with the question that had bothered me. “Mr. Kaplan, why didn't you tell me sooner that I'd made the finals?” I was maybe even angry. “In fact, when you first gave me the concerto. At the very beginning. You knew there was this competition. I want to know why I was the last person to find out.”

“So. You have been concerned, haven't you?”

I nodded my head. “When did you find out I was a finalist?”

He looked at me over his half-glasses and waited for a little while. “Not so long before I told you. Not so very long, Allegra.”

Not so very long. It was getting through to me. “My parents knew and everything, then. A long time before I found out.”

“Allegra, you had school to finish up. The softball team … Those play-offs you were in…”

For the whole last six weeks of school I'd been mostly a walking softball uniform. The school was counting on us, and in the mornings the intercom kept reciting the results of our games into all the rooms, and they made it seem like the most important thing in the world. And there were final exams. Jessica and Sarah and I had very hard ones in our classes. “But even at the beginning. You didn't say, ‘If you choose the Fourth Concerto you'll be entering the Bloch Competition—but if you choose the Third, you won't, because the Competition concerto is Number Four.'”

“Indeed. Yes.” He folded his hands together, then spread them out flat on his lap. “I didn't tell you you might make the Bloch play-offs.” He waited for me to laugh, and I did, just a little bit. “My dear, it's this way. First, I know too much about what happens when young musicians are forced into competition. Imagine how you'd have felt, trying to prepare this concerto for the finals if you were all the time wishing you were playing a different concerto. And second, once you selected this concerto, if I'd told you right then about the competition, you'd have learned it differently. Don't you think so?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“I want you first to love the music.
Then
compete.”

“But it's the same concerto.”

“No. If I'd given it to you and said, ‘Listen, Allegra, you will play this concerto in competition in exactly so-and-so months,' it would not be the same concerto in your hands.”

I looked at him and thumbed the strings of my violin with my right hand. It's a sort of nervous habit I have.

“And your softball is very important to you, too, is it not?”

I glimpsed myself a few weeks before, running to practice, running from practice, studying geography and English and math and everything else for finals, and my parents making me sit down and eat dinner with the whole family almost every single night “because we are a family, we're not just four random people running in and out of the same house,” as my father said. And I glimpsed myself stretching to catch a fly in one game that made the winning out and hearing everybody yelling “Shapiro!” over and over again, and I remembered half the time having dust everywhere on me, in my ears and my hair, and the other half taking showers and hearing my whole body getting squeaky clean, and always being so tired. Tired. All the time. “It was important. It was important then.”

“Indeed. And Mozart was resting then. Now he's getting his turn. Things in their seasons, Allegra.” His eyebrows arched. “This is the Mozart season.”

I nodded my head a little bit.

“I want you and the concerto to be in partnership first. Only then can we bring you close to Mozart. A general partnership of good feeling first. Then we close the distance. Is that clear?”

“I guess so.”

“Well,” he laughed, “good. Because I'm not convinced it's clear to me. These things are hard to explain, you know.”

“I know.” I laughed.

“Remember what somebody said: Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Let's play. Which movement?”

“Let's do the first,” I said. I wanted to try this Closing the Distance from the beginning.

He stopped me at letter E. “Allegra, I want you to try something this week. I want you to play this whole movement just as boldly as you can. I want you to say, ‘ME: Allegra Shapiro. I'M playing this concerto.' I want you to jump right into it. Let's see what that accomplishes.”

“Okay,” I said. We started it again.

At the end of my lesson, Mrs. Kaplan brought in chocolate-chip cookies. She calls the treats Endorphin Therapy. “These are to give you the strength to get home, dear,” she said. She has gray hair and a soft double chin. The Endorphin Therapy was a joke, of course, but I was glad to have the extra strength, even if it would just be for the cadenzas.

*   *   *

I changed the sheets on my bed for Deirdre. I put on the ones with the music notation. You can read parts of
The Magic Flute
on them. Mommy and Daddy gave them to me for my eleventh birthday, last year. I dusted everything I could reach, the lampshades and everything, because Deirdre is allergic. Jessica had brought me a Chinese doll all the way from Hong Kong when we were nine years old, and I even dusted that. And I took a box of things to the music room. My pajamas and my clipboard and things.

Deirdre's airplane was late. She was coming from Aspen, Colorado. She was singing there at a festival. While we waited, Daddy kept us occupied by making us guess things he already knew. How many daily newspapers are published in New York? Twenty-three. How many of them aren't in English? Thirteen. Both Mommy and I guessed way wrong. What Tibetan product does the British army use in its helmets? Yak hair. We both guessed way wrong again. What species has nerve fiber a thousand times wider than humans'? The squid. My mother got hilarious and said Daddy could ask everybody in the entire airport and nobody would know that one.

I went to the bathroom. In the Portland airport, you have to step on a button on the floor to turn on any water at all. There was a middle-aged lady standing in front of a washbasin, feeling around. She had a white cane with a red tip hanging on her arm, and she was wearing sunglasses. She obviously wanted to turn the water on. There was nobody else in the bathroom. I said, “You have to step on a button.”