The Mozart Season (7 page)

She felt around with her right foot. Water spurted out of the faucet. “Oh—thanks,” she said. It's always kind of surprising when you hit the button for the first time.

“It's the same with the toilet,” I said. “To get it to flush.” I didn't know if I was doing the right thing or not.

She turned sideways toward me but I knew she couldn't see me. “What an interesting system,” she said. Then she laughed. “It's a secret code.”

“Yep,” I said. I laughed, too.

I pretended to be washing my hands but I was just running the water and watching her. How would you know how to turn on the water if somebody didn't tell you, if you couldn't see it? It could take you hours to figure it out. You'd be feeling around in your brain for the right question to ask, and you'd be wondering why the water wouldn't go on. You'd hear it going on at the other basins. You wouldn't have the information you need.

It was a little bit—very much—like trying to get over the gap to the Mozart concerto. I could hear it played beautifully on the records, and I was feeling around in my brain for the information I had to have to play it the way I needed to play it.

Deirdre was carrying about six bags, and she had a huge suitcase checked. She has a whole lot of big blond hair all around in curls, and she has great big loopy earrings. An Ear Lady. And she has big lips that look almost strange when she sings. It's a very dramatic mouth.

“Allegra. I knew you when you were an ovary. Let me look at you.” She and I were squinched in the backseat of Daddy's car, with some of her bags, and the rest of her luggage was behind us, in the place where his cello rides. She has huge dark brown eyes that stare. “Ah, the gene pool,” she said, and laughed. “You're so much like your mommy when she was younger. And there's that black, black hair! Fleur, did anybody in your family ever have black hair?”

Mommy laughed. “No. I don't think so.”

“It's not really black,” I said. “Just very dark brown.”

“Do you know what I mean when I say ‘gene pool'?” she said.

“Yep. It's the way you get things from both parents. In your genes.”

“And from their parents, and their grandparents. Oh—Raisa sends hugs and kisses to everybody. She was going to send a cake—but I couldn't keep it in a bag for five days. How's the violin going?” she asked me.

“Fine,” I said.

“What're you playing now?”

I shuffled music around in my mind, avoiding Mozart. I wasn't ready to tell her about the competition.

“She's playing page turner this summer,” Daddy said. “Earning money. By the way, Allegra, can you turn for a pianist on Saturday? Two o'clock?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Ah, blessed are the Oregon breezes,” Deirdre said. “What've you turned?”

I told her all the pieces I could think of.

We put all Deirdre's bags and things in my room. She said she just wanted to be alone for a few minutes “to try to find some coherence.”

*   *   *

With Deirdre staying with us, arranging practice times could get complicated. Bro David hung a sign-up sheet on the music-room door. It was divided into half-hour blocks, and you could sign up for as many as you wanted, as long as you weren't selfish about it. The sign-up sheet had a picture on it that he drew. It was somebody with lots of arms, like that Hindu god Siva, and the person was playing two violins and a cello and singing at the same time.

I was just about asleep in the music room that first night and I was watching this painting we have. It's by Marc Chagall and it's called
The Green Violinist.
The man has a green face, and he's playing a violin. He's wearing a purple hat and coat, and things are flying through the painting. The violinist is up in the air above some buildings, and there's a small gray man flying in the sky and another man, even smaller, holding up his arms to catch the flying one. I've always liked that painting. You can think that the man playing the violin is sending flying music into the air and that's why everything flies, or you can think there's some other reason why they fly. We don't have the real painting, we have a print of it. We saw the real one in New York once when we went to visit my grandmother Raisa.

There's a streetlight near the corner of our house, and it shines through the windows of the music room at night, so you can see things kind of in a gray color. And there are sort of trapezoids of light on the carpet from the French doors.

Somebody knocked on the door. “Am I bothering you, Allegra?” It was Deirdre.

I told her she wasn't.

“I won't stay long.” She was in a balloony white nightgown with lace, and bare feet, the nightgown made a cottony sound when she walked. Her hair was hanging all down her back. She still had long, dangly earrings on, and you could hear them tinkling when she walked. She had a big glass of milk in one hand.

“Want me to turn on the lamp?” I asked.

“No, I just want to sit here with you in the half-light.”

She sat down in the chair the second violinist uses when there are quartets. She put the glass of milk on the floor and stretched both arms above her head and then out to the sides, the way you do in the breaststroke. Then she folded her hands in her lap. “I'm stupid with exhaustion. And I can't sleep. Does that ever happen to you?” she said.

“I think so,” I said. I was thinking of the final exams we had to take at the end of school. Jessica and Sarah and I spent the whole night just sitting in front of the TV set, watching old movies. We were at Sarah's house. We'd taken the history exam that day. All on Egypt and ancient China.

“It was Aspen that did it to me. The altitude. And rehearsal's at nine tomorrow morning. This is terrible.”

I hunched up on my left elbow and bunched up the pillows. “Do you get nervous when you sing?” I asked her.

“Do I get nervous?” She didn't say anything for about a minute. “Allegra, I throw up before I go onstage.”

“Deirdre, that's awful,” I said.

“I know. It is awful. The first thing I find when I'm singing anyplace new is the bathroom. That's more important than where the stage is or who's accompanying me or anything else. It's ghastly.”

“But once you get started singing it's all right?”

“Yes. It gets all right. I could take a beta blocker, but I don't like drugs.”

“What's a beta blocker?”

“It's a drug. It slows your heart, makes it less excitable. It helps keep you steady. Great for stage fright. Juilliard kids take them all the time. They walk in and play their hearts out. It's crazy.”

“It doesn't sound crazy to me.” I was thinking about the competition, of course. I didn't know there was a drug for stage fright.

“Oh, I know somebody who hallucinated when she took it. Very good flutist. She won a prize and she saw donkeys in the auditorium. I don't think it's a very good trade-off.”

She got up and walked over to the photograph of Einstein as an old man playing the violin. He has that white hair you always see in pictures of him. She hummed around the photographs of Fritz Kreisler, Pablo Casals, and the other musicians on the wall. She walked over to the French doors and looked out. “Your roses are wonderful. Do you know that?”

“Yep,” I said. I thought of the dancing man, without any roses. We probably have more than our share.

She walked back to the chair and sat down. She almost didn't make any noise when she moved. “What are the big things in your life these days, Allegra?” she said. “Now that school's out and everything.”

I moved a little bit and pushed the pillows around and sat up straighter. I didn't say anything. I hadn't told anybody in person, except my parents and Bro David, about the competition. I'd told Sarah and Jessica by postcard.

She hit her forehead with her fist. “Oh—I completely forgot. This guy your mommy and I used to know is coming here. It's a guy we knew at school. In fact, he's already here. Teaching at some college. Or university. He's a biologist. He's got a son, a violinist. Older than you. I haven't seen the kid since he was tiny. I heard about him in Aspen, though; he's supposed to be very good. Somebody who knows somebody who knows him told me. I wrote it all down on an envelope. He'll probably turn up in your orchestra—what's it called?”

“The Portland Youth Orchestra,” I said.

“He'll probably turn up here. Do you like playing in it?” she asked.

“Sure. I like it a lot.”

“Are you the youngest?”

“No. There are a couple of really little kids.”

“But you're one of the youngest?”

“I guess so. Yep. I am. You know what somebody did once?”

“What?” She took a big swig of milk.

“This guy, he's a cellist, he had the repeat section memorized, and he didn't turn the page back, so the girl playing on the outside just went ahead and didn't play the repeat. It was only in rehearsal, but still.”

Deirdre laughed, just a little bit. “That's a very dirty trick, Allegra.”

“I know it. He got in trouble for it.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“He didn't get to play the whole next concert. Not even rehearsals. He was kicked out for the whole time. Three months.”

She was laughing again. “Good for him, he deserved it. I get the impression you really love the violin, Allegra. Am I right?”

“Yep. I do.”

“Do you know why?”

“No. I don't
think
I know. It feels good.”

“Can you imagine not playing it?”

“No!” It came out surprisingly loud.

Deirdre nodded her head. “Then you're stuck with it, aren't you?”

“I guess so. I guess I am.”

She looked at me for quite a while with her intense eyes. “Allegra, here's something about doing music—or painting a picture or anything. When you're doing it, you have to remember everything you've ever learned, and simultaneously forget all of it and do something totally new.” She was silent for a while more. “Because if you do the first part and not the second, you're making music or art just like everybody else's. It's not your own.”

I was asking myself silently if I could ever do that, remember and forget at the same time.

“When I lived in Boston, I used to watch the Celtics a lot. They do the same exact thing—when they're at their best. It's the same with your Trail Blazers in Portland. You watch one of those beautiful shots go exploding down through the basket and that's what's going on. That guy has in his memory every basket he's ever shot—and at the same instant he's making up a new one. The divine inspiration of the NBA.”

“Deirdre, I never heard anybody say that before.”

“Well, that's the way it is.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Yes, that's part of it. When I'm at my best.”

I imagined her bent over throwing up. “And you still throw up?”

“Sure. That's why, in fact. Or that's part of it. I'm afraid I won't be able to get that simultaneity.” She clenched and unclenched both her hands on the lap of her white nightgown. “There are all kinds of static just waiting up there,” she pointed to her head, “to sabotage things.”

I reached for the clipboard. “How do you spell those?”

“What? ‘Sabotage'?” She spelled it for me. “It means ‘to ruin completely.' You have to learn new words for school, or for yourself?”

“Well, both, I guess. A list for school, but I'll need them anyway. And simultan—”

She spelled “simultaneity.” I wrote them down.

“You could wear a raincoat,” I said. “For throwing up.”

She was stretching her arms again. “That's exactly what I do.”

“Good,” I said. “What's this violinist like, this boy?”

“Oh, Steve? I don't know. When he was a little kid, he was darling. He had a sixteenth-size violin. Curly hair and huge eyes. Long eyelashes. And Lego blocks. He built the most amazing things, he must've been three years old. Big towers. He had phenomenal concentration.” I was watching Deirdre take her long, dangly earrings out of her ears. They tinkled when she had them both out and was holding them in her hand. “He'll probably end up being your boyfriend, Allegra.”

“I don't think so. You said he's old.”

“Oh, not so old. Probably about Bro David's age, I should think. That's not old. I can tell you lots about old.” She got up and went over to a photograph of Ernest Bloch. It's kind of low on the wall, and you have to bend over to look at it. I kept not telling her about the Bloch Competition.

I heard a clinking of metal on wood. Two clinkings. She knelt down, her balloony nightgown spreading kind of like a white swan around her.

“I dropped an earring.” She was bending over Daddy's cello, which he'd left out of the case, lying on its side. “I can't find it. Turn on the light, will you?” she said.

I got up and turned it on. It was too bright; my eyes hurt. She was feeling around. Then she took hold of the cello by the neck. You could hear something rattle inside.

She looked at me. She looked panicked. “Allegra. It fell through the f-hole,” she said in a frightened voice. She put the cello back on its side. “Oh, Allegra. What have I
done?
” She was whispering.

“It's okay,” I whispered back, as I walked over to where she was squatting on the floor. “We'll shake it out. Look. You pick up the neck, I'll pick up this end, we'll just turn it over—” I started to pick up the body.

“No! I couldn't pick up a thing. I'm shattered. Allegra, it's always like this. Every single place I go I do something hideous.…” She put both hands up over her face, one fisted up with the other earring in it. Her hands were shaking.

I squatted down beside her and put my hand on her shoulder. I whispered, “No, really, Daddy won't be mad. It's all right. We'll just let it fall out the f-hole where it went in.… Or the other one…”