Wild Roses

Wild Roses

Deb Caletti
 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my dear friends and partners--Ben
Camardi and Jen Klonsky. It's a privilege to be part of your intelligence,
humor, and insight. Thanks as well, to Jenn Zatorski, Leah Hays, Sam Schutz, and
all the fine folks at Simon & Schuster--you guys are the best. Gratitude
also to Kirsty Skidmore and Amanda Punter and U.K. Scholastic.

Doug Longman, music teacher
extraordinaire--thanks for essential information, and for your dedication to
teaching. And to all those organizations that assist writers and, more
importantly, get the word out about books, my appreciation and admiration. Thank
you Artist Trust; National Book Foundation; PNBA, with special thanks to Rene
Kirkpatrick; California Young Reader Medal Program; PSLA; International Reading
Association; YALSA, and to libraries everywhere, particularly King County
Library System. Librarians are awesome, and KCLS is home to my
favorites.

Anne Greenberg; the beautiful and singular
Muriel Diamond; "Magic" friends; Rick Young; and the Flo Villa houseboat
gang--life is happier with you in it. Love and endless thanks to my clan in
Virginia, California, Chicago. And to my new family in Denver, Seattle, Phoenix,
L.A., and Mineral Point--oh, lucky girl am I.

Finally, deep and forever love and gratitude to
Evie Caletti, Paul and Jan Caletti, Sue Rath and family. And to my Sam and Nick,
who make every day a present.
 

Chapter One

To say my life changed when my mother married
Dino Cavalli (yes, the Dino Cavalli) would be like saying that the tornado
changed things for Dorothy There was only one other thing that would impact my
life so much, and that was when Ian Waters drove up our road on his bicycle, his
violin case sticking out from a compartment on the side, and his long black coat
flying out behind him.

My stepfather was both crazy and a genius, and
I guess that's where I should start. If you've read about him recently, you
already know this. He was a human meteor. Supposedly there's an actual,
researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it
because I've seen it with my own eyes. Sure, you have the artists and writers
and musicians like my mom, say, who are talented and calm and get things done
without much

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fuss. The closest she gets to madness is when
she gets flustered and calls me William, which is our dog's name. But then there
are the van Goghs and Hemingways and Mozarts, those who feel a hunger so deep,
so far down, that greatness lies there too, nestled somewhere within it. Those
who get their inner voice and direction from the cool, mysterious insides of the
moon, and not from the earth like the rest of us. In other words, brilliant
nuts.

I guess we should also begin with an
understanding, and that is, if you are one of those easily offended people who
insist that every human breath be politically correct, it's probably best we
just part company now I'll loan you my copy of Little House in the Big Woods (I
actually loved it when I was eight) and you can disappear into prairie
perfection, because I will not dance around this topic claiming that Dino
Cavalli was joy-impaired (hugely depressed), excessively imaginative
(delusional), abundantly security conscious (paranoid as hell) or emotionally
challenged (wacko). I'm not talking about your mentally ill favorite granny or
sick best uncle--I'm not judging anyone else who's ill. This is my singular
experience. I've lived it; I've earned the right to describe how it felt from
inside my own skin. So if your life truths have to be protected the same way
some people keep their couches in plastic, then ciao. Have a nice life. If we
bump into each other at Target, I'm the one buying the sour gummy worms, and
that's all you need to know about me.

Anyway, madness and genius. They're the
disturbed pals of. the human condition. The Bonnie and Clyde, the

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Thelma and Louise, the baking soda and vinegar.
Insanity just walks alongside the brilliant like some creepy, insistent shadow.
Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens. William Faulkner, Dostoevsky,
Cezanne, Gauguin. Tolstoy, Sylvia Plath, Keats, and Shelley. Walt Whitman and F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Michelangelo. All wacko. And we can't forget the musicians,
because this story is about them, especially. Schumann and Beethoven, Chopin and
Handel and Rachmaninov and Liszt. Tchaikovsky and Wagner.

And, of course, Dino Cavalli.

In that group you've got every variety of
creation: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Farewell to Arms and the epic
poem, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which, if you ask me, finds its true greatness as
a cure for insomnia. You've also got every variety of crazy act. You've got the
gross--van Gogh slicing off his earlobe and giving it to a woman (you can just
hear her--Damn, I was hoping for chocolates), and the unimaginable--Virginia
Woolf filling her pockets with stones to hold her down in the river so that she
could do an effective job of drowning. And even the funny--the reason our dog is
named William, for example, is because Dino Cavalli bought him during a
particularly bad bout of paranoia and named him for his enemy and former manager
and agent, William Tiero. He liked the idea of this poor, ugly dog named William
that would eat used Kleenex if he had the chance. He liked yelling at William
for getting too personal with guests. I can hear his voice even now, in his
Italian accent. Get your nose out of Mrs.

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Kadinsky's crotch, William, he'd say with mock
seriousness, and everyone would picture William Tiero with his bald head and
beetle eyes, and they would laugh. Man, oh, man. You didn't want to get on Dino
Cavalli's bad side.

Some people think the brilliant have been
touched by God, and if this is true then Dino Cavalli got God on the day he was
wearing black leather and listening to his metal CDs, feeling a bit twisted and
in the kind of mood where you laugh at people when they fall down. God wearing a
studded collar. Because, sure, Dino Cavalli was a world-renowned composer and
violinist, a combination of talent virtually unheard of, but there were days he
didn't get out of bed, even to shower. And, sure, he wrote and performed Amort
lnnamorato, said to, "have moments of such brutal tenderness and soulful passion
that it will live forever in both the hearts of audience members and the annals
of modern composing,"1 as well as the unforgettable Artemisia ("breathtaking and
heart-stopping work with the brilliance of the seventeenth-century masters."2),
but he also had the ability to make you feel small to the point of
disappearance. His perfectionism could shatter your joy like a bullet through a
stained glass window.

What I'm saying is, he possessed magnificent
and destructive layers. Either that or he was just plain possessed. I mean, it
all got toned down in the papers, but we all know what could have happened to
William Tiero that day. We all now know what happens when you self-

1 Dawson Cook, "Cavalli Strikes a Perfect Note"
Strad Magazine (April 1996): 12-15. ' Alice Lambert, "The Season's Best" Strad
Magazine (May 1989): 20-22.

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destruct. Yet I've got to say, listening to his
music can make you cry. Goose bumps actually rise up along your arms.

Everyone wants to get close to genius and fame,
claim pieces of it, mostly because it's the closest they'll ever get to fame
themselves. You learn this when you live with someone renowned. Those who know
that Dino Cavalli was my stepfather think I'm near enough to fame to call it
good. Fame, the nearness of it, the possibility of it rubbing off, seems to turn
people into obsessed Tolkien characters, hypnotized not by a ring but by the
thought of getting on TV Luckily at my school, most of the kids who hear the
name Dino Cavalli will think it's some brand of designer shoes. To the majority
I am just Cassie Morgan, regular seventeen-year-old trying to figure out what to
do with my life and hoping my jeans are clean and swearing at myself for cutting
my own bangs again. Few know my stepfather was once on the cover of Time
magazine, or was also well known for the journals in which he wrote of his
sexual adventures as a young composer in Paris. Everyone is too involved in the
school game of How Orange Is Tiffany Morris's Makeup Today to care, even if they
did. But the teachers and orchestra students, they know who I am, and I see what
it means to them. Once during a school concert this kid was staring so hard at
me that he accidentally stepped into an open viola case and wore it like an
overgrown shoe for a few seconds on the gym floor.

And then there's Siang Chibo, who used to
follow me home every day. She would walk far behind me and duck

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behind trees when I turned around, like some
cartoon spy. She once tripped over a tree root in the process and spewed the
contents of her backpack all over the place. You couldn't find a more
incompetent stalker. I went over to her after she fell, and her palms even had
those little pockmarks on them from landing on gravel. Now we have a
Scrooge-Tiny Tim partnership of reluctant giving and nauseating gratitude. To
Siang, I'm second in line in the worship chain of command, right after Dino. If
people look at the famous as if they've been touched by God, then they look at
those close to the famous as the ones who have seen Jesus' face in the
eggplant.

You would have never recognized the Dino I
lived with in the books that had been written about him before the "incident."
No one had a clue. No one seemed to see what was coming. His demons were the
real truth, but those who clutched at his fame made him into someone else. Just
listen to Irma Lattori, a villager from Sabbotino Grappa, interviewed in Edward
Reynolds's Dino Cavalli--The Early Years: An Oral History, the much-quoted
source of Dino's childhood. It's his only authorized biography, in which the
people who knew him then tell the events of his life.

Everyone in Sabbotino Grappa knew Dino Cavalli
had that special light, Irma says in the book. From the time he was an infant. I
would see his mother, Maria, walk him around in his carriage. She was a
beautiful woman with round, warm eyes. She always dressed elegantly, oh, so
rich. She had tucked a peacock feather in the back of his carriage. It rose up,
like a grand flag. You want to know where he got Un Cielo Delle

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Piume Del Peacock? That was his inspiration.
Maria always appreciated the unusual. She wore hats, even when no one wore hats.
Stunning. No wonder he became a ladies' man. He was horn, you see, taking in the
world and using it in his work. Born to beauty and greatness. He couldn't have
been more than six months old, this time I am remembering. He reached his hands
up to me when I bent to look at him. He wanted me to hold him. He wouldn't let
my sister Camille go near him.3

And Frank Mancini, gardener, another one of the
villagers from tiny Sabbotino Grappa: A beautiful garden, beautiful. Four
hundred years old. Magnolias in the spring. Plumbagos, hibiscus in the summer.
Lemon trees and figs. An olive garden. I worked my fingers to the bone. Now I
cannot tie my own shoe, my fingers are so crippled. But it was a beautiful
garden, and you could hear the child playing the violin through the open window.
Small boy, not more than four years old, and he played the violin! A divine
gift. His mother played the piano. Music was in his veins. And the smell of
lemon trees. I didn't mind that the father was cheap and barely paid me enough
to buy food.

All in all, as gagging as a dental X
ray.

"No one ever mentions that he is a
wife-stealing psycho," my father said once after Dino was featured in the
entertainment section of the newspaper--Famed Musician Seeks Local Inspiration.
He tossed the paper down on his kitchen table. "With bad breath."

3 Dino Cavalli--The Early Years: An Oral
History. From Edward Reynolds, New York, N.Y. Aldine Press, 1999.

4 Dino Cavalli--The Early Years: An Oral
History. From Edward Reynolds, New York, N.Y. Aldine Press, 1999.

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"You haven't even been close enough to him to
smell his breath," I said.

"Who says you have to be close," my father
said. Let's just say my father didn't read the divorce books that say you are
not supposed to talk badly about the other parent and the other parent's
partner. Actually, I think he probably did read them, but has somehow convinced
himself that only my mother is required to follow these rules. He ignores the
other Divorced Parenting Don'ts too, the ones where you aren't supposed to grill
your kid about what happens in the other home. Sometimes he tries to be casual
about his fishing around, and other times it's like I'm in one of those movies
where the criminal sits under the bare light-bulb in a room and after twelve
hours confesses to a crime he didn't commit.

My parents were divorced three years ago, and
my mother married Dino five days after the divorce was final. Do the math and
figure out what happened. If you've been through this, you know the vocabulary.
Parenting plan, custody evaluation, visitation, court orders, mediation,
transfer time. And can anyone say restraining order! I can talk with my friend
Zebe about these things. Ever since I met her in Beginning Spanish we've spoken
the same language, in more ways than one. Her new stepfather may not be famous,
but we understand the most important things about each other. She knows that you
really don't give a crap about who gets you on Labor Day, that no-fault divorce
art the three stupidest words ever spoken, and that you are not split as easily
as your parents' old