Atlantis: Three Tales (20 page)

My father's friends and family often spoke of Dad as someone who could get music from any instrument. Back then I had no idea what it meant to pull even a note from trumpet, clarinet, or transverse flute, each with its different mouthpiece—much less to get tunes from them, each with its different fingering.

But, however haltingly, Dad could play them all.

When I was eight, a few glimpses through the living-room arch at my aunt's home in New Jersey, where my cousin stood before the fireplace with his instrument at his chin, under the wire-framed gaze of his young, balding, black-suited music teacher, grew in me, a year later, to a passion for the violin. (Boyd's teacher was white; and, before my grandmother shooed me away to play upstairs and leave them alone, it was one of the few times in childhood when I was oddly aware that my family and I were not—possibly because Boyd wore, on his brown oval face, the same wire-rimmed glasses as that pale young man.) My mother nursed the passion on. And when it did not go away, I inherited Boyd's
old instrument: he had given it up for college and medical school. To ensure that the passion was not a whim, Dad purchased four beginner violin instruction books.

We also got Boyd's music stand.

During breaks between funerals, my father would nip upstairs to give me a lesson. Sometimes he would set me up with stand and book in the evening before the dining room fireplace. By staying a lesson or two ahead, he proceeded to teach me violin—having decided he'd like to master a stringed instrument himself.

My father may have been a natural musician, but he was not a natural teacher. A wholly dogmatic man, he wanted things done his way—now. He had no sense that four-fifths of all meaningful instruction is the attentive silence teacher must proffer student, during which silence, among his or her own fumblings, the student actually learns—a silence in which teacherly attention must all be on which errors
not
to correct. Therefore the tension between us was high. It speaks well for us both that we were still at it three months on: I was still putting in an hour or two a day of practice on my own. In those months my father taught me to read the treble clef and got me more or less comfortable with up to two or three sharps, two or three flats. (Somehow, in the midst of it all, I also learned how to renotate all the music for B-flat cornet, that had been Dad's first instrument.) But these lessons were not pleasant. Then the short-haired woman who wore green felt skirts and taught stringed instruments at my downtown elementary school rescued me.

In the sixth-floor music room Mrs. Wallace gave real violin lessons—a room in which, years before, with colored paper patterns and black and white magnetic dogs, along with questions and answers that a squat, graysuited, white-haired woman with an Irish name (Mrs. MacDougal?) had written down, smiling, on her clipboard, I'd been tested for reading and found lacking. My first hope at beginning the violin had been that I'd take lessons with Mrs. Wallace, like my schoolmate Jonathan, who was a bully, very handsome, called his judge mother and lawyer father by their first names, and never wore underwear—for which fact alone, I think, I tried to become his friend and got so far as to
be invited for the weekend with him and his parents to their summer house on an island in Lake Placid, which you reached, across overcast evening waters, by motorboat.

But Dad had intervened.

After two months of Dad's lessons, I'd brought my violin into school and reported for practice with the Middle School orchestra. For the simple pieces we played, I did well enough. But after another month Mr. Ax detected something in my playing . . . idiosyncratic? Or perhaps I just told him how I was learning. He spoke to Mrs. Wallace, who called my parents in. Both of them—quite unusual—came. I stood outside the open door and overheard Mrs. Wallace explain that there were certain things that could only be taught by an experienced teacher—that, indeed, to follow a book without real instruction could, for an instrument like the violin, do more harm than good.

Since I'd stuck to it as long as I had, it was possible I had real talent.

So real lessons began—just in time, too: my father and I had had a falling out over the interpretation of a single phrase in a song which, between the two of us, we'd been working on by ear. “The Autumn Leaves . . .” It came over the radio enough times so that we both knew it pretty well. But—

“No—!”
I'd insist, grabbing for the violin, while Dad turned, with the instrument under his chin, out of my reach, as if protecting it with his body from my eager hands. “It doesn't drop down again, there. It stays up, on the same note—the fourth.
Then
it drops down, only
half
a step!”

“Well, isn't that what I'm doing?” he protested, turning back.

“No, you're not—!”

Whatever it was, my father honestly couldn't hear it. And, as an ear musician, what he couldn't hear, he couldn't play—even if you wrote it out.

It led to loud and insistent declamations from him—and tears from me, till my mother looked in from the kitchen. “
What
are the two of you going on about so? It's only a song!”

“Look!” Dad insisted, “I'm going to
show
you you're wrong! I'm
going to get the sheet music!”

“Okay,” I said. “You'll see!” while I tried not to cry anymore.

The third time he told me he'd been to a music store and couldn't find it, I began to think some kind of shuck was going on. The song was still popular enough on the radio that, now and again, it would lilt into the living room.

“. . . Don't you hear that, Dad?”

“And I tell you, that's what I'm doing!”

Then one afternoon he announced: “Okay, I found it. It isn't called ‘The Autumn Leaves.' The title's ‘September Song.' That's why the man at the music store kept telling me he didn't have it in. You'll see now.”

We set the sheet music up on Boyd's old music stand in front of the mantel.

I got out the violin. Dad put on his glasses, which he needed to read music, took the instrument from me, and began to play. I looked over his shoulder—

“No!”
I shouted, when he reached the passage. “That's not what it says! You didn't play what the notes are—”

“Yes, I did!”

“No, you
didn't!
See—it
does
stay up on the fourth. Like I said. And there—only a half step down . . .”

“. . . to E.”

“To F. That's an F!”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Here, let me play it.”

I did.

And messed up the questionable phrase.

“See, that's just what—”

“But I made a
mistake!
I've been listening to
you
do it wrong so many times, I just did it the way—”

“Now watch your tongue! Don't you get insulting!”

“Let me do it again.”

I did.

“And
that's
what the notes say, too!” I dropped the bow from the strings—to take the instrument from my chin. Perspiration left a shiny crescent inside the ebony chin rest.

“Well, then,” my father declared, which was pretty much his way in an argument, “the music's just
wrong!
And so are you! Look, I've been trying to tell you all along: I
know
how the damned song goes!
You're
just too pig-headed to listen!”

“But look, the music even says—!”

“Well, I don't
care
what it says!”

“But . . . !” And, like a mountain climber who has suddenly had the foothold struck from beneath the toe carrying the weight, I tumbled from the heights of logic, reason, and evidence into the pit of steaming tears, which rose about me, to scald my eyes. Putting the violin down on the varnished table twice as dark as it was, I stalked from the dining room.

Angrily Dad called after me: “Come on back here! Don't you walk out on me like that! You've got your practicing to do!” Then, in a moment of total frustration, he added: “You are one hard-headed nigger, is what
you
are!”

“Sam!”
my mother called, outraged, from the kitchen: but it was both my father's name and mine.

Dad shouted after me, in what—today—I suspect was an emotional plea rising wholly outside the realms of reason: “Can't you ever admit you're wrong about
anything?
”

What I heard, though, as I stood in the hall, quivering by the entrance to the walk-in closet (in which, at Christmas, I could never find the presents that must be hidden behind the winter coats or somewhere on the upper shelves with the eight-millimeter movie camera and the stenotype machine—from the unimaginable time before my birth when Mom had been a stenographer—and the piled-up hat boxes) was the absolute and obscene, to me, contradiction with all reason, so that when tears and words broke out together—“Why can't
you
!”—I'm surprised that, back in the dining room, he even understood what I'd said.

He shouted: “Don't you talk to me like that—!”

Maybe it was because we'd shouted it so many times before.

But that's what Mrs. Wallace's lessons rescued me from—rescued us both from, really.

At school, in the small sixth-floor room at the end of the hallway, with its green walls and its tan shade lowered over the wire window guards, Mrs. Wallace, sweater mottled with the sun outside, ambled about the little space, attending to my scales, tunes, and, finally, at our twin stands, my duets with her. With her own violin against her hip, her estimate of what my father had been able to do with me ranged from the professional musician's disdain for all things amateur to real surprise at what he'd accomplished. On the one hand, I was already comfortable with the circle of fourths (for the flatted keys) and the circle of fifths (for the sharped ones) that she did not usually give to students until they were much more advanced than three months. On the other, that most important arch of the left hand, as it supports the violin neck, that allows the string player to turn strength into speed when moving among the higher finger positions, was something neither Dad nor I had ever paid much attention to.

“The violin,” Mrs. Wallace would explain, her face near mine, forcing back my hand beneath the slim neck's shaft (she was almost without chin), “is not a dagger that you clutch. Nor are you trying to cut your throat with it. Here. Pretend there's a hard rubber ball in your hand, between your palm and the instrument. Don't ever let your hand close through that ball. Come on, now. You're a violinist.
You're
holding it like a country fiddler!”

And sometimes, when I would make a mistake, she'd say with the faintest smile: “Did your father teach you that, too?” which, as he was no longer there to badger me, I was now free to resent, however silently: without him, of course, I wouldn't have been there at all.

My father was also a fairly good artist. When, as a four- and five-year-old, I would come to some adult and ask, “Draw me a bird . . . ? Draw me a lady . . . ?” Dad would take the paper, and the figures he'd sketch would have form, dimensionality, even personality. Once he showed me, for a
cat I'd requested, the basic geometric forms I could build it from, that later might guide the modelling of more detailed features.

Dad never tried to teach me to draw. Had he, I'm sure we would have had the same conflict as we did over music. But, in 1951, we acquired our first television set—a huge console Zenith that also contained a record player and a radio. Once I'd finished watching
Pat Michaels and the Magic Cottage, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Howdy Doody, Buzz Corey and the Space Patrol, Tom Corbett
—
Space Cadet, Captain Video
, and
Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders
, the Saturday morning show I always caught on the black and white screen was
Draw with Me
, a Basic Art Course led by “internationally known artist John Nagy.” The day I first tuned in, in the middle of the program, right up there on the screen were Dad's basic forms—John Nagy might have even been, that show, drawing a cat.

Nagy was the perfect television artist: he wore plaid shirts, dress slacks—never jeans. Often he made his entrance smoking a pipe. Sometimes he even rolled up his sleeves. He had a beard—a small, neat one. Everything about him was redolent of autumns on Provincetown beaches. He had an oboe of a voice, and his bearing was that of your most sympathetic summer camp counselor. The show was aimed wholly at making pictures that
looked
like something. Weekly he went over those principles that have organized Western figurative drawing and painting since the Renaissance: vanishing points, horizon lines, one-and two-point perspective. (“For objects sitting on the ground or parallel with it, the vanishing point—or points—are
on
the horizon, which is always at about eye level, even if it's behind a hill or a house. Always sketch it in, however lightly. And even if you don't, always be aware of
where
the horizon line is in your picture . . .” What a revelation for the nine-year-old sketcher of city streets and Central Park paths!) The program's teaching plan was wholly imitative. Nagy had his sketch pad, his pencil, his eraser, and—mysteriously and most importantly—his paper stomp. (Could anyone draw anything without a paper stomp? Apparently Nagy didn't think so.) You had
your
sketch pad, pencil, eraser—and used your fingertip for the stomped-in shading (then got prints all
over the rest of the page). Nagy would draw a line or a shape; you would draw that line or that shape. (“If it doesn't look exactly like mine, don't worry. Just relax and do the best you can. You'll still be surprised at the results.”) And at half an hour's end, both Nagy and you would have a basket of flowers on a table, a boat hulk beached against a grassy dune (like I said, P-town), a dog sitting before a fireplace, or a small house at the end of a path among the trees and hills.