Limbo (10 page)

Did my mother like the work?

“It didn't matter if you liked it or not because everybody worked all the time. It's just what people did. You didn't even think about it. But I always preferred working outdoors to in, so I didn't mind being a picker. And singing passed the time. We were always singing.”

What did they sing?

“Oh, whatever was popular then. The migrants sang too, but they had their own songs, you know, in Spanish.”

What were those songs about?

My mother didn't know.

“I should have asked your Uncle Joey,” she said one day, a new variation on a story that, by now, I'd heard many times. “He probably could have told me.”

Oh?

That particular day it was snowing hard, and the windshield wipers kept freezing to the windshield. Every twenty minutes or so, I'd hold the wheel steady so my mother could roll down the window, lean out, and whack at them with the scraper.

Uncle Joey speaks
Spanish
?

“Well, I assume he does. His people come from Cuba. I guess I never asked.”

I thought about Uncle Joey, the first of my uncles I'd been able to tell apart from the others—not because he appeared any different, but because of his laugh. I'd always assumed he was a Luxemburger, like the rest of my uncles, like almost everyone we knew. Had he been a migrant worker?

“Oh, no, he's from Chicago somewhere.”

Chicago?! Then how had he met my aunt?

“I honestly don't remember,” my mother said. “I was just a little girl. The older ones remember these things, but they don't talk around me.”

Why?

“I think it's because of Daddy.”

She always drove more slowly when she spoke about serious things, speeding up again as she approached the good parts: punch lines, moments of revenge or revelation.

“It's like we grew up in different families,” my mother said. “The older ones had a father; we younger ones never did. I'm the only one who can't remember him at all.”

Cars swerved around us, blowing their horns. So many of my mother's memories ended here, with her father's absence, a space I imagined to be smooth and white, like Lake Michigan when it froze over in winter. At the center of all that whiteness was the day of my grandfather's death. He'd been up on a wagon and had lost his balance. He'd fallen and landed on a pitchfork. Where on the farm had this happened? Who had been with him? Where, exactly, was he wounded? Did he die at home or at a hospital? Was he clearheaded? Was he able to tell his family good-bye?

My mother wasn't sure. All she knew was that it had been an accident, nobody's fault.

“But the insurance people ruled it
self-inflicted
,” she said, “because Grandma told them he'd
jumped
off the wagon. If she'd said
fallen
, the insurance would have paid, but English still wasn't spoken much at home, and she didn't know how to explain. Luxemburg was what they all spoke. They say I spoke it, too, when I was very young,
before the second world war. Of course, after that, we only spoke English. You didn't want people saying you weren't American.”

Jumped
instead of
fallen
. I was fascinated by the thought that so much could hinge on the difference of a single word.

“There's one story I've heard about Daddy and me,” my mother said, “but I don't know—maybe I made it up. He was lying on the bed, and everybody knew he was dying except me. I crawled up beside him and began to play with my doll. One of my sisters tried to pull me down, but he said, No, let her stay.”

Another swerve, another correction. The hum of the tires on the road.

“But that doesn't make sense because later, after I was married, I heard somebody say he died at the hospital. I'd always thought he had died at home. I think I heard that he'd walked into the house after the accident, that it hadn't seemed so bad at first, but I suppose—well, a pitchfork is filthy. They didn't have antibiotics back then. I put a pitchfork through the top of my foot once, right through my boot, when I was eight. I was stacking hay. My foot swelled up like you wouldn't believe.”

But I did believe. I could see the foot, pink as quartz, and how my grandmother had to force it down into the steaming pan of Epsom salts. I could see the feed sack dress my mother wore, printed with tiny, yellow flowers. I
had watched as she'd chosen this pattern from the pile of sacks at the mill, wondering if her father would have liked it. Wondering what had been his favorite color.

Wondering about the sound of his voice, the sound of his laugh, the way he'd spoken her mother's name.

I could see the room where my grandfather lay dying, forty-two years old with a house full of children, the older ones praying the rosary, the younger ones wide-eyed, confused. I could see the baby on the bed, playing with her doll. I could hear my grandfather's voice:
let her stay
. I felt the emptiness of that bed, where my mother would sleep beside my grandmother until she turned thirteen. The bed where I, too, would sleep as a girl whenever I spent the night. The floury smell of my grandmother's skin. The way she dressed behind the door, facing the wall, as she'd done all those years she'd shared the room with my mother—something I knew long before my mother told me.

Modesty
: the first time I saw that word, it claimed the shape of my grandmother's back, the worn gray sheen of her corset.
Chastity
: the nights I lay beside her listening to the chime of the clock, the creak of the walls.
Sorrow
: my body filling the long thin furrow my mother's had made. My grandfather's impression eroded now, lost, nowhere to be found in that bed.

My grandmother's voice in the darkness, soft: Are you awake?

Yes, Grandma, I am.

She presses the warm beads of her rosary into my hand.

Whenever I cannot sleep, she says, I pray.

 

My new teacher
, Miss Williams, was in her late twenties. In addition to managing a thriving studio, she was well known as an accompanist. Periodically, she'd cancel several weeks of lessons to go on tour with a singer or violinist, returning with grand stories of the road: lost instruments, horrible pianos, bizarre gifts sent backstage. In her absence I practiced independently, listened to the records she loaned me, and read the biographies of composers and virtuosi she recommended. In particular, I idolized Clara Weick Schumann. Despite undiagnosed pains in her arms, complications from numerous pregnancies, and a husband deteriorating in an asylum, she'd continued to compose and perform. I was fascinated by speculations that she might, after Robert Schumann's death, have married Johannes Brahms. Instead, she'd chosen to devote the rest of her life to music alone.

Did I have such courage? Would I ever dare to sacrifice love for art? Nights, after I'd practiced particularly hard, my arms sometimes woke me with their dull ache. I'd move them around, seeking fresh, cool patches of sheet, and wonder if Clara had done the same thing, listening to the sound of carriages passing over the cobblestones of the Ald
stadt. The truth was that I took pride in my painful arms. They were a badge of courage, evidence of my seriousness. Like Clara, I could rise above a trifling thing like pain, and this made me impatient whenever Miss Williams stopped my lessons—at least three times over the course of the two hours we'd spend together—to have me stand, raise my arms over my head, and stretch my neck from side to side. “Every half an hour,” she said. “It's important to get in the habit of taking breaks. Set a timer so you don't forget.”

Miss Williams had a number of tricks like these. She herself had bursitis in her shoulder, chronic tendinitis in her right pinky finger. After lessons, she'd leave the studio with my mother and me and walk us down the hall to the entryway, where there was a soft-drink machine. My mother would buy two ice-cold cans of Jolly Good Creme Soda, which I'd stuff down the sleeves of my coat, adjusting them until they pressed on the tenderest points of my forearms. Miss Williams, in the meantime, bought her own can, which she held against her neck as we said our goodbyes.

“Hazards of the trade,” she said. “You learn to live with such things.”

I'd been studying with Miss Williams for nearly two years when she decided to tour full time. Regretfully, she'd no longer be able to teach private students. Tears came into my eyes when she told us this.

“Can you recommend somebody else?” my mother said quickly.

“Yes and no,” Miss Williams said.

The woman she had in mind, Evelyn Austin Gall, taught in a nearby suburb. Mrs. Gall, Miss Williams warned, though an excellent teacher, was not the warm and fuzzy type. Now in her fifties, educated in Europe as a child prodigy, she'd had a respectable concert career before marrying late in life and settling down in the United States. We set up an audition in the fall of my junior year.

Mrs. Gall taught out of her palatial home in Highland Park, Illinois. The living room held two grand pianos, a marble fireplace, built-in bookshelves filled with
hardback
books. Ancestral portraits lined the walls. My mother and I had never seen anything like it. Mrs. Gall, it was clear, had never seen anything like either of us: she looked us up and down, taking in our frizzy perms, our unevenly worn shoes and puffy winter coats, our bitten fingernails. Still, she agreed to teach me for a six-month trial period. She suggested that, during that time, my mother park the Pinto in the service driveway. She also hinted that it might be better if we left our shoes at the door. My mother, I noticed, was staring at the bookshelves; I followed the direction of her gaze. There, in plain view, where anybody might see it, was a copy of
The Joy of Sex
.

My mother and I blushed identical shades of pink.

Lessons with Mrs. Gall did not include theory and counterpoint, as they had with Miss Williams. They did include the metronome. Mrs. Gall would set it at one speed, then demand I play at another. If I slowed down or speeded up, Mrs. Gall helped me out by beating the proper time on my shoulder with a flyswatter. She loved to talk about the concerts she'd given at my age, dropping names my mother and I did not know, referring to places we'd clearly never been, praising international restaurants, museums, and galleries we'd obviously never heard of. I left my lessons humiliated, frustrated, embarrassed for both my mother and me, and I retained very little of the excellent critiques she gave, though in college, I'd review the comments she'd written on my music, marveling at her insights, her ingenious fingerings. Several fingering sequences she'd credited to Beethoven himself. When I'd looked skeptical, she'd written out her pedagogical lineage, showing how it had come to her, and from whom. I did not question anything she said to me after that.

But I did not like her any better, did not feel comfortable in her presence. Keeping one eye on that flyswatter, I fumbled and stumbled through pieces that, at home, I could play easily. A few months later, I choked at the regional competition in which Mrs. Gall had entered me, using her highly visible and prestigious name. The harder I tried, the worse everything got. Mrs. Gall, observing the slippery
slope of my emotional state, assigned less challenging pieces, but it was no use. I couldn't play for her. I was afraid of her. I couldn't absorb a single thing she said, and it was decided, by mutual consent, that Mrs. Gall and I would part ways.

At my last lesson, she was strangely kind. “Your talent is genuine. If you'd come to me five years sooner…” She sighed, then turned to my mother. “When the time comes for college applications, please know I'd be happy to write letters on her behalf.”

My mother smiled in the way that meant she was furious.

At the door, Mrs. Gall abruptly kissed me: another surprise. “You just haven't had the opportunities,” she said. “But you'll be very successful someday at whatever you do. I am certain of it.”

There was genuine goodwill in her eyes, but my mother was not at an angle to see it. Before we reached the car, she stopped me, pulled off her fuzzy mitten, and firmly rubbed the print of Mrs. Gall's lipstick from my cheek.

 

Knowing what I
now know, I see we had many options. There were excellent summer workshops at places like Oberlin and Bloomington; there were boarding schools, such as Interlochen. It is very possible that Mrs. Gall tried to tell us about such things, but the information would
have been lost in the general cultural avalanche she released on us each week. And even if I had applied to Interlochen, or a summer workshop, I doubt my parents would have let me go. I was the sort of sixteen-year-old girl who looked like she was twelve, who spent weekends on her grandmother's farm playing Scrabble and working in the garden. I served at church suppers. I dotted my i's with little hearts. Drugs frightened me—I refused a Tic-Tac once at a party, afraid it might be something illegal. Occasionally, one of my friends got hold of a bottle of Tickle Pink, but I wouldn't even take a sip after I'd read that each swallow of alcohol killed millions of brain cells. If I was going to be a concert pianist, I'd need every one.

Mrs. Gall had given us the name of someone at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, a man who no longer performed very much because of crippling arthritis in his fingers. However, neither my mother nor I was eager to take Mrs. Gall's recommendation, and we decided, without ever discussing it, that we'd find another teacher on our own. My mother called every public school music teacher she knew, music directors at Catholic churches, youth orchestras around the Midwest. The name of one teacher kept coming up, a woman at a music conservatory conveniently located in Milwaukee. My first teacher had warned me away from the place, saying it was too large, too commercially oriented. But Miss Williams, who we'd contacted as well, had heard
good things about Miss Martinique—though she was surprised to hear Miss Martinique was still teaching.