Maybe (Maybe Not) (13 page)

She said it kept her going to church for a long time.

G
rand Junction, Colorado. Hot afternoon in mid-July. Local newspaper headline says: POWER SHORTAGE IN GRAND JUNCTION.

In the men’s room in the local airport passenger terminal, another kind of power problem is in progress. From behind a stall door comes the sharp cry of a small child: “No, no, no, no, no. I won’t. I won’t.”

Followed by an imploring voice of a man under great pressure. “Please. Do it for Daddy?” and the little voice replies, “No. No, no, no, no, no.”

The seven men using the facilities turn their faces in unison toward the stall with what-the-hell looks. In the opening at the bottom of the door, two sets of feet can be seen. A small pair, sockless, in black patent-leather
sandals. And a much larger pair, in polished brown cowboy boots. The encounter continues:

“Look, I know you have to go. You go every day. If you don’t go now, you’ll have to go when we’re standing in line or after we’re strapped into our seats or when we’re thirty-five-thousand feet in the air, and you’ll probably mess your pants and we’ll have to clean you up when we’re way up there and you don’t want to have to do that and I don’t want to have to do that so why don’t you just go now like a good girl?”

“No. This is the boys’ place.”

“I know, but Daddy can’t go into the girls’ room.”

“No.”

“What will Mommy and Grandma say when we get off the plane and you’ve messed your pants and you’re crying and I’m mad? They won’t be glad to see us.”

“Yes, they will.”

“We’re going to miss our plane if you don’t go now.”

“I don’t care.”

“Am I going to have to spank you?”

“No.”

“Then please, please, at least try.”

“No.”

“If you’ll go, I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

“No.”

“I’ll buy you a present—you can pick it.”

“No.”

“I’ll give you a dollar.”

“No.”

“Please try—just as a favor to Daddy.”

“No.”

The big voice gets tough. “Well bygod you’ve just got to do it, that’s all there is to it. You’re going to sit on this pot until something happens.”

The sounds of struggle as the small feet disappear. “Noooooooooooooo.”

“You…little…you…little.… Aw, hell.”

The stall door swings open.

A five-year-old girl emerges in tears, her lips puckered in fierce refusal and her mind set in cement as she marches solemnly past the onlookers and out the door.

Her father follows. Big man in a black Stetson. Red-faced mad. Embarrassed. Defeated. Humiliated.

Nobody pushes him around. Nobody tells him “No.” But his five-year-old girl-child has done it. And she has also not done her “business.” And there’s going to be trouble in the air and a fracas when they get to Denver. He storms out the door after the child, fit to be tied.

The impromptu Committee of Wise Men who have witnessed this drama and who remain behind in the sudden quiet of the men’s john render their judgments.

“Sure glad I ain’t in his shoes.”

“Ought to take the big guy into the bar and buy him a drink.”

“Women—don’t know what’s worse trouble, the little ones or the big ones.”

“That kid’s gonna ’splode at thirty-five-thousand feet.”

A guy washing his hands speaks with the wisdom of Solomon.

“If it had been me, I’d have given her a banana split, a hundred dollars, all the presents she could carry, and a United States Savings Bond before I would have got on that plane with her.”

Later, I saw the man and his child headed back to the men’s room in a big hurry. The little girl’s disposal system had settled the matter. Now she
had
to go. The last I saw of father and daughter they were sitting side by side in silence. Just the two of them in the otherwise empty departure lounge.

They missed the plane.

I wish I could have heard him when he called his wife to explain.

Father and daughter will survive this ordeal.

Time will turn it into family legend.

This is the kind of story a father will save to tell about his daughter at the rehearsal dinner of her wedding. It will be funny, especially with the embellishments fathers are prone to make. It is she who will be
embarrassed this time. But the father will make it clear, as fathers sometimes do, that he’s proud of this independent-minded child—has always been—and the groom had better understand that he’s marrying a strong women who has been thinking for herself for a long time.

T
hough the formal study of music was not part of my education or family life, I have always wished otherwise—always yearned to speak the language and know the customs that would give me a passport to that land across the border separating an audience from the stage.

How I have wished to be able to play or even conduct—to be part of the orchestra somehow, and not forever confined to a seat in the audience!

In
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
, I mentioned my respect for symphonic music. Beethoven’s Ninth in particular. In my secret life, I fantasized that someday I would rent a hall, a symphony orchestra, and a great chorale—and personally conduct that giant piece of music
while simultaneously playing the kettledrum parts.

About a year after the publication of
Kindergarten
, I received an astonishing call from a representative of the Minneapolis Chamber Symphony. The fantasy in my book had been noted. Would I be interested in conducting at least the final movement of the Ninth? My presence would give them some useful public attention, and I could fulfill my dream. How about it?

I assumed they knew what they were doing, or they would not have asked.

They assumed I knew what I was doing, or I would not have written knowledgeably about Beethoven.

And I assumed that what I had always heard was true: that an orchestra really doesn’t need a conductor. All you had to do was give the downbeat and gyrate your arms in time to the music all the way to the end and take a bow.

As for Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony, I had read the available literature and attended live performances of the piece. On many occasions I had conducted it—while standing alone in my living room.

Of course. I could do this.

On behalf of my new self-image as the Legendary Fuljumowski, I accepted.

And thereby set in motion a wave of extraordinary events. It will take a while to tell you, but as in a symphony, all the small parts are necessary for the whole.

There were not just a
few
things I did not know about what I had got myself into. For one thing, the orchestra was in turmoil—in one of those seasons of self-destructive chaos that arts organizations are prone to endure. Its founding conductor had been fired by its board. Key musicians had resigned in protest. A new conductor had not yet been hired. Despite the catharsis and purge, planning for the coming orchestral season was necessarily being carried forward by an office staff who knew a lot about promotion but not as much about me and Beethoven’s Ninth as they should have.

By the time the new conductor arrived, the season had been announced. He and the orchestra were privately appalled to hear about me. The conductor came to visit me in Seattle, and with gentle forbearance he inquired:

“Just how well do you read an orchestral score, Mr. Fulghum?”

I replied, “I don’t read music at all. Is that really a problem?”

There was a long pause in the conversation.

He explained that the Ninth was so difficult that most professional conductors wouldn’t attempt it until they had years of experience.

He explained that in the final movement alone there were at least thirty-one places where the conductor had to stop and start the orchestra with sensitive changes in tempo.

He explained that a chamber orchestra did not normally
include the Ninth in its repertoire, since they had only twenty-six musicians and must add players for big pieces. Not only would there be fifty musicians to lead, but there were a hundred members of the chorus to conduct, plus four soloists. Though they were all professional musicians, very few, if any, of the players or singers had ever performed the Ninth. Even if they could play and sing the music, getting the group to come together as a cohesive ensemble would be a major task.

He explained that while I was doing so well in my living room waving my arms, I was about a half-second behind the music and could leave and go to the bathroom and come back and they would still be playing. In the real concert setting, the conductor must have the complete score in his head. In the real concert hall, the conductor must be thinking seconds ahead, knowing everything that had happened, was presently happening, and was going to happen in the next minute—all at once.

He explained until he reached a mental impasse.

“In sum, what you want to do is…is…is…so…so…completely …”

He couldn’t find the words.

“But I really, really want to do this,” I pleaded.

Another long pause in the conversation.

He said, and I quote directly: “We are in deep shit.”

He had found the right words, all right—he had
finally come up with a formal musical term I could fully comprehend.

To his surprise, and even to my own, I was not dissuaded.

“But
could
it be done—I mean, if I worked hard enough and long enough and wanted to do this badly enough? Is it
possible?”

“Maybe.”

We made a deal. He would help me in every way he could to learn conducting in the most elemental way. Which proved a little easier than I expected, since clarity and simplicity and consistency were far more important than dramatics.

I promised to do something I had not done since high school: to learn something—in that wonderful phrase—
by heart.
To memorize the piece so thoroughly it would always be a part of me.

And to translate the score into some idiosyncratic form I could follow.

We would give it six months. If I could pull it off, well and good. If not, I promised to become catastrophically ill a week before the performance and not show up at all.

When I went to work on the Ninth, I fell back on my college skills. On that attitude that says there is no intellectual task that cannot be performed between
noon on Sunday and a 9:00 A.M. Monday class, if that’s what stands between you and passing a course. If you’re worried enough and scared enough and desperate enough, you can do miraculous things with your mind.

Not only could you read
War and Peace
if you had to, you’d even consider writing a sequel to
War and Peace.
Thinking back on what I pulled off to get my B.A., Beethoven’s Ninth seemed less daunting. It also helped my morale when I learned that the first time Beethoven conducted it in rehearsal, he crashed it—never got through it. Beethoven bombed.

Learning the Ninth may have been the hardest and most exciting intellectual challenge of my life. It was so impossibly absurd a thing to attempt I could not turn away. How bad could it be? The worst I could do was bring about a hilarious debacle nobody would ever forget. At best, I could actually do it.

This was a
must.
A crazy, unimaginable, no-way-out
must.

One week before the concert, I presented myself to the maestro in a nervous-but-ready-as-I’ll-ever-be condition. We worked daily. While he played through the score on the piano, he cajoled and shouted and sang me up and down the changes.

He never said it, but I believe to this day he knew I couldn’t do it and he knew I knew I couldn’t do it,
but he would leave it to the disaster of the first rehearsal to speak the truth to me.

This man has a Yale Ph.D. and is a gentleman and a scholar. He also has a wicked sense of humor, so I also suspect he did
not
want to miss out on what promised to become one of the great comedy moments in recent symphonic history.

And speaking of truth, it was only at this stage that I learned about the distemper of the orchestra. The wounds of the war over the leadership and personnel changes in the orchestra were not healed. Contract negotiations between the union and the board had not been settled. And to top it off, the season would begin with the tacky idea of a chamber orchestra doing part of the Ninth with an amateur wannabe at the podium.