Playing Scared (2 page)

But as I came to the end of the first theme—a series of fast octave jumps, Cs to Gs to Cs—my wet fingers went sliding. I stopped for an instant, but a discernible instant. I was never one of those pianists who could glide past mistakes and make them invisible to all but the most knowledgeable listeners. I halted, then resumed, and for a while I was once again able to forget everything but the music, my fingers plunging into the densest passages of the piece. This was the part I loved, and for a few moments I was able to enter Mozart’s world. Sometimes I
thought these passages were the only thing that could explain myself to me, but as I moved through the music, or the music moved through me, some almost imperceptible signal registered in my brain, and I remembered where I was, remembered the adjudicator who was sitting alone in a gray suit at a table in the aisle, scratching silently with his pencil. My mother was there, too, hidden somewhere in the audience. She was listening attentively, critically, while, just where I could see them from the corner of my eye, my competitors hovered expectantly in the front row like—and now it dawned on me exactly whom they reminded me of—Madame Defarge and her fellow
tricoteuses
from
A Tale of Two Cities
, sitting back with their needles and yarn, knitting and watching greedily as the guillotine did its job.

That image precipitated another slip, but now I was close to the end and I pushed on to the place where my fingers dashed through a long run of notes like a sparkler going off. The lanced finger was tolling its own internal alarm bell:
Boil, boil, toil and trouble.
The final chords were here now, demanding their due, and then the piece was over.

I gave a hurried bow and rushed off the stage, searching out my mother as I headed toward my seat. The audience rushed by like trees along the highway when my father drove fast, passing every car just for the hell of it and yelling at me to get my arm inside unless I wanted to lose it. I wondered if it was because I was walking so fast, or were there tears in my eyes? I groped for my seat, and though I knew it was childish, that she would hate it, I couldn’t help myself: I turned back and sought out my mother’s face. When at last I lit on it, she refused to look at me. She sat erect, her posture as always
ramrod straight, staring ahead in the middle of a crowded row. I asked her with my eyes the only thing I cared about—
Are you mad at me?
—but she looked determinedly away, watching the boy who was next up onstage.

He was unknown to me, with a foreign-looking name, Kiran or something similar, and he was wonderful. Finally, here was someone who, even under pressure, played with the love I felt when I played by myself. I was so moved that, for once, I didn’t feel envy. What I thought was that I would happily gain fifty pounds if I could just make the piano sing like that. At that moment, it was the most valuable thing I could imagine for trade. A few months earlier, I had entered puberty and blossomed from a gawky kid with braids into a pudgy teenager with breasts. These days, when I came down to breakfast in a flannel nightgown, my parents almost in one breath urged me to go upstairs and “cover up.” The extra pounds clearly bothered my svelte mother, who referred to them as “big ones.” As in, “It looks like you’ve gained a few big ones.” The fantasy that I might trade fifty pounds to play like
that
—and without stage fright—seemed a good exchange.

Kiran was the last person to play, and for a long time after he finished, the adjudicator continued making notes. Now that the music was over, the scratch of his pencil filled the hall. At last, he approached and stood in front of us, a slight man who, with his thin hair and sharpened features, looked like Fred Astaire. He talked about the importance of performing and playing, but I knew it had nothing to do with me, and when he mentioned Kiran’s name and everyone applauded, I clapped along. The adjudicator talked some more, and then
I thought I heard my name. I couldn’t be sure, though. I had had a similar experience many times in school, where I habitually sat with a book open on my lap, just under the desktop, so immersed in the story and the characters that the teacher would sometimes call my name two or three times before I responded, not looking up until the sound of laughter broke the spell. It was like being under water.

Now, looking up, I realized with surprise that I had been named second-place winner. Apparently, the audience also was surprised. A noise like a collective gasp moved through the room, and the adjudicator raised a hand as if to stem a political revolt. Yes, he said, his voice loud now, she made mistakes. That is why she didn’t get first place. But she played the most musically of anyone here. It matters little if a musician plays perfectly but without feeling. And with that pronouncement, he beckoned me forward and presented me with a silver medal.

I was not nearly as gratified as my mother. She saw the prize—and more important, the adjudicator’s remarks—as vindication of everything that she had long been claiming for me. Her delight knew no bounds after she discovered that the adjudicator, Harold Weiss, was a member of the faculty of Eastman School of Music in Rochester, where her older sister, Madeline—my aunty Maddy—had once trained as a concert pianist. He had declared that I was “really musical,” and who recognized talent better than an Eastman professor? I was of course glad that I had made my mother so proud, but it didn’t seem like such a big deal. I might even have forgotten the whole episode if it had ended there. But its real significance would become clear only in retrospect.

Mother, Sara, brother Joseph, and Aunty Maddy
(Author’s family photo)

Two years after the competition in St. Catharines, when I was sixteen, my family—me, my brother, sister, and mother—moved into my aunt’s house in Hornell, a dreary town tucked in the Allegheny Mountains of western New York, about seventy-five miles from Rochester. Only my father stayed behind in Ontario, with the vague promise that he would follow as soon as he sold his furniture store. Though the town was bleak, the house was a country in and of itself, a mansion with a personality that seemed to shape our relationships. Stepping into its vestibule was, to us, who had never seen
Europe, as good as entering Versailles. We immediately removed our shoes because the floors of every room, except for the kitchen and bathrooms, were covered with beautiful Oriental rugs. The library was filled with leather-bound volumes of classic literature and out-of-date business tomes, and the top ledges of the bookshelves were lined with ivory busts of Greek gods and goddesses.

The parlor was so large that Aunty Maddy’s Steinway grand took up what seemed like a mere nook, and there were clocks everywhere: a porcelain clock from eighteenth-century France, hand-painted with fleurs-de-lis, that kept silent time and an enormous grandfather clock that ticked loudly and boomed the quarter hour, following you up the heavy staircase, past the landing with its stained-glass windows of the rising sun and looming moon, into the Queen’s Room, as we called it, where Aunty Maddy slept alone, ever since the death of Uncle Benny five years earlier, and the Princess Room, where my mother also now slept alone in a canopied bed.

When the sisters were together, everyone else was excluded. The two of them would disappear upstairs and sit on Maddy’s bed, poring over her treasures of gold and diamonds that she kept locked away in a brown leather traveler’s bag inside her closet. With the doors closed and the curtains drawn, the two sisters sealed off the world. They had grown up poor; their father had lost everything in the Depression, and my mother had combed the hills when she was a young girl, gathering dandelion greens for dinner. But Maddy, who was the oldest, had always had a penchant for making money. Whenever she babysat her little sister, she made a game of searching out
pennies and nickels below the curbs and trapped beneath the street grates. Maddy had luck, and she was generous with it. My mother, Polly, revered her. Though the move to Hornell clearly fulfilled her deepest wish, to be with her sister, it also suited her musical ambitions for me. For Maddy announced that she intended to send me to Eastman’s preparatory department. I was to be given opportunities I would never have had if we stayed in Port Colborne.

Before the beginning of the school year, my mother called Eastman and asked to speak to Mr. Weiss, reminding him of my performance a couple of years earlier in St. Catharines. Yes, he said, he did in fact remember it. He remembered me. And he agreed to take me on as a student. Which meant that every Saturday morning, I would leave Aunty Maddy’s house at seven o’clock, catch the bus in front of the little Greyhound storefront a block away, change buses in Dansville twenty miles away, and arrive in Rochester by ten. My lesson began at eleven, and when I knocked on Mr. Weiss’s studio door, he greeted me in his neat gray suit with a polite wave of the hand.

One of the first things he said when I walked into his studio, swinging the stiff calfskin “music case” that my aunt had bought me, was that my days of competition were over. For the next two years, until I turned eighteen and went off to college, I would spend Saturdays taking lessons, studying music history, theory, counterpoint, and harmony, participating in school recitals, playing in Eastman’s grand concert hall, and giving the occasional demonstration to visiting piano teachers in his studio.

Mr. Weiss emphasized technique. He could easily devote half the lesson to drilling me on scales, arpeggios, and diminished sevenths, and I practiced them at home at least an hour every day. My fingers flew. His ban on competition had eased some of my anxiety. There were annual evaluations before the head of the preparatory department and recitals in the grand concert hall, but these were low-key affairs compared with the frenzied competitions of my childhood. I liked to wander through the conservatory’s basement, listening to the din of scales, fugues, sonatas, and études that filtered out of the practice rooms and into the hallway. I could usually find an empty room where I, too, could practice or, more likely, crack open
Dombey and Son
or whatever Dickens novel I was reading at the time.

The last performance I ever gave was at my graduation recital in May 1971. It was a program of all the preparatory students, each of us required to play just one piece. Mine was Brahms’s Intermezzo in A Major, a dark and introspective work. From Brahms to Dickens, I loved everything to do with the nineteenth century, and I played well. When it was over, I relaxed in my seat. A violinist was now onstage, someone I recognized from my music appreciation class. She was playing a Mozart violin sonata, and I knew at once that her playing—her tone, her phrasing, her passion—was on a different order of magnitude from mine. I was reminded of Kiran, the pianist who had made such an enormous impression four years earlier. I knew in an instant that I could never play like this girl, no matter how much I practiced or how flawlessly I executed. That instant of comprehension was both transformative and distressing.

Father, Mother, and Aunty Maddy
(Author’s family photo)

I had played well enough to reignite the two sisters’ ambitions, however. For as soon as I left the recital hall, I saw them in a huddle with Mr. Weiss in the middle of the lobby. My mother motioned me over. “Would you like to go to Eastman’s instead of university?” she asked. “Mr. Weiss thinks—”

I didn’t wait to hear the rest. “Absolutely not,” I said. I had my own plans. I was going to become a writer. At that moment, I didn’t care if I ever played the piano again. It felt final—like leaving the church, turning away from the faith, and becoming a lapsed Catholic or nonobservant Jew. It was years before I understood how deeply music had permeated my identity, years before I recognized that the word
practice
had a wider meaning than time spent at the piano. It was almost an epiphany when, as an adult, I realized that the word was commonly used in connection with religion. But now I was eighteen and could worship—or not—wherever and whatever I chose.

In my senior year of college, I lived across the hall from a guy who wore desert boots and bright-colored T-shirts under his denim button-downs. I could always tell when he was around by the loud jazz that wafted out of his room. When I finally got up my nerve to knock on his door and ask about the record he was playing (Don Pullen’s
Solo Piano Album
), we became friends. I quickly learned that he was a music obsessive who had gone to Columbia College for one reason: to work at the university radio station, WKCR-FM, the beacon of New York City’s progressive jazz scene. When we met, Rich was its president.