You Should Have Known (8 page)

Henry's violin teacher lived in a shabby building on Morningside Drive, with a wide, dark lobby and a population of aging European refugees and Columbia professors. There was supposedly a doorman on duty at all times, but he seemed to be on break whenever they arrived, no matter what time of day that was. Grace pressed the intercom button just inside the outer doors and waited the usual minute or two for Mr. Rosenbaum to make his deliberate way from the lesson room to the kitchen phone, where he buzzed them in. In the creaking elevator, Henry removed his violin from its backpack configuration and gripped it properly by the handle. He seemed to use these last moments to prepare himself for the exacting Mr. Rosenbaum, who, over the years, had often reminded his students that others—more talented others, the implication was—were always in the wings, hoping to replace any who proved less gifted than originally thought or were not sufficiently devoted to practice. Henry was aware, because Grace had made him aware, that he had been granted his place on Vitaly Rosenbaum's roster because of his ability and promise, and paradoxically this seemed to mean more to him as the years passed. He did not want to lose his slot, Grace understood. He did not want the decision made for him.

“Good afternoon.” The violin teacher was waiting for them in his open doorway, the dim corridor of his apartment extending behind him. From the kitchen wafted an unmistakable smell of cabbage, part of Malka Rosenbaum's highly limited repertoire of straight-from-the-shtetl food.

“Good afternoon,” said Grace.

“Hi,” said Henry.

“You practice?” Vitaly Rosenbaum said immediately.

Henry nodded. “But I had a math test this morning I had to study for. So not last night.”

“Life is constant test,” he scolded predictably. “You can't stop practice for math. Music is good for math.”

Henry nodded. Over the years, he had also been told that music was good for history, literature, physical health, mental health, and, of course, math. But he also knew he had to study.

Grace didn't go with them into the lesson room. She took her customary seat in the hallway outside, a low and ornate wooden chair from an earlier era, when comfort in furniture was not highly prized, and took out her cell phone to check messages. There were two: one from Jonathan, to say he'd admitted two patients to the hospital that day and would not be home until late, and the other from one of her own patients, canceling an appointment for the following day without explanation or any mention of rescheduling. Grace frowned. She was wondering how worried to be about this woman, whose husband had chosen the previous session to admit that his self-termed “college experimentation” with other men had not ended in college but was in fact ongoing and not—to Grace's mind—experimental at all. The couple had been married for eight years and had five-year-old twin girls. After a moment, Grace found the woman's number and left a message to call her back.

From down the hall, she heard the music: Bach's Violin Sonata no. 1 in G Minor, the Siciliana movement. She listened for a moment, until Mr. Rosenbaum's voice broke into both her son's melodic line and her own distracted lull, then returned to her appointment book and drew a line through the canceled session. She had been working with the couple for about eight months, and her initial wariness about the husband had quickly focused on his sexual orientation. She had chosen not to challenge him about this, giving them a little time to see if it arose on its own, and indeed it had. There followed weeks and weeks of circular talk about his distance, his lack of connection, and his failure to nurture that had caused the wife to wilt in sadness on the oatmeal-colored sofa. And then, suddenly, she alluded to some moment in their first date or their second date, when he had mentioned a relationship with someone in his fraternity. “Well, I mean,” he had said, “I told you about that. I don't know why you're bringing it up now. I'd always been curious.”

Ping.
It was like a little chime going off in the room.

But it had been only one person. One
serious
person. The others…

Ping.

Oh please
, she thought now, doodling a nautilus around the crossed-out appointment. And here again, right now, on the less than comfortable chair in Vitaly Rosenbaum's cabbage-infused hallway on Morningside Heights, came the pounding frustration she had experienced that afternoon in her office. That so very familiar frustration.

To him, she might have said:
A few things to do and not to do if you're a gay man? Do: Be a gay man. Don't: Lie about being a gay man. Don't: Pretend not to be a gay man. Don't: Marry a woman and have children with her, unless she knows damn well that you're a gay man, and it's her own decision.

And to her:
When a man tells you he's gay, don't marry him. And yes, he told you. In his half-assed, dishonest, utterly irresponsible way, he told you. So don't say you didn't know. You should have known!

Grace closed her eyes. She had now been coming to this apartment for eight years, and every time she rounded the corner from 114th, she thought of her old adviser from graduate school, who had also lived on Morningside Drive, only two blocks north. Dr. Emily Rose—Mama Rose, as everyone called her, as she actually
encouraged
everyone to call her, something that still amazed Grace—had been a therapist from an earlier era: a time of long hugs when you arrived and longer ones when you departed, and (literal, physical) hand-holding, and more than a few of the accoutrements of the human potential movement, in which she had done what passed for her academic work on “transpersonal psychology.” Mama Rose had met with her students in the very room where she saw patients, a light-filled chamber overlooking Morningside Park, full of hanging spider plants and unframed abstract paintings and oversize kilim floor pillows on which everyone was expected to sit cross-legged, and whose every class, advisory meeting, and undoubtedly therapeutic session began with that soul-crunching (at least to Grace) embrace. So appallingly intrusive. For the longest time, she had pined for another adviser, but in the end she stayed, and for the worst of all reasons. Mama Rose had never, to her knowledge, given a single one of her students a grade lower than an A.

Padded footfalls in another part of the apartment. Malka Rosenbaum, seldom seen and generally silent when she did appear. Her husband had made it over first, after the war, but she had been netted by some iron curtain bureaucracy and stuck for years. They had missed their chance to have children, Grace supposed, but for some reason she felt less sympathy for them than for the many clients she had worked with who had struggled, or were struggling, with infertility. Vitaly had skill and passion for the violin, if not for his actual students, but he was a joyless person, and Malka was not a person at all. It wasn't their fault. They had been robbed and deeply harmed and seen terrible things, and while some people might still find a wellspring of life and joy for the world after that, most could not. The Rosenbaums, clearly, could not. When she thought of them caring for an infant, a toddler, a little child, she felt the slow pain of a dimming light.

Vitaly's next student, a thin Korean girl in a Barnard sweatshirt, her long hair encased in a pink scrunchie, arrived a few minutes before Henry's lesson ended and ducked past the chair where Grace was sitting, avoiding eye contact. She leaned against the wall in the narrow hallway, grimly looking over her music, and when Henry came out, the three of them did an awkward limbo around one another. Grace and Henry stepped out onto the landing to put on their coats.

“Okay?” said Grace.

“Okay.”

They got a cab on Broadway, headed south, and drove through the park to the East Side.

“I heard some very nice playing,” Grace said, mainly because she wanted him to speak to her.

Henry shrugged, his bony shoulders pointing through his sweater. “Not according to Mr. Rosenbaum.”

“No?” Grace asked.

Another shrug. A patient of Grace's had once joked that the shrug was the most accurate barometer of adolescence. More than one per hour signaled its onset. More than two per hour was a full-blown case. When words reemerged, if they ever did, the kid was coming out of it.

“I think he thinks I'm wasting his time. He just sits there with his eyes closed. It's not that he says I'm doing bad…”

“Badly,” Grace said softly. She couldn't help it.

“Badly. But he used to say more good stuff. You think he wants me to quit?”

Grace felt a pulse of distress go through her, like some radioactive dye injected into a vein, then shot out from the heart. She waited for it to subside. Vitaly Rosenbaum, old in years and far from robust in health, might very well wish to divest himself of those students least likely to perform at concert or even conservatory level, but he had said nothing to her.

“No, of course not,” she said as cheerily as she could. “Sweetie, you don't play for Mr. Rosenbaum. You owe him your respect and your hard work, but your relationship with music is between you and music.”

Though, even as she said it, she thought of the years, and the sweet sounds of his playing, and the pride she and Jonathan had felt, and yes, also the money. God, so much money. He couldn't quit. Didn't he love music? Didn't he love to play the violin? She realized suddenly that she didn't quite know, and didn't quite want to know.

Henry—now predictably—shrugged again. “Dad said I could quit, if I wanted.”

Shocked, Grace stared ahead, at the muted taxi TV screen, on which new Zagat reviews were listed
. L'Horloge
,
Casa Home
,
The Grange
. “Oh?” was all she could manage.

“Last summer. We were up at the lake, and I didn't bring my violin up with me. Remember?”

Grace remembered. She'd been annoyed about that. Those three weeks in the Connecticut house were three weeks of lost practice. “He asked me if I still liked it and I said I wasn't sure. He said life was too short to spend so much time on something I didn't like. He said my main responsibility was to myself, and lots of people go through their whole lives without learning that.”

Her head was spinning.
“My main responsibility is to myself”?
What did that mean? Of course he didn't feel that way. No one who did the work he did could feel that way. Jonathan gave everything to his patients and their families. He took their calls at all hours, got up from his bed to rush to the hospital, put in heartbreaking death vigils during which he frantically searched for some unexplored solution to the problem of a dying child, like a death row attorney on execution day. He was the opposite of a hedonist. He declined most pleasures and all luxuries. His life, and her life, was a life of service to terribly unhappy people, carefully balanced by the precious, personal joy of family love and the modest enjoyment of comforts.
My main responsibility is to myself?
Henry must have misunderstood. She felt as if she'd been hurled up out of the taxi and didn't know where to alight first—on her need to correct this notion as soon as possible, on her own guilt, on her sudden, overpowering resentment of Jonathan, or on the unfamiliarity of that. What had possessed him to say such a thing?

“Do you want to quit?” she asked, willing her voice to be steady.

Another shrug, but this one was softer, slower, as if Henry had tired himself out.

“Tell you what,” she said as the taxi turned south on Fifth Avenue, “let's talk about this again in a few months. It's a major decision, and you'd need to be really sure. Maybe there are other things we should be thinking about, like a different teacher. Or maybe there's another instrument you'd like to try.”

Though even this took a toll on her. The acerbic and depressive but highly sought Vitaly Rosenbaum was no ordinary violin teacher. Each August, he tested dozens and dozens of boys and girls from families who knew enough to find him, and he permitted just a few to become his students. He had taken Henry on as a four-year-old with a missing front tooth and big hands for his age and perfect pitch obtained from some unknown genetic source, certainly not his parents. And as for other instruments, Grace secretly disliked most of them. True, there was an upright piano in their apartment, a relic of her own enforced lessons as a child, but she had never enjoyed piano music and would have had the thing removed if two attempts to donate it had not proved so discouraging. (Shockingly, no one wanted an out-of-tune, circa 1965 piano of undistinguished make, and the cost of getting it out was totally obscene.) She did not enjoy brass music, woodwind music, or most other string instruments. She liked the violin, and she liked violinists, who had always seemed intent and serene to her. And smart. There had been a girl in her own Rearden class who disappeared early most afternoons, skipping sports practice and after-school clubs, apparently undaunted by her lack of school-related social life; she'd exuded a calmness and confidence Grace had admired. Then, one day when Grace was about ten years old, her mother had brought her to a small, music-burnished chamber adjacent to Carnegie Hall, and there she and a number of her classmates and their mothers all sat for an hour listening to this girl perform a concert of astoundingly complex music, accompanied by a very grown-up, very bald, and very fat pianist. The kids were fidgety in general, but the mothers, Grace's own mother in particular, were rapt. Afterward, Grace's mother had gone to speak to the mother of the girl, a regal woman in classic Chanel, and Grace had stayed in her seat, too embarrassed to congratulate her classmate. The girl had left after seventh grade, bound for homeschooling and an even more intense schedule of violin study, and Grace had lost track of her. But when the time came, she had wanted her own child to play the violin.

“Whatever,” she heard him say. Or thought she heard.