12

Yesterday

JOANNE

In high school, I started to suspect there was a method to Mr. K’s concertizing madness. One year, he hauled the high school orchestra all the way to West Virginia University, a twelve-hour bus ride, to perform for an audience that included prominent music professors.

On the way there, Stephanie took out her violin on the bus and entertained us with TV theme songs—The Love Boat, The Brady Bunch, whatever we called out to her, she nailed it. At a rest stop somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, I slid into a faux-leather booth at Bob’s Big Boy next to Melanie and Miriam. Through the big plate-glass window, we could see Jonathan, the class brain, picking at the ground with a tool he pulled from his pocket, searching for fossils.

“Where do you think you’ll go to college?” Melanie asked me.

“Don’t rush me!” I laughed.

Ever since our quartet had gotten back together again, I couldn’t help noticing a difference in our playing. We blended better than we had before, the music flowing a little more easily. Maybe it was because we were progressing as musicians, but more likely, we were growing up. College was getting closer, our shared childhood a little further away. The differences that had grown between Melanie and Miriam and me seemed suddenly childish and long ago.

In West Virginia, our quartet would be performing a piece that composer Philip Gordon had written especially for us, with each one of our personalities and abilities in mind. We knew we wouldn’t be playing together much longer. I gazed out the window at Jonathan in the parking lot, then looked from Melanie to Miriam across the table littered with hamburger scraps and a congealing side order of greasy fries.

“Time to go,” Mr. K ordered from the front of the room.

I took a last sip of my Coca-Cola and then, with a wink toward Miriam, poured the rest into her glass of milk. She upended a bottle of ketchup and conked it on the bottom until it spurted into the mix. Melanie picked up the salt and pepper shakers to add the finishing touch. Then we sat back to admire our masterpiece: a perfectly gross concoction, just like we used to make as little girls.

The West Virginia performance went well, so well that four orchestra members were awarded music scholarships there. Miriam was one of them, and so was our cellist friend, John Stine.

Mr. K, it turned out, had quietly been helping to arrange college music scholarships for his students for years. He also gave lessons to some of his students for free. Miriam told me about what she laughingly called the every-other-Simon rule—she and all six of her siblings studied privately with Mr. K, but he only charged for half of them.

Now Mr. K was focusing his attention on recruiting the next generation of students. He had lots of help, including from a new student teacher: Miss Lipman. Michele was following in his footsteps, studying music education while playing violin as concertmaster of the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra. Another of our teachers was Darlene Morrow Brandt; the violinist whom Mr. K had yelled at twenty years earlier for crying onstage was now one of his most trusted colleagues.

Mr. K looked for every angle, and every gimmick, to fill the pipeline with prospective new recruits. That’s why one day he handed Donald Meyers a red costume. We’re playing Orpheus in the Underworld, he said. We need a devil.

Don, a few years behind me, was one of the most impossible students Mr. K had ever had. His left thumb was always creeping up in an ungainly way alongside the neck of his violin. It drove Mr. K nuts. “I weel cut thumb off and feed eet to cheekens!” Mr. K would warn him. Don loved the violin madly anyway.

Don’s role was perfect for him. Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld—an operetta best known for giving the world the cancan—was a crowd favorite, especially for little kids. The piece starts slowly before picking up steam. Just as it winds up to the big cancan moment, Don as the devil ran onto the stage, pushing Mr. K off the podium. With theatrical melodrama worthy of an old vaudeville act, the two of them went at it in front of the audience, pushing and shoving, while the orchestra threw itself into an increasingly maniacal rendition of the dance, until Mr. K finally triumphed as the piece rushed to its climax.

Don Meyers never did make it beyond the back of the second violin section as a musician. But at the end of our orchestra concert that day, Mr. K ushered him to the front of the stage to take his solo bow.

The truth is, there weren’t too many stunts Mr. K wouldn’t try, if it would win him just one more young student. He was especially eager to recruit boys. When he took the high school orchestra to elementary schools, he always called on the two tallest, most handsome violinists to perform a duet. “Now eef any of you boys in the audience steel think violin eez for sissies,” he would say when they finished, “these two young men weel be happy to discuss weeth you afterward on the playground. Eef you dare.”

The high school boys, the braver ones, were the ones who pulled pranks on Mr. K. Before each concert, they would hide a Playboy magazine centerfold in his music. When he was in a good mood, he would chuckle and give the boys an appreciative wink. But once, when his mood was sour, the boys mistakenly slipped the centerfold into the middle of the most difficult piece. As Mr. K turned the page mid-symphony, his eyes widened, his face contorted with rage, and he furiously tore the centerfold out of his music with a grand sweep of his arm. As the orchestra played on, Playmate of the Year Miss 1978 fluttered slowly over the front rows of the startled audience.

Senior year, when auditions for regional orchestra rolled around, Mr. K won the trifecta. Melanie made concertmaster of the orchestra for the fourth year in a row. Miriam was named principal cellist. I was principal violist. Stephanie, in her first year of eligibility, was a first violinist. In all, twenty-three East Brunswick students made the cut. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising when the Music Teachers’ Association announced its choice to conduct the orchestra: Mr. K.

For our final concert, the high school orchestra chipped in to buy Mr. K a present: a new podium. It was fresh and clean and sturdy, with not a scuff on it. It had a brass plaque with his name engraved on the side. Best of all, it had carpeting on top to muffle the stomping we’d been listening to for the past ten years. He thanked us politely but stopped using it as soon as he could. He preferred the worn, old, hollow wooden box—the one on which I had first seen him as a kindergartener—where his footfalls echoed out as loud as gunshots.

As we barreled toward graduation, Mr. K offered to help me make an audition tape for college applications. Walking into his studio for the recording session, I was struck by how small and dark it was. I hadn’t played for him in this room for a long time now. It seemed a lifetime ago that I had moved on to lessons with Paul Doktor at his apartment in Manhattan, with its airy high-ceilinged living room and two walls of windows looking out over Broadway.

Perhaps noticing my unease, Mr. K asked me about my thoughts on college.

I told him about my visits to campuses, about the schools I liked most. I told him I wanted to be a journalist. Then I confessed that I narrowed down my college list based not on journalism courses but on music programs. I had talked it over with my parents. We figured that any of the places we visited would offer a fine education—but only a few would also offer the chance to play with a great student orchestra.

“I love music. That’s why I could never do it for a living,” I said. “It would ruin it for me.”

Mr. K nodded. He understood. Then he turned to the tape machine, his finger hovering over the “record” button, signaling the conversation was over.

“Again,” he said.

He spent hours with me making that tape. I think I thanked him when he was done, but I don’t remember. When it came time to get a recommendation letter for college, I didn’t ask him. I figured colleges would rather hear from somebody important. I asked Paul Doktor instead.

One of the last times the quartet performed together was during our senior year of high school. There was a terrible car crash that weekend, just around the corner from my house. Two classmates died in the wreck.

Mr. K called us together afterward to tell us we would be performing at the funeral of one of the boys, a popular athlete. We gathered in the small high school classroom Mr. K used for chamber music rehearsals. He handed us the music selection: the Beatles’ song “Yesterday.” The boy’s little sister was a beginner violinist, Mr. K explained. “He loved to listen to her play.” Our quartet would symbolize that devotion.

The funeral was during a school day. Melanie, Miriam, and I drove to the church in silence, with our teacher Darlene Brandt at the wheel of her car. She was going to fill in for Stephanie on second violin, since Steph was still in junior high school on the other side of town.

Inside the church, we set up in the balcony and waited for our cue. From our perch, we looked down on an unimaginable sight: a casket being carried by teenage pallbearers wearing their varsity jackets buttoned up to the neck. In the front of the church sat the boy’s sister, a beautiful little blond girl. At one point she turned around. She glanced up at us in the balcony. I could see she was looking straight into Melanie’s eyes.

None of us spoke. When it was time to play, we gently eased into the bittersweet strains of the song, trading melody and harmony, one to the other. There’s a bond created by musicians who play together. It was clear to us then that the bond wasn’t something that comes and goes or depends on your mood. It stays with you and gets stronger with time; the more you test it and try it and push it, the more you punish it even, the more powerful it becomes. We played the song, and, without exchanging a word, we mourned together.