15

Duets

JOANNE

In the decade after I graduated from high school, I only saw Mr. K once. Melanie gave a recital on the East Brunswick High School auditorium stage, presenting the program she had prepared for her New England Conservatory master’s degree in performance.

I brought along Tom, the boy I was dating, and introduced him to Mr. K at the punch-and-cookies reception in the old orchestra rehearsal room afterward. Mr. K gave Tom an only slightly suspicious “What are your intentions?” once-over before extending his hand. As Mr. K moved along to speak to other well-wishers, I made a quick exit. I had to get back to work.

There wasn’t much room for the viola in my new life as a Wall Street Journal reporter. I wrote about the insurance business, then about the real estate business. I was in awe of the other reporters in the newsroom. They were smart and funny; sometimes I just sat back in my cubicle and listened to them working their sources on the phone, then tried to mimic their technique for cajoling and coaxing information out of reluctant executives.

I worked on a manual typewriter, on carbon paper in triplicate—the Journal was among the last technological holdouts and still hadn’t warmed up to computers in the newsroom. My boss, Larry, marked up my copy with vast swaths of red pen, peppering me with fifty questions on stories that ran only fifteen sentences.

Where is this company based? What does it do? How old is the executive? Is he AN executive vice president or THE executive vice president? Is that earnings or revenue? Is she a “Miss” or a “Mrs.”? Do you realize you used twenty-seven semicolons in three paragraphs?

I had a lot to learn as a reporter and even more to learn as a business reporter. I didn’t know how to read a balance sheet and had taken only one semester of economics. The most useful skill I had acquired so far was a legacy from years with Mr. K: a thick skin. I didn’t get easily intimidated. Executives could bluff or badger or patronize me, or yell at me after a story ran, but whatever they dished out, I could take. I had already been toughened up. I had Mr. K to thank for that.

My musical activity steadily dwindled and soon consisted primarily of listening to my Walkman on the subway. I practiced my viola every once in a while and briefly played in a community orchestra, but it was dispiriting to realize that my technique was getting rusty and there weren’t enough after-work hours to fix it.

I did make time to volunteer with a local senior citizens group. Every Sunday, I spent the afternoon sitting in the musty living room of a housebound widow who was nearing one hundred years old. She couldn’t remember what she did yesterday or this morning, and she frequently forgot who I was. But every week she recounted vibrantly detailed stories about her childhood. She told me about her father, a Confederate soldier in the Civil War who lied about his age to enlist at fifteen; the southern plantation on which she grew up; her twelve older brothers. Her mother just kept on having babies until she finally got a girl.

The widow’s apartment, a study in faded elegance, was a small, dark two-bedroom on the second floor of a fancy building off Park Avenue. The living room faced an airshaft. When you looked out, you couldn’t tell what the weather was, or whether it was morning or night. She spoke in wistful detail about the eleven-room Park Avenue apartment she and her Harvard-educated lawyer husband shared until they lost everything and downsized during the Depression. Each week, before I left, she offered up her papery cheek for a kiss.

I couldn’t have told you why, but I enjoyed our visits at least as much as she did. They reminded me of something. It was only later that I realized I was re-creating those trips to nursing homes and hospitals with Mr. K. They going to want to touch you, to hug and kiss you, I could still hear him saying. Let them.

Most of my hours, though, were spent at work. My boss wisely paired me up with one of the most experienced reporters in the newsroom, a ferociously competitive fireball named Dan Hertzberg. I would trot after him, tripping over my scuffed black pumps, as he sped along the pockmarked sidewalks and through Wall Street canyons. One day, after we cowrote a short and not terribly momentous news story, I came running into the newsroom, waving a copy of the New York Times.

“Dan, Dan, our story is better than the Times’s story!”

Dan just looked at me in stony silence. Then he shot back: “Not better enough.”

I had to smile. Not better enough. That could have been Mr. K’s motto. Dan was articulating something that had been drilled into me for my entire life: Next time work harder. Again!

In the newsroom, my colleagues and I laughingly called that kind of thinking a “healthy neurosis,” but we meant it as a compliment: it was that quality of having just enough anxiety to triple-check a fact or make one more phone call. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously said, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

Kierkegaard had nothing on Mr. K, who could have taught the course on that one.

I would have mentioned that to Mr. K if I talked to him at all. But I didn’t. I was preoccupied with my job and my boyfriend and my friends and the new life I was making in New York City. Most days I worked until late at night. On occasional summer evenings I ran out by seven P.M. to go with Tom to hear the free New York Philharmonic concerts in the park. We listened to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff on a batik blanket while eating the romantic picnics he packed of champagne and cheese and fresh bread from Zabar’s delicatessen. When I turned twenty-five, I married him.

I tried to keep up with the viola. For a couple of months I played duets with a violist friend. Sometimes I made it to symphony concerts, but they frustrated me. I would watch the viola players, who usually were performing some orchestral work I had once played myself, and feel guilty: I should be practicing. When I was nine months pregnant, I briefly joined a quartet through the Ninety-Second Street Y, figuring I would get some time to play during maternity leave. Like many mothers-to-be, I was hopelessly naive about how life was about to change.

When Rebecca was born, and then Andrew two years later, it was clear my playing days were over. I shoved my viola in its case, the address of my college dormitory still stuck on front with peeling tape, into the back of my closet and forgot about it.

MELANIE

As the plane touches down in Leningrad, I glance apprehensively at my father next to me. “Are you okay, Daddy?”

He is clutching the armrests of his seat, his chin bobbing ever so slightly up and down. His eyes are fixed on the window. I follow his gaze. Uniformed soldiers are stationed on the tarmac outside, machine guns at their sides.

“Fine, fine,” he says with an awkward shake of his head, apparently intended to convey confidence. “It makes me uncomfortable to see all these guns, that’s all.”

My father has been ill at ease since we embarked on our trip. I’ve been with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for more than a year now, and I invited him to join me on the orchestra’s tour of the Soviet Union. He hasn’t been back to the Old Country since he fled Ukraine forty years earlier. The Communist threat has haunted him ever since. As a little girl, I thought his name was on a list somewhere in the country, and that he could be snatched away from me and banished to the gulags. But now, in 1990, the Soviet Union is in the thrall of glasnost. The Berlin Wall has fallen. Shouldn’t he have gotten over his fear by now?

Traveling together this way is new to us, a strange role reversal. We’re on my turf now. I give my dad instructions, anxious that he not misbehave somehow and embarrass me in front of my new colleagues. I feel my face flush when, at the airport, he struggles with the buttons on his coat. In line for security, while he fumbles with his carry-on bag—“eet’s new, the zippers are treecky”—I snap at him: “Hurry up, Daddy! We don’t want to get left behind the group.” I grab the bag away from him and close it myself, glancing around to make sure none of my colleagues have seen. Oh my God, he’s getting old, I think.

On the long flight over, my dad calms himself with a double vodka before falling into a fitful sleep. I stay awake, watching him covertly from behind my book. He has never had time or money for “gallivanting” all over the place like some people, as he always says. But he’s given up his orchestra conducting duties, passing his baton to a new generation, including Gordon Tedeschi: the boy who challenged me at ASTA when I was nine years old now directs the East Brunswick High School orchestra. My dad has cut back on his private teaching schedule, too. As I turn the pages of my book without reading them, I steal a glance at his snoring form. He has always taken energy from his students, as if they fueled him with some sort of hormone-amped adrenaline cocktail. Without them, he seems suddenly older, tired. A little bit lost.

The seat belt sign turns off. Around us, my colleagues are pulling on their shoes, digging in their bags for sweaters, and grabbing flute and violin cases out of the overhead bins. Some are grumbling because our trip is during the Thanksgiving holiday, and they resent being away from home. I understand their irritation, but how can they not be as excited as I am to go to an exotic foreign country, behind the Iron Curtain? In any case, even if I do miss Thanksgiving with my family, it will be worth it if I can make a good impression on the conductor and earn tenure with the orchestra when I become eligible at the end of my second year.

I put away my book and give my father a teasing grin as we edge down the aisle toward the cockpit door.

“And you’re sure your name isn’t on some list somewhere…?”

“God, I hope not!” He smiles weakly.

Leningrad is in the midst of a food shortage. The government is planning emergency food rationing. There are no restaurants to feed us, so the hotel serves dinner each night. As the old joke goes, the food is bad and there isn’t enough of it. But the vodka is plentiful. After dinner, my father makes himself at home with my orchestra colleagues at a makeshift bar he sets up in his room. “You must try my famous Black Russians,” he announces. “Vodka, Kahlua, and secret Ukrainian incantations.”

In Leningrad, the streets are rutted, and the few stores that are open have nothing on the shelves. In our concrete bunker of a hotel, the water in the bathroom faucet spurts out brown. On the streets, soldiers offer to sell us their medals and caps; on the train, the ticket taker tries to sell his uniform. Moscow, where we travel a few days later, isn’t much better. On Thanksgiving Day, our hotel gamely attempts to serve us a festive meal, notable mostly for the large rat that scampers across the middle of the dining room floor.

This tour will be one of the last for Chicago Symphony conductor Sir Georg Solti, who is nearing the end of what will be his twenty-two-year run as its maestro. Sir Georg thoroughly intimidates me. A Hungarian-born music legend, he, like my dad, fled his home country and ended up in Germany after the war. He built his conducting career there and at Covent Garden in London, before taking over the Chicago Symphony in 1969.

Like a benevolent monarch, Sir Georg is warm and affectionate but doesn’t mingle much with the rest of us. His thick Eastern European accent is different from my dad’s but just as difficult to decipher. He floats through our lives trailed by a flurry of attendants. I can’t imagine him buttering his own toast.

My dad and I are waiting to go down to the lobby when the elevator opens. There inside is Sir Georg himself. I clear my throat tentatively and introduce my father.

“You have a good girl there!” the maestro says, turning toward my dad.

My dad stares back blankly.

My father, who can so intimidate his students, has turned into a starstruck teenager right before my eyes. He looks mutely at Sir Georg. I worry briefly that he will lose his command of the English language as he moves his lips, trying to form the words he wants to say. His chin sways a bit from side to side.

“Thank you! Thees eez a wonderful opportunity for me, to travel weeth you and hear such great music!” he finally blurts out.

I exhale, relieved, but then my dad tumbles on. “I feel eet has galvanized me professionally!”

What?

Sir Georg smiles politely and steps off into the lobby.

“ ‘Galvanized professionally’?” I hiss at my dad. “Why did you have to say that? What were you thinking?”

My dad looks hurt. His head bobbles a bit as he glares at me. I have no idea what he was thinking. But I’m pretty sure I know what Sir Georg was thinking: Weird girl has weird father… no tenure for her!

On the overnight train ride from Leningrad to Moscow, we cross through snow-covered steppes, illuminated by moonlight. The trees are heavy with fresh snow. The scene from our window is straight out of the film Doctor Zhivago, which my dad and I have watched together many times.

Inexplicably, the train comes to a stop in the midst of the frozen landscape. Everyone else is asleep as we sit, transfixed, staring out the window. My dad begins to hum. We often play a game of “Name That Tune,” where I hum a few bars of whatever the Chicago Symphony will be performing that week and my dad guesses the name of the piece and the composer. His accuracy is uncanny. This time, I am the one who recognizes the song: “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago. I join in, harmonizing with him. Predictably, the water supply on the overheated train has run out. Porters come around offering big bottles of vodka instead. My father and I swish the glasses in our hands as we hum. “I feel like Strelnikov could appear at any moment,” he says, a reference to the film’s evil commissar.

My dad has had so much trepidation about this trip. Although he has told me very little about his childhood, I know that for his entire life, the Soviet Union has meant fear, death, men in uniform with bayonets. Yet coming here, he’s struck instead by the similarities with his home. He is enveloped in the warmth of the familiar—the snowy landscape, the white birch trees, the people, the meager food and plentiful vodka, and, especially, the music.

There is something utterly magical about bringing a piece of music home and performing it where it was born. It sounds different—more powerful—in its own home than it does anywhere else in the world. It comes alive, it’s almost tangible, a bridge not just to other people but across time and place. I imagine it must be like standing on magnetic north, holding a compass. There the needle spins wildly, as if brought to life. Playing the music of a particular people in its original place has that enchanted quality as well. My dad, in the audience, feels it as powerfully as I do onstage, as the symphony plays Shostakovich in the hall where Tchaikovsky himself was once the conductor.

At one of the concerts, my father sits in the audience next to a Soviet school music teacher. As a boy, he had refused to even speak Russian, though he knew the language better than any other. “The Russians came to our country,” he would say. “Let them speak our language.” But now in the audience, he falls easily into Russian with the teacher, who like him has a gravely ill family member, in her case a young daughter. The little girl’s condition is treatable, but the medication she needs isn’t available in the Soviet Union. My father jots down the teacher’s address before he leaves.

I can see that my dad, swept up in the music and the landscape, isn’t a scared little boy anymore. He’s faced his fear. He has finally moved on. It strikes me that he’s like that compass needle, coming alive as he comes home to his own true north. He’s traveled willingly into the heart of evil that has haunted him since childhood, only to realize that what he feared is just a ghost. The horror is in the past. The music and the landscape and the people that remain are the same as those he had so loved.

We talk quietly for hours, watching as the snow transforms from moonlit blue to sunlit pink. In the reflected glow of the dawn, his is the face of a man who has confronted the demons that have tortured him for his entire life. For the first time, the demons don’t win.

A few months later, my dad and Steph come to celebrate Easter with me in Chicago. Easter has always been one of my mom’s favorite holidays. When we were little, she dressed my sister and me in frills and made a big dinner of ham with cloves, with a festive Easter cake for dessert. But as my mother’s health declined, Baba took over the holiday.

Baba’s Ukrainian Easter was another matter entirely: a dark, days-long ritual that began with a mandatory egg-decorating session that entailed painting elaborate designs using beeswax. Ukrainian legend has it that if you don’t decorate eggs, an evil serpent will destroy the world. The holiday ended with hours in church, where we kneeled before the Plashchynytsia, a plastic tablecloth with a portrait of the crucified Jesus. Elderly women in babushkas, for whom kneeling wasn’t a sufficient display of devotion, crawled slowly on hands and knees from the back of the church all the way to the altar, then kissed each of the wounds on the portrait while crossing themselves profusely.

On a spring day, in my rented house in Chicago, I do my best to meld both my mom’s and Baba’s traditions for my family. Like my mom, I make glazed ham and, for dessert, a bunny-shaped cake. For Baba, I agree to take my father to a Ukrainian church across town. I don’t bother with the complicated egg-decorating ritual. I have to draw the line somewhere.

“It’s in a dicey neighborhood,” I tell my dad, as he scours a map to find the church Baba has specified. “Can’t you just tell Baba you went? Fib a little?”

My dad gives me a dark look. “She’s my mother. I can’t lie to her.”

It is a beautiful church. It’s relatively new, with a colorful mosaic above the entrance that depicts the baptism of the Ukrainians in 988 by Saints Vladimir and Olga. But when we file inside and take our seats for the service, we are surprised to find it almost empty.

“Ah! Damn!” My father has realized something.

“Okay, Daddy, spill,” Steph demands.

“Well… eet isn’t Easter here.”

There are only a handful of Ukrainian churches in the entire country. As it turns out, two of them are here on this street—and we’re in the wrong one. This one celebrates Easter according to the Orthodox calendar, not the Gregorian calendar used in the West. It was, in fact, built by a group of die-hard parishioners who were outraged when the other church switched calendars back in 1969.

After the service, Ed is incredulous. “Let me get this straight. At the Ukrainian Catholic church across the street it’s Easter? But at this one it isn’t? They couldn’t agree on what day to have Easter so they built a whole new church?”

“Apparently so,” my father says sheepishly. So much for celebrating Easter Ukrainian style. We haven’t decorated the eggs with beeswax, and now we haven’t made it to the right church. Baba would have been outraged at the bad luck of it all. Had she been here, she surely would have warned that evil spirits would now rain down upon us.

Instead, we laugh it off.

Over dinner at home, we tease my dad as we heap big helpings of ham and macaroni and cheese onto our plates. Afterward, Steph and I snuggle on the couch while my dad and Ed pick over the leftovers and share a nightcap. Steph lays her head in my lap and lets me stroke her velvety cheeks.

This is what I’ve been missing. My family.

My whole life, this is all that I’ve longed for. Finally, I feel like I have a normal, happy family. I sleep soundly that night.

At the airport the next morning, I can hardly let go of Steph, and I unexpectedly find myself sobbing. We talk about how we’ll see each other in August, when she, my dad, and I will spend some time together again at his house in New Jersey. I try to console myself that it’s only a few months away.

“Sounds like a plan,” Steph says, as her flight is called. “I love you, Mel. Say bye to old Ed for me. I’ll call you, okay?” She gives me a squeeze.

I wipe my eyes as I watch her walk down the jetway. She’s happily hugging a grocery bag of leftover ham and cake to her chest.

That is the last time I will see my sister.