20

Coda

JOANNE

Just before Thanksgiving, en route home from a World Economic Forum meeting, I checked my e-mail at the Dubai airport and saw an urgent message from our quartet’s old cellist Miriam, half a world away. She had sent it at almost four o’clock in the morning her time.

The subject line read: “The time has arrived…”

Her message said that Mr. K had lost his battle with Parkinson’s disease. He had died a few hours before. He was eighty-one. Miriam, a devout mother of five who homeschooled her kids, noted the significance of the date: in the Catholic religion, it was the Feast Day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music. “Could there be any more appropriate send-off for a man who brought the gift of music to hundreds, if not thousands of lives?” she asked.

I didn’t know anything about saints. But I did know there was something I had to do. After I landed in New York the next day, still bleary and jet-lagged, I tossed my suitcase, unopened, onto my bed and started digging through my closets. I couldn’t remember where I had last stashed my old viola. But I needed to find out.

I wasn’t the only one. In the days and weeks that followed, the news of Mr. K’s passing traveled from student to student, from one generation to the next, from state to state and across the oceans. The tech executive in Virginia. The musician in San Francisco. The writer in Utah. Through Facebook and texts and e-mail came the call: it was time for us—Mr. K’s students and colleagues—to play one final concert together, this time for him.

The outpouring took me by surprise. Mr. K was the toughest teacher we ever had. He could be downright mean. If he was teaching today, he wouldn’t stand a chance. Parents would be outraged. They’d be calling and complaining. They’d yell at the principal if he singled out their kid for playing out of tune. They’d call a lawyer if he suggested their child was “deaf” or an “idyot.” Administrators would be pressured to fire him. Almost surely they would.

In the end, the fact is, Mr. K did push us hard: harder than our parents, harder than our other teachers. He scared the daylights out of us. Through sheer force of will, he made us better than we had any right to be.

It didn’t hit me, until then, how much we loved him for it.

I finally found my instrument, squeezed behind some old business suits that should have been given away ages ago. The case was cracked and coated with dust, untouched for more than a decade, since the day of Steph’s memorial service. The hinges creaked when I opened it. I was greeted by a cascade of loose horsehair—my bow a victim of mites, the repairman would later explain. It was pure agony to twist my fingers into position. But to my astonishment—and that of my teenage children—I could still manage a credible sound.

It turned out that there were one hundred people just like me. When I showed up at Hammarskjold Middle School to rehearse before that afternoon’s concert, there they were: four decades’ worth of former students and colleagues. There were lawyers and accountants, engineers and executives. There were people who hadn’t played in decades sitting alongside professional musicians like Melanie, who had flown in from Chicago with her musician husband and their three violinist children. There were multiple generations of music teachers. They flew in from California and Oregon, from Virginia and Massachusetts. They came with siblings and children; Miriam Cotter took her seat with thirteen other family members.

Across the room I spotted my old classmate Ted Kesler, the boy whom Mr. K picked on so relentlessly, who sat at the back of the first violin section. When I thought back to Mr. K at his toughest, Ted always came to mind. I could still see Mr. K forcing him to play alone—“Again! Again!”—while the rest of the kids in the orchestra watched. Ted was a college professor of education now. We greeted each other warmly, but I was puzzled. Why show up for a teacher who tortured him so?

“In some ways, Mr. K was a terrible match for me,” he readily conceded.

But then Ted told me something I didn’t know when we were kids. His mother had died when he was in grade school, before he moved to East Brunswick. His father was a Holocaust survivor who was raising four children on his own; other family members had perished in concentration camps. Mr. K showed his father a respect, a deference, that you didn’t see with the other parents. “Mr. K was hard on me in part because I was lost and aimless and unguided,” Ted said. “You know, he wanted more from me.” What’s more, “the orchestra kept me connected within a community,” he said. “It sustained me. All of those musicians in the group effort kept pushing me forward… That kept me going: the collaborative energy.”

I settled into my seat in the viola section beside Miriam’s younger brother Joe, now a music teacher, and looked around at old friends laughing and hugging and pulling out dusty student instruments they hadn’t touched in years. Music teacher Darlene Brandt, who Mr. K had taught in the 1950s, stood in a corner chatting with Melanie’s children, who he instructed fifty years later. In between were musicians of all ages and every conceivable level of ability, mixing easily with one another, comparing tales about our fearsome teacher.

Ted was right. Mr. K understood better than anyone the bond music creates among people who play it together. Beyond his bluster—and behind his wicked sense of humor and taste for Black Russians—perhaps that was his lesson all along.

He surely learned it the hard way. He had every reason to be bitter and self-pitying. The nightmarish childhood, the years in refugee camps, the heartbreak of his wife struck down by multiple sclerosis. All those years while we whined that he was riding us too hard, he was raising his daughters and caring for his sick wife on his own. Then there was Stephanie, murdered. There were the seven years, after she went missing, that he spent searching for her, never giving up hope until her remains were found.

Yet on that day, as all of us crowded onto the stage, we saw that the legacy he had left behind was pure joy. You could see it in the faces of the audience when the curtain rose for the performance that afternoon. You could hear it as Melanie, her three children, and her husband performed as a family. You could feel it when the full orchestra, led by Mr. K’s onetime protégé Dr. Sandra Dackow, poured itself into his favorite Tchaikovsky and Bach. It powered us through the lost years, the lack of rehearsal time, and the stray notes from us rustier alums.

When Sandy lifted her baton and we began to play, you have heard more polished performers in your life. You have heard more difficult music. But you have never heard any concert as heartfelt as this one. It was plain as could be to everyone in that concert hall, whether on the stage or in the audience: at the close of his life, Mr. K’s dreams—forged as a child, when he stood amid the rubble and listened to a German soldier play the violin—were fulfilled. His orchestra played on.

“We succeeded at first because we were afraid not to—and later because we knew this man believed we could play brilliantly, so we believed it ourselves,” Darlene told the crowd.

Afterward, Melanie took the stage to describe the proud father who waved like a maniac from a Lincoln Center balcony the first time she played there. Then she introduced her own performance, of his favorite piece, “Méditation” from Thaïs. “The last few times I visited my dad, I brought my violin and played for him for hours on end. I played because I knew he loved it,” she said softly.

“I’m really glad I had the chance to make music for him while he was still here to enjoy it. And now I would like to play for him just one last time, to say good-bye.”

Before the concert, half a dozen old friends had gathered for brunch at a local restaurant. Most of us hadn’t seen each other in decades. Melanie and her husband, Ed, were there, and so was Miriam Cotter. John Stine—the strapping cellist whose music-teacher mother was Mr. K’s best friend—was now a tech executive who sat on the board of his local symphony. Our old friend Michael Grossman was a professional violinist and teacher in Oregon. Miriam Perkoff was a professional cellist in San Francisco. Jonathan, who went on to Princeton and Yale Medical School, was a doctor in Boston.

Over heaping plates of scrambled eggs and pancakes, we reminisced about the old days, and compared notes about children and jobs and the cities in which we lived. Then the conversation shifted to Mr. K.

I put a question to the others, because I wasn’t sure of the answer myself: Why did we all feel drawn to come back? What was it about this one teacher?

The answers flew thick and fast.

“He taught me what discipline was,” Miriam Perkoff said.

“Self-confidence.”

“How to fail. The experience of having to pick yourself up afterward and move on.”

“Resilience.”

“My livelihood for the last thirty years. It was a gift from my teenage years with Jerry,” Michael said. “If I had to make a choice between performing and teaching, it’s so obvious it would be teaching. It’s really cool, this gift that keeps on giving.”

To those answers, I said, I would add one more: optimism.

If you wanted to, you could have looked around the table that day and seen a catalog of woe: Death. Divorce. Illness. Melanie’s parents and sister, gone. Michael’s wife, struck by cancer, had died barely a month before. But instead, as we pushed away the remnants of our scrambled eggs and pancakes, reluctant to leave, not wanting the moment to pass, our table was animated by laughter and warmth and hopefulness. There was a bond that decades of separation and a few gray hairs couldn’t break.

In a way, that was what Mr. K had been trying to teach us since we were children. I thought back to that day in high school, when Mr. K arranged for Melanie and our quartet to play at the funeral of the boy who had died in a horrific car crash. The boy had doted on his sister, a beginner violinist. We performed “Yesterday,” as a reminder of how much he loved to listen to her play.

After brunch, slowly pushing back our chairs, we gathered our instruments and headed to our old junior high school, where the orchestra would be gathering. In the cafeteria, we unpacked our instruments as the far-flung students arrived for Mr. K’s final concert.

That’s when suddenly we saw her, that little girl, now grown, a professional musician herself. She had never stopped thinking about her brother’s funeral, she told me. When she heard about this concert, she flew from Denver in the hope that she might find the musicians who played in his honor.

For thirty years, she told me, she had just wanted the chance to say thank you.

As did we all.