Shortly after I turned fifteen, I decided to break up with my boyfriend, to make more time for my music. Bob was two years older than I was, and very earnest and sweet. I always knew when he was about to kiss me because he’d look left, then right, then left again, as if he were about to cross a busy street. Bob didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let him drive me to my piano lessons in Skokie. What did I mean, I needed to concentrate? And why wouldn’t I come to the phone if he called while I was practicing? I was always practicing. Why did I have to be so disciplined all the time?
“Practice some other time,” he’d say. “I miss you.”
We had pulled over by the side of the road somewhere, and I had just noticed that the sharp yellow slice of asphalt lit by our headlights seemed to be, well, moving. But it didn’t seem like the right moment to bring this up. Billy Joel was singing “Honesty” on Bob’s eight-track tape player, and Bob, who was crying, was telling me he would always think of me whenever he heard that song. I said, “But I’m being honest,” and he said, patiently—he was so very patient—“I know that. That’s why I said I’ll think of you.”
“Oh,” I said. I had not told him I was breaking up with him because I wanted to be a concert pianist. What I’d told him was that I had decided to become a nun. I’d used the nun story before, at parties on the bluff, when I hadn’t wanted to drink or do bong hits or make out with some gross senior I’d never seen before. It was the sort of announcement that took people by surprise. Nobody ever doubted it. It was as if you’d announced you had lice. Everybody just stepped way back.
Bob wiped his nose on his sleeve. I watched uneasily as the asphalt rippled outside my window. It looked like water streaming across the road, only thicker. Deeper.
“So how long have you known?” he finally said.
“Not long.”
“Then how can you be sure?”
“I just am,” I said, even though the only thing I was sure of right then was that I didn’t want to see him looking left, then right, then left anymore. The collar of his letterman’s jacket lay heavy across the back of my neck. He was already talking about his class ring, how he wanted me to help him pick it out, how good it would look on my finger. I knew that if we dated for another few months, we’d sleep together. If we slept together for the next two years, we’d get engaged. We’d get married the summer after graduation. Until then, every Saturday night, I’d have to whisper what we’d done together into the dark booth where Father Stone sat like a shadow behind the scrim, his pale ear like a bottomless cup.
“I’m sorry,” I said stupidly.
“I need some air,” Bob said.
He got out and started to walk, and I opened up my door, too, saying, “Wait.”
“What the hell’s all over the road?” Bob said.
It was frogs. Thousands upon thousands. The sound was overwhelming. We hadn’t heard anything in the car, what with the windows rolled up, and Billy Joel singing about everyone being so untrue.
“Don’t move,” I shouted to Bob.
“Aw, shit!” Bob said, taking a huge step toward the car. He balanced on one foot, still crying. The underside of his white high-top was dark with goo.
“You’re killing them!” I said.
“I can’t help it!”
He took another step. Now I was crying, too. The frogs kept coming out of the tall swampy grasses along the roadside, wave after wave, like dark water rising, like a plague sent from the wrathful God in whom we both absolutely believed.
On lesson days, I got to leave my last class early. Nothing could have pleased me more. I waited for my mother at the high school flagpole, in the center of the courtyard, in full view of enough classroom windows to discourage anybody from bothering me. Dear God, I’d pray, let her be on time today, let her get here before the bell rings. My mother came directly from the elementary school, which let out earlier than the high school, but every now and then she’d get held up by some minor emergency. I’d close my eyes, force myself to keep them closed until I’d counted ten. Likely as not, by the time I peeked, her little red Pinto would be slipping and sliding around the icy circular drive. She’d pull up beside me, lean across the passenger’s seat to thump the sticking door.
“How was school?” she’d say, but I’d get in without answering, wait for her to fill the silence. It was only gassing up at the key-pump west of town that I finally started to breathe again, to shed the boiled yellow light of the classroom, to dissolve the wrinkled pit of nervousness that never fully left my chest. Early in my sophomore year I’d had the misfortune to catch the attention of three members of the wrestling team. Now, they knocked their hips against me if they passed me in the stairwell; they reached into their pants and grabbed themselves when they saw me coming down the hall. After school, I walked home in the street as they trailed me on the sidewalks, chucking small stones and apple cores at the backs of my legs. “We’re coming for you, sweetheart,” they’d call, and then they’d make loud, smacking sounds against the palms of their hands. Raised on stories from the Lives of the Saints, stories in which girls were canonized for choosing death over rape, I lived in the fear that I, too, might be forced to choose. And if God decided to test me in this way, I knew that I would fail. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to finish high school. I wanted to get into a good conservatory. I wanted…
…but was hard to imagine what I wanted. I knew only what I didn’t want: this school, this dry-throated uneasiness, this feeling I had not yet learned to identify as rage. It was 1980, the year of giving nippers. One boy, cheered on by a larger group, would grab an unpopular kid’s nipple, twist it hard enough to leave a bruise that—according to locker room wisdom—could give you cancer. I’d gotten a nipper back in September, and the pain had brought me to my knees. Now I was watching that breast anxiously. I had memorized the Seven Deadly Warning Signs.
The two-hour trip to Skokie was a break from all that. After a day spent holding my arms against my sides, it felt glorious to gesture again, to lift the hood of the Pinto and check the oil and wiper fluid, to reach the squeegee across the windshield while my mother topped off the gas. We made another pit stop, this time for doughnuts and coffee. Then we followed the two-lane highway toward the interstate, accelerating through the sprawl of car dealerships and billboards. We passed the dying farmhouses, dark and still as ghosts; the broken-backed barns; the fundamentalist church. We passed the new subdivisions, with their orderly rows of aluminum prefabs, their identical shrubs and listless trees, their snow-covered flowerpots. Home-made signs promised ANTIQUES 4 SALE; FREE UGLY KITTENS; A TAIL TO REMEMBER TAXIDERMY. A chipped plaster Virgin gazed vaguely at the frozen ground. Nearby stood a wooden cutout of a woman jack-knifed at the waist, fat buttocks pointing at the road.
But as soon as we’d merged onto I-43, the landscape opened like the palm of a hand, fields rising and falling in a gentle undulation like the breathing of a sleeping child. Here were the working dairy farms, each with its various outbuildings, its orchards, its windbreak of pines. Many of the houses had been built from quarry stone, with wide porches and steeply pitched roofs, and the same families had lived in them for generations. My mother told me stories she hadn’t heard so much as come to know, stories that spread from person to person the way pollen spreads flower to flower. These stories belonged to the houses in the same way that the houses, the farms, belonged to the land. These stories walked the pastures and slept in the beds and followed the children to school. They were larger, more permanent, than the people who had lived them and, like the people who had lived them, they’d been shaped by the space into which they’d been born: narrow staircases and drafty porches, packed-earth basements and cold root cellars, the crops and the harvests and the winter isolations, the whims of the weather and the clean, wide distance of the sky.
We passed a brick house with a new vinyl addition that sat on its head like a terrible wig. My mother described the woman who had lived there, a woman originally from Chicago. She had been the first person in the county to get linoleum, which she’d ordered not only for the kitchen but the living room as well. Everybody had been invited to see it on the day it was installed: she’d served coffee and pop and sweet chunks of Bundt cake, and people all agreed how very nice it looked. But the woman hadn’t known how to care for it, and the following day, she ruined it with floor wax. Within an hour, she’d polished away every last bit of that glorious shine.
Several miles to the south stood another, smaller house with a great front porch tacked across the front of it like a grin. The man who lived there had married a beautiful woman, and this woman had given birth to three daughters, all of whom inherited their mother’s golden hair. One night, when the girls were teenagers, the man had come home drunk, raging. He’d had enough of their vanities, he said. He was going to cut their hair, kick the Devil out of their hearts. While he fetched the pinking shears from the woman’s sewing basket, she managed to hurry the girls from their bedroom and hide them under the porch. There, shivering in their bathrobes, they listened to their mother’s pleadings, the long silence that followed, and when she finally came to get them, she wore a kerchief over her head. The man sobered up and apologized, but the woman’s hair never grew back the way it had been. He brought home expensive conditioners, treatments, but the woman passed them along to her daughters instead. He’d been right, she told company as her husband stared into his hands. She had been vain. She was too old to worry over something as foolish as her hair. It wasn’t as if they were youngsters any-more—oh, no, they were finished with all that, you’d better believe it. She was done with all the nonsense that had gone with a pretty head of hair.
This was the landscape my mother painted for me, spreading memory after memory over everything I saw like watercolors over a photograph. Before I knew it, we’d be passing through the suburban sprawl north of Milwaukee, riding the twisting overpasses through the downtown. My mother talked on. Here and there, she’d tighten her grip on the wheel, stopping midsentence if she needed to change lanes, but her voice, when she continued, always was steady, and she’d pick up exactly where she’d left off. I pressed my forehead against the cool window and listened to her voice the way I might have listened to music, following its highs and lows, anticipating its pauses, the inevitable shifts in tone, for my mother spoke to me on these drives the way, some day, she would often speak on our long trips to the Mayo clinic: as if she hadn’t spoken to anyone in years. As if she believed she had only the length of this drive, this single journey, to tell me everything she’d learned over the course of a lifetime.
I listened, daydreamed, listened some more. The city streets below the interstate seemed to move like my mother’s sentences: long and straight, running parallel to each other without ever actually connecting, punctuated by parking lots and schools, the exclamation points of church steeples straining for the sky. The lake in the distance was pale and empty, a place where anything might be written, unlike the city with its high-rises and clamor, its layerings, its competing obligations. Old cathedrals lifted their chins beside new gas stations; strip malls quarreled with aging Victorians. Boxy brown apartment complexes and condos lined up on the horizon like soldiers on the march. This was an unfamiliar landscape, a language my mother didn’t speak. What we saw, we saw literally, with the concrete vision of the eye. Here a house was just a house and not the people who lived there. A bridge was only a bridge and not the story of its crossings.
Perhaps this was why, soon after we’d left Milwaukee behind, my mother’s gaze shifted inward. Now she talked about her childhood, about growing up the youngest of nine on the farm she still called home, about the way she and her sisters sang as they worked in the massive vegetable gardens, in the orchards, in the family’s fields, wearing dresses sewn from cotton feed sacks. She sang on Sundays, too, in the choir loft of Saint Nicholas Church, and she sang to herself at the preserving company, standing beside the conveyor belt, sorting clots of dirt and dead mice and twigs from the produce. She’d started working in the cannery fields the summer before her seventh birthday and, during our trips to Skokie, she took me along with her and her sisters. Mornings before dawn, we waited together, shivering in the early morning chill, for the truck that would shuttle us to the day’s work site. She showed me how to fight my way to the outside of the truckbed, where we could hang on to the wooden slats, bracing ourselves for balance. She taught me how to breathe through my mouth to avoid the sick-sweet smell of exhaust. How to duck the streams of tobacco juice that the driver spat from his open window.
“Well, no,” my mother said, surprised by my question, “nobody ever fell off the truck because, if they had, they would have been killed.” She mused, drifting briefly toward the guard rail, then jerked us back into our lane. “And sometimes we carried knives. We’d have landed on those knives, even if the fall itself hadn’t killed us.”
And what were the knives for?
“Spinach.” My mother bit deep into the word. “When it was in season. But mostly, we picked beans. Penny and a half a pound.”
How did the cannery know how much to pay each picker?
“Well, we each had a bucket and our own burlap bag,” my mother said. “You picked into your bucket, then emptied the bucket into your bag, and when it was full, you signaled the bean boss to come over with the scale. He’d tie the bag with twine and weigh it right there in front of you. Then he’d punch the weight on you card. You turned in that punch card to get your pay.”
Did my mother like the work?
“It didn’t matter if you liked it or not because everybody worked all the time. It’s just what people did. You didn’t even think about it. But I always preferred working outdoors to in, so I didn’t mind being a picker. And singing passed the time. We were always singing.”
What did they sing?
“Oh, whatever was popular then. The migrants sang too, but they had their own songs, you know, in Spanish.”
What were those songs about?
My mother didn’t know.
“I should have asked your Uncle Joey,” she said one day, a new variation on a story that, by now, I’d heard many times. “He probably could have told me.”
Oh?
That particular day it was snowing hard, and the windshield wipers kept freezing to the windshield. Every twenty minutes or so, I’d hold the wheel steady so my mother could roll down the window, lean out, and whack at them with the scraper.
Uncle Joey speaks Spanish?
“Well, I assume he does. His people come from Cuba. I guess I never asked.”
I thought about Uncle Joey, the first of my uncles I’d been able to tell apart from the others—not because he appeared any different, but because of his laugh. I’d always assumed he was a Luxemburger, like the rest of my uncles, like almost everyone we knew. Had he been a migrant worker?
“Oh, no, he’s from Chicago somewhere.”
Chicago?! Then how had he met my aunt?
“I honestly don’t remember,” my mother said. “I was just a little girl. The older ones remember these things, but they don’t talk around me.”
Why?
“I think it’s because of Daddy.”
She always drove more slowly when she spoke about serious things, speeding up again as she approached the good parts: punch lines, moments of revenge or revelation.
“It’s like we grew up in different families,” my mother said. “The older ones had a father; we younger ones never did. I’m the only one who can’t remember him at all.”
Cars swerved around us, blowing their horns. So many of my mother’s memories ended here, with her father’s absence, a space I imagined to be smooth and white, like Lake Michigan when it froze over in winter. At the center of all that whiteness was the day of my grandfather’s death. He’d been up on a wagon and had lost his balance. He’d fallen and landed on a pitchfork. Where on the farm had this happened? Who had been with him? Where, exactly, was he wounded? Did he die at home or at a hospital? Was he clearheaded? Was he able to tell his family good-bye?
My mother wasn’t sure. All she knew was that it had been an accident, nobody’s fault.
“But the insurance people ruled it self-inflicted,” she said, “because Grandma told them he’d jumped off the wagon. If she’d said fallen, the insurance would have paid, but English still wasn’t spoken much at home, and she didn’t know how to explain. Luxemburg was what they all spoke. They say I spoke it, too, when I was very young, before the second world war. Of course, after that, we only spoke English. You didn’t want people saying you weren’t American.”
Jumped instead of fallen. I was fascinated by the thought that so much could hinge on the difference of a single word.
“There’s one story I’ve heard about Daddy and me,” my mother said, “but I don’t know—maybe I made it up. He was lying on the bed, and everybody knew he was dying except me. I crawled up beside him and began to play with my doll. One of my sisters tried to pull me down, but he said, No, let her stay.”
Another swerve, another correction. The hum of the tires on the road.
“But that doesn’t make sense because later, after I was married, I heard somebody say he died at the hospital. I’d always thought he had died at home. I think I heard that he’d walked into the house after the accident, that it hadn’t seemed so bad at first, but I suppose—well, a pitchfork is filthy. They didn’t have antibiotics back then. I put a pitchfork through the top of my foot once, right through my boot, when I was eight. I was stacking hay. My foot swelled up like you wouldn’t believe.”
But I did believe. I could see the foot, pink as quartz, and how my grandmother had to force it down into the steaming pan of Epsom salts. I could see the feed sack dress my mother wore, printed with tiny, yellow flowers. I had watched as she’d chosen this pattern from the pile of sacks at the mill, wondering if her father would have liked it. Wondering what had been his favorite color.
Wondering about the sound of his voice, the sound of his laugh, the way he’d spoken her mother’s name.
I could see the room where my grandfather lay dying, forty-two years old with a house full of children, the older ones praying the rosary, the younger ones wide-eyed, confused. I could see the baby on the bed, playing with her doll. I could hear my grandfather’s voice: let her stay. I felt the emptiness of that bed, where my mother would sleep beside my grandmother until she turned thirteen. The bed where I, too, would sleep as a girl whenever I spent the night. The floury smell of my grandmother’s skin. The way she dressed behind the door, facing the wall, as she’d done all those years she’d shared the room with my mother—something I knew long before my mother told me.
Modesty: the first time I saw that word, it claimed the shape of my grandmother’s back, the worn gray sheen of her corset. Chastity: the nights I lay beside her listening to the chime of the clock, the creak of the walls. Sorrow: my body filling the long thin furrow my mother’s had made. My grandfather’s impression eroded now, lost, nowhere to be found in that bed.
My grandmother’s voice in the darkness, soft: Are you awake?
Yes, Grandma, I am.
She presses the warm beads of her rosary into my hand.
Whenever I cannot sleep, she says, I pray.
My new teacher, Miss Williams, was in her late twenties. In addition to managing a thriving studio, she was well known as an accompanist. Periodically, she’d cancel several weeks of lessons to go on tour with a singer or violinist, returning with grand stories of the road: lost instruments, horrible pianos, bizarre gifts sent backstage. In her absence I practiced independently, listened to the records she loaned me, and read the biographies of composers and virtuosi she recommended. In particular, I idolized Clara Weick Schumann. Despite undiagnosed pains in her arms, complications from numerous pregnancies, and a husband deteriorating in an asylum, she’d continued to compose and perform. I was fascinated by speculations that she might, after Robert Schumann’s death, have married Johannes Brahms. Instead, she’d chosen to devote the rest of her life to music alone.
Did I have such courage? Would I ever dare to sacrifice love for art? Nights, after I’d practiced particularly hard, my arms sometimes woke me with their dull ache. I’d move them around, seeking fresh, cool patches of sheet, and wonder if Clara had done the same thing, listening to the sound of carriages passing over the cobblestones of the Aldstadt. The truth was that I took pride in my painful arms. They were a badge of courage, evidence of my seriousness. Like Clara, I could rise above a trifling thing like pain, and this made me impatient whenever Miss Williams stopped my lessons—at least three times over the course of the two hours we’d spend together—to have me stand, raise my arms over my head, and stretch my neck from side to side. “Every half an hour,” she said. “It’s important to get in the habit of taking breaks. Set a timer so you don’t forget.”
Miss Williams had a number of tricks like these. She herself had bursitis in her shoulder, chronic tendinitis in her right pinky finger. After lessons, she’d leave the studio with my mother and me and walk us down the hall to the entryway, where there was a soft-drink machine. My mother would buy two ice-cold cans of Jolly Good Creme Soda, which I’d stuff down the sleeves of my coat, adjusting them until they pressed on the tenderest points of my forearms. Miss Williams, in the meantime, bought her own can, which she held against her neck as we said our goodbyes.
“Hazards of the trade,” she said. “You learn to live with such things.”
I’d been studying with Miss Williams for nearly two years when she decided to tour full time. Regretfully, she’d no longer be able to teach private students. Tears came into my eyes when she told us this.
“Can you recommend somebody else?” my mother said quickly.
“Yes and no,” Miss Williams said.
The woman she had in mind, Evelyn Austin Gall, taught in a nearby suburb. Mrs. Gall, Miss Williams warned, though an excellent teacher, was not the warm and fuzzy type. Now in her fifties, educated in Europe as a child prodigy, she’d had a respectable concert career before marrying late in life and settling down in the United States. We set up an audition in the fall of my junior year.
Mrs. Gall taught out of her palatial home in Highland Park, Illinois. The living room held two grand pianos, a marble fireplace, built-in bookshelves filled with hardback books. Ancestral portraits lined the walls. My mother and I had never seen anything like it. Mrs. Gall, it was clear, had never seen anything like either of us: she looked us up and down, taking in our frizzy perms, our unevenly worn shoes and puffy winter coats, our bitten fingernails. Still, she agreed to teach me for a six-month trial period. She suggested that, during that time, my mother park the Pinto in the service driveway. She also hinted that it might be better if we left our shoes at the door. My mother, I noticed, was staring at the bookshelves; I followed the direction of her gaze. There, in plain view, where anybody might see it, was a copy of The Joy of Sex.
My mother and I blushed identical shades of pink.
Lessons with Mrs. Gall did not include theory and counterpoint, as they had with Miss Williams. They did include the metronome. Mrs. Gall would set it at one speed, then demand I play at another. If I slowed down or speeded up, Mrs. Gall helped me out by beating the proper time on my shoulder with a flyswatter. She loved to talk about the concerts she’d given at my age, dropping names my mother and I did not know, referring to places we’d clearly never been, praising international restaurants, museums, and galleries we’d obviously never heard of. I left my lessons humiliated, frustrated, embarrassed for both my mother and me, and I retained very little of the excellent critiques she gave, though in college, I’d review the comments she’d written on my music, marveling at her insights, her ingenious fingerings. Several fingering sequences she’d credited to Beethoven himself. When I’d looked skeptical, she’d written out her pedagogical lineage, showing how it had come to her, and from whom. I did not question anything she said to me after that.
But I did not like her any better, did not feel comfortable in her presence. Keeping one eye on that flyswatter, I fumbled and stumbled through pieces that, at home, I could play easily. A few months later, I choked at the regional competition in which Mrs. Gall had entered me, using her highly visible and prestigious name. The harder I tried, the worse everything got. Mrs. Gall, observing the slippery slope of my emotional state, assigned less challenging pieces, but it was no use. I couldn’t play for her. I was afraid of her. I couldn’t absorb a single thing she said, and it was decided, by mutual consent, that Mrs. Gall and I would part ways.
At my last lesson, she was strangely kind. “Your talent is genuine. If you’d come to me five years sooner…” She sighed, then turned to my mother. “When the time comes for college applications, please know I’d be happy to write letters on her behalf.”
My mother smiled in the way that meant she was furious.
At the door, Mrs. Gall abruptly kissed me: another surprise. “You just haven’t had the opportunities,” she said. “But you’ll be very successful someday at whatever you do. I am certain of it.”
There was genuine goodwill in her eyes, but my mother was not at an angle to see it. Before we reached the car, she stopped me, pulled off her fuzzy mitten, and firmly rubbed the print of Mrs. Gall’s lipstick from my cheek.
Knowing what I now know, I see we had many options. There were excellent summer workshops at places like Oberlin and Bloomington; there were boarding schools, such as Interlochen. It is very possible that Mrs. Gall tried to tell us about such things, but the information would have been lost in the general cultural avalanche she released on us each week. And even if I had applied to Interlochen, or a summer workshop, I doubt my parents would have let me go. I was the sort of sixteen-year-old girl who looked like she was twelve, who spent weekends on her grandmother’s farm playing Scrabble and working in the garden. I served at church suppers. I dotted my i’s with little hearts. Drugs frightened me—I refused a Tic-Tac once at a party, afraid it might be something illegal. Occasionally, one of my friends got hold of a bottle of Tickle Pink, but I wouldn’t even take a sip after I’d read that each swallow of alcohol killed millions of brain cells. If I was going to be a concert pianist, I’d need every one.
Mrs. Gall had given us the name of someone at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, a man who no longer performed very much because of crippling arthritis in his fingers. However, neither my mother nor I was eager to take Mrs. Gall’s recommendation, and we decided, without ever discussing it, that we’d find another teacher on our own. My mother called every public school music teacher she knew, music directors at Catholic churches, youth orchestras around the Midwest. The name of one teacher kept coming up, a woman at a music conservatory conveniently located in Milwaukee. My first teacher had warned me away from the place, saying it was too large, too commercially oriented. But Miss Williams, who we’d contacted as well, had heard good things about Miss Martinique—though she was surprised to hear Miss Martinique was still teaching.
“She had a number of successful students in the past,” Miss Williams said. “But by now she must be in her eighties, at least. I didn’t think she was still teaching.”
This comforted me. I imagined somebody like Grandma Krier, somebody completely unlike Mrs. Gall. And I liked the idea of Milwaukee. With my new driver’s license, I could get there by myself, without inconveniencing my mother. To our surprise, Miss Martinique had openings in her studio schedule. I auditioned and was accepted.
At a glance, Miss Martinique looked about seventy, but when she sat down beside you at the piano, you saw she could easily be a thousand years old. Her skin was the color of a jack-o’-lantern, waxy-looking beneath a truly remarkable layer of base makeup and powder. Whenever she nodded, or gestured with a small, gnarled hand, a powdery aura shimmered all around her. Her auburn-colored wig had tendency to slip, covering one ear. Every now and then she’d poke a long-nailed finger underneath it—sckritch, sckritch—and it seemed as if the sound itself, rather than the delicate movement, was what released yet another marvelous cloud of dust. I have no doubt that, in her time, Miss Martinique had been a wonderful piano teacher, but at this point in her life she had forgotten nearly everything she’d ever known about the instrument. Her fingers could no longer function on the keys. She couldn’t see well enough to read music. Her vague comments on my scores frequently wandered off the page altogether.
“Lovely, that’s quite lovely,” was her only comment when, at our first lesson, I sat down and ravaged the first two movements of the Waldstein Sonata. I’d learned them on my own, since leaving Mrs. Gall. Though I’d longed to be told that I played it wonderfully, I knew in my bones that this wasn’t so. The piece was too difficult for me. I’d learned it just to be rebellious. I had fully expected to get knocked back down to size.
As I was driving home, two syllables rose into my throat: uh-oh.
Each week, Miss Martinique tried to pass our sixty-minute lesson in conversation. How was my trip into Milwaukee? Were the roads all right? And where was it I came from again? And did I have brothers and sisters? Her studio was filled with black-and-white photographs of former students, and soon I knew each of their stories by heart: how long they’d studied with Miss Martinique, what contests they’d gone on to win, which orchestras they’d eventually performed with. I might have half an hour left by the time we got down to the Waldstein. Miss Martinique had seen nothing wrong with assigning the third and fourth movements. She offered no guidance when it came to technique, interpretation, fingerings. “Lovely, that’s really quite lovely,” she’d said. At the end of each lesson, she’d tell me to “concentrate on your articulation.” And that was that.
I knew I was in trouble, but I couldn’t bear to admit to my parents how terrible Miss Martinique was, especially after my mother had spent so much time trying to find her. And the drive to Milwaukee was so much easier than going all the way to Chicago. And, frankly, saying I took lessons at a conservatory sounded so much more impressive than saying I took lessons in somebody’s house or rented studio. The conservatory sponsored frequent recitals, with printed programs to be circulated among relatives and friends, press releases to be sent to the local paper. My parents were pleased with the attention I was getting, proud of the compliments they received on my behalf.
And, last but not least, there was the matter of the grand piano, which my parents had bought for me when I was still studying with Mrs. Gall. The moment she’d heard I was playing on an unreliable upright, not even a reputable Yamaha but some brand she’d never heard of, she nearly melted my poor mother with one of her withering looks.
“No wonder the child is always in pain,” she said. “Ruining her fingers on a stiff, uneven keyboard! She must have a decent instrument, something with a lighter action, a consistent touch.”
My mother dared to wonder how much a “decent instrument” would cost.
“My dear,” Mrs. Gall said to her. “A good piano is not an expense. It is an investment.”
She called several dealers who, in turn, made several calls, who in turn set us up to see several used pianos. Only a Steinway grand would do, and it had to be built before the Depression, when the construction materials had been first rate. The most appropriate specimens seemed to be stored in Chicago warehouses, and these warehouses were located down in the Loop, where the buildings had boarded-up windows and the streets were strewn with trash. The piano dealers guided my mother and me into huge, creaking service elevators, led us though mazes of stacked furniture, unveiled pianos so massive I wondered how on earth they would fit in our living room. I’d had a shining black instrument in mind, but the one that felt and sounded best was a 1927 Steinway L, with a mahogany body and slightly yellowed, ivory keys. It had been fitted with a device that had turned it into a player piano; you fed what looked like Braille scrolls into a box underneath the keyboard, and the piano, as if by magic, played. Fortunately, this device, coupled with some other cosmetic damage, had made the piano less expensive than others we had seen.
“Excellent,” Mrs. Gall said.
By then, my father’s real estate company was established, and he’d built several apartment complexes that he managed himself, collecting his own rents, doing most of his own repairs. In the morning, I might see him in suit and tie, heading out for a meeting with the city planner; I might see him in a sports coat, about to take clients to a showing; I might see him in work pants and an old flannel shirt, setting out for a day of roofing, or digging a new sewer line. There was no job he wouldn’t do himself if he had the skills to do it, and there were few skills that his years on the farm had not taught him. He worked seven days a week, often twelve hours a day—except on winter afternoons when the Green Bay Packers played.
There was nothing in the hours either he or my mother kept to indicate they’d become financially secure. The son and daughter of farmers, the children of the Depression, they had kept all the habits of people who still hear the wolf outside the door. My mother saved all the slivers of soap and squished them into a lumpy, new bar. My father watered the ketchup until it was pink, the orange juice until it turned pale. The cords of our lamps and appliances looked like snakes after a meal, swollen fat with duct tape. Kids at school made fun of me for wearing the same clothes over and over again. As a child, my mother had only owned one dress, and it had been made from a cotton feed sack—to her, my three sweaters, three shirts, and two pairs of pants (plus my “nice dress” for Sundays and recitals) bordered on what she called “excess.” I owned one pair of shoes, plus a pair of gym sneakers. I owned one winter coat, and a light jacket for spring. My brother, being a boy, made do with even less. People, after all, were starving in the world; it was sinful to have too much. My father’s car, though well maintained, was still the same old Chevy. My mother’s Pinto had no heat and a broken radio.
But when my mother understood that I needed a better piano, she discussed it with my father, who considered it in his abstract way. One day, without warning, he wrote out the check and placed it in my hand.
“The key to doing good work is having the right tools for the job,” he said.
The piano took up three quarters of the living room, sprawling there like a Bengal tiger beneath the rummage sale prints, the silvery floral couch inherited from one of my father’s tenants. Whenever I thought about what it had cost, I vowed that I would never, in my entire life, ask for anything else again. So what if Miss Martinique was no rocket scientist. At least she didn’t hit me with a flyswatter, or rant and rave because I knew nothing about Impressionist painters. Besides, if I abandoned yet another instructor, perhaps my father would think I’d changed my mind, that I wasn’t really serious about music, that he and my mother had spent all that money on the grand piano for nothing.
It was a gray afternoon in May, three months since my last lesson with Mrs. Gall. I was butchering a Rachmaninoff étude when the telephone rang. Once, I wouldn’t have heard it; now, I leapt up to answer it, eager for the distraction.
“Hello?” I said, crimping the phone between my shoulder and neck so I could rest my arms.
It was Mrs. Gall. She did not bother with preliminaries. She’d happened to run into the teacher she’d recommended for me, the one at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. She was calling to find out why I’d never contacted him. Did I have another teacher?
I did.
Was I happy with this teacher?
I was silent for a moment. Then it all poured out. Mrs. Gall listened, then let me know, in no uncertain terms, how disappointed she was in me. Of course, I must immediately tell my mother about Miss Martinique. Why on earth would I think my mother—or my father, for that matter—wouldn’t want to know that something was the matter? Hadn’t my poor mother driven me hundreds of miles every week? Hadn’t my parents bought me a gorgeous piano? And here I was, wasting my time and their money. I was a junior in high school. Didn’t I realize my college auditions were only one year away?
“I’m going to make a few phone calls,” Mrs. Gall said, and hung up.
“Who was that?” my mother said, coming into the kitchen. Then she saw my face. “My goodness! What happened?”
I told her everything.
That night after supper, the phone rang again. I picked it up, cringing, expecting Mrs. Gall. Instead it was a soft-spoken man who greeted me by name, then asked to speak with my mother. His name was Mr. Celeste, and he taught piano at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. He also taught private lessons out of his home, in a suburb only thirty minutes south of Port Washington. He understood from Mrs. Gall that I was looking for a teacher who could help me prepare for college auditions, and he had an opening in his studio.
Would Ann be interested?
I was back on track.