The Changing of Keys, page 5
I did learn a good deal more from him than that. He was a marvelous teacher. But a lot of it I could have learned on my own in time. Gunter just helped speed things up a bit.
A great man, really. He had his own quirks as a pianist, as I soon realized—never could produce a truly perfect glissando and always stood on ritards so long I thought my teeth would decay during the wait—but he had a glorious dynamic range that reflected his tremendous feeling for the music. From the first, I felt we had that in common. The passion, you know.
He would work with me for an hour at the keyboard and then send me along to Mr. Dixon for a half-hour of theory. Dixon didn’t let me start composition right away—insisted that I be more familiar with all the “tools,” as he called them, before I dared actually to create anything with them. Pompous sort. In any event, it was all right with me—I had no particular wish to invent music, just to perform it.
When I had served my time with Dixon, I was grandly dismissed, feeling as diminished as one of his pet seventh chords, and went to meet Gunter in the lobby for the ride back up the North Shore. It was my favorite part of the day. We usually didn’t talk much—Gunter had to concentrate on his driving, with all the rush-hour traffic, which left me free to stare out the window as we went up Lake Shore Drive, gazing at the water, sometimes blue in early fall, later frozen solid in strange white ripples and slabs, most often gray under a gray sky. Once it began getting dark by 4:30, there was little to see but the lights in the wall of skyscrapers that lined the drive and the inky nothing of invisible lake that bordered its eastern edge.
At home, the nighttime had always turned the ocean surrounding our island into a vast void in which we seemed marooned. But beyond the blackness of this lake, as Gunter and I drove, I could sense the world.
I didn’t think much about it, though. There was too much to absorb in the course of what passed for a normal day. I became accustomed to the routine of the house, of course, to Gunter and Debbie, their schedules and moods. Even school, where I felt vaguely uneasy or worse all of the time, became a habitual nuisance, like a low-grade headache that you cease to notice until you have an idle moment. And I had few enough of those—after school, practice and homework, what few minutes were left to me before bed I usually gave over to working on my weekly letter home, including adding up what money I’d spent on necessaries and accounting for it to Mother. Unsurprisingly, she demanded accurate sums and I got into the habit of saving receipts and grudging extra pennies. Mother sent $50 a month for such expenses as she thought I deserved—new socks or a shirt, a ticket to something, sweets.
She was paying Gunter for my board and lessons, naturally, though what that amounted to was something she was no likelier to tell me than she was to divulge, say, the circumstances of my conception. Neither of which I desired to hear. I’d decided the day I stepped into Gunter’s house that I was glad she had sent me and the only further piece of information I wanted from her was that I could stay on. There was some cold gratification in making that clear to her—I wrote and phoned only as often as she expected me to and had gone so far as to ask the Hellmans if I could spend Christmas with them before Gunter mentioned that Mother had already purchased my ticket home for the holiday.
Another secret. It was rather like being a character in Dickens, finding out the pieces of my own life only when I pried or surprised them from the conspirators around me.
Gunter didn’t willingly withhold things from me, nor did Debbie, and their discomfort was evident when either felt obliged to impart some fact that mother had obviously insisted they conceal. But their complicity, forced or no, sent me into a rage that I didn’t always labor to hide from them. It was unfair to them and I knew it and would remember to save a scrap of my wrath for the twice-monthly call to my Miss Havisham, alone in her house with what I hoped were thick cobwebs of regret.
She registered no dismay when I told her that I would rather have stayed in Chicago than make the long trip home, merely noted that I had better get used to international travel if I were going to perform with orchestras around the world.
I said, at least then I’d be heading somewhere I wanted to go.
She didn’t reply and I waited for a long minute, wanting viciously to hear her sigh or sob or hang up—wanting any kind of feeling response, anything, and fearing it while I hoped.
I couldn’t outlast her, finally giving in and asking if she had heard what I said.
“No, you must learn to speak more distinctly on the telephone. Simon will meet you at the airport on the eighteenth. Give my regards to Gunter.”
She rang off. I walked upstairs to the attic and threw myself down on the bed.
The shadowy room slowly grew darker. I heard Debbie call me for dinner, but I couldn’t seem to answer or move. She called again a few minutes later and almost immediately after, I heard Gunter’s reverberant steps coming up the staircase like crescendo-ing tympani. I didn’t respond when he knocked and said my name before gently opening the door a crack.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Dinner is ready—will you come?”
“I guess not. Thanks.”
My face was to the opposite wall, but I felt him standing there looking at me before pushing the door all the way open and coming to the side of the bed.
“My boy, I think you are not ill. Did your call home upset you?”
Part of me wanted to tell him, wanted to tell him everything, how shut out Mother had always made me feel, how managed, how all the warmth in us both had seemed to die when my father did. I wanted to say my father’s name to Gunter. His name, that Mother never uttered. But I knew I would not and tears spilled out of my eyes and ran across the bridge of my nose and down into my ear and I knew I wouldn’t reach for a tissue, either.
Gunter pulled my desk chair close to the bed and sat down with his hand on my shoulder.
“My boy,” he said and that’s all he spoke for several minutes. I lay there with his hand warming my back, for once not intent on flinging myself away from everyone and everything, but suddenly willing just to lie there in silence and let my fury relax into weariness.
He spoke again. “When your father and I were at university together, we had a kind of game we played. We were the best of friends, but neither of us was much at talking about things that disturbed us or moved us, the deeper things. You know, I could go on all night about a great pint of beer or some instructor who had annoyed me, but I never could bring myself to talk about anything like love. Or fear. Or hurt. Your father was the same. So we got in the habit of playing music when we had something on our minds, some piece that spoke for us what we did not want to say.
“We had rented a piano together for our rooms, an old upright. It wasn’t good enough for serious practice, for that we went to the studios at the music school. But when we were at home, we could work out new pieces or just mess around, you know? And when I was angry or sad, I would play, oh, Shostakovich or a lied, whatever suited my mood. And your father would try to guess the piece and why I chose it.
“Sometimes, we would wind up laughing—I would crunch the keys and he would say, ‘Oh, Bruckner—well, your shoes must hurt and you want to throw them in the river.’ Or he would bang through some hair-raising Liszt and I would say, ‘Massive indigestion. Too many sausage rolls at dinner.’
“But I remember one time in our last year, I had proposed to Debbie and she had said no—did you know she turned me down twice before she finally said yes? Didn’t want to marry a man who was planning to go back to Germany, so I decided to move to America instead—and I was crushed into little fragments inside, like a bag of potato chips that someone had dropped a big rock on. It was all I could do just to walk home and fall into a chair. That’s where I was when your father came home from class, just sitting and staring at the floor. And he saw immediately that something was very wrong, but he didn’t speak. He just sat down at the piano and played the march-to-the-gallows section from Symphonie fantastique. But he was not mocking me—even in my coma of distress, I could hear the sympathy, the kindly humor, in his playing. I finally was able to look up at him and he was smiling sadly at me. He said, ‘Come on, then. Let’s have it.’
“So I got up and played the Das gras ist verdorret measures from Brahms, from the second movement of his German Requiem, because it was the most brokenhearted piece I knew and because that’s what I thought my life would be, that my future without Debbie was like brown, withered grass. I played the whole thing and when I was done, I looked up and your father had tears in his eyes. But he jumped up and grabbed my jacket and threw it at me and said, ‘You’ll win her yet. Let’s go get drunk.’”
Gunter rumbled out his rich, dark chuckle. “I thought he was a mind reader.”
He patted me again. “I am not a mind reader, but I can listen and I will answer questions as best I can.”
He stopped again. The room was nearly dark; a thin strip of light from the doorway formed a silvery bar down the wall near my head. The arch of my shoulder made a strange, humpy shadow at the bottom of it and the raised pattern of the bedspread rasped against my fingertips, irritating them. The only times I could remember being in bed at twilight were when I was ill, and I felt ill now, disoriented, with the lamplight seeping into the room from downstairs making the gloom even darker and the sounds from the kitchen seem remote and alien. The whole room felt surreal, as if I had a fever.
I couldn’t find the energy to speak or turn over, though I heard Gunter getting to his feet.
“Why don’t you sleep for a while?” he said softly. “We will keep your dinner warm for you.”
He stepped to the door.
“Gunter.”
I hadn’t meant to speak and the name came out in a sudden croak.
“Gunter, I think…I think my mother did not love my father. I think she doesn’t love me, either.”
I still faced the wall. I couldn’t bear to turn round. Tears were sliding down into my ear and hair again and I tried desperately to keep them out of my voice.
“She’s never treated me like anything but a…a project. She never cares what I think or feel about anything, just yanks me about like a pony that has to be put through its paces. My playing is the only thing that matters to her, not…me. I don’t want to go back there. I want to stay with you and Debbie.”
I covered my face with my hands to stop my words. I sounded like a pathetic sniveler to myself, a hopeless, whinging infant betraying its own weakness by bleating for attention. I could feel Gunter despising me like everyone else, despising me and my awful family and our failure to be anything resembling normal. I knew he’d want me to leave.
Gunter sat down on the bed next to me and gently pulled at my elbow.
“Look at me.”
I shook my head without turning.
“I must insist,” he said. “It’s important for you to see me when I say what I have to say.”
I didn’t want to. I never wanted to look at anyone ever again, but the firmness of his tone forced me to try to recapture some dignity and I half sat up, wiping my face with my sleeve and turning toward him, although I couldn’t bring myself to look in his eyes.
“I know that your mother’s ways have hurt you. You don’t understand them and she has not explained herself to you. But”—and Gunter gently pushed my shoulders back until my gaze met his—“I also know that your mother loves you very deeply. I see you don’t believe me, but after you have thought on this, maybe after you are grown, you may come to agree with me. You are young and have not yet recognized that, even though she seems cold and unbending, your mother is a sensitive woman, a woman who has been damaged and frightened by life. Your father’s death, her own deafness, things maybe that even I do not know. She has changed much since I first met her and I do not pretend to know her well anymore. But I know this, she married for love and she wanted you and she sent you here to us because she believed it would be good for you and I don’t mean just musically. I know it was painful for her to send you.
“Debbie and I love you like another son, but you must go home to her. There is much that only she can tell you. You must begin finding out.”
He patted my cheek and left the room.
I sat on the edge of the mattress with the streak of light striping my rumpled shirt and bitterness stabbed through me as if the light were a blade.
Mother could keep her secrets, keep them until she went from her silent life to her silent grave. What difference did it make if I knew them or not? The effect would still be the same. I could be in her house or on another continent—she would always keep me one thin white arm’s length away from her.
I was not going to beg her or anyone else for love, ever. I would keep my own secrets and need no one.
I stood abruptly and grabbed my jacket from the hook. If I was going to have to leave anyway, it might as well be now. I opened the dresser and took out the envelope of money I kept under the pile of handkerchiefs I never used. There was almost seventy dollars in it—Debbie and Gunter bought me so many incidentals that I had had little enough occasion to spend my allowance. I zipped it into my coat pocket and opened the window.
Gunter had told me that his boys used to try to sneak out by climbing down the tree outside when they thought their parents were asleep, to lark around the neighborhood in the summer. They never got far, apparently—Gunter said Debbie was always waiting for them at the base of the tree before they got low enough to jump—but it was nearly winter now, the other windows were closed and they wouldn’t be likely to think of me as a tree climber. In fact, I had never climbed one, but I hardly cared. I would do it somehow.
I unlatched the screen and carefully tugged it free of the window frame, nearly falling over the chair Gunter had moved near the bed as I backed up to pull the screen inside. I had to move the bedside table, too, for fear of knocking into the lamp as I put my leg over the sill. I hadn’t been able to force the sash up very far and had to bend nearly double to get my head under it, digging my nails into the wood of it in terror of falling. The tree did not stand right up against the house—the trunk was a good five feet away, but fairly sizable branches reached nearly to the wall, even up this high. I would have to lean out far enough to try to grasp one and swing from it until I could get my feet on another below.
Way below. The frosty grass, a strange orange in the ground-floor lamplight, looked like the surface of something about as distant as Venus and my stomach jangled with electrical shocks of fear. I was only half out of the window, afraid to let go the sill with my left hand long enough to stretch it toward the branch, afraid to launch myself into the void and find I did not have the strength to catch myself. I needed to free my other leg so I could push off, but the window opening was so narrow that I wouldn’t have room to sit on the sill in order to jump. I was going to have to slide down the house until I could get my toes on the top of the next window down and then dive sideways for a handhold on the tree.
I leaned far forward to ease my inside leg out the window behind me, bumping my head on the frame and getting hung up briefly on the lamp cord, but I got my foot into the opening and slipped down the bricks, gripping the sill with aching fingers while I pulled my leg through. My fingers were breaking—what if I damaged them? I wouldn’t be able to play!
And thought, “To hell with playing, it’s only Mother wants me to play,” and scraped my hand hard scrabbling along the sill as I fought viciously for a foothold. I wasn’t tall enough to get a good one; I inched one toe onto the ledge below and knew I’d have to let go with one arm and reach for the branch all in one motion or my other arm would give out and I’d fall for sure.
Out of the corner of my left eye, I could just glimpse a sturdy-enough-looking branch a little above my head—I would have to fly up to it. My foot was starting to cramp from being extended so far and the muscles in my right arm felt as if all the living fiber of them had begun to rip. I couldn’t wait another second.
A shower of paint chips and dirt fell into my eyes as I tore first my left hand and then my right from the sill and launched myself into the tree, blindly clutching where I thought the branch would be. My left hand grasped the thick part of the limb and slipped, scaring me so badly that when my right hand touched leaves, I nearly swam up the slender end of the branch like a lizard up the palm fronds at home. My feet found support and I clung to the trunk with one arm while the other bent the branch in frantic embrace.
As I hung there, panting, I saw a figure—Debbie or Gunter, I couldn’t tell—come to the downstairs window, casting a long shadow that paused as if listening. Maybe they would guess what I was trying to do. Maybe they would check my room to see. I had to hurry.
The shadow disappeared and I slid down the trunk, landed on a root, and twisted my ankle. I swore silently for a long moment, all the nastiest words I’d ever heard, until the pain lessened and I thought I could stand up. I had to limp a little, but I could walk and was creeping into the neighbor’s yard when I heard Gunter shout for me from my bedroom window.
I ran, hobbling. It was cold, made colder by the usual strong wind, and my ears stung as if grazed by shards of ice. The bare trees, intensely black in the harsh pools of street lighting, waved and rattled. With friendly, glowing windows in all the houses, the night was hardly frightening, but to be out at this hour and in these circumstances was undeniably queer and I felt, if not scared exactly, then certainly discomfited, as if I’d wakened in a strange room.
I listened to the soft thud of my trainers on the sidewalk, watching each panel of concrete as I passed, objectively noting the cracks and the bits of ice in them that were all that remained of the snowfall we’d had a week earlier. I had stood outside in it for a freezing hour, watching the flakes—the first I had ever seen—blow around me, shifting and swirling in synchronized harmony like a vast school of tiny white fish. They were fascinating and dizzying and damp and I had come back into the house with my hair coated in frigid drizzle that Debbie had toweled off, laughing. The next day, Gunter had ordered me into my new boots and parka and shown me how to make snowballs that I pitched for him to smash to powder with his softball bat. We shoveled the driveway and the walk and put down salt to keep the ice from forming. The neighbors must have done, as well—there was very little ice on the pavements, just streaks of dirty sand, mostly, rather like the island pavements. Rather like the pavement that went past our bungalow and ended near the sea.
