The Changing of Keys, page 7
Gunter had already sat at the table with me, and when Debbie joined us, he pulled an envelope from his pocket and put it in front of me.
“Go ahead, open it,” he said.
I ripped open the paper and removed a small folder. It was my airline ticket. I saw that it was round trip.
“Before we talk about tonight, I want you to know that you will be returning in January, if you care to,” Gunter said. “Did you think you were never coming back?”
I looked at him without speaking. Debbie started to reach across the table toward me, then stopped and wiped her eyes.
“We don’t want you to leave for good, honey.” She pressed her fist to her mouth for a moment. “We like having you here. We hope you’ve liked it, too. The idea was always for you to stay until you finish high school and we want that more than ever now that we’ve gotten to know you. So I don’t understand why you ran away tonight, as if you thought we wouldn’t care. Or as if you didn’t like us.”
Tears were collecting in her eyes again. “You put yourself in danger and you scared us badly. Why did you do that?”
Gunter’s face was grave. “Please try to explain.”
I stared with unfocused eyes into the short space between my still-zipped jacket and the table’s edge. “It isn’t that I don’t like you,” I muttered and fell silent again.
“Then what?” Debbie quavered.
“Are you angry with us?” Gunter asked slowly.
“Yes!” I burst out. I hadn’t been for hours, but suddenly I was, all over again. “I’m angry at you and I’m angry at my mother and I’m angry at everybody! Everybody seems to have a say over my life but me! Everybody always turns out to be in league with my mother, carrying out her schemes for me, keeping her secrets from me, never listening to what I want for myself. It’s my life, not hers! She had her own and I guess she messed it up and that’s her problem. But she doesn’t deserve to mess mine up, too, and neither do you! What do you really know about me, anyway? You don’t know how I feel or what I want or what I … what I’ve been through! She sent me to you so I’d have to be a pianist! Do you care that I don’t want to be a pianist? She doesn’t! She doesn’t know or care what I want to do! She thinks God chose me to play piano and she’s making sure that piano is my only choice! It’s nothing to her that I want to sing opera, like my father!”
I broke off, aghast, hearing my own words naked and screaming in my ears as if they were actual beings who had found themselves brutally stripped in public. I wanted to grab them back, grab them and hide them away again where they could be safe and mine again as they ought to have stayed, my own secret.
Gunter’s and Debbie’s faces seemed to reflect the shock they saw on my own and, for a second, they simply stared at me. Then they both rose, carefully, as though not to frighten me, and put their arms around me.
“It is all right, if you want to sing,” Gunter murmured. “It is all right. You can study voice as well as piano, like your father. We will not tell your mother—if you become sure that a singing career is what you want, then you can tell her.”
“She’ll know somehow,” I warned them in a whisper. The voice I wished to sing with had vanished.
I couldn’t explain it to them, about Mother’s God and his eye, the sun that relentlessly sought entry to our house like a prison-yard spotlight, no matter how tightly Mother fastened the shutters around her own shadowy, unspoken life. I realized then that I believed she regarded singing as a sin.
“I’m sure I’ll end up paying,” I finally said. I didn’t mean for the lessons.
VI
My father was born in Wales, in Caerphilly, where an ancient castle looms aloof and bleak over the town like a scarred specter of mysterious times and where everyone is always singing. The people of Wales sing the way other people dream or make love—to fill the darkness with magic.
My father sang with them, from almost his first breath—with his family, with the wireless that was always on in their tiny parlor, at church and at school, in Welsh, English, Latin and, much later, in Italian, German, French and Russian. His father had been a teacher, too, not of music but of science, in one of the grammar schools. And yet, in spite of a clear love of the natural world that kept his house full of curious insects, birds’ nests, stones, plants and varieties of fungi, preserved on pins in boxes or cluttering the shelves and tabletops, it was nonetheless music that was my grandfather’s true passion and he taught his two sons to need it as much as he did. They joined him in the glee clubs to which he belonged and learned to savor opera from attending local music-society performances and from the annual trips to Covent Garden that were the family’s much-saved-for and anticipated holiday treats.
I remember a photograph of them all from one of these pilgrimages: my grandmother, in her cloche hat, with her hand on the shoulder of her tall eldest; my father, a solemn six-year-old in a belted jacket and short pants, in the arms of his own dad, who smiled and gazed at his child instead of at the camera. The noble columns and pediment of the opera house rose behind them like the palace of heaven, as if this were where they would choose to come after death.
In the days before I was to fly home, Gunter told me, as my mother never had, that piano had come second for my father after singing. Yet he had had such a gift for it that he was admitted to university on a double scholarship as a member of the college choir and as a student of the legendary Basil Higgins, whose long lionization as the premiere pianist of his day had come to include growing renown as an opera and orchestral conductor.
Gunter had studied with Higgins, too—that was how he and my father had met. Gunter had been sent by his parents to Britain as a ten-year-old to escape the growing power of the Nazis and he had lived with an uncle who had immigrated years earlier. The uncle had become director in a lucrative chemist-supply business in London and was able to send Gunter to university when the time came. That bit of luck was considerably offset by the death of Gunter’s Jewish father in one of the camps and the destitution of his German Protestant mother, who arrived on her brother’s doorstep after the war with a few framed photographs and some documents showing her husband to be the owner of two shops and a house in Dresden, which had first been seized by the Reich and then demolished by Allied bombs.
Gunter was two years older than my father and, from the first, had looked after him like a protective brother, Gunter said one lightless afternoon at the conservatory, where we had paused during my work on a Rachmaninoff concerto to look out the window at a howling snowstorm that was making the air look like horizontal static on an old black-and-white telly. My father was shy and rather serious, but not at all difficult, apparently. Diffident, if anything, masking his intensity with a quiet, noncommittal air. Gunter said he’d had an unexpectedly creative sense of humor, though: When my father found out, a few months after first meeting Gunter, that his new friend’s birthday was coming up, he’d organized their musical mates into a sort of bell choir at their favorite pub, with pint glasses filled with beer to ring particular tones, like a harmonium. They’d tapped out “Happy Birthday” with butter knives and then helped Gunter quaff down all the beer.
That story was a tangent—what Gunter had actually been talking with me about was which one of the conservatory’s voice teachers I should study with. It meant about an hour’s extra lesson and practice time each day and more later if I really meant to go on with it. And he wasn’t about to let me neglect piano—he’d made that clear right away. Said he wasn’t going to let my mother and my talent down by easing up on me, even though he had agreed to my clandestine singing.
“Your father managed to do both in school and perhaps he would eventually have been able to create a sort of combined career for himself,” Gunter had mused to his reflection in the snow-whipped glass. “There are some singers who have become conductors, too, though not many who have been both singers and world-class pianists. Perhaps he would have decided to concentrate on one thing or the other, in time.”
“But he really wasn’t doing any of those things anymore,” I’d protested. “He was just teaching. Except for a piece or two he played on a school program once when I was six, I don’t remember him having a performing career at all.”
“No.” Gunter had glanced at me in a way that seemed apprehensive. “No, he had stopped for a while. He told me he did not want to have to travel a great deal while you were so small, or to leave your mother alone. It can be very hard on families, a musical career. Ask Debbie—I was gone as much as twenty weeks a year for most of our marriage and I could easily have been gone forty. It is important to take as many engagements as possible, but it is also important to be at home as much as possible. Compromise is difficult.”
Actually, Gunter had begun to be absent from home more often as the season progressed. He was trying to travel less in the summer, when he and Debbie were likelier to get long visits from their boys, which meant limiting himself to a few choice festival performances. But during the main concert seasons in Europe and the United States, he had closely scheduled flurries of appearances every three weeks or so and had to leave his students under the supervision of his graduate assistant, Wei Ling. This dour fellow always insisted, in a soft, polite, relentless voice, that I repeat the rhythmic complexities in my pieces over and over until I thought I would shove his head into the piano case and drop the lid on it out of sheer vexation.
Gunter had said that he would begin taking me with him on occasional concert trips, maybe in the next year. But until then, I had to put up with Ling, whom I preferred to call Ding-a, though not quite within his hearing.
I would add voice lessons to my schedule in January. Gunter had recommended Annalise Taylor, a rather famous mezzo who sang at the Met, but I didn’t care to study with a woman and had decided on Ralph Ennis, a youngish baritone who had just debuted at the Vienna Staatsoper and had a leaning toward Donizetti and Bizet. Gunter had no real objection; when I told him, he raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.
I was surreptitiously working on my voice at home, humming vocalises from my father’s books in the privacy of my attic room and occasionally attempting a song or two when the Hellmans were out. Letting them hear what I sounded like, even accidentally, was absolutely out of the question. I had no idea if my voice was good—or even promising—and I was not about let them judge that before I had judged it for myself. I would not have them comparing my singing ability with my father’s, even though I’d had no qualms at all about them measuring my pianistic skills against his. Piano had always come easily to me. I knew I was good and what people thought about it didn’t concern me much. Piano didn’t…matter. Singing did and I guarded it as I would a wound.
My father had loved to sing for others, Gunter said, and sang more readily than he would talk in company. It was the side of him that people who came to love him fell for first, before they knew anything else about him. Except for Mother, if I am to believe her own words. Or word. Conducting had drawn her to him, choral conducting, which, according to Gunter, my father had done merely to earn a living and stay in shape artistically while trying to find success as a singer and pianist. At least at that point, he’d had no intention of following Higgins’s footsteps to the podium, Gunter was quite sure. He’d had some singing engagements with smaller opera companies and with orchestras in Britain and on the continent and was constantly auditioning for more. Higgins’s influence had also gotten him on a variety of important piano-recital series and festival schedules that had him quickly gaining on Gunter who, having graduated first, had a head start on the professional circuit.
And then he had met my mother. Gunter, by then married to Debbie and living in the States, said he had gotten an overseas call one night, very rare in those days. My father had rung him up to say that he was getting married, too, and soon, to a girl who had been singing in his choir for only five months. Would Gunter be best man?
He had sounded blissful, Gunter said. And when Gunter and Debbie had flown to England for the wedding, they found my mother to be very pretty and rather quiet—though it was not the untroubled quiet of my father, but an intense kind of reserve she had, as if she were constantly holding back some passion that would have burst from a less self-willed person.
They had seemed to be very happy together, in spite of the hearing problem that had recently beset my mother, Gunter said. He remembered that, at the wedding dinner, a small but elegant party at a hotel near the church, Mother and he had talked a long time about my father’s career. She had been quite enthusiastic about it and had wanted Gunter to tell her as much as he knew about Higgins’s progress from piano virtuoso to conductor, as she thought my father was brilliant on the church-choir podium and would end up as music director at Bayreuth or Vienna. The idea of living abroad, she had said, had always appealed to her.
Well, that desire, at least, had been achieved, though perhaps not in the way she had hoped. I looked out the porthole of the plane as we circled the islands, dropping lower and lower toward the vivid green and white stepping stones they made across the turquoise sea.
Everything about them looked strangely just the same—the same catamarans bobbing in the water, the same sprawling hotels and clusters of shacks, the same ceremonial guards in pith helmets and jaguar skins at the foot of the drive leading to the royal governor’s mansion that Brownlea and I hurtled past in a cab on the way from the airport to catch the boat home.
Certainly, Brownlea hadn’t changed much. Perhaps the shirt was new. He was standing at the gate when I came through the door from the tarmac and gave me sort of a quick once-over as he extended his hand. He seemed a bit surprised when I shook it and asked how he’d been.
“Well enough, thanks. Classes a bit smaller than usual this year—government rotated some ministry families home and the new ones have only tiny children, generally, so less work for me, I’m happy to say, for a while.”
“Who left?”
“Let’s see, the Hurleys and the Haverfords, Atchesons, McGees and Denisons.”
“The Atchesons? So Colin’s gone?”
“Yes, and there’s been a great taking on about it at the school, too. Well, Colin is a nice, smart boy and will be missed, but he’s not God himself.”
Brownlea gave me a sidelong look. “And how are you?”
“Well enough.”
He didn’t pry. On the boat, he asked an offhand question about or two about Gunter’s playing style and repertoire and wondered how I’d taken to the Chicago weather, but he seemed determined to let me be, overall, and I was relieved to be allowed long silences. At last, one of our little island jitneys dropped us and my luggage on the pavement in front of Mother’s house.
Even before we stepped out of the car, I saw her dim form on the screened porch; it disappeared and a moment later the front door opened, but she didn’t come out. Simon grabbed the bags and went up the steps first, entering only long enough to greet my mother and tactfully decline her invitation to stay to dinner. He put down the bags, gave her his customary kiss on the cheek and set off walking home, cheerfully calling to me, “See you in a day or two” before striding away.
I thought it was good of him not to break into an actual run.
God’s eye glared down on me from above the oleanders. I forced myself to walk into the house, where the unspoken past, and my mother, waited.
It took my eyes a moment or two to adjust to the shadowy room and she continued to wait until I had focused on her before stepping forward with her hands tightly clasped in front of her and kissing my cheek fleetingly, as if afraid to leave a mark.
She spoke my name, overloud, and added, “Welcome home.”
“Hello, Mother.”
She smiled slightly at me. I don’t think I returned it.
“Did you have a good flight?”
“Fine, thanks. Not as bumpy as when I left. Shall I put the bags in my room?”
“Yes, all right.”
She must not have moved in the five minutes it took me to carry my luggage to the rear of the house and unpack my few stacks of clothes. One whole case was filled with music and the Christmas presents for her and Brownlea for which Debbie had helped me shop. I shoved it under the bed, reflexively checking for scorpions, and returned to the hall to find her standing in exactly the same place.
“Would you like a fizzy drink? Gunter tells me you enjoy the orange sort.”
Without waiting to hear my answer, she hurried into the kitchen and began filling a glass with ice and hissing soda.
I wandered into the living room, startled at how small it felt, and stood with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t want to sit down.
Mother brought me my drink. I said thanks and was startled again—there were a few lines of gray in her hair. I suddenly felt as if I had been away years, on another planet, and that everything around me now was old, old and dusty and petrified in time, unchanged but for a creeping decline, while I had been moving at the speed of light and was altered totally, yet had hardly aged a second.
“I thought I’d make snapper for tea. Does that sound all right? You can’t have had much seafood in Chicago. And for pudding, I got ice cream and those chocolate macaroons you like. Are you hungry yet or shall we eat at six, as usual?”
“I can wait.”
I explored the room, knowing that if I sat and looked at her, I would have to ask all the questions that had been hiving in my head like angry wasps since November, and I didn’t want to let them out just yet. I was afraid I’d lose control of them, lose the advantage of my justified wrath if I simply let them burst forth in a mass. I wanted to aim each one of them.
