B005S8O7YE EBOK (2 page)

I
n the first decade of the twentieth century a man and a woman from Poland, another man from Poland, and a woman from Russia undertook to cross a continent and an ocean with little more than a fierce determination to find a better life in America. They were my grandparents, and they found that better life in Brooklyn, New York. Had my grandparents not emigrated when they did, I might have been born Jewish in Eastern Europe during World War II, or I might not have been born at all. Instead, I was born in 1942 in New York City.

The story I heard was that when each of my grandparents landed on Ellis Island, an American immigration official wrote down his or her name. My paternal grandparents’ surname, Glayman (pronounced GLYE-man), was written down as Klein, which means “small” in German. Though not German, my grandfather, David, was of small stature and, at four foot eight, his young wife, Mollie, was even shorter. Their DNA and the similar stature of my maternal grandparents would foreclose a prepubescent dream of at least one of their future American granddaughters. Predestined
to reach a maximum adult height of five feet two inches, I would never grow up to become a tall, slender fashion model.

My name at birth was Carol Joan Klein. It would take me five decades to appreciate my surname and the history that came with it. Along the way I would add an “e” to Carol and acquire several more surnames.

Note to self: wanting to change your surname is not a good reason to get married.

My father’s name was Sidney Klein. Everyone called him Sid. My mother’s name was Eugenia Cammer. Everyone called her Genie. They met in an elevator at Brooklyn College in 1936. Dad was studying chemistry; Mom’s majors were English and drama. They were married on October 6, 1937, after which my mother rechanneled her considerable ambition and intelligence into running a household on a weekly budget of fifteen dollars. My dad left college before graduating and worked briefly as a radio announcer, thereby setting the precedent of a Klein in front of a microphone. He didn’t stay in that job very long. With job security on his mind during the Great Depression, he went into civil service and found his calling as a New York City firefighter.

My dad liked helping people and solving problems. He did both every time he pulled someone out of a burning building. My father’s captain proudly described him to my mother as “always first on the nozzle,” a revelation that brought little comfort to a fireman’s wife. Though many of his colleagues died saving others, my dad lived for many years after his retirement. When I was very young, his shift at the firehouse kept him away from home for several days and nights at a time. I missed him, but the upside was that we were able to do things as a family on his days off. Sometimes we went to Coney Island, a short bus ride from our house, where Mommy and Daddy would sit on a bench nearby while I played in the cool, damp sand under the boardwalk. After a while
I’d climb up onto the splintery wood and let Mommy brush the sand off me. Then I’d skip along the boardwalk between Mommy and Daddy, holding both their hands, until we arrived at the stand where Daddy always gave me a nickel to buy a huge sugary mound of cotton candy.

But the thing I remember most about Coney Island is Daddy, Mommy, and me crowded into one of those primitive audio recording booths to record my voice on a black acetate disc so they could preserve the moment for posterity. That was my first recording experience. I no longer have that disc, but I still remember my three-year-old baby voice saying, “My name is Carol Joan Klein, and I live at 2466 East 24th Street in Brooklyn, New York.”

I sang
“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
And then I began to cry.

O
n December 7, 1941, a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese military effectively ended the debate about whether America should engage more actively in the war against Germany and Japan. I was born two months later in Manhattan on February 9, 1942.

Because firefighters were essential on the home front, my dad didn’t serve in the military, but he, too, put his life on the line every day. My mother managed our family’s money and took care of the semidetached two-family house in Brooklyn on which she and my father had put a down payment after I was born. My mother also took care of me, which I’m told was a full-time job. The rent they collected from the family upstairs was negligible. My father refused to go on relief and my mother refused to go into debt. To make the mortgage payments, my mother shopped with an eye for bargains for everything from food and clothing to laundry soap and tooth powder. She cooked, cleaned, and washed and hung my dad’s sooty clothes on a clothesline with wooden clothespins that lent themselves to being painted and decorated with bits of cloth to look like tiny men and women. In the spring and summer, my mother
tended her Victory Garden in our backyard. That’s where one of my earliest musical memories took place.

It’s still wartime. I’m three years old, and I’m supposed to be helping my mother in the garden, but on this sunny spring day I’m easily distracted by my desire to gambol around the yard and climb up on things on which I shouldn’t be climbing. Our neighbors, Mrs. Butler and Mrs. Bursch, call out to my mother whenever they think I’m in danger, which is approximately every two minutes.

Mrs. Butler lives upstairs from Mrs. Bursch. They’re always together. “Butler and Bursch” is how we think of the single unit the two women seem to have become. Mr. Butler and Mr. Bursch exist but are rarely seen. In good weather, Butler and Bursch sit on a bench across the street next to the public playground. On this occasion they sit on painted metal chairs on the back porch outside Bursch’s kitchen while giving my mother a running commentary on my activities. Clods of freshly watered dirt squish between my bare toes as I cavort among the vegetables and help my mother pull weeds. I pirouette around the garden and sing along with my mother while the radio plays one of the popular songs of the day,
“Bell Bottom Trousers (Coat of Navy Blue).”
I’m too young to understand the meaning of the words, but I sing and dance to the catchy chorus with gusto while my mother alternates between singing and laughing.

When the song is over, Bursch exclaims to my mother, “Isn’t she cute! Mark my words, Genie. Someday she’ll be famous.”

Butler is less optimistic. “I don’t like those popular songs. I wish they’d play real music like Caruso sings.”

The first piece of furniture in my parents’ home was a piano. My mom had deeply disliked the piano lessons my grandmother forced her to take, but she appreciated them later when she found that she could earn fifty cents a lesson teaching piano to neighborhood children. And when she discovered my insatiable curiosity about
music, she was able to pass her knowledge on to me. From the time I could stand on tiptoe to reach the piano keys, I was relentless in asking my mother to teach me the names of notes. The first note she taught me was D above middle C, which I played repeatedly in various rhythmic configurations.

D. D. D. D.

D.D.D. D.D.D.

D… D-D…

D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D.

It was clear that she would have to teach me the rest of the notes just to get some relief.

Although my father’s family had been too poor to afford music lessons, one of my Klein aunts had taught herself to pick out chords on a piano at a friend’s home, and she could sing almost as beautifully as if she had been trained. Though my dad had “an ear for music,” his entire repertoire on piano comprised both parts (one at a time) of the duet of “Heart and Soul,” the melody of
“Chopsticks,”
and a tune in F-sharp that didn’t have a name but allowed him to utilize only the black keys as he rolled his fist up and down the piano to produce a melody. Whenever he played the little tune on the black keys, it never failed to delight me.

Neither my aunt nor my father could tell you the name of a note, but they could sing it back. After my mother taught me the names of all the notes, I could not only sing a note back, I could correctly identify it. Because my father didn’t understand the difference between perfect pitch and relative pitch, he boasted to anyone within earshot of his little girl and a piano that Carol had perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch is when a note matches up consistently with that note in your memory. Whether you’re asked to sing middle C, A,
or E-flat, you will always sing it correctly. With relative pitch, you may not be able to sing or identify a note perfectly the first time, but once you know the first note, you can correctly sing and identify the rest of them. That’s what I do.

Either way, my ability to identify notes impressed my dad, who enjoyed showing me off to his friends. Sometimes, when he and his firehouse buddies had a common day off, they gathered at our house with their wives. The men sat in the living room and told jokes while the women served and refilled the men’s drinks in big green glasses with crackling ice cubes and replenished the little snack dishes that my mother brought out only when we had company. After a while, my father would casually migrate over to the piano and instruct me to stand on the opposite side of the room with my face to the wall so I couldn’t see the piano. Then he’d begin. He always started with middle C.

“What note is that, Carol?” he’d ask, smiling at his friends as if he knew a secret that they didn’t.

“Middle C,” I’d answer.

“What note is
that
?”

“E-flat.”

“How about
that
one?”

“B.”

“And
this
one?”

“F-sharp.”

With that, I turned away from the wall. My dad’s smile was so broad that it encompassed the lower half of his face. I enjoyed making my father happy and getting the notes right—two separate thoughts that an astute psychologist might correctly interpret as one—but I didn’t enjoy being shown off like a trained puppy. And yet those early “performances” were excellent training for my ear.

Even better were the many blissful hours I spent on my own matching up notes in my head with notes on the piano. I had
begun making up songs when I was three. Perched precariously on Brooklyn and Manhattan telephone books atop the piano bench, I improvised words and melodies at the top of my lungs while my little fingers pounded out a rudimentary accompaniment on the piano. Using the most advanced form of recording then available in our household, my mother transcribed onto music paper a song I wrote called “Galloping.”

My first real music lesson took place when I was four. My mother invited me to climb up and sit next to her on the piano bench. (By then I needed only the Brooklyn phone book.) She introduced me to music theory and elementary piano technique using a child-sized book with a bright red cover called
Teaching Little Fingers to Play
, by John Thompson. Here is one of the first songs I learned:

   
1     2 3     1 2 3     2 1 2     3 1     1

Here we go—up a row—to a birth-day par—ty

The numbers indicated the fingering—thumb being 1, index finger 2, and middle finger 3. In this song, 1, 2, and 3 corresponded with middle C, D, and E. I learned the difference between quarter notes (“here we”) and a half note (“go”), where each note was written on or between the lines of the treble staff, and how each note made the journey from the page through my brain and fingers to the piano to produce its own unique tone. My mother never forced me to practice. She didn’t have to. I wanted so much to master the popular songs that poured out of the radio that I played everything she taught me many times over, undoubtedly driving her to distraction even more than had my repetition of D.

My mother enrolled me in kindergarten when I was four. By the end of the school year I had demonstrated such an exceptional facility with words and numbers that my teachers promoted me
directly to second grade. Skipping grades, a common practice in the 1940s, might have been good for my intellectual curiosity, but it was not good for my social development. From second grade on, I was two years younger than most of the kids in my class.

One afternoon, while my father was at his workbench in the basement, my mother was in the kitchen with me. The radio on the shelf above the kitchen table was playing quietly in the background. Between sips of milk and bites of Fig Newtons I was using a yellow pencil to copy random words from a newspaper into a composition book with a black-and-white marbled cover. My mother had just gone to get something from her sewing room at the other end of the house when something about Dinah Shore’s voice on the radio singing
“Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy”
made me set my pencil down. I climbed up on a chair, turned the radio up to full volume so I could hear it in the living room, and ran to the piano to see if I could play it. Hearing the radio suddenly blasting, my mom came running to see if I was all right. When she saw me sitting at the piano she walked into the kitchen, turned off the radio, came back and sat next to me on the bench, and taught me a few basic triads that were compatible with Sonny Burke’s orchestral accompaniment. As she played the chords, we sang the melody and lyrics together.

Hearing my mom and me at the piano brought my dad upstairs. At first he sang along from the doorway, then he came over and sat on the opposite end of the bench from my mother with me in the middle. It was fascinating to watch my dad play the melody to
“Heart and Soul”
while my mom provided the two-handed accompaniment. Then they switched seats and parts. Seated between them, I couldn’t resist making the duet a trio. Some of the chords to “Heart and Soul” were similar to the ones my mother had just taught me for “Shoo Fly Pie,” and though I didn’t have my parents’ agility, the notes I played were harmonious enough to put smiles on all our faces.

It was a happy time. My mom and dad and I were a family. My parents loved each other. They loved me; I loved them; and we all loved music. My early childhood not only gave me a sense of security, it was enriched by a remarkable device that transmitted the latest popular songs and other forms of entertainment through a speaker by means of vacuum tubes, an amplifier, and the intersection of creativity with people’s need for it.