Body & Soul (13 page)

"Shorter. It makes the tube shorter."

"Thus higher." He began with the slide fully extended, blew, pulled the slide in bit by bit and played a major scale. Then he pushed the slide out without stopping and smeared down to the original note. Claude laughed. Weisfeld put the trombone back. "So," he said over his shoulder, "how does the trumpet work? Look at it carefully."

Claude placed the instrument on the glass, just below the valves. He traced the tubing with his eyes. He turned the valves and looked at the holes. After half a minute or so he said, "It must be ... I think..."

"Yes? What?"

"When you press the key, then the air can go through different holes, and then through a different tube. It looks like three different tubes. This little one here, then this one, and this one. It's those holes. They must line up like that inside."

"Stick your finger inside and see if they do."

The boy did so. "That's it!" he said. "That's nifty."

"It's good to know these things," Weisfeld said. "All instruments are similar. A long string on the piano, a long column of air on a wind instrument. Vibrations. Overtones. Stops. Keys. Fingerboards. All alike." He swept his arm to indicate the whole store. "All the instruments in this room are variations on a single idea. Now use a little oil wherever you touched the metal."

Claude reassembled the trumpet and laid it in the felt depressions of its case. He carried it back to the front window and placed it, lid open, for display. As he straightened up he saw a black limousine pull up in front of the shop. The rear door opened and a girl stepped out, her black patent-leather shoes catching the sun, the buttons of her blue coat gleaming like coins. As she raised her head he felt a shock. (Not as strong as, but curiously similar to, the sensation he'd felt once on the Madison Avenue bus when he'd looked up from his book to see a
soldier with a badly scarred face sitting across from him.) Black hair, fair skin with a hint of pink over the cheekbones, large eyes, the nose and mouth exquisite, as if carved from marble.

Now he could see what surely must be her mother trailing on behind, both of them making for the shop, and he began to back up. By the time the bell tinkled he had ducked behind a bookcase to retreat to the back of the room. He fussed with some sheet music without knowing what he was doing.

"Mrs. Fisk," he heard Weisfeld say. "A pleasure to see you again. How can I help you?"

He heard the soft murmur of voices, and then Weisfeld called out. "Claude? Could you bring a chair for Mrs. Fisk, please?"

Weisfeld had moved from behind the counter and stood in the aisle beside the woman. The girl was out of sight, somewhere in the front of the store. Claude unfolded the wooden chair. Weisfeld took out a handkerchief and flicked the seat twice. She sat down, Weisfeld's hand under her elbow, and the boy suddenly realized something was wrong with her. A faint, continuous tremor affected the upper half of her body—her hands, arms, and head were vibrating slowly. She was extremely thin, her face handsome but pallid, the lips compressed and slightly twisted. Her eyes, which rested on him briefly, burned with such intensity he felt himself start as if she had touched him.

"I'll see the flute," she said, and Weisfeld gave a little bow.

Claude retreated to the back and sat down at the Steinway, his hands clasped between his knees. When he heard a faint rustle behind him he leaned forward and began going through sheet music as if looking for something. In a flash of blue, the girl was standing next to him, casually turning the display carousel of show tunes and popular music. No more than two feet away, she did not even glance at him. He remained motionless, staring at the lid of the piano, aware now of a faint scent, a mysterious, warm perfume like nothing he could name. His hands rested on the music stand. The carousel creaked every now and then.

She lifted some music and held it out, still without looking at him. "Play this." He saw her neck, the smooth, curved black wing of hair just below her jaw, her lips, the sharper curve of her eyelashes. He took the music, put it on the piano, and began to play. E-flat minor. A ballad called "Tenderly." As he approached the second ending, she had already chosen something else.

"An insipid piece of music," she said when he'd finished. Her voice was light, not yet fully mature, with diction clear as crystal. "This one."

As he closed his hand on the music she looked at him briefly, without expression. She had given him a piece called "Cow Cow Boogie." He tore through it happily, and played it a second time, adding some decorative figures of his own.

"Barbaric," she said.

The third tune was "Love for Sale," by Cole Porter, in a fairly complicated arrangement. He almost stopped playing at the shock of her nearness when she bent over his left shoulder and extended her arm to turn the page.

"I'll take that," she said when he'd finished. He felt a ridiculous thrill of pleasure that he had finally pleased her. She walked away as abruptly as she had arrived. He folded the music and followed her to the counter. Mrs. Fisk was writing a check on her lap. Claude handed the music to Weisfeld.

"Can he sight-read Mozart?" Mrs. Fisk asked.

"Yes," Weisfeld said.

"Catherine," she said, "take the flute, please."

The girl received the thin black case from Weisfeld. At a sign from him, Claude moved forward to assist Mrs. Fisk as she rose from the chair, but she did not give him her arm, so he simply hovered there. Weisfeld escorted them to the front of the shop, the bell tinkled, and they were gone.

"Who are they?"

"Old customers. Good customers," Weisfeld said. "Rich customers. She wants Catherine to try the flute, so what does she get her? A Cohn, a Selmer? No. She gets her a hundred-year-old solid-silver Zabretti for sixteen hundred dollars."

"What?" Claude was astonished.

Weisfeld waved the check. "She just bought the most expensive instrument in our inventory." He rang open the cash register and slipped the check under the front drawer. "In fact, she got a good price."

"Can she play? Catherine?"

Weisfeld shrugged. "She started on recorders years ago. Mrs. Fisk and the son play violins. I don't know how many instruments I've sold that family."

"Where do they live?"

Weisfeld looked at him quickly. "She's very pretty, isn't she, that girl," he said, as if thinking aloud. "They live on Fifth Avenue. A mansion. Mrs. Fisk is the daughter of Senator Barnes."

"What's wrong with her? The way she shakes like that?"

"It's a shame. She and her sister were famous beauties. They were in the social columns all the time back when I first came over. A very important family."

Claude detected the slightest touch of irony in his tone, but didn't know what to make of it.

"When we close up," Weisfeld said, "I'll take you to dinner at the Rathskeller. A little celebration."

"Can I have a Wiener schnitzel?"

"Absolutely."

Ever since the gold stars in
The Blue Book for Beginners,
Claude had considered Mr. Weisfeld his teacher, his real teacher, the teacher behind all the other teachers with whom, one after another, he had studied. Weisfeld, with the approval of Mr. Larkin, the lawyer, had sent him to various people, and while Weisfeld did not discuss matters of pedagogy with the boy, seemed in fact almost laconic about what the teachers were asking Claude to do, he nevertheless monitored the boy's progress, coming down to the basement once or twice a week to sit on a folding chair and listen. And it was Weisfeld who decided, with only the minimum of discussion with Claude, when it was time to leave one teacher and get another. The effect of this was to create a certain distance between the boy and those instructing him. In varying degrees, he was not so much interested in pleasing them as he was in pleasing Weisfeld through them.

The first, when Claude had been quite young, was Professor Menti, a slender man with a large nose, heavy lips, and a high, prematurely balding forehead. Claude took the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown bus to Riverside Drive and then walked downtown to Menti's sparsely furnished apartment on the ground floor of an old subdivided townhouse. The man always opened the door in a daze of absent-mindedness, taking a moment or two to recognize his pupil, finally ushering him into the dim interior and the Steinway. There he would place a special raised seat on the piano bench, forcing Claude to play from a much higher position than he was used to.

They had started with a C major scale in the right hand.

"So," Menu had said. "Everything is wrong." He spoke softly, with an Italian accent and a twinge of sadness. "Get ready to do it again. I will show you."

Claude placed his hand on the keys, and Menti reached into the pocket of his tattered dressing gown and withdrew a penny, which he placed on the back of the boy's hand. He nodded, and Claude began the scale. Middle C with the thumb, D with the index finger, E with the third finger, and then, as he passed his thumb under his palm toward F, the coin fell off his hand.

"
Eccolà,
" whispered Menti.

Claude had expected the coin to fall, although he'd tried to keep it there. He had no idea why it mattered one way or the other, but he didn't ask, feeling that it might be impertinent. Throughout his time with Professor Menti he simply did what he was told.

"Hold your hand like so." The wrist up, the hand arched, the last joint of the fingers pointing straight down. "Play the keys like so." Lift the finger high, the rest of the hand motionless, and strike straight down, pressing into the key.

It felt odd to the boy. It was as if each finger existed independently, each finger isolated, like wooden soldiers hopping up and down one after the other. For the first few weeks he could not play this way for more than five minutes without a break. His hands and wrists would grow increasingly tight and stiff, subordinated as they were to the fingers. As he grew tired, he would unconsciously move his wrists, and even his arms.

One day Menti brought out an odd-looking contraption—two long metal bars with springs, screws, and plates at each end. He fastened it to the Steinway so that the rods hung horizontally above and in front of the keyboard.

"Put your wrists on the lower bar," Menti said.

The boy obeyed.

Menti knelt down, glanced at the boy's hands, gauged distances, and made a few adjustments to the rods.

"Play the C major scale. Both hands. Contrary motion."

Claude did so, sliding his wrists across the rod without losing contact, his fingers going up and down like pistons.

"Now the B-flat major scale."

This time his wrists lost contact with the rod. Menti, still kneeling, noticed it immediately.

"Aha!" he said, lowering the second bar over the top of the boy's
wrists. It was now impossible for Claude to raise, lower, or twist his wrists. He could only slide them sideways.

"This," Menti said, "is how you will practice scales. Two hours a day. Take it with you and put it on your piano. All keys."

Claude had fitted the device, which was adjustable, to the small white piano in his room, and practiced scales as directed, playing through pain. Menti also gave him various short exercises—trills, mordants, arpeggios, turns, and phrases—to play over and over again, fifty times, a hundred times. Menti acknowledged that exercises became boring quite rapidly, and advised him to place a book or a magazine on the piano and read while his fingers worked. Claude preferred to listen, or to daydream.

Once, while Claude was doing an exercise on the Bechstein in the basement of the music store, Weisfeld had come down on some errand and stopped. "What is that?"

"You have to hold five notes down," Claude explained, "and keep them down while you play one after the other without moving your hand." He demonstrated, playing C D E F G, C# D# E# F# G#, and then D E F# G A. "It's hard."

"Particularly the fourth finger, hmm?" Weisfeld had gone back upstairs without further comment.

It was quite a while before Claude was allowed to spend much time on any actual music. Professor Menti was aware that the boy was able to play more advanced pieces than he was assigned, and the boy was aware that Menti kept the music simple so that he shouldn't slip back into using his wrists and his arms. Menti said little about interpretation, and it was understood that technique was paramount. In a sense, it was as if the music were only an opportunity to test the skills developed through hundreds of hours of scales and exercises.

Claude played easy pieces by Bach, Couperin, and Mozart. Toward the end he committed to memory Clementi's Sonata, op. z, and Mozart's Sonata in D Major, no. 8. Playing for Menti, he learned to mask any emotion in his face, to sit still, and to concentrate on clean execution. But in the basement of the music store he would play another way, closing his eyes the better to feel the wash of colors, forgetting his hands, himself, listening to the structures and interweaving lines. He played right through mistakes, eager to feel the kind of exaltation that could rise in him when he sensed the music taking over—an emotion so intense he would sometimes feel tears in his eyes.

He was relieved when Weisfeld decided it was time for him to leave
Menti. The incessant drills, the dark apartment which had seemed to grow darker with the passage of time, the bitter-almond scent of Menti in his dressing gown—all this he was glad to leave behind.

"I think it's time for
The Well-Tempered Clavier,
" Weisfeld had said. "For that, you'll see Herr Sturm. He lives in the neighborhood."

Herr Sturm was a short man with a large, square head, a fierce expression Claude found unsettling (as if the man were forever threatening to break into a rage), and the habit of pacing as he talked, making violent gestures with his arms, bobbing and weaving.

"Do you know what this is?" he asked, pressing Book One of
The Well-Tempered
to the boy's chest.

"Well, I've played a, I've looked at some of the..." Claude covered the score with his hands.

"Preludes and fugues in all keys!" Herr Sturm cried. "All keys! Can you play in all keys?"