Closing Time (37 page)

My mother and sisters intervened; no more punches were thrown. Fleeing the house to stay overnight with a friend, I understood that the Rubicon had finally been crossed. I still feared my father; in a way, I now feared him more than ever. But I no longer feared him enough to let him hit me again. The next day, via reliable neighborhood intermediaries, my mother let it be known that it was safe to come home. She must have given the old man yet another of her toothless ultimatums: Lay off the kids or you and I are going to call it quits. I am not sure that he dreaded being separated from his family, but he did dread losing his wife’s income. Without her paycheck, he’d be out on the street, down on Skid Row. I avoided contact with him for the next few days: I was out with my band, I was out at my job, I was out playing basketball, I was out. Stewed to the gills when the incident occurred, he retreated into the reassuring amnesia that alcoholism confers on its acolytes and pretended that the whole thing had never happened. Not once for the rest of our lives did we ever talk about the events of that evening. He never again asked if I had volunteered to give my paycheck to my mother. Nor did he ever try hitting me again. He understood that those days were now over; that if he used a belt, I’d use a tire iron. One thing was clear to both of us: If he wanted a punching bag, he’d have to look elsewhere.

For obvious reasons, this made him dangerous. From that day onward, I never went to bed without jamming a chair up against the door and making sure that a butcher knife was lodged safely in the cowboy boots that sat beside my nightstand. I was sure he was only biding his time, waiting for revenge. I was biding my time as well, waiting to be accepted into college so I could clear out of there forever. I never slept well in my father’s house again. And I never turned my back on him.

I was a short-timer now; the finish line was in sight. Once high school was over, once I went away to college, the life I had been looking forward to for so many years could begin. It would be my life, and neither Dr. Jekyll nor Mr. Hyde was going to be part of it. As one of my instructors might have put it, in his maladroit, mangled French,
plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change
.

Chapter 9.

One Saturday morning when I was long past my childhood, my wife phoned from her car and asked me to switch on the radio and identify the piece being performed on the classical music station. I was in a rush that morning, so I tuned in quickly, listened to a few measures, and told her that it sounded like Dvořák’s Cello Concerto. Then I hung up. A few minutes later, motoring along in my own car, I switched on the radio just as the piece was reaching its conclusion. I then phoned my wife and said that it was Schumann’s Cello Concerto she’d been listening to, not Dvořák’s, and I was sure of it. A few minutes later, when the performance finished, the announcer came on the air and said that listeners had just been treated to a stirring rendition of Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto in A minor.

I knew the composition was Schumann’s because there are only a handful of cello concertos in the active canon, and only the famous ones ever get played. These are by Camille Saint-Saëns, who began giving public violin recitals at the age of two; Johannes Brahms, who as a young man used to thump the ivories in a Hamburg bordello, permanently souring his attitude toward women; Edward Elgar, who was ignored at the beginning of his career and ridiculed at the end; the aforementioned Dvořák; and Haydn. There are also formidable cello concertos by Benjamin Britten, Richard Strauss, and a handful of others, but they are almost never heard on the radio and would never be confused with Schumann’s.

While it is true that Schumann may fleetingly sound like a few of his contemporaries, none of them wrote famous cello concertos, so when my wife asked me to identify the piece, I knew that it could not be by Beethoven, Liszt, Berlioz, Schubert, or Mendelssohn. Identifying Schumann as the composer was child’s play for anyone familiar with classical music. More impressive was when I identified Jacqueline du Pré as the soloist. But here I was simply making an educated guess: There are only a few recordings of Schumann’s Cello Concerto in existence, and because of her gifts, plus the aura of tragedy that surrounded her—she died at age forty-two of multiple sclerosis—du Pré’s recording is one of the most frequently aired on the radio. So all in all it seemed like a reasonable hunch.

Anyone who loved classical music could pull off a stunt like this; a close friend, from a more prosperous background than I, can name the key a piece is written in, which I cannot. People like this, people who regard classical music as something akin to oxygen or sunlight, are harder and harder to find in a nation that seems forever poised to revert to its backwoods roots. This is especially true the farther one shimmies down the economic ladder: It goes without saying that people who grow up in humble row homes are unlikely to listen to “serious” music and even less likely to perform it. Susan Orsini was an exception.

I met Susan Orsini the day I graduated from high school. The encounter would change my life, making it both different and better, not just during the time we were together but forever. Our meeting was the result of happenstance; there were 1,435 students in the graduating class at Cardinal Dougherty, and the only municipal facility large enough to accommodate such a dense throng was Convention Hall, a cavernous auditorium that sat at the edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus. Convention Hall was the home of the Philadelphia 76ers, who had won the NBA championship the year before, fielding what was then considered to be the single greatest team in the history of the league. Game five was the first basketball game I ever attended, and by far the most memorable, though pro basketball was so poorly thought of in Philadelphia at the time that my friend Tom Smith and I simply walked up and bought tickets a few minutes before tip-off. There were five future Hall of Fame players on the floor that evening: Wilt Chamberlain, Rick Barry, Hal Greer, Nate Thurmond, and Billy Cunningham, not to mention the redoubtable Chet “The Jet” Walker. Never again would I attend a game showcasing such a dazzling array of talent.

I met Susan because my name began with a “Q” and hers with an “O,” and at graduation we were lined up backstage in parallel lines (girls in one row, boys in the other) right next to each other. After four years of never being allowed anywhere near the girls on the other side of the school, we were now instructed to parade out onto the stage in tandem as if we were all the best of friends. This was perhaps because the Catholic Church abhorred sex but revered symmetry. Though not beautiful in the narrow, technical sense of the word, Susan was one of those girls whose vivaciousness made her seem beautiful: If she could not be the prettiest girl in the room, she would act as if she was. She had a lithe figure, an imperious smile, piercing, somewhat conspiratorial eyes, and lustrous brown hair. As soon as she opened her mouth, I knew that she had more going for her than any other girl I had ever met.

We talked about this and that backstage, and at some point I volunteered the information that I was a musician of sorts. So was she. I played guitar; she played violin in the high school orchestra. I knew that Convention Hall was the only venue the Beatles had not sold out during their 1964 American tour. She did not; popular music was not her forte. She was headed off to Washington in the fall to study music at Catholic University. I was heading directly across town to study literature at Saint Joseph’s College. We hit it off.

Up until that backstage encounter at Convention Hall, I had never met anyone who played the violin. In the neighborhoods I grew up in, some toothless old drunk might occasionally hammer out a polka on the accordion, at least until the neighbors threatened to call the cops and have him stuffed into the meat wagon, or some wine-soaked
paesano
might warble a few tremulous bars from
Rigoletto,
but that was about as cosmopolitan as things ever got. If people played anything, it was the drums. Violins were not part of the equation, nor were French horns, oboes, bassoons, harps, piccolos, harmoniums, or celestes. When I met Susan, I knew that I was entering an exciting new world that had previously been inaccessible to me. Anyone could read good books and watch good movies, the way I had been doing for years. But dating a violin player was like joining a club where they wouldn’t let you in unless you were refined and well-spoken and promised to never play the sound track from
Under the Yum-Yum Tree
at three o’clock in the morning. It was a never-never land, a foreign country I had previously visited only in my dreams. I made sure I got her phone number.

By a strange coincidence, Susan knew one of my closest friends, Mike Craig. Mike was the boy who had looked on in African-American disbelief when Monsignor Collis visited the seventh-grade class at Saint Benedict’s and told everyone to be extra nice to the Queenans because we were the first white people to move into the neighborhood in years. Mike was hosting a graduation party that night, with my band, the Phase Shift Network, or Stained Glass, or whatever we were calling ourselves at the time, providing entertainment of a sort. Three songs into our set, during our routine evisceration of Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” I looked up and saw Susan standing directly in front of the bandstand. She was wearing red culottes with a white top, and by this point I was quite taken with her, particularly in this fetching strawberry-shortcake incarnation. We started dating the next day and soon were seeing each other two or three times a week. One Saturday night, we went all the way downtown to eat at a famous restaurant and then hailed a cab to a fancy movie theater and took in the just-released
2001: A Space Odyssey.
She told me that the opening theme had been written by Richard Strauss, “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss, and the ambient music by an Eastern European composer named György Ligeti. I erroneously assumed that the two Strausses were related and did not learn until much later that one of them had briefly been on the führer’s payroll, though after the war he insisted that he had never really cared for the Nazis and only accepted their paychecks in the service of his career. The other Strauss had no fascist skeletons in his closet. Susan and I dressed to the nines for the outing, as going downtown to see a first-run movie was special.

Susan came from a better economic class than I did. Though the Orsinis lived in a tiny row home, it was in a nicer neighborhood than ours. Her father had a steady job; her mother was quite witty and sophisticated; and the very fact that one of their three children played the violin indicated that they had aspirations far beyond those of my own family and a bit of spare cash to help make those dreams come true. A golden child, Susan liked to be entertained, so I was going through my money fast. But she was worth it.

Susan tagged along to a few of my band’s rehearsals, but she was never terribly fond of rock music, especially not the brand we played: Bar Mitzvah Acid Folk. A student of the classics and an intense performer, she made little effort to disguise her contempt for our bilious musicianship. Most people found us vaguely amusing, but she did not. As the summer progressed she began teaching me the rudiments of serious music. She loaded me up with LPs by Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Brahms. She told me to go home and listen to them carefully, and then the next time we went out, she would quiz me about each composition, asking if I had noticed how a theme was introduced in the first movement, then disappeared, then resurfaced in a slightly different form in the final movement. She took me to two free concerts by the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Robin Hood Dell, their summer home in Fairmount Park. I do not remember the names of the soloists or the pieces performed, as my thoughts were focused elsewhere.

Susan also lent me several fusty music-appreciation books that I found dry and indifferently written. But when she gave me a book chronicling the lives of the great composers, I was bowled over. Prior to meeting her, I had always associated classical music with nose-in-the-air stuffed shirts and had no idea that Mozart died a pauper, that Schubert never owned a piano, or that Stravinsky used to pass along commissions to Erik Satie, who worked cheap. Now that we’d gotten the class-warfare thing out of the way, the musicians seemed as real to me as John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Elvis.

I came late to a love of music. From the time I was small until the moment I heard the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” in November 1963, I had regarded music in primarily disciplinary terms, as just another form of punishment my father could inflict on his family because he was stronger than us. While it is true that, at least by the standards of the workingman, he had relatively good taste in music—he was fond of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, etc.—he simultaneously had very bad taste in music, as he was quite taken by such hokey trifles as “Volare” and “That’s Amore.” My father’s generation never forgave society for sending them off to rescue civilization from Hitler and Mussolini and then repaying them with Bill Haley and His Comets. Enraged that the music they loved was now considered passé, they retaliated with kitsch. I did not stop hating music until I could stake out some terrain of my own, and even though I would soften over the years and revise my earlier opinions about Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, and a few others, there are certain artists and certain songs I can never hear without cringing. To me, the names Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Jerry Vale, and Julius LaRosa are like Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible, Jack the Ripper, and Zog.

Though young people at the time made no effort to conceal their feelings on this matter, adults could not get it through their heads how much we despised their music. One day, the nation’s most esteemed Champagne Music maker, Lawrence Welk, fired a singer named Natalie Nevins from his popular Saturday night television program, a show my father had forced us to watch since it first began airing in 1955, provided we had a television at the time. Nevins was a belligerently perky chantoozey whose greatest crime, so the rumor mill had it, was attempting to upstage the mule-faced bandleader with the Wiener-schnitzelian accent. But others said he dumped her because she was late for a plane.