NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (38 page)

WHERE DOES YOUR MUSIC COME FROM?

W
hen I was sixteen and a junior in high school, my whole life changed. Until then I had led a very ordinary existence, growing up in the postwar years with my younger sister on an elm-lined street in the house in which my mother had been born. I had a Rudge bicycle, a chemistry set and a crewcut, and the only thing that marked me out from the rest of the kids on the block, apart from my height, was that I really liked my piano lessons and shone at the annual recitals of Miss Wakefield’s students. Indeed, I used to daydream of going to New York City and playing the Grieg Piano Concerto under the stars at Lewisohn Stadium, with thousands cheering me as they did Arthur Rubinstein.

My father, an uneasy real-estate broker, regretted an enthusiasm fostered mainly by my mother, and tried to steer me from music toward medicine, starting with the chemistry set and later taking me on long Sunday-morning walks in the course of which he tried to convince me, man to man, that there was nothing like being your own boss. He ran his business from a wooden cottage attached to the back of our house, so he was home a lot, between phone calls, and he probably exercised more of an influence on me than most of the fathers on the block did on their kids.

It was only after I finished junior high and began to flounder around with swarms of strangers in Franklin Pierce High that I discovered how many different worlds lay beyond the placid, comfortable one of Buchanan Street. There were boys who smoked marijuana and girls who got pregnant; longhairs who did math problems in the caf while the others fiddled with their jalopies and hot rods; Negroes who disappeared after school as though they had been swallowed up; jocks who stayed until it got dark,
playing soccer or jogging around the track as if they had no homes to go to and no pianos to practice. I didn’t settle into any of the cliques, because I wasn’t ready to limit myself. Belonging to almost any of them would only have confirmed me as being what I already was on Buchanan Street, and I was getting a little tired of that.

So, with the seamless illogic of the sixteen-year-old, I limited myself almost exclusively to one boy’s company for so long that people used to kid us about going steady, as if we had been of different sexes, or about being twins, as if we had been brothers.

In fact Yuri was a twin himself, and he walked to school every day with his sister Yeti (born Yetta), the ballet dancer. Yeti’s beauty was so immediate that it was frightening. She had long, straight, shimmering blond hair that hung uninterruptedly down her back to her waist, eyes the color of delphiniums in July, set shallow and slantwise above her Slavic cheekbones, and skin smooth as eggshell. She walked with the characteristic half mince, half prance of her craft, toeing out as she advanced, she was as slim and flat-chested as a boy, and because of her self-absorption she was—besides being my best friend’s sister and therefore inviolable—as close to being absolutely uninteresting as any girl I had ever known.

Yuri was something else. He was bowlegged, his tough and kinky brown hair barely grew above my shoulder (after a while they called us Mutt and Jeff), and his thick, passionate lips were usually twisted in a cynical grin. He played the fiddle—which he carried with him nonchalantly in its weathered case wherever he went, even into the john—with dazzling fervor and dexterity. He had been the concertmaster of our school orchestra since his freshman year, but I hesitated to approach him not only because he was so good but because of that grin. The other members of the string section said he was decent enough, if somewhat condescending, like a big kid playing for an afternoon with little ones. They said too that his mother awoke him at dawn so he could practice for two hours every morning before school—later I found that this was true.

One day after ninth period I was in the music room practicing on the Mozart A-Major Concerto, the K. 414, the first movement
of which the conductor, Mr. Fiorino, had promised me I could play with the orchestra for the spring festival, when Yuri Cvetic sauntered in and leaned his elbows on the tail of the piano.

He listened for a while, his fiddle case wedged between his torn sneakers, that grin showing the spaces between his front teeth. Finally he said, “Ever do any accompanying? I got a Brahms thing here we could try.”

Within days we had exchanged confidences never before revealed to anyone else. Everyone took it for granted that we two would eat together in the cafeteria; and when, because of homework or music lessons, we couldn’t see each other after school, we would talk on the phone, more quietly than our sisters but just as lengthily.

Yuri never came to my house more than once or twice. My father complained that he couldn’t bear the squeal of Yuri’s fiddle being tuned up to the piano. It was no more legitimate than his shouting, after we were in tune, “I can’t hear myself talk on the telephone when you guys are playing.” I knew I was losing respect for my father when he came out and said that he mistrusted Yuri not only because he encouraged me to have musical ambitions but because he came from the other side of Pierce High, from Cotter Street, a noisy neighborhood of teenagers tuning up go-karts, women arguing loudly in foreign tongues and drunks too shameless to go on indoors.

Yuri shrugged it off with the grin that I suspect bothered my father more than anything else, for it bespoke that wise invulnerability that can unsettle an adult more than any adolescent surliness. After that we hung out together at the park in fair weather, at his house in foul. His family never objected; they were always delighted to see me whenever I turned up at their second-floor flat.

In addition to his twin sister, who, when she was around, was usually polite enough, in her self-centered way, there was a younger sister, Helen, a freshman when I first met her. Not only had her parents used up their inventiveness on the twins’ names, but they also seemed to have taken one look at their last-born and decided that a ballerina and a violinist would be enough and that this time they would settle simply for a daughter. Helen was
a nice enough girl, with a sweet, even smile and dark, gentle eyes unlike Yuri’s and Yeti’s in that they were always shadowed, as if she didn’t get enough sleep, but she had no interest in music or dance and she never opened a book. She appeared content just to get by in school and to keep the household going while her parents were off working and the twins were off practicing. And besides, she was buxom; she gave you the feeling that if she didn’t watch herself, she’d wind up looking like her mother.

I think that was what put Mrs. Cvetic off her youngest and convinced her that it would be profitless to push Helen into the arts as she had done with the twins. Mrs. Cvetic, a practical nurse, was a heavy-breasted, shapeless woman who breathed through her open mouth and waddled so alarmingly that you could practically feel the friction of her thighs. She always wore a wrinkled and stained uniform, not quite white, its pockets bulging with Pall Malls, wooden kitchen matches and professional samples of Anacin and Bufferin, which she chewed as other people do gum or candy.

“Hiya, boy,” she would greet me on those occasions when she happened to be home of an afternoon. “You gonna play some music with Yuri today? Okay, stay for supper.”

If I declined, she would wave aside my hesitations, the long cigarette bobbing from her lips, ashes sprinkling the bosom of her uniform, while she growled at Helen, “Move away the goddam ironing board so the boys can practice. And let’s see how much goulash we got for supper.”

The ironing board had no legs. Sometimes Helen would balance one end of it on a kitchen step stool, the other on the edge of the upright piano, and press away at her mother’s uniforms (I never could understand why, since Helen was always ironing them, the uniforms were never clean). When I wanted to lift the keyboard lid, she would take the ironing board and lay it on the round oak dining-room table. When she had to set the table for dinner for the six of us, she’d set the plank against the wall. But Mr. Cvetic had bolted a full-length mirror and a long section of three-inch galvanized pipe to the wall for Yeti, and when Yeti hung onto the pipe with one hand, doing her ballet exercises, Helen had to drag the plank, heavy as a painter’s scaffold, out to
the front hall, where it teetered at the head of the stairs, announcing to you as you mounted the worn rubber runners to the Cvetic flat that Helen must be busy doing something else.

Often it was the meals which, while her mother tended the afflicted and her sister flexed her back, Helen prepared by herself and served as well, eating off in a corner like a European mama, only after she had made certain that the rest of us were taken care of. More than once Mr. Cvetic, having worked overtime, came in when we were already on our dessert and had to be served separately. But Helen never lost her composure, even if her father complained that the meat balls were no longer piping hot. It confused me that a girl so downtrodden should look so contented.

In our house the dinner-table conversation was predictable. If mother had the floor, it would be cultural, with quotations from the day’s speaker at her club, John Mason Brown perhaps, or Gilbert Highet. If father was in a talkative mood, and nothing of note had happened in his business during the day, he would inform my sister and me of George Sokolsky’s opinion in the afternoon paper, or of what Galen Drake had philosophized about on the auto radio.

At the Cvetics, you never knew. They ate noisily and greedily, as though each meal was to be their last, and they talked fast and loud—all except Helen, who rarely spoke—about whatever popped into their heads. Slender Yeti put away enormous quantities of everything—three slabs of seven-layer cake were nothing for that girl, whose bare arms, when she reached for more, were like match sticks—and she rattled on, in a voice as thin as her arms, about Madame Tatiana’s yelling fight with the accompanist at ballet school. Yuri, chewing fiercely, mocked Mr. Fiorino’s efforts to conduct Von Suppe (“You’d never catch me doing that, teaching fifth-raters to play fourth-rate music”), and simultaneously, in counterpoint, his mother gave us free professional samples of the folk wisdom she had picked up from her years of nursing chores.

“Gertie blew up like a balloon, poor thing,” she would say, spooning up her soup with a loud trill, “and when the doctor stuck the drain in her belly the smell was like the stockyards. But
sometimes you got to do that, you got to let out the poison. Helen, bring in the rest of the cauliflower.”

Her husband was small, wiry, wizened, and good-humored. I never saw him (but once) in anything other than working clothes—a brown leather jacket over khaki shirt and trousers—just as I never saw Mrs. Cvetic (but once) in anything but that wrinkled white uniform, size forty-six. Mr. Cvetic worked as a journeyman plumber—actually as a plumber’s helper, I think—on the new housing projects that were going up; he drove a clanking old Ford with a busted muffler, and you wouldn’t have thought that he would be mad for theosophy.

I hadn’t been in his company more than ten minutes when he asked me what I knew about Rudolf Steiner, and when I said, Wasn’t he the man who wrote the operettas? I was in for it. Yuri groaned rudely and Yeti wandered off to do her bar exercises before the mirror, but Mr. Cvetic ignored the twins and plunged ahead into a basic description of the anthroposophical life view. It was all very confusing—it seemed to take in everything from organic farming to better kindergartens—but after a while I took some comfort in observing that it was confusing to the rest of the family too and that even Mr. Cvetic himself grew hazy when it came to details.

“But I learn,” he would say to me, snapping the calloused fingers of one hand while he picked his teeth with the other. “That’s the big thing, to learn from the great minds of the ages. You’ll see some day how beauty comes from unity.”

“From unity?”

“And unity comes from variety. The flower comes from the seed, the seed comes from the flower. Where does your music come from?”

“I don’t know. From the composer?”

“The mind comes from the body, the body comes from the mind. You get me?”

Mr. Cvetic took magazines I had never heard of. In our house we got
Reader’s Digest
(my father would still be reading the February issue when the March one arrived) and
Harper’s
and
Book of the Month Club News
. But Mr. Cvetic read
Tomorrow
and
Manas
and a magazine the name of which escapes me, published in some
town in Pennsylvania and dealing with compost gardening, even though he didn’t have so much as a potted plant. He liked to read, moving his lips as he did, about subjects that he didn’t agree with or even understand, which startled me, and what was more he was always grinning with happiness over the wonderful variety of material for argument. He stayed up late making notes (for what purpose I never found out), while his wife shuffled about in house slippers the heels of which had long since been crushed to death under her bulk, dropping ashes on the bare floors and opening windows so the kids wouldn’t have tired blood and sluggish bowels.

Yuri was fed up with all this, just as I was growing tired of the atmosphere in my house, but at least his folks didn’t quarrel with what he was doing; they were proud of it and encouraged him in fulfilling their jumbled-up expectations. Besides, they accepted me practically as a member of the family and were frankly proud that Yuri’s best friend was from Buchanan Street and a musician to boot.

“Man, when the day comes,” Yuri said to me one afternoon in his quick slurred way, running the words together between tongue and full lips much as his father did, “I’m going to have an apartment with Oriental rugs so thick you can drop a golf ball on them and never find it again. I’m
sick
of bare floors just because they’re supposed to be closer to nature or better for Yeti’s posture.”

I tried to sympathize, when actually I envied him. But what did he mean about when the day came? We both had our dreams of glory and were bound together by the discovery that our separate daydreams could interlock so beautifully, but I didn’t really see how our exchange of confidences and intimacies had anything to do with money or Oriental rugs.