Paradise Park (49 page)

Only slowly, like water slowly seeping, the outside world slipped in. It was winter, and we had no place of our own to go. Not that we didn’t love Aunt Lena, but we wished we could get away from her for a while. We were living like a couple of teenagers in her apartment, waiting all the time for her to leave. We were always waiting for her to go see some friends or go to church or to the store. If the weather had been warmer we might at least have gone for walks outside, and sat on park benches and talked, but now already the snow was coming down, and the freezing rain. I have to say the weather was a nasty shock. It was my first winter in twenty years. I’d forgotten how much time you had to spend indoors. And if you wanted to go out, you couldn’t go anywhere for
free. You had to go for coffee or ice cream, or at least for tea. And we didn’t have the money to go out all the time like that. We had no money at all, since all our earnings were going toward taping Mikhail’s recital program for those piano competitions he was entering. The best we could do was go to Brookline Booksmith and stand around and browse the parenting books in the aisles. Mikhail felt bad because he loved books and we could not afford to buy them. If we saw a great new book we got on a waiting list to take it out from the library. Still, we were hopeful that when the competitions came through our lives would change for the better. We used to say that to each other all the time, when the piano store would call and pester about late payments on the baby grand piano.

“Hey, I got you, babe,” I would tell Mikhail, and he’d give me a blank look—since, coming from Russia, the Sonny and Cher reference escaped him.

Our only real sorrow was Mikhail’s rebbe. This great and gentle rabbinical man, who had been Mikhail’s spiritual guide for over two years, had really cooled toward Mikhail since he’d found out Mikhail’s Jewish heritage was a little bit murkier than Mikhail had originally let on. Mikhail’s rebbe just could not get over the fact that Mikhail’s mother had converted to Judaism, and that Mikhail had never mentioned this, or provided all the documents to prove the conversion’s authenticity. We would come to the Bialystoker services, and Mikhail’s rebbe, who was called the Boston Bialystoker, and had once been so kind and outreaching to Mikhail—he would just look right past the two of us as if we didn’t exist. The Boston Bialystoker was portly, and middle aged, with a salt-and-pepper beard in the same style as the rebbe’s beard in New York, but his black eyes never twinkled. Or at least they never twinkled at me. The one time Mikhail tried to introduce me to his former teacher, the rebbe only knit his brow and turned away. Of course no one in the congregation warmed to us as a couple, either, given that their spiritual leader would barely look at us. They’d tolerate us in their midst at services, but that was all.

Every time he went to pray at the Bialystoker
shtiebel
, which was their house of worship, Mikhail would emerge more and more depressed. The corners of his mouth would droop. His whole body would sag; he would actually grow shorter by the time services were over. One day as we trudged home with the slush coming in at the seams of our
shoes, I turned to Mikhail and I saw him with his head ducked down inside his hood and his face tight against the cold and his whole body hunched over like he was in pain. “Mikhail!” I said. “You’re shrinking! Your whole being is shrinking from all this. I can’t let you go to the
shtiebel
anymore. This is not working for you.” “I must go, Sharon,” he said.

“No! You go in happy and you come out sad. You go in tall and you come out short. Is that what praying is all about? Praying is about joy! It’s about love! It’s about expansion! If it doesn’t come as naturally as leaves on a tree, then you shouldn’t go at all!” I said, paraphrasing the great poet John Keats.

We got to the vestibule of our old brick building. I swung the outer glass door open. We rushed inside and shut the door behind us. We were out of the cold. We could unsnap our hoods. “You hear me?”

He sighed. “Where else can I go?”

“Somewhere else!” I said. “We’ll go together somewhere else!” But even I wasn’t sure where that would be.

We trudged up the stairs to the apartment, and Aunt Lena was in the living room playing cards with her best friend, Natalya, and there were newspapers piled up in stacks on the living room floor. Aunt Lena had probably a year’s worth just of
The Boston Globe.
They made me nervous, because to me they looked like a fire hazard. I wanted to take them downstairs to the recycling bins, but she wouldn’t let me. Aunt Lena just liked having a lot of newspapers around. So there she was with her friend playing cards, and we came in and she tisked us for tracking slush into the apartment, and we meekly wiped our shoes on the mat, and Mikhail went into the kitchen and saw the mail there piled on the table, along with Aunt Lena’s various writings—her correspondence and memoirs and literary papers. “Sharon!” he said. There it was—a letter from the Polish Chopin competition that he had entered. I recognized it right away, since it was my handwriting on the envelope. It was one of those self-addressed jobbies with a foreign postal order for a stamp. Of course it occurred to me, Hmm, that letter looks thin, but I held the thought in. I didn’t want anything negative to escape me. I didn’t even want to breathe the wrong way on the envelope.

Mikhail opened it up and read it and then put it down on the table. He looked not so much disappointed, as bewildered. The folks at the Chopin
competition didn’t want him to come out to Kraków. They didn’t want to hear him play. It was such a strange incomprehensible thing. It was one of those senseless tragedies. It was like choking to death on a fish bone. People didn’t want to hear Mikhail play Chopin. Mikhail couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand it. Aunt Lena was dumbfounded. When Natalya left, we discussed the letter over and over together, the three of us. All that night we talked about it, Aunt Lena and I on the couch. Mikhail pacing up and down. Why, oh, why did they refuse to hear Mikhail play? Why did they shy away from the chance to hear him? It was like having an opportunity to drink the elixir of life—the little crystal vial held out to your lips—and then saying, thanks, but no thanks.

Finally Aunt Lena had to conclude it was anti-Semitism, plain and simple. “Your name,” she told Mikhail. “They saw your name, Mikhail Abramovich. They saw that you were Jewish.”

“But why would the judges care if he was Jewish?” I asked her.

“It’s the
Polish
Chopin competition,” she said. “What do you think?” She turned to Mikhail and she said, “You need a name.”

“I have a name,” he said.

“A stage name,” she told him. “All performers have a name for the stage. You are American. You need an American name.
Michael.
Not Mikhail.
Abramowitz.
Not Abramovich.”

“Michael Abramowitz?” I asked.

“That is an American name,” Aunt Lena said.

“Abramowitz?”

“It has to be with a-witz,” she insisted. “Berkowitz, Kantowitz, Horowitz …”

“I will not change my name,” Mikhail said. “Then you will never win,” Aunt Lena said.

All of a sudden Mikhail got angry. “Did Yehudi Menuhin change his name? Did Jascha Heifetz?”

“Heifetz!” Aunt Lena shrieked, as if to say QED! “With an—itz!”

“Did Arthur Rubinstein?” Mikhail demanded. “Did Gil and Orly Shaham? Did Yo-Yo Ma? Does Yo-Yo Ma call himself Joe-Joe Moskowitz?”

“He doesn’t have to change his name,” Aunt Lena said.

“And why not?”

“Because,” she said, “he is Yo-Yo Ma.”

She was a little bit of a conspiracy theorist. She had a touch of
paranoia in her makeup. She believed that Mikhail was doomed to obscurity because he was Jewish and because he did not have the right politics to become a concert pianist. We refused to believe her. We refused to let her get us down. Yet now more and more of our self-addressed stamped envelopes were returning to us. One after another the competitions were sending back letters, and not a single one wanted Mikhail. Not a single panel of judges wanted to hear him in person. He couldn’t even come and play in the first round. Hour after hour I would listen to Mikhail play. I was trying to find some answer or some clue. To me Mikhail sounded exactly like the angels must play piano up in heaven. And I had never been a huge fan of classical music before. I had never sat transfixed listening to Debussy and Satie and Joplin and Chopin before. But maybe that was the answer. Mikhail didn’t play like a classical musician. Whatever he played, he made it swing. Whatever waltz or rag or gymnopaedia he took on, he bent the rhythm a little bit and lushed out the phrases. He made it bloom up around your ears in an unbelievably sexy way. And I didn’t figure this out at the time. But now I realize what was really happening with his tapes when those piano judges listened to them in their dark judging room. They put on Mikhail and all of a sudden from the first notes they sensed this sensuality about him. They sat up straight in their chairs, five white males, and they said, but, no, no, this cannot be. They said to one another, “We cannot accept this one. I sense in his performance a whiff—good heavens—a whiff of the
popular.”
That’s what they said. What was actually happening was that Mikhail’s playing turned those judges on, and they couldn’t stand it. I see that now—although at the time I could not imagine what was happening.

It was the end of January and we’d spent all our money on the competitions. One hundred twenty dollars an hour just for the studio time, and then fifty dollars per hour for the cameraperson—since Mikhail had to be videotaped, so the judges could see that he was actually the one playing the music. And that was a special rate Mikhail got for the videotaping—since the cameraperson was an old friend of his! We couldn’t make our contributions to the rent, or buy food, or clothes, or anything, so we had to depend more than ever on Aunt Lena, which most of the time she took pretty well, but in the long term was not so great for our relationship with her. She tended to snap at us about all kinds of little things, and we’d have no recourse but to go to our room
and sulk like kids. It was terrible how quickly we were disenfranchised. All of a sudden we were trying to figure out some way to buy just a little bit of dignity back. I sold all my old tapes and records at a used music store on Harvard Street. I took my precious collection I’d brought with me from Hawaii, and I sold them off. Mikhail tried to talk me out of it, but I said, “It’s okay, I don’t need them anymore.”

Then he sent his black frock coat and his good black felt hat, and all his black slacks, to a Hasidic consignment store in Brooklyn. He had to wear jeans and T-shirts after that. He wore an oatmeal-colored sweater with raggedy cuffs and a green embroidered Bokharan cap I’d got him for his birthday. I wore jeans, too, that relaxed-fit style, since I’d started expanding at the waist. We didn’t look like Hasids anymore, but, oh, well. We didn’t go to the Bialystoker
shtiebel
anymore either.

“Your energy is way down,” Telemachus told me at work.

“Down!” I said. “I’m running on empty. You don’t even know, Telemachus.” When I first started working for him, I’d found it strange using that whole Homeric name all the time, yet now I hardly noticed. You just yelled, “Hey, Telemachus!” and you didn’t think anything of it.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“We’re broke, Mikhail can’t even get a toe in the door, and our rebbe has completely turned his back on us,” I said. We were standing there in the roar of the juicers, and our customers were straggling in with their rotten winter colds. It was a miserable gray day and every time the door opened you flinched from the bitter draft. All our customers were coming up and asking for citrus with extra C, and hacking all over the counter, and blowing their noses into soggy tissues. “I’m sure I’m going to catch a cold,” I said bitterly.

“Hey,” said Telemachus, “if you say you’re going to catch one, then you are. It’s up to you to decide. If you’re broke, I can’t do anything, since I don’t have the revenues to pay you any more than I already do. And I’m sorry about Mikhail’s toe. But if your rebbe has abandoned you, why don’t you come to our Brighton Havurah?”

T
HE
second Shabbat in February we made our way to Telemachus’s apartment, where the Havurah was meeting. The Havurah was a group that came together every other week at different people’s homes to hold potluck
Shabbat services. Potluck, Telemachus told me, didn’t just mean everyone brought a different vegetarian dish to share for lunch, but also that everyone should bring some spiritual contribution to share with the group as well. So this was a matter of some confusion for Mikhail, since he’d only really been exposed to the Hasidic branch of Judaism, where you concentrated on the liturgy that was already there in the prayer book and you didn’t add new material to the regular service. Mikhail wasn’t even sure he wanted to go to a service that wasn’t based on a fixed text. I was kind of dragging him up the stairs. I had him in one hand, and our side dish in the other. A great big plastic bowl of wild rice salad with dried cranberries that I’d thrown together from what I remembered of Kathryn’s recipe. I’d had to whip up our prayer by myself as well—which I kind of minded, but I didn’t grumble to Mikhail, because he was feeling so low.

We got to Telemachus’s apartment, which was in a much newer, cleaner building than ours, and he ushered us into his living room, which had beautiful soft sand-colored wall-to-wall carpet. Telemachus’s girlfriend, Chris, was there greeting everyone really politely and graciously. She was not at all what I’d imagined his girlfriend would look like. She was so small and scrubbed, and she had blond hair tousled just so. She probably even shaved her legs. I guess I’d expected the woman Telemachus had lived with for three years to be more au naturel. But she introduced us to everybody, and put our wild rice salad on the table with all the other foil-covered bowls and platters. And then we sat on the carpet in a circle.

“Shalom,” Telemachus said in his perfectly Zen-like way. He had a real gift. He had such peace inside of him. Then he reached behind him and he pulled out a guitar.