The Mozart Season (27 page)

“Number Five: A pure, artless, supremely intelligent rendering, in which the buoyant surface of the music is at all times supported by an animated inner pulse.

“Number Six: The mature depth of this interpretation, the vigor of its treatment of the musical ideas, and the astonishing sense of kinship between composer and player—these constitute an almost magical effect.

“In short, ladies and gentlemen, there wasn't a clinker in the bunch.” He smiled at us. I think he beamed.

We were evidently supposed to laugh. Most of us did. The other people in the jury looked around at us and smiled and shifted in their seats.

“And now, our decision. Young people, this job is never easy.…” He nodded at us as if he were saying yes. “This is always mysterious and exciting for the judges. Well. Here is the news. The second-prize winner, who will be the alternate in case the first-prize winner is unable to play in January—” He looked up and down the line of us. “Isn't this an awful moment, everybody?” He chuckled. Nobody said anything.

“Number Three.”

Everybody went “Euuhh?” Just a little sound, not loud.

“Number Three, stand up and show us who you are,” said the round man, cheerfully, looking down the line of us. He really didn't know.

Steve Landauer stood up. He wasn't smiling. Or he was almost not smiling. He looked as if he thought there was a mistake.

A woman read from a list, “Number Three is Steven I. Landauer. Steven is sixteen years old.” Everybody clapped. Still he didn't smile. Christine whispered, “He's mad.” I looked at his mouth. She was probably right.

“Congratulations to you,” the round man said. “Now, Mr. Landauer, we want you to stay good and healthy until January, in case…” He laughed. Steve Landauer didn't. He sat down while people were still clapping.

The round man said, “And the moment everybody's been waiting for, our first-prize winner, who is scheduled to play the concerto with the Symphony in January. We might say this is the performer who hit the ball all the way out of the park.” He looked down at the clipboard and then pushed it against his chest again. “Number Six.”

I felt Christine and Myra say “Oh…” together. I think I said it with them. Karen Karen. I instantly felt a little tiny hurt inside, and I knew there was a part of me that had wanted to win. My hands started clapping, along with everyone else's, and I remembered that she was exactly the age Mozart was when he wrote the concerto. And she loved his music so much, and she probably deserved the prize most of all. She stood up, grinning and gasping.

“My gosh,” she said. “Gosh. Gosh. Oh, gosh.” Her whole dumpiness suddenly looked gorgeous. I can't explain it. The flowers all over her dress were almost vibrating.

The woman said, “First-prize winner is Karen Coleman. Karen is nineteen years old.”

All the judges were standing up and everyone was crowding around Karen Karen. “Thank you, everyone, for a splendid afternoon,” one of the women judges said. We stood up. I wondered how Myra and Ezra and Christine felt. I wondered if they'd counted on winning, if they'd spent the whole summer wanting to win.

Christine and Steve Landauer and I had just a little bit of time to get ready to play the concert in the park.

Christine gave me a hug. “Well, Allegra, we made it through this afternoon, didn't we? Can I call you Staggeringly Soulful from now on?”

Her hug felt good. I laughed. “You played crystallized moments,” I said. “I don't even know what those are.”

She whispered, “I don't either. Crystalline.”

“Oh. Crystalline. Well, you played them.”

People were moving and shuffling around; there was a sound of a lot of people talking and some laughing. Somebody hugged Karen Karen and her glasses fell off sideways. There were shoulders and violin cases and people hugging each other and shaking hands and a combination of smells almost like a locker room. Somebody called Christine “Christine Moments,” and one of the women had Ezra backed into a corner and was telling him about her grandfather who made violins. Myra came over to me and said, “Are you in?”

“In what?”

“In the fan club to come hear Karen play in January. We'll all sit together and cheer.” Looking at her, I thought about each of us going to our next lesson, picking out a new concerto to learn.

“Sure. Yes. Sure. Of course,” I said.

We laughed. “See you then,” she said.

Elter Bubbe Leah might have been a very old lady, very peaceful, sitting in a rocking chair somewhere.

My mother was waiting for me outside the building, sitting in the car reading a book. It was still hot. I got in the car. We looked at each other. I leaned against the seat and closed my eyes, and she started the engine. “The Trout Creek Ridge girl won first,” I said. “Broken fingers and all.” I wanted to spend the whole evening at home, cuddled up with Heavenly Days, instead of playing a concert in the park.

“And how do you feel about that?” she asked. She put her hand on my knee. I opened my eyes and looked at it. It was a bug-saving hand, a symphony-playing hand, a gear-shifting hand. Middle-aged, I suppose. She used to change my diapers with it. It went waggling up along beside her head when she was happy to see people. It was the hand she'd held tight to Deirdre with. It was a Kansas hand that had gone all the way to New York to get to Oregon to have me.

“I feel okay about it,” I said, looking at her hand. “Pretty much.” She squeezed my knee and took hold of the steering wheel. We didn't say anything for a while.

“The alternate was all scowly and pouty. Guess who it is,” I said.

“I don't know. Christine?”

“Mommy,
think.
Think who wouldn't even be happy with second prize.”

She drove along thinking. “I haven't a clue.”

“My new stand partner.”

She opened her mouth wide and drove along with it hanging there. “Oh,” she said. She closed her mouth. “Well. How many judges?”

“Four.”

“Well. Four judges can't be wrong. Good for him.”

Daddy was making spaghetti and Bro David was garlicking the bread when we walked into the kitchen. Bro David had a pastry brush lifted above the loaf of bread, and my father was shoving pasta into the big pot of boiling water. They stopped and held still, nothing moved but the steam coming from the pot. Bro David is taller than Daddy, and neither of them ever wears an apron, and for some reason they looked like Boy Scouts standing there.

I told them the results. They looked at me.

“I'm fine,” I said. “I played it well. You'll hear me on the tape, they're sending everybody a tape.” They were looking at me to see how I really felt. It hit me that the three people standing there in the kitchen might never want to hear that Mozart concerto again in their lives. I laughed. “I'm
fine,
” I said. Their faces relaxed, and they went on getting dinner ready.

I wasn't exactly fine. I was tired, and I was disappointed, and I was happy for Karen, and I knew that I knew my Elter Bubbe Leah better than anybody would ever believe, and what I said was almost true: I
would be
fine. I just wasn't exactly all fine yet.

I ran upstairs to put on my Youth Orchestra dress and had a one-minute hug with Heavenly. My mother tied a big apron on me so I wouldn't spill spaghetti sauce on my dress and we had dinner in a hurry. Everybody was in a good mood, or seemed to be. Something was over. School would start tomorrow. Bro David and I would be running around early in the morning arguing over the bathroom. I looked at him across the dining-room table, and I thought about what an amazing coincidence it was that Kansas and Poland had come together to get us hybrids, shoveling spaghetti into our mouths.

For a moment during dinner, I stopped and closed my eyes and listened. Garlic bread being crunched, little clinks of forks on plates, the sound of somebody wiping a hand on a napkin. Slurps of marinara sauce going into mouths. I opened my eyes. Daddy was holding the basket of garlic bread toward me and he was staring at me. Little Leah with her braids spread out on the pillow in her bed in Suprasl appeared for an instant, and Daddy and I looked at each other, not interrupted by anything, and I said inside my head that this was my father, and then I took the basket from him and we continued our dinner.

*   *   *

Sarah and Jessica had saved a place for my parents on a big blanket with exactly three rows of blankets in front of them. Even though my mother and father were full of spaghetti, I could see them munching on Sarah's Healthy Nut Things.

Word had gotten around about the Bloch finals, and people backstage were calling Christine “Christine Moments,” and I saw three people, two violinists and a clarinet player, try to congratulate Steve Landauer on winning second place. Every single time, he pretended he was looking for something in his violin case or his pocket. He barely said thank-you.

Mr. Kaplan came around the end of the stage, with his sort of stooped-over walk, and we spotted each other and he put his left hand up like a sign. He came close and put both his hands on my shoulders. “Did you enjoy this afternoon?” he asked.

“Yep. I did.”

“The judges were quite taken with you.”

I didn't say anything.

“I spoke with one of them.” He put on a quoting voice, very bass and harrumphing: “‘That Allegra Shapiro. She's Fleur's child?' I said ‘Yes, and Alan's as well.' ‘Quite remarkable, Kaplan. But quite young.'” He leaned toward my left ear, and went on in a softer harrumphing voice: “‘A most inspirational performance, Kaplan. Most inspirational.'” His right hand applied a bit of extra pressure to my left shoulder, and he said, in his own voice, “Almost as exciting as the softball play-offs, eh?” He stepped back to see my reaction.

A big, face-breaking smile came up out of me. I would never in the world tell him about the pictures of Elter Bubbe Leah's childhood that I saw through the notes while I was playing the concerto. I might tell Bubbe Raisa.

“I'm very, very proud,” he said. “I'm going to sit with your parents now. Have a good show.”

Somebody came by and bumped my elbow on the way to the stage. I said, “Yes. Sure. Thanks, Mr. Kaplan.”

He lifted his hand in his flat-handed wave and walked away. I walked up the steps onto the stage.

Steve Landauer's chair was missing its little rubber thing on the bottom of one leg and didn't sit squarely on the platform. He tore off a corner of the music folder and folded it up and stuck it under the uneven leg. The chair still didn't balance. He got very frustrated with it and sat and muttered while we tuned up.

After some speeches about how wonderful it was that the Youth Orchestra could fill in while the Symphony musicians were locked out in the labor conflict, we started playing.

As usual, Mr. Trouble was dancing. The concert went along. People clapped hard, the breeze lifted the pages just enough off the stand so that I was using four clothespins. I put the Sibelius
Valse Triste
up and Steve Landauer shook out his left hand, hanging it down beside his chair. He was still annoyed that the chair sat crooked on the stage, and he jiggled it forward and back a bit to get a firmer grip.

I slid my mute up and put it on the bridge. The instructions say “con sordino” and that means put your mute on. Steve Landauer didn't put his on. I guess he'd forgotten. I pointed with the end of my bow to the words. He put his mute on instantly, without looking at it. He kept his eyes concentrating straight on the conductor. Steve Landauer has very good peripheral vision.

The conductor stood very straight and still so that to the audience it looked as if he was just waiting, and he held up two fingers and turned them back and forth, and made happy and sad faces, to remind us of the double meaning, and we began.

I saw Mr. Trouble out of the corner of my right eye, and he was wondering how to dance with those first low plucked notes in the basses. He was waiting. I thought about how he was so good at waiting. In a way, he'd been spending his whole life waiting.

When we start playing the melody, using our bows, the suspense begins. Then there's a rallentando, a slowing down, and then at letter C there's an a tempo and the very strange silences begin. I don't know any other piece, of all the pieces I've ever heard, that has a silence like that. It's between the second and third beat of the waltz rhythm, and it makes you hold everything up in the air for a moment. Absolutely nothing happens. Like a huge question mark but nobody tells you what the question is. You have to figure it out by yourself.

That moment lets you think so much, your mind can go so fast in that little instant of no sound. You can imagine every question you've ever thought about: Why did Deirdre's baby die? Why did Elter Bubbe Leah get annihilated at Treblinka? Why did Jessica's father die in the volcano? How did Mr. Trouble get the way he is? Will anybody ever be in love with me? You can let it get your mind very overwhelmed.

What I began to notice was that Mr. Trouble got absorbed, too. He started dancing, then I saw him stop and stare at the conductor. His head was going up and down, in rhythm with the conductor's arms. Then he started dancing again.

But he kept stopping. Dancing then stopping, dancing then stopping. He stopped and looked up at us playing, then danced again, his same dance. Then he stopped and looked down at the ground, and then danced again. He kept doing that.

We finished playing the piece and people clapped and we stood up. I very fast put the next music on top. Out of the side of my eye I saw Steve Landauer's leg jerk a little bit, then he almost backed into me. I looked down. Mr. Trouble was standing right below us. He had his veiny hands up on the edge of the boards of the stage. “Miss Allegra,” he said.

I bent down in front of Steve Landauer's legs to hear him.