Two-Part Inventions (9 page)

“But it is,” she cried. “It's all I have.”

“Nonsense,” Richard said. “It's not all you have. It may be your best thing, but it's not the only thing, believe me.”

She didn't believe him. “And anyway, I get scared when people
are listening. I don't know why. I can't do it the way I want, the way I hear it in my head.”

“That's not unusual. But you can learn to overcome it, if you really want to play, that is. Meanwhile, if you can't stop your father when he makes you perform, just play something you know well. Something short. And try to remember it's not the end of the world if you're not perfect. You're asking too much of yourself. Christ, you're just a kid. Now, play something for me. Something you love. You'll see how good it sounds and you'll feel better.”

She was never shy about playing for Richard. He listened like a professional. When he made suggestions, he didn't seem to be correcting
her
, but rather trying to help get the music out properly. That was what mattered to him. She played the fourteenth Bach Invention, a piece full of wit and verve, and when at the closing chord she looked up at him, he smiled and said, “Brava! What did I tell you?” And she did feel better.

“Did your teacher, Mrs. Flower . . . what's her name again, Mrs. Hyacinth?” He always teased her that way.

“Mrs. Gardenia. You know that.”

“All right, Mrs. Gardenia. Did she explain about the staccato at the end of each little phrase? Like this?” He played the first few bars.

“No.”

“And remember, the end is marked fortissimo. That's not just loud, but very loud.”

“She always says I'm doing fine.”

“Well, you are. But look, her cookies aren't going to do anything for you. You need a serious teacher if it's as important to you as you say. Is it?”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“I mean if you want to make this your life. I think you have the talent, but you need other things, too. The will. You have to want it more than anything else. More than any
one
else. And you have to be aggressive. Do you know what that means?”

“I think so. A fighter. But I'm not.”

“Not by nature. You bend too easily, you go along. You're agreeable. But you can learn to be a fighter if it matters enough. Maybe you're too young for me to be talking to you like this. But if you want I can recommend a very good teacher to your parents. You'll have to give up the cookies, though, and he'll be tougher on you than Mrs. Rosebud.”

“Oh, stop that. He? A man, then.”

“A man. Why, does that matter?”

“I guess not. Would he come to my house?”

“I don't know. You'll have to ask him. Here, I'll write down his name and number. He teaches with me at Hunter, you can tell your mother.”

“Okay, thanks.” She doubted that her parents would take Richard's advice about anything. Her mother still interrogated her about her visits and needed to be reassured. “We're friends,” Suzanne would protest.

“What kind of friends?” Gerda said. “What kind of grown man wants an eleven-year-old girl as a friend? It just doesn't feel right.”

She took the slip of paper, but it was two months before she could persuade Gerda to call the man, Reginald Cartelli. Gerda was fond of Mrs. Gardenia and didn't want to hurt her feelings. And wasn't Suzanne making good progress with her?

“Richard says I'd have a better chance of getting into Music and Art if I study with him.”

“But that's almost three years away. And it's a public high school. Why should it be so hard to get into?”

“There's a citywide audition. You have to prepare. I don't think Mrs. Gardenia knows anything about it.”

“All right, I'll call. But I hate to disappoint her. She's been so sweet.”

“Who's more important, Mrs. Gardenia or me?” Maybe that was what Richard meant by being aggressive. Maybe she was learning, at least a little bit.

Mr. Cartelli did not come to her house. Suzanne had to travel to his studio in Brooklyn Heights, where he had two baby grand pianos in the large living room, and only after six months did Gerda allow her to make the subway trip on her own.

 

A
S A BOY, Phil tried hard to break the habit of thinking about his family, his real family, not the aunt and uncle who took him in after the accident. Took him in: That was what their act was called, as if he'd been an abandoned cat crouching in the weeds alongside a road. Remembering, thinking, held so great an allure that it must be avoided. Brooding, his aunt called it when she saw him lying on his bed after school, staring up at nothing.

“You won't do yourself any good by brooding. Better to keep busy. If you haven't got any homework to do, you can help me clean out the fridge.”

Brooding meant restaging in his mind scenes from the past as if he were directing a TV sitcom. The four of them around the kitchen table, eating takeout pizza. He placed them all in their proper seats, his father with his back to the kitchen door, his mother facing him, and he and Billy opposite each other, Billy sitting on phone books because he was still small and the table was high. Billy would be performing antics with the strands of melted cheese, twirling them, trying to tie them in knots, his parents scolding but laughing at the same time. Billy, who wouldn't eat the crusts but tossed them onto Phil's plate because, as they all knew, Phil would eat anything, even the
dry lukewarm crusts. Then they would clear the table together and his mother would send him and his brother into the dining room to do their homework at the big table, and he would help Billy with any words he couldn't read.

Sometimes he began with the mornings, the lingering warm smell of coffee and toast, the breakfast finished, his father the first to leave, pulling out of the driveway in the Buick, its old gears squeaking, his mother stuffing their lunches into bags and kissing them hurriedly as they ran out to meet the school bus stopped in front of the house. Or Sundays, his large brawny father sitting on the lawn mower, pretending he was riding a horse, entertaining Phil and Billy by zigzagging, making swirly designs in the grass. It was as if by recalling intently, putting in place all the details, even the weather, he could conjure these scenes back into reality. Where did the past go, anyway? It couldn't just disappear, could it? It had happened. It must still exist somewhere in a long chronicle of all the happenings in the world, including those of his own family. If he could somehow revive those scenes, his authentic life, then the life he was living now in his aunt and uncle's somber Brooklyn apartment might vanish like a dream. He would close his eyes and will himself back into his room with the bunk beds, the mess of games and schoolbooks and clothes on the floor, the baseball bat in the corner, the pictures of players on the wall.

The room his aunt and uncle had given him was nothing like what a kid's room should be. It had been a spare room, a den, they called it. “You'll have the den,” his aunt said that first night. “You can fix it up later, when we get your things from the house.” The bed was a studio couch—they promised to get a real bed very soon, “as soon as we get our bearings,”
his aunt said—and there was a large leather La-Z-Boy chair and a TV set, a bookshelf with an old set of leather-bound books with gilt titles on the spine that looked like no one had touched them in years. Phil took down one of them to look at, and it made a crinkly sound as he pulled it off the shelf—the cover was stuck to the book next to it. He slid it back quickly. The window looked out onto an airshaft, and the floor was covered with a worn patterned rug whose colors had long since subsided into browns and grays, its fringes in tatters.

His aunt and uncle had gone back to the house in Great Neck, as they promised, a few days after the accident, to get his things and, as they put it, “start clearing things out.”

“Are you going to throw everything away?” he asked. “No, no,” Uncle Mel said. “Just go through things, see what needs to be done.”

Phil begged to go along with them. He wanted to see the rooms, to touch his mother's and father's clothes. He wanted to sit on the living-room couch where he'd watched TV. And there were things of Billy's that he wanted, too. But they wouldn't let him come. They left him with a neighbor.

“But why?” he pleaded. “It's my house. It's my things.”

“Don't worry, we'll bring everything that belongs to you,” Aunt Marsha said. “It wouldn't be good for you to come. You must try to put that behind you. This is your home now.”

He felt the full and despairing helplessness of being nine years old. There was nothing he could do. So, he would never see those things again. And yet they belonged to him, didn't they? If he was the only one left?

Before the accident, he had regarded his aunt and uncle with indifference. They visited occasionally on Sundays, and Aunt
Marsha would ask questions like what was his favorite subject in school, or what sports he liked, and he answered dutifully, bored. She nodded, satisfied that she, too, had done her duty. She was his father's older sister, broad-shouldered and stocky like him, shaped like a cinder block, with short curly very black hair dusted with gray. She had a deep voice like a man's and wore thick glasses and an expression of fixed displeasure, as though what met her eyes failed to meet her standards. Her mouth barely opened when she spoke, and she seldom laughed. She and Uncle Mel had no children. Uncle Mel was mostly gruff and taciturn. But he did like to tell riddles and play games with Phil and Billy, checkers or Mastermind or Battleship. His moves were canny, and he never let them win. “If you can't win the way you planned,” he used to tell Phil, “find another way. Don't always stick to the obvious.” Other than that, all Phil knew about him was that he was an accountant and he liked horse races. Sometimes on a Sunday visit he would sit down quite close to the TV to watch an important race, and when it was over he usually appeared disgruntled with the outcome. “I hope you didn't have too much riding on that horse,” their father would joke, and Uncle Mel shrugged.

“When you're older,” he told Phil and Billy, “I'll take you to the track.”

But all that was before, when there was no need to think about them. Now that he was in their power, his indifference grew to active dislike. He got the idea that what had happened was somehow their fault, though he knew better. There was no one else to blame, so he fixed on them. And because of his antipathy, the cartons and shopping bags they brought back from the house that afternoon remained unopened. “Brooding
won't help,” his aunt said, finding him in his room. “You should go out and play ball with the boys on the street. I packed your bat and your glove. They're in there,” and she waved at the boxes piled up under the window.

He shook his head. It wasn't his street and those boys weren't his friends. The boys he belonged with were at this very moment continuing their lives on the street that had cast him out, a broad curving street with grassy lawns in front of each house, not like here, the street lined with cars in front of sullen apartment buildings, the ball games—he watched them from the living-room windows—interrupted every few minutes by passing traffic.

“I even packed those things of your brother's you said you wanted. Open the boxes and you'll see. Can I help you?”

He didn't bother shaking his head this time, just waited for her to give up and go away. He was afraid to open the boxes, afraid of what he would feel, what might happen to him when he saw the relics of that life that was over, sucked somewhere into a tunnel of the past.

After a while, during the day he managed to forget intermittently, a few minutes at a time. The neighborhood school was all right, though larger, older, and shabbier than his real school. He had always liked the bustle and purposefulness of school and knew how to ingratiate himself with the teachers. He even began to make friends, though he would never give his aunt the satisfaction of saying so. From his earliest years he had made friends easily; he was gregarious and bright, good at sports, and he was too young and too energetic for wretchedness to engulf him completely.

Still, those first few weeks, at night, as soon as he lay down
in bed and after his aunt and uncle had each awkwardly kissed him goodnight, he would obsessively restage his old life, the smell of his mother's hair, like soap and grass, so different from his aunt's, like stale food, the feel of his father's arms hoisting him on his shoulders when he was smaller. Now he could almost carry Billy, at least he was able to stumble around for a few steps before the weight overcame him and he had to toss him onto the bed.

It was Billy, three years younger, whom he thought about even more than his parents, as he lay in bed waiting for sleep. He wasn't used to sleeping alone and could hardly remember the time before Billy shared his room, on the bottom bunk. Although he did carry a vivid memory, fixed as a photograph, of his parents bringing Billy home from the hospital, a package folded in his mother's arms like a loaf of bread wrapped in a blanket. At first he wasn't much fun at all, just a baby Phil couldn't play with and had to be careful to touch gently. But his parents assured him that before long Billy would be walking around and starting to talk, and then Phil would be the big brother; he could teach Billy everything he knew. And they were right. It happened exactly that way. He loved teaching Billy things, and Billy followed Phil around and copied everything he did.