You would have thought you were listening to a recording if you were in Hickman Hall that summer afternoon. It seemed like every music teacher and conductor I had ever met, and plenty I had only heard about from afar, was in attendance, crammed into the recital hall’s three-hundred-plus seats. The audience was absolutely still, holding its collective breath, not wanting to miss a note. The only movement in the hall was Melanie, onstage swaying with the music as she played. The piece is a virtuoso masterpiece with breathtakingly fast passages and haunting melodies. The cadenza—a showy section played without accompaniment—is one of the most famous in music history and one of the most dazzling, with hyperfast arpeggios that require the violinist to ricochet the bow back and forth across the strings.
Melanie later told me she made some sort of mistake that day, and I caught a puzzling glimpse of her dad glaring in the wings. But if she did goof, the audience didn’t catch it. As she finished off the last triumphant chord, the audience was already on its feet, with a thunderous standing ovation that lingered after she left the stage. Of course that was nothing new; she got a standing ovation every time I saw her perform it.
Melanie nodded and bowed graciously at the end of that performance, as she always did. But who knew what she was really thinking? For all the time we spent together, laughing at Steph’s antics or rehearsing together, she almost never talked about her own playing. She didn’t talk much, period. She was reserved, inscrutable, pouring out emotion and swaying soulfully to the music while on the stage, but an enigmatic cipher off of it. She seemed completely oblivious to the effect of her playing, which alternately inspired awe, envy, and ferocious competitiveness in everyone we knew.
I always figured if I played as she did, I’d be shouting it from the rooftops and dancing a jig on the stage. I couldn’t quite understand how she could be so nonchalant about it all. Mr. K, too. He never did more than nod if he approved, scowl slightly if he didn’t. My own parents smothered me with kisses for far less. Didn’t her parents realize she was really good?
The next morning, I stumbled into orchestra rehearsal with an M&M hangover, my throat raspy from whispering way too long after lights out. Still, this was my favorite time of day at ASTA. I loved playing with an orchestra. Whenever the conductor raised the baton and the musicians raised their instruments, whatever little misery might be bugging me disappeared into the music. The sound we made together was so much better than anything I could produce on my own. There was an intimacy about it, a camaraderie, a shared rush of emotion as we played.
I knew most of the other musicians my age by now: Jonathan, the smartest boy in our grade, with the big glasses and a vocabulary to match. Michael, a lanky, gentle violinist who stared at Melanie when he thought nobody was looking. John, a cellist whose mother was a music teacher and a friend of Mr. K. Then there was Paul; after his father left his family, his grandmother sent money each month so he and his brother could continue their lessons with Mr. K.
Jonathan said we were like soldiers in the line of fire. “There’s nothing like crawling under the barbed wire together, with machine guns firing over your head,” as he put it. He had a point. In Mr. K’s orchestra, nobody was literally shooting at us, but we were figuratively diving, rolling, and throwing ourselves in front of his incoming barbs to protect each other anyway.
After dinner each night at ASTA, we had to dress up and attend a concert. I would walk over to Hickman Hall with Melanie, Miriam, and Stephanie, all of us tripping slightly, unaccustomed to our high-heeled sandals, as we navigated the pathway while the sun dipped and glinted between the trees. Sometimes Steph and I would lag behind, dropping on our hands and knees to peer at cicadas and earthworms on the mossy ground, before drifting into the auditorium.
But one rainy Thursday night the summer I turned thirteen, Mr. K was already onstage, pacing anxiously back and forth, as we filed in. He held a white handkerchief hastily folded into a square in one hand and blotted at his forehead while telling us to hurry up and take our seats. He was dressed in his summer best—a tan suit with wide lapels and a fat red, white, and blue tie—and his mustache was fastidiously trimmed. He didn’t mention the one topic that was on everyone’s mind. But you could tell that for once, he was struggling to focus on the music.
Mr. K had been planning for this day, August 8, 1974, all year. He had commissioned a new orchestral work specifically to be performed at the adult orchestra concert. He had worked tirelessly to bring in exactly the right celebrity guest. He had called the newspapers to alert them. Mr. K had, in fact, planned every detail perfectly.
It was the day he had chosen to introduce a new work: Declaration of Independence, written by composer Philip Gordon.
The piece was typical Mr. K. For a Ukrainian guy, he sure had a sentimental streak for American patriotic music. He programmed his favorites into every concert we played. There was American Patrol, a montage of American folks songs built around “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” There was Grand Canyon Suite by Ferde Grofé, and “Hoe-Down” from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo, celebrating the American cowboy.
The same was true of the European classics: if a symphonic work celebrated armed rebellion against oppressors, or freedom, or old-fashioned pioneering, it found a way onto our music stands. There was Finlandia, which Jean Sibelius composed to inspire Finns to rise up against Imperialist Russia. There were Ukrainian folk songs, which Mr. K arranged himself. There was New World Symphony, the Czech composer Dvořák’s ode to spirituals and Native American songs.
But that night’s piece was particularly significant. It honored American independence and was written at Mr. K’s request. It would be narrated by New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne, who was standing off in the wings in a funereally black suit and tie, shifting from one foot to another, looking distracted.
For Mr. K, August 8, 1974, was supposed to be his day, to call attention to his music program. He hadn’t counted on the resignation of President Richard Nixon, which was expected to be announced later that night.
“Geeves me great pleasure to introduce…,” Mr. K announced, “our president.”
For a moment he looked stricken. Nervous laughter rippled through the auditorium.
“Uh… governor.”
Governor Byrne strode onto the stage. The orchestra broke into its opening chords. I couldn’t help but notice the irony of the words the governor was reciting. With patriotic strains swelling in the background, he began: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…”
As he went on, the audience cringed, then tittered uneasily, as he recited those familiar phrases: “when a long train of abuses and usurpations…” and “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government…”
After the concert, we ran back to the dormitory, gathering around a scratchy portable radio in the common room to listen to President Nixon deliver his resignation speech. When it was over, nobody could sleep. I darted down the dormitory corridor from room to room, rehashing the Watergate scandal with one group of girls, soliciting opinions about incoming President Ford from the next. I wished I still carried around the Harriet the Spy composition notebooks I used to bring everywhere, to record history in the making. I waited in a long line to call home from the pay phone in the hall, so I could ask my parents to save the next day’s newspaper.
Truth be told, even when there wasn’t a president resigning, nobody got much sleep during ASTA week. We would try to stay up as late as possible, past our eleven P.M. lights-out curfew, without getting caught. Every year, the boys tried to sneak onto the girls’ floor; once, Mr. K caught our friends Michael and John shimmying up the outside of the building, attempting to climb up a pipe to the girls’ second-floor dorm.
Mr. K trolled both boys’ and girls’ floors every night, announcing “Bed check!” and then poking his head into rooms unannounced. He occasionally reassured the adolescent girls in their
baby-doll pajamas, “Eez okay, I am father of two daughters,” but no one back then thought twice about the propriety of a grown man patrolling the girls’ floor anyway. He warned everybody about “bed check” during his speech the first night of ASTA every summer, getting a laugh when he once garbled his English and announced, “At bedtime, I vant to see two bodies een every bed!”
Most nights after Mr. K made his rounds, we slipped out from under our covers anyway, sharing candy and confessions by flashlight. We got away with staying up late because the adults were off drinking and playing dumb jokes on each other and indulging in Mr. K’s Black Russians.
Rumor had it that Mr. K never went anywhere without his portable Black Russian bar, which he set up in his room every year. From the stories that drifted back to us in the dorms, the grown-ups he invited to his nightcaps were unimaginably wild as they drained his favorite concoction of “vodka, Kahlua, and secret Ukrainian incantations.” Once, the older campers told us, some drunken counselors Saran-wrapped his toilet when he was out checking beds in the dorm. Another time, they booby-trapped his room with empty cans that went crashing down when he opened his door. He laughed and retaliated with raunchy jokes that made some of the counselors—especially the ones who had grown up with him as their teacher—blush.
But that night, the night President Nixon resigned, there were none of the usual high jinks. The excitement in the air got our adrenaline pumping, but for him it seemed only to unearth some deep, mysterious sadness. We couldn’t help noticing it at the concert, how he was somber, more distracted than we had seen him before. Usually, we waited until we heard him stomping down the dormitory hallway before we turned off our flashlights and hid our bags of candy. But that night, his footsteps never came.
PART III
Young people can learn from my example that something can come from nothing. What I have become is the result of my hard efforts.
—FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
8
Baba
MELANIE
Everybody I know is afraid of my father. What they don’t know is that he has a few fears of his own. There are the Communists, who he remains convinced will try to reclaim him at any moment. Then there’s the telephone, which he avoids using because he always bollixes up his English. Driving to new places puts him into a panic, too. My dad has no sense of direction. To compensate, he maps out routes in advance, carefully highlighting directions with a yellow marker.
His greatest fear of all, though, is of his own mother. Up until now, Baba has been mostly a mythical creature in my life, spoken of in hushed tones and in the past tense. You wouldn’t have known she was alive, much less that she lived just a few towns away. She stopped speaking to my dad when I was an infant. She never forgave him for marrying my mother, who is neither Ukrainian nor Catholic—and who, in Baba’s view, made things worse by going out and becoming an invalid, such a shameful burden to my dad.
Baba is a survivor. My father says she saved his life when he was a boy during the war. But whatever strength got her through those ordeals has metastasized into cruelty and hostility toward those closest to her. My step-grandfather is worse. He used to beat my father and, when they arrived in the United States, made him sleep in the spider-infested dirt cellar—then sued him for rent. The last time my mother saw Baba was when I was still in a crib; she showed up at our house while my dad was at work, threatening to tell the press of the lawsuit and ruin my father’s career.
My father has never given up hope of reconciliation. The year I turn ten, my great-uncle dies, and at the funeral, my dad begs Baba for another chance.
The reconciliation has immediate repercussions for Steph and me. Suddenly, we are thrust into Ukrainian boot camp: my dad is determined to show Baba that he can make up for lost time in teaching us our culture.
Our first test comes on Easter, which we are to celebrate at my grandparents’ house, in a tumbledown North Plainfield neighborhood that had been elegant once, a long time ago. “Lock the doors,” my father says as he turns off the highway. I watch out the car window as we roll past old wooden houses, lined up so close that no sky peeks through. As we get closer, the homes get shabbier, with weeds sprouting from the sidewalks and sofas with the springs poking out sitting on peeling porches.
Finally we pull up to my grandparents’ house, a sprawling Victorian with a steep, narrow driveway set far back from the street. Steph and I help set up my mother’s wheelchair and follow my dad as he rolls her up to the crumbling doorstep.
“Now remember, girls, you shake hands and look them straight een the eyes. No slouching, stand up straight. Do you remember what I taught you to say?”
My father has been drilling us on the phrase “Pleased to meet you” in Ukrainian, but Steph is having trouble remembering it.
“Duzhe priemno piznaty,” I pronounce slowly. “Is that right, Daddy?”
“That’s eet.”
Steph is looking pretty green. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
I feel the same way as soon as the front door opens. My grandmother, sour-faced and squeezed into a floral dress edged in bright red rickrack, takes one look at me and pronounces me “homely, but eenteresting.” My step-grandfather, whom we call Doodie, pulls himself up from his chair in front of the TV set, leaving behind a pile of toenail shavings on the floor. The house is three stories tall, but my grandfather has nailed up wallboard to block off the upper floors for what Baba called her “roomers.” My grandparents’ living quarters on the ground floor are dimly lit and violently colored, with Ukrainian embroidery everywhere—pillows, table runners, wall hangings—and religious icons and plates full of garishly colored Ukrainian Easter eggs.
I escape to the bathroom, but the long, skinny space, converted from an old butler’s pantry, isn’t much of a refuge; it has wild red-and-purple carpeting and two swinging doors that don’t lock at either end. The bathtub is filled with cloudy used bath water that my grandmother saves for later to wash the kitchen floor.
I search for my dad and find him in the kitchen, where the radiators are covered with paper towels, left to dry so they can be used again. Baba is bent over a steaming pot, making pyrohy, traditional Ukrainian dumplings filled with potatoes. I try to help with the dishes, but Baba yells at me for using too much water to wash the plates and then for using too much soap. “Vee don’t vaste-it the vater!” she cries, showing me the proper way to wash dishes, with barely any soap and a hasty rinse under a tepid trickle. Later, when my dad is away on business and sends Steph and me to stay with Baba, she will refuse to let us take showers. “Eef you wash hair too much,” she warns darkly, “leetle onions on your head weel dry up and you hair eet weel fall out.”
If I don’t think too much about hygiene, Baba’s cooking is delicious. After a few rounds of vodka for Doodie and my dad, she sets out heaping plates of ham, kielbasa, and an Easter bread she makes called paska on the kitchen table, which is covered with sticky rings left by glasses of Doodie’s favorite homemade cherry brandy. The grown-ups chatter away in Ukrainian that Steph and I can’t follow, until Baba notices that Steph isn’t eating.
“You no like-it thees kielbasa?”
Steph turns pale. “No, it’s not that. It’s just… I’m just… um… I’m… full.” She is a terrible liar.
“Stephka doesn’t eat much,” my dad cuts in. “She has sensitive stomach. But we are working on that. Right, Stephka?” He shoots Steph a warning glare.
Baba looks at Steph appraisingly. “Your tato”—Ukrainian for “daddy”—“ven he was leetle boy, he was beeg trah-ble. He had pepper een hees dupa. Stubborn, too.” Then she launches into a rant about how our father was a dreadful, colicky baby. She used to rub vinegar on his stomach to make him stop crying, she says. But it didn’t work.
“Ay-yi-yi,” she moans at the memory.
“He have-it gazzzz,” she explains. Five decades after the fact she still sounds annoyed. “He was beeg trah-ble.”
After that, we see my grandpa
rents regularly. Every Saturday morning, Doodie shows up at our house to give Ukrainian lessons to Stephanie and me. We gather at our dining room table, the one my mother regrets buying because it’s so poorly constructed that the cheap chairs have collapsed one by one, leaving my father with yet another job on his to-do list. Steph and I exchange a nervous glance as Doodie takes his rickety seat.
“Start veeth—how you call-its?—alphabet,” Doodie commands.
“Ah, beh, veh,” we begin obediently in unison, Steph delaying saying each letter just a fraction of a second so she can hear me say it first.
Mostly, we can’t understand anything Doodie says, his accent is so thick and his syntax so garbled. My American-born uncle, John, once printed up a T-shirt with Doodie’s constant refrain: HOW YOU CALL-ITS? We manage to stumble through the Cyrillic alphabet and a few vocabulary lists. But when he moves on to the language’s complicated grammar, we’re lost.
“Thees means these one and that means those one” is one of his first lessons, which serves only to send us diving under the table pretending we’ve dropped our pencils in order to hide our laughter. Frustrated when we can’t seem to catch on, Doodie shakes his head and mutters “Ayi yi yi!” under his breath, adding a few choice expletives that are not on our vocabulary lists.
It doesn’t seem to matter how hard we work. Under Doodie’s tutelage our progress is glacial, and my grandparents let us know they are terribly disappointed. After a while, our sessions dwindle and eventually stop altogether. Doodie gives up on us.
My dad keeps trying. That summer, he packs Steph and me off to language immersion camp at Soyuzivka, a Ukrainian resort in the Catskill Mountains. Set amid thick woods, Soyuzivka was once a sanitarium for Social Register swells looking for a “nature rest cure”—a nice way of saying it was where rich alcoholics went to dry out or depressed ones went to get away. The doctor who originally built the place was the son of the New York Times editor in chief who broke the Tammany Hall scandal, and his patients supposedly included New Yorker editor Harold Ross and the writers O. Henry, James Thurber, and E. B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web. During the 1920s, so many literary types swarmed the sanitarium that it was nicknamed “the New Yorker Retreat.”
Strings Attached Page 11
