Chapter Five
Dreams, Sun, and Pain
The next day we boarded the train for Menton. I was exhausted from the emotional upheaval of the night before and, as I tested my berth, wondered out loud if I’d be able to sleep. Marge dug into her suitcase and brought out a bottle of cognac.
“Haaaaaaaaaaa!” was my response. “I’ll be well in no time . . . now that we have . . . all the ingredients . . . essential to . . . a French cure!” We all laughed. What more could anyone want besides cognac and an imminent holiday?
The cognac was helpful, because lying in the berth was difficult. The slightest pull of motion in either direction made my muscles grab to try to stay in the same position. Since the muscles wouldn’t hold, everything began to ache more than usual.
“I’m all tired out . . . from trying to lie down!” I told my friends the next morning, with a laugh-wail.
But I soon forgot about pain as I looked out the window at the fabled Côte d’Azur. I had long imagined it as the ultimate in beauty. I was sure it would offer up its scenic glories and history, and give me back my health—all in the next two months. No wonder my insides were leaping with excitement.
As Mademoiselle had described, the Hôtel du Parc was old, spacious, and comfortable. We loved it instantly. Our room had two balconies, and I was almost too excited to breathe when I stepped out onto one of them. Below was the hotel garden, with lemon and palm trees, and flowers everywhere. I could see the blue of the Mediterranean beyond. Everything within my view seemed to promise me wholeness in its brilliant light.
I turned back into the room and said to Martha, “Let’s walk down . . . to the beach . . . before we unpack!” She frowned, assuming I was tired.
“It’s only a block!” I added. By now I could walk that far without much help. It was still slow, but I could take Marge’s or Martha’s arm for balance. I couldn’t wait to see for myself that the ocean was within my reach.
The surf was splashing on the rocky coastline. Water of any kind—ocean, lake, waterfall, stream, or fountain—had always made me catch my breath with delight. The glistening water, the slow rhythm of the tide seemed to be telling me not to be so anxious. It told me to breathe with it and know that its timelessness would sustain me. It was an assurance of life—the ocean’s continuity could help me to find my own.
Every day after breakfast we walked down to the beach. Martha bought me an orange air mattress, which she nicknamed The Bug. I would either lie on The Bug or on the sand, craving the sun’s warmth on my aching muscles, feeling certain that every bit of its energy was healing and strengthening. The warmth seemed to be telling me that the pain would soon be ebbing away.
I wanted to go into the water, but Marge and Martha had been uneasy about that the first day. Even though the tide was gentle at that moment, my balance was none too good even without the tidal pull. That had been the inspiration for The Bug.
My two friends would pull The Bug to the tide line, and I would lie on it. Then they dragged it over the pebbles and launched it, one of them holding onto either end, and took me for a “ride” in the water. I could trail my hands and feet, and almost pretend I was swimming.
Martha was an expert swimmer, and Marge, with her Hawaiian background, had practically grown up in the water. I, too, had been a good swimmer “BP,” as we had begun to call my before-polio self. Once we were in three or four feet of water, I would slide off The Bug and swim a few strokes. The saltwater was so buoyant, and I had always floated so easily, that I found it was less effort to swim than to walk, though of course my arms tired very quickly.
I knew swimming was supposed to be good exercise for polio patients who had paralyzed legs. Why wouldn’t it be equally good for damaged arms? As soon as I was tired, I would hang onto The Bug and be towed in to land again.
On the way in, I could look up at the old part of the town on the hill—the Place de l’Eglise, with the tower of the Cathédrale Saint-Michel against the French Alps in the background. There in the distance was the aesthetic and the historic I had come to Europe to find. Here was the water and the sun. And two devoted friends willing me back to health. How could I not recover quickly?
I found it remarkable that I could lie out in the sun so long without feeling burned, and kept commenting to Martha and Marge on this phenomenon. I was using suntan oil, of course, but even so, I had never been able to lie out in the sun for very long. Wondering if it was the time of year, or perhaps something about this particular part of the world, I kept referring to the miraculous “no-burn” suntan of the Riviera.
Finally, Martha could stand it no longer. “For heaven’s sake, Carol,” she exploded. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I looked at her in bewilderment.
“You keep talking about the ‘no-burn’ tan. You are burned to a crisp every day!”
I argued with her for a while, but Marge backed her up. It was true, I conceded, that my tan had a reddish cast, but surely I’d feel it if I were burned. As we talked, however, it began to emerge that the distortion of perception must be my own.
“You know, I try . . . to forget . . . about the pain . . . most of the time. . . . But maybe it keeps me . . . from noticing . . . if I’m sunburned.” As I thought about it, I realized that I was trying to shut out any awareness of pain, no matter what the cause.
I have since learned that such masking of one pain by another is a common neurological phenomenon—one that I might have expected had I been more medically aware.
The paradise of Menton told me that recovery must be taking place. Also, I was gradually able to walk farther, swim a few strokes, drink my tea with fewer spills. I noted every tiny centimeter of progress as if it were a major victory. My prevailing mood was hope bordering on ecstasy.
No doubt related to my hopeful mood were dreams that first appeared in Menton—glorious Technicolor dreams, in which I would be performing a piano concerto. The soundtrack was always richly scored. Sometimes I would be playing long passages of the Brahms B-flat Concerto or the first movement of the Beethoven Fifth Concerto, “The Emperor,” which I had been working on at Fontainebleau.
It was always music of grandeur and strength. I would awaken in the morning or from a nap, still hearing a golden passage from Brahms or Beethoven or Rachmaninoff, still feeling myself playing the piano effortlessly, bringing the musical message to life with all the skill and imagination I had ever possessed. Although the dreams were in extreme contrast to my actual physical state, I chose to interpret them as signs that I would indeed be playing that way again in no time.
Much later, I learned to equate these glittering fantasies with those of the bereaved who dream of a dear one who has died recently, or even someone long gone who was closely woven into the dreamer’s life. The glorious dreams faded over time, gradually replaced by anxiety visions as my subconscious began to absorb the immensity of my loss.
Every evening after dinner, I would walk through one of the comfortable sitting rooms in the hotel and look longingly at an old upright piano in the corner. Nobody ever played it. I wanted to touch it—and yet was afraid to do so. The suspense grew, and one morning I could hold out no longer.
I went downstairs by myself and peeked into the sitting room. There was no one there. I walked over to the upright piano and sat down on the bench. I put my hand on the keyboard and pressed one of the keys. It took a lot of effort to push it down. Maybe it was a sticky key. I tried another. It, too, seemed to go down only with the greatest of effort. As I tried one after another, it seemed more and more odd. I had never come across a piano with such a resistant action. It must be through lack of care of the instrument, I thought. I had played a lot of uprights in my years of piano playing, and they had always seemed to have comparatively loose, easy actions.
How could I not have known instantly that the problem was my extreme weakness rather than a piano’s strange condition? Though I had every indication that my hands and arms were scarcely capable of the smallest,
easiest of normal movements, let alone the complex and demanding motions involved in piano playing, I couldn’t make the connection. I could admit that I wasn’t yet able to brush my hair, drink my tea with security, hold a book for any length of time, or perform a long list of other simple actions. But I couldn’t yet admit that my piano playing, too, was gone.
My lifelong bonding with the instrument, a kind of organic fusion, was too ingrained to comprehend a rupture. The piano was at my very core; it meant life itself to me. To admit that my playing had gone the way of my hair-brushing or tea-drinking ability would have been equivalent to admitting to myself that I had died.
It was ironic that I should have sat there, continuing to play one note at a time, using my whole arm to accomplish what had been the most natural of movements to the pre-polio me. I had practically started out life playing one note at a time. My mother had told me that before I could even walk, I would crawl over to the piano, pull myself up with one hand on the keyboard, and play one note after another with the other hand. When I found one I particularly liked, I would play it over and over. Evidently I spent long stretches of time “playing” the piano as I grew, started to walk, and could crawl up onto the bench from behind.
My father took snapshots of me at about eighteen months, “playing” with an expression of total ecstasy and absorption. I must have assumed the piano was mine, and preferred it to any toy or other amusement. It had been placed in my parents’ living room by fate—in the form of a friend who was moving from a house to an apartment and no longer had room for his grand. Little had my parents known that the piano would be the greatest source of both pleasure and pain, of meaning and despair, for their firstborn.
They had been pleased and a little mystified at my fascination with the instrument. One evening when I was three, a family friend who taught piano to young children had come over for dinner. Naomi watched with great interest while I “played” with my usual preoccupation. She offered on the spot to give me lessons.
At first my parents protested that I was surely too young. But Naomi had seen something that intrigued her. Such a fascination, she explained, told her that I was not too young. She volunteered her time if my parents would let her come to the house and start my lessons. They gave in, and another fateful step was taken.
Once I had found out that all the sounds I had come to love so much had names, I immediately wanted to know the name of my favorite. It was called B-flat, Naomi told me. B-flat: the key of the Chopin sonata I had been playing immediately before the attack of polio, and the key of one of my first piano pieces, “Mr. B-flat.”
It was a measure of Naomi’s sensitivity that she found such a “masterpiece” for me, in my favorite key. I played it in my first recital appearance, at age four. Naomi told me beforehand that the audience would applaud as I walked onstage and after I had finished playing. But something very strange happened. The applause swelled as I approached the bench in my usual way: right knee onto the back of the bench, then up over the top to sit facing the keyboard. I couldn’t imagine why the people were applauding so much. I hadn’t played yet.
“Mr. B-flat” went off without incident, and there was more applause when I finished. Then Naomi took me out into the auditorium so that I could listen to the older students. I watched while one after another came out, walked past the bench, and then slid between it and the keyboard and sat down. At first I thought that was a strange way to begin the performance. Why was no one climbing onto the bench? Then the truth dawned on me: Theirs was the grown-up way; my way was wrong! That was the last time I climbed onto the bench from behind—in public, anyway.
One day during a lesson, Naomi called excitedly to my mother, who quickly came running from the kitchen into the living room.
“Billie!” she exclaimed. “Carol has perfect pitch!”
Naomi’s laughing voice and the brisk movements of her tall frame radiated enthusiasm. I knew from the tone of her voice that whatever perfect pitch was, it was good for me to have it. She instructed me to walk across the room and stand with my back to the piano while she played notes and asked me to name them. Then she asked me to sing other notes she hadn’t played yet.
She and my mother both seemed to be excited about something; my mother, I noticed, had tears in her eyes. I was puzzled when Naomi explained that not everyone knew those notes by their sounds, especially when she told me that she couldn’t do that herself. How could that be, when she was the one who had taught me the names?
Later, Naomi would say that I “just seemed to mushroom”; that she was less aware of teaching me than of coming every week to listen to me play.
When I was six, I overheard one of my parents’ friends, an amateur pianist, say, “Someday I’ll be paying to hear Carol play in Carnegie Hall.” I could tell from her tone that Carnegie Hall must be the ultimate in places to play. I never questioned that someday I would play there.
The first time someone mentioned the phrase “concert pianist” to me, I was eight, and playing my first solo recital. I knew it was an important occasion because Grandma and Grandpa Rosenberger had come all the way from their Iowa farm. Grandma went for a walk with me the afternoon of the recital, and I was bouncing a large rubber ball as we walked. She wanted to know how I could remember all the music that I was going to play that evening. I thought the question strange. I couldn’t imagine not remembering it, but wanted to reassure her.
“I have it all right here,” I told her, pointing to my chest. I thought that was the center of memory, for didn’t one say, “I know it by heart”? But Grandma’s question was my first indication that perhaps such memory was something unusual, like perfect pitch.
Naomi laughed and shook her head that evening, and said she had never seen anyone so calm and collected before a performance. I couldn’t understand why this was so remarkable. I loved to play for people; I did it all the time, whenever anyone asked me. Why worry about something one knew how to do?
After the recital, someone had asked me if I wanted to be a concert pianist. I thought it over. A concert pianist must be someone who played the piano for people in a concert hall on a regular basis, especially in Carnegie Hall. What could be more natural for me than playing for people? And I already knew that everybody seemed to think my playing was something special. So I said yes, that’s what I wanted to be.
How many years of hard work and exhilarating performances there had been since that evening! But now I sat playing one note at a time, as if I were once again that baby who had intertwined the piano so inextricably with her very core. I played a B-flat, the magic key. It was as hard to push down as the others. I decided I’d better go back upstairs. Once I had returned to Paris, we could rent a piano that had a more normal action.
Marge was leaving for Paris, but Martha would stay with me until my mother arrived. Marge said she had had a wonderful holiday. We all agreed that my getting sick had at least enabled all three of us to see a little of the south of France.
My mother arrived shortly after Marge left, and Martha and I went in a rented car to the airport to meet her. Mom said later that she didn’t recognize me until she saw Martha standing next to me. Her voice quivered a little with emotion, but she laughed and said that she had never seen me so tan or with such a lovely haircut. She had also never seen me so thin.
Mom was dark-haired and slender, with a beautiful face and exquisite bone structure—a happy blend of her Polish, Czech, and English heritage. Her appearance was gentle, but everyone who knew her well was aware of the strong-as-steel interior. I, in contrast, had always looked my strength with the blond hair, sturdy frame, sometimes on the heavy side, and the Germanic facial features of the Rosenbergers. Now I was no longer sturdy, and I was thinner than my mother.
Mom was thrilled, she said, to see me walking, but noticed what Martha had pointed out, that I threw my right leg when I walked—pointing my right foot to the side. My balance wasn’t good enough for me to look down at that foot myself, but it fel
t as if I were going to fall if I tried to straighten it any more. I was just walking the way it felt safest. I already knew the extreme back and abdominal weakness was the problem—the same thing that made going up or down a step frightening, as if I might fall at any moment.
Mom seemed to love being in Menton, and I was happy that she, too, could have a vacation after the worry and strain of Nana’s illness. She invited Martha to stay for a while longer.
We kept the rented car and drove around Menton and the vicinity. I could lie down when my back was tired and sit up to see something particularly spectacular. We marveled at the inspiring views from the celebrated Grand Corniche cliff road “where Mediterranean meets sky,” and such wonders as the medieval walled towns of Eze and Roquebrune. I wrote to Nana in the slow and careful hand I had developed since leaving the hospital: “Eze is built on top of a mountain, and the first time I saw it from a distance, the castle seeming to be rising from nowhere into space, I knew that story-book castles are real, after all!”
Later in the same letter, I summed it up: “This must be the most beautiful spot in the world!”
Mom seemed delighted with my physical progress, but, as I found out later, her letters home were a little less enthusiastic than mine. After assuring Dad that I was walking better and that my back was stronger, she wrote: “Carol’s skin is clearing up nicely—just a few marks left from the nervous rash . . . She is anxious to start practicing but shouldn’t do that for a while yet. We played a little bridge, and she seemed to enjoy it. There is so little she can do, but her spirit is fine.”
And from another letter: “We had a nice talk at dinner tonight. She hasn’t been very talkative—is very quiet, almost vague at times, which is so unlike Carol. But tonight she seemed a little more like her old self.”
To Play Again Page 5
