To Play Again

by Carol Rosenberger

  I added that the session’s content had been so profound I couldn’t even describe it. Then I bubbled a little about Mademoiselle’s vast reservoir of knowledge: “It’s marvelous the way she calls forth so much music in the course of a discussion—for example, playing a recitative from a Bach cantata to illustrate a melodic principle found in Beethoven!”

  I spent the next few days happily “hearing” the Opus 109 in my head, jotting down thoughts and questions about its structure, and luxuriating in an imaginary performance of it in my fantasy.

  Mademoiselle also gave me a musical exercise to try. She suggested that I memorize a Bach fugue away from the piano, one voice at a time, and that I then put the voices together from memory away from the piano. That sounded exciting.

  I began Mademoiselle’s exercise enthusiastically, but found that my enthusiasm was greater than my concentration. I had noticed this with other things: my mind seemed to trail off and lose the train of thought. And then, of course, there was the ever-present fog. I began to realize how much effort I was spending just to concentrate on simple things. The complex seemed beyond me. I talked it over with Martha and Marge one day.

  “You know,” I said to them, “it’s as if I ran a marathon . . . and then had very upsetting news about something . . . and then ran up a few flights of stairs too fast . . . so I couldn’t quite catch my breath . . . and sat down with all the aches and pains . . . and then tried to memorize a fugue one voice at a time.”

  After absorbing this, Marge suggested, “Well, wait a while before memorizing the fugue, then. Just enjoy analyzing the Beethoven.”

  “But Mademoiselle will be disappointed in me if I can’t do it,” I argued, my mind fixated on the more difficult goal.

  “You are the only one who would be disappointed in you if you can’t do it,” Martha corrected, in her most precise diction.

  They were both shrugging off what they saw as a small compromise, but it was the first time in my life that I was unable to respond to a challenge of my musical-mental abilities. Besides having hands that weren’t mine anymore, my brain wasn’t working well either. No matter how I tried to excuse my inability to play on my physical condition, I was now taking a first step toward undermining my confidence in yet another area.

  I was losing confidence in my emotional control, too. I could burst into tears at the slightest provocation, especially if taken by surprise. Once when I was walking slowly along the rue Donizetti, a hurrying pedestrian bumped me enough to upset my balance, and I came close to falling. To my horror I started to cry. There were people all around, so I tried to shake my head a little as if I had something in my eye. I felt ridiculous but couldn’t seem to stop.

  Another time I had volunteered to go to the bakery down the street and get a loaf of bread. Very pleased that I could do something useful, I walked into the shop and waited my turn. In my best French I asked for the kind of bread Martha particularly liked. The baker answered rather abruptly that he was “out of that bread today.” I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t bring myself to order a substitute loaf; all I could do was turn quickly and stumble out of the shop. And I couldn’t hold back the tears.

  Friends from Fontainebleau and friends that Marge and Martha met in their studies in Paris came over to the apartment from time to time. I was always torn between the desire to sit up like everyone else or to lie down to relieve the aching muscles in my back and neck. Usually, when someone was coming to visit us, I tried to rest most of the day so that I could appear as “normal” as possible and participate in the conversation. Even though almost everyone knew I had been ill, I was becoming self-conscious about it.

  Worse than the urge to lie down was the urge to cry. I could ignore the aching back or neck, but I couldn’t seem to stop the tears. Sometimes I would get up and stumble off to the bathroom, from which I would emerge after I had pressed a cold cloth on my eyes to hide the traces. I was always sure someone must have noticed, and I felt uneasy and embarrassed. It seemed I couldn’t trust myself on any front.

  The Fontainebleau group decided to have a Christmas Eve party at our apartment, and I realized that I had nothing to wear. Since I was not in any condition to shop around for a dress, Marge came up with the solution. She had heard of a dressmaker not far away who did beautiful work. My friends went with me to Myriam’s shop on the momentous occasion of choosing fabric and color. Myriam and her assistant listened sympathetically while Marge and Martha told her that I had been very ill, none of my clothes fit, and I couldn’t stand for any length of time. Could she design a simple dress that wouldn’t require much fitting time?

  I loved Myriam’s sketch and the dark green wool we all picked out; but what I remember best about the creation of The Paris Dress, as I called it for years afterward, was Myriam’s understanding of my condition when it came time for the fittings. She had a comfortable place for me to sit down, cushions for my back, and had her assistant standing by. When it was necessary for me to stand up, they both helped me up, and one of them supported me while the other pinned or measured, or whatever needed to be done.

  “Would you like to rest for a little?” she would ask me every minute on the minute. If I indicated that I would, we would all sit down and talk in an unhurried fashion until I felt able to stand again. I believe she would have sat there all day if necessary, even with customers waiting. Whenever I wore the dress, and I wore it for many years, I felt another kind of warmth besides the wool and the lining. Myriam’s understanding and patience seemed to be woven into the garment. In the years to come, I would find out just how rare such qualities were, as I became more and more isolated from other people.

  I wore The Paris Dress for the first time at our Christmas party and managed to get through the evening without any bouts of tears or major spills of wine. I did tire before the guests left, however, and had to retire to Marge and Martha’s room to lie down, like a child who joins the grown-ups for a while and then is put to bed among guests’ coats and purses for the remainder of the party. Even so, I felt the dress had helped me through the evening.

  Earlier in the evening, while I was still upright, a young man who had spent the fall in Vienna told us about the wonderful opera and concerts there, which students could attend for practically nothing. Rooms and meals were also amazingly cheap—a fraction of Parisian prices. As he talked about the marvelous singing one heard in Vienna, and the famous voice teachers at the Academy, Martha and I began to ask questions as fast as he could volunteer information. Neither of us felt particularly happy about Martha’s current voice study, and we had both become uneasy about the cost of living in Paris. And now here was someone talking about a musicians’ city that would solve both problems.

  I knew that Webster Aitken had spent many years in Austria and Germany, and I had a strong desire to learn German and acquaint myself with Central European culture. I also wondered somewhere deep inside if making a clean break with the city where I had fallen ill might catapult me from the ranks of invalid to the almost-well. The next day Martha and I could talk of nothing else, and I decided to ask Dr. Lipsitch how soon I could leave Paris.

  “You can do anything you feel like doing,” he assured me. “You’ll tire easily for a while, though.” I told him I had noticed that.

  “There’s something else that bothers me,” I hesitated, ashamed to mention it and yet wanting to know. “I seem to be easily upset by things.”

  “A little jangled?” He nodded understandingly. “You will be for a while.” He didn’t sound particularly worried, so I felt relieved.

  “My hands are still . . . weak,” I went on. “I wonder how long it will be . . . before I can play?”

  “Just keep working at it,” he advised me cheerfully. “I had polio and I play the violin.”

  This was news to me, but it didn’t tell me very much. I had never heard him play, before or after polio. And had his hands been affected by the disease?

  “Just keep trying to live a normal life,”
he advised me. I nodded. That was my direction for the immediate future. Keep trying.

  Chapter Seven

  Kinship with a Damaged City

  The only thing that made it difficult to leave Paris was my prized series of sessions with Mademoiselle. During the two months since I’d returned from Menton, the weekly trips to 36 rue Ballu had helped me feel that my horizons were expanding. Many who had studied with Mademoiselle saw her as a musical disciplinarian, but to me she was a kindly, wise, even grandmotherly figure.

  In our sessions, she focused on the musical and spiritual values I needed most at that point: something deep, lasting, solid—something I could hang onto. She made me feel that I was a worthwhile artistic personality, only temporarily handicapped, rather than someone no longer worth bothering about. I would never have admitted feeling the latter, but those subconscious processes had already begun. In succeeding years, as my confidence eroded steadily, one of the few things I had to hang onto was Boulanger’s regard for me, as expressed in those post-illness sessions.

  Nevertheless, I wanted to leave. Although I had once worshipped Paris from afar, it had become the scene of my lost health and lost self. It was a city in which I couldn’t cope. I had begun to recognize that my recovery would take longer than anyone had predicted; and I wanted to stay in Europe as long as possible. If what little money I had would go farther in Vienna, then that was a powerful argument in Vienna’s favor.

  It was sad to be leaving Marge, but she had two friends who were looking for a place to live and would jump at the chance to move into the apartment. Another of Marge’s many friends told us that we should also spend some time in Salzburg on our way to Vienna, and gave us some people to look up. It all sounded exciting.

  The prospect of a new adventure somehow mingled with the hope that my health would return along with it. Maybe I would find my old self in Austria. I would have denied having such feelings if anyone had asked me just why I wanted to move on. But I was too foggy and desperate to analyze the reasons.

  Martha and I said a fond goodbye to Marge, who promised to visit us in Vienna when we were settled. Then we boarded the Orient Express to Austria. We got off briefly in Salzburg—just long enough to be enchanted by its atmosphere.

  We had heard that living in Vienna would be cheap. We soon found that “student accommodations” were also primitive beyond anything we had seen in Paris. Our first “hotel room” was a cold, dank, closet-sized cubicle up a flight of winding stairs from street level.

  “Well,” I said cheerfully to Martha, “it’ll be good for me to climb the stairs.”

  Martha didn’t seem to be concentrating on that, however. She deposited me and the luggage in our room and went out to look for a more permanent place to live, while I lay down with a hot-water bottle on my upper back—a typical pose in those days.

  That evening, after Martha had come back tired and cold from her efforts, we ventured out to a small Keller not far from our little hotel. There, we ate lentil soup, dumplings, sauerkraut—hearty, steaming dishes that I had enjoyed on many cold winter evenings back in Michigan. They were some of Nana’s specialties from her Central European background, and here they were again, staples of the Viennese winter fare.

  The nuance and rhythm of the speech I heard from groups of people in the restaurant, that comfortable gemütlich feeling, reminded me of Nana’s speech and her warmth. Her parents were Polish and Bohemian (Czech), and she had grown up speaking and understanding both languages. She had taught me a couple of phrases in Polish when I was a child and, just for fun, to count to ten in German. I even saw faces that reminded me of hers—the broad cheekbones, how the eyes were set. It suddenly felt as if I might find part of my roots here. Since I was looking for myself, that was a strong pull.

  In the middle of the night, Martha and I were jolted awake by loud knocking on our door. Martha’s year of college German and the few pages from the self-taught German book I had bought just before leaving Paris hadn’t prepared us for dealing easily with an emergency when half asleep and unable to use gestures. While we were still deciding how to ask if there was a fire in the building, a male voice demanded—in German that even we could tell was quite slurred—that we let him in. While we whispered about what to do, he was joined by a second voice. We decided to pretend we were asleep. When the footsteps finally stomped down the hall, Martha said in a low voice: “Now you see why the room was so cheap.”

  The next night we went to the opera for the first time. The Wiener Staatsoper (Vienna State Opera House), which had been rebuilt after its war damages, had reopened just a few months before. Every night the house was packed with people who had loved opera all their lives, knew every aria and every singer’s personal history intimately, and were filled with excitement at having their opera house back.

  The evening’s performance was Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), with the great tenor Julius Patzak as Tamino. A war injury had left him with one arm and one hook, and he was nearly sixty; but his exquisite singing gave me the uplifting message that music could triumph over all. In my teens, I had listened to the Metropolitan Opera Saturday broadcasts, and had bought some aria collections to play and sing for fun; but this, finally, was the real thing. My shoulders weren’t up to applauding, but I shouted as best I could with my weakened voice support, and had enough foot power to give a few stamps of approval along with the audience. I told Martha I wanted to come back every night.

  My letters to Mom and Dad from that period contain detailed descriptions of opera performances: who sang what, who was conducting, who had a cold or a fever that night, who had just been reworking something with a voice coach and/or changing roles. If I were to excerpt and combine those reports, the result would read like a newsletter from the Vienna Staatsoper. I’m not sure how much my family wanted to read all the professional and personal details I sent them, but that seems never to have crossed my mind. It does demonstrate how totally involved I became in the Viennese opera world. I had to rest in a horizontal position much of the day when I was going to the Staatsoper that evening, but I escaped into opera as a haven, and a distraction from the constant pain. The times I was able to remain upright through even part of a performance were the high points of those years.

  At the Staatsoper, Martha and I sometimes watched the teenagers lining up for standing room with opera scores in hand. “Just the way American teenagers would line up for a baseball or football game,” I commented.

  “They think they’re in paradise,” she remarked later, as we watched them practically hanging by their toes from the standing-room rails way up in the gallery on the sides of the house, shouting and throwing bouquets down onto the stage. “Who knows,” she added, thoughtfully, “maybe they are.”

  Martha was expressing what we both felt about the Staatsoper every time we approached the neo-Renaissance building. It was paradise to be living just two blocks away from the center where great opera performances took place throughout a ten-month season. Standing room was sixteen to twenty cents and was free to students; what we considered quite decent seats cost forty cents. If I rested most of the day, I could last through a performance without agonizing back pain. Perhaps my escape into opera also had a physical basis, since certain activities masked the constant pain better than others. Almost every night, from the first of September until the last day of June, there was something we both wanted to hear. A change of conductor, a change of cast, or even the repeat of a performance we had heard before. It made no difference. We had entered paradise, too.

  Real life in Vienna, however, was considerably less than paradise. My parents were sending me $100 a month on a regular basis, with supplements when asked for. They couldn’t imagine how I could live on that, but I kept assuring them that I could, since everything was so cheap in Vienna. What I didn’t say was that I was living in a way I could never have imagined at home, and that I was helping Martha to stay in Vienna, too, as her monthly check from home topped out at $60. We
were learning to live Austrian-student style, which is to say, at poverty level.

  We had found temporary quarters that had no central heating, only a Kackelofen, a huge tile stove, in one corner. If you sat near the stove you were quickly roasted, and if you sat far away from it, you froze. That would have been fine for someone active, but it was hardly ideal for me. There was a communal WC (water closet) but no bath. Someone had mentioned something about a public bath, but the image of a large group of people in one big tub wasn’t especially appealing.

  One day Martha summoned her elementary German and said to someone we met at the opera: “I need a bath.” The surprised recipient of this information managed to tell us that there was a public bath, offering individual rooms, called the Diana-Bath.

  The next day, as we made our way to the facility, we saw the sign Diana-Bad on the front of a bombed-out building. Surely the operation must be housed elsewhere! As we got closer, we saw people going in and out. A bath in the open air in the dead of winter? But inside we found that the lobby was well heated and that one could buy tickets for a bath in a fully enclosed bathing room.

  Soaking in a tub at the Diana-Bath for an hour was pleasant, but one couldn’t make a trip there every day. Fortunately, Martha soon found quarters close to both the Staatsoper and the Vienna Music Academy, where she planned to enroll to study voice. The “suite” consisted of two small rooms flowing into each other, forming a space that was large and light and quiet. There was plenty of room for the upright piano I planned to rent.

  The only catch was that we had to walk through two other people’s rooms to get there. From the outer hall of the flat, we proceeded through a room with a purple curtain that stretched the length of the room and was meant to give a little privacy to the chemistry student who occupied it. But if his light was on, we could clearly see him and everything in his room, with the curtain only lending a purplish cast.