Without a word, my mother pushed past me, walked down the long hallway to her bedroom, and closed the door. She no doubt drew the shades shut. I sat on the top step of the stairway, listening for movement; any sign to signal a plan of action, a gesture of concern, a single sob. Sleep rolled over me—hours later, my father came home, stepping past me on the stairs to join my mother in the bedroom. My head lolled on the wall opposite the stair banister. The single sock continued to creep into my semi-sleep. I was a girl who paired things up and would never leave a box spring askew on a bed. I surmised, as I dozed, that Jinx’s escape must have stemmed from a catastrophic experience that would never be shared.
It was late—maybe eleven at night—before I reentered her denuded room. Jostling the mattress to even it up with the box spring, I scooped up the lone balled sock and threw it roughly in my trash basket. I slept.
What was going to be done? This time I was not as gleeful as when Jinx was shipped off a year before. This time, something was very different, and when I woke with a start the next morning, there was a fresh-cut reality enshrouding our house. My sister had behaved well and had toed the line. She changed her stance and had said yes. Yet still she fled.
She may have called a week later to assure my mother that she was okay. Safe. Of course she wasn’t, but the assurances of a young, just barely seventeen-year-old girl were all my parents needed to absolve themselves. Perhaps they had concerns, but not enough to make a move to get her back. This daughter, the queen of no, was loose in New York City in 1969, probably saying yes to someone.
“But where is she?”
“We don’t know, honey, but your father and I think this is for the best.”
“But what will happen to her? Is she staying in a hotel? She doesn’t even have any friends in the city.”
“Honey. You just have to let it go. There’s just nothing more to say on the subject.”
She turned and left the room.
Let it go. Let her go. If they could let her go without a yelp, what would they do for me? An infinitesimal fissure ruptured my longing for my mother. Who could be safe from a mother who did not search for a newly docile and obedient runaway daughter? It didn’t add up; the math was faulty. My sweet little-girl blue eyes became devious, slithering-sneaky snake eyes. A trickster was born.
The King
On tour with an orchestra, you’re taking a busman’s holiday; the only night off you’ve had in six days of back-to-back concerts. You manage to get the last ticket available for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra performing at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Stepping into the empty box, you are surprised when Dutch people lean over and ask, “How did you manage the king’s box?” Oddly, they know to speak English to you. But you have no idea—it was just the last ticket available for a sold-out concert. So you settle in for the program, feeling like a queen, resisting the temptation to wave to your Dutch dominion.
Those Dutch oboe players snap at it, crisply, all through the program. You don’t sound like them at all, but you imagine that you could easily make a sound like this, just as you could imagine living in this human-scale city, full of relaxed bicycle riders. Earlier in the day, you prayed for the young children hanging off the back of bikes as their mothers, pedaling in front, held loose and swinging bags of groceries, weaving in and out of traffic. You could even imagine being loved by a Dutchman, maybe even the king of Holland! These men of Flanders might ride bikes recklessly, be direct and to the point, and have smiling eyes. But they also may have straight and assured mouths, just like the Dutch oboists. Just like you.
But this orchestra sheds all vestiges of its well-bred, seventeenth-century elite Dutch manner for the last piece on the program: Dmitry Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony—the old warhorse that you played when you were in high school. The last movement is arranged for symphonic band and is a staple in all high schools with good music programs. Tonight, RCO heaves it at you, throttling you and driving it home.
During the relentless last movement your eyes gradually land on the timpanist, who is positioned at the back of the orchestra and directly in front of the conductor. The sound of his pounding mallets, at the end of his swinging Fred Astaire arms, catapults over the conductor’s head and lands in your lap, in the king’s box, in Amsterdam.
The timpanist and the conductor start to play their game with each other, and you wonder, who is in control here? This guy, the Dutch timpanist, is pummeling his story, one stroke at a time. The Italian conductor wants to hear it, feel it, be led by it, and graciously steps aside, allowing the beating to hold the night.
My God. Maybe it’s the king’s box. Maybe it’s Rembrandt’s house, which you saw earlier in the day, or the slightly fetid smell of a canal that wafts through the open window in your hotel room. But maybe it is just that damned drummer and that unconventional conductor who are now complicit, acting as one heavenly, dual person—causing you to levitate off your seat. You are thrilled by the pulse; by the easy sway of two people agreeing to be in service to music’s greatness. And you are a queen: hearing, seeing, feeling, bearing witness to something extraordinary—something that will never occur again: that night in Amsterdam when Shostakovich was channeled from the dead and came alive, vibrating at the end of the timpanist’s mallets, through a conductor’s brain and directly into your heart.
Yes
WITH MY SISTER off to the squared and triangled streets of New York City, I raced unbridled into my plan. I was a talented oboist, certainly. But I also worked harder and practiced longer than seemed reasonable to anyone who observed me. With a highly developed, almost desperate sense of discipline (three hours of practicing a day was the norm) and with the guidance of my teacher, Mr. Kemp, I became a small-town star throughout my high school years. The local newspapers wrote articles; the principal of my high school wrote a poem about me after I’d received a favorable review in a Rochester newspaper; I played in all the area youth orchestras. But doubts lingered: I had no idea if I was good enough to get into that music conservatory I’d nonchalantly alluded to.
And then there was money. The default position in our household was that we were continually on the brink of financial collapse, which I suspected was the reason my mother was so secretive about her catalog habits. I never knew what the truth was, but I was always afraid to ask.
The State University of New York at Stony Brook had opened in 1962, and it was to become the state’s go-to university for science and math. I was assured they had a music department tucked somewhere behind the math buildings and science labs. Because we lived nearby, my parents prepared me for that deadening eventuality. My backup school was to be the Katharine Gibbs secretarial school.
With those plans well cemented and inevitable, I boldly began to gather together application materials for music conservatories. The packets arrived in the mail, in full view of my parents, but were never commented on. When it came time for the auditions, I boarded the Long Island Railroad and negotiated New York City on my own with my oboe tucked in my backpack. Girding myself for inevitable rejection, or if by some miracle I was accepted, the reality was, I would be unable to pay. Yet I just stuck my neck out regardless. Letting me go through the motions, my parents, I sensed, knew something I didn’t: that this was all a terrible joke; that I was in a dark tunnel and I’d never get a glimpse of a faint beacon of light. Jinx’s choice almost seemed a reasonable final solution: maybe I’d run away to New York City, too, and lay myself prostrate at the door of a music school.
Acceptances soon came in from the Manhattan School of Music and the Eastman School of Music. I’d played a terrible audition for the Juilliard School. Just an hour before I was scheduled to play, I’d witnessed a trumpet player friend, who’d also come to audition, get hit by a car near the underpass on 65th Street. I was so unnerved that my hands shook badly throughout the audition. The jurors said nothing; they released me with a kind “Thank you, dear,” before I’d finished the first line of the Haydn Oboe Concerto. I wasn
’t surprised by the rejection letter. Scholarships were not forthcoming from Manhattan or Eastman, so, disappointed, I quietly tore up the acceptance letters and threw them in the garbage. I waited.
Then it happened. The only phone in the house was in the kitchen; when it rang, my mother always picked up. She listened for a long time, responding mostly in monosyllables. I knew it was about me, because she kept looking up at me while the person on the other line talked. My mother called out to my father.
“Bob, get in here. It’s Mannes College calling for Marcia!”
She pushed the phone in my direction.
“They want to talk to you.”
The head of the woodwinds department was on the other end of the line. He shared the news with me: I had been offered a four-year full scholarship to the Mannes College of Music in New York City as a recipient of the prestigious Helena Rubinstein grant. They would pay for four years of tuition. I would be attending a real music conservatory in New York City, beginning in the fall of 1973.
As I stood in the kitchen, trying to digest the enormity of the news, my stance unconsciously and incrementally modulated. With arms set across my chest, my foot began to instinctively tap to a rhythm only I could hear. I turned my back on my parents, discussing the details with the man from Mannes. Hanging up the phone after replying with a resounding “YES!” I took a few moments to wallow in that glorious gush of freshly infused plasma pushing through the clotted blood that had for so many years felt viscous, sluggish. I knew my parents had to yield to me now.
I swiveled around, facing them. They remained silent—chagrined, almost. My mother left the room with no words. My father and I stared each other down, and I silently dared him to say one word. We carefully considered each other—both of us feeling the weight of my childhood. After several long seconds he turned to the refrigerator, pulled out a soda, and retired to the living room to have a romp with Vikki through the headphones.
Small droplets of golden hope trickled into my veins. Wotan would now bend to his Brünnhilde, and I would turn left.
Kirsten sang:
Friends! Look!
Don’t you feel and see it?
Do I alone hear this melody,
Which wonderfully and softly…
Invades me?
Mannes
FREEDOM. OR SO I thought. As an eighteen-year-old, I had difficulty shaking loose from my father’s tightly harnessed halter. Even with the relief of the glorious fifty miles of physical distance from him. Or with the help of a made-up grace in my head, Kirsten, who’d gently steered me away from every looming precipice. Freedom didn’t tell me which direction to take. East, west, up, or down: freedom didn’t tell me which was the road best traveled or where easy and deep-trodden footsteps might show me the way. In the fall of 1973, I moved to New York City, panting hard, with my arms outstretched, palms open to the wind, to tightly grab whatever came my way.
The Mannes College of Music was located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on East 74th Street. Henry Fonda’s house flanked one side; we saw Yul Brynner’s bald pate occasionally exit it. The composer Charles Ives had lived at one time across the street. Tony Curtis often strolled by, along with other well-heeled people of the day. Mannes did not have a dormitory, nor did any other music conservatory in New York City in the early 1970s. I had the free ride to school, but now I needed free digs.
The well-heeled doyenne of my new life was Mrs. S., a beautiful and sophisticated Grace Kelly–like woman of newly divorced means. She’d registered with the school, offering food and lodging to a student in exchange for child care. Beginning my first semester of college, I lived with Mrs. S. and her two kids, right across the street from Mannes. For a maid’s room off the kitchen and board, all that was required of me was to care for her young son and daughter three mornings and three evenings a week. The rest of the time was technically mine—to practice the oboe, to attend my classes, and to try to become the artist I couldn’t yet imagine. The registrar at Mannes, a nun in a former life and well versed on rules and rigor, helped me patch all my coursework around my duties for Mrs. S. It was, in theory, ideal: a rigid life where I knew what was expected; lists, schedules, organized time, hard work, and mummylike sleep was what I hoped for.
The very first day of classes, I realized I knew absolutely nothing. Less than zero, actually—or so it seemed at first glance. Like any person embarking on a vast field of study that had previously been a youthful, singular passion, I found actually pulling apart the molecules of music to be both breathtakingly effervescent and bewilderingly impossible. At times I was levitating; other days, I felt I was looking up from the bottom of a New York City manhole. Music theory, sight singing, dictation, music history, music analysis, twentieth-century survey, orchestra, chamber music, art history, Western literature, European history. Oboe lessons. That was my insurmountable first-semester curriculum, but I trudged up those stairs, just off Mannes’s walnut-paneled lobby, every day.
The bright, glowing aura surrounding the school was the faculty, who undoubtedly had faced years of incoming students as ill equipped as I was to take on the enormity of music’s meaning. At once fearsome and terribly kind, our professors overlooked our laughable lack of knowledge and assured us that we would know all this, and maybe more, after four grueling years of study under the tutelage of their august minds.
A niche area of oddball ability earned me a reputation for being a savant. The dreaded exercise called “drop the needle”—too random to study for—allowed our professors to glean what our exposure to music had been thus far.
Records would be stacked on the phonograph, and the professor would literally drop the needle in the middle of the disk. We were given ten seconds to identify, first, the period of the music: Renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, twentieth century, music of today. Then the composer: Gabrieli, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky, Carter. Then, if we were able to, the actual piece. Canzone, the Goldberg Variations, Jupiter Symphony, Eroica Symphony, A German Requiem, Pulcinella Suite, Double Concerto. And the last, infinitesimal, bonus detail: could we identify the orchestra or, if applicable, the performer as soloist? The point was to force us to keep listening and embrace areas of music that were yet unfamiliar.
“Tristan!”
I spat the word out on the first day of my music history class within two seconds after the needle dropped to the vinyl below. One massive cluster of a chord in two fleeting seconds: eureka! The famous half-diminished seventh chord that defined the opera Tristan und Isolde was the very sound that had crowded my ears from the good old days spent lying on my living-room carpet, listening through the din of a vacuum cleaner. Thanks, Mom.
“That’s correct, Miss Butler. Very good.”
Challenging as chess is for many, this game was tic-tac-toe for me. But I couldn’t gloat. The certainty of my grotesque inadequacy in general far outweighed any confidence I might have gained from that game-show quiz. From my vantage point, all my classmates were brilliant and much more talented. And thrillingly familiar…I had found my tribe.
We students were a group of disparate people gathered together seemingly at random, because there was nothing else on this earth we could envision doing with our lives. That random congealing was the very element that felt dear, intimate, and true for us all. We didn’t need to know each other, really—the rare and distinctive gene we had in common was a deep urge to parse out and understand the unknowable: music. We were somber and grave in the face of the task at hand. For many, including me, and surely for diverse reasons, this was a matter of death and then life.
Cramming my oboe and meager possessions into the maid’s room off the kitchen of Mrs. S.’s twelve-room apartment, I prepared to settle in. Along with a single bed, a small chest of drawers, and a lamp, this former servant’s patch of real estate from the beginning of the twentieth century provided not a full bath, not a half bath, but a “quarter bath.” The bathtub was about twenty-four inches square in footprin
t. No showerhead, just a tub spout, and no sink in the room. It did have a toilet: a small blessing. Slapstick, with all four limbs sticking straight in the air, is the only way to describe my bathing experience, and it took me weeks to be able to orchestrate my daily ablutions with relative ease. Whichever way I chose to cleanse any part of myself, there was no such thing as a quick dip.
The now single Mrs. S. was on the prowl for a new man. Many suitors wined and dined her three evenings each and every week, the turnstile of her social life spinning potential stepfathers through the front door. She was a catch: a creamy, liquid blonde with a stunning apartment beautifully decorated in the traditional style.
Luxurious damask fabric covered the sumptuous down-stuffed sofas, and striped dupioni silks covered the club chairs. Pillows with perfect karate-chopped top edges were placed just so, with an expert designerlike eye. “Never enough pillows!” Mrs. S. would declare to the empty living room when she thought no one was listening. The curtains billowed down from ten-foot-high ceilings, layering sheers with swags, sandwiched between pinch-pleat side panels. The artwork was impressive: Klee, Miró, a Mondrian or two. Even I noticed that.
Mrs. S. insisted on 100 percent silk sheets, even for the kids, Whitney and David. Three mornings a week she slithered between those silk sheets, chatting on the phone while I looked after the children, getting them dressed and fed. How odd that she needed me to care for them while she was in the very next room, arranging luncheons with Mitzi and Buffy! When I was a young girl, my mother was also in close proximity yet not available—but I was blind to this irony. Mothers create separation from their children any way they find necessary and for whatever reason. Children cope, and this was all standard operating procedure for Whitney and David. They seemed happy enough.
The Skin Above My Knee Page 5
