On the day of the concert, one of the performers was too sick to play. We had no choice but to go ahead without him.
The audience arrived at what appeared to be a perfectly normal concert. Mr. Minkoff often did have recitals in his studio, and the chairs were set up facing the large grand piano just as usual. The friends, parents, other adults, and the few teachers in the audience were all nicely dressed and chatted quietly as they looked over their programs before the show.
Albert performed first, a sad little Chopin étude. The music sounded more poignant than usual tonight, since the piano was noticeably out of tune.
Next, a boy named Richard played a Beethoven sonata. The famous second movement was quiet and pensive. At the most moving and beautiful moment in the piece, Richard, in his best Minkoff style, was bent over the keyboard, hardly breathing, delicately articulating the sour notes.
The apartment buzzer bleated. People jerked in their seats, then turned to frown at the door. Vera Greenberg, as planned, clicked into the room on her four-inch heels and headed for a seat near the front, right in the middle of a long row of people. “I beg your pardon,” she kept repeating loudly as she squeezed past them, cracking her gum.
There was a lot of exasperated conversation during the interval before the next piece. People muttered irritably and looked over their shoulders at Vera and then at Mr. Minkoff.
I performed a Brahms intermezzo. I played on as though nothing were the matter when the grinding noises gradually began to emanate from the front of the room. (We had hidden the tape recorder behind a closed, floor-to-ceiling window curtain near the piano.) Soon the inexplicable wavering groans from the hidden tape recorder were clearly audible to everyone. Many people in the audience exchanged puzzled looks. I finished to scattered, tentative applause.
And then Vicky unexpectedly stood up. We were about to witness the first public performance of Vanya, the Insane Pianist.
Vicky sedately approached the piano, bowed demurely, and began to play a Chopin prelude. At first, her demeanor was very controlled. She sat bolt upright, her expression serious and withdrawn, her body motionless except for her fingers, tinkling daintily on the keys.
But as the music grew more turbulent, her torso began to sway. Her head dipped toward the keyboard, then lifted; her back arched, her chin raised, her eyes closed. She tossed her head, her long hair swinging more and more wildly, falling over her eyes. She began to moan. The music increased in volume. Now she was making glaring mistakes. The audience, suddenly dead quiet, watched Vicky in horrified astonishment. Her groans became wails; she convulsed on the bench, her open hands crashing with random violence on the keyboard. Finally she leapt to her feet in a disheveled frenzy and ran shrieking from the studio.
There was a long moment of utter, stunned silence. Then a confused, disorderly babble broke out. By now, most of the audience had finally realized that the whole thing was a joke. It was a telling test of character to see which people appreciated the humor of it (Mom and Dad were among the few who did) and which ones were highly offended.
For some reason, we stopped doing pituh-plays soon after this, moving on to more harmless pursuits, such as crashing suburban swimming pools late at night. Still, sometimes Vicky can be persuaded, even now, to do Vanya, the Insane Pianist, to the great amusement of her own children.
Dad’s Cool
Would you like me to show you a dead body sometime?” Dad asked Vicky once when she was six. Vicky clasped her hands, breathing hard. “More than anything else in the world!” she cried.
Dad actually didn’t show Vicky a whole dead body until years later, but we saw many other delightful things at his lab. The dreary old building where he worked at the university medical school was one of our favorite places. The large, ancient elevator had no walls, only a wire cage through which you could see the dusty cables creaking past as you rode up into the gloom. Invariably Dad scared us by jumping up and down in the elevator; the contraption would rattle and shake alarmingly. He also liked to scare us in the laboratory cold room, a freezer the size of a small kitchen, where chemicals and dry ice and often interesting portions of dead animals were kept. While we were examining them, Dad would suddenly step outside and slam the heavy metal door, which could not be opened from the inside. We never knew how long he’d leave us locked up in there, shivering happily.
One of the other scientists on the same floor kept several large boa constrictors in cages in his lab. It was a treat for us to watch the snake stretch its jaws at an impossible angle to swallow a whole egg—and then day by day observe the slow progress of the egg down through the snake’s sleeping body.
Even more wonderful was to be there when live mice were put into the cage. We would watch enthralled as the three mice sat on a dead tree limb, seemingly unaware of the snake’s silent, gradual approach. Then, so quickly we could barely see it happening, one of the mice would be wrapped in the boa’s skillful, deadly embrace. The jaws would gape and the mouse would be gone. The remaining mice never seemed to be troubled by this; they would just go on sitting there on the limb as though nothing were the matter. Their apparent dopey placidity only increased our excitement as the boa’s graceful upper body moved languidly toward them again. Soon the snake’s body had mouse-sized bulges in three places.
We never visited Dad’s lab without begging him to breathe helium. He usually obliged, inhaling the gas from a large metal cylinder. Helium has a peculiar effect on the vocal cords, making them vibrate more quickly than they do in an atmosphere of oxygen. When Dad started to speak after inhaling the gas, he sounded exactly like Donald Duck, and our delighted shrieks of laughter would echo down the long, dim corridor.
Once at Dad’s lab, Danny, who was prodigiously mechanical but had problems learning to read, deciphered the word pull on a red object on the wall and followed this instruction, setting off the fire alarm. Dad handled the resulting uproar with unruffled efficiency. He was not the least bit angry; more than anything else, he was gratified by this indication that Danny might turn out to be literate, after all.
Dad always remained amazingly calm and logical in situations that would drive any other parent (even Mom) into a frenzy. “Don’t get your shirt in a knot,” he admonished Mom when she got upset about something he considered to be trivial. He never lost his cool—or at least almost never.
One summer afternoon when I was thirteen, my friend Angela and I arrived at the lab with a bag of balloons. We went to the sixth floor of the new addition (Dad was working in the old building), where there was a water fountain next to a balcony directly above the main entrance. We filled a balloon with water, leaned over the balcony, and waited until someone was just walking into the building. Then we let the balloon fall. It wasn’t a direct hit, but close enough so that the person leapt aside and dropped all his books and papers.
We did this again and again, never actually dousing anybody, but still laughing hysterically at the startled—and furious—reactions we produced. It was at least half an hour before Dad got to us. He didn’t raise his voice; he just firmly told us to stop and made us mop up the muddy footprints on the floor. His red face was the only sign of emotion he displayed, and that was involuntary.
Often on summer weekends our family went on float trips on a beautiful, secluded river in the Ozarks. We had a canvas boat with a collapsible wooden frame, something like a kayak. After we unpacked upstream, a local garage mechanic would drive our car to a point far down the river and leave it parked there overnight.
We spent the next two days drifting down the river, pausing to swim in the clear water whenever we came to a good deep pool. Dad steered through the frequent rapids, shouting instructions at Mom, who would paddle frantically at the front of the boat. Sometimes Mom, who was not particularly skillful at this, maneuvered the boat into a rock, which would slash a hole in the canvas. Dad would curse briefly at Mom and then patiently dry and patch the boat.
When it began to get dark and the cicadas started the
ir gentle, scratchy song (“That noise makes the sun go down,” Tycho once said), we stopped and camped at some nice woodsy place on the shore. Dad cooked steaks over an open fire, and Mom heated up canned baked beans, which always tasted delicious in the open air. We watched the stars come out and listened to the rushing water as we ate.
Once one of Dad’s medical students and his wife came with us on a weekend camping trip at a spectacular swimming hole. You could swim down a series of small waterfalls, which led to a beautiful, deep pool surrounded by high granite cliffs, from which you could dive into the water.
The student’s wife had brought fried chicken for Sunday lunch, wrapped in waxed paper in a wicker picnic basket. Everyone was enjoying the chicken, which was nicely crisp on the outside and moist within—until Dad, who ate slowly, smiled and held up a little white grub on his finger for us to see.
He had noticed it crawling around the interior of the drumstick he was eating. We all shrieked when we took a closer look at our own pieces of chicken and saw identical white grubs slithering around inside them, too. Enjoying our reaction, Dad explained that flies had easily made their way through the wicker and the loosely wrapped waxed paper to lay eggs inside the chicken the day before, and now the little larvae had hatched. He pointed out, amused, that they were probably harmless, nothing but protein. But the rest of us (even Vicky) felt sick and didn’t eat another bite—which left more chicken for Dad to consume with his usual leisurely gusto.
On weekends when we didn’t go to the country, Dad would sometimes entertain Vicky and me (when we were ten and under) by blindfolding us and driving us by a circuitous route to some point in the city that he knew was unfamiliar to us. We would then take off our blindfolds and get out of the car, and Dad would drive away, leaving us to find our own way home. He never worried, no matter how long it took us. He made sure we had one dime, so that we could call home if we were still lost when it got dark. Vicky and I had fun finding our way back together, feeling like Hansel and Gretel.
The only time we used the dime was when two of our friends came along. These kids got scared when we found no recognizable landmarks after several hours of wandering. Vicky and I weren’t worried, but we let our friends use the dime to call their parents from a pay phone. Their parents were hysterical—and though we described our surroundings, they couldn’t figure out where we were. We didn’t have another dime. The parents told us not to move—and not to talk to strangers.
Then they called Dad, who had just started eating his lunch. “Where are they?” they furiously demanded.
“Beats me,” Dad said. “I left them in that warehouse district over on the other side of the highway—but that was a couple of hours ago.”
“The warehouse district!” they gasped. “We’re driving over there this instant—and you better start looking, too!”
“Sure,” Dad said agreeably. “But I’d suggest that one of you stay at home so that—”
They hung up before listening to Dad’s advice, called the police, and frantically set out to find us.
Dad went back to his lunch, meticulously peeling and slicing an apple, toasting pieces of cheese on buttered bread, sipping from a glass of red wine while reading the paper with his usual thoroughness. Then he got in the car and located us in ten minutes.
Our friends’ parents had been too hysterical to listen to Dad’s rational advice and had both rushed out to search for us, leaving no one at home to answer the phone. There was no way to tell them their kids were okay. They didn’t get back for hours. The police went on looking for us the whole time as well; none of us knew the cops had been called, so no one informed them we had been found. After that, Vicky and I saw these friends only at their house.
In high school, when Vicky and I became the center of our circle of oddball friends, we always had a special celebration on the Fourth of July in honor of Vicky’s birthday, which was actually July 15. Dozens of kids brought food for a potluck supper at our house. One reason this party was particularly festive was that we all sat and ate and drank at one tremendously long table in the backyard, which gave the event the feeling of a royal banquet. Dad helped us make this table out of the many old doors he collected and saved in the basement.
These parties were some of the few times we benefited from one of Dad’s most extreme peculiarities: He never throws anything away. Our basement was jammed with burned-out light bulbs, used fan belts, dead batteries, and piles of decades-old magazines and newspapers that he refused to part with, no matter how much Mom complained. One entire room in the basement was taken up by fifty army surplus mine-detector kits—he had seen them advertised somewhere for a dollar apiece and quickly snapped up every one of them. I don’t remember what the mine detectors themselves were like, but they were packed in sturdy wooden crates; Dad was sure he’d find a use for those crates someday.
But most of this stuff he kept forever and never used. The doors were one exception; another, even more notable, was the treasured melted telephone he discovered while poking around the ruins of a recently burned-down office building. The body of the phone and the dial were very warped and lopsided where the plastic had been softened by the heat. Dad liked it because it looked like something from a Salvador Dali painting.
When Danny was in college, he found the melted telephone and actually got it to work. Danny proudly displayed the cartoonlike phone on his desk when he was a scientist at Bell Laboratories, and he uses it to this day.
Another reason for Vicky’s birthday celebrations being particularly festive was that Mom and Dad went out, leaving us and our friends to party without adult supervision. Most of the time, of course, it was an advantage not to be restricted by parents. But on Vicky’s seventeenth birthday, it was not an advantage that no adults were around when the police showed up with a warrant for Vicky’s arrest. The cops wouldn’t explain what they were arresting her for. They just sternly flashed their badges and ID’s; thrust legal documents at Vicky, whose long blonde hair was in its usual disarray; and actually snapped a pair of handcuffs on her.
“But you can’t do this!” Vicky protested as they led her away. “It’s my birthday party—and it’s the Fourth of July!”
“Crime doesn’t take a holiday,” one of the cops grimly remarked.
Mom and Dad were at someone’s cottage out in the country; we didn’t have the phone number, and it took us quite a while to find it. By the time they got to the police station, Vicky had been there for several hours. The police had roughly strip-searched her and then locked her up in a cell, still refusing to tell her what her crime was supposed to be. Only when Mom and Dad arrived did they reveal that she had been arrested for writing hundreds of dollars’ worth of bad checks.
Vicky was not the most obedient teenager, but writing bad checks was not in her repertoire. Mom was furious at the police.
“Shut up, darling,” Dad said and calmly explained that Vicky had lost her wallet, with her driver’s license in it, at a downtown movie theater several weeks before. She had already applied for a new license. In the meantime, someone who resembled Vicky’s photo on the old license had obviously used it as an ID to pass bad checks in her name.
The cops didn’t buy it.
“Shut up, darling,” Dad told Mom again and called a friend who was a civil rights lawyer. He couldn’t take the case, since it wasn’t in his field, but he gave Dad the name of a criminal lawyer who knew what to do to get the police to release Vicky on bail. She would still have to undergo criminal proceedings.
As frightening as it had been for Vicky to be locked up without explanation, she made the most of it once she was released. She was the only person any of us knew who had been in jail, and everyone was terribly curious and impressed. Vicky did a hilarious impersonation of the matron who had searched her, right down to her drawl and her particularly disgusting way of chewing gum.
The criminal lawyer was not so amusing. He was a smooth type, who wore a jazzy suit and very expensive pointed shoes.
Mom wanted to fire him during his first consultation with Vicky, when he told Vicky it was okay for her to admit to him that she had really written the checks. Dad pulled Mom out of the room and explained to her that criminal lawyers always asked questions like that. But Vicky was upset and worried when he left; she found it frustrating that he blandly refused to believe her repeated insistence that she was innocent.
Later, Dad told the lawyer in private that Vicky wouldn’t have written bad checks—she just didn’t think that way and, anyway, she was given money whenever she asked for it. The lawyer said that all middle-class teenagers were the same; they cared only about money and clothes and being just like everybody else. The lawyer knew Vicky had done it, but he would still take the case. Dad knew Vicky hadn’t done it, but since this guy had been highly recommended to him by a trusted friend, he kept him on.
Dad also maintained control during the lineup. The store clerk who had accepted one of the bad checks was summoned to the police station to see if she could identify the criminal. Vicky stood on a sort of stage at the front of the room in a line with several other females chosen by the police from their secretarial staff. All the other women in the lineup were decades older than Vicky and had short, dark hair.
The clerk studied them for awhile, then murmured that Vicky was wearing earrings like the girl who had passed the check and declared that Vicky was the culprit.
“Shut up, darling,” Dad said when Mom started to protest and then quietly pointed out the obvious to the lawyer, who explained it to the police. The girl who had passed the checks must have looked something like Vicky or else she couldn’t have gotten away with using Vicky’s license, with her photo on it, as an ID. Naturally the clerk had identified Vicky, who was the only blonde and the only teenager in the lineup.
Oddballs Page 8
