Maestro: 4 (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  This, in a way, seemed to give the little family a new identity, and a sense of pride. Chaim had misled them on many things but he had constantly said that, once in America, it was necessary to make the country your own. Forget the ties of the past.

  One tie that Louis could not forget was the bond with his three cousins, for whom he pined even in the midst of discovering his dormant talents as a musician. His thoughts of the three children, his greatest loves, were as strong as ever. In fact, music seemed to bring them closer as it worked its magic on his emotional life. He would labor, he pledged, so that one day they would be proud of him, and he could go back for them. His vision of the future was of great success, followed by a triumphal march back to a huge, tearful reunion, after which he would bring his beloved Rachel, Rebecca and David to America and share his life with them.

  “It was a sort of obsession, just as music became a total preoccupation,” he said with a half smile at Herbie.

  “From the very beginning there were letters. At the start, family letters, which made my father and mother weep, for Uncle Isaak was doing very well back in the village. Then, later, so well that he actually moved to the town of Passau itself. He flourished and became rich—about the same time as my father really commenced to make money—I’ll tell you about this in a moment, Herb.

  “Then, when I was in my teens, I began to get letters from David and the girls. Oy, Herbie, you should have seen some of David’s letters when he became interested in girls. So explicit I had to hide them under a loose floorboard. David was certainly a boy for the girls. What would your average shrink say about the fact that my first sexual fantasies were lived vicariously through my cousin? You know, he also described how his sisters were growing, and once he saw Rachel naked. David would have made a writer. He described this time he saw Rachel; depicted it so accurately that I fantasized doing it with her. I almost could hear her voice saying, ‘Lou, oh Lou.’ You imagine what guilt I had over that? The onus of ages, Herb. Guilt, I know about guilt …” He was sidetracking, off into tributaries of his life that probably had nothing to do with what Kruger was really after, but there was no way of stopping him. “I know from guilt, okay, Herbie.” Again he fixed his eyes on that point, behind Herbie Kruger’s head, which seemed to have become the gateway to his past. “Ah, but I tell you what happened—”

  The next big change took place on the day Joseph completed his servitude with Mr. Chorat. Those three long years into which he had been duped by his brother Chaim.

  While he worked out his time, Joseph took on more and more in the way of private commissions which he fulfilled in the apartment late into the night. Sometimes he would sit until after midnight, bent over his cobbler’s last, shaping, cutting, stitching and nailing special orders.

  This extra backbreaking work paid off handsomely. Most of his private customers were people of influence whom he had stolen from his boss. As soon as he obtained citizenship and was within six months of his release date from the binding contract, Joseph began making subtle approaches to these men and women, who were all more than satisfied with both his work and prices.

  He asked advice about starting his own business. Then he found suitable premises, uptown, fashionable and a good half-hour’s journey, on the El, from the family apartment.

  Next, with the help of a banker’s wife—who came down into the shabby end of the city because she was so satisfied with Joseph’s work—he obtained a loan and made arrangements to purchase and refurbish the little shop premises on the day after his release from Chorat became legal.

  To his wife and son he said nothing of these plans.

  “Herb, believe me, I knew nothing until after it happened, and what I know of his final break from his odious master I learned much later, from listening to my father talk to my mother when they thought I was asleep.”

  “Earwigging,” Herbie commented.

  “What? What is earwigging?”

  “We English,” Herbie knew people smiled when he said this kind of thing with pride. “We English use this expression when someone listens in to conversations. In my business we do much earwigging. Some in my trade talk about electroplating when they’re bugging the telephone calls.”

  “Earwigging? Electroplating? All English are mad.” Passau shook his head, as though clearing it from some daze.

  At the completion of work on that last legal day of his commitment to Chorat, Joseph gathered together his own tools, as he did every night, and made his way to the man’s small office. It was on the dot of closing time, and he left a pile of unfinished work on the bench.

  Elijah Chorat, although a master craftsman and no fool, was an unpleasant man of whom Joseph rarely spoke, except when he wanted to let off steam to his wife. He was short with a bony face and greasy hair which he wore combed back from the hint of a widow’s peak. His eyes, Joseph was to say, were the eyes of a small rodent and his teeth were equally tiny, making the likeness to a rat complete.

  He had, of course, completely lost time of the days, let alone the years, when Joseph Packensteiner came into his office on that Thursday night. He glanced up from his paperwork and snappily asked what his employee wanted.

  “My wages to date. I leave now,” Joseph told him bluntly.

  “Wages? What you talk about, wages? Back to work, Packensteiner. It’s late working tonight.”

  Joseph leaned across the desk. He could smell the man’s bad breath, laced with garlic, as he waved his copy of the legal commitment within an inch of the shoemaker’s face. “The day, Chorat. You don’t remember the day? Or the date? No?”

  “Oh, get on with it. I ain’t got time …”

  “Today, my contract with you is finish. Kaput! End!” Joseph stubbed his finger down onto the paper. “There, in white and black ink. All legal. Today is all completed. I go now, with my money, please.”

  It took a minute for Chorat to realize that he was in trouble. “I give you a raise.” He tried to smile, fighting for time.

  “Raise go up your ass.”

  “A partnership, then. I give you partnership.”

  “Partnership go up your ass.”

  “Look, Packen … Joseph, jobs ain’t easy to find. You’ll live to regret …”

  “I got a job to go to. All I want is my money.”

  To give the devil his due, Chorat knew when he was beaten. He shrugged, counted out Joseph’s wages and nodded.

  Joseph Packensteiner walked out of the shop, without another word, not even pausing to say good-bye to his brother Chaim.

  On the following morning he left the apartment, at the same time he always did, without even mentioning the change of circumstances to Gerda. That day he signed the papers for the bank loan and purchase of the shop, then started to make arrangements for the refitting of the place. He even hired a boy apprentice. With his son, and this other boy, he could manage very well. That night, when Louis returned from his lesson with Hamovitch, his father smiled and said he had news.

  “I tell you, Herb, I was dumbstruck.” Passau’s face mirrored the face of the boy he had been. “I came in, full of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony which Aaron had been going over with me, and my father said, ‘Tomorrow, I’m pulling you out of school. Tomorrow, you begin to work with me.’ I didn’t even know if I would go on with the music. It was like an avalanche on my head.”

  His mother had danced around the room and insisted on being allowed to see the shop her husband had bought.

  “The next morning we went to the place. It was well situated and my father seemed to be doing all the right things. The other boy he had hired was a tall, pimply youth. Sheldon, his name was, Sheldon Pamensky. He spoke English very well—a boy about my age, I suppose.

  “The worst thing was standing in the middle of that shop, where workmen were fitting up a counter and signpainters were busy outside, my father put his arm around my shoulders and told me that I would be an asset to him. He would teach me the whole business of shoemaking. ‘Together,’ he said,
‘we shall make other shops. If you learn the trade as well as Mr. Hamovitch tells me you learn music, then the name of Packensteiner will soon be all over America. Together we shall expand, Louis. We shall expand and become rich.’

  “I was terrified, Herbie. I knew that my future would be in music. But my father thought this was merely a good way to keep me out of trouble. I remember my mother saying, ‘It seems a good hobby for a boy, but it can’t be serious. Nobody makes real money from playing the piano or a fiddle, still, it keeps him from mixing with the wrong types.’ Ha! Herbie. How she was wrong.”

  Joseph Packensteiner was a fair man, and though he felt the music was a waste of time, he rarely kept his son working late at night. He allowed him to go on with the lessons and gave Louis generous time off, but he would not countenance slacking on the job.

  “The two of us, Sheldon and I. This was our first job. We would have to take the measurements of people who my father knew well, or friends they brought to the shop. I tell you, Herbie, I was amazed at the number of customers. My father was a cunning bastard. He had really plundered Chorat’s clientele. Later we began to work with leather and I came to loathe leather. My hands went hard and callused. I worried that this would affect my playing, but I had no options. I went on working for my father and laboring even harder with my music.”

  Louis went to many concerts and opera performances with Hamovitch, and toiled happily over the piano. With all his contacts in the world of music, Aaron Hamovitch was always able to get his hands on tickets. In all, Louis learned the main classical repertoire by hearing it, following with a score, and playing four-handed transcriptions with his teacher at the piano. In this way he polished his technique, and also learned every nuance of all the great symphonies and concertos.

  By the time Louis was fourteen, Aaron Hamovitch knew he was ready to be launched as a concert pianist. He had great plans for his pupil. First it would be one-night solo performances of works by Chopin and Liszt. Then, he knew, as sure as night followed day, that the boy would be invited to play with one of the orchestras. Louis already knew the major, and even some of the relatively modern concertos, by heart—the Beethovens, some of the Mozart, Schumann, the Grieg, and the more recent Rachmaninov Second which, at the time, was considered almost avant-garde.

  When he thought all things were ready, Hamovitch approached Louis’ parents for their permission to thrust his protégé onto the concert platform.

  “Herbie, I only discovered this much later, because Aaron did not even hint of it at the time. He went to my parents and they laughed at him. ‘The boy will make a good cobbler,’ my father said. ‘Yes, Mr. Hamovitch, go on teaching him. Let him play. Take him to these concerts and the opera. I think he benefits from them. But, please, please do not encourage him to think he can make money playing the piano. Madness will come, he will not see life in a proper perspective and he’ll end up neither a good cobbler nor a good piano player.’

  “My mother said, ‘If God had wanted our Louis to be a musician, He would have given him a dowry.’ That was her way.

  “I recall that I never told Aaron that my real desire was to become an orchestra conductor, though he showed me the rudiments and, as you know, made me follow concerts with the score. I viewed the future with dread, but Aaron never once talked of the shape of life to come. Yet he knew, just as I knew, that I was destined to live a life in music, by music and because of music.

  “When I talked to Aaron about my fears, he said, ‘Wait and be patient. Life is a strange thing, Louis. Your time will come, I am sure. Eventually you will go to music not shoemaking, but wait. Work hard and wait.’ So I did just that. Worked and waited. The shop was closed for entire weekends. We had the Sabbath on Saturdays, and the Christian Sunday was free. Aaron would give me lessons and take me to concerts at night during the week, and he would teach me for half a day on Sundays. He would make me practice for hours, and at home I would work, memorizing scores late into the night.”

  “Ja, you were like blotting paper.” Kruger sounded diffident.

  “Like a sponge.”

  “Okay, like a sponge, Lou. I have this picture of you with a score, working by the light of a candle.” In his own way, Herbie was pushing quietly. “So what next, Lou?”

  “The war was going on in Europe, the one we called the Great War. We heard very occasionally now from Uncle Isaak and Aunt Eisa. I would get letters from my cousins about four times a year. They were not doing so well with the war. Then, suddenly, they were doing very well because Uncle Isaak landed a contract to make boots for the military. But we didn’t hear so often, and my mother was getting to be a little dissatisfied with life.”

  The area where the Packensteiners lived was becoming more and more dangerous. Gerda nagged at her husband to make money so they could move out. The Lower East Side was a breeding ground for young gangs, each with their own territory. “Today, the street gangs, people think it’s a phenomenon of our time. They forget the street gangs of the past. Why, in some areas, Herb, near where we lived, you just did not go through certain streets. You knew your place and there were fourteen and fifteen-year-olds who thought very little of murder. Death by violence has always been a fact of city life, and it was a fact that I soon became familiar with. Anyway, it was just after my sixteenth birthday, fall 1917, that I made a friend. Well, really I came across an old friend. A friend who would, in many ways, change my life.”

  It was a Sunday, and the teenager had spent the morning with Aaron Hamovitch. The weather was good so, in the afternoon, Louis decided to take a walk around the area. On a street corner he was addressed by a familiar voice—“Hey, Jewboy Pianist, howya doin’?”

  “This was a boy I had known in school. For the time being, I’ll call him Charlie—or, as we pronounced it then, on the Lower East Side, Cholly.”

  “I’m doin’ okay, Cholly. How’s by you?”

  The boy was swarthy, bright-eyed, sharp, muscular and quick with his fists. In school it was rumored that his father was prominent in the Black Handers, well-known for their methods of extortion and violence in the Little Italy area of the East Side. Even at age eleven Charlie was thought to be a member of the Little Five Pointers, a junior group attached to the most ancient and violent of the old feudal East Side gangs, the Five Pointers, named after an intersection in the Sixth Ward. The Five Pointers had almost a century of brutal history behind it. Other boys had kept away from Charlie in school, though he had always been very friendly towards Louis, who had permission to use the school piano during recess and for an hour in the afternoon—a favor bought for him by Aaron Hamovitch.

  There had been a time, just before his father had hauled him from school to learn the trade of shoemaking, that Charlie asked him if he could play any Italian music—“Like from operas?”

  Louis had invited him to stay in the assembly room one recess, while he played some overtures to operas by Verdi, Rossini and Puccini. “Yea, my fadduh and his friends, they’re crazy about that music.” Charlie had nodded pleasantly. “They listen a lot to the Grand Opera on phonograph records. Nice music. I’m gonna call you da ‘Pianist.’ How about that, kid? Louis ‘da Pianist’ Packensteiner.”

  Now, on that Sunday afternoon, Charlie asked if he wanted to take a walk.

  “Sure, why not? Got nothin’ else to do except go home and get lectures on bein’ a good shoemaker. My old man makes me work in his store now.”

  “Yeah, I heard. Big shoemaker now you’re outta school.”

  “Big shoemaker, my ass. Big pianist more like.”

  Ten minutes later they bumped into a pair of Charlie’s friends. “Meet my friend. He’s a good fellah. Louis da Pianist.”

  “Looks like a kike ta me, Cholly,” one of the lads said.

  “Okay, he’s Jewish. But he has the right attitude, and he’s my friend, just remember that.”

  As they walked on, Charlie asked, “You don’ belong to no racket, do ya?”

  “Racket? No.”

 
; “I mean, like ya ain’t a member of any of the gangs. Ya ain’t connected with the Havemeyer Street crowd or anything like that?” The Havemeyer Streeters were the most aggressive of all the Jewish street gangs.

  “I don’t have nothin’ to do with any of them, Cholly.” He even began to adopt his friend’s manner of speech. “I like a quiet life. I got things of my own goin’, like music. Sure, I know some of them to speak with, but I keep away.”

  “Well, I’ll tell ya, Pianist, if ya ever want to pass through any of the Italian territories, ya make sure ya’re wid me, okay? I mean I know a lot of guys. I got connections, right? Any trouble, ya get holda me fast.”

  Over the next months and years, the unlikely pair became good friends and Charlie often took Louis through the toughest, most disreputable neighborhoods, vouching for him if they were stopped by young Italian hoods.

  One evening, Charlie did three things for Louis Packensteiner. He opened his eyes to a different kind of music, gave him a peek at sexual initiation, and saved his life. All in one night.

  “Tell ya what we should do,” Charlie said. “We should take a ride over ta Harlem. Good things over there. I heard a friend of my fadduh’s say there’s good stuff to do in that area.”

  Louis, under Charlie’s tutelage, had become very streetwise, though he sometimes wondered where Charlie got his money. He always seemed to have money for anything, from omnibus rides to cigarettes. “Yeah, so let’s go to Harlem,” he agreed. He had never been into that district before, but had heard it was lively in more senses than one. He was growing up very fast.

  At the time, Harlem was a sprawling, ill-defined sector, once fashionable but now showing signs of seediness. There was a predominance of black people, but they lived peaceably with the white folk, though the whole area was a spawning ground for crime. It was certainly a district where sharp operators, of both races, could entice clients to the colorful night spots mushrooming along “The Main Stem,” as the major artery—125th Street—was dubbed.