by Gerald Elias
“Now, if you turn to page two,” intoned Vickers, “you’ll see our proposal for musician compensation. First off, salary. We recognize the importance of salary as the primary means of rewarding the musicians for their outstanding work, and as a way to attract the best musicians in the future. At the same time, without wanting to repeat myself, this is a transitional time for us and we want to be sure we’re on solid footing as we move forward. That is the board’s fiduciary obligation. Therefore, we are proposing a ten percent salary reduction the first year, and then incremental increases every six months starting the second year, so that, as you can see, by the last half of the final year of the agreement you will actually be earning more than you are now, and we’ll still be in a highly competitive posture in regard to the Big Five orchestras.
“The second major source of musician compensation is pension. Currently, we make an eight percent annual contribution to the American Federation of Musicians pension fund. We propose to maintain that.”
“Meaning,” said Junior Parsley, “that if we take a salary cut, our pension goes down too.”
“I’m glad you mention that, because our generous compensation package also includes seniority. Currently, seniority pay is a percentage of salary. We propose to convert it to a fixed amount, thereby avoiding the very concern you just mentioned. So whereas it has been one percent per week for every year of service, we now propose a flat rate, which we believe to be much fairer because it isn’t subject to the vagaries of salary. We propose that after every five years of service, each musician receive an additional thirty dollars per week.”
“Do I understand correctly that what you propose is substantially less than we get now?” asked Junior Parsley.
“Comparing a fixed rate to a percentage is apples and oranges,” replied Vickers.
“Moving on. The final piece of the puzzle is health care. Health-care expenses are rising anywhere from twenty to forty percent a year, depending on the provider. You can see for yourself on the diagram on page three that premiums have literally gone off the charts. The bad news is, it will no longer be possible for us to provide the kind of plan we’ve offered in the past at no cost to the musicians. The good news is, recognizing the importance of this issue, we propose establishing a joint management/musician subcommittee to study the possibilities and come up with solutions, which could result in a change of providers, a change in coverage, or musician participation in the plan.
“I guess that’s it. Are there any questions?”
“What about the other issues?” asked Junior Parsley.
“Such as?”
“The musicians have made any number of proposals in response to the historic idiosyncrasy of Harmonium under Vaclav Herza: the excessive rate of music-related injury; of depression and stress-related mental illness related to overscheduling, arbitrary overtime, and verbal harassment; the earlier average retirement age as a result, hence the need for greater pension; the extra cost to the organization of hiring substitute musicians because so many tenured musicians are ill; the need for more paid sick leave as a result; the need for greater, not lesser, health benefits; the seemingly arbitrary demotions of musicians, which you call ‘reseating’ in the contract; the exhausting tour schedules. I can go on and on. I don’t see any response to our proposals here.”
“Now that we have a home in Harmonium Hall, tour schedules will be less of a factor.”
“Is that your response?”
“As for the others, we believe your working conditions to be in accordance with the industry standard and propose continuing them as currently provided for in the CBA. We see no reason to waste paper with old news. We’re trying to cut down on office expenses.
“Oh, yes, we did add some language in the grievance clause. Just to clarify management’s rights. Nothing substantial.”
Junior Parsley looked left, then right, catching the eyes of the other members of the committee.
“May we caucus?” he asked Vickers.
“By all means.”
“Where?”
“Why don’t you stay here? We can stretch our legs while you enjoy the view.”
Ten minutes later the management team was invited back to the table, chatting with affected nonchalance as they leafed through their assortment of papers, as if doing so would produce the hoped-for result.
“That was a quick caucus,” said Vickers. “Ready to sign on the dotted line?” she asked, all amiability.
“Since everyone has a busy schedule, Adrianne,” said Parsley, “I’ll cut to the chase. This new package is worse than the last one you made. After that one, we responded immediately with proposals to bring us closer together, and it took you a month to get back to us. As you said, the clock is ticking, but any time pressure you may have regarding the opening of the hall you’ve brought upon yourself. It doesn’t bother us. Not only have you not addressed many of our counterproposals, every change you’ve made is more onerous than before, including your idea for a health-care subcommittee, where you’re kind enough to allow us to choose how we want to slit our own throats. The committee has unanimously agreed that we see no further need to talk.”
This time the musicians’ negotiating team stood up.
“If you think you can fucking pressure us,” Vickers said, “by holding the opening of the hall over our heads as a negotiating ploy, that works both ways.”
“You’ve got a hundred-million-dollar capital campaign in the works,” countered Junior Parsley, “and you expect us to agree to cut our salary and benefits? You better have a quiet chat with your faith-based gurus. And while we’re at it, Adrianne, fuck you too.”
THIRTEEN
MONDAY
Jacobus woke up with a start and a shout, the remnants of a disturbing dream entombed somewhere in the foggy recesses of his brain. Whether the dream was of lieder or Liederkranz, he couldn’t retrieve it, nor did he care to. Except for his excursions to the bathroom and a brief foray to the backyard to listen to a flock of wild turkeys gobble their way through the underbrush, Jacobus had spent the remainder of Sunday splayed on the couch, unable even to drag himself upstairs to bed.
The crick in Jacobus’s neck reminded him that he was still on the couch, its frayed fabric arms exposing the inner plywood, but that was nevertheless a step up from the fever, which seemed to have departed in the night without totally incapacitating him. And even if visions of chopped liver and pastrami didn’t quite dance in his head, at least they weren’t doing a dirge.
His first task—a simple one for most people, who could do it simply by opening their eyes—was to determine whether it was day or night. He could turn on the radio to find out, but that would require his excavating through what Sherry O’Brien had quaintly referred to as his “paraphernalia” to get to it. So Jacobus did it with his ears. An avian chorus was beginning its warm-up exercises in his forest, either heralding the new day or saying good-bye to the sun at dusk. There being no audible traffic from Route 41, it was more likely early morning, but how early? The mockingbird had not yet begun its comic virtuoso imitation act, which it did only after hearing the other birds, so Jacobus decided it must be about 6:30 in the morning, give or take twelve hours.
Jacobus rubbed his face, felt for the cane next to the couch, and hobbled to the bathroom. He turned on the cold tap and stuck his head under the faucet. Reasonably awake now, he let Trotsky out the back door to go fend for himself, reassuring him he would holler when the burnt toast—their preference—was ready. He went into the kitchen sufficiently recovered to make himself a cup of coffee, brewing it weaker than usual but extra hot because he still felt a little under the weather. Nathaniel was always pushing him to drink tea whenever he caught a bug, but the thought of tea almost brought back his nausea.
Jacobus carried his mug to the living room. On one wall was an old floor-to-ceiling pine bookshelf, but since the ceiling was only a little over six feet high, it didn’t provide all that much shelf space. That was one reason, but
only one, why most of Jacobus’s music and records were strewn everywhere. The only things still on his bookshelves, in fact, were his old books, which he no longer had the ability to read but didn’t have the heart to discard. He couldn’t use his music for himself either, for that matter, but he kept it to provide his students with the fingerings and bowings that he or his teacher and mentor, Dr. Krovney, had penciled in many years ago.
Nathaniel had devised an ingenious filing system for Jacobus to be able to identify all his records and music. He didn’t bother with the books because either Jacobus wouldn’t be able to read them or, in the case of his books in Braille, he could read them anyway. With everything else Nathaniel had painstakingly punched a series of tiny holes in the top right-hand corner of all the covers, and as long as Jacobus didn’t forget the easily fathomable code, all he had to do was feel the holes with his fingertips and he’d know what it was that he was holding in his hands.
Jacobus had thanked Nathaniel, then immediately ignored the system. The codes long since forgotten, he now foraged among the piles of records on the ancient upright Sohmer piano next to the bookshelf. The second pile to the left, the sixth record down, the one with the frayed edge and brittle Scotch tape. That should be his old Harmonium LP of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade with Herza conducting, recorded shortly after Myron Moskowitz became concertmaster of the orchestra. If he was wrong, he’d know as soon as he heard the first note, but he was not.
Loosely based on A Thousand and One Nights, the piece begins with a brief but foreboding introduction by the low brass, representing the voice of the Sultan Schariar, followed by the first of a half dozen exquisite violin solos portraying the seductive “once upon a time” voice of Scheherazade. Moskowitz played the solos with the personality of the protagonist clearly in mind, never overly aggressive, just suggestive enough for the Persian princess to keep the sultan salivating for more. By the time Sinbad’s ship crashed against the rocks in the last movement and Scheherazade completed her final commentary, tapering into a “happily ever after” cadence, Jacobus was reaffirmed in his affection for the particular performance, by both Herza and Moskowitz, and for Rimsky-Korsakov’s skill in creating vivid musical imagery. Jacobus asked himself the same old questions for which he knew he would never have the answers: Why was it that when he listened to a recording for the thousand and first time, when he knew exactly what was going to happen, he was still enthralled by the music? How is it that we can connect certain sounds an orchestra makes with Sinbad’s ship crashing against rocks? They really sound nothing like one another, yet we’d swear we can see the damn boat. How is it that musicians who have nothing in common with the composer, nothing in common even with each other, can band together and create something miraculous? Just look at Herza and Sherry O’Brien, ready to kill each other, two maladjusted humans—like himself, he added—but cavorting like lovers as soon as the performance begins. How different in personality, Jacobus thought, Scheherazade O’Brien was from her namesake. Or was she?
Jacobus was roused from his thoughts by the phonograph needle scratching the inner ring of the LP, scolding him to remove the record before it was ruined. He placed it back in its jacket, then picked up the phone and dialed information, requesting a phone number in Sarasota, Florida. Yet another number to be memorized. How many more could he fit into his brain?
“Moscowitz,” said the voice after the third ring.
“Ronnie? Jacobus.”
“Jake! That you? How goes it?”
He sounded preoccupied, in a hurry. Myron Moskowitz was, or had been before he retired, one of those violinists who could have had a solo career but were either too busy making money or engaging in extracurricular activities, so although he ascended to the cusp of stardom early in his career, winning prizes in the Queen Elizabeth of Brussels and the Montreal competitions, he ultimately settled for the Harmonium concertmaster job. Not that this was a small feat. It was an accomplishment that Jacobus envied—he would have been in a similar position had things literally not turned black for him—but still, it was the lure of the juicy, predictable paycheck with abundant time for golf and girls, as much as the musical challenge, that had lured Moskowitz.
“You busy?” Jacobus asked.
“Just eighteen holes in a little while.”
“On a Monday morning?”
“Monday, Shmunday. If it’s morning, it’s tee time.”
Jacobus considered the supreme expertise of the world’s great golfers: their years of training, their ability to concentrate and perform under extreme stress, their physical talent in hitting a ball hundreds of yards into a tiny cup. He shook his head in perplexed sadness that so many untold hours of tireless, dedicated work did the world not one iota of good.
“Maybe I’ll just call back another time,” said Jacobus, already regretting he had gone even this far.
“No problem, Jake,” said Moskowitz. “What’s up, hearing from you, out of the blue?”
“It’s about your former student. O’Brien.”
“Sherry? Got a lot of spunk, that kid.”
“She seems to want to follow in your footsteps.”
“Don’t they all, when they’re young? Then when they follow your footsteps into the quicksand and have sunk up to their pupik in the mire, then they start to have their second thoughts.”
“Sounds like you don’t regret retirement.”
“Regret? Those last years with Herza gave me an ulcer. When I left, I went kicking and screaming because I didn’t want to admit it, but you know what? I had had enough and it turns out I really do like golf—I’m down to an eight handicap. I really do like fishing. I really do like warm weather and a gin and tonic. I go for a drive and watch the Yankees play spring training and have a beer and a hot dog with the grandkids. Okay, they have a Coke. I sold my violin, I’ve got my pension, and I’m enjoying life. Jake, there is life after Mozart.”
“Well, O’Brien has just reached the quicksand part,” said Jacobus, “but seems determined to wade through it.” He recounted his exchange with her, and Herza’s demeaning reprimand, and through the telling felt Moskowitz’s demeanor darken.
“When’s the audition?” Moskowitz asked when Jacobus finished.
“Prelims begin today,” he replied.
“Let me tell you a little bit about Sherry,” Moskowitz said, “so you’ll know what makes her tick, and then I gotta run.
“She studied with me for five, six years, and getting her to unload her story took all that time. You know what serious teaching is. It’s half music, half gymnastics, and half psychiatry. That’s three halves. What the hell.
“She grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her father, Mike, worked on an assembly line at a GM plant. Sherry’s mother, Beth or Bess, I can’t remember, came from a more cultured background and was a music lover. She and Mike had a hard time making babies and Sherry was their one child. The mother died in childbirth—Bessie, that was her name—but before she died, her final request was that Mike name their baby Scheherazade and to see that she became a violinist. The mother used to watch Night at the Symphony on PBS—which is where she fell in love with the violin solo in the piece after which Sherry was named—while husband Mike went to Night at the Saloon to down boilermakers with his assembly-line buddies. Then they took Night at the Symphony off the air because people decided watching Charlie’s Angels was more entertaining, at which point Mike had no more excuse to get drunk.
“But Mike had otherwise been a devoted husband, and he kept his promise, to a fault, as you’ll hear, and spent a fortune on the kid’s training. But the downside was that, with his blue-collar mentality, he forced the kid to practice seven, eight hours a day, every day, six days a week.”
“Only six? He have a soft spot?”
“Sunday was a free day. Mike was a churchgoing man, and Sunday was the Sabbath. For six days you can be a carousing bastard, but if you go to church, all is forgiven. Hey, maybe that’s not a bad idea. To make a long story short,
all the kid had was the violin—no friends, no hobbies, no social life.”
“Sounds like you had a problem student on your hands.”
“Oh, contraire,” said Moskowitz. “Talk about dogged determination! I wish my other students had that kind of stick-to-itiveness. The kid didn’t have a helluva lot of natural talent, if you know what I mean, but every time someone would tell her she had no future as a violinist, she just ramped it up a notch. Sometimes at lessons I felt she was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode, but she never did. She never even threw a tantrum, though I’m sure I gave her cause. She’s tough. She can take it. The girl wouldn’t take no for an answer. You’ve heard her play. It’s flawless.”
“She’s got a chip on her shoulder, then,” said Jacobus.
“You’ve nailed it,” said Moskowitz.
“You suppose that accounts for her bitching about Herza? Her grievance threat?”
“Look. No one knows better than me that Herza is an A-one prick. But the greater the conductor, the more his prickdom is tolerated. You know that. And the thing is, Herza is the best, so he gets away with murder and no one does anything about it. No one can do anything about it. And being concertmaster, well, you get the brunt of it.”
“It goes with the territory.”
“It goes with the territory,” Moskowitz repeated, with emphasis. “One time, I remember we were doing Dvořák Eight and I’m playing the violin solo in the slow movement. It sounds fine to me. The same way I played it for thirty years. Herza stops and tells me to do it again. Doesn’t say why. Doesn’t say what he wants different. I play it again. I try to play it better. Herza stops again. Tells me to play it again. We played patty-cake ten times, all the while the orchestra is just sitting there, and not one damn time does he tell me what he wants.”
“So what’s the moral of the story?”
“Who the hell knows? After the tenth time he just kept on going. I think he just wanted to let me and the orchestra know who was boss.”
