"Here boy," the father said, pressing a stack of bacon strips on his fork and dumping them helter-skelter in my plate. "Eat, eat."
I wolfed down the first few pieces with enormous zest. The thin strips of meat had become dry in the oven and the rind was as tough as a leather bootlace. Still, it was bacon, and I gorged myself, not paying the least attention to the fact that I was the only one at the table eating it. Annie's brothers and sisters sat observing my private feast, their expressions—as before—impassive. Annie's youngest sister leaned over to Annie and whispered something in her ear, to which Annie responded with an annoyed "Sh!"
Annie's father's geniality continued to expand as I ate. "Good bacon, eh? You like?"
"It's my very favourite," I mumbled, talking with my mouth full. Then, after a moment, I added, "Well, almost my very favourite. I love spaghetti just as much. Annie's boyfriend is going to take me to an Italian restaurant soon for spaghetti and meat balls."
My host scowled. "What boyfriend?"
"Pete Lisanti," I responded airily, popping another piece of bacon into my mouth.
The scowl deepened, the voice took on a dark tone.
"How you know Pete Lisanti?"
"He comes to our house a lot. I like Pete. He says some day when Annie and him are married—"
"My daughter no gonna marry no bloody dago," the father cut in quietly, looking sternly over at Annie. Annie looked at me and seemed about to say something, then she turned away and stared at the floor beneath her chair. Her father rose without taking his eyes from the girl. Then, as before, there came a violent outburst. "My daughter no gonna marry no bloody dago!" This time he shouted the edict at the top of his lungs. Annie's mother too got up from the table and began shrieking at Annie in Ukrainian. I watched the drama from my corner of the table, completely fascinated by what I was seeing and hearing, not in the least conscious of the betrayal I had inadvertently committed.
Annie, the poor wretched victim, could stand the tirade no longer. She ran from the table in tears and disappeared into one of the bedrooms ad joining the kitchen, slamming the door behind her. Now everyone was deserting the table-the kids to run outside and escape the tumult, the father to pace up and down the kitchen, the mother to sit in a corner of the room rocking and swaying her body and moaning to herself, "Oi oi oi oi ..."
I was alone, little Lord Fauntleroy in my Sunday best, quietly demolishing the remnants of a pound of bacon, wetting my fingers and catching up tiny bacon crumbs on my plate and on the oilcloth, while around me the people of the house—like the house itself—were dividing and crumbling.
Not until the horn of my father's car sounded outside the house at dusk did Annie emerge. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her mouth drooped sorrowfully. The horn sounded again. "Come on," was all she said to me. She said goodbye to no one in her family, and no one said goodbye to her. I started to follow her out to the car, then turned to say thank you to Annie's mother and father but they were gone.
"Well, did you have a good feed?" my father asked, shifting the car into gear.
"It was fine," I answered. Through the car window I could see· Annie's brothers and sisters still staring at me in their dispirited way. A lone light on the street had just lit up. In the air floated the familiar smell of sulphur. Behind us, as we drove off down the roadway, the dust billowed up and Annie's house disappeared.
Annie remained with us for almost a year after that Sunday. Then she left, as we knew she would, to marry Pete Lisanti. In the interval between that visit to her home and her departure from ours, she never again confided anything in me beyond her feelings about the weather or her intentions to manicure her nails. But I continued to trust my little secrets to her and never once was my trust misplaced or violated. Pete never did take me for spaghetti to an Italian restaurant and my passion for bacon was confined to the Ritz Cafe across the street, a not-so-ritzy establishment run by an exhausted-looking Cantonese who was said to have lost a fortune in the stock market.
The wedding—to which we were invited—was a terribly stiff affair, held in a Roman Catholic church. Annie's parents, staunch Greek Orthodox, sat unsmiling on one side of the aisle; Pete's sat unsmiling on the other. Annie and Pete borrowed a car and honeymooned for a week in a rented cabin near Batchawana Bay, north of the Sault. Before long they had three kids of their own and a small frame house in the West End near the heart of "Little Italy." Pete switched from the James Street Aces to the Marconi Flyers. Then he injured his back at the plant and had to give up hockey.
Annie and Pete never left the West End.
Room and Keyboard
The boy in the New Yorker advertisement is about nine or ten. Well-scrubbed and neatly attired, he's the kind of kid you see on a Saturday at F.A.O. Schwarz's being presented with an expensive birthday toy by an adoring grandmother from Scarsdale. He stands with one hand boyishly tucked in his trousers pocket, the other resting casually on a piano bench, all poise and self-assurance, a typical young Manhattanite who divides his time between penthouse and private academy. The copy beneath the picture glows with high hope: "He'll be playing a Steinway, the piano played by most professional pianists, which should add some incentive to his practice hours." The writer of this bit of prose may know a great deal about pianos and piano virtuosi. What he knows about boys, on the other hand, doesn't amount to a hemidemisemiquaver.
I stare at the advertisement and suddenly I am the boy in the picture. It is October, 1935. Voices are speaking to me, at me, over me, and around me.
"What do you mean you don't want to learn to play the piano?"
"Everybody nowadays plays piano—"
"Show me one house in this town that doesn't have a piano?"
The voices, rising in pitch and intensity with each delivery, are those of my mother and father. It is Saturday, lunchtime. The table bears leftovers from last night's traditional Friday night supper, reheated except for the remainder of a chicken which we eat cold with H.P. Sauce. A traditional Saturday lunch. It will soon be time for my parents to return downstairs to the store to make the final push for the week. ("If you don't make .a dollar on Saturdays, you might as well close up altogether.") More important to me, the Saturday matinee at the Algoma Theatre begins in less than an hour. Burgess, my redheaded freckled friend will soon be knocking at the door. There will be a dime for the movie, a nickel for a chocolate bar, and a couple of hours of re-enacting with Burgess that day's episode of the Tarzan serial after the show is over and we are let out blinking in the late afternoon sun. Why can't they just let me eat my cold chicken and H.P. Sauce and leave me in peace?
This is the fourth or fifth meal in a row during which I've been forced to sit through these persuasions. I look anxiously at the kitchen clock. One thirty. A half-hour to go before the lights go out in the Algoma and that marvellously menacing M.G.M. lion flashes onto the screen, its impatient roar drowned out by cheering and whistling and stamping feet. The voices continue, pressing, reasoning, unreasoning.
"Remember Top Hat? The minute you came out of the movie you knew every song by heart, some even with the words! Fred Astaire didn't even sing them so good. I'm telling you you got a brilliant ear. It's a shame not to use it."
"And it'll be fun. Your father'll play his violin and you'll play the piano and the two of you can perform at parties sometimes.''
Compared to glorious freedom in the streets of Sault Ste. Marie, the idea of musical togetherness at home is hardly a temptation. Even less tempting is the prospect of a fatherand-son act. I see my father looking benignly down at me over the bow of his instrument, and I see myself in a velvet suit (like Freddy Bartholomew but even less appealing be cause I wear eyeglasses) playing dainty little trills and being hugged by bosomy old women and cheek-pinched by their paunchy old husbands. I'm the darling of the Sunday after noon tea-and-spongecake set. What will my boyfriends say? It is almost too horrible to think of. Indeed, so overcome am I by the horror of it that tears form, collect around the lower rims of my g
lasses, and roll down my cheeks dropping one by one into my soup. My mother prudently slides the soupbowl out of range. "It's salty enough already," she says.
Now they are reminding me that Irving Cohen, who lives a couple of blocks away, is only a year or two older than I and already he is in Grade Eight of the Toronto Conservatory piano course. The comparison infuriates me. Why must I always be compared to kids who are totally abnormal, kids who will engage willingly in the most unnatural activities just to ingratiate themselves with their elders? Irving Cohen, whom I have by turns scorned or ignored in our chance meetings, is now Private Enemy Number One on my list. Angrily I cry out, "I don't care what Irving Cohen does! I hate Irving Cohen!"
Finally comes that last-resort word—please. "Please," my father urges, "just take one lesson and see how you like it."
"But we haven't even got a piano," I argue back, hopelessly, my voice choking into a pitiful squeak.
"We'll get one. I'll look in the paper. Somebody always has a piano for sale."
Burgess stands in the doorway slapping his tweed cap against his thigh. It is late and he is impatient. I rush past him, my glasses tear-stained, and he turns, bewildered, to run after me. In my hand I clutch a dime for the movie, a nickel for the chocolate bar, and an extra dime—ten whole cents!—to spend as I please.
I have given up, caved in, knuckled under. I will be a piano player.
It is one week later. I have come home from school to find a piano standing in the hallway outside our apartment, like some strange timid monster waiting to be invited inside to become part of the family. Once the struggle to squeeze the piano through the front door is over, my parents stand back, appraising their latest acquisition.
"I think we got a bargain at thirty-five dollars," my father says.
"Yes, but don't forget you had to pay the movers on top of that," my mother says, a strong hint of disapproval in her tone.
My father defends himself. "I couldn't help it. The old lady said she needed thirty-five dollars clear to bail her son out of jail." But my mother is unconvinced. "I still think you could've made a deal for twenty-five. We're not millionaires, you know."
Not millionaires indeed. Still, in these arid penny-pinching times, when it is often difficult to find a chicken in every Jewish pot, how customary it has become to find a piano in every Jewish living-room! Our home will follow this pound-foolish custom, except that the huge ugly-brown instrument—after being denied lodging in the living-room (too cramped), in my parents' bedroom (too private), in the kitchen (too cluttered)—finally ends up in my bedroom at the rear of the apartment.
That room—windowless, sharing a frosted-glass skylight with the adjoining kitchen—exists in a state of half-darkness even on the brightest days. It is an area that begs for more sun and a bit of breeze. Instead it now receives within its four walls this gloomy monolith, keys yellowed and chipped, innards thickly coated with dust, and a middle A that probably hasn't vibrated four hundred and forty times per second since the day it was first struck at the factory.
"Where did the old lady keep it?" my mother asks, screwing up her nose. "The whole piano smells like bacon grease."
"I'll fix that soon enough," my father assures her, and promptly dumps a bag of mothballs through the top of the piano. I can hear them cascading through the strings and springs and hammers.
My mother screws up her nose again. "Now it smells like bacon grease and mothballs,'' she says.
What can this hideous piece of furniture possibly add to my life that I should be forced to cohabit with it? I think about the old lady's son and how lucky he'd been in jail. Imagine, a cell without a piano.
My father hisses obscenities in six Eastern European languages as he scrapes and rubs and polishes the instrument. The piano-tuner (who swears in English only) seizes one tool, hurls down another, mutters angry orders to himself, pounds middle A with his right index finger until both finger and note are exhausted. Finally, the strings have been tamed and the tuner puts down his pliers, seats himself at the keyboard, clears his throat, and plays at full volume one chorus of "I Love Coffee, I Love Tea." My mother laughs with amusement, and my father urges the tuner to play another chorus. I stay well in the background, praying that this toolbag Paderewski will fracture his fingers.
Now there is a man seated next to me on the piano bench. His hands, bony and bluish (he has walked over a mile in the raw November night to give me my first lesson) rest on the keys and he explains in a cultured English accent that I must pretend I am holding an orange in each of my hands. I can smell Sen-Sen on his breath as he examines my outstreched fingers the way a gourmet examines fresh beef to see if it's properly marbled. "We'll have to get rid of that webbing between your fingers," he says, looking solemn, like a surgeon about to cut. "At the moment your hands look like duck's feet."
"The Cohens told us that their Irving had the same trouble with his hands at first," my father says.
"Lots and lots of good solid practice, that's what does the trick," the teacher says. Father and teacher nod solemnly. The rapport between them, established only minutes ago, is now centuries old.
"Irving Cohen does a half-hour in the morning before, school, fifteen minutes at lunch, and a whole hour at night. And on Saturdays and Sundays he sometimes plays two hours straight without a stop." As he recites these statistics my father looks grimly at me, I look grimly at the teacher who in turn looks grimly at my father. We are, the three of us,
a new phenomenon in the world of music—The Grim Trio.
I am miserable, but presently misery gives way to hatred. I hate Irving Cohen even more now. And I realize that he and I are now destined to become rivals. My father is al ready burnishing the family armour. "Don't worry," he tells the piano teacher, "just give this kid of mine a year and he'll be up to Irving Cohen. The whole town'll be talking about him."
It is two years later. We are in the Foresters Hall, a large, draughty room which ordinarily serves the Jewish com munity as a place of worship, but which tonight has been transformed into a theatre with a low, hastily-constructed stage, a curtain consisting of several white bedsheets, and some blue and white paper streamers draped in a limp and unimaginative fashion from the light fixtures on the ceiling. The final curtain has been drawn on the annual Purim play, the last curtain calls have been taken by the child stars, and the proud parents in the audience are busily trading compliments. There follows a short, musical concert. One untalented child after another steps sheepishly to centre-stage. Some sing songs, two young violinists scrape together a duet, the melody of which begins uncertainly and disappears entirely by the third or fourth bar. A trumpet player threatens to blast down the walls of Jericho for a second time in history. Everyone is off-key.
Now the master-of-ceremonies stands at centre-stage, beaming back at the roomful of beaming parents. "The time has come to hear from Ahasuerus and Haman," he announces. This introduction greatly amuses the audience, and the master-of-ceremonies is very pleased with his little joke. I, too, feel satisfaction for in my role as King Ahasuerus I have had the pleasure on this night of condemning the evil villain, Raman-played by Irving Cohen-to hang. The sight of Irving being dragged off to the gallows has pro vided me with spiritual uplift, and I recall praying that he would stumble from the stage and crash-land right on his web-free fingers.
Haman, having suffered a humiliating death in the play, is invited to play the piano first, a courtesy which I welcome in the belief that he who plays last, plays best. Irving is seated at the piano. He is too shy to turn and face his audience, and merely mumbles over his shoulder the title of the piece he will play. No one quite catches the title, and I manage only to catch the words "by Johann Sebastian Bach." (I learn later by peeking at his music book that it is a prelude and fugue.) His fingers are swift and accurate. And the voices in the fugue mesh with the precision of well tooled gears, the whole piece building strongly to a stirring, concluding major chord. There is a moment of silence. Rising from the p
iano bench, Irving turns and bows stiffly. The audience is cold; this has been cerebral music, music that is not of the heart. The applause, therefore, is merely polite and dies quickly. Irving moves awkwardly across the stage before the silent crowd and returns to his seat.
"His teacher's that German fellow," someone whispers.
"Goddam Germans. They're all alike. Everything comes out like from a machine," another responds.
"And now King Ahasuerus, please," the master-of-ceremonies calls, milking the situation for one more laugh.
I begin to play the opening phrases of Johann Strauss' "Tales of the Vienna Woods," and as I pass into the main theme, an "ah!" of recognition rises from the crowd. I have chosen wisely and I play the piece reasonably well, schmaltzing up my performance by playing the waltz rhythm of the left hand "rubato" in the shameless style of a band of gypsy restaurant musicians. Rustling leaves and chirping birds flow from my right hand. We are so deeply immersed in the Viennese woods that one or two people in the room are moved to hum or whistle along with me. I cannot spot my father and mother among the patrons, but vanity tells me they must be exploding with pleasure. The last grand chords bring down the house.
But I do not stop to accept the accolade; instead I rush off the stage and out of the room, making straight for the privacy of a nearby lavatory. There I fling "Tales of the Vienna Woods" into a waste basket.
A Good Place to Come From Page 4
