A Good Place to Come From

by Morley Torgov

  Later, at home, my father is triumphant. "Didn't I tell you someday he'd be ahead of Irving Cohen? Didn't I say the whole town would be talking about him?"'

  "Stop saying those rotten things about Irving," I shout. "He's better than the whole bunch of you put together!"

  My father and mother exchange bewildered glances.

  "All of a sudden Irving Cohen is your hero?" my father asks.

  I make no reply. My father and mother will never under stand what has happened to me on this night. They will never understand that I have come face to face with my own cheapness, and the cheap tastes of the well-meaning audience. In shoddiness, we have been joined together, the audience and I, and I am ashamed of the union.

  I exhibit my contempt for Johann Strauss, and for his devotees, and for myself, by deliberately playing "The Blue Danube Waltz" with my left hand in the key of C and my right hand in C-sharp. The dissonance is wall-crumbling.

  My father is furious. "You're ruining a good piano," he cries.

  "Then stop making me play this lousy Jewish music," I yell back. ("Jewish" music, according to my father, is any kind of music that has heart and soul, and into this broad category he has lumped Tchaikowsky, Chopin, Schumann, Rubinstein and practically anybody else who has written an easily hummable tune or a melody in a minor key.)

  "I suppose that German anti-semite knows what's good music, eh?" my father says derisively.

  In the end I win. At my next lesson, my piano teacher shows up with two new volumes which he places ceremoniously before me at the piano—Bach's two-part inventions, and a book of Mozart's sonatas.

  The days of toy music are over.

  On the following Saturday, Burgess is at the door.

  "I won't be going to the Algoma today," I say to him. "I'm going to Irving Cohen's house. Maybe I'll see you after the show gets out."

  Burgess is off like a shot, a happy redhead bound for an afternoon with Hopalong Cassidy and Buck Rogers.

  I am bound for an afternoon salon with Irving Cohen, and two composers whom I have never heard of-Debussy and George Gershwin. I have become a twelve-year-old snob.

  It is 1943 and Irving Cohen and I are now two of the leading lights in the local musical world—a world that consists largely of Tony Dionisi's Dance Band ("the band that makes dyin' easy"), the Canadian Legion Fife and Drum Corps, an assortment of teachers and musicians who frequent Anderson's Music Store to play records on Saturdays, and another assortment of teen-age zoot-suited music lovers who feed the nickelodeon at Capy's Grill on Saturday nights. It is a world very much alone in space; there are no other musical planets nearby, no stars out there in the bleak universe. The town has yet to be visited by a string quartet, let alone a symphony orchestra. Solo artists—those few who dare to perform for the folks who live at the end of the railway line—are usually second-rate, on their way up to, or well on their way down from, virtuosity. The local radio station carries the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons and the New York Philharmonic concerts on Sundays; apart from those two programs most of the air time is taken up with country-and-western and, of course, the big bands of the time—Miller, Shaw, Dorsey.

  Irving is the painstaking technician, given to spending a whole afternoon at the keyboard working on a single passage until each bit of fingering has become second-nature to him. Though he remains shy and awkward in front of an audience, his technique is awesome. Under his fingers, Chopin's "Black-Keys Etude" emerges from the pianoforte like bullets from a machinegun-rapid, precise, forceful. I, on the other hand, rely on charm, plus massive applications of the loud pedal, to see me through the trickier spots. I have a kind of romantic bedside manner that lulls audiences into overlooking careless octave runs and blurred trills.

  I have also become a war hero. I am one of the performers at a public concert to boost the sale of war bonds, and am in the midst of pounding out a passionate rendition of Sibelius' "Romance" when a gooseneck lamp perched atop the vibrating upright piano begins to edge forward. The lamp is irreversibly bound to a collision course with the keyboard, but I nevertheless continue playing. Precisely at the sound of the next loud base-note, the lamp plunges down coming to rest just a few inches above the keys where it dangles by its cord, like Damocles' sword. The audience gasps but, without missing so much as a grace note, I carry right on (those war bonds must be sold!), finishing the Romance with a dramatic flourish. Following which I rise and calmly restore the lamp to the top of the piano. The next day I am hailed in the local press as "a courageous young artist." Like Aladdin and Florence Nightingale, I have established my reputation with the aid of a lamp.

  "Play us a little tune" has become a standing inside joke with Irving and me. No matter where we are, if there is a piano in the room, someone will pipe up with "Play us a little tune" and we are expected to be gracious and without further urging seat ourselves at the keyboard. There is no end to this shotgun concertizing. Furriers from Toronto, pants manufacturers from Winnipeg, dress salesmen from Montreal—it makes no difference. Each and every one is assumed to be a devotee of "good music." Singly or in groups they are corralled into the living-room ("I don't care how busy you are, you must hear my son play the piano ... ") where they are obliged to sit through all three movements of a Mozart or Beethoven sonata before they can write so much as a dollar's worth of business. To a commercial traveller, whose only genuine aim is to sell his merchandise and get the hell out of Sault Ste. Marie on the next train, this mandatory musical interlude must be sheer agony. Irving and I compose special numbers for these occasions: "Prelude To The Sale of a Pair of Pants," "Overture to Overalls," "Fanfare for Furriers." There is more than a tinge of malice in this, for we are shrewd enough to sense the traveller's agony and perceptive enough to realize that he doesn't care a hoot about Mozart or Beethoven.

  Given such a thin cultural atmosphere, what sustains us and helps us to flourish? It is something we have developed which I call "The Gershwin Game." Thanks to Irving's initial discovery, Irving and I have become Gersh—win addicts, totally caught up in the music, the lifestyle, the wit, the lore and the legend flowing from and created around that composer. For hours at a time we play recordings of the Rhapsody in Blue, the Second Rhapsody, Cuban Overture, American in Paris, the Three Piano Preludes, the orchestral suite from Porgy and Bess, the popular show songs, and above all, the Concerto in F. We read and reread aloud passages from Oscar Levant's book, A Smattering of Ignorance, until we have memorized whole pages of dialogue between Gershwin and his friend-confidant-exponent-and-biographer. Irving takes to wearing a bar-pin through his shirt collar in the style of Gershwin and I buy my first double-breasted suit to give myself that snappy New Yorkin-the-thirties look. Since Sault Ste. Marie has no Broadway, we imagine that the lights that line the canals and locks on the Michigan side of the St. Mary's River are the bright lights of the theatre district. A booth at the back of Capy's Grill becomes our Algonquin Round Table, occupied exclusively by two pseudo-sophisticates. From the other booths the uninitiated view this make-believe with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. When the waitress brings Irving's chocolate sundae and mine, Irving points to his—which has extra whipped cream—and, borrowing a Gershwin line, says, "You see, that's the difference between genius and talent." At the end of an evening during which Irving has monopolized the keyboard at my house, I borrow a Levant line, "An evening with Irving Cohen is an Irving Cohen evening." It goes on and on and our parents and friends begin to wonder when it will end.

  It ends in June, 1944. "Gershwin," who is now of draft age, joins the United States Navy. "Levant," who is not yet old enough for military service, stays behind in Sault Ste. Marie. The passion for Gershwin's music goes on. But The Gershwin Game is over. One person alone cannot play.

  Twenty years have gone by. Irving Cohen has helped to win World War II off the coast of China, has finished a fine arts course at a university in Michigan, and has married. His family has left Sault Ste. Marie and I have lost track of
his whereabouts and career. I am married, have two small children, and reside in the· middle of a carefully planned network of cui-de-sacs and dead-end streets in a suburb of Toronto. One day the telephone rings: "Hello, it's Irving . . . Irving Cohen . . . I happen to be passing through Toronto ..." We meet and for a few minutes The Gershwin Game is on again, revived with great enthusiasm and laughter.

  At last the conversation turns to the present.

  "What're you doing with yourself these days?" Irving asks. "I'm a lawyer. What's your line?"

  "Hospital linens. Sheets, pillow cases, towels. Best line in the trade. Competition can't touch our stuff for quality. We've got this new line on the market now-real soft finish, launders like a dream. A lot easier on the patients, you know; cuts down on bedsores and nuisances like that. How about you, are you specializing in anything?"

  "Business law. You know—real estate, mortgages, corporate deals of various sorts. Do you still play a little piano once in a while?"

  "No, not much," Irving replies. "I've changed my whole lifestyle over the years." From his jacket he withdraws a slim leather case and offers me a cigar. "Jamaican. I like 'em better than Cuban. Go ahead, take one, they're great."

  Full-cheeked and thick-lipped, like two contented bull frogs, we sit blowing thick clouds of cigar smoke ·into the air. "Did you read recently that George Gershwin suffered from chronic constipation all during his adult life, and that he visited brothels from time to time?" I ask.

  "You're kidding?" Irving responds, smiling incredulously.

  ''Honest-to-God.''

  "Too bad about Levant," he says, snapping his gold cigar clipper open and shut. "He sure turned into a wreck. I saw him try to play part of the slow movement of Gershwin's Concerto in F one night on Jack Paar's show. What a disaster!"

  "I guess you and I were smart to stay out of the music business."

  We nod in agreement. Two men who made the right decisions years ago, each at his own point somewhere along the path that leads from genius to talent, and from talent to reality.

  The Guest Speaker

  What did we know about anything?

  Highly educated we weren't. Well informed we weren't. Neither were we makers of news; indeed we didn't even live anywhere close to makers of news.

  There were no supper-hour pundits on the radio interpreting events for us while we ate our beef-and-barley soup, no celebrity-commentators appearing on a television screen nightly at bedtime to issue grave warnings or forecast promising upturns for tomorrow. The news, like the moon, had its dark side-a side none of us could see or comprehend. Only local gossip could be discussed in depth and with authority; after all, first-hand rumours were always more reliable than second-hand knowledge.

  So when you got right down to it, what did we really know about anything?

  Not much. But we did possess a deep thirst. We yearned to see and to hear someone in our midst-anyone-who could stand up and say, "I know ... I was there ... I saw with my own eyes ..." We were like parched prairie earth that waits open-pored for the rains.

  At last the rains came.

  The gods—that is, the executive of one of the Jewish charitable agencies in Toronto-had heard our prayers and sent us an elderly scholar, a man in his late sixties or early seventies, to enlighten and inspire us in the backwoods.

  He was to speak to us about the Jewish Homeland in Palestine. The occasion therefore called for a full congregational meeting: men, women, children, even babes in arms. Wooden folding-chairs crashed, the smells of coffee and smoked fish drifted over the room from the refreshment table set up at the back, parents confiscated yo-yos, admonishing their kids at the same time to pay attention and learn something.

  The guest speaker, accompanied by the chairman, made his way through the noisy audience to the head table and sank heavily into the only armchair in the place. Perspira tion shone from his broad forehead. He was flushed and obviously having difficulty catching his breath.

  "The steps must have been too much for the old man," someone whispered. (Two long flights of steps had to be climbed to reach our third-storey meeting hall.)

  "Naw," someone replied, "he just ate supper at the rabbi's, that's all."

  The latter diagnosis was correct. The speaker had indeed supped at the rabbi's, stuffing himself—or being stuffed by his generous hosts—with the sort of meal that provided ballast against strong winds and rough currents: boiling hot soup, fish, a variety of meats and poultry, the traditional leaden puddings, all laced with enough garlic and spices to power a city for a year.

  The chairman began: "Tonight it is my great pleasure and privilege ..." As he fumbled painfully over his own syntax and polysyllables, I studied the old man who sat at his side basking sweatily in the glowing introduction. He was short and dangerously fat, filling his blue serge suit so fully it resembled a fresh tube of toothpaste about to disgorge its contents. His collar and tie fought against each other to maintain their respective rights around his ample neck. The buttons of his vest struggled to be free of their holes and threatened at any moment to explode from his chest, fly like fragments of shrapnel across the meeting hall, and embed themselves in the ceiling and walls.

  Fifteen minutes had now gone by and the chairman mumbled and stumbled on. Having outlined the history of the guest's birth in Russia, his education (a yeshiva in Odessa, seminars with this famous rabbi, discourses with that learned professor), the chairman reached the point of the young scholar's departure by ship for America.

  The same voice that had earlier diagnosed the guest's respiratory troubles spoke again in a loud whisper.

  "I'll bet it'll be a slow boat. Look who's the captain."

  He was right. The "captain" was making the most of his hour at the helm. During the next ten minutes, that liner touched every port in the Mediterranean, spent two endless days and nights lying over for supplies at Gibraltar (here we were treated to a cave by cave description of the famous rock), heaved and tossed its way across a stormy Atlantic, and steamed—at long last—into New York Harbor ("past that magnificent lady with her arm upheld beckoning the poor and the tired . . .").

  The poor and the tired. I looked at the uncomfortable corpulence seated in the armchair. All these years had passed, I thought, and he still looks poor and tired. Still, there was an intellectual air about the man, no denying it. The clothes, slightly shabby and poorly fitted in the first place, bespoke a man whose cares centred around library and book, rather than closet and wardrobe. The thick bifocals, the right index finger pressed against his temple, the assortment of fountain pens arrayed like medals across the pockets of his vest-all these signs pointed to a profound man, a man who thought only important thoughts, a man to whom even a routine weather report must have carried deep philosophical overtones.

  The chairman had now transported us to a soul-stirring day in the mid-thirties when the scholar was about to set foot on Palestine's soil for the first time. "Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, the thoughts which, in these times of trial and tribulation for our people, moved the mind and the heart of our esteemed guest as he gazed upon those shores where once Moses ..."

  Another loud whisper behind me: "The sonofabitch always has to grab the limelight—" "Shah!"

  "Shah my ass. I came here to listen to the speaker from Toronto, not the chairman from the Sault."

  Heads turned, eyes glowered, the chairman came to a full stop, freezing the action in Haifa Harbor just as the guest of honour was halfway down the gangplank. Boldly the backseat critic rose to his feet.

  "Are you gonna let him talk or aren't you?" he shot at the chairman.

  "When you're the chairman you'll run it your way. Right now I'm the chairman and I'm running it my way."

  Chairman and critic glared at each other, then critic sat down. But it was too late now. The chairman couldn't find his place among the dozen sheets of foolscap spread before him on the lectern. His timing, never exactly masterful, was now completely destroyed. Like Captain Queeg's, his self-
confidence had been shattered; his ship was floundering-it was time to get off the bridge. Left stranded on the gangplank, the speaker would have to disembark in his own words..

  "I suppose," the chairman said icily, glaring still at his unruly opponent in the audience, "I had better let you hear the rest of the story from our distinguished visitor himself."

  The abruptness with which he sat down took everyone by surprise, most of all the guest of honour who didn't appear ready to rise, now or ever. An awkward silence fell over the room. The chairman turned to the guest, gestured toward the lectern, inviting the old man to take the floor.

  The speaker gripped the arms of his chair and, with a mighty effort, made it to his feet. Once on his feet, he seemed about to fall forward across the head table and would in deed have done so, had the chairman not pushed the lectern in front of him in the nick of time. Leaning wearily on the lectern, he stared at the sheaf of notes before him. Everyone waited. At last he looked up and spoke.

  "Water ... I need a little water, please ... "

  A pause while a jug of water was produced. One glass, two glasses, and part of a third were consumed before the speaker uttered another word.

  He began sotto voce, partly I suspect because it was his style to begin very quietly and build to a climax, but more because the repast upon which he had gorged himself several hours earlier was only now beginning to inch its way down his esophagus and into the vast tunnel that formed his digestive tract. That words emerged from his mouth at all under these circumstances was miraculous.

  "I speak to you this evening at a difficult time."

  This opening statement, pronounced with profound gravity, drew a slight titter from some members of the audience. "I feel a great weight upon my heart, and pain in the very depths of my soul [widespread titters, plus one outright chuckle that quickly turned itself into a polite cough] as I stand before you to relate what is happening."