"I have something very important to tell you." My sister, Roberta, speaking from her recliner in Berkeley, is 84, and has her own style of dementia-inflected communication. She rarely initiates a conversation, but she can be very direct and knows how to get my attention when she wants to.
"I had to break up with my piano teacher today."
This would be August 2019. "I didn't want to, but I had to do it, so I wrote her a letter about how I felt like a fraud all these years and couldn't continue lessons." This letter was mailed from the post office on 83rd and Amsterdam in 1951.
The piano teacher, a Viennese emigré with the mannerisms of a grand dame on her way down, demanded scales and arpeggios in the years after the War when New York was a city filled with European refugees struggling to survive on a diet of strudel and hot tea in a glass. There were lace makers and bookbinders, milliners and piano teachers, the last kept afloat by families whose class status depended, in part, on subjecting their children to private music lessons. Miss Schafraneck came to the house dressed entirely in black, the hem of her ankle-length dress kissing the top of her lace-up shoes. She wore an enormous hat decorated with silk flowers and long gloves that she drew down from her elbows and off her fingers as she sat down next to Roberta at the paltry instrument, a down-at-the heels, out-of-tune spinet. She was the kind of person who might have bumped into Freud unexpectedly at the bakery on the Ringstrasse earlier in the century. Miss S. was an independent contractor working in the orbit of a Russian conservatory teacher, one Mme. van Gerova, a woman I never met but who was reputedly so ferocious that my sister never failed to throw up on the morning of the recital.
Every week, Miss S. would open the yellow book of Czerny exercises, set the metronome and turn her powdered face toward Roberta in expectation, Tick Tock. And every week, my sister, a natural musician with an uncanny gift who never practiced, would stumble over the notes. Roberta had what we called in those days "an ear." If you asked her to play "Melancholy Baby," she would play "Melancholy Baby" and if you wanted to sing along but couldn't manage the key, she would transpose it up or down as required. If you asked her to play "Rhapsody in Blue," she would play "Rhapsody in Blue" and if you asked her to play something she didn't know, she'd make a game of it. Ask you to sing a few bars and take it from there. It was like a magic act. Something out of vaudeville or the side show at the circus where people got paid to swallow swords.
The lessons continued under protest through the forties until 1951, at which point Roberta, aged 16, refused to comply.
"She doesn't appreciate my gift. Tick Tock. She just wants me to move my fingers up and down the keyboard a certain way, her way. She wants me to be someone else. The music isn't in my fingers. I wanted to tell her that at my lesson, but I couldn't do it. I was too scared and of course mother and daddy were no help. They think I'm Paderewski. They want to dress me up and show me off, see me on the stage at Carnegie Hall. So I sent her a letter just yesterday, Miss Schafraneck. I don't know how she feels about it. What do you think? Do you think she's mad at me? Do you think I hurt her feelings"?
What I think is, give 'em hell, Harry. What I think is the Andrews Sisters are harmonizing on the jukebox at the soda shoppe. Girls are wearing bobby socks and saddle shoes. TV is just starting to give radio a run for its money. The backdrop is mid-century, but the fear and outrage and defiance are doing their chemistry on Roberta in the eternal now. She is staring me down, struggling to free herself from someone else's idea of what music is and I'm the six year old witness to her suffering. Who's to say it isn't 1951? Tick Tock.
"And another thing. I wanted to ask you something else."
"Okay. Shoot."
"When you were a little girl, did you like me"?
Please join me on Friday, October 25th at 5:30 at The Bookstore in Lenox for a reading from Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement. The Bookstore is a great venue for writers and their friends. Hope to see you there.
