Cambridge (7 page)

This must have been in the fall, because as the weather got colder, the one interesting thing—which, when A.A. talked of it, sounded impossible to me—appeared at school. The one interesting thing was diagramming sentences. I was crazy for it.

I liked the way the dependent clauses and the phrases hooked off the main line, how almost every part of speech could have a little bracketed appendage to modify it, and how the skeleton of the sentence stood out bold and obvious while the extra parts thrummed along beneath it. The diagrammed sentence looked a bit like a long-division problem, and I liked that too, as if it conferred on words the seriousness and truth that had been reserved for numbers. I liked the nouns and their subcategories: the common noun, the proper noun, the collective noun, the abstract noun. Most of all I liked that what I took for granted—talking, reading, writing—could be rationalized and made scientific, and thereby be made real.

And so I was seduced into accepting the school’s values.

All that I had done perfectly and loved without thinking I now loved for corrupt reasons. Language, which had been my secret music, became a branch of knowledge—one at which I excelled. Now I could tell myself I wasn’t a dunce. Even the teachers could see I was good at it.

I didn’t have to learn the rules of grammar because I already knew them; the rules were just articulations of patterns and structures I’d already felt and enjoyed. In a way it was a relief to find out that other people, the ones who had codified these rules, had also detected these patterns. It made me feel less strange. The teacher kept saying, “You already know how to do this,” to the class. “You speak correctly without thinking about it,” she’d say. But it wasn’t true. Many of them didn’t speak correctly, and even those who did, didn’t hear what they were saying. They didn’t hear the way the language was made and how it fitted together.

So I became the good girl. I understood everything right away and could spout it back with no mistakes. I looked forward to English class as if it were a movie or a trip to the beach. A warm, jittery, zingy feeling would come over me, sitting in my hateful
chair near the door and waiting for the teacher to begin. My hand was always up in class.

“I know! I know!” I’d say.

At first the teacher was delighted that at last I knew something. Soon, though, my enthusiasm began to irritate.

“Let’s give someone else a chance,” she’d say.

Sometimes she’d say, “I’m sure
you
know. Let’s see what everybody else knows.”

Even this felt like a compliment. It went without saying that I, the Queen of Language, would know whatever it was. But after a while, she wasn’t calling on me anymore. And my abilities didn’t impress my classmates. By spring, I was back to my old position: No Good.

When I think about it now, I wonder if I had excelled at numbers, some special arrangement would have been specially arranged for me—tutorials, advanced classes, something to congratulate me on my intelligence and to certify that I was ahead of the game. A talent to be nurtured, in the charmless parlance of pedagogy.

But my talent for words was discrete. It didn’t extend to my other capacities in any way. Still using my fingers for adding and subtracting at the end of the year, still not listening to the Revolutionary drivel, I had crept back underground. Just as well. I was immune to the seductions of achievement—or so I thought. I could tell myself that. I could claim outsider status, still, unsullied by my brief touch of success with dangling participles and complex sentences. I could keep growing and thinking and reading in secret, in my dark, sorry-for-myself basement of failure and neglect, like a little rat.

In Which, Vishwa

It was April before Frederika came over from Sweden. The trees had put out small leaves the color of lettuce, and the baby was walking around without help. My mother went into a whirl of repainting and refurnishing for Frederika’s room, which was next to mine on the top floor. It had been a staging area for cast-off clothes and boxes of books destined for the sale basement of the Harvard Book Store, rather Bigelow-like in its disorganization. Transforming it took her only a week. She loaded the car with boxes and piles, drove off, and returned with new boxes and piles. Black deck paint for the chipped, eroded pine floor, lengths of white curtain fabric with geometric cutouts, a butterfly chair with a black leather seat, a long red-and-white-and-black-striped cotton rug from India, a tiny octagonal bedside table from Morocco made of mahogany and mother-of-pearl. Some bookshelves—she’d need those, wouldn’t she? It would be nice to paint them red. No. Better black, and all along the low wall under the eaves. There. Done.

“Is it too much black?” she asked.

Frederika stood in the doorway with a suitcase (bulging, I was happy to see; she intended to stay a long time) at each ankle and started to sniffle.

“Nobody has ever done a thing like this for me,” she said.

I’d forgotten Frederika’s funny Swedish way of talking. “Nobody hass effer,” she said. Ingrid had lost her Swedish accent by now; her voice tipped up at the end of words and sentences, but that was all. Frederika still sounded like a singing crow, especially talking through tears.

My mother had been waiting for a compliment on her decor, not her kindness. I could tell she felt let down.

My mother was complicated, and she came from a complicated family. Her mother, Leah, was the eldest daughter of an
anarchist agitator who spent a lot of time in jail, though he was at liberty enough to father an additional seven daughters. Then Leah’s mother, my great-grandmother, died young and left Leah in charge. This probably explains why my mother was an only child. There were many aunts for Leah to keep track of, some still children when my mother was born. My grandfather’s side was also a muddle—like the brother nobody would talk to because he was a communist and they were socialists; you had to go to the other side of the street if you saw him coming. (This political dynamic turned up again later in my mother’s life, since my father had been raised as a communist.) And somewhere along a cousinly branch of my maternal grandfather’s family was our notable artist: Richard Neutra, the modernist architect. He’d left Vienna in the twenties and passed through Philadelphia on his way to Taliesin (that didn’t work out) and then to Schindler in Los Angeles, leaving a deep impression of arrogance and a single snapshot in my grandmother’s desk drawer in which his eyebrows rivaled those of Edward Teller. Maybe there was something about Hungarians (even if they were only Austro-Hungarians) that made for eyebrow growth. My mother inherited them, along with the talent for design. My grandmother Leah sniffed when his name came up in conversation. “Richard,” she’d say. “Huh.” Nobody heard a peep out of him between 1924 and the early sixties, when my father was in the news for being on the diplomatic team that negotiated the first test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. Famous! Richard called. Could he stop by for lunch when he was next in Washington?

My mother had several thwarted or perhaps renounced ambitions. Maybe they were not ambitions, only talents. To say
only
, to call them
talents
, is entirely to misrepresent her and her abilities.

Renounced, in the case of the piano. She wouldn’t have studied for fifteen years and applied to conservatory if she’d had no ambition. When she was accepted, her mother the pragmatic anarchist had said, “Where’s that going to get you? You think you’re Horowitz?” My father had already proposed marriage, and my grandmother thought that was the way to go. “What else are you going to do with your life?” Leah said. Cruel, but a clear-eyed assessment of women’s prospects in America between the wars.

Yet my grandmother had paid for all those lessons, twice a week when it became clear how very good my mother was. She’d leased an upright, she’d leased a better upright, she’d bought one, in the end, on their strained budget. When we made our semiannual pilgrimages to Philadelphia (Christmas vacation, summer vacation), my mother would walk into her childhood home and go straight to the piano, open the keyboard, and bang out some Scarlatti. Black, tinny, usually out of tune, it was a far cry from the baby grand crackle-finish chestnut-colored Baldwin that had its own room in our house.

My mother had a story that I liked as much as I liked Ingrid’s Trans-Siberian story. It was the story of Herschel.

Herschel was a high school classmate and suitor of my mother’s. She had many. My father was the main and perpetual suitor; he’d been on the job since second grade. Now and then he was supplanted. He’d wait, it would blow over, and he’d be back at the head of the line. They were all about sixteen. Herschel had been having a fair amount of success with my mother, enough to worry Herschel’s violin teacher and probably my father as well. The violin teacher was always scolding Herschel: You’re going to ruin your bow arm if you keep necking with that girl! Herschel had the brilliant idea to take my mother to his lesson so she
could play something on the teacher’s Steinway. She played a Bach partita with a Chopin chaser. The violin teacher rescinded his objections.

“And what about Daddy?” I asked.

“Well, in the end …” My mother would never finish that sentence.

They’d married a month after graduating from Penn. A photo of my mother in her mortarboard stood next to a photo of my newlywed mother and father on the upright in Philadelphia. They moved to New York and then the war started, and then and then. A photo of my father in uniform with a cocked triangular cap completed the piano-top album.

My mother’s talent for the decoration of houses didn’t need practice. It was innate. When something needed to change at home, or when she got in the mood for a change, she changed things and it was always right. She had aesthetic perfect pitch. It was a very specific aesthetic. Richard Neutra had become famous as the architect who domesticated the International Style, putting Bauhaus ideas into private houses rather than public buildings. He learned that from my mother.

The piano was a different story. It demanded a great deal of attention—more than I did, or perhaps its demands were louder. Every day by one o’clock, after the shopping and the minimal housecleaning, after feeding me some sort of lunch if I was home sick or on vacation, my mother sat down at the piano. She put her coffee cup and her ashtray next to the music on the ridged shelf above the keyboard, lit a cigarette she was going to forget to smoke, and got to work. Two hours, three hours, four hours: Often she was still at it when my father came home in the evening. In the delicious interludes of illness when I had a not-too-terrible stomachache or a scratchy throat but no fever and had cajoled her into letting me skip school, I spent my dreamy
day off reading to the accompaniment of the Beethoven sonata she was working on or the syncopations of Debussy’s “Golliwog’s Cakewalk.” Brahms, Ravel, the
Mikrokosmos
of Bartók, the Schubert Impromptus, miles of Mozart, the wrenching Partita in E Minor, one of her favorites, which she played with a frightening attack: I had a lifetime subscription to Carnegie Hall. So much for my grandmother’s dismissal of my mother as no Horowitz fifteen years earlier.

But it was practice, not a seamless, straight-through performance. Circle back, start again from measure ten, take it from the repeat, too fast, too slow, with more feeling, less
legato
, missed that phrase, missed that transition, take it from the beginning.

And that was maddening if I was truly sick, which now and then I was. My fever rose with each repetition, and the hammer blows of the piano nailed my head at each stroke, until I was in a noisy nightmare of a phrase repeated over and over. The fever was the same as—maybe the result of—my mother’s dissatisfaction with her playing. Edgy and hot, tangled in my dank sheets, I’d get stuck in the moment, convinced the rest of my life would be a repetition of now, right now, this phrase banged out again and again in my hot head and trembly pulse. In my fever-state I’d believe that if only she would play the thing all the way through, I would get better.

I never felt this way about the practice aspect when I was just malingering with my “tummy ache.”

Some evenings she gave a concert for my father. He would lean into the sofa and conduct the back cushions with one arm, singing along in his atonal way. It was remarkable that a man of such musical ineptitude could be married to a woman of such ability. He couldn’t keep time, he couldn’t carry a tune, he didn’t seem even to realize when a phrase had ended, but none of this diminished his pleasure in her playing. He knew her repertoire
as well as she did.
Dum
dum, dah dum, dum, dum,
dum
dum, dada dum dum, he’d squawk as she launched into the
Italian Concerto
, and he’d croak and sigh in a sort of unison with the long, sad, sweeping measures of Opus 109, the Beethoven sonata to which my mother devoted more than three years of constant study. She wanted to get it right. She did. I have never heard a performance better than those she gave for the neighborhood cats and sparrows every afternoon while first one then another cigarette burned down to a ghostly black tube in the ashtray beside the music she didn’t need to read anymore.

A bit of this talent passed on to me. I could sing a melody after hearing it once. I could also pick it out, with my middle and index fingers, on the piano. Therefore I was sent to solfège on Saturday mornings down the street at the Longy School of Music. As usual, I hated it. And I wasn’t good at it either. Roger was there too, and as usual, he excelled. He could sight-sing with all the correct syllables, do re do fa, whatever it was. But since he didn’t have much feeling for music, he didn’t sing the tune right. He didn’t care; he was having fun. My objection to solfège was predictable: Why did I have to say these foolish syllables? These syllables weren’t really part of music. Nobody used these stupid syllables to play music with. My mother was willing to grant that the note names were just a convenience (inconvenience, I muttered), but, like my father insisting on the utility of arithmetic, she insisted that sight-reading was fundamental and that if I couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to do it, I couldn’t learn music.