Home from the Vinyl Cafe (10 page)

Sister Emilienne would sit on the piano bench as they played, and as she listened, her head would tilt to the right. She would smile and nod and tilt over, just like the nuns in
The Sound of Music
.

Annie adored her. One spring she went on a school trip to Quebec City and brought Sister Emilienne a little plastic snowglobe from Ste. Anne de Beaupré. It was the size of a baseball, with a miniature model of the shrine inside.

“Oh, look,” said Sister Emilienne when she opened her present. “When I shake it, look how the angels fly around the shrine.” She put it on a shelf in her studio.

Every lesson Annie would head off determined to find out if Sister Emilienne had any hair under her wimple, or if, as Dave had earnestly told her, she was as bald as a bowling ball. Annie was forever touching Sister Emilienne’s long graceful robes. There seemed to be so many mysterious layers. Sometimes Annie would reach out and touch one of the crosses that hung around the nun’s neck.

Sometimes when she came home from her lessons, Annie would dress up in her mother’s skirts and put on some of her old jewelry. Margaret would sit patiently at the piano, and Annie would give her mother a piano lesson. “Put your thumb on the C,” she would say, and Margaret would put her thumb on the D beside middle C and say, “This one?”

Piano seemed to come naturally to Annie. She was playing Bach in the first year. And maybe Sister Emilienne was right.
Maybe she could play better than any six-year-old in the country.

Indeed, the summer after she began her lessons, Annie was chosen to play for Queen Elizabeth when she came to Halifax.

The recital was on the lawn of the citadel. They set up a stage and a yellow and white awning for shade. Annie was sitting two rows behind the queen, and she saw her yawn while the choir was singing “Farewell to Nova Scotia.” To this day Annie can remember watching the queen yawn and deciding that playing Bach was not a good idea. Thinking that the queen had probably already heard Bach, Annie decided it would be better if she made something up. When they called her name, she walked onto the stage in her new smocked dress, her white socks, and her black shoes. She sat at the piano, and when she began to play, she was making the notes up out of her head. If someone hadn’t come and dragged her off the stage, she would have sat there forever, entertaining the queen, completely confident that her improvisation was far superior to Bach.

One day when Annie was seven, Charlie invited a fiddler to the house to play with him, and when Annie saw his violin, she fell in love with it. She had never been so close to a violin before. She loved the way it looked, and the smell of the rosin and the rich colors of the wood, and she adored the sound. When they finished playing, she asked her father if she could touch the violin.

The day Annie began her violin lessons was the most exciting day of her life. She came home from her first class and ripped open her violin case. She made the whole family listen
to what she could do. She could play all four open strings: E, A, D, and G. She had her mother call out the notes, and she would play them. She couldn’t believe how easy it was.

The next week her teacher taught her to put down her first finger, and she could play A and B on one string. That was a very big deal.

She wanted to learn how to read notes.

“Just show me where they are,” she said. Pretty soon she was able to play small pieces with the teacher playing along. She was a violinist. It was brilliant.

It made Charlie extraordinarily happy to watch his daughter. But Annie didn’t notice. Because the music made her happier.

Eventually, she got to a whole different level, and playing the violin became work. She did what lots of kids do: She pretended to practice. She would shut the door to her room and set up a novel on her music stand. She would play random notes and read the book as she played—she raced through
Anne of Green Gables
this way—and when her mother called from the kitchen, “That doesn’t sound like practicing to me,” Annie would call back to say she was sight-reading.

But she kept at it. And if you keep at anything long enough, the work adds up. She went to McGill University and studied music. When she graduated, she got a job with the Montreal String Quartet. It was a wonderful honor for a young musician—playing with three great musicians, all of them at least a decade older—but she felt incomplete. She wasn’t having fun. Everyone was so intense. And earnest. Annie had thought that when she got out of school, playing music would be fun again.

One day a friend who knew the famous Israeli violinist
Avi Stovman said, “He takes students, you know. If you want to write to him, you can mention my name.” So Annie wrote. And to her great shock, Avi Stovman called her back. She came home from a rehearsal one afternoon, and her roommate said, “You are not going to believe who called today.”

When Annie called him back, he said, “Send me a tape.” So she made a tape and sent it to him. But he didn’t respond. She waited for a month and never heard a word. She thought, The tape was horrible. She decided he was laughing so hard, he couldn’t make it to the telephone. Her friends said, “Phone him back.” And one night after a big spaghetti dinner, when they had drunk two bottles of Mateus, her boyfriend, Owen, dragged her to the telephone and dialed Avi Stovman’s number. He handed her the phone and held her to the wall to make her talk to the great violinist.

When Stovman answered, he said, “I’ve been going to the post office every day. Where is your tape?”

It had been lost in the mail.

He said, “There is nothing I can do. I only take seven students. My class is already full.”

Annie decided he had listened to the tape and it was dreadful and he was just being polite. But her friends didn’t let her quit. They said, “Go to New York and phone him when you get there. Play for him.”

In April, Owen forced her into a car, and they set off for New York City. They drove until after midnight, following Highway 9 along the valley of the Hudson River. The next morning when they stopped for breakfast in Hastings-on-Hudson, Pete Seeger walked by them on their way to the cafe. Owen said, “It’s an omen.” They were in Manhattan just after noon. The idea was Annie would make a casual phone call and then go and play for Avi Stovman.

She called him from outside a bookstore on the corner of Fifty-second and Seventh.

He said, “Where are you? You sound like you’re around the corner.”

Annie said, “I am around the corner.” She was standing on one foot and then the other, not looking at Owen, who was watching from inside the bookstore.

Stovman said, “Come on over. I’m leaving tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. But you can come tonight and play for me.”

“That’s okay,” Annie replied. “I don’t think it’s a very good time.” Then she said goodbye and hung up. Her music career was over. She didn’t have what it took. She broke up with Owen on the way home at a gas station in Pough-keepsie.

Three months later, Annie told the whole story to the viola player in the Montreal String Quartet. It turned out that this woman knew Stovman’s assistant. They had studied together.

“You’re crazy,” the woman said. “I’m going to phone Ruth. You are going to play for Stovman when he comes to Montreal.”

Stovman remembered the girl who hadn’t sent the tape and hadn’t come to play. He was interested enough to see if she would show up on her third chance. He said, “All right. When I’m in Montreal, if she wants, she can come and she can play and I will listen.”

Annie went to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and knocked on his door nervously. He was playing with the Montreal Symphony that night. It was four in the afternoon, and he was sitting in his room watching
M*A*S*H
on television.

Annie warmed up in the bathroom. She thought she
sounded okay. But when she came out to play for him, a strange thing happened. She put her bow on the strings, and she couldn’t hear anything.

She stopped, and Stovman looked at her and said, “What’s wrong? Keep playing.” So she started again, but she still couldn’t hear the music. When she finished, she didn’t have a clue what she had done. It could have been the same random notes she played for the queen.

Stovman said, “Is that a favorite piece?”

Annie just stared at him, horrified at what had happened. In the middle of this long silence, Annie realized Stovman was looking for a nice way to get rid of her. She said, “Maybe it’s not a good idea that I come to New York.” She was trying to help him out.

“What?” he snapped. “Do you think you won’t learn anything? You think you have nothing to learn? Of course you have to come to New York. I’m just trying to think how we’re going to get you started.”

And that was that.