Streets of Gold (23 page)

My Aunt Bianca’s corset shop on a Saturday afternoon in September, shortly before my eighth birthday. I am curled up in a floppy armchair draped with brassieres. My aunt is working at one of her dress dummies, fashioning a corset for a lady of gigantic proportions. There are pins sticking in her mouth, and when she answers my questions, she mumbles around the pins. A soft, slow, gentle autumn rain nuzzles the plate-glass window of the shop. Somewhere far in the distance, there is the lingering intermittent rumble of thunder.

“Are brassieres sexy?” I ask.

“What?” she says.

“Tony says they are.”

“Well...”

“Are they?”

“Not to me,” Aunt Bianca says.

“What does that
mean
, anyway?”

“What does what mean?”

“Sexy.”

“Go ask Tony.”

“Do you think he knows?”

“Maybe,” Aunt Bianca says. “He’s advanced for his age.”

“Yeah.” Silence. Distant thunder. “Aunt Bianca?”

“Mmmm?”

“Why do ladies wear them, anyway?”

“You ask too many questions,” she says.

My grandfather first took me to meet Federico Passaro on a bitterly cold day in January of 1935. Showing the proper deference to an educated man (and especially a man educated in
music!
), he alternately addressed Passaro as either
Dottore
or
Professore
, telling him how long I’d been studying, and how beautifully I could play, and then explaining that I had perfect pitch, which phenomenon he demonstrated by striking three random notes simultaneously on the keyboard, and asking me to identify them — which of course I did. Passaro seemed singularly unimpressed by my feat. At least, he made no comment about it. I later learned that he, too, had perfect pitch, so what was the big deal? All he wanted was to hear me play, but I was shivering (literally and figuratively) at the electric heater in the corner of the room, and beginning to think my hands would never get warm.

I liked his voice. His English was tinged with a faint accent, and when he spoke to my grandfather in the Neapolitan dialect, even this sounded less harsh than it did in the streets of Harlem. He was described to me later by my grandfather as a short, squat man in his early sixties, with a wild thatch of black hair, a hooked nose (“like a Jew’s, Ignazio”) and lips perpetually pursed as though in displeasure. When I finally sat down to play a piece I knew cold — C. P. E. Bact’s “Solfegietto” - he stood by my side at the piano and listened attentively, his even breathing interrupted only once, when I fluffed a passage I’d played without error perhaps a hundred times before.

I wish I could say that something startling happened the first time I played for Passaro. I couldn’t see his reactions, of course, but I can guarantee there was no dramatic B-movie-type revelation, with Passaro shouting “
Madonna mia!”
in discovery of a remarkable child prodigy in his living room. I simply played the piece through, cursing myself for the fluff (but blaming it on my cold chops), and when I’d struck the final chords, I sat at the piano in silence, my hands in my lap, and waited.

“Well,” my grandfather said in Italian, “what do you think?”

“Who has been teaching you?” Passaro asked.

“Miss Goodbody. At school.”

“And you’ve been playing for how long?”

“I started when I was six.”

“How old are you now?”

“I was eight in October.”

“So that’s more than two years.”

“Yes.”

“Has your teacher given you any Chopin?”

“Just the A-Major Prelude.”

“Bach, of course.”

“Yes.”

“Mendelssohn?”

“The ‘Six Pieces for Children.’ ”

“No Brahms, eh?”

“No.”

“How does she teach you? Does she play the piece for you, or what? I’ve never taught a blind person.”

“The pieces are in Braille,” I said. “She usually plays them through first, and then I read the notes. In Braille.”

“Ah,” Passaro said.

“So what do you think?” my grandfather asked in Italian.

“I’ve never taught a blind person,” Passaro answered in Italian.

“How long do you practice every day?” he asked me.

“Two hours.”

“If I teach you, I want you to practice not only during the hours you’ve set aside for practice, but also when you simply
feel
like playing. That is important to me.”

“Okay,” I said.

“How will I know what compositions are available in Braille?” Passaro asked.

“I can get a list from Miss Goodbody,” I said.

“Why do you want to leave her?” Passaro asked.

I hesitated. Then, looking up from the keyboard for the first time, I turned in the direction of Passaro’s voice, and said, “I can play better than she can.”

“I see,” Passaro said. “Will you expect to play better than I can?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ve played at Carnegie Hall,” Passaro said. “I gave a recital at Carnegie Hall fourteen years ago.”

“Okay,” I said, and nodded.

“Okay? What does that mean, okay?”

“If you want me to play at... whatever you said, I’ll do it.”

“What do you want?”

“I just want to learn how to play better.”

“For what? To amuse your friends?”

“Just to be real good,” I said.

“Do you think you’re good now?”

“Yes.”

“You’re very sloppy,” Passaro said. “If a student of mine had been studying with me for two and a half years...”

“It’s not that long,” I said.

“Then what? Two years and two months? Even so. I would stop giving lessons to someone who was still so sloppy after all that time.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t think I’m so sloppy. Just because I made a dumb mistake...”

“I’m not talking about the mistake. I’ve heard
giants
make mistakes, though rarely. I am talking about your fingering. I am talking about
this
,” he said, and his right hand must have darted out because the next thing I heard was a descending arpeggio, “instead of
this
,” he said, and the identical arpeggio sprang clean and crisp and true from the instrument. “Do you hear a difference?”

“Yes.”

“Can you play what I just played?”

“Maybe.”

“Try it.”

“Was that an F sharp?” I asked. “The first note?”

“Was it?”

“Yes.” I found F sharp above high C, positioned my right hand over the keys, and played the arpeggio slowly and carefully, F sharp, C sharp, A, and then to F sharp again, repeating the notes until I reached the center of the keyboard. I took my hand off the keys.

“That was sloppy,” Passaro said.

“Well, it was the first time I played it.”

“I’ve never taught a blind person,” Passaro said.  “I don’t like students who whine or complain or who don’t do the work. If I have to worry about hurting your feelings because you’re blind, then I don’t want to teach you.”

“Well, how would you hurt my feelings?” I asked.

“Doesn’t it hurt your feelings to know you’re sloppy?”

“No.”

“It should,” Passaro said.

“Miss Goodbody doesn’t think I’m sloppy.”

“If you can play better than she can, how would she
know
if you’re sloppy?”

I burst out laughing.

“You think that’s funny?” Passaro said

“Yeah,” I said, still laughing.

“Don’t laugh when the
professore
is talking,” my grandfather said.

“When can you get me this Braille list?” Passaro asked.

“Will you teach him?”

“First I want to see the list. If there are enough compositions on it, compositions I
want
to teach...”

“There are millions of pieces in Braille,” I said.

“Including Chopin’s C-Minor Polonaise?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if I told you you’ll be playing it in three months’ time?”

“I don’t even know what it sounds like.”

“It sounds like
this
,” he said, and he reached across me with his left hand, and began playing simultaneously with his right hand, and what I heard was impossibly intricate.

His hands stopped abruptly. “Well?” he said.

“It took me three months to learn the ‘Solfegietto,’ ” I said.

“And you
still
play it badly,” he said. “What do you think of what I just played?”

“It sounded hard.”

“It
is
hard.”

“I don’t know if I could play it in three months.”

“You’re right. You probably won’t be playing it for three years.”

“Allora, dottore,”
my grandfather said. “
Sì o no?
Will you teach him or not?”

“Get me the list,” Passaro said.

It is my brother who takes me to my weekly piano lesson in the Bronx. My mother says we resemble each other. “Ike and Mike, they look alike,” she says, making reference to the Rube Goldberg cartoon creations, and not to what my name will become one day in the distant future. Tony has blond hair, like mine, but it is curly. His eyes are blue, too. His chin has a cleft in it. I have explored it with my hands; I know his face as well as I know my own. We board the Third Avenue El on 125th at eleven o’clock each Saturday morning. We sit side by side on the caned seats, and exchange dreams while we ride up to Tremont Avenue. I am going to play at Carnegie Hall one day. (I know what Carnegie Hall is now; Passaro has told me. He has also promised me I will play there.) My brother is going to be a famous ballplayer. Winter or summer, he wears a leather mitt on his left hand and repeatedly socks a baseball into the pocket as we ride uptown, the steady rhythm counterpointed by the clacking of the wheels along the track.

He reels off batting averages, and lifetime records, and describes a game my Uncle Dominick took him to see in Yankee Stadium. Lou Gehrig is his hero. He tells me he is going to marry Letitia. (They are both eleven years old.) He says he is going to become rich and famous and then he and Letitia will move to Mamaroneck, in a private house where he’ll live all the time except when he has to go on the road with the team. When he was in the third grade, his teacher invited him and three other kids to her house in Mamaroneck for a Saturday outing. Tony says the house was like in the movies. That’s the kind of house he wants to live in someday. He tells me I’ll come visit him. He says I’ll play a concert someplace, and come to his house afterward in a big black Cadillac limousine driven by a chauffeur, I’ll still be wearing my black tuxedo from the concert, and he and Letitia will be having a big party for me with champagne and everything in their private house in Mamaroneck. And when he plays at Yankee Stadium, he’ll get Uncle Dominick or Uncle Luke to take me to the game, and they’ll describe the action to me, and when he comes to the plate he’ll point his bat at the left-field bleachers and that’ll mean he’s going to put one away for me.

He says he will ask Letitia if she has a friend for me. He promises that when I’m a big concert player and rich and famous, I’ll have beautiful girls hanging all over me, rich girls in long satin dresses, wearing pearls at their throats, draped on the piano, and never mind that I’m blind, that won’t matter to them, Iggie. He doesn’t want no rich girls in satin, my brother Tony. All he wants is Letitia, who’s the most beautiful girl in the world. He tells me he wishes I could see her, she’s so
nice,
Iggie, I mean it, I love her so much. And then he describes her for me again, and I try to conjure Letitia, try to create an image that will match the voice I have heard so many times. We will both be rich and famous, my brother and I.

This is America.

It is entirely possible.

On my ninth birthday, he gives me a dog. The dog is a mutt he paid three dollars for in the pet shop on Third Avenue. With a little help from my grandfather, I name the dog Vesuvio. Vesuvio is a good dog with but a single failing: he refuses to be housebroken. My mother is a compulsive housekeeper, then
and
now, and does not need a half collie-half spitz (imagine
that
mating scene!) messing up her nice linoleums. In a desperate attempt to keep Vesuvio out of the dining room and bedrooms, thereby encouraging him to go on the paper we have put under the kitchen sink, she removes two leaves from the dining room table and stretches them across the doorway to the kitchen at night, one on top of the other, constructing a barrier she hopes will keep him out of the rest of the apartment. But one night, getting out of bed and walking toward the kitchen for a glass of water, she forgets about those two dining room leaves and bangs her shins against them and, according to her, almost breaks both her legs. That does it. I come home from school one day to discover that Vesuvio has been taken away by the ASPCA. Naturally, I decide to leave home. The first person I complain and confide to is my grandfather.

“She gave Vesuvio away.”

“Who?”

“Mama.”

“He was making in the house.”

“Sit down, stop crying. Now stop. You’re a man, no? Men don’t cry all the time. Who took him?”

“The ASPCA.”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s a place that takes dogs. Grandpa, I’ll bet they’re gonna kill him.”

“No, no.”

“Yes, Grandpa. They’ll put him in a room with gas.”

“Why would they do that? No. They’ll find a home for him in the country, where he can run free. That’s what a big dog like Vesuvio needs, a lot of room. Don’t worry, they’ll take good care of him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Ignazio, I’m sure.”

“Grandpa, let’s go to Fiormonte.”

“Right this minute?”

“Yes. I never want to see her again, Grandpa, I mean it. I
hate
her.”