Two-Part Inventions (6 page)

She couldn't wait to tell Joseph when he came home from work. He grunted, skeptical as he always was of Gerda's enthusiasms, of most enthusiasms except those regarding business ventures. She was undaunted. Just wait and see, she said. Wait till after supper. In her state of exaltation, Gerda had left the chicken in the oven too long. Joseph and the boys, Fred and Gary, who were nearly fourteen, pronounced it dry.

“What does it matter? It's only a chicken. Dry!” Gerda said scornfully, though she was usually sensitive to comments about her cooking. “Do you realize what this means? She has a natural gift.”

After supper, Gerda made Suzanne play for her father and brothers, who seated themselves patiently in the living room, indulgently, then listened in growing wonder. Tune after tune, with one finger: “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” In the midst of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” there came a whistle from the kitchen, ascending to a screech. Suzanne stopped; it was an adversarial music, ugly and unremitting.

“Gerda, the teapot,” Joseph said.

“Oh, I forgot all about it.” She'd been sitting entranced. She rushed into the kitchen and the noise stopped.

“Well, how about that,” Joseph Stellman said at last. “How
about that. Come here and let me look at you,” he commanded Suzanne, and she obeyed. He placed his hands on her shoulders and scrutinized her, as if he could locate on her face some physical source of the music. Then he hugged her roughly. “That was very good. That was really something special.”

He was a hulk of a man, hairy, solid, and muscular, with thick impassive features in a face that looked always in need of a shave, and hazel eyes that studied the world with wary discontent, as though from long experience he expected it to fall short of his requirements. The youngest child of a large immigrant family, he chided his sons constantly for their lack of ambition. Drive, he called it, reminding them that America was the land of opportunity. “Look at FDR. You're probably too young to remember, but he was a cripple. Did he let that stop him? No. And you have your legs and arms and brains, so use them.”

He had taken pride in the birth of twin sons, as if the doubleness implied his superior potency, and from the start nursed the desire that they be special. Special. It was a word he used often, for people in the news, feats of diplomacy or athletics, popular entertainers. Most people were run-of-the-mill. Ordinary. Ordinary himself—and he knew this—he had contempt for the ordinary in public life. His sons disappointed him, easygoing good-natured boys, average students who didn't appreciate their privileged lives—Joseph's early years had been anything but privileged, in a cramped apartment on the Lower East Side—boyishly predictable in their interests, showing no unusual skills except for punch ball in the street and card tricks, their current passion. “Pick a card, Pop,” one or the other would say, and he would do so stiffly, grudgingly.
They would proceed to execute quite extraordinary and baffling feats with the deck for which Joseph could muster no interest, while Gerda, looking on, was suitably amazed. He even found something sinister in such antics, as if they verged on the disreputable.

The boys presented a united front at all times, a separate unit within the family, spending hours together in their room doing God knows what—learning more card tricks, probably; certainly not studying—although if Suzanne wandered in they accepted her willingly, as they would a family pet. Or they would disappear for hours on end, playing ball in the schoolyard, they said if Joseph questioned them. He had given up on them as far as special was concerned. They were decent boys who stayed out of trouble, so he was leaving them to grow up as they would. Now it struck him that it was the girl, whose birth was unplanned and greeted, by him if not by Gerda, with mixed feelings (more responsibility, more expense), who might turn out to gratify his yearnings for something special.

And so he invested his hopes in her, small as she was. Special came to mean more than playing the piano. Special meant school as well. What good was having a gift if you didn't develop the brains to deploy it properly? Suzanne was bright enough, everyone found her charming—she had a natural ingenuous grace—but she didn't put herself forward. Piano lessons were all very well, but she must learn to be more aggressive, to stand up for herself, to compete. Life was a battleground. She had the weapons, but she must train her will to use them.

She did well in school. Her quarterly report cards gave him nothing to reproach her with. Until, in the fourth grade, she presented a report card to him as usual for his signature. Gerda
was cleaning up the remains of dinner, and the boys, by then sophomores at Brooklyn College, had gone upstairs ostensibly to study. Joseph was sitting in his shirtsleeves at the small desk in the dining room where he paid the bills. He gave the report card a cursory glance, a small folded four-sided document on stiff paper that attempted to look official. He was reaching for his fountain pen, when he noticed the B+ in geography.

“Why only a B+?” he asked, as if it were a joke, yet not entirely a joke.

“I was absent the day she gave the test. It was when I had the earache.”

“And so?”

“And so she said that was a fair grade, considering I missed the test.”

“It's not a fair grade. You don't have to accept that. Go back to your teacher,” Joseph said, frowning at the world's injustice, “and tell her your father said to give you a makeup test.”

“I don't want to. What does it matter? It's not even a final grade, just the middle of the term.”

“Do what I tell you,” he said firmly. “There's no reason you shouldn't have an A. You need to stand up for your rights. I'm sure you know your geography.” He handed the card back to her and turned away to uncap the pen and reach for the top bill on the pile, an envelope, Suzanne noticed as she was turning away, with a tiny picture of a telephone on it.

She avoided arguing with him. His will was as ungainly and immobile as his body. She could be strong, too, in another way: She was able to withdraw and pretend that what was happening was not really happening, just a show she was enacting. In this way, she could do unpleasant things—like many of
the actions demanded by school—and get through them with aplomb. The following day she approached Mrs. Gutterman and told her what her father had said about the makeup test. The teacher hesitated, then nodded.

Late in the afternoon, after she had named the mountain ranges of North America, Mrs. Gutterman, a reedy woman in her fifties with gray clothes and wispy blond hair in a precarious pompadour, asked Suzanne to stand up at her seat. As one of the tallest in the class, Suzanne was in the fourth row toward the back of the room.

“All right, Suzanne. We can make this quick. I'll just ask you a few questions.”

Not happening, Susanne thought. Just stand and give the answers. The real world is inside, where no one can touch. As the entire class turned to watch, Mrs. Gutterman asked her to name the longest rivers in North and South America, which Suzanne knew, and then the capital cities of several European countries, which she also knew, and then asked her what the prime meridian was, which Suzanne did not know. She remembered it had been explained more than once, but it had puzzled her the first time, and after that she had daydreamed. Now, in the kind of patient, teacherly voice that conceals impatience, Mrs. Gutterman said that the prime meridian was an arbitrary line passing through the town of Greenwich, in Great Britain, at which the earth's longitude is zero. Suzanne still didn't grasp what those words meant, but she did know that if she had memorized them and recited them back, her answer would have been counted as correct.

“So,” Mrs. Gutterman concluded, “you can tell your father that B+ was not unfair after all.” She paused, then continued
with a certain satisfaction. “Tell your father that a B+ is all you deserve.” Again she paused, as if reconsidering her words, and added more gently, “And that's not so bad, really. It's a good grade.”

That evening Suzanne told her father about the test. “I didn't know what the prime meridian was.”

“The prime meridian,” he muttered. “Christ, I could have told you that. All right, then, never mind.” He picked up his newspaper and slapped its folds into place.

Why didn't he explain it, then, if he knew what it was? He must think it didn't matter, Suzanne thought. He didn't care whether she knew what the prime meridian was. What mattered was whether she could display her knowledge in public.

For her father's sake she didn't repeat the teacher's words. Their asperity was not lost on her, yet she knew they would humiliate Joseph more than they had humiliated her. But if the words struck her only lightly when she was nine, they stayed with her forever, gaining in density, to insinuate themselves whenever her performance fell short of perfection. They were less a mortification, she feared, than a possibly accurate statement of fact: B+ is all you deserve.

But that came later on. Meanwhile, after the memorable day when Suzanne's gift had been discovered, Gerda was quick to spread the word about it, as in the Middle Ages someone might report to the townspeople a sighting of a saint's face on a crumbling wall or cast-off garment, and soon all the neighbors knew. In time Suzanne was taking piano lessons from Mrs. Gardenia, a canasta friend of Selma Gruber across the street, who extolled her mild way with young children. Mrs. Gardenia had short curly white hair fluffed around her head,
pink cheeks, and small round wire-rimmed glasses. Her breath smelled of the wintergreen lozenges she liked to suck. She lived and taught in an apartment on Kings Highway, where Gerda accompanied Suzanne every Wednesday afternoon on the bus after kindergarten let out. Suzanne enjoyed the lessons. She liked learning new melodies, and liked reaching up to put her mother's fare in the box on the bus, one dime.

After the bus they walked three blocks to Mrs. Gardenia's tan brick building, where older children played boxball and Hit the Penny out front, then took the elevator to the fourth floor, where Mrs. Gardenia stood waiting at her door, wearing a flowered print dress—Suzanne rarely saw the same dress twice—and black lace-up Oxford shoes, smiling and waving her left hand, adorned with several rings that flashed rainbows in the light.

First thing, Mrs. Gardenia would ask Gerda if she wanted a cup of tea, which she always declined. Then, while Suzanne had her half-hour lesson in the living room, Gerda would sit reading
Redbook
or
Good Housekeeping
at the dining-room table, which was covered with an embroidered cloth, flowers and birds. Mrs. Gardenia had stitched it herself, she told them at the first lesson; it kept her busy in the evenings, and she could do it while she watched her new TV.

The living room was small, crowded with tufted furniture with brass buttons running up the arms, and with knickknacks on shelves, miniature porcelain figurines of farm animals, fringed lampshades, and small scatter rugs on top of larger rugs. A dollhouse room, Suzanne thought, as she stepped carefully so as not to slip on the rugs.

Mrs. Gardenia pulled a chair next to the piano bench and
said, “So, let's hear what we've accomplished this week.” She assigned Suzanne scales and exercises from Hanon, which she hated, and every few weeks she would produce a new piece of music, presenting it as a reward. Mrs. Gardenia was lavish with her praise and kindly when she corrected errors in her flutelike voice, sometimes taking Suzanne's hand in hers and arranging the fingers on the keys. Suzanne's hands were still too small to stretch an entire octave.

After the lesson there was a glass of orange juice on a coaster placed on a small table near the piano, and two cookies on a flowered plate next to a white paper napkin folded in a triangle. The cookies changed from week to week; Suzanne liked the shortbread best. She ate her snack while Mrs. Gardenia and her mother chatted about recipes and shopping and mutual acquaintances, Selma Gruber's daughter, for one, who was going out with a law student who drove a flashy car and kept her out till all hours.

Suzanne grew attached to Mrs. Gardenia and her progress was swift. Her hands grew and her fingers gained strength. After the first year and a half there came simplified and abridged versions of Haydn or Mozart sonatas, an occasional waltz. She could hear the music in her head and feel it in her fingers. She even got in the habit of playing her simple pieces on the kitchen tabletop or on her desk at school. When she got into bed, almost unconsciously her fingers played against her palms, repeating phrases over and over. She practiced dutifully a half-hour a day, as Mrs. Gardenia instructed, but after she finished the formal practicing she would amuse herself by picking out popular tunes she heard on the radio Gerda kept in the kitchen, or made up tunes of her own. After another year she was beginning
on the Bach Inventions and the easier sections of the French and English Suites, as well as the chromatic fantasies of Kuhlau and a few short pieces by Couperin. But this relaxed idyll changed when she came under the influence of Richard Penzer, the man across the street whom all the mothers warned their girls to avoid.