Violin (37 page)

Katrinka sent her daughters, Jackie and Julie, boxes of exquisite things. Katrinka seemed freed from a great and tragic burden. Little or nothing was said of the past.

Glenn sought out old books and recordings of European jazz stars. Rosalind laughed and laughed. Martin and Glenn went off together to the old famous cafés, as if they could really find Jean-Paul Sartre if they looked hard enough. Martin was always on the phone, closing an Act of Sale on a house back home, until I begged him to take over the management of the endless trek for all of us.

Grady was relieved; we needed him as much as ever.

Laughter. Had Leopold and little Wolfgang ever had so much fun? And let us not forget there was a girl child there, a sister who was said to play as exquisitely as her prodigiously talented brother. A sister who had married and given birth to children rather than symphonies and operas.

Nobody could have ever been happier than we were on the road.

Laughter was our natural tongue once more.

They almost threw us out of the Louvre for laughing. It was not that we didn’t love the Mona Lisa. We did, only we were so very excited and so bursting with life. We could have kissed strangers, obnoxiously, but we had better sense, and we hugged and kissed one another.

Glenn walked ahead of us, smiling sheepishly and then laughing too because it was too much happiness to disregard.

In London, my former husband, Lev, came with his wife, Chelsea, my sometime friend, and now seeming sister, and the black-haired boy twins, pristine and well behaved, and the tall, blond, beautiful eldest son, Christopher. It made me cry to see this boy, whose laugh did make me think of Lily.

Lev sat in the front row of the concert hall when I played. I played for Lev, for the happy times, and later he
said it was like that drunken picnic of years before—only riskier, more ambitious, more fully realized. I was dazed with old love. Or love that is everlasting. He brought his keen academic words to the thing.

We vowed to meet—all of us—again in Boston.

These children, these living boys, they seemed somehow my descendants, descendants of Lev’s early loss and struggle and rebirth, and I had been a part of that. Could I claim them as my nephews?

We had room after room at Manchester, Edinburgh, Belfast. The concerts were benefits again for the lost Jews of the War, the lost Gypsies, the struggling Catholics of Northern Ireland, for those who suffered the disease that had killed Karl, or the cancer of the blood that had killed Lily.

People offered us other violins. Would we play this fine Strad for a special event? Would we accept this Guarneri? Would we want to purchase this short Strad and fine Tourte bow?

I accepted the gifts.
I
bought the other violins.
I stared at them in feverish curiosity. How would they sound? How would they feel? Could I bring a single note forth out of the Guarneri? Out of any of them?

I stared at them, I packed them and carried them with us, but I didn’t even touch them.

In Frankfurt, I bought another Strad, a short Strad, exquisite, comparable to my own, but I didn’t dare pluck the strings. It was on the market, and had no one to love it; it cost so much, but what was that to us in our blissful and boundless prosperity?

Violins and bows traveled with the bags. I kept the long Strad in my arms—my Strad—first wrapped in velvet, finally in a special sack with its bow. I would not trust it to a case. I carried the sack everywhere.

I looked for ghosts.

I saw sunlight.

My godmother, Aunt Bridget, came to be with us in Dublin. She didn’t much care for the cold. Whether her name was Bridget or not she was soon headed straight home to Mississippi. We thought it so funny.

But she loved the music, and she’d clap and stomp her feet when I played, which made the others in the room—or hall, or auditorium, or theater or whatever it was—rather shocked. But we had this agreement—that I wanted her to do it.

Many cousins and other aunts came to join us in Ireland, and later in Berlin. I made the pilgrimage to Bonn. I shivered at Beethoven’s door.

I pressed my head to the cold stones and wept like Stefan had at the grave.

Many a time, I recalled the Maestro’s themes, the melodies of the Little Genius or the Mad Russian and plunged into them to open my own floodgates, but critics seldom if ever noticed, so poor was I at rendering anything by anyone else, so utterly beyond control and discipline.

But these were times of unbroken ecstasy. Any fool had to see this for what it was; only the most deranged would have dragged a sorrow or caution into it.

At moments such as these—when the light rain fell in Covent Garden—and I walked in circles beneath the moon, and the cars waited, their lights steaming in the mist as if they breathed as I breathed—all I could do was be happy. Question nothing. Know this for what it is. Know it. And maybe one day, I’ll have to remember it from some alien vantage point and it will seem as dreamy and colorful and celestial as those Chapel visits, or lying in Mother’s arms as she turned the pages of the poetry book, by lamplight
that fended off no menace, because none had come yet to dwell there.

We went to Milan. To Venice. To Florence. Count Sokolosky joined us in Belgrade.

I had a fancy in particular for the opera houses. I didn’t need for it to be paid. If they would guarantee the hall, I would come, I would pay myself, and each night it was different, and unpredictable, and each night it was a joy and the pain was safely banked within the joy, and each night it was recorded by technicians running about with speakers and earphones and stringing thin wires across the stage, and I looked out on the faces of those who applauded.

I looked and tried to see each face, not to fail each face, to meet the warmth of each face, when the song was done, not to ever slip back into pain and shyness and cringing as if my past was my shell and I a snail too weak for this ascent, too bound to the old track of ugliness, too full of self-loathing.

A seamstress in Florence made me pretty, loose skirts of velvet, and soft tunics of fine fabric that would leave my arms free in silk balloon sleeves when I played, not hampering the rigor, or ever breaking the spell, yet concealing the weight I hated so much, so that I seemed to myself in the brief films I was forced to see a blur of hair and color and a blur of sound. Glorious.

And when the moment came, and I stepped before the lights, when I looked into the engulfing dark, I knew my dreams were mine.

But there was darker music to come, surely. The Rosary has The Joyful, The Glorious and The Sorrowful Mysteries. Mother, sleep. Lie still. Be warm. Lily, close your eyes. Father, it’s over now, say the breathing and the
pupils of your eyes. Close them. Dear Lord, can they hear my music?

And I was searching for a very certain palace of marble, was I not, and did I not know from all these opera houses—Venice, Florence, Rome—that the palace of marble in my strange dreams must have been an opera house, did I not know or suspect now from the memory of the central stairs in the dreams, a structure and design I saw repeated in all these regal halls built with pomp and faith, the center stair rising to a landing and then dividing to right and left to climb to the mezzanine for the milling bejeweled crowd.

Where was that palace in the dreams, the palace so full of different patterns of marble that it rivaled the Basilica of St. Peter’s? What had the dream meant? Had it been just the leakage of his tormented soul, that he let me see the city of Rio, the scene of his last crime before he had come to me, and found some sharp thorn in my soul connected with that place? Or was it some concoction amended to his memories by my own fancy, along with the frothy, glorious sea that gave birth to countless dancing phantoms?

Nowhere did I see that kind of opera house, that mix of beauty.

In New York, we played at Lincoln Center, and at Carnegie Hall. Our concerts were now broken into programs of varying length. Which means, as time passed, I could go on—unbroken—for a greater time, and the flow of melody grew more complex, and the range greater, and the operation of the lengthy whole more fluid.

I couldn’t bear really to listen to my own recordings. Martin, Glenn, Rosalind and Katrinka handled those things. Rosalind, Katrinka and Grady made the contracts, the deals.

They were an unusual item: our tapes, or disks. They offered the music of an untutored woman who can’t read a note of music really, except do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do, who never plays the same song twice, who can’t most likely repeat the same song—and the critics were swift to point this out. How is one to value such accomplishments, the improvisation which in Mozart’s time could not be preserved unless recorded in pen and ink, but now could be kept forever, with the same reverence given to “serious music”!

“Not really Tchaikovsky, not really Shostakovich! Not really Beethoven! Not really Mozart.”

“If you like your music as thick and sweet as maple syrup, you may find Miss Becker’s improvisations to your taste, but some of us want more from life than pancakes.”

“She is genuine, she is probably technically manic-depressive, possibly even an epileptic—only her doctor knows for sure—she obviously doesn’t know how she does what she does, but the effect is, without a doubt, mesmerizing.”

The praise was thrilling—genius, spellbinder, magician, naïf—and equally distant from the roots of the song in me, and what I knew and felt. But it came like kisses striking the face, and gave occasional thrills to our entourage, and many quotes were slapped on our packaged disks and tapes, which now sold millions.

We moved from hotel to hotel, by whim, by invitation, by chance sometimes, by sheer caprice.

Grady warned against our spendthrift ways. But he had to admit that the sales of the records had already exceeded Karl’s trust fund. And the fund was doubling. And the sales of the records might go on forever.

We couldn’t stint. We didn’t care. Katrinka felt safe!
Jackie and Julie went to the finest school back home, then dreamed about Switzerland.

We went down into Nashville.

I wanted to hear and play for the bluegrass fiddlers. I sought out the young bluegrass genius Alison Krauss, whose music I so loved. I wanted to lay roses at her door. Maybe she would recognize the name Triana Becker.

My sound, however, was not bluegrass anymore than it was Gaelic. It was the European sound, the Viennese and the Russian sound, the heroic sound, the Baroque sound—all that melded together—the soaring flights of the longhairs, as they had once been called before that tag line was co-opted by hippies who looked like Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, I was one of them.

I was a musician.

I was a virtuoso.

I played the violin. It belonged in my hands. I loved it. Loved it. Loved it.

I did not need to meet the brilliant Leila Josefowicz, Vanessa Mae, or my dearest Alison Krauss. Or the great Isaac Stern. I had no nerve for such things. I needed only to think, I can play.

I
can play. Maybe someday they will hear Triana Becker.

Laughter.

It rang in the hotel rooms where we gathered to drink the champagne, and we ate desserts full of chocolate and cream, and I lay on the floor at night, looking up into the chandelier the way I liked to do at home, and every morning and night …

 … Every morning or night, we called home to see if there had been any word of Faye, our lost sister, our beloved lost sister. We talked of her in interviews on the steps of theaters in Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco.

“…   our sister Faye, we haven’t seen her in two years.”

Grady’s office in New Orleans fielded phone calls from people who were not Faye, and had not seen her. They could not accurately describe her small beautifully proportioned body, her effervescent smile, her loving eyes, her tiny hands, so strong, and so cruelly marked with small thumbs by the alcohol that had poisoned the dark water in which she had fought to live, so tiny, so sickly.

Sometimes I played for Faye. I was with tiny Faye on the back flagstones at the house on St. Charles, with the cat in her arms, smiling, oblivious, an invincible elf, oblivious to the drunken woman inside, or the screaming fights, the sound of a woman vomiting behind a bathroom door. It was for Faye who lay on the patio, and loved to feel the rain dry up on the flagstones in the sun. Faye who knew secrets like that, while other people quarreled and accused.

There were times on the road that were hard for others. Because I couldn’t stop myself from playing the long Strad. I went nuts, said Glenn. Dr. Guidry came. In one place, my brother-in-law Martin suggested I be tested for drugs, and Katrinka screamed at him.

There were no drugs. There was no wine. There was music.

It was like a fiddler’s replay of
The Red Shoes.
I played and played and played until everyone else in the suite had fallen asleep.

Once I was even taken from the stage. A rescue operation, I think, because it had gone on and on, and people were clamoring for encores. I collapsed but soon came to my senses.

I discovered the masterly film
Immortal Beloved
in which the great actor Gary Oldman seemed to capture the Beethoven I had all my life worshiped and perhaps in my
madness even glimpsed. I looked into the eyes of the great actor Gary Oldman. He caught the transcendence. He caught the heroic of which I dreamed, and the isolation which I knew, and the perseverance which I made my daily office.

“We’ll find Faye!” Rosalind said. In hotel dining rooms we replayed together all the good things that had happened. “You’ve made so much noise that Faye is bound to hear it and she’ll come back! She’ll want to be with us now.…”

Katrinka broke into joke telling and rampant wit. Nothing could chill her now—not the taxes, not the mortgage, not old age, or death, or where the girls would go to college, or whether her husband was spending too much of our money—nothing troubled her.

Because everything in this bounty and success could be solved or resolved.

This was Success Moderne. A success that can only be known in our time, I would guess, when people round the world can record, watch and listen—all at the same time—to the improvisations of one violinist.