And at her club meeting, for the assembled women in their hats and long-sleeved winter dresses sitting about our living room, my mother would urge me, with my boy soprano, to Rose Murphy’s “I wanna be loved by you, just you and nobody else but you… Poo-poo-pa-doop!” till held-in laughter broke out along the green couch and wooden bridge chairs, among the gloves and hat veils.
Was I the same age? From black, twelve-inch 78 rpms, slipped from the brown wrapping-paper envelopes in their colorful book-like album covers (unlike my father’s extensive jazz collection, from Rhapsody in Blue unto the real thing: their covers were blue or maroon, every one, with white or pink dots), I lay on the living room’s rose rug and memorized Peter and the Wolf and (on the rag rug before the fireplace up at our country place) Tubby the Tuba and (back in New York) a children’s opera, The Emperor’s New Clothes. But all this was driven from current obsession when, in the city one autumn, Mom took me to see a little theater production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. An obsessed month later I’d talked Dad into buying me the D’Oyly Carte album with Martin Greene as Major General Stanley (the first thirty-three-and-a-third rpm long-playing records we owned); and I’d sing along with the verbal intricacies of the very model of a modern major general’s patter.
Years before, from among many on the radio, I’d learned a song. It went:
A year or so after my trip to hear the Gilbert and Sullivan, an afternoon radio program called Spot the Hits became popular for a season. New songs aired on it, and a “panel of experts” discussed, with the composer, its chances of making the Hit Parade. While I was playing in the upstairs nursery one day, Spot the Hits was on the radio, and, from the three-piece orchestra and studio tenor, a pretty song wafted over the blocks and erector-set pieces spread around me:
When it was over, several of the experts (in those pre-rock ’n’ roll days) allowed as how it was lyrical, engaging, and likely for success.
“But,” objected one, as it struck him, “the melody is identical to ‘Younger than Springtime’!” He sang the opening lines from first one song, then the other.
It was.
The composer who’d written the tune spluttered that he’d been entirely unaware of the similarity. The program’s moderator spluttered; and there was a minute of that awkward confusion which occasionally plagued live radio and, later, live TV. I was convinced then, and still am, that the plagiarism was inadvertent. But despite my conviction, or perhaps because of it, the moment has remained indelible.
And that winter my cousin Betty and her boyfriend Wendell took me to an indoor ice skating rink somewhere in the city. After renting skates, with Wendell and Betty at either elbow, I made fair progress around the rink while the electric calliope played “Buckle Down, Winsockie,” to which Wendell sang the lyrics, till finally I could move about the ice on my own.
My father’s friends and family often spoke of Dad as someone who could get music from any instrument. Back then I had no idea what it meant to pull even a note from trumpet, clarinet, or transverse flute, each with its different mouthpiece — much less to get tunes from them, each with its different fingering.
But, however haltingly, Dad could play them all.
When I was eight, a few glimpses through the living-room arch at my aunt’s home in New Jersey, where my cousin stood before the fireplace with his instrument at his chin, under the wire-framed gaze of his young, balding, black-suited music teacher, grew in me, a year later, to a passion for the violin. (Boyd’s teacher was white; and, before my grandmother shooed me away to play upstairs and leave them alone, it was one of the few times in childhood when I was oddly aware that my family and I were not — possibly because Boyd wore, on his brown oval face, the same wire-rimmed glasses as that pale young man.) My mother nursed the passion on. And when it did not go away, I inherited Boyd’s old instrument: he had given it up for college and medical school. To ensure that the passion was not a whim, Dad purchased four beginner violin instruction books.
We also got Boyd’s music stand.
During breaks between funerals, my father would nip upstairs to give me a lesson. Sometimes he would set me up with stand and book in the evening before the dining room fireplace. By staying a lesson or two ahead, he proceeded to teach me violin — having decided he’d like to master a stringed instrument himself.
My father may have been a natural musician, but he was not a natural teacher. A wholly dogmatic man, he wanted things done his way — now. He had no sense that four-fifths of all meaningful instruction is the attentive silence teacher must proffer student, during which silence, among his or her own fumblings, the student actually learns — a silence in which teacherly attention must all be on which errors not to correct. Therefore the tension between us was high. It speaks well for us both that we were still at it three months on: I was still putting in an hour or two a day of practice on my own. In those months my father taught me to read the treble clef and got me more or less comfortable with up to two or three sharps, two or three flats. (Somehow, in the midst of it all, I also learned how to renotate all the music for B-flat cornet, that had been Dad’s first instrument.) But these lessons were not pleasant. Then the short-haired woman who wore green felt skirts and taught stringed instruments at my downtown elementary school rescued me.
In the sixth-floor music room Mrs. Wallace gave real violin lessons — a room in which, years before, with colored paper patterns and black and white magnetic dogs, along with questions and answers that a squat, graysuited, white-haired woman with an Irish name (Mrs. MacDougal?) had written down, smiling, on her clipboard, I’d been tested for reading and found lacking. My first hope at beginning the violin had been that I’d take lessons with Mrs. Wallace, like my schoolmate Jonathan, who was a bully, very handsome, called his judge mother and lawyer father by their first names, and never wore underwear — for which fact alone, I think, I tried to become his friend and got so far as to be invited for the weekend with him and his parents to their summer house on an island in Lake Placid, which you reached, across overcast evening waters, by motorboat.
But Dad had intervened.
After two months of Dad’s lessons, I’d brought my violin into school and reported for practice with the Middle School orchestra. For the simple pieces we played, I did well enough. But after another month Mr. Ax detected something in my playing… idiosyncratic? Or perhaps I just told him how I was learning. He spoke to Mrs. Wallace, who called my parents in. Both of them — quite unusual — came. I stood outside the open door and overheard Mrs. Wallace explain that there were certain things that could only be taught by an experienced teacher — that, indeed, to follow a book without real instruction could, for an instrument like the violin, do more harm than good.
Since I’d stuck to it as long as I had, it was possible I had real talent.
So real lessons began — just in time, too: my father and I had had a falling out over the interpretation of a single phrase in a song which, between the two of us, we’d been working on by ear. “The Autumn Leaves…” It came over the radio enough times so that we both knew it pretty well. But —