“No — !” I’d insist, grabbing for the violin, while Dad turned, with the instrument under his chin, out of my reach, as if protecting it with his body from my eager hands. “It doesn’t drop down again, there. It stays up, on the same note — the fourth. Then it drops down, only half a step!”
“Well, isn’t that what I’m doing?” he protested, turning back.
“No, you’re not — !”
Whatever it was, my father honestly couldn’t hear it. And, as an ear musician, what he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t play — even if you wrote it out.
It led to loud and insistent declamations from him — and tears from me, till my mother looked in from the kitchen. “What are the two of you going on about so? It’s only a song!”
“Look!” Dad insisted, “I’m going to show you you’re wrong! I’m going to get the sheet music!”
“Okay,” I said. “You’ll see!” while I tried not to cry anymore.
The third time he told me he’d been to a music store and couldn’t find it, I began to think some kind of shuck was going on. The song was still popular enough on the radio that, now and again, it would lilt into the living room.
“… Don’t you hear that, Dad?”
“And I tell you, that’s what I’m doing!”
Then one afternoon he announced: “Okay, I found it. It isn’t called ‘The Autumn Leaves.’ The title’s ‘September Song.’ That’s why the man at the music store kept telling me he didn’t have it in. You’ll see now.”
We set the sheet music up on Boyd’s old music stand in front of the mantel.
I got out the violin. Dad put on his glasses, which he needed to read music, took the instrument from me, and began to play. I looked over his shoulder —
“No!” I shouted, when he reached the passage. “That’s not what it says! You didn’t play what the notes are — ”
“Yes, I did!”
“No, you didn’t! See — it does stay up on the fourth. Like I said. And there — only a half step down…”
“… to E.”
“To F. That’s an F!”
“Well, yes, but — ”
“Here, let me play it.”
I did.
And messed up the questionable phrase.
“See, that’s just what — ”
“But I made a mistake! I’ve been listening to you do it wrong so many times, I just did it the way — ”
“Now watch your tongue! Don’t you get insulting!”
“Let me do it again.”
I did.
“And that’s what the notes say, too!” I dropped the bow from the strings — to take the instrument from my chin. Perspiration left a shiny crescent inside the ebony chin rest.
“Well, then,” my father declared, which was pretty much his way in an argument, “the music’s just wrong! And so are you! Look, I’ve been trying to tell you all along: I know how the damned song goes! You’re just too pig-headed to listen!”
“But look, the music even says — !”
“Well, I don’t care what it says!”
“But…!” And, like a mountain climber who has suddenly had the foothold struck from beneath the toe carrying the weight, I tumbled from the heights of logic, reason, and evidence into the pit of steaming tears, which rose about me, to scald my eyes. Putting the violin down on the varnished table twice as dark as it was, I stalked from the dining room.
Angrily Dad called after me: “Come on back here! Don’t you walk out on me like that! You’ve got your practicing to do!” Then, in a moment of total frustration, he added: “You are one hard-headed nigger, is what you are!”
“Sam!” my mother called, outraged, from the kitchen: but it was both my father’s name and mine.
Dad shouted after me, in what — today — I suspect was an emotional plea rising wholly outside the realms of reason: “Can’t you ever admit you’re wrong about anything?”
What I heard, though, as I stood in the hall, quivering by the entrance to the walk-in closet (in which, at Christmas, I could never find the presents that must be hidden behind the winter coats or somewhere on the upper shelves with the eight-millimeter movie camera and the stenotype machine — from the unimaginable time before my birth when Mom had been a stenographer — and the piled-up hat boxes) was the absolute and obscene, to me, contradiction with all reason, so that when tears and words broke out together — “Why can’t you!”—I’m surprised that, back in the dining room, he even understood what I’d said.
He shouted: “Don’t you talk to me like that — !”
Maybe it was because we’d shouted it so many times before.
But that’s what Mrs. Wallace’s lessons rescued me from — rescued us both from, really.
At school, in the small sixth-floor room at the end of the hallway, with its green walls and its tan shade lowered over the wire window guards, Mrs. Wallace, sweater mottled with the sun outside, ambled about the little space, attending to my scales, tunes, and, finally, at our twin stands, my duets with her. With her own violin against her hip, her estimate of what my father had been able to do with me ranged from the professional musician’s disdain for all things amateur to real surprise at what he’d accomplished. On the one hand, I was already comfortable with the circle of fourths (for the flatted keys) and the circle of fifths (for the sharped ones) that she did not usually give to students until they were much more advanced than three months. On the other, that most important arch of the left hand, as it supports the violin neck, that allows the string player to turn strength into speed when moving among the higher finger positions, was something neither Dad nor I had ever paid much attention to.
“The violin,” Mrs. Wallace would explain, her face near mine, forcing back my hand beneath the slim neck’s shaft (she was almost without chin), “is not a dagger that you clutch. Nor are you trying to cut your throat with it. Here. Pretend there’s a hard rubber ball in your hand, between your palm and the instrument. Don’t ever let your hand close through that ball. Come on, now. You’re a violinist. You’re holding it like a country fiddler!”
And sometimes, when I would make a mistake, she’d say with the faintest smile: “Did your father teach you that, too?” which, as he was no longer there to badger me, I was now free to resent, however silently: without him, of course, I wouldn’t have been there at all.
My father was also a fairly good artist. When, as a four- and five-year-old, I would come to some adult and ask, “Draw me a bird…? Draw me a lady…?” Dad would take the paper, and the figures he’d sketch would have form, dimensionality, even personality. Once he showed me, for a cat I’d requested, the basic geometric forms I could build it from, that later might guide the modelling of more detailed features.
Dad never tried to teach me to draw. Had he, I’m sure we would have had the same conflict as we did over music. But, in 1951, we acquired our first television set — a huge console Zenith that also contained a record player and a radio. Once I’d finished watching Pat Michaels and the Magic Cottage, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Howdy Doody, Buzz Corey and the Space Patrol, Tom Corbett — Space Cadet, Captain Video, and Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, the Saturday morning show I always caught on the black and white screen was Draw with Me, a Basic Art Course led by “internationally known artist John Nagy.” The day I first tuned in, in the middle of the program, right up there on the screen were Dad’s basic forms — John Nagy might have even been, that show, drawing a cat.