When I began taking piano lessons from Miss Goodbody, I told all the kids in class that I was better than they were. They were the little blind bastards; I was musical — Miss Goodbody had said so. Whenever I wore a new suit to school, even though I couldn’t see what the hell it looked like, I boasted about my grandfather the tailor, and told all the other kids he made clothes for very rich people, a lie no one ever believed. And even though I recognized this same cruelty in the other blind kids whenever it was directed at me, I turned insight into sight and told myself that only I was smart enough to see through the ploy (to see through it, mind you), and understand that a bragging little blind bastard was nonetheless blind, a part of the club, a freak, an outcast — a nothing.
The thing I liked most about the Blind School was those piano lessons with Miss Goodbody, who had discovered during our Bluebird-Blackbird sessions in the school auditorium that I could accurately reproduce by voice any note she struck on the keyboard. This must have astonished her. I was officially a Blackbird with a terrible singing voice, but I never sang off key, and she was beginning to find out I had perfect pitch. Today, I can identify as many as five notes being struck simultaneously on the keyboard, even if they’re cacophonous. That’s not an extraordinary feat; you’re either born with a good ear or you’re not. But Miss Goodbody took it as a sign from above that I was destined to study the piano. Since the lessons were free, they were encouraged by my mother — even though I hated them at first. In defiance and frustration, I would sometimes get up from the piano and, groping for the nearest wall, place my hands on it, palms flat, and repeatedly bang it with my head. The white keys were impossible. The black notes stood out from the keyboard, and I could feel them and distinguish them from the whites. But that endless row of seemingly identical keys stretching from Mongolia to the Cape of Good Hope? Impossible. There are blind pianists (not very good ones) who play only in F sharp, B, and D flat because there are five black keyboard notes in each of those tonalities. A showboat blind pianist like George Shearing can reach out suddenly with his right hand and plink a G above high C, unerringly true and clean and hard, but that’s a very difficult thing to do, believe me, even for men who can see.
I worked like a dog memorizing that keyboard and the major scales, Miss Goodbody drumming intervals into my head and teaching me to play simple five-note pieces in different keys, accompanying them with basic chords, identifying the chords for me. My repertoire of chords was limited in the beginning to the tonic, the dominant seventh, and the subdominant, but I learned to identify and to play these in all the keys. (Miss Goodbody, I’ve since learned, was somewhat advanced for her time, in that she believed a person could not play intelligently or feelingly unless he knew what was happening harmonically.) Rhythm was a serious problem. I could hear the rhythm as well as any sighted person, but conceptualizing a “quarter note” or “four eighth notes” without being able to see those notes was enormously difficult. Miss Goodbody helped me with this by singing out the values of the notes. “Quarter, quarter, eighth, eighth, eighth, eighth,” simultaneously clapping her hands in tempo. By the time I was ready to begin reading Braille music, Miss Goodbody had acquainted me with the entire keyboard, encouraging me to play with “big” motions, forcing me to move out of a habit I’d had in the beginning (clinging to that middle C for dear life, my thumb firmly rooted on it), and teaching me to identify the major, minor, diminished, and augmented triads in all twelve keys.
I should explain that Braille musical notation is rather complicated, and involves a great deal more than simply embossing or raising a sighted person’s music so that it can be felt by the blind. To begin with, the bass clef and the treble clef are not normally indicated in Braille music. Instead, the keyboard is divided into seven octaves starting with the lowest C on the piano, and using each successive C as a reference point. When Miss Goodbody was identifying a specific note, she would say, “That’s a second-octave D,” or “No, Iggie, you’re looking for a sixth-octave G.” I’d been having enough trouble learning to read regular Braille, and now I was presented with an entirely new language — just as music for the sighted is a language quite different from English or Bantu. To give you some idea, this is what a simple exercise would look like in European notation:
I’ve been told by sighted people who are not musicians that those sixteenth notes in the bass clef of the first and second measures look forbidding, as do the triplets in the treble clef of the last two measures. But believe me, this is a very simple exercise. Well, here’s that same passage as it would look (or, more correctly, feel) in Braille:
Try, then, to imagine the Braille notation for a beast like the “Hammerklavier.” The mind boggles. And mine did. In fact, I still find Braille music confusing at times, even though I studied it for the better part of ten years. Space is a problem in music for the blind, and very often the same symbols are used to mean different things. Imagine being a blind musician for a moment (thank God, you don’t have to) and running across a symbol that stands for a whole note as well as an eighth note. Rampant bewilderment? I tell you. Or stumble across a shorthand musical direction that says, “Count back twelve measures and repeat the first four of them.” Dandy, huh?
Patiently, Miss Goodbody taught me to read. I memorized the keyboard, I memorized the chords, I memorized pieces in Braille, feeling the raised dots with one hand while I played the notes with the other, and then reversing the process with the other hand. By the end of my first year of study with her, I was reading and playing simple pieces like Schumann’s “The Merry Farmer” (which I heard sung as a bawdy tune years later, the lyrics proclaiming: “There once was an Indian maid/who always was afraid/some young buckaroo/would slip her a screw/while she lay in the shade”) and Tchaikovsky’s “Doll’s Burial,” which I hated, and was struggling with more complicated stuff like Beethoven’s Sonatina in G and his “Ecossaise.”
And meanwhile, the myth was taking shape around me.
The apartment we lived in was a fourth-floor walk-up, consisting of a kitchen, a dining room that doubled as a living room because that’s where the radio was, and two bedrooms next door to each other — one shared by my mother and father, the other by Tony and me. The apartment was not a railroad flat in the strictest sense. That is, the rooms were not stretched out in a single straight line, like train tracks. But it was a railroad flat in that there were no interior corridors, and to get to one room you had to pass through another. My parents must have made love very tiptoe carefully, lest Tony or I, on the way to the bathroom in the dead of night, stumble upon their ecstasy. The kitchen was tiny, with the icebox, the gas range, and the sink lined up against one wall, a wooden table with an oilcloth cover (I loved the feel and the smell of that oilcloth) against the opposite wall. A window opened onto the backyard clotheslines, and also onto the windows of countless neighbors with whom, like an Italian (excuse me — American) Molly Goldberg, my mother held many shouted conversations as she hung out the laundry.