"Aren't you a little early?" he asked, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece that had pointed to five minutes of twelve for a month. "Josef's in here. We're running over a little sonatino by someone he knows."
"Good," she said, trying to smile. "I'll listen." She could see her fingers sinking powerless into a blur of piano keys. She felt tired – felt that if he looked at her much longer her hands might tremble.
He stood uncertain, halfway in the room. Sharply his teeth pushed down on his bright, swollen lips. "Hungry, Bienchen?" he asked. "There's some apple cake Anna made, and milk."
"I'll wait till afterward," she said. "Thanks."
"After you finish with a very fine lesson – eh?" His smile seemed to crumble at the corners.
There was a sound from behind him in the studio and Mister Lafkowitz pushed at the other panel of the door and stood beside him.
"Frances?" he said, smiling. "And how is the work coming now?"
Without meaning to, Mister Lafkowitz always made her feel clumsy and overgrown. He was such a small man himself, with a weary look when he was not holding his violin. His eyebrows curved high above his sallow, Jewish face as though asking a question, but the lids of his eyes drowsed languorous and indifferent. Today he seemed distracted. She watched him come into the room for no apparent purpose, holding his pearl-tipped bow in his still fingers, slowly gliding the white horsehair through a chalky piece of rosin. His eyes were sharp bright slits today and the linen handkerchief that flowed down from his collar darkened the shadows beneath them.
"I gather you're doing a lot now," smiled Mister Lafkowitz, although she had not yet answered the question.
She looked at Mister Bilderbach. He turned away. His heavy shoulders pushed the door open wide so that the late afternoon sun came through the window of the studio and shafted yellow over the dusty living room. Behind her teacher she could see the squat long piano, the window, and the bust of Brahms.
"No," she said to Mister Lafkowitz, "I'm doing terribly." Her thin fingers flipped at the pages of her music. "I don't know what's the matter," she said, looking at Mister Bilderbach's stooped muscular back that stood tense and listening.
Mister Lafkowitz smiled. "There are times, I suppose, when one -"
A harsh chord sounded from the piano. "Don't you think we'd better get on with this?" asked Mister Bilderbach.
"Immediately," said Mister Lafkowitz, giving the bow one more scrape before starting toward the door. She could see him pick up his violin from the top of the piano. He caught her eye and lowered the instrument "You've seen the picture of Heime?"
Her fingers curled tight over the sharp corner of the satchel. "What picture?"
"One of Heime in the Musical Courier there on the table. Inside the top cover."
The sonatina began. Discordant yet somehow simple. Empty but with a sharp-cut style of its own. She reached for the magazine and opened it.
There Heime was – in the left-hand corner. Holding his violin with his fingers hooked down over the strings for a pizzicato. With his dark serge knickers strapped neatly beneath his knees, a sweater and rolled collar. It was a bad picture. Although it was snapped in profile his eyes were cut around toward the photographer and his finger looked as though it would pluck the wrong string. He seemed suffering to turn around toward the picture-taking apparatus. He was thinner – his stomach did not poke out now – but he hadn't changed much in six months.
Heime Israelsky, talented young violinist, snapped while at work in his teacher's studio on Riverside Drive. Young Master Israelsky, who will soon celebrate his fifteenth birthday, has been invited to play the Beethoven Concerto with -
That morning, after she had practiced from six until eight, her dad had made her sit down at the table with the family for breakfast. She hated breakfast; it gave her a sick feeling afterward. She would rather wait and get four chocolate bars with her twenty cents lunch money and munch them during school – bringing up little morsels from the pocket under cover of her handkerchief, stopping dead when the silver paper rattled. But this morning her dad had put a fried egg on her plate and she had known that if it burst – so that the slimy yellow oozed over the white – she would cry. And that had happened. The same feeling was upon her now. Gingerly she laid the magazine back on the table and closed her eyes.
The music in the studio seemed to be urging violently and clumsily for something that was not to be had. After a moment her thoughts drew back from Heime and the concerto and the picture – and hovered around the lesson once more. She slid over on the sofa until she could see plainly into the studio – the two of them playing, peering at the notations on the piano, lustfully drawing out all that was there.
She could not forget the memory of Mister Bilderbach's face as he had stared at her a moment ago. Her hands, still twitching unconsciously to the motions of the fugue, closed over her bony knees. Tired, she was. And with a circling, sinking away feeling like the one that often came to her just before she dropped off to sleep on the nights when she had over-practiced. Like those weary half-dreams that buzzed and carried her out into their own whirligig space.
A Wunderkind - a Wunderkind – a Wunderkind. The syllables would come out rolling in the deep German way, roar against her ears and then fall to a murmur. Along with the faces circling, swelling out in distortion, diminishing to pale blobs – Mister Bilderbach, Mrs. Bilderbach, Heime, Mister Lafkowitz. Around and around in a circle revolving to the guttural Wunderkind. Mister Bilderbach looming large in the middle of the circle, his face urging – with the others around him.
Phrases of music seesawing crazily. Notes she had been practicing falling over each other like a handful of marbles dropped downstairs. Bach, Debussy, Prokofieff, Brahms – timed grotesquely to the far off throb of her tired body and the buzzing circle.
Sometimes – when she had not worked more than three hours or had stayed out from high school – the dreams were not so confused. The music soared clearly in her mind and quick, precise little memories would come back – clear as the sissy "Age of Innocence" picture Heime had given her after their joint concert was over.
A Wunderkind - a Wunderkind. That was what Mister Bilderbach had called her when, at twelve, she first came to him. Older pupils had repeated the word.
Not that he had ever said the word to her. "Bienchen -" (She had a plain American name but he never used it except when her mistakes were enormous.) "Bienchen," he would say, "I know it must be terrible. Carrying around all the time a head that thick. Poor Bienchen -"
Mister Bilderbach's father had been a Dutch violinist. His mother was from Prague. He had been born in this country and had spent his youth in Germany. So many times she wished she had not been born and brought up in just Cincinnati. How do you say cheese in German? Mister Bilderbach, what is Dutch for I don't understand you?
The first day she came to the studio. After she played the whole Second Hungarian Rhapsody from memory. The room graying with twilight. His face as he leaned over the piano.
"Now we begin all over," he said that first day. "It – playing music – is more than cleverness. If a twelve-year-old girl's fingers cover so many keys to a second – that means nothing."
He tapped his broad chest and his forehead with his stubby hand. "Here and here. You are old enough to understand that." He lighted a cigarette and gently blew the first exhalation above her head. "And work – work – work -. We will start now with these Bach Inventions and these little Schumann pieces." His hands moved again – this time to jerk the cord of the lamp behind her and point to the music. "I will show you how I wish this practiced. Listen carefully now."