’Neath the blossoms waiting the words went,
Poor Butterfly!
For she loved him so.
Leo had loved that song from the first moment. He loved watching his mother as she played it, her pale lids fluttering, a little blue vein beating in her temple, her eyes shining – until there would come the brutal knocking from downstairs in the butcher shop; he would be pounding the broom handle on the ceiling, telling Emily to shut up, the noise was driving him crazy.
He rolled over and fingered his wallet out of his back pocket, then wiped his thumb and finger on the roll of his shorts and carefully extracted her photograph from one of the glassine windows. He held it with the utmost delicacy, for one corner was badly dog-eared, and the paper was in danger of cracking. The photo had been taken behind the pleated curtain of the little automatic picture booth by the entrance to Kresge’s 5 amp; 10 – four shots for a quarter, ten cents more for “artistic hand tinting.” “Smile, Mom,” he had told her, but she wouldn’t, she didn’t like showing her uneven teeth. What the camera had therefore captured was this other, gentler, and more tender smile, filled with caring and a pensive yearning – a trifle fearful too, the least tinge of anxiety in the eyes, those large, deep-set eyes.
He could see her still, her face framed in that high curved window that looked down on Gallop Street, watching for him as he came up the street from school, when she would smile and wave behind the glass. She would hurry down the hall stairs, finger to her lips to tell him that he shouldn’t make noise and tip off Rudy, who, if he knew Leo was home, would make him fetch the broom and sweep the butcher shop. “Come upstairs,” she would whisper, and there she’d have a treat waiting, hot chocolate and cinnamon toast on cold days, lemonade and cookies on warm ones.
On rainy days they would sneak up into the attic together, where they would go through boxes and old trunks, or she would read to him, fanciful stories, from Palfrey’s Golden Treasury or Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales, while he sat by her side and poured over the colored plates tipped in among the pages and protected by opaque sheets of paper, illustrations of Aladdin with his magic lamp; of Ali Baba in the cave of the Forty Thieves; of Robert the Bruce, whose kingdom hung on the gossamer thread of a single spider; of Daedalus and Icarus, and Theseus killing the Minotaur.
She was always thinking of things to amuse him, like taking him to the double bill at the matinee (despite Rudy’s objections), to The Big Trail and Min and Bill, maybe the latest Gold Diggers, or to Cimarron. Sometimes they’d visit the merry-go-round in the park, where a couple of times they’d accidentally happened across a friend of Emily’s, Mr Burroughs, a nice gentleman who bought Leo a balloon and a box of saltwater taffy and suggested that Leo not mention their fun to Rudy. But Leo didn’t need any prompting, because he never told Rudy anything. He hated Rudy. Always, after school, while picking up scraps of fat from the floor, he would watch him, surly and frowning under his trademark straw hat, his strong, hairy hands wielding the sharp-edged cleaver, a cigar butt plugging the corner of his lips like a cork in a jug. The sight of him in his long butcher’s apron, blotched with the blood of dead animals, made Leo sick at his stomach.
Rudy didn’t like Leo either; didn’t want him around, and he resented the time Emily spent with him, accusing her of making a sissy out of the boy. One night, when he went up to bed and failed to find his wife waiting for him, he went to look for her. Hearing voices from Leo’s room, he came rushing in and, yanking her out of the chair, flung her against the wall in a jealous rage, shouting that the boy was a mollycoddle and would grow up worthless. Leaving Emily, he rushed at Leo and dragged him to the window, where he threw up the sash, and turning Leo upside down, dangled him over the windowsill by his heels.
Below Leo, the world was spinning around; he was sure his end had come. The ground seemed to swirl up to meet him, making him sick, and Emily was struggling with Rudy, trying to drag Leo inside. Finally Rudy let go, and Leo felt himself falling! Falling down and down – a moment later he was safe in Emily’s arms. She soothed him and said it would be all right, while Rudy went around kicking the furniture. But when Leo was put to bed again and left alone, the panic rose in him and he lay there sweating, afraid to shut his eyes, for as soon as he did he saw himself looking down from a great height, and then he would start to fall, over and over, endlessly falling, falling… falling
… down into the darkness…
That had been the start of his bad dreams, the dreams that sometimes roused him to screaming wakefulness and brought Emily to his side, calling him, while the awakened Rudy ranted and raged.
Rudy wasn’t Leo’s father; his real father had died when Leo was very young, and Emily had remarried. Why Rudy Matuchek? This was the subject of much speculation among the neighbors, why a sweet, attractive young woman would ever marry “a man like that!” Leo had no answer. All he knew was that he had loved Emily more than anything in the whole world, and now she was dead. He blamed Rudy, and why not, since it was all his fault, making her cross the bridge with him when he knew it wasn’t safe, leaving Leo with nothing but a cold bed in an old hops-drying room.
No, that wasn’t true, not quite. For Emily had left him something beyond price: the music, and her violin.
One day, when Emily had gone upstreet and Rudy was taking care of customers, Leo had sneaked into the front room and lifted down the black case from the shelf. He set it on the floor, unsnapped the catches. The instrument lay in its bed of shiny-worn purple plush, and as he took it out his thumb struck the strings and it made an interesting sound. Turning, he saw his mother in the doorway. He was afraid she would be angry at him for touching her violin, but she had come toward him, smiling, with out-stretched arms and tears in her eyes. She wasn’t angry, she was pleased. She told him about his famous ancestor, the composer and concert violinist Joseph Joachim (the name had since received a minor alteration in spelling), who had played for the Emperor of Austria, and she showed him just how to tuck the instrument in the crook of his neck, moving his hand with her own so the bow slid across the strings, pressing his fingers on the fingerboard – there and there. That had been the start of Leo the violinist, and Emily put all her hopes and dreams of life in him: one day, she said, he would be a famous concert artist like Jascha Heifetz or Yehudi Menuhin.
Every afternoon, she gave him a lesson the same way her father had taught her, until he became technically proficient. She was patient and dogged, Leo was clever and persistent. He learned quickly. She called him her “prodigy,” her “little Paganini,” and she took him next door to Mrs Kranze, where he offered up “Poor Butterfly” for the old woman who lived in the back room, whose husband had played the viola with the Boston Symphony. The old woman kissed Leo’s cheek and said, “]a, gute, gute, sehr gute. ”
But when he was old enough to help out in the shop, the lessons stopped. “We need a butcher here,” Rudy barked, “not a music man. No rhapsodies in this house! Hear me?” That was when Leo learned just how determined a person his mother was. Before sending him off to school next morning she told him everything would be all right, and Leo divined that she intended he should continue with his lessons. But not here, not in the house. He must now begin with a professional teacher.
There was only one teacher of the violin in the whole of Saggetts Notch, a Mr Schneidermann, who occupied the quarters over the law offices in the Wooster Block at the end of L Street, on the other side of the river. Three days a week, after school, Leo would get on the trolley car and ride the length of L Street to the corner shop, where he would get off for his lesson. Emily told Rudy that Leo had gone to the YMCA branch for a swim lesson, and to put him further off the scent Leo would leave the empty case on the shelf and sneak the violin out under his jacket. Mr Schneidermann was a kind man and would never give Leo away, while – this was a happy coincidence – the lawyer on the street floor proved to be the same Mr Burroughs who’d bought Leo the saltwater taffy at the park, and he was happy to let Leo sneak up the back way, safe from prying eyes.