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| HER VIOLIN by Don Pelles The hardest part was getting rid of her things. I have heard of people making a shrine of a dead child’s room, keeping it just the way it was, for years. Does anyone really do that? How could you? Just walking by her door was nearly enough to drown me. Her clothes we gave away to Goodwill; my husband took care of it – I couldn’t bear to. I’m not sure what he did with her bed, her dresser, her books, her desk, the broken brown armchair she would never let us throw out. The second day after the funeral, they were gone, that’s all I know. There was one thing, however, we couldn’t give away. But we did not know what to do with it. Her violin. I still see her sometimes, reflected in the window pane where my face alone should be. It takes me unawares; when I focus my eyes to look closer, she’s not there. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a ghost story or a spiritual thing. I’m not that kind of woman. I believe in the material reality; when a person dies, she dies. For sure you don’t go around haunting water surfaces and window panes. It had been Maya’s idea from the beginning. “I want to be a vi-lin woman,” she told us one day, just like that. She had just turned four. I smiled at her and nodded, saying “That’s nice, Honey,” or something like that, and went about my business. But a few days later, there it was again – “Mommy, I want to be a violin woman.” Where could she have gotten that notion? From the TV? I remember seeing a news story, some time around then, about little children in a violin class; I don’t remember if Maya was in the room, or if she was, whether she was paying any attention. Or it could have been from another child at her day care. We asked around, we looked through the classifieds and in the yellow pages. Some teachers wouldn’t take a child that young; they advised us to wait a few years. The one we finally settled on, Mrs. Hansen, told us we could have started her at three or even younger. She taught the Suzuki method, which meant that we as parents were expected to be thoroughly involved. We sat in on the lessons sometimes – Maya was in a group with three other children. We sat with her while she practiced, to offer support and encouragement, and we played tapes of pieces she was learning or would work on soon. So from the start this was my project and my husband’s, not just Maya’s. We did not know how long Maya would stick with it. She was often frustrated, and who could blame her? The finger had to be in exactly the right place on the string or the note would not be in tune. The tapes in some ways were as much a hindrance as a help: at her level and with her tiny, squeaky instrument, she could never get her playing to sound like the music on the tape – up to tempo (often too fast, we thought) and recorded with a full-bodied and probably expensive violin. The tapes were hard to manipulate, too: you had to start and stop them and go back and forth to find the beginning of a piece, always a distraction (a few years later they got CDs, much better in that regard). I remember one time in particular, early on. Maya was practicing her piece, a little do-re-mi thing, and having a tough time with it. Over and over, she couldn’t get it right; she was on the point of tears, and I said, “Just relax, Honey, you’ll get it,” or something unhelpful and inane like that. She stopped and looked at me with anger in her eyes. “You play it,” she said, thrusting the violin and bow into my hands. “I can’t, Maya; you’re the musician --” I started to say, but she was already leaving the room. We are not -- were not -- pushy parents; as I said, the violin had been Maya’s idea, and we were not about to force her to continue if her interest had waned. But it never did; she would get frustrated sometimes, but never to the point of quitting. The violin, as it turned out, was a life-long love affair for her. My daughter was no musical prodigy, but she did very well. After two years of “learning to hear,” Maya began reading music, right at the same time she was learning to read words. She started individual lessons soon afterward. The violins – we rented them – kept getting larger, keeping pace with the growth of her hands and arms. Each one sounded better than the previous. By the time she was ten, Maya was ready for a full-sized instrument. That could have been a problem: violins are expensive, even poor-to-mediocre ones, and a good violin can be very expensive, on the order of a small car. I mentioned it to my mother, over lunch one Saturday. We were at her house (I had been trying to go over there more often, since my father’s death the year before). She went on about something else – I wasn’t even sure if she had been listening. Then suddenly she stopped, in the middle of a sentence. “My great aunt Lydia, my grandmother Rose’s sister – she would be your great-great aunt – played the violin,” she said, looking at me over her glasses. “Did you know that?” I didn’t. She nodded. “She died when I was four. But I can distinctly remember her playing her violin.” “Wasn’t that unusual?” I said. “I mean, a woman violinist back then?” She tilted her head to one side. “I don’t know,” she said, and again, “I don’t know. She played it, though, and pretty well too, as I recall.” She was four years old – what did she know? I thought, and then remembered that my own daughter had started playing the violin at that age. “You know,” I said aloud. “I think I remember seeing pictures of Aunt Lydia. In one of those old photo albums, up there in the attic.” I gestured upward with my hand. Indeed, I had grown up in this house. Every now and then, when I was a child, when I wanted to get away from everybody, I would go up there, into the attic. It was a dim and dusty place, but not totally dark – one small, very dirty window let in some light. I would sit on a broken chair, and sometimes, when I’d get tired of just sitting, I would browse among the boxes and the things on the shelves for “clues,” as I imagined, to mysteries long-forgotten. An old pair of eyeglasses (whose?), a lady’s hat, envelopes full of bank statements, a cigar box containing two rolled-up snake skins, an old typewriter with glass windows in the sides. And a stack of photo albums, with pictures of old-timey-looking people. “Yes,” she said. “That was where we’d look for you when you couldn’t be found anywhere else. Why you wanted to be up there I’ll never know.” And then I remembered something else. “Ma,” I said, “there was a violin up there. A violin, in a wooden case.” She looked up at me, her mouth slightly open. “Was that…?” I started to say. “Yes, I think so. Yes, that was Aunt Lydia’s violin.” She nodded, smiling to herself, looking inward as though envisioning Lydia herself, up in the attic. I could see my nine-year-old self sitting there, the object in front of me which, unknown to me then, had had a significance long ago in my family, and would be important many years later in my daughter’s life. And in my own. Then my mother laid her fragile, age-spotted hand gently on my arm. “But who knows what kind of shape it’s in,” she said. So, my Maya inherited her great-great-great aunt’s violin. We had no idea whether it would still be playable after all those years, or what would be the quality, even if it were. We took it to an instrument repair shop; the man was glum and non-committal. He couldn’t see any damage, there weren’t any visible cracks. He sighed, looked up at us, then back down. Sometimes, he said, these old instruments can’t take the string tension. If he could string it, there was no telling how it would sound – ‘old’ didn’t necessarily mean ‘good.’ He wrote out a ticket; we could call back in a week. As it turned out, he called us. His attitude had changed completely. He had cleaned it, re-glued the neck, and refitted the pegs. The violin was not only playable, it had a depth and clarity of sound unusual for a nineteenth century German violin, which it was. “Who’s going to play it?” he asked? That’s none of your business, I thought, as I said to him, “It’s for my ten-year-old daughter.” “Hmmph,” he said. “I thought maybe it was for you. No offense, Madam, but I doubt your ten-year-old will appreciate an instrument of this quality. Would you possibly consider selling it?” I was offended. Would nine-year-old Mozart, who was writing symphonies at the time, have appreciated an instrument of this quality? Not to say Maya was Mozart. But again I said nothing. “We wouldn’t think of selling it,” I told him, in a tone to end the discussion. Other than her music, Maya was a very normal child: she hung by her heels from the monkey bars, she roughhoused with boys and girls alike, she got her clothes dirty and went around with scabs on her knees. She played soccer and, a couple years later, softball. She was a good student but not great; she was not particularly bookish. When she was eight she broke my heart by insisting on having her lovely reddish-brown hair cut to just below her ears; she was tired of it getting in her way, she said, and she thought it would look better. And I had to admit, afterward, that it did suit her: the cut continued the line of her cheekbones across her broad face. She had tan skin, no redhead’s complexion, and her eyes were light brown – lit brown, she always liked to say (but it was true). A conflict came up her fourth grade year: Mrs. Hansen had scheduled a recital at exactly the same time, it turned out, as Maya’s championship soccer game. We had not checked the dates, and in any case, no one had expected her team to be in the championship. But they somehow made the “playoffs,” and when we did check, we found that if they made it all the way, Maya would have to choose. She had been working on her recital piece for over three months. She would be the star, the highlight of the afternoon, Mrs. Hansen’s (and my!) pride and joy. But on the field her teammates were counting on her: though not a scorer, Maya was solid in her halfback position and the “Titans” would have been merely mortal without her. In the end, soccer won out. Soccer was a team sport; Maya could not let her comrades down. But the pain of the choice was palpable; it rippled out from her and no one around her could feel carefree that day. The soccer team played their worst game of the year, a 7 - 0 calamity. And Maya broke her foot – “at least it wasn’t my hand,” she said. She took the game and the broken foot as a sign from God that she had made the wrong choice (“So why didn’t God tell you this beforehand?” I wanted to say. But I didn’t). From that point on it was a rare day that Maya missed practicing, even when she was sick (which she seldom was). When we went to Disney World that next summer, the violin – “my liddle fiddle,” she called it – came along, and she played it, too. She took it to camp with her. I don’t know how much she actually played it there – some, I know, but the teasing was apparently pretty strong. Her last spring, her twelfth year, she was moving ahead quickly. She left Suzuki Book 5 behind and was well along in Book 6, the Rameau Gavotte and the two Handel sonatas. She would listen, over and over again, to her CD of Heifitz playing Bach’s Solo Sonatas and Partitas – she vowed she would play them someday, and I had no doubt that she would. That was her attitude: I can do anything – if not today, then tomorrow. It was not just the violin, it was the way she attacked life, and death. You could see it in the way she stood: broad shoulders squared, feet pressed against the earth, and in her fierce dedication to the things she considered important. That last summer, a week after school let out, Maya went off to camp. Three weeks, to run in the sun, to swim in the lake, to sing by the campfire at night, to listen to ghost stories, to be on her own, more or less. The third year she’d gone, progressing from “minnow” to “salmon” to “shark.” She had talked some that spring about music camp; that would have been six weeks and more expensive, but we could have handled it. She still would have had half the summer at home. But she wanted to see her friends from the summer before, and she really did love it there. We let her make up her own mind and in the end she chose Tippecanoe – “One more time,” she said, “’cause next year I’m going to really be serious,” drawing out the last ‘s’ and furrowing her brow. She had been a little short of breath the last week of camp. She had had to come out of her final soccer game and she wasn’t able to finish the one-mile swim for her “Killer Whale” certificate. She shrugged it off; she didn’t tell us about it right away when she came back. We noticed that something wasn’t quite right: she would cough, then take in a deep breath. Maya said it was a chest cold and we had no reason to think it wasn’t – no big deal. But a week later she was worse, so I took her, over protests, to the doctor. Dr. Bondell was a short man with a gray mustache and a large round head, bare on top except for a strip of gray hair around the sides and back. When we had first gone to him – he had been Maya’s pediatrician from her infancy – the mustache had been mostly brown and the hair only thinning. He greeted us warmly, and after Maya told him her story, he made a not-very-funny joke about too much night air at camp. Then he began the examination. “Breathe,” he said, then “Let it out,” and again, and again as he moved the stethoscope around her chest and back. He pressed his fingers into her lower back and under her rib cage. Then he began tapping on her all around, front and back, listening to the sound. And saying less and less as he worked. He put a cuff around her arm and took her pressure, the first time she had had that done. Then he took two crimson tubes of her blood. He picked up his pad and wrote as he talked: “I want you to get a chest X-ray,” he said to Maya directly, then handing me the slip and looking at me with solemn eyes, “six-thirty-eight, one floor down.” “What do you think it is?” I ventured. “I want to see the X-rays,” was all he would say. That was ten in the morning. He called us that afternoon at two: Maya had cancer. The tumor was large – it must have grown very quickly. It was filling up her chest cavity and had begun to press against her lungs, which was why the cough and the shortness of breath. They went into her right away. It did not look good: the tumor was not a compact mass that they could just neatly cut out – it was wrapped about her lungs and reaching for her heart; it was in the process of penetrating her aorta. They removed what they could, but they couldn’t get everything, not without killing her then and there. Of course a mother asks herself, couldn’t we have found it before? Before it got so big? But there were no symptoms, not a hint, nothing anyone could have been aware of, not even Maya. If she felt something, she didn’t think it was anything unusual. Her body was going through changes anyway. And she did have a physical, six weeks before the camp – the nurse did it, I think. No X-rays, certainly – why would anybody have thought to take X-rays? How suddenly everything can change. As though you pass through a curtain, unknowable, invisible even when you’re right up against it, from one world into a totally different one. You reach back but you can’t touch or even see where you came from any more. I would gaze and gaze at my only child, still looking perfectly healthy – glowing skin, shining hair, eyes quick and alert – and try to keep myself together until I was out of her presence. It was our grief and terror, which of course slipped out no matter what we did, that distressed her the most. “Please Mom, I’m going to be ok, ok?” is what she would say, trying to seem as perky as possible. Maya herself seemed to take it in stride. I think she believed she could simply refuse to die: because she was Maya, because it was all wrong, because God wouldn’t let this happen to her. Maya believed the universe was her friend, that ultimately she would be protected and safe. I suppose I should feel good about that, that my child was able to feel that way. Our hope then was in radiation and chemo; it was a slim chance, but our only one. Maya had to go through all that -- feeling wretched, the nausea, being tired all the time (the hair loss was the least of it). She took it on as a challenge, like a difficult piece that she was determined to play, by sheer force of will. If ever a positive attitude could get a person through cancer – and I’m told that sometimes it can – Maya should have been a survivor. In her case, the disease was too strong: it took her three miserable months to die. She turned twelve the week before. At the end, heavily dosed with painkillers, she seemed almost calm, accepting. It was only coming back from the funeral that I fully realized what had happened, in all its finality. Life seemed to have lost the context of time and place. We had crossed that divide the moment the doctor explained the X-rays, into this bleaker, colder world, uncaring and unrelenting. My husband went back to work the next week. I didn’t know how he could do it, but after half a day at home I understood. I had planned to take that week off – my job allowed it. I did not want to face people: the obligatory sympathy, the awkwardness. The awful normality of it, that Maya could be dead and everything else go on as usual. But I found I could not stay by myself in that house. For a day and a half I wandered. I wandered through malls – something I never did. I found myself looking at children’s clothing in windows, thinking, “How would Maya look in that?” I would see children, especially girls, and start to cry; I would walk away quickly, find a bathroom, and sit in a stall until I could stop. I drove to a park, a botanical garden with fall flowers in bloom; I sought out the less used paths, hoping I would have them to myself. But the flowers had the same effect on me as the children: they were so beautiful but I knew that soon the vitality and colors would go out of them and they would crumble away. I sat on a bench beside a pond; I thought for a minute I saw Maya’s face looking at me from the water surface, rippled. On Wednesday I went to work, much as I dreaded it, doing my damnedest to not interact with anybody. Everybody told me I was so brave. Brave how? For going on, for living? What choice is there? You don’t feel like you can, but days go by anyway and you do. You can only cry for so many hours in a day. Eventually that becomes minutes, and eventually not even every day. But it never goes away. I didn’t know what to do with her violin. You don’t sell something like that, short of starvation. It was the one thing in the world, the one physical object that Maya had truly treasured. And it had been Aunt Lydia’s. We put it in the attic when we cleaned out her room. But when the weather turned and began to get cold, I started to worry about it (it had survived more than 50 years in my mother’s attic, but who knew about mine?). One frigid night in January – Maya had been dead nearly four months – I lay in our bed, thinking about the violin upstairs in the attic, wondering if it was at that moment beginning to crack. I could not sleep; I put on my robe and went to check on it. I would not say the attic was warm, but it was nowhere near as freezing as I had feared. I opened the case and took it out; I sat there among the boxes and the dust, her violin in my lap, crying in the night. The nine-year-old me, staring at the violin in her mother‘s attic, seemed so close; I wanted to touch her, to tell, to warn her. But even if I could, what would I say? When I was done I put it back in its case and left it there. I returned to my bed and snuggled against my warm husband, who had not realized I was gone. But the first oppressively hot day in late May forced it back into my consciousness. I could feel the wood warping, smell the softening glue. This time I wasted neither time nor tears – I ran to the attic, grabbed it up, and carried it to a cooler place – the coffee table in our living room. I opened the case; a light tap on the top rang true, the neck and fingerboard were in line – no damage. It stayed there, on the table, for a week or so, until, cleaning up the house, I made space for it on a bookcase shelf. For me, though, that was never comfortable. I would walk past it fifteen times a day, and each time, I saw it. Ordinary objects, with time, become familiar in their places and rarely reach into conscious thought. But I saw Maya’s violin, every single time. And heard it as well. It was background to my dreams. Dreaming, or remembering my dreams (they say everybody dreams), had always been rare for me. But now I had a dream life in addition to my waking one. Sometimes Maya would be playing one of her child-violins in the foreground. She would make a mistake, start the piece again, stop again, over and over. She would cry out, frustrated: “Mama, help me.” “You’re doing fine,” was all I could say – “Keep playing.” I knew I couldn’t help her. And then, “Help me, please help me” – piteous and desperate now, the sound of her violin, far off, playing a Bach partita. But I couldn’t help her, I couldn’t help her. Help-less. Or she would play a piece, and then it would play on the CD, which would play it faster. She would pick up the fiddle and play it herself at that tempo, and then the CD, even faster. And again, and again, until Maya would break down, unable to keep up with the mad, runaway speed of the violin on the record. She would sob, and I would cry with her – it was all I could do. More dreams: Maya practicing a piece, but she can’t get it right. “Help me, Mama,” she says, but all I can do is shake my head. I feel so sad. She tries it again, and messes up. “Help me,” emphatically. “I can’t,” I mouthe. Over and over. I was months and months, dreaming those dreams. At last I moved the violin again, to the top shelf in my bedroom closet, temperate and dry, but out of sight. It was no good. I felt like I was putting her in the closet. And the dreams continued, even though I wasn’t passing by it fifteen times a day. And then, one night --. The same dream: Maya practicing, couldn’t get it right. “Help me, Mama,” she cried. I shook my head; a tear ran from my eye. I started to say, “I can’t, Baby” – but instead, I looked – no, glared -- at her and I snatched the violin from her hands. I placed it under my chin, placed my left palm under the fingerboard and my fingers on the strings, took the bow between the thumb and fingers of my right hand, and played her piece – myself. I played it, on her violin. And then I showed her the fingering, and how to bow it. I handed her the violin, and she played the piece without any mistakes, gazing at me the whole time. Some dreams fade in the morning, turn into vague shapes and silent sounds, more felt than remembered. But this dream stayed clear in my mind – every note, every touch, the scrape of the horsehair across the strings, the expression on her face, and on mine. And I knew exactly what I had to do. * * * * * * When I dream about the violin now, it is my daughter who is helping me. I will play the piece, then she takes the instrument from me and shows me. She points out, very patiently, what I can do better – my bowing, the phrasing, the dynamics. She corrects my posture, the angle of my left arm, the wrist on my bowing arm. And when, in my waking time, I play for my teacher or at a recital, Maya’s attention shows. Well past 40 now, I am myself becoming a violin woman. It is our violin that I play. |
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