From the novel....Milly and Johanna's Mother, Leah, in 1962

Thanksgiving, 1962     

Driving back from Charles’ parents’ house in Summit we had the most ridiculous fight. Not that it was a fight in the sense that we were arguing. We had the girls with us, of course. Milly was in the front between us, her head on my lap. She slept most of the way. Johanna was in the back seat, reading Nancy Drew, every now and then spelling out a word and asking me what it meant:

“What’s an r-o-a-d-s-t-e-r, Mommy?’ ‘What’s a hex sign?’”

Charles is no talker, anyway, so that’s another way it wasn’t really an argument. But you can have a fight without fighting words, of course. What happened was that I brought up the idea again of me giving piano lessons. Not even teaching school again. Just piano lessons. I ought to have known better. Charles was already in a bad mood because his brother had been at his parents’ house, as well as his older sister and her husband—not that they count as a threat to him. It’s his brother, Henry, who riles him. Henry is five years his junior and makes more money than he does. His wife, Suzanne, is younger than I am and they have two sons instead of two daughters.

Suzanne could double as Dinah Shore singing “See the USA in a Chevrolet.” She’s sprightly, for God’s sake. Tall, blonde, busty. She wears those artillery bras. And the sons are the same way—tall and blond. Hitler would be proud of their erect carriage and sparkling blue eyes. I don’t think a holiday goes by that Charles doesn’t not-so-subtly rue his choice of a Sicilian fisherman’s daughter from Gloucester as his wife, even if she did somehow make it out of Gloucester, as well as into and out of music school.

Before we got married, before the babies, I thought he liked it that I taught school. But once Henry married Suzanne and he rose at Alcoa like lava at the top of a volcano, Charles has been impatient with his life. Or the deficiencies he notices: We don’t have a vacation home. Having had daughters, he can’t coach a Little League team. He doesn’t have a wife with a chiseled clavicles and manicured fingernails.

I think it’s superficial of him to want all that. But I still can’t help feeling apologetic. Inadequate. I feel I’ve failed, somehow. I’m short. I’m dark. (In fact, our daughters have my complexion and brown eyes.) I listen to “Cavaleria Rusticana” and Verdi instead of Bing Crosby and Patti Page. I read instead of playing tennis. I grow vegetables instead of day lilies. I make pasta with cauliflower and sardines (actually, I don’t make that anymore; I’ve learned from the women at the church how to make Swedish meatballs and angels-on-horseback). I’m almost there, but not-quite in an unsettling, though defining, not-quite way.

So when I brought up giving piano lessons, Charles just said quietly, “And turn our living room into a store front?”

I knew what he meant. I even know who he was referring to: Angela Orlando Brancaleone. Her husband had been a drunk as well as a fishermen, as if the two weren’t incompatible. And she was scolded by the Our Lady of Good Voyage priest for giving piano lessons in her parlor after Vito Brancaleone’s ship went down off the Georges Banks.

‘What’s she supposed to do?’ my mother had asked, time and again, ‘Say novenas to the Blessed Virgin Mother to send poor Angela another drunken fisherman that she could marry and bury some more? Though it’s true she didn’t have to bother much about the burying part. The sea took care of that.’

I think my mother sent me to Signora Brancaleone for lessons just to spite the parish priest. And if was spitefulness toward him, it was such a gift for me.

Signora used to talk about music as if it were tactile, as if every musical phrase had a concrete correlative in the real world.

‘Listen,’ she would say, as I practiced one of Schumman’s “Scenes from Childhood.” ‘What do you hear in ‘Traumerei’? Does it make you think of dreaming?’

After every lesson she’d send me home with laden with treats, loaning me her recordings of operas and symphonies.

“Next lesson I want you to sing for me the Funeral March in the Beethoven 3,” she’d say. Or, “Listen to this and next lesson, you tell me what it was that Smetana was writing about when he wrote, “The Moldau.” (I didn’t even know then that the Moldau was a river.)

She gave me easy assignments, too: Everybody knew the Offenbach can-can music and “Pomp and Circumstance” and “The Waltz of the Flowers.”
“Yes, but what do they have in common?” she’d asked. I, of course, had no idea.

Jane Avril, Can-can

“It’s all music for showing off!” she’d declared, as if anyone with ears would have heard that. “The putains dancing and showing off their backsides, the scholars parading in to special music because they’d passed some tests—as if any fisherman in Gloucester ever got a diploma for making it back past Dog Bar breakwater. No, it’s just prayers and tears when they don’t come back--. Oh, but then there is “The Waltz of the Flowers.” They have a right to show off. Flowers are better than can-can dancers or scholars and even fishermen. All they do is live to give beauty. And when they die, we’re sad, maybe for a day. But we know they’ll come back next spring. And the next spring after that. The flowers don’t ever really leave us.”

That’s the kind of thing she would say and it made sense to me. Maybe she was a little crazy—she was a widow who had five kids to support. That would have made me crazy, too. But she told such great stories. She made music this invitation into another world, a world beyond the cramped streets and smelly wharves where drunken men, back in port and flush with cash, wanted girls like me. Or any girl, actually.

So Signora Brancaleone was a kind of anchor, grounding me. She was also as much a beacon, letting me know there was safe passage: I could leave Gloucester. I would be all right.

From the Novel...in which Milly's mother thinks she is dating Beethoven

In the Gloaming

  

Milly always dreaded the Arts in the Schools programs when regional visual artists or dancers or musicians would come in and either perform in the small, stuffy auditorium—the students bored to tears, furtively texting. Or the artists might visit a few classrooms, encouraging questions, which were usually inane, though mercifully few. Milly would feel sorry for the earnest visitors, trying to spark interest in disaffected students dumb as bricks. And then she would feel sorry for her own students, many of whom were not dumb as bricks. It’s just that most of the class was not college-bound and the smart kids were easily intimidated by them. In this rural, working class school district, it was athletics, not art, that scored points with the student body.

            The only time Milly could remember an Arts in the School program that went well was when Chinese-American poet Da Chen did a presentation on writing and drawing ideographs. He was funny and bold, assuring them that for Chinese poets it was all about the drinking—about getting drunk and writing a better poem than your buddy had just written. He cursed in front of them. He played Chinese flute. The kids were rapt. And when he asked for questions at the end, one student—a student best known for picking fights and ditching classes—raised his hand immediately.

            “Can I have that?” he asked, referring to the completed ideograph Da Chen had painted on newsprint. Wordlessly and dramatically, Da Chen peeled off the sheet of paper, rolled it up and handed it to the kid.

            “Now you write a poem and send it back to me,” he said, “Your teacher’s got my email address.”

            “I don’t write poems. I write rap,” the kid said.

            “What? You don’t think rap’s poetry?” Da Chen asked, “Send me some.”

            And the kid nodded. Milly wondered if he had ever followed through.

            Today’s artist was the conductor of region’s professional orchestra. Turns out the Hudson Valley Orchestra was a well-regarded group and also well-funded, so they were able to hire a fairly high-profile conductor. But despite his strengths at the podium Anders Lanski was no match for high school students. He was known to do brilliant children’s concerts, getting the little kids to tap out rhythms or dance or sing along. But the high schoolers weren’t about to tap or whistle or anything remotely interactive. And though he played bits of very famous music—“Greensleeves,” the opening bars of “The Nutcracker” and Beethoven’s 5^th,  the majority of the students didn’t seem to recognize any of it. Then he played a UTube clip of one of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concerts, trying to get the students to join with the audience in the clapping parts of “The Radetzy March.” But the goofy-looking old white guy conducting a theater full of well-dressed Europeans just made them laugh. He hit Pause.

            He explained that this was a traditional New Year’s concert performed annually in Vienna since before WWII. “The Radetzy March” was always played as an encore and people loved it. It was tradition. The students’ blank faces didn’t seem to register any importance in that.

            “It’s like reading “Twas the Night Before Christmas” on the night before Christmas,” he said and Milly had a sense of dread over what was coming next.

            Casey Wiley, home-schooled through eighth grade, raised her hand, “In our house we read from the Gospel of Luke on Christmas Eve.”

            And yes, she said it with an attitude.

            “Look, the point is,” Anders Lanski said, clearly exasperated, “Musicians and conductors don’t always like what they have to play or conduct. I don’t like “The Radetzy March,” he went on, “And yeah, maybe those people clapping look old and stupid to you. But sometimes you have to play things people want to hear so they’ll continue to support the orchestra.”

            Milly smiled to herself. She admired his honesty. Music is art. But if you want to play, it also has to be a business.

            Anders must have struck a nerve with the students because they were mildly more polite after that. And when it came time for Q & A, they actually had questions. Not terribly intelligent ones. But questions, nonetheless. One girl—a student in Milly’s sixth period English class--even asked what his early musical influences were.

            “Like most of you, I listened to what was on the radio. I was in a band--.”

            “What’d you play?” a boy called out.

            “Oh, I played keyboards. My mom had made me take piano lessons from the time I was really young. She made me practice. I figured getting into a band in high school was a good way to get even. We rehearsed in our basement. She really hated it.”

            The same boy called out, “I mean songs. What songs did you play?”

            Anders laughed, “What do you think? Loud ones. You’re probably too young to know them,” he said, and burst into a pretty good Jim Morrison: “Come on, come on, come on, come on, touch me baby…Can’t you see that I am not afraid?”

            The teachers all laughed, the students just seemed shocked. This guy was supposed to be a boring snob.

            Then he channeled Joe Cocker, “Ain’t it high time we went, ain’t it high time we went?” flailing his arms and shaking his head. And he finished up his medley with a spot-on Robert Plant, “And she’s buy-uy-ing a stair-air-way to heh-von.”

            The teachers began clapping and, confused, the students joined in.

            Another girl raised her hand, “So why did you stop playing rock?”