Smells like cheese

A musical journey

Mrs. DeVito was my first piano teacher, and at first, I couldn’t have explained  why she reminded me of Bruno’s, the grocery store around the corner.  In that dimly-lit store, big hanging provolones dominated both the visual and olfactory landscapes.  The teacher, who nestled her blue-veined hand over mine so as to mold it into the proper domed shape for piano, who sat so close to me on the piano bench that our shoulders touched, smelled like cheese. 

My family was Jewish in Brooklyn, a two-ingredient melting pot where most of our neighbors were Italian.  We shopped at Bruno’s  only when we were out of milk and Vivian’s, the odor-free store on the corner – “You could eat off the floor,” said my mother –  was closed. Bruno, who spoke Italian to  most of the customers, kept his store open long hours;  to us, he was always plan B, a bit out-of- bounds. 

There was nothing out of bounds about Mrs. DeVito, a rather formal woman – a widow, as I remember – who kept her emotional if not physical distance,  and would have been horrified to suspect she smelled like anything.

We had encountered  her at the local YWHA (Young Women’s Hebrew Association), where early music lessons had two components:  A private lesson with one teacher (Mrs. DeVito), and a music theory class with a teacher whose most long-lasting mark on my memory is that every week during the break in the class, he went to the vending machine in the  stairwell and bought every student a nickel candy bar.  

On the day I had my first lesson with Mrs. DeVito, my mother sat outside the room waiting, so she could walk home with me.  I was eight, old enough in those times to walk that half-mile alone, but she must have realized that I’d need some support on Day 1 of piano.  The distance  between the Y and home was exactly 10 blocks, which over the years that followed,  going to the Y for piano lessons, swimming lessons, cooking lessons and all kinds of crafts,  I would count off a thousand times.

 I cried all the way home.   My mother’s old piano occupied a corner of our  living room, but she rarely played. Starting lessons had been my idea.  Because I’d set the challenge for myself, it was all the more distressing to think  that music was just too complicated for me to learn.  I would be both a failure and a quitter.  

Would my fingers ever understand the directions that were imparted by those marks on the staff?   Would I really have the time to practice every day?   What about when my friends were going bike-riding, and I was supposed to practice? Would my mother be furious if I didn’t?  These lessons were costing her money.

For a year – from September to June, just like the school year – I took lessons, picking my way through “Hot Cross Buns” (I knew what rugelach were, but if a hot cross bun had been placed before me, I’d have had trouble identifying it), to “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” (we had no old grey geese in Brooklyn).   And then  it was time for a recital. 

 The Y had a battered auditorium/gym,  usually the setting for Hadassah card parties, basketball practice  and potato-latke-making classes for teen-agers. For the end-of-year concert,  there were rows of folding metal chairs set up, enough for students, parents and whatever grandparents could be roped into attending.

The director of the music program stood at the front of the hall with a tattered sheet of paper in his hand, announcing the students one by one as they tottered to the stage to play their selections.  It was June in Brooklyn, hot and humid;  A large fan in one corner of the room blew over the heads of listeners, causing the corners of  the director’s creased paper to tremble.

Having practiced for months and memorized the music, I  was all ready to play my piece, Bach’s “Minuet in G Major.”  There were perhaps a dozen pupils in the first half of the program, then a dozen more after an intermission.   I sat at the edge of my chair, kicking my legs back and forth while I waited for my name to be called.  “And now, last but not least,” said the director, as I half stood up … , and then he said someone else’s name.   I turned to my parents, my eyes filled with tears.  “They forgot me,” I whispered.

“Just a minute,” said my mother, hurrying to the director’s side for a quick conversation before Barbara or Susan or Carole or whoever she was took the stage.   A soft but audible groan from the audience filled the room as concert-goers realized this event would be even longer than it had already been. 

The penultimate performer did her stuff, and then I did mine, and then everyone sighed, it was over, and that was that. 

Then there was the second year of piano lessons, and the second recital.  I was 10, and I was two years into my music studies.  This time I was to play “Fur Elise,” student renditions of which have been keeping Beethoven rolling in his grave for a couple of centuries.  The challenges were several-fold: it was a longer piece, more difficult to memorize; the pianist was to employ the pedal.  

This time there was a printed program, and I was on it.  All was in perfect readiness, the chair frames just a little rustier than the year before, the plastic upholstery just a little more tattered.  The dusty old curtain of the stage had been opened, and there were two pianos, side by side, in preparation for the kids who were going to play duets.

When the director called my name, I ascended the stage and sat down at the piano closest to the audience.  I was focused on the keyboard in front of me, but as I launched into the slow trill with which the piece begins,  a peripheral glance indicated that something else was going on nearby.  I continued with my performance,  proud of my solid memorization. Literally, I would not miss a beat..

I could hear a kind of gasp from the audience, and whatever it was that had attracted my side-eye came into focus.  A little kid, just a bit more than a toddler, had joined me on  stage, and was making his way to the piano on my left.    As I launched into what we elegantly called “the middle part” of the piece, this small improvising accompanist used his fist to pound out  a countermelody on the other piano.

I tried not to look at him, not to listen to him, to pretend he wasn’t there at all.  He remained on stage, playing that piano, for the duration of my performance.  I couldn’t tell whether the large applause at the end was for me or the kid who’d drowned me out.  As I left the stage, the director put the best shine on things:   “What a trouper,” he said.   

With that, my musical association with the Y ended.  My mother decided I would take lessons from her Hadassah friend Roz, a tiny woman with small hands that scampered over the keys of the grand piano in her apartment.  At first, this seemed good; she lived only nine blocks away, thereby saving a good two blocks when you added up the round trip to and fro lessons.

But we were mismatched:  I was a great galumphing girl and she was a small and peppy terrier of a woman.  Like Mrs. DeVito, she was a widow; I guess piano-teaching was considered a genteel occupation if a woman  “had to work.”

She played wonderfully well for Hadassah musicales and casino nights, but there was nothing inspiring about her relationship to music.   Also, she didn’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings, so she let go without comment the weeks I showed up for lessons without having practiced sufficient times.  I felt both guilty and annoyed. There was no recital, but that year I mastered “Malaguena.”

A year after I’d begun with Roz, my mother told her that I wanted to learn “popular” music rather than classical. My sixth grade teacher that year was Fred Greenbaum, who was the only sixth grade teacher in our school with a piano in the classroom.   He was known far and wide (well, far and wide as the geographical district of P.S. 180 students)  for his piano wizardry.

I don’t remember how my mother reached out, but she and Mrs. Greenbaum settled on a deal in which she paid him to come after school one day a week to give me a lesson.  I think that this was kind of a secret; Mr. Greenbaum’s higher-ups probably would not have liked him receiving greenbacks from the parents of one of his students.

I knew that this arrangement was really special.  I was glad to be in Mr. Greenbaum’s class during the school year, and there was no question of his improving my already good grades in exchange for the wads of cash (probably $3) he got for each music lesson.  It was I, after all, who had been chosen to read the 23rd psalm at elementary school graduation.  Mr. Greenberg coming to my house on Friday afternoons was just more proof of how special I was.

Mr. Greenberg had taught me a bunch about chord structure and how to use my left hand not only to accompany the melody in my right, but also to make everything sound as though it had been written by John Philip Sousa, with a few arpeggios thrown in.  His lessons deepened my relationship with the keyboard. But when it was time for junior high, the next year, that arrangement just didn’t make any sense.  

My father’s response to my music was always  critical.  Although my parents were proud of my playing (I did a fine rendition of “When You Wish Upon a Star” for company), when we were alone in the house, his reaction to my practicing was cool. He would be sitting in his easy chair, reading the paper or a book.  I’d play something, and he’d shake his head.  “Really sloppy,” he’d say.  “You’re not doing your best.”   And I’d play it again, and he’d say, “Still sloppy.”  He couldn’t read music, played a little harmonica by ear.   What he knew how to do, though, was take a lot of the joy of playing away from me, and make me, to this day, phobic about playing if anyone but my husband is in the house.   (My dream gig, I always thought, would be playing at Nordstrom, where no one is listening.)

 My mother,glad that  I was, after days of being nagged, taking the time to practice, rarely said anything negative.  But towards the end of every week,  if she noticed that I hadn’t practiced enough, she would threaten me with canceling the lesson.  “I’m not going to throw my money away,” she’d say, “I’m just going to call the teacher.”  The thought of this humiliation would cause tears of shame, and send me scurrying to the living room to try to make up the deficit.

I don’t know where my mother heard of Mr. Beckerman, but whoever told her about him said he was a sensational teacher, that he knew all kinds of motivational tricks and methods.  A middle-aged man with a bulging belly and a bulging briefcase, he’d show up every week with fresh things to learn, whether or not I’d properly learned the things he’d brought the week before.  Also in that briefcase was  a chalk white plastic bust of a famous musician.  Mr. Beckerman gave one out for each lesson.  Before long, the top of the piano was covered with rows of those figurines, each about 4 inches high.

Let’s call the Mr. Beckerman years the “Deep Purple”  era.  I not only remember playing that piece, but I remember my outrage when I looked at the music, which Mr. Beckerman had marked up with his deep blue ballpoint pen.  Somehow, he thought that although I could read music, and understood chord structure, it would be helpful if there was a C-major chord written in the music, he write “C-E-G-C” under it (if it was in the bass clef) or over it (if it was in the treble clef).    This not only made the sheet  music, printed in all its tidy majesty, look like an unmade bed; it was also an insult to my (perhaps limited, but still proud)  musical intelligence.  

I still have some of the music I played in those days, and it still annoys me to look at the mess Mr. Beckerman made of it.  I suppose he thought he was being helpful, and the ends (playing some complicated pieces) justified his means.   While I was playing a piece to which he’d assigned me the week before, he’d have the new one in his lap, hardly  listening to the prior assignment while he scribbled all over the pages of the new one. 

If you were Mr. Beckerman’s student, you “progressed” at breakneck speed.   The parents got good show-off opportunities when the kid (me) was hauled into the living room after a dinner party to play a Chopin waltz.   “Hot Cross Buns” had been left behind forever.

It didn’t matter how you held your hands, or whether you kept your foot on the pedal as though it were for gas and you were driving up Telegraph Hill. If you never quite remembered that the B was supposed to be a B-flat, well, so what, next week you’d be on to another piece.

Mr. Beckerman’s system, all carrots and no sticks, included the pinnacle of  his piano students’ year:  a student recital  at Carnegie Hall.    This wasn’t the grand concert hall, but one of several smaller venues in that 57th Street monument to music.  

I was one of Mr. Beckerman’s most advanced students and with his blessing (I honestly can’t remember which one of us suggested this), it was decided that I would play the “Minute Waltz.”  Extreme nerves, runaway tempos, faulty memory, take your pick.  It was a disaster.  I can’t even remember what my parents said, or how we made it home, or anything that happened later that day.  I can only close my eyes and picture that dark room with a single light on the piano and me lost, lost, lost, desperately trying to hack my way through the forest to the end of the piece.

That was the end of Mr. Beckerman, but not my musical studies. Somehow, I persevered with lessons. 

 A distant relative who seemed to be on her way to becoming a professional pianist – she was to wind up  the head of the music department at the High School of Music and Art in New York – was consulted.  She knew of a wonderful teacher, she said.  But he charged $8 an hour, he was in Manhattan and I’d have to go to his place, and before he would take me on, I’d have to audition.

George Pappas’ apartment was on West 55th Street in Manhattan, an hour’s subway ride away from where we lived, in deep Brooklyn.  My mother was with me for the audition.  

He lived on the fifth floor of an undistinguished apartment house, with a bored-looking doorman downstairs.  You walked right into the living room, where two grand Steinways stood side by side.  Mr.  Pappas, I’d been told, was a concert pianist, and he lived with another concert pianist.  Thus, the two pianos, a perfect arrangement for lessons.  

I sat down at one and lurched my way through a  couple of Chopin waltzes for that audition, missing notes that had gone long-lost during the era of Mr. Beckerman.     I was so nervous that I couldn’t look at Mr. Pappas’ expression, but he was probably wincing. 

Somehow, however,  he agreed to take me on.   He had a full roster of students, but we arranged that I would show up at his place every Sunday morning at 10.    This was pretty much just after I had gone through confirmation, meaning that Sunday school, at last, was over and done.  But for me, there’d be no sleeping in. By nine, I was up, out of the house and nestled in the subway car, among the early-morning errand-runners and drunks sleeping off Saturday night revels, 

As for the lessons, Mr. Pappas grabbed me by the scruff of my musical neck  and pulled me back from Chopin waltzes.   In perhaps my second year of lessons, with Mrs. DeVito in charge,  I thought I had “learned” Mozart’s Sonata in C. Mr. Pappas went way back to that, and I started learning it again, along with  two-part Bach inventions.  The focus was on how I held my hands, and the difference between slamming my fingers flat on the keys and stroking them as though I were tickling the head of our family dog.  There were hours of practice that involved just my hands, when I wasn’t even working on a prepared composition.  There were no annual recitals.

  In all the years – about five – that I took lessons from Mr. Pappas, he never talked with my parents, and I never saw another student in his apartment.  We didn’t flit from piece to piece.  We hunkered down and worked on the hands.  I sensed it was a privilege to take lessons from him, and when I realized that he was gay –  the first gay person that I knew –  his sophisticated mystique was even more captivating to me. 

.

Eventually, I played to accompany singers in school performances.  I played duets with friends whose skills were often superior to mine.  And I am happy spending  time at the piano alone, or with my husband upstairs, so no one else is listening.  I have more patience now than I did as a kid to work out the wrong notes. 

My thoughts about high points of my musical efforts are at first dominated by the low points:  my father’s criticisms, my dislike of Mr. Beckerman, sensing how much my older sister resented my parents dragging me into the living room to provide show-off after-meal  entertainment for their dinner guests; my younger son, a musician, slamming the door to his room so he didn’t have to hear it when I sat down by myself to play for pleasure.   

But there were two glorious moments.  Eventually, after a few years of re-studying pieces I’d chalked up as “done,” we got back into Chopin, preludes this time.  That included the “Raindrop” prelude, No. 15 in D-flat major. One Sunday morning, Mr. Pappas had a houseguest, who emerged from another room while I was in the middle of the lesson.   Mr. Pappas asked me to play that prelude for him. There was no gushing, but the command performance was a lavish compliment.

 It was perhaps a year later that I told my parents I thought it was time for me to stop taking lessons.  I knew my talents wouldn’t take me further, and that I had reached the pinnacle of my own capabilities.

Not so.  At 93, my mother had a stroke that took away not only her vigor, but also her speech.  She recuperated for two or three weeks at a brain-rehab facility, a large and well-run facility on the other side of the Bay from San Francisco.  The place was run like a camp, with patients given wheelchairs upon arrival, providing them with enough mobility to attend classes, seminars, movies, meals.

One Saturday, I was with her in the dining room, where the patients helped themselves to packages of apple sauce, stewed fruit, cottage cheese and other things that didn’t need much chewing or swallowing.   The week before, I had noticed an upright piano on one side of the room, so this week,  I’d brought along some music, fake books that would allow me to play standards from the American repertoire, music from Broadway shows, folk music and the like.   We’d been told by counselors that speech occupies a different section of the brain than music, and that music, which comes easily, could perhaps “free up” speech.

The piano was even more awful than my playing.  Most of the notes in the octaves lower or higher than middle C were gone, so the player had to use the instrument with arms spread wide, playing in registers at least sixteen notes apart.   With my mother’s wheelchair maneuvered into place at my side,  I flipped through the book, looking for songs she might like. .  My lessons in “popular” music had enabled me to sight read and plunk out the chords. My mother, unable to read the song titles at the top of each page,  smiled when she recognized a tune, and mumbled a few words along with the music.

We did some songs from “My Fair Lady” and “Oklahoma,” a little Stephen Foster (I know, politically incorrect, but everyone knew those songs).  Finally, I wanted to play something I liked, and as I flipped through the pages, I came across Tom Paxton’s  “The Last Thing on My Mind.” 

In my croaking alto,  I sang; at the two ends of the piano, I played.   My mother, member of a different generation than her folk-music-loving Boomer daughter,  didn’t join in  But another patient, a grizzled and frail looking man, wheeled his way over and  sang along with the music.  He knew all the words. 

I knew that smile on my mother’s face.  The moment was worth every nickel she’d  spent.