The Last Samurai

At last he said that was enough. He gave her a simple exercise & he said: I want you to play this four hours a day for two months the way I showed you. After that you can go back to one of your pieces, but you must play with a relaxed wrist. If you can’t play with a relaxed wrist don’t play it. And you should play the exercise for two hours before you practice anything.

He said: Go back to the beginning and in a year you may have something to show me. I don’t promise we’ll take you, but I promise we’ll hear you play.

He said: You may think that promise isn’t worth a year of your life.

And he said: You may be right, but it’s the best I can do.

My mother shook his hand and said thank you politely.

She said: What about the violin? Is there anything you’d like me to do on the violin?

The homely man started to laugh & said No I don’t think so. He said he also had no advice to offer on the viola, the mandolin or the flute.

He said: Still, Rubinstein never played the flute and it doesn’t seem to have hurt him.

He said: I don’t know who’s been teaching you, but—Where is it you’re from, Philadelphia? Give this man a call, you can mention my name. Don’t call him if you’re not going to work, he’ll never speak to me again, but if you’re serious—Actually don’t call him for a couple of months, try it and see if you really want to put in the time, and if you’re serious give him a call.

He wrote a name & a phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to her and she put it in her bag. She asked if it was all right to play the exercise in B major instead, and he laughed and said she could play it 50% of the time in B major as long as she played it with a relaxed wrist. So she thanked him again, and she picked up the violin viola mandolin handbag and flute and left the room.

Another minute and she was outside in the street, staring up at the buildings. It was early afternoon.

If she had been accepted by the Juilliard she would have gone to the top of the Empire State Building and looked down on the city she had conquered; New York would have lain at her feet.

She did not want to go to the Empire State Building, so she walked to the Plaza Hotel to see the fountain where Fitzgerald and Zelda had danced in the nude. She said later that she stood by the fountain crying and shaking & yet thinking that it was the happiest day of her life, because if you were the youngest of five no one ever took you seriously, & now someone had taken her so seriously as a musician that he had told her to spend four hours a day on a single exercise. If the Juilliard said something like that even her father would have to take her seriously, & by some miracle she out of the whole family would be a real musician.

It was true that she actually wanted to be a singer but at least it was a start.

It began to drizzle, so she went to Saks Fifth Avenue to look at sweaters, and then she went back to the station and caught a train back to Philadelphia.

She got home and explained and nobody seemed to understand that somebody had taken her seriously.

What does he know? said my grandfather. Who ever heard of him? If he’s such a genius how come we never heard of him, eh?

I have to practice, said my mother, and she went to the piano. The memory of her heavy arm, with the weighted hand stumbling over the keys, was still new. She put her hands on the keys and for an hour a terrible, jerking noise came from the front room. All of the children had played the piano attractively from the age of three; no Konigsberg had ever played a scale in living memory; my grandparents had never heard anything so horrible in all their lives.

My grandparents had previously thought that nothing could be worse than to hear Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor 30 times a day. They now thought they should have known when they were lucky. My grandmother went so far as to say Why don’t you play that lovely piece you were playing the other day, Linda?

My mother said she could not play anything but the exercise for two months.

Meanwhile everybody was wondering what had happened to Buddy, who had just driven off with his friend without a word to anybody.

My mother said maybe he went downtown to look for a sweater.

My mother practiced hours every day, hours as painful to hear as to play. At first everybody thought she would give in. Day followed day, and the terrible stumbling sounds went on for hours on end.

She did not know what else to do.

In retrospect almost every aspect of the audition was much more hideously embarrassing than it had been at the time, the viola sonata in particular with the three repeats and the new andante kept coming back to haunt her. The only good thing about it was that at least she hadn’t opened her mouth to sing. But even after just three weeks of the exercise she thought that she would never again be able to walk innocently into a room to show what she could do.