Cambridge

Vishwa hopped up from the sofa, trying to put his shoes on as he stood. Only one foot got in.

  “Vishwa,” he said, extending his beautiful hand.

  Frederika had hold of the baby’s arm with her right hand to make sure she didn’t wander away. She put out her left.

  “And I am Frederika,” she said.

  They stood there holding hands, Vishwa with one sock foot, Frederika nearly a head taller, while Brahms swooped and dived and sighed. I sat on the sofa with half the heavy score in my lap, watching.

  “You are the nanny?” Vishwa asked.

  Frederika looked as if she were going to get mad, then she smiled. “Not exactly. But, I suppose I am. And other things too.”

  “Other?” Vishwa inclined his head toward her.

  “General helpfulness,” she said.

  “General helpfulness is …” Vishwa paused. “General helpfulness is, well, helpful.” I could see that he thought he’d said a dumb thing. Frederika liked it, though. Her smile got bigger.

  “I am trying,” she said. “Okay, now.” She got a better grip on the baby’s soft arm. “Let’s not disturb.”

  “It is a delight to meet you,” said Vishwa.

  “Okay, okay,” said Frederika.

  Okay, okay, was Frederika’s normal exit line, but Vishwa didn’t know that and looked put out.

  “She always says that,” I told him, after she’d left. “She says, Okay, okay, instead of Good-bye.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Vishwa. He was staring off at nothing. The third movement kept dipping and soaring.

  “Is she new, this nanny?” he asked.

  “She was in England with us,” I told him. “First she was in England, then she was in Italy, and now she’s come here.”

  “Oh.” He patted his funny hair a few times. “Well, now,” he said, all brisk business. “Lesson finished.” He grabbed the score and stuffed it into his briefcase. “I’ll leave you the record. That way you can listen if you like.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “What should I practice?”

  “Practice?” Vishwa squinted at me with his neck extended while putting on his other shoe. “You practice listening,” he said. “Listen and sing.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s a lot,” he said. “To really listen: That’s work. But you’re a good listener, I can tell.”

  “I am?” I was amazed. “Why? How? How can you tell?”

  “You let the music in,” he said.

  All week I sang the parts of the symphony that I could remember. I even took the liberty of using the record player once, while my mother was at the Star Market. Like the sofa, the record player was somehow off-limits. It wasn’t forbidden, but it was a restricted area, not part of my world the way the backyard was. I sat on the floor to listen so as not to commit the double trespass of using the sofa and the record player simultaneously.

  I forgot to turn it off, though, and my mother noticed.

  “Were you listening to your Brahms?” she asked.

  “Vishwa told me to,” I said, ready to fight.

  “That’s good,” was all she said.

  I was excited that Tuesday was coming around again, bringing Vishwa and my next lesson.

  “Hello, hello,” he said. “Did you listen?”

  I nodded.

  “Can you sing some?”

  I did.

  “Good,” he said. “Now let’s try with the score.”

  We got on the sofa and he spread the score across our laps. “You like the poco allegretto,” he said, “so let’s start there. Look.” He pointed at the big block of strings, the violins first and the violas and cellos below. “Can you see the line of the music making the song?”

  I looked, but it was just a tangle.

  “Sing it,” he said. “Sing it and watch the line.”

  I sang, and suddenly, I did see it. I saw the score making the movement of the sound. “I see it!” I said.

  It seems amazing to me now that with all the solfège and piano lessons, with all the exposure that I’d had to it, written music had not until that moment added up to anything. Each note or chord had been a distinct, unique problem I couldn’t solve. I knew that the notes were the alphabet of sound, but for me they were dots and lines. Maybe it was because Vishwa was so cozy, or because I’d sung the third movement of Brahms’s symphony a hundred times. Something changed that day. I saw that the music on the page was the sentences, the paragraphs, the story of the symphony, and that it could be read the way I would read a book. For the space of several minutes, I had the sensation of reading it as I sang.

  “There,” said Vishwa. “You can read it. You saw the sound on the page.”

  Immediately I had a bad thought. “It’s because I know how it goes,” I said. “If I didn’t know the melody, I wouldn’t see it there.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “I wonder if that’s true. And even if it is, is that important?”

  “It’s not really reading,” I said.

  “Do you want to try a part you don’t know?”

  “No!” I wailed. “Suppose it isn’t real?”

  For a minute he didn’t say anything. Sticky little tears made the edges of my eyes itch.

  “Why is this a big problem?” Vishwa asked. He seemed to be making a general inquiry, not really asking me, and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know why, anyhow. “You have so much feeling and understanding for the music. I don’t see why you’re worried. You’ll learn to read eventually, if that’s what you want. Do you want to?”

  That was hard to answer. I wanted what I always wanted, to know how to do it already.

  “I ought to know how,” I said. “I ought to know already. I went to all that stupid solfège.”

  “Solfège is not helpful,” said Vishwa.

  “I didn’t like it,” I said.

  “Nobody likes it! It murders music.”

  Romantic Vishwa, the Indian Liszt—though my mother probably would have told me that Liszt practiced his finger exercises and went to solfège and I was kidding myself if I thought he hadn’t.

  While I was thinking about Liszt, Vishwa had done a sandpiper and was on the other side of the room rummaging in the briefcase.

  “I brought another record,” he said. “We can listen to a new thing. Not to read, just to hear something nice. There’s a song for it too.”

  He put on the record.

  “This is, the symphony, that Schubert wrote and never finished,” he sang along with it. It was very beautiful. For the second line, which went higher and seemed to have changed key, he sang the same words, and then, a little extra downward turn in the music, “Never finished, never finished.”

  “Why didn’t he finish it?” I asked.

  “Didn’t get around to it,” Vishwa said. “Then, died.”

  We sat and listened together. Vishwa did a bit of surreptitious conducting, moving his right hand back and forth near his knee. I relaxed.

  My mother came in. “This is, the symphony, that Schubert wrote and never finished,” she sang.

  “Does everybody know this?” I asked.

  “I think so,” said Vishwa. “Even people who don’t know much about music. Unlike you,” he said, tilting his head toward my mother.

  My mother nodded, agreeing with this assessment.

  “And now you know it too,” Vishwa told me.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” my mother said.

  “No, no, we’re done for today,” said Vishwa.

  “I wondered—Frederika and I wondered—if you would like to stay for dinner.”

  Frederika and I wondered, I thought. Why was Frederika part of the wondering?

  An agonized look sprang onto Vishwa’s face.

  “I cannot stay tonight,” he said. “I cannot. How I wish I could. Oh, dear.”

  “Is there a rehearsal?”

  Vishwa shook his head, but didn’t say why.

  “Another time, then.” My mother turned to go.

  “Next week!”
Vishwa was standing up to emphasize that next week would be good. “I could stay next week. Or even”—he looked at the floor—“tomorrow or the day after that.”

  “Next week,” said my mother. “Stay after the next lesson. That will be nice.”

  “It will be wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very much.” Vishwa bowed a little at my mother’s back. When he turned toward me again, to collect the score from the sofa, he was smiling so fiercely I thought his lips might crack. He tried to resume a normal face to say good-bye, but he couldn’t. I watched him failing to get a grip on his smile. “See you next week,” he said, beaming.

  Some Dinner Parties

  Vishwa came Tuesdays. Wednesday there was a big planning session. Frederika and my mother holed up in the kitchen with cookbooks and notepads, toys for the baby so they could keep her distracted, lots of cigarettes for my mother, and lots of cups of tea for Frederika. Almost immediately they ran into a cultural complication.

  “Is Vishwa a Hindu?” my mother asked. “That must be a Hindu name.”

  “I have no idea,” said Frederika.

  “Carl will know because of Jagdeesh. I’d better call.”

  “Who’s Jagdeesh?” I asked. I had claimed a stomachache and been allowed to stay home and participate. My job was to boil water for Frederika’s tea.

  “Vishwa’s brother,” my mother said. “He’s an economist with Daddy. That’s why we have Vishwa.”

  She got on the phone.

  “They’re Hindu, aren’t they?” she asked. “But what about being religious? I mean food.” Pause. “Well, you have to find out!” Pause. “But suppose he doesn’t eat beef? Suppose he’s a vegetarian? We have to know.” Another pause while my father gave a disquisition on something. “That’s just impossible,” my mother said. “I can’t even—that can’t be true. He would never have accepted the invitation.” She hung up and stared out the kitchen window.

  “What is it? What is it?” asked Frederika.

  “Wait a minute,” my mother said. She called my father back. “Do you think we should invite Jagdeesh too?” Pause. “No, I don’t want to. What I’m asking is whether you think we ought to.” Pause. “Fine. We won’t invite him. But call back as soon as you talk to him.” She hung up.

  “He says if they’re Brahmans, Vishwa won’t eat any food prepared by us. That’s part of being a Brahman. It’s hopeless.”

  “But he wouldn’t have accepted,” Frederika said. “Just as you said. He wouldn’t have said yes.”

  “Maybe to be polite? Maybe to see you?” My mother lit a cigarette. She had one going already.

  “You have one,” Frederika pointed out.

  The phone rang. My mother grabbed it. “Okay.” She nodded. “Okay. Good. Great! Bye.”

  “So?” Frederika leaned across the kitchen table.

  “He will eat anything, even beef. But he prefers no beef. And they are Brahmans. But they’re not religious anymore.”

  “Why can’t we prepare the food?” I asked.

  “We can!” said Frederika.

  “Jagdeesh is pleased because he’s been worrying about Vishwa. He wants to see Vishwa settle down,” my mother said.

  “But why did you say we couldn’t prepare it?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” my mother told me. “It’s a system, an arrangement they have in India about who does what in society. It’s very complicated and I can’t explain it and anyhow it doesn’t matter. I mean, to our dinner.” She turned to Frederika. “Coq au vin? We could have polenta first. You remember that way they make it, cook it first on the stove, then cut it up and put it under the broiler with a little cheese on top. That’s good. Polenta and chicken and then—I don’t know what.”

  “Pickled things,” suggested Frederika. She was a good pickler.

  “Hot things, maybe? Indian food is hot,” my mother said. “But we’re not trying to give him Indian food, are we.”

  “I could make gravlax,” said Frederika.

  “Mmm,” said my mother. “That’s confusing, though, isn’t it? Gravlax, then polenta, then chicken?”

  “It’s international,” said Frederika.

  “It’s that,” my mother agreed.

  “I could make the cardamom cake,” Frederika said.

  “That,” my mother said, “is precisely what you should make. Cardamom is Indian but cardamom cake is Swedish. It’s perfect.”

  “No gravlax?” Frederika sounded disappointed.

  “Let’s see what develops with the rest of dinner,” my mother said.

  “Is cardamom from India?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” my mother said, “but they like it there.”

  I went into the living room and took down the big dictionary, the one I could barely lift off the shelf, to look up cardamom. “An East Indian plant,” it said. “It is Indian,” I called into the kitchen, but nobody responded. I sat on the sofa and hummed my Brahms. Then I hummed the symphony that Schubert wrote and never finished. Then I went back into the kitchen, where my mother was having a new idea.

  “If he’ll eat beef,” she said, “we could have a kind of musical menu. Tournedos Rossini, Mozart cake. There’s some kind of Something Verdi, but I can’t remember what it is.”

  “But he doesn’t like to eat the beef,” Frederika said. “What other music foods are there?”

  “ ‘If music be the food of love,’ ” my mother said. “ ‘Play on,’ ” she added.

  “I’m going for a bike ride,” I said.

  “I thought you had a stomachache,” said my mother. She was a stickler about that. I could stay home with my fake illness, but I had to pretend to have it all day.

  Frederika clinked her teacup against her saucer. “I need more tea.” She winked at me. She was being sweet, trying to make me feel important. “I can’t think without tea.”

  My mother had been standing at the stove considering the dinner possibilities and looking at the burners as if she were imagining each thing cooking there. Suddenly she said, “We’re making too much of this. We should just have dinner the way we always do. It’s not a party. We want him to feel he’s part of the family.”

  “Spaghetti?” Frederika asked. She sounded alarmed.

  “Why not? Or a nice cozy roast chicken.”

  “With a bit of polenta and a cardamom cake?” Frederika had my mother’s number.

  My mother laughed. Then she pointed at Frederika. “This is your future we’re talking about.”

  “I think you are jumping at a conclusion,” Frederika said. Her face was pink.

  “Jumping to,” said my mother. “I’m just trying to arrive at a conclusion. A successful conclusion for you.”

  “But we haven’t even started,” said Frederika.

  “That’s about to change.” My mother went back to the pile of cookbooks and opened one. “Broiled swordfish?”

  “I think swordfishes are ugly-looking,” said Frederika.

  I went upstairs to read.

  Thursday, when I got home from school, it was coq au vin again. Friday, it was sole baked in sour cream and tarragon. Saturday, Frederika had a little fit.

  “Maybe this is all a mistake,” she said. “Maybe he only says he’s coming for politeness. Because he can’t say no he’s not coming if we invite him!”

  “Let’s just have spaghetti,” my mother said. This was meant to be comforting, but it didn’t work.

  “No!” Frederika was near tears. “Spaghetti is too poverty.”

  “Spaghetti doesn’t have to be that way, Freddy,” my mother said. “Freddy” was only for when Frederika was very upset, like when she got homesick. “How about a nice cozy chicken,” my mother intoned. “Roasty, all crispy, who wouldn’t like that?”

  “Yah, yah, okay, okay,” said Frederika, calming down. “And I do make cardamom cake sometimes. It’s not so damnable special-occasion.”

  “It’s damnable good,” said my mother. Damnable was a locution of Frederika’s that we had taken up.
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  Meanwhile, we had meat loaf for dinner. My father objected.

  “Annette,” he said. “Meat loaf?”

  “I’m too busy with the Vishwa event to worry about making something complicated for us too,” she said. “Anyhow, it’s pretty good.”

  “Beets will be next,” he said.

  My father was permitted to indulge his multi-vegetable phobia. The only cooked vegetables he would eat were the expensive ones: artichokes and asparagus. Later in the century it turned out he liked fennel too, but that didn’t help in the fifties, when nobody in America, including my mother, had heard of it yet. Potatoes were okay, but according to my mother, they were not a vegetable. Carrots and beets in particular were anathema. They were some sort of pollutant, and if they appeared on my father’s plate, he couldn’t eat dinner. Succotash was also taboo. By the age of eight I’d figured out that this phobia was about his mother, a great overcooker of carrots and beets and succotash—and cabbage and broccoli and squash. I liked these Russian mushes; they presented hundreds of opportunities to apply sour cream.

  We ate a lot of salad. Some nights we sat at the table chewing wads of watercress like a herd of cows. My mother tried sneaking in peas, for instance, or celery. They were always discovered and abominated. Lettuce, all varieties, was okay, tomatoes were okay, endive was okay. Spinach, green beans, kale, chard: all not okay. It was a kosherlike insanity with not even as much logic as Leviticus.

  That night we had roasted potatoes and a salad of endive and blanched asparagus with the meat loaf, so my father did not have much grounds for complaint. His real complaint was my mother’s distraction. Dinner was when he told about his day. If my mother did not give the appearance of being focused on him—a performance that included making a marvelous, mostly vegetable-free dinner—he got irritated.

  “Vishwa,” my father said. “He might as well be the King of Siam for all the trouble he’s causing.”

  My mother raised her eyebrows at Frederika in an Oh, men! signal. “It’s just for this first time,” she told my father.

  “Is he coming to dinner every week?” my father asked.

  “If things go well,” my mother said.

  “You’re joking!”

  “You don’t even know him,” my mother said. “He’s very charming and intelligent, and of course, a musical genius.”