Chapter Five
Sour notes
When I was six, my mother felt I should play the violin. I have no idea why, since I had shown no musical talent and we had little money. Nevertheless, she convinced my father to buy me an old instrument hanging in a pawn shop. It had a small crack in its body, two broken strings and a bow with so many horse hairs missing it looked like a device invented to floss elephants’ teeth. But when it was examined by the thin, anxious, dark-haired man who would become my instructor it was discovered to be a — battered old violin that cost twice as much to repair as my father had begrudgingly paid for it.
It was a time when hundreds of thousands of unemployed men would stoop to do anything for a few dollars. Men came to our door offering to sharpen knives. They offered to paint the house, fix broken appliances, do any needed house repairs, weed the garden, all for a couple of dollars, or, at times, only a meal.
I don’t know what Mr. Dix, my violin instructor, had done before the Depression. I like to think he had played first violin with the Cleveland Orchestra and lost his job for putting too much rosin on his bow strings at a time the management was cutting expenses. I like to think that he had fallen in love with a young woman while hitchhiking through Canton on his way to find a job in Cincinnati and so remained in our city.
Whatever wrong he had done, he looked like he needed a meal and his frayed collar and sleeve ends showed that he needed a new shirt. Unfortunately, he was also a serious lover of music.
Pianists only have to hit the correct key to get the right note. No one can play the violin without signing a pact with the devil.
It defies the laws of physics for a human to press his finger on a taut string in exactly the right place two times in a row while holding a hollow wooden box with his chin and, with his other hand, drawing part of a horse’s tail across the string. Not only that, but the string on which the tail is being rubbed must be the right one out of four possible choices. If that isn’t difficult enough, consider this: the bow must not touch the other strings. Such a movement cannot be done by a human. It requires the aid of supernatural power, whether from the devil, or from God.
Catholic school kids were compelled to ask a lot of God, mostly through the Virgin Mother and enough saints to triple the population density of California, a place that is not their natural habitat. The nuns told us of angels who came down from heaven and helped boys and girls who prayed for help with their homework — some even did some of the work for them. I prayed for help a lot. Why study or practice when you can get an angel to do it for you?
I was too scared of authority to pray to God directly to help me find E flat, or to send down one of His angels who could do it. You didn’t want to upset someone who could send you directly to hell with trivial matters. I prayed to the fourteen saints or so who had the reputation of being the top agents, the ones who could bypass all the secretaries and personal assistants and get though to God at his private, unlisted number.
Not even St. Jude, the patron of the impossible, could help. What came out of my violin sounded like a cat with its tail caught under a rocker.
It’s hard to believe that Mr. Dix had so many pupils he could afford to lose one. After six weeks of lessons, he still wore frayed shirts and looked like he was on a two week fast. But starvation was preferable to listening to me make the scraping sounds of a rusty hinge. A cow rubbing against a barbed wire fence made more melody.
He told my parents the task was hopeless and was never seen again.
But my mother didn’t give up. When I was in sixth grade she bought a small marimba with her Avon money and brought it in the house saying I was to learn to play it.
“We let you choose the violin. Now I’m going to choose what you’re going to play.”
It was useless to protest that I didn’t choose the violin. It was entirely their idea, but they were convinced that my dearest wish when I was six was to become a great violinist.
I had never seen a marimba, which is like a xylophone with long tubes hanging down from it. The ones they use mostly in orchestras that play Latin American music have tubes of polished metal. Mine had cardboard tubes like the ones inside a rolls of paper towels and toilet paper, except they were painted silver and had a metal cap on one end.
She choose the marimba for me because the man in the apartment next to us in Chicago had played the instrument at the World’s Fair and she had been fascinated watching him hold several mallets in each hand and pound out music.
I never got to the several mallets in each hand phase. But at least when I hit a wooden bar that had “C-” engraved on it, I got “C-.” |
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