Long after her death I began to wonder about the feelings stirred up for Mom by the gift Grandma gave me of a Steinway upright piano on my seventh birthday. Although my mother wouldn't talk about her past, it is now clear that she never got over the loss of her piano or her resentment of Grandma for selling it. But, as usual, Mom wasn't talking. Nor did I ever see her sit down at the Steinway to play.
I, myself, loved experimenting, pounding away at the keyboard, an unpleasant sound to any ear but my own, prompting Mom to start investigating music schools.
Being a cultural and intellectual snob, she didn't care for many people, but she admired musicians and liked Mrs. Kravitt, a music teacher at the Metropolitan Music School in Manhattan. Bonded by a shared passion for music in general and the piano in particular, they teamed up in the spring of 1947 to oversee my musical education.
I was bored with practicing too, but Mom wanted me to practice an hour, "... EVERY day," she emphasized, "even if it's not a whole hour." Alert in the kitchen to the first sign of distraction in the dining room, she'd chide, "If you don't pay attention you're just wasting your time," and then, "Slow down!" as I galloped through an exercize, hoping to overpower mistakes and get it finished. "Keeping correct time is more important than playing fast," she'd always say. My eyes continually strayed from the music and fixed on my hands, which is how I was able to successfully resist musical literacy throughout three years of piano and theory lessons.
My mother loved her friends, they loved her, I loved them and, as a young child, wished we could all live together. With Pop, of course.
As a toddler during an outing with Mom and a friend of hers, it dawned on me that I was able to follow and understand their conversation. I quit whining and fidgeting and started listening, looking from speaker to speaker transfixed on Mom's lap. Her familiar voice was speaking known words, referring to someone I knew who went somewhere and did something I recognized. "I can understand this!" came to me in a flash, and from then on I took an interest in adult conversations. I recognized information when I heard it.
In a 1944 snapshot, her back perfectly aligned as always and straight like Grandma's, Mom sits on a concrete ledge at the entrance to a New York City BMT subway. Cool, composed and dignified, her lean, elegant look was consistent, as she clasps her fingers in her lap. Never out of style in what would today be described as a classic "dress-for-success" suit, her wardrobe emphasized brown which, on occasion, brightened to orange. A nurse's watch hangs upside down on her lapel. In later years she switched to a wristwatch, its face on the inside of her wrist, a small eccentricity, but typical of my mother, a woman with a mind of her own.
In the photo, Margie, her friend from high school, stands close by her side wearing a wide smile, a jaunty blazer, skirt and loafers. Leaning back into the two friends, straining the brass buttons of my traveling jacket, I grin shyly yet arrogantly into the sun with that special look of a young child safe with a trusted parent.
Merry and full of deep affection for my whole family, Margie was always generous, always a treat to be with. Deaf from birth and an accomplished lip reader, she spoke clearly in the nasal intonation of deaf people. Communication between us was often nonverbal and always easy. Margie took me on special theater dates, treated me to the Royal ballet where we saw Dame Margot Fontaine dance Swan Lake, and Broadway shows like Charley's Aunt with Ray Bolger.
Margie lived with her agreeable sister and cranky mother in an upscale building near Central Park. Her mother, a German Jew, looked down upon our Eastern European origins, another unpleasant reminder of childhood for my mother, whose snobby German Jewish neighbors had lots more income than my Grandma Lotte could bring in after separating from her abusive husband.
Margie never married; "a positive role model," my mother explained when I was 12, proof that, " ... a woman does not need a husband" to have a life. It was many years after my divorce, when I understood what a remarkable bit of wisdom Mom presented me with at age 12, impressively radical for 1952, the most conservative of times