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"Come work on it here," my father wrote. "There will
be nothing to distract you."
And so I packed my cello, drove from New York up the
coast, crossed on the ferry to Digby, bought a pint of
fragrant roadside blueberries and followed the gravel road
as far as the hand-lettered sign, "Please drive in. My car
battery is dead." With an arrow pointing up the dirt track
to my father's cabin.
I went so he would know that if I lost the competition
in Florence, my first try at a big international prize, it
would not be because I hadn't worked hard.
By day I practiced under a pine tree next to the
inland Nova Scotia lake. Slavishly I attended to dynamics,
rhythm, intonation, coordination, all measures of progress
my father noted and endorsed. And tried to convince myself
that if my technique was reliably solid, then I'd be free
to let fly the emotion. The open-air acoustic made
Dvorák's fierce opening articulations sound no stronger
than mosquitoes. The double-stops raised welts on my
thumb.
Evenings, I studied the shape and calculus of each
phrase, trying to express the heart of the music in the
one-room cabin, lit by a 20-watt bulb run off his car
battery, now recharged — positive to positive, negative to
negative — by my VW. And tried to conceal from my father
that in my hands, no matter how many hours spent, each
melody might still fall short of brilliance.
We kept a half dozen eggs and a stick of butter cool
along with some tomatoes and cukes in a bucket lowered on a
rope into the well. We fried up trout from the lake on the
woodstove. We swam off the log stringer propped on rocks
that he called a pier, checked each other for leeches and
ticks. He cleared brush, split firewood. Wrote
affectionate, argumentative letters to his brothers. He
rigged a handrail to guide us to the outhouse at night.
In the five years since my mother died, this had
become his favorite vacation.
Each week we drove the twelve miles to Mrs. Hubley's
store, whose sign on the asbestos siding promised
"GROCERIES" but whose dim interior provided conversation,
gossip and a Coke from her cooler along with canned stew,
packaged cookies and a pound or two of frozen hamburger.
Staples meant to tide us over until we could imbibe of the
only sustenance that counted: my forthcoming success.
At the end of a month I followed the gravel road out,
mailed my father's letters at Mrs. Hubley's, swallowed hard
to keep my stomach down on the car ferry that pitched and
rolled. I flew to Italy, cello carefully strapped into the
seat next to mine together with my father's admonition,
"Don't let up now." I checked into the pensione, one of a
number where small ambrosial blueberries came clotted with
cream, where tomatoes glistened with olive oil and aromatic
green herbs, and where behind each door hopeful contestants
practiced the cello hours at a stretch.
Behind my own door I concentrated on dissecting quirky
memory traps in Bach, the right balance of discipline and
charm in Boccherini, musical maturity in Beethoven. In the
ornate concert hall I rehearsed with the pianist assigned
to me, a short, plump woman with stubby, unerring fingers.
"I made the second round!" I shouted into the handset
of a post office telephone while the blank-faced clerk
clocked my assertions. "I'll tell him," shouted Mrs.
Hubley, who had never spoken to someone in a foreign
country before.
On stage several days later I focused on the dissonant
harmonies of the contemporary piece, willing myself to
ignore the judges seated twelve rows back, faces
impenetrable, pencils poised.
"I made the finals," I hollered into the now familiar
bureaucratic phone. "He'll be very happy," Mrs. Hubley
said, her far-away voice a disappointing substitute for the
eager excitement I anticipated in my father's face.
But on Dvorák my father's faith in me rested, and
Dvorák was a saga I wasn't certain I was up to telling. It
needed precision. But more than that, it needed sweep. I
was pretty sure I could deliver a solid performance with no
major blunders. Or an abandoned performance that risked
everything.
But not both.
On stage with the eighty-member orchestra and a
maestro who spoke no English, I could not keep the judges,
pencils busy, from insinuating themselves into my
consciousness. I shored up defenses, quieted my shaking
fingers and went for blemish-free. The less overt
humiliation. When I finished dead last of all ten
finalists, I felt a small shudder, like one of several that
shook my mother the night she died when I, alone, was with
her because my father, rationing the voltage of his grief,
and too proud for tears, had chosen premature solitude.
And I, in a similar act of evasion, flew home without
calling.
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