Eventually I learned to love music. This happened many years after the Professor came to our house and banged his wooden cane on our old second-hand piano, years after he would curl his wizened hands over mine and place my fingers correctly on the keys.
I wasn't a particularly rebellious child, but you could often find me daydreaming, looking out the window to a world more interesting than my own. I loved being outdoors. I was 'done with indoor complaints,' as Whitman expressed it. Though I usually had a book in hand, I liked to read outside, sitting under our weeping willow tree or on the front stoop. But even more than reading, I loved the long summer days of playing kickball or softball, riding my bicycle with my friends. Some of us had dance or music lessons, usually with the piano. Houses had one the same way they had a garage, a playroom with a T.V. and a living room where kids were not allowed to touch the furniture. So even though the lessons didn't fit in with the 'open road,' I accepted that playing the piano was something that I just needed to learn.
It's Monday, nearly 5 o'clock on a November afternoon. These are days when darkness steals up on you suddenly. In the kitchen I flick on the switch and light floods the bright yellow walls. I'm doodling on a piece of paper, nervous as usual before my piano lesson with the Professor, who was recommended to us as a "demanding but fair" teacher, and a real concert pianist in Russia. I've already had a year of group lessons at my school, so now it's time to "hone your skills," as my mother says, and take from a real piano master.
"Why does he always kiss your hand?" I ask her before the lesson.
"Because he's European," she pauses from cutting up an onion, "and you see it's a European custom for a man to kiss a lady's hand."
"Sounds pretty weird to me," I manage to say before the doorbell rings, precisely at 5:00. I crumple up the paper I'm drawing on, take a deep breath, try to shake off my feeling of doom and open the door.
"Gutevening." The Professor bows, and with his cane he hobbles past me to the kitchen. My mother pauses in her dinner preparation—she's cut the onion, minced the garlic, rinsed the lettuce. Now she's washing out some dirty glasses. The Professor goes to take her wet hand, bends slightly and rests his thin lips upon it. "It smells like onion," she protests, laughing but doesn't draw her hand away. He gestures 'no matter,' and bows again.
The hand-kissing over, the professor follows me down eight steps in our split level house to the 'piano room.' Unlike living rooms in my friends' houses where the piano is the showcase item, in our house it's hidden in what was originally a large playroom but made into two rooms, one for my father's study, the other for the piano. Besides being in the wrong place, the piano should be a sleek black baby grand, not an old brown second-hand Knabe. The room has one good feature though: a large window looking directly out to the cul-de-sac where all the neighborhood kids gather and play baseball in the summer. This window, with the blinds carefully lifted, is my escape, when the piano lessons with the Professor become too hard for me to take.
Besides the hand-kissing, the Professor follows other rituals. Next to the piano must be the electric heater and a stool where he props up his spindly legs. My mother brings him the dusty green Army blanket that he arranges on his lap, but it also makes him sneeze. He rubs his legs as I play. My legs are burning. I'm sweating.
His name? He is only the Professor from Russia who lived many years in Paris before coming to America. I never hear him speak Russian or French, hardly even English. He counts loudly like a child learning: "and WONNE and TOOO and TREEE." I never probe into his background. For me, it has no meaning.
"Cannot you count!" he yells at me through the long dark winter afternoons. It seems I can't, never in a way he approves. In enormous black accusatory letters, he writes over whatever piece I'm learning: 'TO COUNT!', 'NOT TO SKIP!' or 'TO WORK!' For emphasis he bangs his cane on the old Knabe.
He terrifies me. Other kids take lessons from sweet teachers who reward them for learning their pieces with gold star stickers in their piano music books. I beg my mother to let me stop with the lessons, but her reply is always "He has such a good reputation in the Washington area, and besides, it's so nice to play the piano, don't you agree?" Maybe she feels the piano will bring a little culture into my rough eleven-year-old life, away from competing with my three brothers with batting practice, tackle football and bicycle races (which I always lose with skinned elbows and knees.) So, week after week through the winter months I trudge through Czerny exercises and Bach inventions. I endure the sound of WONNE and TOOO and TREEE, the sight of the stooped over little old white-haired man, the smell of stale cigar and heavy cheap cologne, of breath mints he pops into his mouth as I play. And I taste these lessons, bitter medicine I figure I must swallow to learn.
One evening in early spring, I am carefully counting Saint Saën's 'The Swan.' The professor bangs his cane. "No! Play like you are in love." He coughs. "Ha! You in love. All right. Not to skip. We continue." The professor's remark keeps turning around in my mind. Had the Professor ever known love?
"Why are you more bad?" he yells at me on a warm spring evening, sensing that I'm not practicing. With the longer days I'm beginning to stray from the piano. The heater and blanket are put away. During the lesson I catch myself gazing out the large window to the cul-de-sac and shouts of kids playing baseball. Here I am inside with this old pointy-nosed grouch who takes my hand in his pale, blue-veined and translucent hand, and tries to curl my fingers in the right position.
As the end of the school year nears, my mother finally takes pity on me and agrees that I won't have to continue with the Professor in the fall, that we can look for another piano teacher. ("You don't want to give it up do you?") I can hardly contain my excitement the day of the last lesson. No more "WONNE and TOOO and TREEE!"
It's a brilliant sunny day in early June when the doorbell rings and we begin like all the other lessons, with the hand-kissing in the kitchen and the Professor following me down the steps to the piano. The room is flooded with light. He is dressed in light clothes, with a short-sleeved shirt open at the neck. Some scraggly white hairs are visible. I look away in disgust. Whatever time of year, I feel he should be wearing a long-sleeved shirt and maybe even a coat.
He doesn't know yet that I'm not continuing lessons in the fall, and he assigns me a piece to work on in the summer months. "Until September when we will meet again," he stares at me. I look away.
"If you do not mind I play a little, it sounds like this." He sits on the bench next to me, his bony thigh touching my own. I edge over to make more room.
A piece by Schumann, called 'Knight Rupert.' It is dark, ugly. "Stop, stop!" I want to yell. The shouting of the kids outside gradually fills my ears. If I close my eyes, I'm hitting the ball right between second and third base, where Lynn Martin is standing and she can't catch a thing. I run the bases to the sound of cheers.
The cheers dissolve into a deep rumbling like thunder, pulling me back into the room, to this evil-sounding dark song.
That splendid day of June, the Professor walks out of my life forever, but the ominous echoes of 'Knight Rupert' hang in the air for days.
The following year, I have lessons with a teacher who makes a living as a jazz musician. He never yells, doesn't tell me to practice, and lets me play from the Beatles songbook. But since he demands little, I give less.
So, for a few years I stop lessons, drop my tomboy role, stop competing with my brothers, and devote my energy to getting boys to like me. For a while my mother keeps telling me how wonderful it is to know how to play the piano, but then she gives up. The old Knabe sits downstairs. Dust collects on the keys.
But a few years later I decide on my own to start lessons again. I ride my bicycle to my new teacher's house, sit in her living room with the baby grand that I yearned for. I love to hear her play. She reminds me to count and to pay attention to forte and pianissimo. She expects me to practice. With the metronome click-clacking on top of the piano, for a while I hear in my mind the Professor's measured counting. At a recital I play Chopin's 'Minute Waltz' under my own anxiety. I practice so much that my family starts humming the frenetic opening bars of the waltz throughout the day. My teacher compliments me but tells me to relax more and not be so tense. As the lessons continue, the 'WONNE and TOOO and TREEE' gradually fade away.
Over fifty years have passed and I've often thought of the Professor, this slight feeble Russian émigré who taught by fear. I wish I had seen him more as a person, but maybe that wasn't possible for my eleven-year-old self. Just what was his story, and was it because of him or despite him that I continue to play? Can you really learn from someone you hate? As a teacher myself I always tried to create a pleasant learning environment, believing that to learn it must be from someone you like.
Today I sit at my white upright, manufactured in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century, as sunlight streams in from the living room doors. The piano has a story of its own; it was used in speakeasies during Prohibition. It's heavy, the keys stick and it can't stay tuned very well. But I still play. Under the wobbly piano stool lies a small handmade rust colored rug. Certainly I'm no Rachmaninoff or Rubinstein. For me it's just "nice to play," and it makes me happy that I've had a piano most of my life.
When my daughter took piano lessons, at the same age as me, I used to love to watch her and her teacher, who arrived at the house usually breathless, as she was running from lesson to lesson. This lovely young woman always encouraged her pupil ("That's wonderful. I can see you really practiced this week!") and my daughter's bright smile. No sense of doom there.
I used to wonder sometimes, up there in piano teachers heaven, did the Professor ever have regrets about the way he treated his students? I'm sure he didn't; after you kissed the mother's hand, onion smell or not, for him, his rule by fear was surely the only way to teach.
