The Last Samurai

Uncle Buddy and my mother had wanted to be singers because they loved opera, but they did not really know what you had to do to become one.

The way they saw it was, obviously a music school couldn’t let in every Tom Dick and Harry, it would assess people on the basis of their instruments, once you got in you could start singing. But after the audition my mother thought it might work some other way. If there was this desert of technical work to be crossed before you could play the piano, maybe every other instrument and maybe the voice was also surrounded by a desert.

My mother kept playing the exercise. She did not belong to the school choir because it spent most of its time preparing for the Christian highlights of the year. Who knew what you had to do to be a singer?

My mother kept playing the exercise because the Juilliard had said the piano was her instrument.

One day my grandmother came into the room. She said You know your father only wants what’s best for you. She said You’re driving him crazy, what do you think it’s like for a man like that to hear this day after day? She said Look. Don’t decide today. You’ve done two hours already, enough for one day, come downtown with me and help me pick out a blouse for your sister.

They went shopping and her mother bought her a dress for $200 and another dress for $250 and a hat and another hat that looked better and a pair of shoes to go with one of the hats. They went home and her father offered her a trip to Florida which she declined. They went shopping and her mother bought her six cashmere sweaters in pastel shades.

My grandmother kept coming in whenever my mother tried to practice and my mother got angrier and angrier. What had happened was this:

My grandfather had left Vienna in 1922 and he had settled in Philadelphia and done pretty well. The quality of the music available was not really comparable to what he was used to, but otherwise it was not too bad. He married and got through the Depression all right and from a business point of view the War was a good thing because sales of wedding rings shot up. From another point of view the War changed his views.

Most of his family was still in Austria. If you are a jeweler people think you are made of money and sooner or later a letter would come, probably from someone he had never liked, he would have to come up with several thousand dollars for a surety and then he would get involved in a protracted correspondence. Say you have a man who has an advanced degree in engineering and a year of teaching at university level, say he has had to resign his position at the end of the year because students of Aryan stock should not be defiled by instruction from a person of impure blood, say he has spent some time in industry though not at the level you would expect for his qualifications, say he has an actual offer of a teaching position at an American college, you write to the State Department and the State Department explains that unfortunately a minimum of two years’ teaching experience is required for the application to be approved. You get into a protracted correspondence and one day you write to the applicant to explain what is happening and get no reply.

Mr. Konigsberg did not talk about this much, and when his children said they wanted to be musicians he did not even touch on it lightly, but he said you can never tell what will happen. He said being an accountant was not the end of the world. He said being a secretary was not so terrible.

It seemed as though the things he did not say were so terrible they could not be said, and of course it’s not so terrible to be a secretary or an accountant. But Linda had seen four before her do something that was not so terrible. Now it turned out that it had absolutely nothing to do with whether McCarthyism was anti-Semitism dressed up as an attack on the Communists or with their chances of resettling in Canada or Brazil should the need arise. What it really was was that their father couldn’t stand to be around people who were practicing to the standard set by the finest conservatory in the country. Well, if you want to ruin people’s lives, fine. You want to reenact the Goddamned Sound of Music in the home, fine. But you don’t have to blame it on Hitler.

Then Buddy and the atheist came back and the atheist said they could just buy a piano for the motel and Linda could practice there. Linda said wouldn’t it bother the guests and the atheist explained that the guests would arrive in the evening after a long day’s driving and be on their way first thing the next morning, that was the beauty of a motel. He said grinning that what’s more he would take her to Helene’s and teach her to play pool so that she would always have something to fall back on.