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Lessons Learned

Of the various teachers in Charles’s life, including high-school teachers Miss Hudgins and Miss Curran, and Ron Satok, an artist his parents retained to instruct him, the most influential and charismatic of his teachers was Rachel Cavalho, the forty-eight-year-old piano teacher who entered his life when he was eight. A tiny woman, she was always impeccably dressed, with a lace hanky wedged in her blouse sleeve and just the right understated necklace. She always wore her face made up like a little China doll, with false eyebrows painted black, little rounds of cheek rouge, and daubs of green over her eyes.

Temperamental and stubborn, she fancied herself the inspired mentor whose job it was to develop his skills, his higher thoughts, and his aspirations, and in so doing to transform him into an educated young man of breeding.

Once she took hold of Charles, Rachel wouldn’t let go. To describe their relationship as a teacher-student one is too simple; he was her full-time project. She was testy, hypersensitive, unhappy, and judgmental, but thoroughly dedicated to her work. She lived in a world of novels, minuets, and sonatinas, nostalgic for a civility and grace she had left behind in London and was unable to find in Canada. Above all, she was dedicated to keeping the banal outside world at a distance. Discipline was her religion; emotion to her was base and self-indulgent.

She compelled Charles to help her move to an apartment over a hardware store on Eglinton Avenue at Warren Road, where he studied with her from age ten to twenty. The main room was dominated by her pride and joy and raison d’être, a Bechstein concert grand piano and some carefully chosen exquisite objets d’art: a nineteenth-century painted-wood sculpture of a serene Japanese woman, which she always referred to as “my goddess,” a Chinese carved chair, some silk tapestries, and a nineteenth-century ink drawing by Rousseau.

Charles’s music teacher, Rachel Cavalho, 1963.