Читать книгу I Dwell in Possibility - Toni McNaron - Страница 16

Child’s Play

“Toni’s so talented—she can amuse herself for hours.” My mother said this often to our family and friends as proof of my creativity and resourcefulness. Hearing it, I always see myself sitting alone in a room, coloring or reading or building some new fantasy world.

The story began in my baby bed with its several rows of colored wooden beads strung on thin metal rods like an abacus. From the time I could stand, I moved the beads in endless mutations to produce colors and spaces. At three, I was given a little slate with a real abacus for its top. When my mother handed me my slate and piece of chalk, she said: “Here, honey, now draw a cat or print your ABC’s.” As long as she watched, I demonstrated what I gather were my precocious motor and mental skills. But as soon as she went into some other room, I put down the chalk and began to count and arrange the beads. I loved the click of one against another and the gliding sound as I moved a whole row from left to right, fast. Their bright reds, blues, greens, and yellows cheered me up, reminding me of my baby bed and of how much I liked standing up in it, staring at the big colored spheres.

At about four, I began to catch my feces in my hands before they fell into the toilet bowl, take them into my bedroom and hide them in an old shoebox my sister gave me. That box stayed under my bed, near the windows. When the grownups were busy elsewhere, I would steal into my room, crawl down between my bed and the wall, haul out my box and make wonderful creations. At its height my collection included ten figures and four or five cars. One day as I was busily executing my new idea for a giraffe, my mother discovered me. Deeply shocked, she gave me a severe lecture about “niceness,” then punished me by having me sit quietly in a chair for some five minutes. A few days later, she presented me with a box of colored modelling clay, but I refused to use it, saying, “Clay is for babies.”

I learned during this earliest phase of my artistic development that what I made could not last long, and that lesson was reinforced throughout my childhood. As payroll master for his company, my father brought home bags of bills and change every Thursday, only to take them away on Fridays to hand out in small brown envelopes to the workers. But while they were in our house, I could dump out and play with their contents. Each unbleached muslin bag from the First National Bank of Fairfield could hold several hundred copper pennies. I loved to hear them tumble onto my bedroom floor, then watch them scatter under my bed, into corners, out into the hall. Because Daddy worried that a coin or two might get lost under some piece of furniture, he urged me to play on the living room rug. The public nature of this space frustrated me, since people tracked back and forth on their way out the door. In the middle of an elaborate design, a large foot could invade my work area, disrupting my pennies, causing me to cry quietly as I tried to restore them.

The pennies served as borders for buildings, people, objects. But almost as soon as I had finished a town or barnyard or sentence, Mamie came and scooped them up because she needed the room for something, or Daddy rebagged them so he could get to bed in time to feel rested at 4:00 A.M., his wake-up hour.

The effect of these interruptions on my creativity was marked. Unlike some I know, I never kept a diary or journal, and I have no signs of childhood art, though I engaged almost daily in the act of making. I remember feeling quiet and steadied by such activities, safer than when talking. From a very early age, I was able to lose myself in such creative play, going far from5130 Holly Court, Fairfield, Alabama. But writing any of it down seemed dangerous to me; someone could easily take my stories or plans away if they existed on paper. So I lived out my mother’s proud boast—I did indeed amuse myself for hours, leaving no record for anyone to find, not even me.

I was a skinny child with a head full of long blond hair that I wore in curls like Scarlett O’Hara. This hair was mostly a bother as I ran wildly outside. Summers, Mamie plaited it into two stubbly braids held with rubber bands that pulled and were covered with grosgrain ribbons of various colors. Try as she did, my mother seemed incapable of making tight, neat braids like I saw on girls at school, but at least my neck was partly cleared so sweat could roll down easier. Every late afternoon, my hair had to be brushed, since my rambunctious playing tangled it horribly. Tender headed, I cried through most of this ritual. But all adults seemed convinced that my hair was my “crowning glory,” so there was no getting away from the torture. To this day, I have to force myself to brush the recommended fifty strokes and prefer simply to wash my hair and run my hands through it as it dries.

The reason I was skinny is my food story. At a rather early age I learned that if I did not eat my lunch or dinner, my mother would stay at the table coaxing me. Wanting her undivided attention sometimes fiercely, I began what must have been a tedious ritual. I picked and poked at my food until my father and sister were long gone from the table. Then Mamie and I were left to battle out the carrots or spinach or even mashed potatoes and gravy. “Eat, honey,” was the refrain to which I turned deaf ears, knowing I could outsit her and keep her talking.

The hard part of my regimen was that food got cold and inedible, so that finally no one would have wanted to have it. To handle this unforeseen development, I figured out how to toss bits of congealed vegetables or cold meat down the big furnace duct that came up to the dining room floor and was covered with a metal grating that I polished monthly to keep its brass coating shiny. While Mamie was in the kitchen getting another glass of iced tea, I would deftly get rid of some of the odious food. When she returned, I would brag about my cooperative behavior, “See all I’ve eaten while you were gone; aren’t I a good and brave girl now?” My poor mother praised me for what she took to be eating but what in reality was lying and having sure wrist action that later helped me throw a baseball to first base with amazing accuracy.

One day when I was about eleven and had been tossing unwanted food down the grate for years, I was shocked to learn that we were going to have the furnace cleaned out. On the appointed day, I made myself scarce the moment the burly white workman arrived at about nine in the morning. Ironically, we were all having lunch when he knocked on the basement door, came into our dining room, and unwrapped a small bundle. “I can’t tell how this stuff ever got into your furnace, ma’am, but I took it out. Do you want me to throw it away or what?” To my horror, the bundle contained parched chicken bones, unrecognizably shrunken things that must once have been carrots or beans or squash, dust-coated blobs of years-old potatoes. My mother graciously scooped it all up, saying over her shoulder as she fled into the kitchen, “Oh, never mind, I can just put it here in the trash, probably a cat or mouse did it.” Lame by any measure, and we both knew it.

When Mamie returned from the back porch, she sat down resignedly and looked right at me. “Toni, honey, how could you have told me such stories all these years. I thought you were trying to eat, and you were doing something no nice person could imagine. Wherever did you get such an idea in the first place?” I answered not at all but glumly chewed the vegetable before me. I never really answered Mamie, and she never required it. From then on, I had to invent new schemes to cover my not eating. Stashing small amounts in a pocket or trying to attract the cat’s attention without also alerting my mother were far less effective than the furnace trick had been.

Though I resisted real food, for years I played something called “store” and a variation I named “drugstore.” Mamie saved Rice Krispies and Grapenuts Flakes containers, Quaker Oats tins, RC Cola bottles, Oxydol boxes. Being resourceful, I also badgered our next door neighbor lady for such rareties as Black Jack shoe polish cans, Sauer’s almond extract bottles, and Blue Bonnet margarine holders. On makeshift shelves or tall cardboard crates, I set up my wares, each marked with a tiny price tag, and sat patiently waiting for other children to come “buy” something. We never actually paid money for such empties but gave each other rocks or shards of pretty colored glass that had been given designated values.

“Drugstore” was beautiful. I saved old medicine bottles, of which we seemed to have a great abundance, what with the vague illnesses that kept me home from school and my mother’s various potions. Into each clear bottle went first tap water, then a few drops of food dye. The result was a rainbow of bottles, each having a label on which I wrote the virtues of the exotic contents. “Sure cure for toenails hanging part way off.” “Take one spoonful daily and never again have circles under your eyes.” “Drink regularly for itchy heads or rashes between your toes.” Each evening, I stored all the pretty liquids in the basement, only to set up the entire show next day even though almost no one ever came to see or buy my magic elixirs. The colors fascinated me, just as the beads on my baby bed had years before and just as organic chemistry and stained-glass windows would years later.

My artistic flair was inhibited by all the rules of public school. Teachers wanted me to sit still for hours, coloring within the lines, making trees green and cows brown and people light pink. Once in second grade I argued for the trueness of a picture. I had drawn a brown person and a pink cow because I had seen brown people out in country fields with scrawny pinkish-red cows. My teacher, driven by racism as much as a narrow view of art, threw my piece of construction paper into the waste basket, saying, “If you insist that there are brown people and pink cows, I’ll report you to the principal who will talk to your mother about your disrespectful attitude.” I got a C in conduct that semester.

As a very little girl, I loved to make musical sounds—song snatches, whistles, simple noises that felt good. My mother sang and encouraged me to hum along with her at home and church. In grammar school, I learned there was someone called “the music teacher” who would come to our classes one hour a week. I was elated, since it meant I would learn real tunes and words. I even fancied being able to teach Mamie a song. The teacher was a tall, thin woman with fading auburn hair and big feet and hands. She would stride into our classroom, go straight to the old spinet that was wildly out of tune, and begin playing some song whose lyrics were much too advanced for us. I learned “On the Road to Mandalay” without having any idea where or what Mandalay was. But I was quite drawn to “flying fishes”; they reminded me of brown people and pink cows, and I wished I lived “in China across the bay” since maybe there they would let me color as I saw things and not worry about the lines.

The music teacher did not like my voice because it was too low. She forced me to sing soprano notes. I squeaked and cracked and sounded awful. Everyone laughed at me for singing off key, and my record began to say I was “unmusical.” To help me retain self-respect and some interest in singing, my mother assured me, “Just keep singing out as loudly as you want at church, honey, and if it isn’t quite right, no one will mind.” She also told me that singing an octave lower than other girls was perfectly all right, that if I ever joined a choir, I would be placed with people called altos because their voices were “mellow.” That word became a lifeline to counter “unmusical” as I fought to hang on to my love of making sounds. No wonder I came to prefer cellos and French horns, contraltos and basses, the left hand on the piano, fog horns at sea.

Too many of the people who taught me spent most of their time trying to help marginally literate students. Consequently the few teachers who did excite me remain in my mind like crystal. Much of my free time was spent in their rooms, where I helped them arrange borders above the blackboard or clean their space. I often lost potential friends because I chose to answer the questions teachers asked in class. Although it was painful not to be accepted, I did not regret my choices even when I was making them. Those women were generous to me, in class and out. They told me extra things about geography or math or sentence diagramming; they let me take heavy books or satchels full of our homework to their cars; occasionally they even asked me to read spelling quizzes or other students’ test papers when the answers just involved numbers or letters.

The first time this happened was in second grade. My teacher was Miss Virginia Lindsay, a slight honey-blond woman in her late thirties. She was known for her long hikes even in damp Alabama winters and for her summer travels to exotic places not in America. After about three months as her pupil, I was allowed to help grade spelling papers on Wednesdays after lunch. I would bolt my food and race back to Miss Lindsay’s room where we sat together at her big desk. She gave me a red pencil like hers to put check marks beside misspelled words. Being left-handed, I made check marks that looked backwards, so I learned to reverse them. I would not give away our secret. Miss Lindsay always patted me on the arm when we were done and said, “You’ll make a fine teacher someday.”

In fifth-grade, a tall, fleshy, not-so-smart woman named Bernice Brown taught us things I already knew, but she was warm and affectionate and liked me. One afternoon she took me aside, and put her arm around me: “Now, Toni, you know, don’t you, that you’re a special little girl who will keep going to school for a long time? And when you’ve gotten big degrees and I’m old, I’ll feel so proud that you were in my fifth-grade room. And if you aren’t popular, just wait till you’re older.” The elliptical nature of her last remark haunted me even as the rest of her speech made me feel special and proud.

And I remember Miss Gray, a wiry woman probably only two or three years from retirement, who taught sixth-grade math with an iron fist. On rainy days after she had drilled us in fractions or simple equations or long word problems, she showed us a softer side. She would recite long poems, my favorite being one that began, “Now, William, come here sir.” Miss Gray never prepared us for her shift from math to poetry but suddenly would turn her small head capped by thinning frizzly hair and bellow out this or some other first line. I always jumped at first but then settled in for the treat that her recitation was. The lasting thing Miss Gray taught me was that math and poetry do not need to be disconnected. She primed me for my later fascination with Jacob Bronowski and Buckminster Fuller, who urged adults to stop talking about the gulf between science and the humanities.

But most of the time I was just bored by what went on in that stuffy brick building where too many students did not know how to read or write. I began being absent often, having one form or another of a cold-flu-sore-throat ailment just bad enough to keep me home but not so bad as to keep me from reading or playing games by myself. My report cards tell it all: for the first eight years of school, I consistently ran up higher numbers in the “times absent” column than in the “times present” one, though I collected zeroes in the “times tardy” slot. One school year they went: first semester—absent 64 days, present 26; second semester—absent 57 days, present 33. In the space for accompanying remarks appears: “Toni seems quite bright, but could you encourage her to come to school more often?”

When I did not attend school, I had to stay in bed quietly during the mornings, since I was “sick.” However, if by lunch time I had no fever, I could play quietly in the side yard during the afternoon. I quickly found ways to insure a reading of 98.5 degrees. As soon as Mamie placed the cool tube under my tongue, I maneuvered it on top. The only drawback to this practice was that sometimes the result was so low as to raise suspicion. But when it worked, I could get up as long as I promised not to run around.

Most days I played the same solitary game. Outside our bathroom window stood a massive oak tree. Forgetting mosquitos, gnats, and other southern bugs that attack anyone who stays outside for more than a few minutes, I spent hours hunkered down on the ground.

First I would scoop out dirt from around roots, then mold wet clay tunnels that leaned against them, and finally turn twigs and carefully sculpted leaves into road signs that meant “Right Turn Only” or “Do Not Enter” or “Danger High Voltage.” They only meant that to me, but then if I were not there, things merely looked scuffed up, as if a squirrel had scratched around for stray acorns. Once my highway was complete, I carefully smuggled tiny metal cars and trucks outside. Though for some reason unknown to me my parents bought me such toys never intended for little girls, they were to stay in the house so as not to get dirty or broken. For hours I intently moved cars and trucks along my dirt roads, twisting and turning through the system of tunnels and overpasses. Sometimes several cars stopped at once so the riders could get out to share inside information about road conditions or talk about where to go next. Occasionally a truck turned over going too fast around a sharp curve. Upset, I rushed vehicles to the scene to rescue the unlucky driver and his family who were with him on an outing. If asked the name of my game, I would have said without blinking an eye, “Running Away.” I imagined going first into town, then to places nearby whose names I knew—Bessemer, Tarrant City, Dolomite, Powderly, Ensley. If I needed to go farther away, I picked Mobile or Florida or Mandalay.

Though I could play alone for an unusually long time without becoming distracted, this ability became a way to handle my increasing sense of difference from other children my age and the resulting isolation. Occasionally an exception emerged, some child in our neighborhood or at school with whom I formed a tight bond at least for a brief period. I have photographs of two of these friends. One is a tiny snapshot of Sue Brooks and me at my third birthday party. Binky (Sue’s nickname) and I are perched on a little stepstool placed on the sidewalk as part of some game. We are each holding a balloon chosen from the great cache Mamie had suspended from the dining room chandelier. We are looking innocently and intently into one another’s faces, seemingly with no heed of the camera, the photographer, or the other children. The outside world had vanished for that frozen moment.

The other photo dates from high school days. I am at Sarah Jones’s house after school, palling around with her and Sue Hood, another schoolmate. The three of us were fast friends for a year until Sarah and Sue began having predictable dates with boys, and I sunk further into my inability to secure any such prize. On this afternoon, we are posing suggestively: Sarah lounges on her front step while I stand near her in a pose I’d seen Hedy Lamarr strike in movies. We look content and connected, something I was not to feel often outside the confines of my home.

When I was eight, I made my first and only penny peep show and experienced a devastating blow to my efforts to share my creative self outside my family. My mother carefully taught me how to construct such a spectacle. First you must find a sloping hillside (we had a huge one in our vacant lot filled with flower beds). Then you take a trowel—or better yet your hands—and burrow into the slope. When the space is the right size, you line it with cardboard to keep out falling dirt and curious bugs. With the frame complete, the real work begins. A penny peep show is made up of tiny bits of paper or material, formed into recognizable objects, all placed in that hollowed-out space and covered with a piece of window glass. The glass in turn is covered with a cloth or strip of cardboard, thus hiding your “show” from view. People are then invited to take a peep at the cost of a penny. These projects were popular in my childhood, and I paid lots of pennies to see other children’s shows.

When I came to make my own, I decided to be more elaborate in my choice of objects to put in the boxed-in space. I made tables and chairs of match sticks, painstakingly gluing each slim stick to its fellows. I constructed people from wads of cotton, dressing them in scraps of cloth from my mother’s hooked rug work basket. Finally, I wrapped live flowers in tiny waxed-paper containers that would hold water longer than newspaper. After almost a week of preparations, I invited neighbor children and even a few select adults to “peep” by writing crude invitations that I dropped into mailboxes. On the appointed day, I stationed myself beside my wonder half an hour before showtime, just in case someone tried to get a free sneak preview. As viewers began to arrive and give me their pennies, my heart pounded with what I would only later understand to be artist’s nerves before an unveiling.

After about ten people had come, I took advantage of a lull to run inside to the bathroom. Less than five minutes later, I returned to find the glass smashed in, the flowers crushed, and the little matchstick furniture in shambles. I burst into angry tears and screams that lasted over an hour. I was inconsolable, filled with fury for whoever had destroyed some inner part of me that I had lovingly presented to be “peeped” at. My mother never convinced me to build another show, though she often would sit on the ground with me and begin putting things together from the dirt around us. I would watch her for a few moments and then break into sobs until she had to take me inside and comfort me with candy or some other sweet.

The next Easter Mamie gave me a gorgeous spun sugar egg: a peep show with an isinglass window that opened onto a resplendent garden filled with every imaginable flower and a bunny for good measure. The next year, she began giving me special decorated eggs made of thin milk glass. Each bore my name, the date, and some lovely design: tiny blue forget-me-nots; a bouquet of purple violets; a wreath of yellow jonquils. I have moved this collection around with me over the past thirty-five years.

I do not remember making anything for a long time after my peep show was wrecked. Determined to protect myself, I retreated into my head, where images and creations seemed safer than when set out for public display. I crammed in story after story of little girls who saved friends from disaster and then gradually focused on horses or cats or more exotic animals once I had read Kipling. In the animal stories, I was always the undying champion who rescued them from capture and caging in zoos, or from natural predators.

One of my favorites, which I told myself from the ages of eight to eleven, with minor variations, focused on the same subject as my game with trucks among the oak roots—running away:

A little girl packs a wicker picnic basket with all the leftover fried chicken and biscuits from her mother’s refrigerator, leaving room for her floppy-eared harlequin rabbit and a story book. Then she tiptoes out of her house while her mother fixes lunch. She runs as fast as she can, as long as she can, and winds up on the edge of town where the road begins to open onto lush meadows filled with butterflies and brown-skinned hopping rabbits.

She runs into the very center of this grass sea, plops down with her cache of chicken and biscuits, and begins unwrapping little packets of food. She can never eat just the one she’s made for that afternoon but keeps at it until all the food is gone. Her stomach full, she lies down in the field, reads a little, quickly falls into a sleep filled with magical dreams. Usually she is awakened by a beautiful yellow and blue butterfly lighting on her nose or by a furry rabbit sniffing loudly around her hair and face. These interruptions never frighten her, because she never wakes to find it dark.

Once the little girl sits up, she realizes that she is hungry. It is dusk and the sun is going down. She begins to feel cold and lonely, hugs her rabbit to her chest, and sings herself back to sleep. She is protected during the night by fairies or brownies and rises to a glorious sunrise and a little dish of Cream of Wheat.

After eating, she sets out for far places that she always reaches safely. These journeys lead the little girl to cities and countries whose names her big sister has taught her, places like Borneo and Atlanta and Walla Walla, Washington, her favorite place in the world to say out loud.

My stories never had endings. I just stopped telling them or let them trail off into shadowy scenes while I went into the kitchen to help my mother do the dishes. As I retrace their outline, I realize that what is missing is another human being. Though I was able to surround my heroine with benign and affectionate nature, I could not conceive a companion of her own kind.

The closest I ever came to such a person was my make-believe baby sister. Between the ages of seven and ten, disliking dolls, I fabricated Sarah Sue, much my junior. I bossed her around unmercifully but defended her from the ornaments that were likely to slip off their marble-top tables at any moment and from the adults who could interrupt her at their whim. She was an admiring audience for my roly poly bug collections, my June bug captures, my skating up and down the sidewalk that marked our property boundaries. She consoled me about having to eat at least one or two of the carrots on my plate or about having to sit quietly after lunch in the summer. When my mother took me downtown while she shopped at all her favorite department stores, Sarah Sue listened to my endless complaining and shared my dislike of such activities. I do not remember why I stopped creating her, but I suspect it had something to do with her getting too big to handle and having a will of her own. In any event, I eventually gave her up rather than continuing to drag her around as a flimsy sign of my imaginary power.

Just about the time I lost Sarah Sue, I entered into one of the most purely creative if bizarre stages of my young life. I felt increasing pressure to become more lady-like, as Mamie talked about brassieres and lipstick and ruffled dresses. I decided to withdraw from the irksome business of growing up, since I knew that I did not want to become a southern lady, learning how to faint without hurting myself or letting my skirt rise above my knees, or how to lower my eyes, hold them down, and then raise them slowly and alluringly. While my mother indoctrinated me into the culture she believed I was destined for, something inside me resisted fiercely. Sensing that Toni, the defiant ten year old, would lose, I cleverly chose to become a horse. I had already read many cowboy stories as well as technical studies of horses that described breeds, named body parts, and defined various gaits and habits.

Borrowing from one of my favorite radio programs, “Tennessee Jed and His Great Horse Smokey,” I became Smokey. Weekday afternoons an hour before the “Lone Ranger,” the show was a southern version of the classic masked Samaritan. Having no gender, Smokey was a means for me to escape the confining behaviors appropriate for adolescent girls. I whinnied at the table when I wanted something, and my parents acknowledged but did not disrupt my fantasy. Years later, when I took psychology courses and learned that children are hospitalized for far less severe antisocial or withdrawal symptoms, I felt grateful to my family. Instead of mincing like a preadolescent girl, for two years I cantered, galloped, trotted, and occasionally even pranced.

During this period, my sister visited Boston. Her gift to me upon her return was a treasured black leather bridle, complete with steel bit. With that bit between my teeth, and her (or my mother) holding the reins, I ran around our front yard, neighing.

In the middle of my dilemma over how to express my creative energy without its being ridiculed, interrupted, or destroyed, my mother asked if I would like to take piano lessons. At first, I recoiled from the suggestion, since it would mean sitting inside for long periods and I preferred to run. But Mamie felt strongly that one of her daughters should play the piano, given her own talent and love for music.

After weeks of discussion, I agreed. My first teacher, Mrs. Bowen, lived near us and taught in her home. After about a year with her, I transferred to the Birmingham Conservatory of Music and half-hour lessons from Miss Edith Plosser. I was excited to have a music teacher with such an unusual name, though she seemed cold and stern. Her repeated complaint was that I did not practice seriously or long enough. Since we did not own a piano, practice meant calling our across-the-street neighbor, Nell Hill, to find out when it was convenient for me to come over to her house where there was an out-of-tune upright. At the same time that she complained about my sketchy practicing, Miss Plosser thought me potentially talented, so she set me to such masters as Bach, Scarlatti, and Clementi. They had no tunes and were terribly demanding technically. I began to cut practice times shorter than usual.

Once I was safely ensconced at the conservatory, Mamie convinced my father that I had to have a piano. Somehow, one was procured—a Betsy Ross spinet, made in America of partly seasoned wood because of the Second World War. Since our house was already liberally furnished, my piano was placed in the hallway outside my bedroom door. My sister’s bedroom was at the end of that hall, so when I practiced, she was trapped in or barred from her room. Any time she interrupted, I welcomed the break, though the situation must have irritated Betty.

My third teacher, Mr. Parker, was over six feet tall with jet black hair and deep-set, searching eyes. His hands were enormous, reaching an octave plus two with ease. His span and temperament inclined him toward Franz Liszt, so I studied most of Liszt’s corpus. My hands are also fairly large and by sheer determination, I can play an octave plus two. I gave that measure of determination because I was amazed at the raw emotion within the music. A part of me otherwise unknown and unencouraged was awakened, and putting my passion into the ivory keyboard had less risk than my previously chosen media. My interpretations pleased Mr. Parker, so he set me to such equally romantic giants as Rachmaninoff, Katchaturian, and the mature Chopin. I suddenly turned from a phlegmatic pupil into someone who went eagerly to her turquoise velvet piano stool and stayed there, hoping my sister would not need to get into or out of her bedroom, pounding away at the forte passages, rendering soft parts with maximum tragic sadness.

At first I exulted in the forte passages, hitting the keys with such ferocity that I sometimes made the crystal vase that sat atop the piano vibrate. After seeing Rubenstein at our local auditorium, I began to raise myself off the piano stool as I banged some percussive chord of a Chopin étude or Rachmaninoff concerto. Gradually, as I came to trust both the piano and myself more, I let myself pour years of accumulated melancholy and aloneness into the pianissimo phrases, knowing without language that the keyboard was a safer repository for such emotions than writing or speech. After all, the moment I struck the key, the act was over. Musical tears could always be explained away as deriving from Chopin’s romanticism or Brahms’s sweetness. Not having to “own” the emotions that sounded from my fingers emboldened me to express myself more deeply and fully than in any other circumstance or medium.

Playing the piano gave me even more satisfaction than playing pitch with a hard ball. Like my hero, Walt Dropo, I was left-handed and preferred to play first base, since it was one of the few instances in which being left-handed counted for rather than against me. I had a beautiful leather hardball glove with Walt’s signature on the claw, and the clean “splop” of a ball landing solidly in the pocket of that mitt brought me small but distinct rushes through my mid-twenties when I finally abandoned playing pitch.

My two outlets became counterproductive, since the ferocity with which I played pitch endangered my hands for executing delicate piano runs. Mamie, of course, wanted me to give up pitch, but I refused. Once I went so far as to limit baseball to two hours a day during the month immediately preceding a major recital. I remember occasionally going to lessons (in the musty house where Mr. Parker and hisailing mother lived) with a sprained finger. My thumb took the worst beating: if I reached to catch a side ball incorrectly, my thumb bent back on itself from the force of the throw. When that happened, swelling set in, lasting at least three days. Often I could not play a note intended for the right thumb because mine was too big for the space between keys.

The worst scene in this battle of wits with my mother and between the selves warring within me occurred the month before my senior recital. After several solo pieces, I was to end by playing a Katchaturian duo with my teacher. By this point in my career, I knew I was good, at least at broadly romantic music. Maybe I panicked at the prospect of a career as a pianist. In any event, I entered into my pitch activity with renewed concentration, extending my allotment by however many minutes it took Mamie to realize my time was up.

A week before the big event at the concert grand, as I was catching a particularly hard throw by my playmate, Kenny, I felt searing pain. As my thumb folded back, I knew I had sprained it badly. I began immediately soaking my swollen finger religiously. After two days, my thumb barely fit into the key area. Lying about my pain, I practiced with a strange enthusiasm, leaving off my baseball fetish entirely. The night of my performance, pains shot from my thumb up into my right arm. No one knew I had taken six aspirin just before leaving home. I executed my solo pieces with clarity and passion, and in the final duo, Mr. Parker and I played superbly. The audience applauded enthusiastically, but I took that recital as further proof of something I was coming increasingly to believe and practice: people seemed satisfied, even pleased, with performances at which not quite all of me was present or in which not quite all of me was engaged.