A Short Story by
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"I Am So Loving the Cello"
Thomas Hubschman
I an very happy that Thomas Hubschman has given me the honor of publishing this short story from his great collection The Jew's Wife and Other Stories.
Hubschman is a great short story writer, a master at the craft. I recommend his work to any and all. He writes in the tradition of Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov.
Official Author Biography
Thomas J. Hubschman is the author of Look at Me Now, Billy Boy, My
Bess and The Jew's Wife & Other Stories and three science fiction
novels. His work has appeared in New York Press, The Antigonish
Review, Eclectica, The Blue Moon Review and many other publications.
Two of his short stories were broadcast on the BBC World Service. He
has also edited two
anthologies of new writing from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
I Am So
Loving the Cello
By
Thomas J. Hubschman
Arthur Aranoff
and his wife lived in 6E, over Israel Bernstein’s family. We—my mother and
father and myself and sometimes Mary Henderson our housekeeper when she slept
over—lived in 5C. Mr. Aranoff was our building’s resident celebrity. He played
the cello, mostly for Mutual or one of the other house orchestras that radio
networks maintained in those days, but occasionally he sat in with the New York
Philharmonic or the Metropolitan Opera when one of their regular cellists fell
ill.
We had other
professionals living in the building, a six-storey affair with an elevator and
dumbwaiter just off Tremont Avenue Bronx . Mitchell Papov, a retired oral
surgeon, lived in 1D, and Bernice Kauffman’s father was a certified public
accountant. But Arthur Aranoff was our star, a man who had played, however
briefly, under the batons of both Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini. When he
tipped his floppy dark fedora to one of the building’s housewives, she flushed
with pleasure. “Good morning, Mr. Aranoff,” she replied with a little bow as if
he were nobility. Sometimes he wore a cape instead of an overcoat like other
men. My mother said the cape made it easier for him to carry his instrument to
a performance, but my father, a jobber in the fur trade who had worked his way
up from cutter’s helper, insisted that the cape was an affectation, just a
means for Aranoff to call attention to himself.
Mr. Aranoff
practiced five or six hours a day, including Saturdays and Sundays. We couldn’t
hear him, but Izzy Bernstein said the noise drove his parents crazy and that
they were always banging on the ceiling with a broom handle. They complained to
the landlord and there was even a court case, but the judge ruled that since
the cello was Mr. Aranoff’s livelihood he had a right to practice “during
regular business hours." My father said that if Aranoff lived over our own
apartment he would know how to fix Aranoff’s wagon, and he wouldn’t need any
judge to help him either. Sometimes he cursed Aranoff in Yiddish, to which my
mother, the daughter of a prosperous Upper West Side
factors man and herself an amateur pianist, would respond by asking if he
wouldn’t like another slice of honey cake.
When she
mentioned one evening when my father was only halfway through his baked chicken
that Arthur Aranoff was going to play the Haydn cello concerto on the radio
that Saturday, my father immediately lost his appetite.
“But, David, you
always love my baked chicken.”
“Sorry,” he said,
looking confused by his lost of interest. He considered his wife’s cooking on a
par with his mother’s, though Grandma’s was a very different kind of cuisine,
heavy middle-European stuff that would constipate an elephant.
“Why should you
begrudge the man his moment of triumph? It’s only with a radio orchestra.”
“Aranoff is a shnorer.
Never done an honest day’s work in his life.”
My mother replied
with what I had come to think of as her stage laugh, a sound that reminded me
of the celeste in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker which she took me to see at City Center
“Art is
his work, dear,” she said, clearing away his plate and trotting out a flan she
had whipped up that afternoon. I saw him hesitate as she put the glass dessert
dish down and poured some caramel sauce on top. But it didn’t take him long to
choose between the flan and his principles. “Just as fur coats is your work.
You both create things of beauty. Your own creations we can see and feel.
Arthur Aranoff’s are less tangible, something experienced only in the heart.”
I doubt my father
even knew what “tangible” meant. And he had no illusions about what he did for
a living: he sold animal skins to fat rich women. But my mother always talked
like that whenever the subject was anything remotely connected with art. My
father probably didn’t even feel offended. He readily acknowledged that his
wife was better educated and more cultivated than he was. He was not ashamed
but proud of it, like a man who owned a work by a great master. The work of art
did not diminish its owner simply because he was not himself capable of
creating such beauty. Quite the contrary.
But he still
hated Arthur Aranoff, and one way or the other he was going to settle the man’s
hash.
All week the
building was in a buzz about the concert. The broadcast was scheduled for eight p.m. , so even Mrs. Gottlieb who
kept a strictly kosher house would be able to tune in. In the evenings my
mother behaved as if the event were to be no big deal and scarcely mentioned
it. But during the day she spoke about little else with the other women in the building.
The performer himself was said to be rehearsing constantly, eight, even ten
hours a day. The Bernsteins were furious.
I too was
excited, though my loyalties were divided between my mother’s love for music
which I shared and my father’s injured pride. His brother Michael was an
orthopedic surgeon, and his sister had married a bigtime lawyer. All his
family’s resources, including those that should have gone into my father’s own
education, had gone toward putting his brother through medical school. From a
very early age I was familiar with the tale of how everyone had chipped in to
make sure that Michael got his M.D., only to see the new doctor turn his back
on his uncouth relations the minute he started dating an OB-GYN’s daughter from
Forest Hills . Aunt Miriam, as I knew her, had
a twitch that I learned to imitate. “How lovely to see you, my child!” I would
mimic in Aunt Miriam’s quasi-gentile accent and then blink my left eye hard as
if something had just flown into it. My father would rock with delight. “That’s
good! That’s good! Esther, come see
Annie’s imitation of that stuck-up shmalts-ball Michael married."
When Saturday
finally rolled around my mother could no longer hide her excitement. We were
not friends with the Aranoffs—as a couple my parents hardly ever socialized—but
I had accompanied my mother any number of times when Mr. Aranoff doffed his big
hat and stopped to chat with her on the sidewalk. I could see there was some
kind of mutual admiration going on there. Aranoff didn’t speak as well as my
mother. Few people did. But his way of expressing himself was a long way from
father’s harsh Bronxsprech, and neither Aranoff nor my mother ever used
any Yiddish during these conversational impromptus. Sometimes as I listened to
them exchange opinions about Casals or Heifitz I would think, What if Mr.
Aranoff were my father instead of the coarse man that fate had assigned me?
When my mother
returned to our apartment after one of these chance meetings she seemed
intoxicated, the way she looked after she had had a Sunday afternoon “highball”
or a second glass of Manischewitz during seder. Sometimes she even sang, gay
little tunes with French lyrics about shepherds and long summer nights.
Father worked
most Saturdays, and this was to be no exception. In the afternoon mother baked
a cake and listened to a live broadcast of La Boheme on the same station
that was going to air Mr. Aranoff’s performance that night. She sometimes asked
father if he wouldn’t like to go to an opera with her, and he always managed to
put her off without outright refusing—his schedule was too unpredictable; you
never knew when a buyer would have to be taken to dinner; his hemorrhoids. She
wouldn’t dream of going to an opera or even a movie without her husband
accompanying her. No matter how much French she spoke or how progressive her
political and moral ideas, the loyal Jewish wife was still very strong in her.
All afternoon we sang along with the music coming out of the RCA portable she
kept on top of the refrigerator, and when poor tubercular Mimi was breathing
her last I saw two tears trickle down my mother’s pale cheeks in perfect
unison.
By seven o’clock the dishes were done
and my mother had changed into the dress she wore when she took me shopping on Fordham Road
“How about
taking a walk up to Cushman’s for cheesecake?” he said, abruptly closing the
paper. They frequently strolled along the Grand Concourse on a Saturday
evening, weather permitting, a habit left over from my father’s Orthodox youth.
She reminded
him that the concert would be starting in half an hour. “That shmuck.
For him I have to give up my evening?”
“He’s our
neighbor, David. It isn’t every day someone you know gets to play on the radio.
Besides, I made a cake this afternoon. Your favorite. Annie helped.”
My father grunted
and regarded me as if I were part of the conspiracy against him. But he allowed
my mother to cut him a generous slice and sat down at the kitchen table while
she fiddled with the knobs on the RCA. “Why can’t we get a real radio,” she
said, voicing one of her rare complaints, “like other people?”
“You don’t need a
radio to hear Aranoff,” he replied, his mouth full of devil’s food. “All you
have to do is step out in the hall.”
We listened to a
long newscast, then a commentary by Gabriel Heeter or someone very like him,
accompanied by snide comments from my father who looked as if he would very
much like to leave my mother to her arty nonsense but was afraid what might happen
if he did.
Finally we heard
the theme music for the concert. Then the announcer came on, a deep
self-confident voice speaking a kind of Anglo-American that no one I knew
spoke. When he introduced the soloist for the Haydn concerto he called him “our
own virtuoso, Arthur Aranoff,” at which point my father made a vulgar sound.
Mother shushed him.
Impressed though
I was by Arthur Aranoff’s being chosen as soloist for a radio performance, I
really had no idea how good or bad he was. Nor had I ever heard the Haydn cello
concerto before. But I figured if I listened closely I would be able to tell if
he really was a “virtuoso.” So that was what I did, sitting quietly beside my
parents at the kitchen table which still contained a few dark crumbs from my
father’s dessert.
But father was
fidgeting like a schoolboy being kept after class. He would stand up as if he
suddenly remembered he had to do something else, then abruptly sit down again.
During the slow movement he went into the living room and rustled the pages of
the Post until my mother asked him to please stop. By the time the final
movement was under way he was back standing in the kitchen doorway. But his
restlessness seemed to have disappeared. He even seemed to be enjoying the
bouncy closing theme, patting the doorjamb in time with the music. My mother
smiled up at him. He smiled back.
“Need anything
from the corner?” he asked after the concert was over. “I thought I’d pick up a
copy of the News.”
“You don’t want
to take a walk up the Concourse?”
“After I get
back. Annie,” he said then, “care to come along?”
“Do I have
to?”
I suspected right
away he was up to something my mother would not approve of, and I wanted to
find out what it was. But I had to at least make a pretense of not being a
willing party to it.
He took my hand
as soon as we were out of the apartment and held onto it as we waited for the
elevator and then during the ride down to the building’s lobby where we ran
into the Leibermans.
“You heard the
concert?” Mrs. Leiberman said, all a-dither.
“I heard, Mrs.
Leiberman. A virtuoso performance!” father said, though I knew he was only
using that phrase because he had heard the radio announcer use it. But Mrs.
Leiberman nodded her head in approval and then, noticing me, said, “What a big
girl!” and patted my shoulder with her bony fingers.
Walking down Tremont Avenue
When we reached
the corner newsstand, instead of buying a newspaper he raised his thick index
finger and nodded toward the telephone booth nearby. It was clear he had
mischief in mind, so I followed him in. He closed the door, forcing me to stand
very close, something I hadn’t done since I was a young child. In the cramped,
airless quarters I became aware for the first time of his masculine smell, an
odor of old sweat and some sort of solvent. To my surprise, I found I liked it.
He dropped a
coin in the box and carefully dialed a number. I heard the ringing in the
receiver which he held, as he did all telephones, half an inch from his ear as
if wary of what might come out of it. Then I heard someone pick up on the other
end.
“Please may I
speak,” my father began in the voice of a middle-age Polish Jewish woman, “with
the great voytchuoso Arthur Aranoff.”
I started to
giggle. He glanced down and nodded as if to confirm my part in the ruse. At
that point I didn’t really expect Arthur Aranoff to come to the phone. You
couldn’t just call up a radio station and get to speak to one of the
performers, whether it was just our neighbor from 6E or Jack Benny himself. And
yet my father seemed so confident—I had heard him do a Yiddish accent before
but never a full-blown impersonation, and certainly not that of a woman—that I
was beginning to believe he could bring it off.
“That’s you,
Meester Aranoff?” he said in a voice that sounded like claw-handed Mrs.
Leiberman and all the other superannuated immigrant Jewish women I had ever
known, with a touch of Milton Berle thrown in (how had he got the voice down so
pat? did he practice in the freight elevators at Feinman & Sons?) I could
see great jiggly bosoms that had nothing to do with my own hard chest. I could
smell latkes frying in grease so thick my mother would flee retching in
disgust. I could hear all the raucous noises and uncouth smells of a Jewish
ancestry I had till that moment felt so uneasy with. And I was amazed at how
much fun it all seemed to be.
“Meester Aranoff,
I am so lovink the cello! For years I am leestening the Haydn concerto. Such
beauty, Meester Aranoff. Such feelink! But never do I hear playink like yours.
A voytchuoso, Meester Aranoff. That’s what I’m callink you. A voytchuoso!”
He paused to give
Aranoff a chance to respond and took the opportunity to give me a wink, part
co-conspirator, part caution not to give the game away.
“No, no, Meester
Aranoff. No false modesty. Tsu fil anivez iz a halber shtoltz. I’m
sayink to my Moishe here, ‘Dahlink, I must tell in person this man how much I
am lovink his cello.’”
I was gagging
with laughter. This was better than a Marx Brothers comedy. Better than Steven
Rabinowitz’s imitation of Mrs. Froelich.
“Not at all,
Meester Aranoff. Every void you desoyve. Every. Single. Void.”
The next morning
we ran into the Aranoffs in the lobby. Mr. Aranoff was wearing his black cape
and had set his floppy hat at a rakish angle. His wife had on a frilly print
dress. Aranoff doffed his hat to my mother and she immediately complimented him
on the concert the night before. He flushed with pleasure.
“A virtuoso
performance,” my father said, taking everyone by surprise, since nobody, the
Aranoffs included, had any illusions about my father’s interest in music. He
had once signed a petition for the Bernsteins even though we ourselves never
heard anything from the Aranoffs’ apartment. “Well, thank you, David,” Aranoff
said, obviously moved by this compliment from an unexpected source. “Thank you
very much indeed.”
“It was very well
received,” Mrs. Aranoff put in. “Tell them, Arthur, about the woman who called
in to the radio station.”
Aranoff feigned
modesty, but it was obvious he had been telling the story to everyone.
“Just some
aficionado,” he said. “An educated woman. European accent. Probably a musician
herself. It was very gratifying.”
“Isn’t that
marvelous,” my mother said. “Well, we all know how good you are, Arthur,
and we’re very proud of you.”
“Very,” father
said, giving my hand a squeeze.
My father never
repeated his performance in that telephone booth. But those few minutes
convinced me of something about him I would never forget and doubly cherished
for being kept a secret from everyone but the two of us. It was like having a
world-class gunslinger for a father, a Wyatt Earp who had come out of
retirement just that one time to rid the town of bad guys before sinking back
into anonymity. It was like having a father who was every bit as much a
virtuoso as Arthur Aranoff, even if he didn’t get to perform for millions of
people and no one but myself knew how good he was.
Of course, we
never told my mother, and even between us we scarcely ever recalled that evening—a
couple exceptions being: when he took me in his arms at my wedding reception
for the traditional father-daughter dance and in response to an overzealous
violinist in the trio he had hired for the occasion whispered, “I am so lovink
the cello!”; the other time was when I visited him in the hospital shortly
before his death.
He was barely
able to speak. He gestured for me to come closer. I did, until our heads were
just a few inches from each other. His eyes were glazed from pain-killers and
there were tubes in his nostrils. I thought what he wanted was a kiss, so I
kissed him on his pink stubbly cheek. But then he parted his lips and I turned
my head sideways to catch what he was going to say.
Despite the grim
circumstances I broke into a wide grin. Pleased with his success, he smiled as
well.
Afterward, my
mother asked what he had said.
“Just,” I
replied, “that he loves me very much.”
End of Guest Post
My review of his collection is here
You can learn more about him and his work on his webpage and his two blogs, one devoted to his music.
http://www.gowanusbooks.com/
Mel u
1 comment:
Delightful story :)
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