granted. Soon Leonora was herself again. She sang as she moved around her furniture with the feather duster that was her scepter. Practical, punctual, perfect, her figure restored to full bloom, she dispensed food and comfort in return for the love of men.
Yakuv continued to practice behind his closed door, emerging only for meals. His music no longer stormed in rage but was as calm as could be expected of him. My father too was calm—that was his nature—but now with some hidden sorrow that made me postpone my plan of finding my own place. Sometimes I joined him on his walks, or we played chess, a game he loved though he always lost. That didn’t matter to him; he was a bad player but an excellent loser.
Kitty changed—or rather, changed back again. Instead of the simple flowered smock, she reverted to her flamboyant dresses, looped with large, noisy pieces of costume jewelry. Several times she came storming into the apartment, probably after walking all the way from downtown, as she had done on that rainy night, and as on that night, ready to burst into the room from where the piano rang out. But each time she was prevented by Leonora who stood in front of the door, her arms spread across it. Then Rudy intervened; he took his sister-in-law’s hand and spoke to her soothingly. Kitty let herself be led away meekly, saying only, “Do you know how long he hasn’t come to me?” Then I realized that Yakuv had been spending not only all his days but many of his nights in our apartment.
It might be thought that their rivalry would turn the sisters into enemies, but this was not at all what happened. Instead they drew closer together in an intimacy that excluded even Rudy and me. They met several times a week, not in our apartment where they could not be alone, nor in Kitty’s loft—Leonora refusing to venture into that part of town, which seemed wild, dark, and suspect to her. Their favorite rendezvous was the Palm Court of a large hotel, probably similar to the sort of place they had frequented in their youth, with gilt-framed mirrors, a string orchestra, and ladies and gentlemen (some of them lovers) seated on plush sofas enjoying their afternoon coffee and cake. Here Leonora and Kitty exchanged their intimate secrets, just as they had done when they were young. At that time Leonora had confided the tender ins and outs of Rudy’s courtship, Kitty had analyzed the characters of her lovers whom it had amused her to keep dangling on a string. Now the confidences they shared were about the same man. They would also have spoken—this was their style—of Life in general, of Love. Sometimes they may have glanced at their reflections in the hotel mirror, pleased at what they saw: though older now, they were still the same handsome sisters, Leonora in her elegant two-piece with the diamond brooch in the lapel, Kitty still bohemian under a pile of bright red hair.
A decade passed in this way within my family. Meanwhile, I came and went; I saw that the situation was not going to change in a hurry nor was there anything I could do about it. Rudy encouraged me to leave, even though I was the only one to whom he occasionally showed something of his own feelings instead of pretending he didn’t have any. I went back to college to finish my degree, I read a lot, I began to write. I had one or two stories published in little magazines, and these made my father so proud that he bought up copies to give to everyone he knew.
Yakuv also came and went. He was often on tour, for his reputation was now established and he had engagements all over the country. It did not improve his temper—on the contrary, he became more difficult. He was still firing his agents so that Leonora had to find new ones and also secretaries to attend him on his tours. Usually these secretaries returned without him; either he had fired them or they couldn’t stand him another day. He would cable urgently for a replacement, but by then everyone had heard about him and no one was willing to go. He blamed us for this failure—what could he do, he said, if we sent him nothing but blockheads and idiots, and meanwhile how was he to manage, again he had missed a plane and left the suitcase with his tails in a hotel? Twice Leonora went herself to take care of him, but when they came back, they were not on speaking terms and Rudy had to make peace between them. Leonora refused to undertake another tour with him; and after a barrage of urgent messages from Kansas City, Kitty was dispatched to him—with misgivings that turned out to be justified, for he sent her back within a week.
Sometimes I suspected that his tantrums were not entirely genuine. I have seen him turn away, suppressing a smile—exactly as he had done in earlier years after some wild fight with Kitty. The music we heard him play after one of these upheavals was invariably tranquil, romantic, filling everyone with good feelings. “With me, too, his manner had never changed from the time I was a child and he my teacher. He gave me books he thought I ought to read, and when he wanted to relax, he called me to play some game with him—dominoes usually, to my relief, never chess at which I suspected him to be a master. When he wanted to be affectionate, he still pinched my cheek; and when he was angry with me, it was not as with the others but as with a child, wagging his finger in my face. This made me laugh, and then he laughed too. Eventually it happened that when he was in one of his moods, Leonora and Kitty would send me to calm him down. It was as though I were free of the web that entangled them—by this I suppose I mean their intense sexual involvement with him. I felt nothing like that; how could I? For me he was just an elderly little man, almost a dwarf with a huge head and a mass of grey hair. His teeth were reduced to little stumps stained brown with tobacco.
When another crisis arose with another secretary fired in mid-tour, it was natural for someone—was it Leonora, was it Kitty?—to suggest that I should take my turn with the job at which they had already failed. It was my father who objected; he said he had higher expectations for me, and hoped I had for myself too, than to be handmaid and servant to Yakuv on his travels. Leonora and Kitty reared up as one person—it was strange how united they were nowadays; they said it would be a rich experience for me as well as a privilege to be in close contact with an artist like Yakuv. Rudy made a face as though saying—perhaps he actually did say—hadn’t we had enough of this privilege over the past ten years? But he gave me money for the trip and told me to wire for more when I needed it, especially if I needed it for my ticket home.
Almost the first thing Yakuv said to me was, “You’ll need some money.” This was in a cab on our way from the airport—unexpectedly, he had been standing there waiting for me. He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a fistful of notes: “Is this enough?” He put his hand in his other pocket and drew out some more. From then on it was the way we carried out all our financial transactions: he didn’t pay me a salary but just offered me everything in his pockets to pick out as much as I needed. This was not very much, since my hotel room and plane tickets and cab rides were all included in his, paid for by the sponsors. I lasted longer than anyone else had done, traveling with him from one city to another. We always checked into the same kind of hotel, I in a small single room and he in a suite that had often to be changed, due to his complaints about noise and other inconveniences. During the day, if I didn’t go to his rehearsals, I stayed in the hotel by myself; I wasn’t interested in the cities we were in—they were all the same, with the same sort of museums built in the early 1900s by local millionaires to house their art collections. At night I attended his performances in a concert hall donated by a later set of millionaires; I was very proud of him, his playing and the effect it had on his audience. He was not only a superb pianist, he looked the part too as he lunged up and down the keyboard, his coat-tails hanging over the piano stool, a wild-haired artist, profoundly foreign, an East European import from an earlier era. Afterward there was always a reception and dinner for him; surrounded by rich and wrinkled women, his eyes would rove around the room, and when he found me, he shrugged and grimaced from behind their jeweled backs.
Leonora had given me careful instructions about his routine, what to do with his clothes, when he would need the first cup of black coffee that he drank throughout the day. Of course, like everyone else, I got things wrong and he flew into a rage but always one that was tempered to me—that is, to the child I was for him. And with me he got over it more quickly than with the others, and also pitched in to help, so that somehow we muddled through together. Whenever there were a couple of hours to spare in the afternoons, we would go to a local cinema; he liked only gangster or cowboy movies, and since the same program was always playing in the different cities we visited, we saw each one several times. At night I sat up with
