The Mozart Season Read Online Free PDF

one’s a male. Had his shots, they all had their shots. See? He likes you.”
    I picked him up, and he felt very warm and good to hold. I looked at him up close. He was absolutely, completely black. And his eyes were very big and blue. I put him against my chest, and he tried to climb up me; I could feel his heart beating very fast.
    I looked at Daddy. He looked at the cat. He laughed. The fat lady, who had extremely fat fingers, put the kitten in one of the shoe boxes and we all came home together.
    Heavenly turned out to be a girl. We had her spayed because my mother wouldn’t let her have kittens. And her eyes turned yellow; they look like moons.
    When I got into bed with Heavenly after the concert, there was a note on the clipboard on the floor:
    Do I have to rent a tux if you win?
    You spelled annihilate wrong. I fixed it.
    Two n ’s. He’d corrected it on the clipboard.
    I opened my window about six inches. There’s a nice sound that comes in. It’s tree frogs, and little mutters of bushes settling down. Heavenly settled herself between my feet.
    It’s always hard to go to sleep after a concert. It’s your adrenaline. I kept seeing the dancing man with his torn shoe, moving slowly around and around, the brownness of all of him, and the music making him smile. Maybe such a man was a little bit crazy. But you couldn’t be too crazy if you liked to dance to string quartet music.
    That morning, all I’d had in my head was having a fun lesson and learning new words for September and missing my friends who’d gone away to do things for the summer. A few hours later, along had come the competition and the strange dancing man, and I’d turned the pages in public for money, and I’d learned “tenacity” and “annihilate.” In South Africa they annihilate people. You could let nervousness annihilate your chances of playing Mozart the way you wanted to. Hitler tried to annihilate the Jews.
    On our dining-room wall we have a photograph from Poland of a little girl standing in a field of flowers, holding a purse in her hand. There’s a white goose standing beside her, and she’s holding a homemade straw broom; it was what she used to tend her flock of geese with. The purse is velvet with some embroidery on it. She was my great-grandmother, and she was Jewish, and her name was Leah. My middle name.
    My mother’s grandmother was going to be a dancer. She was in Kansas, and she wasn’t at all Jewish. She kept a diary of the things she did on the farm, milking goats and churning butter and rubbing medicine on the cow’s udder. And she didn’t get smallpox when it came. She didn’t turn out to be a dancer, she turned out to be a farmer with her husband. Her diary went on for sixty-six years, and then she got senile and lay in bed asking for horses. She kept waving her arms in the air and asking for horses and then she died with her whole family looking at her in her bed with the quilt she made on top of it.
    My mother came from Kansas. The same quilt my great-grandmother died under was on my mother’s bed when she was my age, and now it’s on my bed. They lived so far out in the country, they had several people on the same telephone line. It was called a party line. My mother and her girlfriend Alice, who lived two miles away, could pick up the phone and listen to the neighbors’ conversations. In fact, on the day my mother knew she’d find out if Juilliard had accepted her, she was sixty-five miles away at her violin lesson, and the postmistress called to say it was a thick envelope from Juilliard, not a thin one. But nobody was home, and Alice picked up the phone when she heard the three rings for my mother’s house, and she took the message. So Alice found out before my mother did that she was going to go to New York to go to music school. My mother and Alice were each other’s answering machines. They still phone