Monthly Story (April, '24): Spring Concert

Fiction

[Spring Concert is one of the very first stories I published long, long ago. It appeared in the now defunct Twin Cities Magazine and was later anthologized in Stiller’s Pond: New Fiction from the Upper Midwest. It also won me a Loft Mentor Series award, which, through a chance meeting, changed my life. For good reason, I have a fair amount of affection for this simple little story.]

Spring Concert

"Michael," Mrs. Heinemann says to me. "Michael Tressler will please sing his alto part and stop showing off. There are no tenors in this group."

I am 13 here, understand, and I have no nicknames in her presence. I yank my chin back and concentrate hard on singing alto, though when my voice has slipped a gear like this it is no use. This has been happening on and off for weeks, and Mrs. Heinemann's pleas have meant nothing to my willful vocal cords.

"Stay in alto just for tonight, Michael Tressler."

I wear a clean, short-sleeved shirt and a clip-on tie. Carla Rusinsky stands next to me in a strapless red sundress, and her golden hair is combed to one side and battened down with barrettes and left to fall on her bare shoulder. We are both frozen in place, afraid to acknowledge that the backs of our hands are touching. Mrs. Heinemann goes through the windup motion with her willowy arms, and 40 seventh-graders lurch off into song again. She flaps her wings at us, mouths our lyrics with all her long face, and I breathe in Carla's lilac perfume until my voice careens back into alto.

"All right, people," Mrs. Heinemann tells us after we've slogged through another of her endless arrangements. "Listen now." She claps her hands and waits for us to settle into attention. "Be back here at 10 minutes to eight and line up.  That gives you five minutes to go comb your hair."

Billy Dreibelbis pushes through the back of the crowd and puts his hands on my shoulders. "Get me out of here, Mike," he says, and we muscle a path toward the door. "Is your voice really doing that, or are you faking it?" he wants to know.  Billy sings soprano and, if anything, his voice is only getting higher.

"You can't fake that," I tell him.

I shake Billy off in the hallway and go find my father. He is at the usual spot in the lobby, leaning against a post, a paperback book stuffed into his sports jacket pocket, his belly turning the waistband of his trousers back in a neat, white fold. He has the trademark bushy black beard. I am circled and squeezed in his arms. "Where have you been?" He kisses the top of my head. "I've been out here forever."

My father has driven 60 miles of Pennsylvania roads from where he lives to see my spring concert.

"The drive over was great," he says. "Everything's blooming its brains out. I kept the window down all the way to smell it."

He comes to all my concerts and to Parent-Teacher Nights, or he has in the past. Soon he and the bluegrass band he plays bass for will move to Louisville, Kentucky, and we won't see each other much until I am older. My father was the Original Hippie, the Last Great Bohemian. He and his friends have big plans to make it in the music world. I stand very straight, my shoulders back like a soldier's, thinking it would be better if he didn't hug me here. Since the Louisville announcement, I don't know what to say to him.

"Did you hear us warming up?" I ask.

His eyes look past me, focusing on nothing in particular. I know what he is going to say. "You sounded good." I get a light tap of his fist on my chest. "Really good."

"No, we didn't," I say. "We were practicing those songs because we can't learn them right. Everybody's really mad at her."

He is staring at his right cowboy boot as if something about it is terribly unpleasant. Then, in slow motion, he kicks an imaginary rock or can.

"Why doesn't she make you smile when you sing?" he asks for the 500th time. My father is a man given to enthusiasms, and I have very consciously pushed his Mrs. Heinemann-and-the-subject-of-singing button. "That would lift your voices toward some sort of joy." Despite his girth and height, he is sometimes unbelievably graceful, almost dainty. He stands on tiptoe, gesturing with fine, long hands, his wrists white, thin, and hairless sticking out of his cuffs. People have turned to see who this raised voice so caught up in itself is. "And why--why, why?--doesn't she choose simple music and just let you sing?"  My face signals that his manner is becoming an embarrassment. "After all," he stage whispers, "the whole idea is to make music, to celebrate!"

I agree. We all agree. Even Mrs. Heinemann must agree, but I wish he would please shut up.

"My voice keeps cracking," I tell him. "I don't think I can sing my part, but she won't listen to me."

All his considerable weight rests on one leg as he thinks about this. "It's because she's bored with her life, Mike," he sighs. "People need to grow, to move." he says.

I know he hopes I read his mind here. Without saying the exact words, he is trying to explain why he is leaving me again. I feel slightly ashamed of this man I am standing with in the crowded lobby. My friends have started drifting back toward the practice room.

"Are you giving me a ride afterwards?" I ask.

"Sure."

"I'll find you then," I say and leave him.

Everybody has the jitters. We line up on the bleachers, the closed curtain separating us from our audience of murmuring parents. The talk in the cafeteria and on the school bus all week has been that we are not ready for this concert, that we sound awful. Mrs. Heinemann decided five weeks ago we would do all new material. Now, with the stage lights bright and hot on our faces and with Carla's lilac mixing with another girl's rose, Mrs. Heinemann's right hand points in a karate-chop position and counts singers in tiny motions like a good knife dicing vegetables. Every few strokes she stops and waves us closer to one another, and our feet shuffle on the wooden planks. Carla and I try not to touch flesh to flesh.  Mrs. Heinemann whispers instructions, holds her right palm up for our attention, points the left to Audrey Klinger, the accompanist, and to the stage hand who will open the curtain. Both hands come down, we swallow collectively, and Audrey begins playing "Consider Yourself" from Oliver.

As the curtain opens, I clasp my hands in front and watch Mrs. Heinemann's flapping wings for the signal to sing. Then Audrey misses a difficult run, goes flat, and we begin in disarray. But I am firmly in alto. We lug together, trying to find our way in the rounds and tempo changes of Mrs. Heinemann's fancy arrangement. Disaster. When it is over, the audience applauds politely, as it does no matter how good or bad we are, and a smiling, oblivious Mrs. Heinemann clicks her high heels to the microphone.

"Welcome to our" this, that, and the other, she is saying. I am looking out at the rows of faces for my mother and father, who will be sitting far away from each other. She goes on thanking people for their contributions, like a little child blessing everyone she knows in her bedtime prayers. I am struck by the sort of comment my father would make: "She is trying to spread the blame for this mess."

At the termination of this speech, Audrey starts the endless, over-moody introduction to "Moon River." The stage lights go down and pale blue ones come up. But not all the blue lights work correctly, and part of the chorus is left in darkness as the stage hands knock around in the back to fix the problem. Our parents chuckle nervously as the light finally comes up. Mrs. Heinemann, unfazed, waves her director's arms at us in a private dance. We are not yet singing. Billy Dreibelbis once suggested that if that introduction were two bars longer she might actually start to fly. My father's beard and receding hairline somehow pop out of the crowd, and I know from how he stretches side to side and up and down that he is looking for me. Once, when I could tell he had found me on stage, he waved. And he kept waving until I acknowledged him by nodding my head, yes, Dad.  I complained about my embarrassment later, but he only shrugged and laughed. "That's the kind of person I am," was all he would say.

We are singing "Moon River" now, and we sound all right. No real enthusiasm, of course, but we manage to hit the right notes. We finish and move from song to song, but we have peaked on "Moon River," and everything else seems to only drag our spirits lower. The program is rigged against our ever soaring. Our parents shift in their seats, losing interest. And there on the stage, at 13, I am for some reason struck by the realization that my father is right to escape to something beyond the life of our little town. He is right to pay the heavy price in alienation and hostility I already knew I'd levy for this betrayal. I feel somehow unclean even thinking this at the time, as if I were the one walking off to suit myself. But then something happens:

Our program is almost over. The lights are up, and we have just butchered a complicated, disastrous medley. My father is scowling, boiling. I don't even have to look at him; I know how he reacts. Even Mrs. Heinemann seems to have come half-awake to how awful we sound. Her movements are heavier, her mouth has fallen, she closes her eyes as if praying just to get through this evening. She is looking down the barrel of 40 angry seventh-graders.

Then Billy Dreibelbis whispers the name of a song we have done well all year, and many of us turn to look at him. He won't look directly at Mrs. Heinemann, but he smiles defiantly. Somebody repeats the title, and then somebody else. Mrs. Heinemann holds her hand up and stares at the floor to quiet us. But dresses rustle and heavy shoes clomp restlessly on the bleachers; more of us whisper the title.

She clicks over to the piano for a conference. Audrey's upturned face nods, and then Mrs. Heinemann comes back across the stage and says the title. Victory.  We buck up, hug ourselves, and sing. It is strong, almost desperate singing. I have the sense that we are swaying. When Carla's arm touches mine, I glance into her face and, for one supercharged instant, we sing into each other's eyes. My father's neck almost cranes off his shoulders to get a better look at me. Carla and I edge closer. We are practically holding hands. Our hips are touching.

Then my voice suddenly shifts into a strong tenor, so strong it varooms past the other voices in the chorus and carries out into the auditorium. Somebody, a man, laughs, but I see, I feel, people take special note of me. Mrs. Heinemann's eyes panic, plead. But I can't stop myself. My father's voice climbs inside my head. "Smile, Mike!  Smile!"

So I smile. Lifting both my voice and my face, I imagine the chorus bands together to push me forward. I am filled with a strange sadness and joy, an obedience to inevitability, an overwhelming awareness that the very lining of my soul is now irreparably torn and made visible. My father bounces in his seat. He is waving.

I am 13 years old here. Changes were taking place in my life that I do not yet understand.

Is he waving me on, or is he only waving goodbye?