Chapter 1

The irony was amazing. Kelly had been diagnosed with inoperable ovarian cancer. She was given less than a year to live. But during the time that we coped with this, her quality of life was good. She was often tired from the chemotherapy, and she lost her hair, but nausea and other side effects were kept at bay by the other drugs she was given.

Then there came that fatal trip.

Kelly went to Collingwood to visit her parents at their retirement cottage. I was playing a concert that night. She laughed when I worried. She was driving the Audi Quattro. Although it was November, the skies were clear, and she was driving the ultimate traction machine. Then it began to snow.

About midnight, I got the call from the Ontario Provincial Police. Black ice. The Audi suddenly went sideways, jumped the median and wound up in the path of an 18 wheeler. My Kelly was dead. Instantly, they said. Oh God, I fervently hope it was instant.

Kelly and I had owned everything jointly. We were cosigners on all our loans, including our mortgage. But Kelly was the principal borrower in every case. That meant that the loans were life-insured on her but not on me. She had a steady job as a professor at the university and later as an administrator. I was a freelance composer and pianist. My income was up and down, hardly steady. Besides, I’d had a heart attack about 20 years ago. If I died of another heart attack, which seemed statistically likely to the insurance Johnnies, I wouldn’t be insured. Preexisting condition. But Kelly was in perfect health. Her parents had lived well into their 80s. And she probably would have as well. Except for little things called “cancer” and “accident.”

So the insurance paid off the house and our loans. Kelly had a good insurance policy from the university. I think it was about half a million. She had another policy for a bit over a million that she had taken out herself. I didn’t even know about it. Well, perhaps she may have told me, but, as Kelly often said, the best way to get my eyes to glaze over is to talk about anything involving finances or business. Now I wouldn’t have to worry so much about that. Both policies paid double indemnity for accidental death. And I was the sole beneficiary.

When it was added to all Kelly’s insurance, the settlement left me with a few million in the bank and no debts. My lawyer, Isadore Mandelbaum, put me in touch with some dependable people to invest my money conservatively and look after it. I had a reasonably good guaranteed income -- about $100,000.00 annually -- with no significant debts -- plus, of course, whatever I made playing and composing, which could be quite respectable in a good year.

After Kelly’s death, I kept largely to myself for months. As far as most of the music community was concerned, I had dropped out of sight. Close friends like Izzy Mandelbaum, my manager Ken Davenport and Robert Helwig, my oldest friend from the old days, kept in touch. Others were well-meaning, but one by one they stopped calling. In a way it was a relief. One exception was my next-door neighbor Bobby Simms.

Bobby had bought the little place next door about a year and a half previously. He lived there with his Yorkshire terrier Pooh. Bobby was a successful hairdresser. He had a salon in the fashionable Yonge and Eglinton area of Toronto. Bobby lived up to the stereotype of the gay hair dresser. My friend Ken, an open gay for many years, described Bobby as “not just gay but ecstatic”. But I discovered that the most important thing about Bobby was not his sexual orientation but his innate goodness. Bobby was the salt of the earth.

At Kelly’s funeral, Bobby had hugged me and wept. He’d made me promise to call him if there was anything I needed, “anything at all,” he’d said. I thought at first that he might be coming on to me, but I soon learned otherwise.

My first reaction after people left me alone was to take refuge in the bottle. I’d been a drinker since university, but now I never went to bed sober. In fact, for months I was always drunk after 5:00 in the afternoon.

Bobby took to visiting me with special dishes that he “just happened to have cooked too much of.” He was always worried that Pooh was making too much noise. In truth Pooh was a noisy little beast, but, like Bobby, there was no harm in him. I found his yapping vaguely comforting. Of course, the real message of Bobby’s visits was, “I care about you, and I’m worried about you.” He was a great guy.

Gradually, I started to pull myself together. I was still drinking more than most, but I rarely woke up with a raging hangover. Most days, I hung out in my studio. I composed very little, but I played the piano constantly. Unconsciously, I started to regain my technique, and playing became more effortless and more contemplative. As my fingers began to work better, I found myself gravitating more and more to Rachmaninoff, especially the Études Tableaux, those wonderful enigmatic pieces that Rachmaninoff had so tantalizingly labeled as graphic descriptions and then refused to tell us what they described. They’re among the most rewarding and challenging works in the piano repertoire. I had loved them for years. I remembered the words of my last piano teacher, Madame Levinsky. She’d said, “Morry, there are two types of people in the world: those who admit that they like Rachmaninoff and those who won’t admit it. You have not yet admitted to yourself your love for this music, but you are too good a musician not to love it. Play with your heart, not your fingers.” Corny but true.

One afternoon just as I had lost myself in Rachmaninoff, the phone rang. The number on the caller ID was not one that I knew, but I answered anyway. “Morry, hi. This is Aaron Kline.” I was very surprised. Aaron was Bobby’s partner in the hairdressing salon. Unlike Bobby, he disproved the stereotype of the hairdresser. Aaron was straight, married and had a teen-aged daughter. He lived in the neighborhood, just a few blocks away. I knew him, of course, but not well. I was very surprised to have him call me, and I told him so.

“Morry, to tell the truth, I’d like to ask a favour of you. My daughter Rachel is really talented. She’s been studying music theory with a teacher from the conservatory. They seem to have hit an impasse. I wonder if you could help out.”

I don’t teach. I have tried it in the past and found it a bad fit. I told Aaron this as delicately as I could, but he insisted that he wasn’t trying to hire me to teach Rachel. She clearly couldn’t continue with the current teacher. Aaron simply wanted me to talk to Rachel, look at her work and determine if it was worth her time and his money for her to get another teacher. I could sense Bobby’s hand in this. I suspected it was yet another of his ways of bringing me out of my shell.

I asked Aaron what level Rachel was at. He told me that she’d completed her grade 10 piano and grade 3 theory. That meant that she’d completed all the courses offered in those subjects at the Royal Conservatory of Music. She had been taking harmony and counterpoint from a private teacher. It sounded as though she was a very advanced student for her age. Reluctantly, I agreed to see Rachel. We settled on Saturday morning. I set my computer to wake me well ahead. Otherwise I’d forget.

Aaron called on a Tuesday. I remember that because the next day, Wednesday, I bought a car. I’d been toying with the idea for a while. Izzy Mandelbaum kept telling me that I’d waited long enough. Sooner or later I had to take the plunge. Since Kelly had died in an Audi, that make was out of the question. I knew that the accident wasn’t the car’s fault, but the association was too negative. I was still very fond of German iron, so I thought I’d check out BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

The great thing about making your own schedule is that you can shop when everyone else is stuck in an office. There was a Mercedes dealer just a few blocks from my house. I took a stroll over on Wednesday morning. The showroom was empty except for a couple of bored-looking salesmen and me. I looked around the area and checked out the new cars. Nothing seemed to appeal to me. Then I went into the “pre-owned” showroom. A cute little 190E 2.6 caught my eye. It was a weird colour -- kind of a pinkie silver metallic, and it had only a few thousand clicks on the odometer. I could easily afford a new one, but if I could save a bundle on this little beauty and still have most of the warranty, why not? It appealed to my Scottish blood. I signed the papers, gave them a cheque and was the owner of an almost-new Mercedes. I picked it up the next day and spent Thursday and Friday driving around, playing with my new toy.

Things were looking up, ever so slightly.

On Saturday morning at about 10:30, Aaron arrived with Rachel. She was a very pretty girl with striking coloration. Her skin was very white. You could almost call it alabaster. Her hair was very black. I wondered if her father had given it a little help in the colour department. But her eyes were her most striking features. They were an extremely light brown -- almost an amber colour. She was petite. It would later become apparent that at thirteen she’d already reached her adult height, just a shade less than 5’2”. The whole package added up to a very beautiful girl.

Her demeanour was less beautiful. Rachel didn’t look particularly happy to see me. She had also taken no pains with her appearance. She was wearing track pants, a none-too-clean T-shirt and sneakers that had been around the block a few times. I sensed that she was very nearly as disenchanted with the situation as I was. I invited Aaron to have a cup of coffee in the morning room, and I took the sullen Rachel downstairs to my studio.

I asked Rachel if she’d brought her recent assignments with her. She took them out of her knapsack and put them on my desk. “OK, play them for me,” I said.

“Play them? These aren’t music!”

“Aren’t they? Why not? They’re supposed to be. Otherwise there’s no point to all this.”

Slowly, the realization dawned on her. She took her assignments to the piano, sat down and played. As she played, she frowned. “This sounds like hell,” she said.

“Then it has to be wrong,” I told her.

“What do you mean? It’s what I was assigned to do.”

“I suspect that’s exactly what’s wrong. Do you want to write music?”

“Yeah, but this isn’t writing music.”

“That’s what’s wrong. You were given the wrong assignment, and you can do a lot better. Look at these again. Make them better and play them for me.”

“But there are all these rules. How can I make music with all these rules I’m supposed to follow? It’s like trying to play the piano with boxing gloves.”

“That’s overstating it, but there is a challenge. Look at it as a game with rules. Do you play baseball?” She nodded. “Imagine trying to play baseball with no rules. Or here’s a better analogy. Canadian children study French in school. When you were learning French, you were taught to speak first. You learned to speak a lot of it before you learned any rules of grammar, right?” She nodded again. “But if you hadn’t learned those rules, you’d continue to speak French like a child, not like an adult. Learning grammar made you able to communicate more of your thoughts to other people. Consider these rules the grammar of music. The grammar and syntax of language are like a contract. They’re an agreement between the speaker and the listener. If you say something a certain way, then the person who hears you can understand it, based on the rules you’ve agreed on. These are the rules for musical communication. They can be made to work. Many, many composers have done it before. Find a way.”

She screwed up her face. “Does that mean that you have to use these rules all the time?”

I smiled. She was even brighter than I thought. “No. It just means that you have to learn to use them. Then you can go forward from there. If Einstein hadn’t known the work of Newton and all the other physicists and mathematicians who came before him, he’d have had to start all over again. But he didn’t. He could build on the past. Learn these rules. Let them become second nature to you. Then you can go beyond them.

“Now show me how you can make music out of this assignment.”

She puckered her brow. After a few minutes, she took her pencil out of her bag and began to make changes. Several times, she erased the changes and started over. Finally, she looked up at me. I nodded, and she began to play. It was music. Very good music. The girl had talent.

When she finished, I touched her shoulder and motioned her to the chesterfield. We sat down, and I looked directly at her.

“Rachel, I’m going to offer you a bargain. I’ll see you every week at this time but only if you’ll do your best to make music out of whatever assignment I give you. Fair warning: the assignments will seem silly at times, but you need to trust me that there will always be a reason for them. And there will always be a way to make music from them. Your job will be to find it. Will you do it?”

She looked down for a moment. Then she looked at me with a radiant smile. “Sure. Why not? No one else has ever put it to me that way before. I thought that theory and music were two different things. It’s a hell of a lot more fun this way.”

“Rachel, here is your first lesson. Music theory is what we have learned from composers who have gone before us. We study it so that we won’t have to make the mistakes that they did before they solved them. We made up these rules after studying their music. I hate to call these things ‘rules.’ They’re more like principles. They’re the basis of the music that we know -- music by the great creators who went before us.

“After you’ve mastered these things that have been left for us, you can make your own rules. That’s what making music -- real music, not mass-produced junk -- is all about. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re studying nuclear physics. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and that lets us reach for the stars. Deal?” I held out my hand.

She took it. “Deal!”

“OK, let’s go upstairs and talk to your dad.”

We joined Aaron in the breakfast room. I explained to him the deal that Rachel and I had struck. I carefully explained that I was not doing this for money. As long as Rachel and I respected one another and both lived up to our agreement, the relationship would continue. When either of us didn’t wish the arrangement to continue, it would be over. In the meantime, we’d make music.

Next Saturday, Rachel showed up promptly at 10:00. I couldn’t help but notice that she looked better groomed, and was certainly better dressed. She was wearing a pair of jeans that had clearly just been ironed and a very smart-looking red top. She even smiled when she saw me. “Mr. Stewart, I hope you’ll like what I’ve written.”

“Rachel, I’m sure that I’ll enjoy it. But first, we need to get one thing straight. There’s no Mr. Stewart living here. My name is Morry. If I can call you by your first name, it works the other way as well. We’ll have no artificial distinctions based on age. Deal?”

She beamed. “Deal!”

She quickly hung up her jacket and headed for the studio. I followed in her wake. Once there, she seated herself at the piano, turned to make sure that I was properly attentive and began to play. I was rapt. This child had not only done a brilliant job on her assignment, she’d extended it into a little piece lasting about three minutes. It was almost perfectly constructed. She instinctively seemed to understand things such as antecedent and consequent phrases. She had also used a rudimentary three-part song form, though I doubted that she could put a name to it.

When she finished, she turned to me. “Did you like it?”

I said, “No.”

She looked dejected.

I said, “I loved it. You’ve taken what I gave you and not only made music of it. You’ve taken it to another level. Let’s take some time to analyze what you’ve done. After that, we’ll look ahead to next week. Then I’m going to buy you lunch to celebrate.”

The next two hours flew by. She was amazed when I explained to her the niceties of what she’d accomplished. Then, we looked at ways to improve it. I explained some of the basic rules of the next level we were beginning to touch on: form. After we went through those, I asked her to try to improve her piece. She took about twenty minutes. I could find no fault in what she had done.

We went to lunch at Poor Joseph’s Restaurant on Parliament Street. Joe Toscano was a great guy who also happened to run a very nice, reasonably priced restaurant. He had many loyal patrons in the neighborhood, me among them. He greeted us at the door, bowed to Rachel as though she were a great lady and showed us to our table. We had a very enjoyable lunch, and I walked Rachel back to her house.

Over the next few months, this came to be a regular pattern for us. Rachel would show up for her lesson more than adequately prepared. She was always surprising me. We’d have the lesson, and then go to lunch. We ended up becoming friends. We talked about all sorts of things: school, her friends, and, inevitably, sex and relationships.

Rachel was always a very direct person. She could come up with the damnedest things. One day over lunch, she looked up from her fettucine Alfredo and said, “Morry, what do you think about people my age having sex?”

I gulped, and then tried my best at an answer. “You’ve asked me a serious question, so I’ll do my best to give you a serious answer. I’m not going to give you the so-called ‘common’ wisdom about teenage sex. You asked me what I think personally, and I’ll tell you.

“I think that it’s OK for some people and not for others, and that it’s OK in certain situations and not in others. For instance, I’ve known people for whom having sex was no more important than a handshake. I’ve known others who fell in love with everyone they ever kissed. Obviously, that second kind of person has to be very careful about relationships. Fortunately, most of us are somewhere in between.

“As far as thirteen-year-olds having sex is concerned, I think that it’s probably not a good idea for most people your age. There are too many problems you can encounter.

“In your case specifically, you have the additional problem of being very bright and talented. Your chronological age may be thirteen, but your mental age is much, much older. Your emotional age is older as well. Very few thirteen year olds have the ability to apply themselves the way that you can. All of this means that you have to be very careful in any close personal or romantic relationships. And I think that I know you well enough to know that you’re not the sort to have sex with just anyone.

“Rachel, may I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever had sex?”

She blushed and looked down at her plate. “No, I haven’t. I’ve thought about it, but only really thought about doing it with one person. And I’m sure that he’s not interested. Not now anyway.

“Now can I ask you a personal question?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Morry, are you a genius?”

Unfortunately, I had been having a sip of wine when she asked me that. When I finished choking, I said, “No, I’m definitely not a genius.”

“How do you know?”, she said.

I took a deep breath. “I know because I have known geniuses. I have eaten and drunk with them. I have been their friend. Jimmy Jimson was the greatest genius I have ever met. Jacques Poitier is a genius, not Jimmy’s equal, but brilliant. I know that I’m not in their league -- not even close. Why did you ask?”

“Because my dad says that you’re a genius. Of course, he also thinks that Bobby is a genius.” She grinned mischievously into her plate.

“Rachel, can we be serious for a moment?” She nodded. “I’m not a genius, but you just might be. You have a great musical gift. You’ll soon have to decide what to do about it. You’ll have to decide whether to pursue it or not. I think that you owe it to yourself to stick with it. It would be a crime to throw away what you’ve been given. You have the instincts to be not just a good composer -- you could be a great composer. It’s time that you started thinking about that. Believe me, thirteen may be young for sex, but it’s not too young to think about your career.”

“But,” she said, “I'm not thirteen -- I’m fourteen.”

“Fourteen? I thought you were thirteen.”

“Today’s my birthday.”

I was a bit flustered. I hadn’t known. I congratulated her, and then I excused myself and found Joe, the restaurateur. I took him aside. He listened and departed. Within minutes, he was back with a large cake. On top were fourteen candles. He placed it in front of Rachel. She looked up at me through teary eyes and blew out the candles. I rapped on my wine glass, and the restaurant grew quiet.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Today is a great day. I congratulate you on being part of this day. This is the fourteenth anniversary of the day that Ms. Rachel Kline came into our world. I promise you that in years to come this day will be celebrated by people all over the world. I invite all of you to join me in celebration. Please join us in a piece of cake and a glass of champagne.”

Joe and his guys had already started pouring champagne. Pol Roger. If it was good enough for Sir Winston Churchill, it’s good enough for me. I cannot abide the fake stuff -- the Spanish, American and Canadian rip-offs. As I had expected, none of the patrons turned down the bubbly or the cake. When all had been served, I rose again. “A toast. To Rachel!”

They echoed my words, “To Rachel!” and drank up.

The next day, Aaron came to see me. He said, “Rachel told me what you did for her yesterday. I wanted to thank you.”

“Aaron, anything that I’ve done for her is nothing compared to what she has done for me. Seeing her develop week by week has given me back myself. Thank you. And thank Bobby for me.”

He grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, well Bobby did mention that you might have the time to help Rachel.”

Aaron stood to go. We looked at each other. Wordlessly we embraced. Then he turned and left.