Read Online The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff - Free Book Online

what I mean when I say ‘gene pool’?” she said.
    â€œYep. It’s the way you get things from both parents. In your genes.”
    â€œAnd from their parents, and their grandparents. Oh—Raisa sends hugs and kisses to everybody. She was going to send a cake—but I couldn’t keep it in a bag for five days. How’s the violin going?” she asked me.
    â€œFine,” I said.
    â€œWhat’re you playing now?”
    I shuffled music around in my mind, avoiding Mozart. I wasn’t ready to tell her about the competition.
    â€œShe’s playing page turner this summer,” Daddy said. “Earning money. By the way, Allegra, can you turn for a pianist on Saturday? Two o’clock?”
    â€œYep,” I said.
    â€œAh, blessed are the Oregon breezes,” Deirdre said. “What’ve you turned?”
    I told her all the pieces I could think of.
    We put all Deirdre’s bags and things in my room. She said she just wanted to be alone for a few minutes “to try to find some coherence.”
    *   *   *
    With Deirdre staying with us, arranging practice times could get complicated. Bro David hung a sign-up sheet on the music-room door. It was divided into half-hour blocks, and you could sign up for as many as you wanted, as long as you weren’t selfish about it. The sign-up sheet had a picture on it that he drew. It was somebody with lots of arms, like that Hindu god Siva, and the person was playing two violins and a cello and singing at the same time.
    I was just about asleep in the music room that first night and I was watching this painting we have. It’s by Marc Chagall and it’s called The Green Violinist. The man has a green face, and he’s playing a violin. He’s wearing a purple hat and coat, and things are flying through the painting. The violinist is up in the air above some buildings, and there’s a small gray man flying in the sky and another man, even smaller, holding up his arms to catch the flying one. I’ve always liked that painting. You can think that the man playing the violin is sending flying music into the air and that’s why everything flies, or you can think there’s some other reason why they fly. We don’t have the real painting, we have a print of it. We saw the real one in New York once when we went to visit my grandmother Raisa.
    There’s a streetlight near the corner of our house, and it shines through the windows of the music room at night, so you can see things kind of in a gray color. And there are sort of trapezoids of light on the carpet from the French doors.
    Somebody knocked on the door. “Am I bothering you, Allegra?” It was Deirdre.
    I told her she wasn’t.
    â€œI won’t stay long.” She was in a balloony white nightgown with lace, and bare feet, the nightgown made a cottony sound when she walked. Her hair was hanging all down her back. She still had long, dangly earrings on, and you could hear them tinkling when she walked. She had a big glass of milk in one hand.
    â€œWant me to turn on the lamp?” I asked.
    â€œNo, I just want to sit here with you in the half-light.”
    She sat down in the chair the second violinist uses when there are quartets. She put the glass of milk on the floor and stretched both arms above her head and then out to the sides, the way you do in the breaststroke. Then she folded her hands in her lap. “I’m stupid with exhaustion. And I can’t sleep. Does that ever happen to you?” she said.
    â€œI think so,” I said. I was thinking of the final exams we had to take at the end of school. Jessica and Sarah and I spent the whole night just sitting in front of the TV set, watching old movies. We were at Sarah’s house. We’d taken the history exam that day. All on Egypt and ancient China.
    â€œIt was Aspen that did it to me. The altitude. And rehearsal’s at nine tomorrow morning.