American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [31]
time to earn her own living approached, she waited for a sign that she might have a calling. She knew that she possessed an uncommon discipline of mind and a fierce sensitivity to the physical world but she did not know what to do with these endowments. She was a slender girl with a strong body and a desire to express herself through movement, but she appreciated the difficulty of economic survival and was aware that she might not be able to make money by becoming a dancer, which was her dream. Her interest in reading had not declined, but she had seen how little books had to do with her strange world and she felt too vibrantly alive for their dry pages. In the meantime, her mother drifted from low-paying employment to low-paying employment. Creditors would have to be assuaged, arrangements were always pending, logistics seemed to consume her existence. Anna lifted the papers on her desk and rearranged them. The headstrong young girl who had bravely taken on the challenge of motherhood had, in spite of her wish to take care of her daughter, grown up into a confused and distracted woman. Neither mother nor daughter was unmindful of the dangers that they chronically encountered through the annoying encroachment of real life and its responsibilities and demands. Yet they were united in their bafflement as to how to respond to them. Their little family unit seemed to thrive in a state of extended crisis. But one day Honor knocked a spoon off the table at dinner and when she bent down to pick it up she caught sight of her concave reflection in the oval of tarnished silver and saw that she was no longer a little girl. When she emerged in the upright position she had decided to change her personality. She would be courageous and independent as befitted a young woman at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Anna stood up to get something and, having forgotten what it was, sat down again. Honor looked at her mother across the table and a hitherto undiscovered reservoir of compassion rocked like an ocean in her chest. She swayed slightly from the waves of feeling. The next day she left home and found work as a dancer.
1936
The factory was located on Fayette Street. It appeared to Joe to be nothing more than a series of sheds and was in fact formerly a garage. It had been chosen by Aram because of its proximity to the ocean, for tempering cymbals in sea water, and resembled his centuries-old factory in Istanbul as closely as possible. Aram had come from Turkey to teach his nephew the art of making cymbals. It was the family profession and required the use of a secret formula that Aram had come to impart in person. He was an upright gentleman with an old-country demeanor. He could be found sitting out in front of the factory and striking gleaming metal discs with his felt-covered hammer. The chimes could be heard high above the noises of the alley.
They made the cymbals the way they had always been made, the way Aram’s ancestors had made them in Turkey. There was a secret unwritten formula that only the family knew. A copper alloy was mixed and shaped into a molten pancake and fired until it glowed orange in the depths of a gigantic furnace. The cymbal makers did this again and again until the metal hardened into a thin black disk. Then they stamped the center of the cup by machine and returned it to the oven yet again to add a sweet lightness, Aram told them, to the tone of the cymbal. After this the inchoate instrument was hammered for hours by hand and then left to season. For two weeks it went untouched. Then it was tested every other day over the course of two more weeks until it was deemed ready. Each shining cymbal required one month of labor to be born.
When Vivian and Joe pulled up, Aram greeted Vivian with a smile. He welcomed them inside. She had met him in one of the clubs in Harlem where he had gone to meet with drummers to learn their language and find out how to make better cymbals for them. Vivian had known some drummers back then, she explained quietly. Aram invited them in and made tea. Vivian’s eyes shone