Dinners with Ruth by Nina Totenberg

Author:Nina Totenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Ten FRIENDS in JOY

At age fifty-four, I became the very thing that I had worried about twenty years before: a fairly young widow. I knew that I did not want to be alone for the rest of my life. But wanting and having were two very different things.

Floyd had died in August 1998. In November, my eighty-nine-year-old father was slated to give a major recital in Boston. I said to myself, “He’s eighty-nine, how many more of these are there going to be?” And I decided I had better go. The concert was beautiful. Every seat was taken, and I stopped counting how many encores he played. One was a Niccolò Paganini Caprice, and while my father coaxed the beautiful notes and devilishly difficult passages from his violin, the student orchestra seated behind him watched, transfixed. Two of the young violinists wept as they took in the sight of this elderly artist playing as if he were thirty and with a passion like there was no tomorrow. People in the audience roared their approval and threw dozens of floral bouquets onto the stage.

Afterwards, we stored the flowers in a bathtub to arrange the next day and then sat down for tea, heaping praise upon the maestro. His eyes sparkling, he looked at us, and opined, in that distinctive Polish accent, “You know, one of the advantages of living so long is that when you can play very well at a very young age, the audience screams and yells, and when you are very old and can still do it, they scream and yell. I,” he said with a mischievous smile, “have been lucky enough to hit it at both ends.”

During the concert’s intermission, a man I did not recognize walked up to me and said, “Hello, Nina, remember when we met?” I faked it and pretended I did. Meanwhile, I was frantically scrolling through my mental Rolodex trying to recall who exactly he was, and please God, what was his name? As he talked, I finally remembered that he was a doctor, and that my mother had sold a house to him and his wife. My mother, as I recalled, had been very fond of his wife, who had been recovering from breast cancer treatment when she was house hunting. Blessedly, I remembered his wife’s name. Gail. “How’s Gail?” I asked. He told me she had died, and then asked me, “How’s Floyd?” I answered that he too had died. They had died within a month of each other. And my mother had died almost exactly two years before.

I didn’t think much about our chance encounter until I received a letter from David Reines. I’m someone who keeps almost nothing, but I kept this note. It’s been in my desk drawer for almost a quarter century. In his wretched doctor’s handwriting (which he later told me he had labored to make decipherable), he wrote out what he recalled of the poet Mary Elizabeth Frye’s words:

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