Murder to Music (1997) Anthology by Cynthia Manson; Kathleen Hallig

Author:Cynthia Manson; Kathleen Hallig [Hallig, Cynthia Manson; Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MOM SINGS AN ARIA

James Yaffe

It was one of the greatest disappointments of my mother’s life that I never turned out to be a musical genius. For a couple of years, when I was a kid, Mom made me take violin lessons. At the end of the first year I played a piece called Rustling Leaves. At the end of the second year I was still playing Rustling Leaves. Poor Mom had to admit I wasn’t another Jascha Heifetz, and that was the end of my musical career.

Mom has always been crazy about music herself. She did a little singing when she was a girl, and might have done something with her voice—instead she got married, moved up to the Bronx, and devoted herself to raising a future Lieutenant in the New York City Homicide Squad. But she still listens regularly to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, and she can still hum along with all the familiar arias. That was why—when my wife Shirley and I went up to the Bronx the other night for our regular Friday dinner—I knew Mom would be interested in my latest case.

“You’re a music lover, Mom,” I said. “Maybe you can understand how a man could love music so much that he’d commit murder for it.”

“This is hard to understand?” Mom said, looking up from her roast chicken. “Why else did I stop your violin lessons? Once, while you were playing one of your pieces, I happened to take a look at your teacher, Mrs. Steinberg—and on her face was murder, if I ever saw it!”

“You don’t mean that literally, do you, Mother?” Shirley said. “A woman wouldn’t really feel like murdering a little boy because he played the violin badly.”

“People can have plenty feelings that were never in your psychology books at college,” Mom said. “Believe me, in my own family—my Aunt Goldie who thought the pigeon outside her window was actually her late husband Jake—”

Mom went into detail, and her story was fascinating. Then she passed the chicken a second time, and I was able to get back to my murder.

“Have you ever seen the standing-room line at the Metropolitan Opera House?” I said. “Half an hour before every performance the box office sells standing-room tickets at two-fifty each, on a first-come first-served basis. The opera lovers start lining up outside the house hours ahead of time. They stand on their feet for three hours before the opera just so they can stand on their feet for three hours during the opera! Talk about crazy human motives!”

“People with no ears in their heads,” Mom said, “shouldn’t be so quick to call other people crazy.” And she gave me one of those glares which has been making me feel like a naughty little five-year-old ever since I was a naughty little five-year-old.

I turned my eyes away and pushed on. “Well, there are certain people who show up on the opera standing-room line night after night, for practically every performance throughout the season.

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