The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff Page B

haven’t told them about the Rose Music, Allegra. How many people were there in our band?”
    We told them about the people coming to play on the sculpture with us, and Deirdre imitated the accent of the lady with the big hat. I told them about the old lady in the green visor being wheeled away and saying, “Wonderful … Wonderful…” in her little craggly voice.
    Then Daddy got a phone call to fill in for a missing cellist the next night at Waterfront Park, a concert by the West Coast Chamber Orchestra, and Mommy and Deirdre went off to pick raspberries in the country, and I practiced. Deirdre would sing her next concert, the same program as before but at a different place with a different bathroom, and she’d stay another day and we’d take a picnic and go to the concert and hear Daddy play music.
    I went to Deirdre’s second concert, too. She was perfectly fine; she didn’t get strange at all. Just before she went upstairs to bed that night, she said, “Do you know what Martin Luther said he’d do if he thought the end of the world was coming soon? He said he’d plant apple trees.”
    I looked at her, standing on the bottom step with her hand on the banister, holding both tiny sandals by their straps. Her big eyes were all shiny from the adrenaline of the concert.
    Bro David was standing at the top of the stairs looking down at us. “Deirdre, if the end of the world was coming, how would there be time for any apples to grow?” he said. He said it in a voice that showed he wasn’t expecting an answer.
    Deirdre looked up at him. “Just to have them there, you see? Not for them to be of any use—there wouldn’t be time. Just to have apple trees. Just growing up out of the earth…” She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and we said good night. Her dress floated up the stairs behind her.
    I listened up the stairs. Bro David said, “That was in the fourteenth century. What did he know?”
    â€œWell, sixteenth, actually,” Deirdre said. “But it’s a pretty idea.…”
    â€œDoesn’t sound too bright to me,” he said.
    Deirdre said exasperatedly, “Bro David, you are such a realist. ”
    Immediately the family was laughing. Daddy and Mommy from their bedroom, me from the bottom of the stairs. I think we were all laughing at different things, though.
    *   *   *
    At the Waterfront Concerts, thousands of people come and sit on the grass to hear the music. Charley Horner was playing in the orchestra, and I saw him walk over to Daddy’s chair and say something that made Daddy laugh. Daddy has a nice reasonable laugh, where his face breaks open and then shuts itself up again.
    The park has food booths all lined up along the sides. Somebody on the radio called the Waterfront Concerts “the best-smelling concerts west of the Hudson.”
    When the orchestra started to play the second half of the concert, the same dancing man from before started dancing. He had his same clothes on. He danced the same dance, forward and back and around, and he had the same concentrating look on his face. Some people just watched him, some people pointed at him, some people didn’t pay any attention to him at all. Just like before.
    Deirdre stared at him and let out a loud whisper, “Aaaahhhh.” Then she whispered, “Why on earth doesn’t somebody dance with that man?”
    Nobody said anything. My mother and two of her friends and I just sat there.
    â€œWell, why doesn’t somebody?” she said.
    I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I said. I looked across Deirdre at Mommy, who was just listening to the music.
    Deirdre stood up and started walking around people. She had raspberry stains on her big, swingy blue-and-white-striped skirt, at the side. Everybody had blankets or sleeping bags spread out, and she had to be careful not to step right on