<<  -- 6 --  Jenna Orkin    ROSALYN TURECK

One night after my son Alex (not his real name) was born, I met Tureck when she was with a feminist writer, Marilyn French. Afterwards I read French's book in which a character says that all men are rapists at heart. The character is killed.
I disagreed with the assessment of men but it stuck with me. I wrote to French asking, among other things, if she had a son. Yes, she answered and reproached me for a common mistake among readers: That of assuming that a character is a spokesperson for the writer. The character's view was untenable, French said, which was why she had died.
When I saw Tureck again, we spoke of French's book. I mentioned the character who believed that all men have the instinct for rape.
'Do you believe that?' Tureck asked.
'I can't afford to, can I?' I said, alluding to my son.
'No,' she smiled.

The last time I saw her, I brought Alex, then two, to her apartment which was stuffed with rare old instruments and artifacts from grateful fans all over the world. To keep Alex occupied, on the way over I bought a piece of poundcake from the deli. He crumbled it happily for half an hour. But crumbs and ants were a small price to pay to keep the instruments in tact. Tureck thought he was adorable. She then returned to Oxford for the next thirteen years or so.

Last year my friend Miriam showed me an article in which Tureck had been quoted. A cantor at her temple had been accused of molesting a young boy and Tureck, as a well-known congregant, was asked her opinion. 'It's terrible if true,' she said.
It took a while before I acted on the information that she was in town. I was working with a coalition of scientists, parents and Lower Manhattan residents, trying to get the EPA to do a proper cleanup around Ground Zero. Alex, now seventeen, had been a student at Stuyvesant High School, four blocks north of the World Trade Center, on 9/11. Life was fraught so that I could never think about anything else til Friday evening which is not a great time to be calling a temple for contact info. But eventually I got her number.
A housekeeper answered the phone. Tureck was playing the piano as robustly as ever in the background.
She was living in Riverdale with a view of endless sky. A friend, a conductor who'd been her student when he was twelve, had recommended the place. He and his wife lived nearby.
'I came home to end my days,' Tureck said, with more equanimity than I would have expected her to show in the face of death. I now wonder how much she knew about the imminence of that end.
She was writing her autobiography which would have thirty chapters. ('One for each variation,' I said, referring to the Goldberg Variations. 'Very good,' she said.)
I told her about the work we were doing at Ground Zero. She was intrigued. But as the country was about to go to war with Iraq, her more pressing questions were about that. Were there petitions to squelch the idea as she'd like to sign and maybe make some phonecalls?
Yes, lots, I said, and sent them to her. I also sent her Clinton's fax number and other contact info. And I sent her a poem I'd written about 9/11 which was on the Museum of the City of New York website. I wondered what she'd make of the quatrain:

WTC, those letters,
Now a code for grief and fear ...
When I was studying music they
Stood for the Well-Tempered Clavier.

She said that in the Spring I should come up and visit.

Spring came -- along with the Iraq war -- and went, as the war did not. The battle of Ground Zero also continued with no end in sight. When I saw that Tureck had died I kicked myself for not calling to see if she wanted to make good on the invitation. Then I reflected that burying myself in work is what she would have done. But I regret letting the time slip by.

As I read her obituary I thought, 'She was one of a kind,' but no, she wasn't. For what kind would that be? She taught me important lessons about many things besides Bach. They constitute the revelation that began when I was sixteen.