It was a drawback, then, perhaps even a disappointment to have fallen in with a man who had no feeling for the dramas and delights of physical competition, but in all fairness to Schneiderman, the opposite was no doubt also true, for Ferguson’s inability to play a musical instrument must have come as a disappointment to his stepfather, who was skilled at both the piano and the violin, not at the highest professional level, perhaps, but to Ferguson’s untrained ear his renditions of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert were flat-out marvels of beauty and precision, as good as anything to be heard on the hundreds of L.P. records Schneiderman had brought with him to Central Park West. It wasn’t that Ferguson hadn’t tried, but his struggle to master the rudiments of keyboard proficiency had ended in failure, at least according to his teacher, old frizzy-haired Miss Muggeridge, who probably freelanced as a witch when she wasn’t breaking the spirits of young children forced to study the piano. After nine months of lessons when he was in the first grade, his mother was told he was a heavy-handed clod of a boy, which led her to conclude that she had started him too early (forget about Mozart composing symphonies when he was six and seven — he didn’t count!), and when she suggested to her failed pianist that he take a year off before making a fresh start with another teacher, Ferguson was relieved that he would never have to see Miss Muggeridge again. The year off was of course the year of the Newark fire, and once they moved to New York and got past the curious interregnum, the little one was at Hilliard, the big one was in disarray, and the piano was forgotten.
So Schneiderman had disappointed Ferguson, and Ferguson had disappointed Schneiderman, but since neither one of them ever spoke about it to the other, each one remained unaware of the other’s disappointment. Eventually, when Ferguson became a starting forward on his freshman basketball team, Schneiderman began to show some interest in sports, at least to the extent of going to several games with Ferguson’s mother, where he cheered on his stepson from the stands, but Ferguson never learned how to play a musical instrument. Still and all, it can safely be said that Ferguson profited more from his stepfather’s involvement with music than Schneiderman did from his stepson’s talent for putting balls in hoops and boxing out opponents for rebounds. At twelve and a half, Ferguson knew nothing about any kind of music except rock and roll, which he and his friends unanimously adored. His head was filled with the lyrics and melodies of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Del Shannon, Fats Domino, and dozens of other pop singers, but when it came to classical music he was a virgin, not to mention jazz, blues, and the nascent folk revival, about which he was utterly ignorant as well, barring some comic ballads by the Kingston Trio, who were having their moment then. Knowing Schneiderman changed all that. For a boy who had been to only two concerts in his life (a performance of Handel’s
Messiah at Carnegie Hall with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Paul; a matinee of Peter and the Wolf, which he saw with his lower school classmates during his first month at Hilliard), a boy who owned not a single record of classical music, whose mother owned not a single record of any kind and listened only to ancient standards and big-band stuff on the radio, for such a boy, who lacked even the smallest glimmer of knowledge about string quartets or symphonies or cantatas, just listening to his stepfather play the piano or the violin was a revelation, and beyond that there was the further revelation of listening to his stepfather’s record collection and discovering that music could actually reconfigure the atoms in a person’s brain, and beyond what happened in the apartments on Central Park West and Riverside Drive, there were the excursions with his mother and Schneiderman to Carnegie Hall and Town Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House that began just weeks after the three of them settled in together. Schneiderman wasn’t on a pedagogical mission, there was no plan to give the boy or his mother a formal education in music, he merely wanted to expose them to works he thought they would respond to, which meant not starting off with Mahler or Schoenberg or Webern but with booming, joyful works such as the 1812 Overture (Ferguson gasped when he heard the cannon for the first time) or histrionic pieces such as the Symphonie Fantastique or the vibrant program music of Pictures at an Exhibition, but bit by bit he lured them in, and before long they were accompanying him to Mozart operas and Bach cello recitals, and for the twelve- and thirteen-year-old Ferguson, who continued to adore the rock and roll he had always adored, those nights out in the concert halls were nothing less than a revelation about the workings of his own heart, for music was the heart, he realized, the fullest expression of the human heart, and now that he had heard what he had heard, he was beginning to hear better, and the better he heard, the more deeply he felt — sometimes so deeply that his body shook.