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virtuosos of her youth.
    His playing thrilled a deep Russian chord in her. She found space in her class.

    DURING THE Great Depression many of Morningside Heights’ apartment buildings degenerated into single-room-occupancy hotels of such squalor that they scared off even students. Neighboring Columbia University had recently begun a program of crash gentrificationby buying up whole blocks and returning them to family housing, and 15 Claremont Avenue, a handsome ten-story structure three blocks from Juilliard, was one of the beneficiaries. Thefive-room apartment leased by Mr. and Mrs. Allen Spicer was generously sized, the room for rent had its own bath, and best of all, there was an ornate Chickering grand in the living room.
    Bristle-haired Allen Spicer worked in the traffic department of the New York Telephone Company. His chubby, white-haired wife, Hazel, was secretary to the principal of a Bronx high school. They needed the extra income, but Mrs. Spicer was reluctant to take responsibility for a roomer as young as Van. Rildia Bee charmingly waved away her doubts and asked if her son might be allowed to practice on the piano for an hour or two a day. Mrs. Spicer reluctantly agreed, so long as she didn’t have to listen to scales. Van moved in, and Rildia Bee left her only child for the first time.
    He loved his parents deeply, but in many ways the move was a relief. His Texas adolescence, he once admitted, had been a living hell:“You can’t love music enough to want to play it without other kids thinking you’re queer or something.” In his early teens he shot up to his full height, his shoe size nearly matching his years, and his hair kinked into an uncontrollable frizz. When unisex salons were widely regarded as abominations and the epithet longhair , signifying an artist or intellectual, was akin to sissy , he had been easy pickings for school jocks. As well as retreating still further into music, he had unburdened his awkwardness into old-fashioned poems: one, published in the National Anthology of High School Poetry in 1950, was bleakly titled “The Void.” Though he was no genius at academic work—his IQ was measured ata high but unspectacular 119—he had sweated through summer sessions in the dusty brick groves of Kilgore College to graduate high school at sixteen, twelfth in a class of 103, with the highest ratings for personality, attitude, attendance, associates, chance of success, and character, though only a “satisfactory” for leadership, and ready to get out of town as fast as he could.
    Like any teenager away from home the first time, he cut loosesome strings. His room was a pigsty. Every day, Rildia Bee sent him the Kilgore News Herald , and the unread copies piled up with the other clutter until it threatened to block the door. Occasionally he stayed up all night and tackled a batch. “My room looks wonderful and I’ll never let it get untidy again,” he’d vow to Hazel Spicer in the morning, but it always did. He was terrible at writing home; after weeks of silence he telephoned, reversing the charges. Against his parents’ strict precepts, he tried smoking and drinking: “Just a little rum,” he said when he joined the Spicers in their late-afternoon rum and Coke. The biggest relief after years as a special case was Juilliard’s unabashed elitism. In a place where violinists strode down the hall throwing off double-stops and triple-stops, he no longer stood out for devotion to his craft.
    Yet he still stood out. It was hard not to when his blond pompadour bobbed above the heads of everyone else and his contagious laugh echoed down the hall. He was perpetually putting his paddle-like arms round anyone who came within their ambit, which disarmed most but annoyed some. A young voice student namedLeontyne Price was shocked when he, a Lhévinne student, spoke to her in the cafeteria, a major arena for student showboating, where the tribes normally kept their own counsel. Then there was