Part Two: The Daughter Who Never Knew
Finding Anna Whitfield — for she had married and changed her name — took Susan three days, a music-school alumni office, and one very kind librarian in Chicago. Anna was fifty-eight, a concert pianist and teacher, and she was giving a masterclass in our state capital the following week. Susan wrote her a careful letter, not explaining everything, only saying that a piano her mother had once owned had come into my hands, and that there were things inside it she might want to see.
Anna called me on a Thursday evening. Her voice was polite and guarded, the voice of a woman who has learned to be careful with strangers.
“Mrs. Marsh,” she said, “my mother passed away in the spring. I am not sure what you could have of hers that I would need.”
“Letters,” I said. “Twenty-three of them. She wrote them to her sister. They are about you, and about music, and about a piano she sold the winter you were six.”
There was a long silence on the line. Then, very quietly: “My mother never played the piano.”
“She did,” I said. “Beautifully, if her letters are to be believed. She gave it up so you could learn.”
Anna came to my house the following Saturday. She stood in my doorway, a tall woman in a dark coat, her hands — a pianist’s hands, long and strong — folded tightly in front of her. I led her to the piano and opened the bench. She untied the ribbon with shaking fingers and read the first letter standing up. Then she sat down, very suddenly, on the bench, and read the second. And the third.
I made tea. I left it on the side table. She did not touch it for an hour.
When she finally looked up, her face was wet, and she was laughing at the same time, which is a combination I had never seen look so much like relief.
“All my life,” she said, “I thought my mother didn’t understand music. When I practiced, she would sit in the kitchen and listen, and I thought she was just being polite. When I won my first competition, she cried, and I thought mothers just cry. I never knew she was listening with a musician’s ear. I never knew she had given up her own playing for mine. I spent years feeling guilty for leaving home to study, and she spent years feeling guilty for letting me go, and neither of us ever said a word.”
She put her hands on the keys then — my piano, her mother’s piano, nobody’s piano for years — and played a few bars of a Chopin nocturne, softly, the way you speak to someone who has just woken up. The stuck pedal squeaked. One chipped key clicked. It did not matter. The sound filled my quiet house like sunlight coming through a window I had forgotten was there.
“It needs work,” Anna said, wiping her eyes. “A proper tuning, a new pedal, a little love. Mrs. Marsh, would you let me pay for it? It is the least I can do. And when it is ready — would you play it with me? Just once, here, for whoever wants to come?”
I thought of my daughter’s worried face, of my silent rooms, of Rose’s jar marked “piano” that always got emptied for someone else. “Yes,” I said. “I would like that very much.”
Over the next three weeks, a piano tuner named Mr. Okafor came twice, the pedal was fixed, the chipped key was replaced, and Anna drove down from the city every weekend with sheet music and stories about her mother that she was only now learning to tell. Susan came too, at first to check on me, and then, I noticed, to listen. One Sunday she sat beside me on the bench and said, “Mom, I didn’t know you missed it this much.”
“I didn’t either,” I said. “Until it came back.”
