Part One: The Piano Nobody Wanted
My name is Eleanor Marsh, and I am sixty-one years old. For thirty-four years I taught piano to the children of Cedar Falls, in a little studio above the hardware store, until my hands began to ache in the mornings and my doctor told me, gently, that it was time to stop. I retired in June. By October, my house was too quiet, my days were too long, and I was beginning to understand that a person can miss noise the way other people miss company.
That was why I went to the estate sale on Willow Court on a Saturday morning, though I had no business buying anything. The house belonged to a woman named Rose Calloway, who had died in the spring at eighty-four. Her children had flown in, emptied the closets, priced the furniture, and gone home again. What was left stood in the garage with masking-tape prices: a lamp, a set of dishes, a rocking chair, and, pushed against the back wall under a dust sheet, an upright piano.
It was not a beautiful piano. The wood was dark with age, one key was chipped, and the middle pedal stuck. But when I lifted the fallboard and pressed a chord, the sound that came out was warm and true, like a voice that had been waiting to be used again. The price tag said two hundred dollars. My daughter, Susan, who had driven me there, put a hand on my arm.
“Mom,” she said, “you just retired. You do not need a project.”
“I need something to listen to,” I said, and I bought it.
The delivery men brought it on Tuesday and set it against the living-room wall where my old teaching piano used to stand. I spent the afternoon cleaning it, wiping the keys with a soft cloth, polishing the wood until it glowed a little. When I lifted the bench lid to put my music books away, I found something that did not belong to me: a bundle of letters, tied with faded blue ribbon, tucked into the bottom of the bench.
There were twenty-three of them, written in a neat, slanting hand, addressed to a sister named June, and dated from 1974 to 1989. I know I should have put them aside. They were not mine. But the first envelope was already open, and the first line caught me before I could stop myself: “June, I sold the piano today.”
I sat on the floor of my living room and read until the light went out of the room. Rose Calloway, it turned out, had been a pianist. Not a famous one, not a rich one — a girl from a small town who had won a scholarship to a music school in the city, who had practiced six hours a day, who had dreamed of concert halls. Then she married, then her daughter was born, then money got tight, and one winter she sold her piano to pay for her little girl’s first year of music lessons.
“She will have what I could not keep,” Rose wrote. “That is enough. It has to be enough.”
But it was not enough, not really. Letter after letter, year after year, Rose wrote about hearing music in her head while she washed dishes, about saving coins in a jar marked “piano” that always got emptied for shoes or school fees, about watching her daughter grow into a fine young pianist and biting her tongue whenever she wanted to say, “I used to play too.”
“I never told Anna,” she wrote in 1988. “She thinks I was only ever her mother. Perhaps that is kinder. Perhaps she would be ashamed of a mother who gave up.”
Anna. Rose’s daughter was named Anna. And as I sat there among the letters, with my own teaching years behind me and my own daughter worried about my quiet house, I understood something with a clarity that startled me: Rose Calloway had spent forty years believing her sacrifice was invisible. Somebody ought to tell her daughter the truth.
The next morning I called Susan. “I need your help,” I said. “I need to find a concert pianist named Anna Calloway.”
There was a pause. “Mom,” Susan said slowly, “are you sure this is a good idea?”
“No,” I said. “But it is a necessary one.”
