Chapter 1: The Dress
The dress cost three dollars. Althea Moss knew that because she had counted the money out at the thrift shop on Frankford Avenue, three damp bills from her cleaning wages, and the woman behind the till had folded it into a paper bag as if it were something precious. It was pale blue, with small white flowers scattered across the skirt, and a thin belt that tied at the waist. At home, her grandmother had taken it in at the shoulders, let it out at the hem, and pressed it until the fabric lay flat. Now, walking up the stone steps toward the Alden Conservatory of Music, Althea felt the dress move against her knees like something borrowed from another girl's life.
She stopped halfway up the steps and looked at the building. It was the kind of place she had only ever seen from the bus window: grey stone, tall windows, columns that made the entrance feel like a doorway into another century. A brass plaque read ALDEN CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC, EST. 1892. Somewhere inside, a black grand piano waited in a recital hall, and a panel of judges waited with it. Althea tightened her grip on her folder.
The folder was not impressive either. It was plain manila, its edges soft from handling, and inside were sheets of music she had copied out by hand and taped together where the paper had torn. Some pages were ruled notebook paper; some were the backs of old church bulletins. The notes were written in her own careful hand, black ink, a little smudged where her palm had rested. She had practised from those pages for months, first on the church upright, then on the battered keyboard in her bedroom, until the music lived more in her fingers than on the paper. Still, she carried the folder close to her chest, as if letting go of it might let go of everything else.
Her shoes were the only pair she owned that were not work shoes: black flats, scuffed at the toes, polished that morning until they caught a dull shine. Each step made a small, clean sound. She counted them without meaning to. Twelve steps.
At the top, a girl about her own age swept past in a dark dress that probably cost more than a month of Althea's wages. She did not look at Althea. Althea stepped aside, and for a moment she stood alone on the landing, the city noise falling away behind her, the heavy doors in front of her like a question she had not yet answered.
She thought about turning around. The thought arrived cleanly, without drama. She could walk back down the steps, catch the bus home, and be at work by seven that evening, mopping office floors in the dark, and no one would ever know she had come this far. Her grandmother would not scold her. Her brother Jerome would tease her for a day and then let it go. Life could go on exactly as it had before, safe and small and known.
But then she thought about the piano at New Hope Community Church, and the late-afternoon light falling across its keys on Sundays, and her grandmother's hands moving across those same keys before arthritis stiffened them. She thought about her mother singing in the kitchen when Althea was small, a hymn about a river that remembered everyone who had ever crossed it. She thought about the nights she had sat at her keyboard after midnight and played until her fingers ached, because the music would not let her stop. She had not come all this way, through all those nights, to turn around on the steps.
Althea took a breath. The air smelled of stone and cut grass and faint rain. She smoothed her skirt, the way her grandmother had that morning, and pushed open the heavy door. Then she was inside, standing in a wide hallway with a polished floor and a ceiling so high it made her feel small in a way that was almost comforting. Somewhere above her, a piano ran scales like water over stones, and a violin answered from another room. The building hummed with music, and for the first time that day, Althea did not feel like an intruder. She felt like someone who had finally arrived where the music had been pointing all along.
She found the registrar's desk by following the signs and joined the line of waiting candidates, her folder held close. Her heart beat too fast, her palms were damp, and she was terrified in the plain, ordinary way anyone would be. But beneath the fear, steady as a bass note under a melody, was resolve. She had dressed herself in three dollars' worth of courage and carried her music across the city in a taped-together folder. She was here. Whatever happened in the room with the grand piano, no one could take that away, because she had already done the hardest part. She had walked up the steps, and she had not turned around.