Chapter 2: The Notice
Three weeks earlier, Althea had not been planning to audition for anything. She had gone to the public library on a Tuesday afternoon because she only half remembered a hymn, and she thought the library might have a book of old spirituals. The library was cool and quiet after the heat outside, smelling faintly of paper and floor polish. She moved down the music aisle, running her fingers along the spines, when Anita Cole came around the corner holding a sheet of paper like a small, bright flag.
Anita was twenty-four, with a quick smile and a clerk's badge pinned to her cardigan, and she had known Althea since Althea was a teenager practising on the library's old upright. "You need to see this," Anita said, holding out the paper. It was a notice, printed in plain black letters, and Althea read it standing between the shelves, her heart doing something strange and uneven in her chest. The Alden Conservatory of Music was holding auditions for a new class of piano students. The date was a Saturday in late spring. Applicants were to bring two pieces, one of their own choosing. There was a fee, but a line at the bottom said it could be waived for applicants who asked.
Althea read the notice twice. Then she folded it, put it in her pocket, thanked Anita, and went home without mentioning it to anyone. That evening she cleaned offices as usual, pushing her cart down long corridors, emptying bins, wiping desks while the city went dark outside the windows. She sang in her head while she worked, the way she always did, turning a hymn over until it settled into something new. But underneath the singing, a small voice kept saying the same thing: not for girls like you. Not for girls who learned on a church upright and a battered keyboard. Not for girls who cleaned offices at night.
For three days she carried the folded notice in her apron pocket at work and in her coat pocket at home, taking it out when no one was looking and reading it again. On the fourth day, her grandmother found it. Esther Moss was seventy-eight, with hands stiffened by arthritis and eyes that missed very little. She was sitting at the kitchen table shelling peas when Althea came in from her shift, and she held up the folded paper and said, "What's this, then?" Althea tried to laugh it off, saying it was nothing, just something from the library. Esther unfolded it slowly, read it through her glasses, and then looked at her granddaughter for a long moment without speaking.
"Why haven't you told me?" Esther asked. Althea shrugged and said she probably wouldn't go, that the fee and the travel and the time off work made it foolish, that she wasn't trained properly, that the judges would know in the first minute. Esther listened patiently, without interrupting. Then she set the notice flat on the table, smoothed it with her palm, and said, "Child, your mother sang in this kitchen when she had nothing, and she sang like she had everything. You play the same way. Don't you dare fold that up and hide it."
That night, after Jerome had gone to bed and the apartment was quiet, Althea sat at her keyboard and played the hymn her mother used to sing, the one about the river. She played it plainly at first, the way she had learned it as a child, and then, without deciding to, she let it grow, adding a low rolling rhythm underneath and a harmony that lifted the melody like light on water. She played until her eyes stung and her shoulders ached, and when she finally stopped, the room seemed to hold the sound a moment longer, as if the music were reluctant to leave. She knew then that she would go to the audition, not because she expected to be accepted, but because not going would feel like a betrayal of something she could not name.
The next morning she told Anita, who helped her print the application forms and fill them in at a library table, and who wrote a short note asking for the fee to be waived. Anita did not make a fuss. She simply slid the forms across the table and said, "There. Now it's real." Esther hemmed the thrift-store dress that weekend, humming while she worked, and Jerome, sixteen, who worked after school at a grocery, told her she was going to make the judges cry and then pretended he had not said anything kind at all.
On the morning of the audition, Althea stood in the doorway with her folder in her hands, and Esther pressed a small cloth handkerchief into her palm and said, "Play like you're at church, baby. Play like you mean it." Althea nodded, because her throat was too tight for words, and she walked out into the spring morning, toward the bus stop, carrying a folded notice that had become, somewhere along the way, a promise.