Chapter 21: Midnight Hall
The last practice room emptied at ten, and Althea Moss stayed until the porter tapped the doorframe and said, very gently, that the building was closing. She packed her folder slowly. Her scales had been clean. Her chords had been correct. Professor Adler had nodded in the way that meant approval without warmth, and Althea had left feeling like a letter folded too many times.
Outside, the October air was sharp against her face. She thought about the keyboard waiting in her bedroom, its keys yellowed and two of them sticking in damp weather, and how little it could tell her about the sound she was losing. She was not angry. Anger would have been easier. She was only tired in a way that sleep did not seem likely to fix.
Gus Fontaine was locking the side door of Alden when she passed it. He was a man in his sixties with a ring of keys that chimed softly at his belt. He had nodded to her in corridors for weeks. Now he looked at her, and then at the dark building behind him, and seemed to make a decision the way quiet people do, without announcing it.
"You play different when nobody's listening, don't you?" he said.
Althea did not know how to answer without sounding ungrateful for the place she had fought so hard to enter. "I don't know anymore," she said.
Gus studied her for a moment. "The hall's empty after eleven," he said. "I mop it last. The piano stays unlocked. If a student happened to be in there, practising soft, I would have to pretend I didn't notice, because my hearing isn't what it was."
She understood the offer, and the kindness inside it: he had given her a way to accept without begging. "Thank you," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she intended. "Eleven fifteen," he said. "Not before. And out by one."
She went home, changed into her cleaning uniform, and worked her shift in the office building on Market Street. Usually she sang in her head while she worked, hymns her mother had sung, fragments of jazz Wendell had played at church. Tonight her head was quiet, and the quiet worried her more than any wrong note would have. When her shift ended, she did not go straight to bed. She went back to Alden, because something in her had decided before her mind caught up.
The side door was ajar. Gus was at the far end of the corridor with his mop, and he did not look up when she slipped past him toward the recital hall. The hall was dark except for the green exit lights. The grand piano stood in the centre of the stage like a held breath. Althea climbed the steps slowly, sat down, lifted the lid, and rested her fingers on the keys without pressing them.
For a long minute she did not play at all. She listened to the building: the tick of cooling radiators, the distant hum of the street, her own breathing. Then she played the first notes of "The River Remembers," the simple melody her mother had sung, the one she had been told to keep simple and then told to keep restrained. She played it plainly, the way a child would, and it sounded honest. Then, without deciding to, she let a second voice enter underneath it, low and patient, like water finding a deeper channel. Her left hand remembered the gospel rhythm from church. Her right hand reached for a jazz harmony Wendell had once shown her, not to impress anyone, but because the melody seemed to ask for it.
The sound filled the dark hall differently than it had filled a classroom. There was no one to grade it, no one to warn her about excess. The piano answered her the way the church upright never quite had, and she felt her shoulders drop for the first time in weeks. She played the piece through, and then again, slower, letting the silences last as long as they wanted to. She tried the restrained version too, and heard how thin it sounded beside the other, like a photograph of a river instead of the river itself.
She was remembering why she had wanted this at all. It was not the scholarship, though she needed it. It was this: a melody growing under her hands until it became larger than the room and yet still entirely her own.
When she finished, the last chord hung in the air and faded, and she sat still with her hands in her lap. Gus appeared in the doorway with his mop, and he did not clap or speak. He only leaned against the frame for a moment, then went back to his work. Althea closed the piano lid gently and walked out into the morning, which was turning pale over the rooftops. As she waited for the bus, she found herself humming, very softly, the second voice under the melody, and it felt like something returning home.