Chapter 30: The Next Girl
Spring came back to Philadelphia gently, with light returning to the Alden's tall windows and buds opening along the streets of East Philadelphia. Althea Moss was twenty now, in her second year at the conservatory, and her life had settled into a shape she could hardly have imagined on the morning she first walked to Alden in a three-dollar dress. The scholarship had ended the night shifts. She no longer cleaned offices after midnight; instead, she practised in the daylight, studied, taught, and slept like a person whose days belonged to her. Esther's health was steady, Jerome was saving for a car, and the bills were paid on time, a small miracle she still noticed every month.
On Saturday mornings, she taught at New Hope Community Church. It had started informally, a few neighbourhood children gathering around the upright after the service. Then more came, and their parents asked if she would teach properly, and before long there was a real class, with a sign-up sheet Anita Cole had printed at the library. Althea taught the way Wendell Osei had taught her: technique is a vessel, not a cage. She taught scales and posture, but also taught the children to listen to what a melody was trying to say, and to play it the way they heard it, even when their fingers stumbled.
One Saturday, a new girl arrived. She was perhaps fifteen, thin and watchful, with a secondhand coat and a folder clutched to her chest the way Althea had once clutched her taped-together sheet music. She hovered in the doorway, watching the other children with the look of someone who had already decided she did not belong.
Althea recognised that look at once. She had worn it herself.
She finished with the child at the keys, thanked her, and walked over to the doorway. "Hello," she said, gently, so as not to startle her. "I'm Althea. Are you here for the class?"
The girl nodded, barely. "I only play at home, on my cousin's keyboard. I'm not trained. My teacher said I should keep it simple, that I shouldn't try anything big, or people will laugh."
The words landed like an echo from her own past. Keep it simple. Do not embarrass yourself. She remembered Ashford saying it, and the year it had taken to understand that simplicity and smallness were not the same thing.
"Come and sit," Althea said, and led her to the upright. "Play something for me. Anything. Even just a few notes. Play it the way you hear it at home."
The girl sat, hesitated, and then played. It was a simple melody, a little uneven, played with stiff fingers and a held breath, but underneath the stiffness there was something unmistakable: a feeling, a shape, a voice trying to get out. Althea listened the way Wendell had once listened to her, and the way Adler had, and the way, finally, Ashford had: not for perfection, but for truth.
"That was beautiful," Althea said, when the last note faded.
The girl looked up, disbelieving. "It was simple."
"Simple is a good place to start," Althea said, and smiled. "It is not a place to stay if your heart is bigger than that. Do not keep yourself small, not for a teacher, not for a judge, not for anyone. Play it simple first, if that helps you begin. Then let it grow. The music knows the way, if you let it."
The girl's eyes filled, and she nodded, and then she played the melody again, and this time her shoulders loosened, and the notes came out warmer, braver, a little more her own. Around them, the other children watched, and the church hall was quiet in the particular way rooms are quiet when something true is happening.
Later, as the class ended and the children filed out into the spring afternoon, Althea stayed at the upright for a while, alone, her hands resting on the worn keys. She thought of the whole road: the thrift dress, the first audition, the simple piece played to polite boredom, the minute she had asked for and been given, the river that had carried her from a church piano to a conservatory stage and back home again. She thought of Esther in the front row, of Jerome filming, of Wendell's lessons, of Gus in the dark hall, of Adler's steady faith, and of Ashford's quiet nod, the nod of a man who had learned, late, to listen.
She played the first notes of her mother's hymn, softly, for no audience at all, and the old piano answered, faithful as ever. Outside, the light was golden on the street, and somewhere in the neighbourhood, a girl was walking home with a folder against her chest, already a little less afraid than she had been when she arrived.
Althea smiled to herself, lifted her hands from the keys, and went out into the spring, ready for whatever music came next.