Chapter 9: The Simple Piece
Althea placed her hands on the keys. They were cool and smooth beneath her fingers, and for a moment she simply felt them. She took a breath, counted silently, and began.
The simple piece was a short, gentle melody she had known since childhood, the kind of tune that asks nothing of the player except steadiness and care. It had no tricks, no sudden leaps. She played the first notes cleanly, each one clear and separate, the way she had been taught to play them at church when the congregation needed to follow a hymn.
The grand piano answered her with a tone so rich and full that it startled her. At home, on the church upright, a note was a small, plain thing. Here, a note seemed to have a room of its own. Althea steadied herself and went on, keeping her tempo even, keeping everything exactly as Dr. Ashford had asked.
She played well. Her fingers found every note without hesitation. The melody rose and fell in its modest arc and came to rest, as it was meant to do, without fuss. It was the kind of performance that could not be faulted, and Althea felt, even as she played it, that it could not be loved either.
She glanced up once at the judges. Dr. Ashford listened with his hands folded, his face calm and unreadable. He nodded once, very slightly, at a passage she played cleanly. Professor Brandt was writing on his paper. Professor Adler watched Althea's hands rather than her face, her expression thoughtful, as if she were listening for something that was not quite there.
Althea finished the first section and moved into the second, which was almost the same as the first, with only a small variation near the end. She played it just as carefully. The notes were correct. The rhythm was correct. And yet, with every bar, she felt herself growing smaller, as if she were standing behind a curtain, playing for people who could hear the music but could not see the person making it.
She thought of the way she played at New Hope Community Church, when the congregation sang along and the music belonged to everyone in the room. She thought of the nights after her cleaning shift, alone with her battered keyboard, when she let a hymn wander into jazz and back again. None of that was in this room. None of that was allowed in this piece.
The melody came to its end. Althea played the final chord softly, held it for the proper length of time, and lifted her hands from the keys. The last note faded into the high, quiet hall. Then Dr. Ashford nodded.
"Thank you, Miss Moss," he said. "That was clean. Very clean. Good tone. Good control."
Professor Brandt added, "Steady tempo. No errors of note."
Professor Adler smiled, but her smile was careful. "A lovely, simple piece," she said. "Beautifully played."
Althea thanked them, but the praise sat strangely on her. It was the praise she had been told to earn, and it felt like being thanked for a letter she had not written. She had done exactly what Dr. Ashford asked. She had kept it simple. She had not embarrassed herself. And she had, in the process, disappeared.
She looked down at her hands in her lap. They were still, but they felt empty, as if they had just carried a weight that was not their own. She thought of her grandmother, who had hemmed her dress, and of Jerome, who had told her to play the way she played at church, and of Wendell, who had said that technique was a vessel, not a cage.
Dr. Ashford was already turning a page on his clipboard. Professor Brandt was writing a final note. The audition, it seemed, was nearly over. In a moment, Mrs. Feldman would open the door, and Althea would walk back down the corridor and out to the bus, carrying a polite verdict and a feeling she could not yet name.
But the feeling rose in her now, clear and insistent: this was not enough. She had come all this way, in a three-dollar dress, with taped sheet music and a lifetime of midnight practice, to play a piece that any careful student could play. She had hidden the best thing she had, the music that was truly hers, because a stranger had told her to keep it small.
She looked at the piano. Its keys gleamed in the pale light. She felt her heart beating hard against her ribs, the way it had beaten when she first walked through the iron gates that morning.
Althea did not stand up. She did not reach for her folder. She kept her hands in her lap and waited for the courage to do the one thing she had not planned to do. The hall was quiet. The piano was waiting. And beneath her obedience, the river of her own music was still running, patient and unembarrassed, asking only to be heard.