Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Diana
July 2015
D iana didn’t agree to go on another date with someone until the summer Madeline was thirteen. By that time, Madeline had been out of school for a while, away from “normal childhood,” entrenched in seven- or eight-hour days of practice and doing online math and language homework when she had the time. For her part, Diana felt as though she ate, slept, and dreamed of Madeline’s career. It was everything she was. For money, they of course had the cash that Madeline earned from competitions, and beyond that, Diana still worked the bar across the road, cleaned houses, and, sometimes, sold makeup door-to-door. She knew better than to ever ask the other piano moms if they wanted to buy from her. They already looked down on her and hated Madeline for her talent. Diana didn’t want to make it worse with a few lipsticks.
The man who asked Diana out on a date that summer was the half brother of Mrs. Everett, Madeline’s most recent piano teacher, the one Diana was sure would propel Madeline into the stratosphere and get her to Juilliard. Mrs. Everett’s brother Greg was staying with her that summer because his house had been destroyed in a forest fire in California, and he had nowhere else to go. The minute Diana saw him at Mrs. Everett’s place, her heart had dropped into her stomach. He was handsome with intense, actor-like features and thick eyebrows and broad shoulders. He played the piano, too, although Mrs. Everett liked to say he was more of a rock star than anything else. He sat on the bench and “performed” Elton John and Billy Joel songs that made Madeline laugh and swoon. Diana didn’t often let Madeline listen to pop or rock, but right then, Diana thought only of how exhilarating it was to listen to a handsome man play for them. Was this the kind of life she deserved? Why had she been alone for so long?
Greg took Diana out for pizza on a Friday night. Madeline was at home, practicing, but Diana had left her some money so she could order food and even walk down the road to rent a DVD from the Red Box. It was a relief to be able to leave Madeline by herself. Diana couldn’t remember the last time the two of them had taken a night off from each other, and she guessed they needed it.
Greg was suave and funny and charming. He told stories about California, about Manhattan, about living in Paris and Rome, and Diana told him what she remembered about Poland and how desperately she wanted to go back there. It was something she hadn’t fully realized until she’d heard herself say it aloud. Greg said he loved Poland. He’d been three times.
“Do you still have family back there?” he asked.
Diana thought of her mother, remembering the last article she’d read about Barbara’s performance in a sold-out concert hall in Madrid.
“I don’t have anyone,” she lied. “But I have some nice memories, I suppose.” Did that sound pathetic? Why was she overthinking everything?
Greg and Diana shared a meat lover’s pizza that Diana knew she would regret tomorrow and held hands and walked around downtown by the river. Diana told Greg that she and Madeline were about to go to another contest out west, and Greg told Diana that Mrs. Everett, his half sister, was pretty sure Madeline was the student who was going to “push her teaching career into the big leagues.”
“She said that?” Diana asked, breathless. It was what she believed, too, but she’d never heard Mrs. Everett say it so clearly, and it grounded Diana’s dreams in truth.
“From what I hear, Madeline is the real deal,” Greg said.
He walked her home and kissed her on the front porch. Diana wondered if he could tell she hadn’t been kissed in years and years? She hoped not.
But Diana floated back into the house to find a mess. Madeline was on the sofa, crying hard. A pizza box was on the floor, mostly gone, and there was a nearly empty two-liter of pop beside it. Madeline’s fingers were greasy, and her hair hung in strings. Diana’s first instinct was to scream out, “What happened here?” She hated that she jumped to anger before compassion. It was what her father had been like, too. It only made Madeline cry harder. Diana put the pizza and the pop on the counter and sat down next to her daughter, touching her shoulder. She cursed herself for letting Madeline order greasy food. Normally, she fed Madeline a perfect diet that kept her trim and healthy and her hair shiny and feminine. She knew it was part of what the judges looked for at the competitions. She wouldn’t be brought down by junk food.
But when Madeline finally pulled up her head to answer her mother, she whispered, “I want to quit.”
Diana’s head echoed. “Excuse me?”
Madeline got up from the sofa and put a tissue over her face, trying to mop herself up. This time, her voice had more conviction when she said it. “I want to quit the piano.”
Diana stood in the middle of the room and blinked at her daughter. She felt as though she’d never seen her before. She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water and stared out the window, wondering if this was Madeline’s “teenage attitude” coming out to play. Somehow, maybe because Madeline was so driven and “not like other kids,” Diana had thought she could avoid this part of the narrative. She turned around and went back to the living room to use her most forceful of tones—one she’d taken from her mother, back when her mother had yelled at her in Poland, yelled at her to clean the dishes or tidy up her room. “You can’t quit,” she said.
Madeline fell back on the sofa and burst into even more tears. There seemed to be no end to them. She blubbered, saying, “You don’t understand. I’ve hated the piano for years. I want a normal life with normal friends. Every single pianist my age hates me, Mom, and I can’t handle it. I have nightmares about the piano. I feel like I will never be allowed to do anything else.”
Diana sat on the sofa next to her daughter and tried hard to remember that not twenty minutes ago, she’d been wrapped in the arms of a handsome man who’d made her life feel more purposeful than it ever had. What would happen to her if Madeline quit the piano? Mrs. Everett would be heartbroken, for one. Her career was tied up in Madeline’s career, and Mrs. Everett would fade back into the shadows if Madeline left her. Of course, that would mean no more Greg because Diana would no longer be the special mother of the genius daughter. She’d be the woman who let the prodigy die out before she really got started. What then? Diana would go back to exclusively cleaning houses and working at the bar and selling silly products to people who already had more than enough to their name. Tears welled in her eyes. To Madeline now, Diana heard herself say a series of terrible things, things that she would never repeat, things that instilled in Madeline the importance of her piano career. Madeline got up, wide-eyed, and retreated to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. She didn’t practice the rest of the night. But when she got up the following morning, she went diligently to the piano and practiced four hours before lunch, crying quietly the entire time.
What had made Madeline hate the piano so suddenly? Diana wondered as she cleaned the kitchen, listening to her sweeping rhythms and the emotional arcs of her sonatas.
Later that afternoon, Diana suggested that Madeline call a neighbor girl and ask her to go for ice cream down the road. Madeline looked sullen and confused. “Why?”
“You said you wanted a normal life,” Diana said. “Kids get ice cream together. Kids run around together.” She took a beat. “But you have to be back in two hours. You’ve only practiced five hours today, and you know that isn’t enough.”
Madeline flared her nostrils and said, “I don’t like her,” meaning the neighbor kid.
Diana threw up her hands. But before she could say anything more, there was a knock on the door. Madeline spun around and began to play a wickedly fast piano piece, one that she’d mastered last year that still sometimes haunted Diana’s dreams. Diana knew she was playing it to get on Diana’s nerves. There was another knock on the door, and Diana hurried to the foyer to answer it, ready to tell whoever it was that she didn’t have time.
But the man at the door gave her pause. He was slender and very tall, with soft blond hair that curled around his ears. Despite the heat, he wore a black trench coat and black leather boots that made her think of wandering an ancient city in autumn.
“Diana Nowak?” the man asked in a Polish accent.
Diana took a breath. Never in her life had she been addressed by her mother’s last name. She opened her lips to protest, but before she could, the man tilted his head and closed his eyes. “She’s sensational,” he said, speaking of Madeline playing the piano. “It’s so much better live than in the recordings.” He looked dazed but thrilled.
“Recordings?” Diana blurted.
The man opened his eyes again and studied Diana as though she were something in the way that he needed to clean up. “My name is Aleksander. I work for your mother.”
Diana nearly fell to the ground. She blacked out for a second after that and found herself at the kitchen counter, making Aleksander a cup of tea. Madeline was still practicing that heinous song, the one Diana hated, and Diana wanted to go into the living room and remind her how urgent it was that she practice the Rachmaninoff before her next piano lesson. Aleksander sat at the kitchen table with his hands on his thighs, his eyes closed as he listened.
Finally, irritation filled Diana’s chest, and she demanded, “How did she find me?”
Aleksander answered simply, “We’ve known for quite some time.”
This felt like a dagger through Diana’s gut. She stamped the mug of tea on the table and remained standing. Her mother had always known where she was. Her mother had been watching her. Her mother had been listening to Madeline’s piano recordings, biding her time until she contacted them. It was too much to bear. Diana alternated between wanting to scream and wanting to weep. What do you want from us? she thought. And then she realized that her mother didn’t want anything from Diana; all she wanted was Madeline. Madeline was the genius. Madeline was the prodigy.
Madeline finished her wretched display of adolescent anger and finally began to practice the Rachmaninoff. Aleksander’s lips settled. “I’m sure you’ve heard your mother play this one? It’s one of her most famous performances.”
Of course Diana had. Barbara Nowak played this particular Rachmaninoff with the USSR Symphony back in 1978. She’d worn a black velvet dress, and her hair was piled in an elaborate swoop over her head. The video had been uploaded to YouTube, and Diana had watched it anywhere between twenty-five and fifty times.
Aleksander sipped his tea and studied Diana. It was clear to her that this man had far too much information about Diana, about her past, about what Barbara had really thought when her father had taken her out of Poland and moved her to America. Had Barbara cried? Had she tried to find Diana immediately, or had that come later? Or because it gave her more time to practice the piano and focus on her career, had she not cared at all?
“I’ll get to the point, shall I?” Aleksander went on, switching to Polish as though he wanted to test Diana and see if she still understood it.
Diana answered in a Polish she knew was unpracticed and strained. “Please, get to the point. I don’t have all day.”
Aleksander seemed to be enjoying himself. “Ms. Nowak requests that her granddaughter come to Poland to train with one of the best ex-Soviet piano teachers. It is only under her tutelage that Madeline will become what she’s meant to become. It is only under the watchful eye of Ms. Nowak that her career will really flourish. If she remains here, she will squander her unique and raw ability and become…” Here, he sniffed and looked at the tips of his fingers. “She’ll become like any other middling American musician. I’ve listened to the radio. I know what happens.”
Diana balked with a mix of surprise and rage. “I think you’re forgetting,” she answered in Polish so that Madeline couldn’t understand, “that it’s only under my watchful eye that Madeline has become a pianist at all. It’s only because of everything I’ve done by myself here in America that Madeline is winning competitions and practicing seven, eight, and sometimes nine hours a day. She’s already brilliant, and she’s going to be one of the greats.”
“That’s all well and good,” Aleksander said. “But she needs Ms. Nowak, now. Your mother knows that, and I think you know it, too.”
Diana was fuming. Never in her life had she wanted to throw so many things at a man’s head—not even when a judge in Topeka had suggested that Madeline “wasn’t exactly a prodigy, but she was very, very good.”
Diana pointed at the front door and glared at him. “You need to leave immediately.”
Aleksander removed a business card from his breast pocket and put it on the table. “Contact me at this number when you change your mind,” he said, his voice jovial. He then got up and began whistling along with Madeline’s playing. “I’ll tell your mother you said hello.”
“Don’t tell her I said hello,” Diana stammered, still in Polish. Her eyes were hot. “Tell her I said to leave us alone.”
Diana couldn’t believe her ears. After years of aching for her—after trying to contact her—Diana was closing the door on a future relationship with her mother forever. Never in her life had she thought her mother could be half as cruel as this. Diana felt her heart break.
After Aleksander left, Diana hunched over the kitchen table and bit her tongue to avoid crying. It didn’t work. When Madeline heard her, she stopped playing and ran in to comfort her, telling her mother, “I promise I won’t quit. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” Diana could see how miserable Madeline was. She could see that she was a prisoner of the piano. She could see that Diana had forced her into that prison. But everyone in life had their own sort of prison. Most of their prisons had nothing to do with being a genius capable of overtaking the classical music world. Diana’s prison was the fact that her mother didn’t love her enough to reach out.
Diana resolved to love her daughter harder, to do everything she could for her career, for her life. She doubled down because of guilt. Some of her knew that going to Poland to study with her mother and her mother’s ex-Soviet teacher would have been the best thing for Madeline’s career. But how could she possibly let her mother take over her daughter’s life like that?
That night, when Greg called to set up another date, Diana felt like a shell of her former self. She let the phone go to voicemail and deleted every single one he sent. Eventually, he left Michigan and went back to California, where, through social media, Diana saw that he met a beautiful and younger woman who, in quick succession, gave him three blond and blue-eyed children. They all went to the beach together and ate mangoes beneath the sun.
Meanwhile, Diana and Madeline were locked in a forever dance—en route to making Madeline’s career the best possible. Juilliard auditions were approaching. After that, Madeline’s life would open up, and maybe, just maybe, Diana could find a version of personal happiness that would make her understand all this sacrifice was worth it.