2
Barbara stepped closer, and Madeline bit her tongue to keep from coughing. She imagined the next months of her life in Warsaw—a city she knew she could love, given the time. She imagined hundreds of hours at the piano; she imagined this intelligent and frightening woman yelling at her and ripping her playing apart. She imagined Diana, listening from the next room, ready to come in and tell Madeline that she hadn’t practiced enough, that what she was playing wasn’t quite right. Madeline imagined the sleepless nights, the worry. She imagined stepping away from improvisation to play the difficult and sweeping pieces of the “real classical musicians.” She bit her tongue.
“This proposition is really the best thing you will ever receive,” Barbara said. “It’s a lifeline back to the life you built for yourself. The life you might have had if it weren’t for that audition. It’s the life you should have had if only your mother had listened to reason.”
Madeline felt the words like a sharp knife. “I’m sorry? What do you mean?”
Barbara didn’t sense that she’d made a mistake. She walked across the living room and poured herself a glass of water with lemon and didn’t offer Madeline one. “When I first learned about your stupendous abilities—that you, like me, were a prodigy—I had my employee Aleksander contact your mother about bringing you here. By then, the Iron Curtain was down, and we had every resource available here. I wanted to oversee your growth and make sure you had the career you should have had. But your mother wouldn’t listen to reason. She refused to talk about it. And for what? So you could live in that little house in Michigan? So she could clean houses to keep you fed? I always knew she inherited far too much of her father’s silliness. But that was too much.” Barbara shook her head.
Madeline felt cold and shivery. It was hard to fathom that, all those years ago, her mother had been speaking to Aleksander about a potential future in Poland.
Madeline hadn’t spoken for several minutes. But she saw a window, and she leaped for it. “I can’t blame my mother for not wanting to take your offer.” Her voice shook.
Barbara turned and looked at Madeline with surprise. “I beg your pardon? Are you really saying that my offer wasn’t generous? Are you really saying that I didn’t have your best interests at heart?”
Madeline wet her lips. On the one hand, she didn’t want to anger the older woman; she’d come all this way and she wanted her love so desperately; she wanted the future she opened up for Madeline—a future of opera houses and silk dresses and interviews and her name in lights. She wanted everything she’d worked for to be worth it, the hundreds of thousands of hours of practice. She wanted her mother in heaven to look down and say, I knew she could do it. But on the other hand—she couldn’t forget what Barbara had done. She saw cruelty and passivity echoing from her eyes.
Madeline didn’t answer Barbara, not immediately. Instead, she asked a question that surprised both of them. “Did my mother ever play the piano?”
Barbara’s cheek twitched. “I put her in lessons at three. She soon demonstrated how little of my abilities she’d inherited. By five, it was clear she wouldn’t be anything special. I still pushed her, of course. She was practicing hours a day—crying before, during, and after. I suspect she hated it.”
“Maybe she could sense how disappointed you were,” Madeline said.
Barbara raised her shoulders. “I soon grew bored of that entire project. I’m sure Diana did, too. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t pursue it in America.”
Madeline’s heart felt squeezed. Here was something she needed to know more about, but she didn’t know if she was brave enough to ask the right questions and dig into the dirt of her family’s past.
“Why didn’t you go with them?” Madeline asked.
“You know very well that Diana’s father and I were no longer together,” Barbara said. “My career was here. My life was here. My teachers, my colleagues, my everything. The Wall had just fallen, and nobody knew what was coming for us. Nobody knew how our lives would change.”
“But your daughter,” Madeline stuttered, “she was suddenly gone. Wasn’t that painful?”
Barbara betrayed no sense of emotion. She sipped her water and cast her eyes to the window. Madeline tried to fathom what she was thinking. Was she remembering the first few days after Diana had left, how empty and vacuous her house had felt? Or was she relishing those first few days, remembering them as the first that allowed her a life she hadn’t known she could have—a childfree existence that let her fully exist within the world of music?
Before Madeline could stop herself, she said, “We had nothing. But I guess you already know that. You know about the cleaning houses and the bar job and the times when Mom went without food so that I could eat. You know that our house was small and cramped, and that every spare cent we had went to piano, piano lessons, piano competitions. You know all this because you were watching us, waiting to find a way to use us for your gain.”
Barbara rolled her eyes into the back of her head. “You’ve inherited your drama from your mother.”
“She was your daughter,” Madeline shot back. “She died, and I didn’t even have money for a proper funeral! She died, and I was all alone!”
Barbara couldn’t look at Madeline. Madeline wondered if, somewhere behind those cruel eyes, Barbara felt any sense of shame. But there wasn’t time for such an emotion, not so soon before Barbara was set to take the stage and perform in front of thousands of people, people who’d paid good money to see the iconic Barbara Nowak. It was widely known in the classical music world that Barbara never, ever made a mistake. That she was powerful and strong and sharp-witted. That she was always five steps ahead. But Madeline knew this wouldn’t always be so. She knew that one day—perhaps sooner, rather than later—age would catch up to Barbara. It would sprinkle into her arpeggios. Her memory would grow ragged. It was a tragic thing, but tragic things happened all the time.
Madeline understood. Barbara wanted Madeline to extend Barbara’s name in the world of classical music. She wanted them to play together, so that when she decided to retire, Barbara could point at Madeline and say, this is my lineage. In that way, she would live forever. Her name would go on.
But Madeline was suddenly clear. She wanted nothing to do with this woman. Her head and heart echoed with the love and compassion and artistry and beauty she’d discovered at The Copperfield House. Greta had met her with hundreds of little hugs and funny quips; she’d instilled in her a level of understanding of herself and her dreams that she never could have fathomed otherwise. Without Greta, Madeline never would have had her Parisian jazz career, which meant that Barbara never would have contacted her and decided, seemingly out of nowhere, to pledge her life to Madeline’s career. None of this would have been possible without The Copperfield House. But Madeline wanted to wash her hands of all of it. She wanted to get out of Poland immediately and return to her cozy life with Henry, a life they were at the very start of.
Madeline might have insulted Barbara. She might have called her cruel and manipulative and power-hungry and money-driven. But what good would it do her to insult her? And wouldn’t insulting her prove that Barbara had more power over Madeline than she did?
So Madeline said, “Thank you for the very kind offer. Unfortunately, I must decline.”
Barbara looked as though Madeline had just slapped her. But the moment lasted only a second before Barbara fixed her face and walked to the window. She didn’t want to look at Madeline—at the young woman who had her face—a second longer.
“Very well,” she said. “Mind you, this is a limited offer. I hope you will stay for the show, regardless. Perhaps something in it will invigorate you. Perhaps it will show you what kind of future is really possible. After that, you would be very welcome to contact Aleksander, who will begin the proceedings. We will, of course, help you move from Paris. I imagine you don’t own very many things.”
Madeline couldn’t believe this. It was almost as though Barbara assumed she would change her mind. But Madeline was firm in her belief.
“Thank you,” she said, taking a step back toward the door.
Barbara probably sensed how resolute she was. She didn’t turn around. “Listen for the third movement,” she said suddenly, speaking, Madeline was sure, of the Rachmaninoff she was set to perform that evening. “I had hoped we could talk about it. I play it the way you played it as a teenager. I thought your interpretation—an interpretation that came out during your Juilliard audition—was particularly jarring and inspired.”
This struck Madeline as strange. Her grandmother had somehow gotten a hold of her old audition, which meant that there was a recording somewhere. More than that, her grandmother had heard something beautiful in that audition—something worth holding on to.
But Madeline didn’t want to stick around to hear her grandmother echo the worst day of her life.
“Thank you,” Madeline said again, then ducked through the door and hurried down the hallway, around the stage and back into the main hall. When she burst outside, her knees wavered, and she nearly tumbled to the concrete. The twilight felt especially poignant and velvet, and tears fell down her cheeks. She raised her face to the sky and searched for her mother, whispering, “I love you, I love you, I’m so sorry, I love you.” She pressed her lips to her fingers and blew a kiss to the heavens.
It was then she heard a voice across the street calling for her. “Madeline?”
She dropped her head to see Henry, dressed immaculately in a perfect tuxedo, his hair styled. He was on his way to the concert, where they’d planned to meet and watch the show. But Madeline knew she wouldn’t be going back inside again. She threw herself into Henry’s arms and sobbed in a way that renewed her. Her spirit felt awake. Henry held her hard and whispered to her that he would always be there, that he would always take care of her, and that he would be there for every creative journey she planned to go on.
Much later, after they’d booked morning flights back to Paris, Madeline contacted David to say she’d be at tomorrow’s performance. After they’d called Greta to tell her what had happened, they strolled through the plaza, arm in arm, and listened to the faint sound of Barbara’s piano floating through the chilly wind. Madeline felt achy with love for music, for Henry, for life itself. But even though she wanted nothing to do with that woman, a part of her had to admit that Barbara knew how to create magic. Madeline had that ability, too.