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fingerings.
    Still, he did not suspect her full powers.
    Then, one day, as they were finishing lunch, Robert began tapping the tabletop, and though Clara stood up and spoke his name, though baby Eugenie began to cry, though the cook appeared from the kitchen with anxious offers of soup, more soup, Möchte Herr Schumann ein bisschen mehr? he pounded away, beating hard time with the flat of his hand as Elise, Ludwig, and Ferdinand pounded, too; as Marie took Eugenie into her arms; as Julie rose coolly from her place and, with a beautiful woman’s look of disdain, slipped quietly from the room.

    “Do you hear? Do you hear the heavenly choir?” Robert shouted as Clara rounded the table, catching her skirt, spilling the water that remained in the pitcher as she stilled, at last, her husband’s hand with the wide, warm weight of her own. Silence as Robert lifted that hand to his mouth, kissed it, rubbed his sweating cheek against it, all the while looking into Clara’s face as if trying to recall her name. Brahms stared, helpless, along with the children. It was like watching a drowning man pulled from the water, the precarious moment when it seems both the man and his rescuer will tumble into the waves. Then, impossibly, through the sheer force of will, the balance shifts.
    She had raised him up again.
    Panting, weeping, wild-eyed and wet.
    It was the most beautiful thing Johannes Brahms had ever seen.

 

    Today Schumann spoke about a peculiar phenomenon that he has noticed for several days now. It is the inner hearing of beautiful music in the form of entire works! The timbre sounds like wind music heard from afar, and is distinguished by the most glorious harmonies…. He spoke of it, saying, “This is what it must be like in another life when we have shed our corporeal selves.”
    —From the diaries of Rupert Becker,
concertmaster of the Düsseldorf orchestra, 1854 *

11.
    O NE WARM EVENING, IN the middle of May, my mother dropped by just as I was finishing Heidi’s lesson. She’d brought the piano teacher’s obituary, something she’d been promising to show me.
    “He was good to you,” she said, lifting Heidi off the bench and into her arms for a kiss. “He was a friend.”
    “We have five more minutes on our lesson,” I said. “Heidi, do you want to play something for Grandma? How about Musette?”
    “I don’t want to play anymore.” From the safety of my mother’s arms, Heidi shot me a look of triumph.
    “He gave you that portrait of Clara Schumann. Do you still have it?”
    “I don’t know. Heidi, you owe me those last five minutes.”
    “Remember that time he told me I should take you shopping for clothes? He even gave me some coupons.”
    “I didn’t want to use them,” I said. “I didn’t want to go.”
    “Still,” my mother said, placing the obituary on top ofthe piano, “he meant well. It was a nice gesture, don’t you think?”
    Heidi asked, “Is that man dead?”
    What I said to Heidi: “He had a good, long life.”
    What I said to my mother: “He was kind of an odd person, if you want to know the truth.”
    “He certainly loved his students.”
    “Grandma, will you play a game with me? Will you pretend we are kittens?”
    “Fine with me,” I said, giving up, and as the two of them decided on the location of a safe, warm nest, I bent over the single smudged paragraph of accomplishments, the face that might have belonged to any tremulous old man.
    He wore the same dark wool sweater at each lesson.
    He wore slippers with argyle socks, plaid trousers, a wide leather belt.
    I wore oversize shirts, baggy jeans, tennis shoes. I kept my arms close to my sides as I slipped between the rows of chairs at the monthly open studios, at the master classes with de Larrocha, Watts, Gutierrez, squeezing myself along balcony edges during group excursions to winter symphonies, to summer festivals, to private concerts where the piano teacher guided me forward, introduced me, invited me to play.