They trotted her out like a show pony. A circus act. When they asked her to play, she played—the Waltzes, Debussy, the Chopin “Étude” she’d mastered.
They reported on her perfect grade-point average before she began, every time. She was exceptional! A remarkable exception! Proof of something, surely, of the rightness of the school’s mission. Virginal and pure to boot. Studious. Accomplished on the piano, on which she played not race music, but the classics.
Mary Elizabeth kept picturing that young man’s hands floating over the keys, from such a distance, from the faraway seats where she and Aunt Paulie had been sitting. And yet she felt like she was right there, beside him, or somehow inside him, her hands his hands, glazing the keys like rainwater. Fingers like the legs of racehorses.
She thought if she could play the French composers, and also now Stravinsky, the pieces Aunt Paulie had regretted never learning, the music might somehow still be hers. Hers and Aunt Paulie’s. Those years in Paris, that longing in Paulie’s chest, in both their chests, when they played. Sometimes, when she finished playing Chopin, Mary Elizabeth sat at the piano and wept.
But a funny thing: She couldn’t play the Stravinksy. She knew now that she never would.
Only the first movement, Mr. Roth said, the “Russian Dance.” Then the familiar Chopin “Étude,” but a new piece here, too, one of the Preludes, that also needed plenty of attention. Every day, at least six hours a day—before breakfast, before dinner, before bed, study another time somehow—from January until the concert in May. He’d never even thought of playing Petrushka, he told her one day. He laughed when he said it.
On the evening of the concert—a dreamy May evening, crushed magnolia leaves under her feet; for the first time in weeks, in months, she noticed her surroundings—the Music Building auditorium was filled. Invited guests, president and trustees and wives in suits in a light weave and pearls and hats. Every single music student, Maze and Harris Whitman and their friends, all of them itchy in their stockings and dresses and ties. Her daddy and mama in the front row. “Right there beside the president,” he’d be planning to tell them all in church on Sunday. “Right there in the very next seat.”
What a torment it all had to be for her poor mama, Mary Elizabeth thought at the stage door, looking out. She stopped there after she was introduced and stared out into the big, dim room, the Steinway in front of her, bathed in white light. She stared down at her own hands while everything went silent.
And then she turned around and walked behind the curtain hanging at the back of the stage, then out through the building’s back entrance. She walked, her eyes wide open, seeing everything but hearing nothing, all the way back to Ladies Hall, where she carefully finished packing her things.
Eventually Maze found her, sitting in the backseat of her daddy’s car in the dormitory parking lot, hands folded in her lap. Waiting.