Elise Blackwell - An Unfinished Score

Petra strokes Suzanne’s hair, causing a table of male professors to stare at them without even disguising their leers. Performing for them, Petra kisses her cheek and holds her hand on the tabletop. “You say it like it’s already over. Anyway, you have a great life. Musician married to a musician — how often does that work out? And the quartet is actually succeeding, and Adele likes you a lot more than she likes me. And she loves you just as much.”

Suzanne lifts a smile. “If you and I make out right now, those men will die of heart attacks.”

“Almost reason enough,” Petra says, pulling back, dropping the physical contact altogether. “So, what do you call Harold in Italy ?”

This is one Suzanne hasn’t heard, so she waits for Petra to deliver the punch line.

“The longest joke ever written.”

Suzanne bursts out laughing, but there are tears, too, and Petra looks stricken.

“I’m sorry,” Suzanne says. “That’s the last piece I played in St. Louis. It makes me think of one of those lives I didn’t get to live.”

Her cell phone vibrates again. This time there is no number to read, only the word unknown .

“Is it important?” Petra asks.

“I hope not.” Suzanne returns the still buzzing phone to her pocket and lifts her viola case. Though she holds it on her hip with both arms, like a young child, she feels as though her arms are flailing, as though she has just stepped off a cliff and is plummeting, waiting for the ground to rise up and stop her fall. The sensation is as real as in a dream.

By Saturday, Suzanne’s phone has vibrated with another call from Chicago and two more unknowns . She knows that it has to be about Alex and that she should answer it, but she also knows that the woman who called her home is probably Olivia Elling. She cannot swallow when she even thinks the name, so she turns off her phone for long stretches. It’s not denial, she promises herself, but a necessary postponement. It feels like time has stopped, just for a bit, right in the middle of her life flying apart. Soon enough some god will hit the start button, her universe will expand at the speed of light, and everything she has will be taken from her.

It is her turn to make the trip into the city, bringing the bows to the only person she and Petra trust to rehair them. Ben is at the dining-room table with blank score pages and a pencil. His neck curves, and his hair falls into his eyes. On a whim, she asks him to go with her. “We could get lunch,” she says, but what she is thinking is that they can walk in the park and she can tell him everything. She can tell him everything before someone else does.

“No thanks,” he says. “I need the work time.”

So she makes her way to the back of the house and finds Adele alone in her room, arranging stuffed animals in circles on the floor. She waves for Adele’s attention and asks if she wants to come to New York. “We have to bring the bows to Doug, but we can do fun stuff, too.”

Adele smiles and signs, “I like the train!”

“Brush your hair and teeth and we’ll go.”

The trolley-style car that runs back and forth between Princeton and the train station at Princeton Junction — called the Dinky by everyone in town — is less than a mile away. Suzanne and Adele turn up John Street, walking across the neighborhood facetiously named Downtown Deluxe by the black families pushed there to make room for the upscale retail development of Palmer Square. Most of the original inhabitants — some of them descendants of valets and footmen granted their own freedom after accompanying young Southern gentlemen to Princeton — are elderly now, their children and grandchildren moved into suburban neighborhoods. Downtown Deluxe has turned partly Latino, attracting Princeton’s new workforce, mostly young men and a few families from central Mexico, some from Guatemala.

Increasingly, though, as the rest of the town is grabbed by millionaires, the neighborhood is sprinkled with young white families. Suzanne’s is one of these: she is part of the neighborhood’s problem of rising property taxes that may push its poorer residents outside borough limits. Sometimes at one of Elizabeth’s parties, someone reminds her of this, as though she could have afforded to live anywhere in town and is slumming for fun. Yet her neighbors are kind to her. They do not hold her responsible for wider demographic shifts, and, like people everywhere, they are sympathetic to a house with a young child, even if they can’t figure out whether the blond or the brunette is her mother. It helps that Adele is a charmer, She waves and presses the word hello from her mouth as they pass Percy, a thin, elderly man who shuffles through the neighborhood, smoking cigarettes and striking up conversations with whoever walks by.

The handful of people on the Dinky are aggressively underdressed in a way that calls attention to their university affiliation. There are just a few more people — these in business clothes — on the breezy platform at Princeton Junction as they wait for the off-hours local. When the Amtrak train rushes through, Adele squeezes Suzanne’s hand hard, a laugh monopolizing her small face.

On their train, people boarding and exiting smile at Suzanne as she signs with Adele as best she can with the bow cases tucked under her arm. Their expressions are a cross between the amused looks given to mothers of identical twins and the pitying looks laid on mothers of children in wheelchairs. Half adorable novelty, half handicapped. There are men in the world, Suzanne knows, who go out of their way to date deaf women. She reminds herself, again, that she is not Adele’s mother. That she is not a mother.

The music in Pennsylvania Station — it is Brahms today — always makes Suzanne feel as though she is in a movie, the camera taking a long-scene shot of its troubled heroine, a woman about to find a suitcase that does not belong to her and will entangle her in mystery and adventure, in danger that she will narrowly avert by using her wits. As always, she is embarrassed when she catches herself with this thought. She focuses on the floor, made grimy by the day’s thousand shoes, and holds Adele’s hand as they press through the crowd’s main current and rise by escalator to the street, one of Manhattan’s least attractive stretches.

She tightens her arm over the bows, having heard the stories of musicians leaving instruments in cars or on street corners. The violist who left his four-million-dollar Stradivarius in a taxi and celebrated its recovery by playing a concert for the Newark airport cabdrivers. The most famous missing American viola left on a Chicago curb as its owner climbed into a limo, an instrument that reappeared years later in a murder-for-hire scheme. The Italian virtuoso who lost two separate Amati violins — a decade being time enough, it seems, to forget a hard-learned lesson.

She cannot imagine New York without sound — the city is sound — but she tries to give Adele a day for her senses. They start with taste at an outdoor café across from Lincoln Center. Crunchy granola parfaited with creamy yogurt and fruit. Suzanne closes her eyes, feels the textures in her mouth, notices which part of her tongue tastes sour, which sweet.

The café is next door to an Italian restaurant where she once ate with Alex after a Friday morning Philharmonic performance. Joshua Felder was the soloist that day, playing Bartók’s unalloyed violin concerto. Afterward Alex told her that Felder would be the world’s top violinist within a year and that once he was he would give them a private performance. “Not really going out on a limb with that first claim,” she answered as they sat facing the street, autumn sun on their faces.