The Daughters: A Novel (11 page)

I shook my head. She knew that wasn’t true. Her eyes told me so.

“I think you need to go to your room and think about what you’re saying. Maybe when you come back out you’ll be ready to practice again, like a good girl.”

We stared each other down for a moment; then I spun on my heel and ran out of the room. Lying on my bed, I did exactly what
she asked—thought about my questions, and thought about Ada’s answers too. All the girls, buried in the yard. All the girls, safe with Greta.

Except one.

I
t’s unsettling to think that I’m still looking for my lost family all these years later: one more of Greta’s daughters tucked into the soil. I know it’s crazy, but part of me thinks,
There’ll be a sign
. Ada wouldn’t just leave me. As I step outside the apartment building, my phone rings again from the bowels of my purse, and I think,
It’s starting
. I answer without even checking the caller ID.

“Lu?” On the other end of the line, John sounds frantic. “Are you all right? I’ve been calling.”

“I’m fine.” I feel a little numb—just John. What did I expect? “I was in the shower.”

I hear him sit down as he says, “Oh,” and can in an instant imagine him exactly. On break from rehearsal, hiding from the elementary school audience in the singer’s greenroom, sitting on the old leather couch. Stirring honey into his midday cup of peppermint tea. His flushed cheeks. The chintzy tinkle of a cheap steel spoon in a microwaveable ceramic mug. He never really liked children before Kara was born, which is one reason his sudden devotion to the image of our perfect family unnerves me. That, and the fact that it can’t last. Once the truth is out, then what?

“Well,” he finally says, “any plans for the day?”

“Yes.” I readjust Kara with one hand, tuck the phone between my chin and shoulder with the other. “Ada.”

“What?” Concern creeps back into John’s voice.

“We’re going to see Ada.” I pause, letting him think I’m crazy. “Bring flowers.” I pause again. “To the
cemetery
, John.”

“Today? In this?” I imagine him gesturing to the weather, which, from his windowless room, he can’t see.

“We’ll be fine.”

John hesitates.

“Be careful, Lu,” he says. “Be gentle with yourself.”

He has no idea how much loss a person can stand.

Of course, I haven’t lost him yet. So maybe neither do I.

6

K
ara’s infant form switches around in every Greta story; she’s bundled up inside them like a tiny egg. In Greta you can see us all, descending from her like wooden nesting dolls. But when I was a girl I thought the view stopped with me. That when my baba Ada braided my hair or led me through scales, I was the last note in the song, the last line in the tale. The little queen our family machine was built to make.

In her time, my mother, Sara, thought so too. I couldn’t know, as a child, what a surprise I’d been to her. All I saw was that she was suspicious of me. That she wanted to keep me close, but didn’t know how to stay.

If she was bored she picked up my hand, so much smaller than hers even I could see it was delicate, and clipped off the raw, smiling ends of my nails. If she was in a good mood, she’d file them down with her many emery boards, each possessing its own subtle use. And she’d pick a candy color she felt suited me and paint my nails until they resembled jelly beans.

“Okay,” she’d say. “Now blow on them. And don’t move. You can’t move until they’re dry because you’ll muck around with something and mess them up.” Then she’d frown. “I’m not doing this over again. So you’d better keep them neat.”

So I would sit. Sara disappeared into her room or out into the day, but I remained perfectly still, to show her I could. When Ada happened by—ten minutes later, sometimes an hour—she would find me in my small wooden kitchen chair, practicing my mother’s frown. My hands would be laid out on the table in front of me, itching on the palms and starting to twitch impossibly, with my fingers each separated by the width of a cotton ball.

The first time she discovered me this way, Ada sat across from me and smiled as if we were playing a game.

“What are you doing?”

I didn’t look up. It seemed important to maintain focus on my nails.

“I have to wait for them to dry. Otherwise I’m going to mess them up.”

Ada made a small
aah
and came over to me, picking up one of my hands in her own. “So when will these be dry?” she asked. “They look dry to me.”

I scowled. “You can’t tell by looking.”

“So touch one.”

“I’m not allowed.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well.”

We sat quietly together for some time. The beams of sun coming through the window traveled across the waxcloth on the table and crept up my wrists. At last Baba Ada stood up and stretched her arms, pressing her nails into her palms and then wiggling her fingers, balling her hands up and then extending them so her arms looked like wings.

“Sitting here is making me stiff,
lalka
. I’m going to go get a hot chocolate,” she said. “I was going to invite you, but I can see that you’re busy. So I suppose I’ll just have to go alone.” She walked out into the hall, still talking back at me as she put on her coat. “It’s too bad. A long way to go by myself, since I don’t have a book to read on the train ride. And I’ll be awfully lonely if I have to wait for a table. But there’s nothing to be done.”

Before she had fitted her key to the lock, I sprang from my seat and threw myself against the door. Ada came back in and wrapped me up against the wind outside, making sure that my scarf and hat matched the new grown-up color of my nails. Sitting pressed together on the train, rocking back and forth as we traveled towards a bus exchange, Ada told me about Greta’s home in Poland: about what had been and what was to come. I leaned into her on the turns and let the words seep beneath my skin, as the light had in our small kitchen.

I knew that Ada was trying to make me feel better about the fact that my mother had left me alone. What I didn’t understand was that once upon a time, my mother had heard these stories too. That she’d been petted and painted and made to believe she was whole, until one day she cracked open and out I came: a smaller doll with a sleeker voice.

Ada taught us both that Greta’s magic set our family line in motion: women who came from women, women who came with music. Each woman a better singer, a more perfect form. When I was a girl I couldn’t see that in these stories, Kara was implied by my very existence. That I was required to improve on my mother, and that the day would come to improve on me.

M
y first major role was almost Mélisande from Debussy, and it was so boring that I cried the first time I ran through it with Baba Ada, who was at that point still my de facto voice coach. You barely need a soprano for the part, and I just think the libretto is ridiculous, with its all-too-fragile heroine and her darkly fated loves. I was an apprentice at the Lyric back then, allowed occasionally to fill in soubrette roles, like the Massenet, and pretend I wasn’t biting my fingernails to pieces every time a new show was being cast. So when they decided to give me a genuine debut, whispering the news in my ear and giving me a champagne toast, I was meant to be very grateful.

The only justification I could fathom for the casting was that I was young and knew how to hold back my sass onstage when the moment demanded it. They didn’t want a mezzo-soprano, they wanted someone really innocent, and after spending twenty years under Ada’s watchful eye, I suppose I appeared to qualify. She hadn’t been careful with Sara, because Sara’s voice is low and easy, waves against a boat and wine dripping down the neck of a bottle. But my voice is limoncello, steam from a kettle, flint. It can be dangerous if you turn your back on it, and Ada knew better than to make that mistake again.

The first day of rehearsal was a disaster. Or at least it started out that way. I’d been working over the role phrase by phrase, picking it apart with Baba Ada in our living room, while outside the snow melted and then froze back up in rigid bulges. We could have worked in my mother’s empty room—had, in fact, intended to turn it into a studio. But that didn’t pan out. Her absence shuddered through it, always. When I crossed the threshold I couldn’t
sustain notes and started breaking out in nervous sweats. My throat closed up, growing thicker and thicker from the inside, and I swallowed with great glottal gulps until Ada couldn’t take it anymore and swatted my bottom. I felt smoke rising behind my eyes. So we moved back into the living room.

I stood onstage at the Lyric beside the piano and drummed it with the pads of my fingers. The pianist gave me a dirty look—I was nowhere near the tempo of the section we were rehearsing.
Pelléas et Mélisande
has no real arias, but there are two brief solos and one of them belongs to Mélisande. A foundling from the woods, she marries a prince and falls in love with his brother but is too stupid to understand quite what she’s done. Her song from the tower is all about her long and long-suffering hair—shades of Rapunzel—very waiflike and full of dull quavering. That was what we were starting our day with. I tapped out the rhythm but sped it up to triple the appropriate pace. In my rehearsals with Ada, I’d sprinted through the song to keep myself motivated, and it left us both rolling on the floor with tears in our eyes.
My long hair awaits you in the tower
—it sounds much better frantic, as maniacal as its meaning.

“Ehm, I think we should get started,” said Rick. These days, I’ve come to love Rick. I love that his name sounds like it should belong to a bricklayer instead of an accompanist. And that he can hold a casual conversation while playing Tchaikovsky’s first concerto. But that morning I did not love him yet.

“I am started,” I snapped at him. “All warmed up and nowhere to go.”

“Whatever.” Rick yawned. He’s used to dealing with divas, actual divas. I barely weighed enough to legally give blood.

“All right,” said the director, Martin. He was parked in the fifth row—not the house’s best seats but close enough to be audible when he wanted to start dissecting our work. Beside him
sat Philippe, who was overseeing the whole season, and looked crassly intimidating in a black mock turtleneck and blazer. It was unusual for Philippe to attend a first run-through, and I pushed away the feeling that perhaps his presence had to do with me. The feeling that this was perhaps a test.

“From the beginning. We’ll run through the tower song a few times at least so we can”—he waved a hand above his head—“get calibrated, really make sure Mélisande feels right. She’s the key to setting the tone here. Remember”—Martin swiveled to face me directly—“in her head, she’s still lost in the woods, even though technically speaking she’s up in the castle. And she’s about to get a lot more lost, though she doesn’t know it yet.”

He leaned over and whispered something to Philippe and then settled back in his seat, hitching one ankle over his knee.

“Okay, Mellie, let’s take her for a ride,” said Rick. I glared at him but said nothing, just curled my fingernails up into my palm so I wouldn’t be tempted to tap them on the piano shell. I rested my other hand briefly on my stomach, checking my own posture since there was no ruler here to keep me in place. Then I breathed, and sang.

Mes longs cheveux descendent jusqu’au seuil de la tour;

Mes cheveux vous attendent tout le long de la tour,

Et tout le long du jour,

Et tout le long du jour.

I had just about reached Mélisande’s list of saints when Philippe tilted over and started whispering to Martin. I stared at them without breaking my pace, then glanced back at Rick, who shrugged. It’s not a long piece, and we were through it before I had time to really worry. Without looking up, Martin flicked a hand at us.

“Again.”

And so we started from the beginning.
Mes longs cheveux descendent
, and all the rest. The two men had their heads pressed together as if they were teenage boys planning a conquest. They flipped through something, and then Martin looked up briefly.

“Again,” he said.

So we did it again. And again. And again. Repetition, obviously, is par for the course in a rehearsal, especially an early one, but you usually get some sort of direction to stop you from tearing off into the same mistakes over and over. By the fifth go-round, I was tapping my foot against the stage as quietly as I could, swaying my hips just a little to see if a hint of the sultry would get some kind of response.
Très innocent
, they’d said.
Très jeune
.

On the sixth repetition, Martin and Philippe were still deep in congress, and my heart was beating hard.
Well
, I thought,
give them something worth whispering about.
I caught Rick’s eye just before he went into the opening and released a quick thrum of nails on the piano, then two more, double time. He winked at me.

At first I’m not sure either of the men in the audience noticed our slight edits to the score, but by the tenth bar I’d substituted out Mélisande’s quiet liquid rippling for a tremulous jazz, and by the time we turned the corner into our seventh repetition, Rick and I were racing each other to see who could control the tempo. I had unsettled him by taking the whole piece up an octave, and he retaliated by trilling shamelessly at the end of a phrase.