Page 35 of Nantucket Longing

Had Barbara ever been in love?Had she loved her husband—the man who’d taken Diana to America?Madeline surged with questions.

There was a knock on the door, and Henry hurried to answer it.A woman in a hotel uniform wheeled in a silver tray upon which was placed several gleaming platters and another bottle of champagne.In a wavering English, she announced that Barbara had ordered Madeline her favorite foods to be eaten during her afternoon rest.An envelope was tucked between the plates with Madeline’s name on it.When the woman left, Madeline took a breath and tugged it open to read, in perfect English:There is a dress waiting for you in the closet.A car will be sent to you at six thirty sharp.Madeline passed the note to Henry, who nodded.

“It’s all so secretive,” he said.

Madeline waved her hands.“I have this feeling she’s playing a weird game.”

They investigated the food: delicious pierogies and soups and sausages and little fruits and vanilla pudding and cream.Madeline ate slowly, shifting the flavors over her tongue, and tried to imagine her mother as a young girl, eating like this.Diana had almost never cooked Polish food, and Madeline wondered now if it was because the memories surrounding it were too painful.

In the closet was a black velvet dress not unlike what she’d worn to her Juilliard audition.Madeline wondered if somehow, Barbara knew that.

Madeline and Henry spent the afternoon wandering the glossy streets of Warsaw, holding hands and hardly speaking, kissing in plazas and drinking coffee.When they returned, Madeline put on the velvet dress and touched up her makeup, then waited for the car to arrive.She’d told Henry to meet her at the opera house at the eight p.m.start time.Henry kept reminding her that he was just down the road, just a phone call away.When the car pulled up, she hugged him so tightly that tears sprang to her eyes.“I love you,” she whispered in his ear.

“I love you,” he said, “so much.”

I will always have this, she reminded herself.But the minute she thought it, she felt naive.Love was never a guarantee.After all she’d been through, how could she forget that?

The drive to the opera house took two minutes and made her think she really should have walked.But the minute she arrived, she was ushered through a back hallway and behind the stage to a dressing room.A door opened, and she stepped into a room with an ornate and old-fashioned stage desk lined with bulbs and dotted with makeup.To the left sat an open grand piano, which still seemed to vibrate, as though whoever had been playing it had only just removed their hands from the keys.To the right, by the window, stood a woman in her sixties, facing the plaza, dressed in an immaculate and sophisticated black dress.Her silver hair was piled ornately.This was Barbara Nowak.This was Madeline’s last remaining relative.Madeline’s heart pulsed.

She didn’t know what to say.The door closed behind her.They were alone.

For what felt like a very long time, Madeline watched Barbara, whose eyes remained on the plaza outside.Madeline thought she was going to faint.

Finally, Barbara tilted her head and said—in a British-tilted accent that hardly told of her Polish roots, “You play beautifully.”

Madeline’s heart leaped into her throat.“Thank you?”

Barbara turned around to look at her.Madeline had the sense that she was being scrutinized.

“Of course, in your technique, it’s clear that you took many years off,” Barbara said.“Years that you cannot get back.But I’ve spoken to friends and colleagues about this.We sense a renewed and powerful strength in your jazz playing—proof that you’ve discovered a new emotional pathway for yourself in the music.It’s confounding.Several of my colleagues were quite excited, I can tell you that.I’ve suggested that going to Juilliard might have stripped away that emotionality.Maybe you would have started to play just like everyone else.That’s what Juilliard does.They make carbon copies of the same musicians.Everyone has to sound like the old recordings.Otherwise, they’re nothing.”

Barbara took several steps closer and showed her small, pearl-like teeth.Was that a smile?Madeline wasn’t sure, so she kept her own lips pressed tightly closed.

“Of course, I desperately wanted you to go to Juilliard,” Barbara said.“I kept tabs on the entire process.In fact, I had a mole in Juilliard itself, whom I told to call me as soon as you’d auditioned and tell me what the status was.I could hardly sleep the night before.You see, when I was first performing as a young girl, I wanted desperately to go to the United States and attend Juilliard.But it wasn’t possible.The Iron Curtain kept me from the great arenas of the Western world, so I threw myself into the East.I have no regrets.It is because of the East that I was able to have the career I did.”

Madeline could hardly fathom this.Her grandmother had known about her Juilliard audition?

Barbara stepped closer, so close that Madeline could smell the intensity of her floral perfume.She didn’t like it.It was too extreme, too old-fashioned.

“I thought your career was over,” Barbara said.“You faded out of the cultural conversation, and I thought—that was that.What a disaster that was.And then, imagine my surprise when a colleague went to Paris on vacation and wandered into a little jazz bar.She took a photograph of you and sent it with a caption, something like Barbara Nowak’s mini-me.I couldn’t believe my eyes.Was this really the granddaughter I’d lost track of?The master pianist granddaughter who’d turned her back on music to live in such a heinous place as Los Angeles?”

Madeline’s stomach was in knots.

“I tried to get my hands on every single one of the recordings from your previous few months in that jazz quintet,” Barbara said.“You started out sloppily enough, as was to be expected, but you really hit your stride in mid-October, early November.Goodness.I think you might be the best jazz pianist I’ve ever heard.I’m sure you know, as a classical pianist, I don’t always have time for that whole world.”She made a dismissive gesture, circling her hand.“But if anything, in opening that door for yourself, you’ve stepped closer to mine again.”She raised her chin and looked Madeline dead in the eyes.“I have a proposal for you.”

Madeline couldn’t breathe.

“It will take time and effort and practice, practice, practice,” she said.“But I want to showcase your talents at a concert in Warsaw this autumn.It would mean leaving Paris, leaving your jazz quintet, and studying full-time with me, but it would also mean returning to your classical roots, joining me on the major stage, and taking the ‘crown’ that was always meant to be yours.You were something special.You still could be.”

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.

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