Chapter 10
Story: The Chairwoman Grabbed a Six-Year-Old on Stage — Then the Locket Swung Into the Light
The gala's finale was scheduled for nine-fifteen.
At nine-fifteen, the conductor Erdos stepped onto the podium with the baton Margo had returned to him. He raised it. The house orchestra on the right went silent. The ballroom — two hundred donors, some of whom had been on their phones for half an hour — went quiet.
Then he lowered the baton and looked at the stage.
Margo had been lifted onto the soloist's chair. Hollis had done that himself — picked her up, carefully, one hand under her arm, and set her down on the padded velvet chair that stood beside the rented concert grand, facing the room. She had the canvas tote on her lap. She had the locket tucked under her collar, where it belonged. She had, at some point in the last forty minutes, been given a small glass of ginger ale by a waiter who had crossed the whole ballroom to bring it to her.
Hollis leaned down and said something in her ear.
Then he turned to the room.
"Ladies and gentlemen. The featured work this evening was written by Marguerite A. Bower. The chair this evening has been vacated. If the composer's daughter will permit us, the orchestra will play Movement Three in her mother's name."
The room looked at the small girl on the chair.
Margo looked at the concert grand. She had been in a ballroom once before, at a wedding, and had touched a piano for exactly five seconds before an adult had lifted her off the bench. She had never been allowed to play in public. Her mother had taught her two notes, at a kitchen table, on a rented keyboard, a long time ago.
Hollis said something to the conductor. The conductor nodded. He turned to the orchestra. He raised the baton.
And before the first string sounded — before Erdos's downbeat — Margo reached out with her right hand and pressed three keys.
The first three notes of Movement Three. The same three notes that begin the cello line. She played them slowly and wrong, with the wrong finger, on a rented nine-foot concert grand, in a ballroom of two hundred people.
The room did not laugh.
The orchestra came in on the fourth note, exactly as if it had been expected, because Erdos had been waiting for those three notes his whole life without knowing it.
The cello line rose out of the pit on the right. Margo's father was playing it. His bow hand was steady. His face was not.
The room stood up.
They stood through the whole movement — six minutes and forty seconds — the donors, the board, the waiters, the AV kid in the back booth, Lila Fernandez with her phone abandoned on the table, Hollis Brand with his reading glasses folded in his fist. Nobody looked at the projection screen anymore, even though it still read, in forty-eight-point type:
*Riverside Suite — Marguerite A. Bower*
Halfway through, Margo stopped looking at the audience. She looked at her father in the pit. He looked at her. Neither of them waved. Neither of them cried. They just looked at each other across six minutes of music, which is what people do when they have both been alone for a very long time and have finally, somewhere with a projection screen and a silver microphone and a woman in an emerald dress, been believed.
When the last note ended, the room did not applaud. It held. It held for four full seconds, which in a ballroom is forever.
Then the applause came and did not stop.
The next morning, the Riverside Children's Hospital Foundation issued a statement. *Riverside Suite* was withdrawn from the program. Its composer of record was corrected to Marguerite A. Bower. A new fund was opened in her name to pay for music lessons for the hospital's long-term patients.
Two weeks later, the Columbus chamber series and the Louisville festival sent separate letters. The chairwoman's attorneys answered none of them. By January, her name was off three boards, off the paper's society page, off the donor wall at the Cincinnati Symphony. She was not charged with anything. She was not arrested. She was simply, in the way that matters most in a city like Cincinnati, quietly removed from the list of people who are asked.
On Sunday, Margo and her father went to the chapel at Riverside. Her father had been asked to play the chapel's ten o'clock service, a thing he had not done since the year his wife died. He had said no seven times and yes on the eighth.
Margo sat in the front pew with her canvas tote on her lap and her mother's locket outside her collar now, where it belonged. Hollis Brand sat two rows back, alone, in a gray sweater instead of a tuxedo, with the original manuscript of *Threads* in a manila envelope on the seat next to him.
After the service, the three of them walked out into the cold October light.
"He'll have lessons," her father said. "If you want."
"She can have the keyboard," Hollis said. "I still have it. It's in my storage unit. She should have it."
Margo did not answer. She was watching a small bird work its way along the gutter above the chapel door. Then she reached up and took the locket in her hand and turned the front face toward the light, where the tiny letters stood out — *M.A.B.* — and she turned it over and read the second line again, the way she had read it a hundred times, back when she could not read.
*for my girl — play it loud.*
She put the locket back against her chest, inside her coat, where it would be warm, and she slid her hand into her father's, and she said, very quietly, "I did."
Advertisement