His Daughter's Recital
娘のピアノを聞けぬまま見つめる。天才ゆえ家族を顧みなかった過去への悔恨がにじむ。
His daughter Klara was giving her first public , and she had begged him to attend.
For years he had been a father mostly in name, absent behind the closed door of his study.
The symphony had eaten his evenings, his birthdays, and a thousand small moments he could not recover.
Now he sat in the third row of a hall, his hands folded stiffly in his lap.
Klara walked to the piano in a pale dress, her chin lifted with courage.
She found his face in the audience and gave him a small, hopeful, frightened smile.
Then she began to play, and Reyner watched her hands move across the keys.
He saw the pattern of her fingers, the rise and fall of her shoulders, the of her body.
But of the sound itself, the sound he had given his whole life to, he heard almost nothing.
The most important music of the evening was playing, and its maker's father sat in silence.
He read the phrases in the arch of her wrists and the closing of her eyes.
He guessed at the tempo from the nodding of her head and the pressing of the pedal.
It was like watching rain fall on the far side of a thick and soundless window.
A he had long refused rose in him, not for his ears, but for his years.
He had sacrificed her childhood to his art, and now he could not even hear its fruit.
He thought of all the evenings he had waved her away to finish a difficult page.
If he had listened to her then, he thought, he would have something to remember now.
The came too late, as such reflections almost always do, wearing the face of .
When she finished, the audience around him lifted their hands and clapped with evident warmth.
He could feel the as a faint trembling in the floor beneath his shoes.
Klara stood and bowed, then looked again for him, waiting to see what he had felt.
He rose to his feet, and he let his face say what his ears could not .
His eyes were wet, and his hands were shaking, and his pride in her was .
She understood at once, and her frightened smile opened into something steadier and glad.
Afterward he took her hands and told her, truthfully, that she had played beautifully.
He did not say that he had heard it; he said that he had seen it, which was true.
And he promised himself, silently, that he would learn to be before it was entirely too late.