The girl at the piano was small for fourteen, with a long braid down her back and a dress the color of cream. She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the keys while the church fell quiet around her. I slipped into the last pew with my coat still buttoned. Sunlight came down in blue and gold through the windows of the Lutheran sanctuary. There were perhaps sixty people in the pews, parents and grandparents and little brothers in clip on ties. And then she raised her hands, and began to play, and I forgot every one of them.
It was a slow piece, with a long, falling melody that seemed to reach for something it could not quite hold. I did not know the name. But I knew the way she played it, with her shoulders low and her head tilted a little toward the left, as if she were listening to a person standing at her ear. Stan used to do that. In the evenings, at our own old upright in Lima, he would sit and pick out a hymn with one finger and tilt his head just like that. I put my hand over my mouth and held on.
When it ended, the church held its breath. Then people clapped, and an old man in the front pew said, “Brava.” The girl rose, curtsied awkwardly, and caught sight of me in the back. She did not know me. But she looked, for one second, at my face, and some thing passed over hers, a flicker, as if she were seeing an echo of someone. She went out the side door with the other children. A woman beside me whispered, “That is Annie Webb. She is the best student Mrs. Engle has had in years.” I found my feet and followed.
Love that was never given a name can still find its way home through the hands of the child who inherited it.
She was waiting for me in the vestibule, by a table of cookies and punch. She stood very straight, with her hands clasped in front of her. An older woman stood beside her, in a violet dress, with a gentle face and short white hair. This was Mrs. Engle. And a younger woman, perhaps forty, in a work uniform, with weary eyes, who turned out to be the aunt. The girl said, “Excuse me, madam. Are you Mrs. Kopp?” I said I was. She said, “Grandpa Stan told me about you. He said you made the best peach pie in Ohio.” I could not speak. I put my hand on the table.
Her aunt, Janet, took me aside. She had the look of a woman who had been practicing this conversation for months and had lost her place in it. She said, “Mrs. Kopp, I am sorry. I should have called. Stan did not want me to. He wanted to tell you himself, when the time was right, and then the time ran out.” She led me to a bench in the hall. She said, “the mother of Annie was Beth Webb. Her maiden name was Hartman. She was the girl he dated in high school in 1976. She was three months along when her family moved her to Fort Wayne.”
I stared at her. “Stan did not know,” she said. “He never knew, for thirty eight years. Beth gave birth to a baby girl in the spring of 1977 and gave her up, to a couple in Indiana. That baby was the mother of Annie, Susan. Susan found the name of Stan in the adoption records when she was thirty. She wrote him a letter. It came to his work, at the plant. He read it standing in the parking lot. He drove to Fort Wayne that weekend.” She smiled sadly. “Susan died three years ago, of a sudden aneurysm. She made him promise to look after Annie.”
I sat on the bench with my coat on. I counted backward. Susan had been born in 1977. Stan and I met in 1979, and were married in 1981. All these years, a daughter of his, a grown woman, a stranger, had lived two hours away. Stan had known her for eight years, and never found a way to tell me. The anger came and went, quickly, like a wave. What I felt after was larger, and sadder. I thought of the way he sat at the piano. I thought of him on the couch of Mrs. Engle with his eyes closed. He was not hiding. He was grieving.
Annie came and sat beside me. She did not say anything for a while. Then she said, in a small, steady voice, “Grandpa Stan said you might be angry.” I said I was not. “He said you were the kindest person he ever met, and that he was afraid of making you sad.” I took her hand. It was cool and slender, with the calluses of a musician at the tips of the fingers. I said, “Annie, I am not angry. I am only sorry I did not know you sooner. You play like him. Did anyone ever tell you that?”
She smiled. It broke across her face all at once. “Mrs. Engle says I tilt my head like he did,” she said. “She says it is hereditary.” I laughed. I laughed so hard I had to wipe my eyes with a napkin, and Mrs. Engle laughed too, and Janet, and the whole hallway turned to look. In the corner of the vestibule, where Stan used to sit and listen, a stack of programs lay on a table, and the top one had a line in the bottom corner, Dedicated to Stanley Kopp, who always sat in the back.
They came to Lima for Thanksgiving. I set the long table in the dining room and put the good plates out, the ones with the gold rim. Annie sat at the old upright after dinner, and she played the slow, falling piece again, the one from the recital, for our son and his family, who had flown from Phoenix to meet her. Nobody spoke. At the end, my son wiped his eyes and said, quietly, “Dad would have loved this.” And I said, “Dad is here.” We could all feel it. He was sitting in the back, listening, with his head tilted to the left.
