“…that one. The girl with the lit window. She is the only person in ten years who ever played for me.” Vincent smiled through his tears. “I thought she meant a nurse. Then she said, Vincent, give that child my pin, because I never got to wear it for anyone who deserved it.” Sophie finally opened her fist. In her palm lay a small gold pin in the shape of a lyre, with a chip of sapphire set at its center. On the back, in letters worn almost flat, someone had engraved: Metropolitan Opera, April 1961. Brava, Lucia. Sophie read it twice. “Lucia,” she whispered. “Her name was Lucia?”
I had to sit down on the piano bench beside my daughter. For ten years I had carried soup across that yard to a frail widow who said she used to sing at Holy Ghost church. I had pictured a choir. I had never once pictured a stage. Vincent saw my face and laughed softly. “Everybody does. Mama never said a word about it. She was a stand in. The lead soprano lost her voice at noon, and my mother, who was twenty three, sang the whole second act. The audience stood for eleven minutes. The cast each received a pin from the director that night.”
“A week later she married my father, who ran a bakery on Atwells Avenue, and she sang only in church and in the kitchen after that,” Vincent went on. “When he died in 2009, she stopped singing altogether. The house went silent, and the silence got into her.” He looked at Sophie. “Then one April evening, a little girl across the yard started playing Jingle Bells, badly, with the window open. She told me she laughed until she cried. She said, Vincent, I think I can hum again. Every night after that, she hummed along, very quietly, under her blanket. For ten years.”
A tiny gold pin from an opera stage one night in 1961 found its way to a girl who played badly with the window open.
Sophie put both hands over her mouth, and the pin trembled in her fingers. “I did not know,” she said. “I thought she was not listening.” Vincent shook his head. “She was listening to every note. She could tell by the sound which evenings you were sad. She said that you played slower when you were sad. On the night before your exams, she told me, you played so fast that she was sure you would get every answer right.”
He reached into his coat for a ring of keys and a second folded paper. “There is one more thing. The house has a piano in the front room, a Steinway baby grand that my father bought in 1965 on payments. Nobody has played it since he died. She wanted it to go to you.”
The movers came the following Saturday, four large men in gray coveralls, and they carried that Steinway out the front door of the dark house and across the narrow yard, step by careful step, with half the street watching. We had to take out our front window to get it in. Our little church upright, the one I bought for three hundred dollars, we gave back to Holy Ghost, where it now sits in the basement for the children of the Sunday school. Sophie taped a note inside the lid. It said, Play it for somebody who needs it. Last week I heard a nine year old girl in that basement, picking out Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, badly, with the door propped open. I smiled the whole way home.
In March, Sophie auditioned at the New England Conservatory in Boston, a school I could never have dreamed of for her. Vincent wrote a letter to the committee on his own. When the acceptance arrived in April, the envelope also held a scholarship notice from the Lucia Castellano Fund, which had been established, quietly, in January. Sophie read it on the porch in the sunshine, and she did not scream or cry. She simply walked across the yard to the empty house, stood at the old window, and said to the glass, “I am going, Mrs. Castellano. Thank you for listening.”
That summer, on the evening of the anniversary, Sophie opened our window as wide as it would go. Vincent sat on a folding chair in the yard, in a wool coat, though it was warm. Sophie began Ave Maria. She played it slowly, the way she played when she was sad and the way she played when she was grateful, which I now understood were the same. Halfway through, another window opened, then another. A neighbor lady in an apron stepped onto her stoop and began to sing the Latin words in a voice cracked and sweet. Then a second voice joined hers, from the street.
By the last verse, there were twenty people in the yard, singing the old hymn in their house slippers. Vincent did not sing. He sat with his face in his hands and his shoulders shaking, and when it ended, the entire street was silent for a long moment, as if holding its breath. Then someone applauded, and then everyone did, and the sound rolled down the block like warm rain. Sophie stood up from the bench and bowed, with the little gold lyre pinned to her collar, and I thought my heart would burst out of my ribs.
She is in Boston now, in her second year. Every Christmas, a tin of pizzelles arrives on our porch, made from the recipe of Mrs. Castellano, delivered by a son who drives down from the city. No note. We understand. Sophie still keeps her window open on Sunday nights when she is home, and on one of those nights I stepped outside and looked at the dark house across the yard. The curtain moved. I know it was only the wind. But I waved anyway, and I whispered, “She plays for you, Lucia. She always will.”
