Annie had four siblings, all of whom, unlike her, often had several friends at a time over after school, so that the house was usually full of kids and their activities: records playing, the bigger boys bounding recklessly and thunderously up or down the stairs, Annie’s sisters and their friends in one or the other of their rooms, dressing up or trying different hairstyles suggested by Seventeen; or gathered in the front hall, using the telephone to pass along school gossip. It must be that, she had thought, that put Sofie off—the noise, the looseness. A looseness that for Annie and her siblings was just part of the sense among them that they were on their own. That their mother had better things to do than fuss with them.

Or other things, anyway. In the daytime, what seemed like her endless chores. Ironing in the kitchen, her cigarette set in an ashtray on the counter nearby, a ritualized pause after each section of a girl’s dress or a boy’s shirt to drag on the cigarette some predetermined number of times. Typing up a report by Annie’s father at the dining room table, or a long letter of her own to her mother, with many carbon copies to go to her sisters.

Sometimes she was literally absent, particularly late in the afternoon, when she went down the street to the Petersons’ house, or the Millers’ or the Levis’ or the Nakagawas’ to have cocktails with the other wives—and then the husbands too, as they drifted home from the campus or emerged from their studies at the far reaches of the houses.

Without her, the noise level in the house rose even higher. The records were turned up, the older kids danced with their friends in the living room or tried their mother’s cigarettes in the backyard—she smoked Pall Malls, which she drew out of an oval red tin, a hundred to the can. It was easy to pilfer a few without their absence being noticed.

All of this couldn’t have been more different from the atmosphere at Sofie’s house. Most importantly, Sofie’s mother was always present—present in every sense, engaged with her two daughters and whatever friends they brought home. Milk and cookies were served when you arrived. The napkins were cloth, ironed, folded elegantly on one side of the plate. The plate was beautiful, more beautiful than Annie’s mother’s best china, which had an ivy pattern trailing around the edge and was used only at Sunday dinner and on holidays. The glass that held the milk was thick and cut with patterned shapes. Mrs. Kahn sat with Sofie and Annie and Vera, Sofie’s little sister, and asked about their day at school in her faint accent, unidentifiable to Annie at the time.

She seemed genuinely interested in Annie too. Oh, Annie liked painting? Why? What about it? Had she ever seen Cézanne’s still lifes? Oh, she must, she must. She went off to find a book to show Annie images of these paintings. “Of course, this one is in the Art Institute,” she said, pointing.

Oh, yes, Annie said, as though she’d known that, as though she went to the Art Institute regularly—which she knew Sofie and Mrs. Kahn and Vera did.

She had gone once in fact—perhaps twice? she couldn’t remember—with her father. Her gentle father, the one in Annie’s family who, like Mrs. Kahn, seemed to care about the worlds his children were interested in, though he didn’t have the time Mrs. Kahn had to open the doors to these worlds for them. In any case, at that period of clearly defined divisions of labor between men and women, this would have been Annie’s mother’s role, if she’d cared to play it. Which she didn’t care to do. Or perhaps was too busy to do.

When Annie and Sofie went into Sofie’s room to loll on either end of her bed and talk or to listen to the radio, Mrs. Kahn would go to the living room and play the piano. Annie could hear the rich, rolling music intermittently under their own noise.

She used to be a pianist, Sofie said when Annie asked about it.

“But she’s not anymore?” Annie asked.

“Yah, the war,” Sofie said, in a way that seemed so much to assume Annie’s understanding that she felt precluded from asking anything more. “The war” was a point of reference in Sofie’s house in a way it wasn’t at Annie’s, in a way that gave it a mysterious power for Annie.

Those afternoons always ended the same way. At a certain point, Mrs. Kahn would knock on Sofie’s door, and when Sofie opened it to her, she would turn to Annie and say, apologetically, that she hated to interrupt, but it was time for Sofie to practice.

When the outer door to Sofie’s apartment building closed behind Annie and she started the walk home down Hyde Park Boulevard and then across Fifty-Sixth Street to Stony Island Avenue and under the IC tracks, she was aware of the complex and conflicting feelings that flooded her, every time. A real pleasure in moving away from the quiet of Sofie’s life toward the freedom of the ruleless, noisy house she inhabited with her siblings; but also a keen jealousy of the rituals, the sense of beauty, she was leaving behind at Sofie’s house, a growing consciousness of the high expectations that were clearly set for Sofie and her sister, and of the sense she always had at the Kahns’—the sense that she too might be a serious person, to be taken seriously.

Later Annie came to see that of course money was part of it—the difference between the homes. That her own father, who ran the university’s admissions office, was undoubtedly paid far less than Mr. Kahn, who was a physicist. But she thought that the mothers had something to do with it too. The problem being, as she saw it even then, with her own mother, who seemed to have no interests beyond her personal experiences, her own history.

She could remember rushing upstairs to tell her mother of her own rapture with The Messiah after she’d gone to hear it in Rockefeller Chapel one year with her father and her oldest sister. Oh, of course, her mother said, dismissal in her voice. She knew it perfectly well. She’d sung it in Chorus in her senior year of high school in Belmont, and Bob Samuelson, who had the tenor solos, had been madly in love with her then and couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She remembered what she’d worn for their performances—it was the first time her mother had allowed her to wear black: how sexy she’d looked! She recalled—for herself primarily, Annie sensed even then—the party they’d had after the last performance. Bob had drunk too much from a flask he’d brought with him, and in the car on the way home, he’d tried to kiss her.

She was stretched out on the daybed in Annie’s father’s study while she was telling Annie this, a paperback mystery in her hand, her cigarette waiting in the ashtray next to the bed, its smoke coiling slowly upward.

But what about the music? Annie wanted to ask.

What about Handel? What about beauty? What about Cézanne?

What about Bach? Whose perfect music Annie had heard Sofie play one Sunday afternoon when the Kahns had a concert for friends in the living room of their apartment. Through the row of windows to the east, you could see the lake—immense, churning, a white-capped greenish gray below the leaden sky on this cold late-fall day. The audience sat in rows of folding chairs the Kahns must have kept just for these occasions. There were perhaps twenty people there. Annie was one of three non-adults present, the other two being Sofie and Vera. She felt both proud of that and terrified of the conversations with the adults that would resume once the performance was over. You are a friend of Sofie’s? How nice. A musician too? Oh. Well, so few people had Sofie’s gifts. Or her mother’s, for that matter.

And Annie would find some eleven-year-old’s way of agreeing, while feeling confused, ordinary, ungifted. Dull.

17

The door swung open on the airless, silent front hallway. Annie set her bags on the bench there. She carried the few groceries from Vermont back to the kitchen to put them away. She took her overnight bag upstairs. In spite of her impulse to lie down yet again, she made herself do the responsible, orderly things—dirty clothes in the hamper in the closet, clean ones put away, toiletries returned to the bathroom.

Then she went to Graham’s study and checked the messages on the phone there. There were a half dozen or so from various friends. But it was too late, she thought, to start calling tonight.

Instead, she went online and googled Sofie Kahn.

And there she was. There were five or six photos of her on her website. One was of her on a stage somewhere, playing with the other members of the quartet, but the others were publicity photos of her alone. Portraits, really. In two her hair was gray, pulled back in a bun. In the others she was younger, with the luxuriant dark hair Annie remembered tumbling over her shoulders. She was always posed with the cello.

As she moved around the website, Annie was able to guess a little of Sofie’s life. Playing with various orchestras around the world. Appearing with the quartet at music festivals, at concert halls in distant countries, at colleges. Giving master classes here and there. Annie knew enough to understand that this was a hard life in some ways. But she presumed the music made it worthwhile, was the counterweight against everything that was difficult. She hoped so.