My mother hasn’t disappeared, not yet, not completely. He doesn’t understand the frailty of the brain. My father still plays the violin with her but misses the woman he married. Her fingers still caress the piano keys at home, but her anxieties and phobias keep her from the spotlight and the concert grand piano. When her concert life is over, when her fragile memory breaks her life into fragments, she is forced to stop performing. When my mother grows up and marries, it is to a tall, handsome violinist, a teacher at Juilliard. My grandmother believes my grandfather was overwhelmed by his daughter’s beauty and talent. That painting destroys my grandparents’ marriage. Books line the walls, except the wall with the painting of my mother. As a writer, I take up the least space, so I have the smaller bedroom downstairs, which I share with Greg. My father lives in the separate apartment on the top floor. The brownstone, in the west seventies of New York City, has been in our family for generations. When we part, I want to call him to come to me. He wraps me in one of his arms, the other arm in my hair. We don’t know how much time we have that day and want to use all of it. We smile and kiss, sharing morning passion. I laugh because I know he wants to take the painting down and replace it with a Miró of a yellow parrot.
He tells me he loves me then asks how my mother’s practice is going. It’s time for my husband to bring me my coffee and toast. He got lost years earlier and never found his way back. I know the artist who painted her portrait-dead now of dementia. When I rise from my bed to dress and get on with my day, she floats off the canvas.
If I stare long enough at the portrait, which was commissioned by my grandfather, I can almost hear the remote ticks of my mother’s metronome. Her long fingers are busy on the piano keys.Ī large oil painting of my mother occupies an entire wall of the bedroom I share with Greg. She’s draped in a silk piano shawl, and her wild black hair falls to her waist. When I open my eyes in the morning, I see my mother.
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