When Bobby took his girlfriend back to her dormitory, he didn’t even try for a kiss. He waited on the snow-swept stoop until her proctor opened the door, then tipped his hat and went back to the cab. But he didn’t go home. He paid the cabbie double to take him back to the concert hall as fast as possible. There he waited with a crowd of admirers at the backstage door. For forty-five minutes the fans huddled together, inadvertently keeping one another warm. Then the doors opened and the musicians poured out.
The waiting fans clapped politely while Bobby studied each face, looking for the cellist.
Then the conductor emerged with his daughter beside him, and the polite applause magnified. Music critics and orchestra patrons crowded around to congratulate him on the performance and to ask him to sign their programs.
At first Bobby was disappointed, thinking his cellist must have slipped out through a different exit. But then he caught the gaze of the conductor’s daughter and recognized her almost-black eyes.
He flinched, shocked. On stage, with her cello, she had seemed to be in the full flower of womanhood, more experienced in love and passion than Bobby could ever hope to be. Now, clad in a bulky wool coat, dark hair tucked into a felt beret, standing demurely beside the tall man, who was surely her father, she looked like a child.
Bobby pushed forward and waited his turn for a word with the conductor. When the moment came, he ignored the man and faced his daughter. “My name’s Bobby Campbell,” he said, “and I’m a prodigy, too.”
Karen’s father frowned with disapproval.
At first Bobby assumed the conductor was jealous that someone was congratulating his daughter instead of himself. Later, after Bobby got to know Karen’s father, he came to realize that wasn’t it at all. Even though he was a composer, a conductor, a pianist, an artist—even though his livelihood was entirely dependent on the approval of others—he was embarrassed by praise.
This was a quality common among socialists, Bobby would learn later. They preferred to share credit, so it was a perverse act of love when the conductor interjected to correct Bobby that Karen was no prodigy—talented, yes, but she still had a lot to learn—and in any case, she was fifteen, and in the world of music one could hardly call a fifteen-year-old a prodigy.
Karen ignored her father. She looked up at Bobby with those deep, black eyes and allowed a smile to cross her red lips. “I’m Karen Hamilton. So what sort of prodigy are you?”
Bobby explained that he was only seventeen but already a sophomore at Columbia. That led to a longer discussion about New York and how it compared to Minneapolis, which led to a lengthy report on his family and its history. How his grandfather had emigrated from Ireland, developed a hardy strain of strawberry resistant to frost, and made a fortune in manufacturing jam.
Bobby had always been an easy conversationalist, but he wasn’t generally a braggart. Pride was the deadliest of the seven sins, and he’d studied enough history to know that even the pagan Greeks counted hubris as dangerous. But he also had an overwhelming feeling that this might be his only chance to impress this girl and that he needed to impress her. She stirred something in him that made him want to be his best.
He found himself walking beside Karen and her father, still talking, describing how proud he’d made his parents and teachers, when Karen interrupted.
“Do you think your grandfather made his own parents proud?” she asked him.
Bobby hesitated, confused. “My grandfather?”
Karen nodded. “Wasn’t he the one who made your family’s fortune? Wasn’t he the one who emigrated from Ireland? What must his parents have thought when he abandoned them?”
Bobby was befuddled. He admitted that he had never considered this, but Karen didn’t let it go. “So now that you are considering it, what do you think about it?”
Bobby didn’t even understand the question. All he could do was stare. They’d arrived at the conductor’s apartment, a modest building on the Lower East Side. Bobby looked up at the building’s dirty facade, hoping to find some direction, some answer, in the lines of its brickwork.
The conductor came to his rescue. “What I think my daughter is saying,” he suggested, “is that sometimes it is more important to follow your heart than to do what others expect of you.”
Karen nodded. “What is it you want to do? What is it that your heart desires?”
Bobby stared at her a moment longer. Then he told her the truth. “I don’t know.”
Karen smiled again. It wasn’t a joyous smile, and it wasn’t mirthful or even polite. It was the worst kind of smile—a pitying one. “When you do find out,” she said, “you tell me.”
Bobby’s heart was sinking fast. He had failed to impress this girl. His bragging hadn’t elicited interest; it had brought out only charity. He’d been given his one chance, and he’d fallen flat on his face.
But then Karen did something unexpected. She stepped forward, took his hand in both of hers, stood on tiptoe, and brushed his cheek with her lips. “Good night,” she said before ascending the steps to her building with her father.
“Good night,” Bobby responded, in a daze. And as he watched her disappear into the dark foyer and watched the door shut behind her, he suddenly knew the answer to her question. He knew what his heart desired.
It desired her.
CHAPTER 4
THE CELLIST
While Karen bartered for a shovel, while she trudged back and forth to the bakery, her father stayed home at his piano, gnawing down the point of his last pencil and continuing to compose music.
Karen hated her father. He was the reason they’d left New York in the first place. He was the reason they’d traveled across the Atlantic and then up through the Baltic Sea to this beautiful but isolated port city of ice towers and blue skies. Leningrad was where Dmitri Shostakovich lived and worked, and Karen’s father lionized the Russian composer, who was perhaps the most famous composer of the twentieth century. Shostakovich was only thirty-one years old when his Fifth Symphony had become a worldwide success.
Karen’s father had conducted that symphony in America, and Shostakovich was so impressed by the performance that he invited him to join the orchestra in Leningrad. He even offered Karen, a budding cellist, the opportunity to study with him at the Leningrad Conservatory.
Karen’s father jumped at the chance. Despite Karen’s wishes, he dragged her with him across two oceans and an entire continent, leaving her boyfriend, Bobby, behind. When she left New York in 1939, Karen was fifteen. She’d been gone for only a year and a half, but it seemed like a lifetime now.
Mr. Shostakovich wasn’t only the reason they came to Leningrad. He was also the reason they didn’t flee in June when the Germans invaded. Their work here was too important, Mr. Shostakovich claimed. The defenders needed music, and the world needed music, because Shostakovich was working on a new composition, a Seventh Symphony written in Leningrad, for Leningrad. He told Karen’s father that the symphony would be performed all over the world, a firm declaration that Leningrad was besieged but not broken, that one European nation at least was able to stand up to the German war machine, take the worst that it could offer, and remain unconquered.
It was a beautiful sentiment, one that Karen’s father, with all his impractical romanticism, fully believed in. He joined the civilian corps that helped build the trenches and antiaircraft pits surrounding the city. He volunteered for the conservatory’s fire brigade so that he could stand and serve beside his hero, Dmitri Shostakovich.