The Silent Sister(23)
According to the instructions I’d found on the Internet, I needed a particular cable to hook up the VHS player to the TV. I knew there was a drawer in the kitchen filled with all sorts of cables. I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the drawer, pulling apart the tangle of cords and cables until I found the one I needed. Back in the living room, I had no problem connecting the tape player to the TV. I slipped the older of the two tapes—1980—into the player, sat on the sofa, and hit play.
The tape began, and I sat forward on the edge of the sofa, clutching the remote in my hand. The image was grainy, but clear enough that I could see a little girl dwarfed by a cavernous stage as she lifted a violin to her chin. I wasn’t even sure it was Lisa, but as she began to play the camera zoomed close enough that I could see the fair hair. She would have been seven in 1980, I thought. A tiny, skinny, fragile-looking seven, and although her features were indistinct, I imagined the concentration in her face as she played. I didn’t know the piece, but it was clearly complex and tears filled my eyes.
I moved to the floor in front of the TV, trying to get even closer to my sister, my throat so tight it ached. What incredible courage she had had to be able to stand on that huge stage in front of … I couldn’t see the audience, but I imagined there were hundreds of people seated in the auditorium. Danny would not have been born yet, and I wondered if it would temper his envy of her to see her at such a tender age and realize the pressure she must have been under during her entire short life.
The tape was a little more than an hour long, and I watched every second of it, mesmerized. It contained bits and pieces of different recitals and concerts. In a couple of segments, Lisa performed with other children, although it was obvious she was the youngest, the tiniest of them all. In one piece, she was the only child in a sea of adult violinists. That segment hurt me the most to watch. Although she played with confidence and skill, I thought I could see the vulnerability in her. The tender innocence that any child of seven would have. How hard had she been pushed? I wondered if she was truly doing what she’d wanted to be doing. She’d never been allowed to have a real childhood.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, reaching forward to touch the screen with my fingertips.
When the tape ended, I sat still for a moment before ejecting it and inserting the second. “Rome Music Festival, June 1987” the label read. Lisa would have been fourteen in 1987. This tape was much clearer, with a professional quality to it. It opened in what looked like the gate of an airport. A group of energetic teens appeared to have taken over the seating area, some of them standing, others sitting, all of them laughing and talking. I searched the faces for my sister. A few frowning adults sat in nearby seats, clearly not amused at finding themselves surrounded by a bunch of rowdy teenagers, probably Lisa’s fellow music students. They were all about the age of the kids I counseled, thirty or forty of them, loud and goofing around while crammed into the waiting area. The scene, full of adolescent hormones and blossoming egos, would have been comical if I hadn’t been so intent on finding Lisa in the crowd.
A brown-haired man appeared on the screen. He held his right arm in the air, and as if he’d cast a spell over them, the kids stopped what they were doing and looked in his direction. He was tall and slender, with a thin angular face that was just shy of handsome. He gave a slight nod, and the kids pulled their instruments from cases I’d barely noticed till that moment. They began to play. Violins. Violas. Cellos. As usual, I had no idea what music they were playing but it was a happy, bouncy melody that quickly had the sour-faced spectators not only smiling, but clapping.
I finally spotted Lisa. She stood to the side, nearly out of the camera’s view. I recognized the boy next to her from the photographs in my father’s box. Matty, with the curly dark hair. When that piece was over, the conductor or teacher, or whatever he was, motioned to Lisa and she moved forward. He lifted his baton, and she began to play a solo. She looked very much like a feminine version of Danny. She was so pretty. There was a fragility to her features, but it was clear that when it came to her violin, there was nothing fragile about her. She was in complete command. I knew she’d been good—I knew she’d been a prodigy—but I found her incredible talent heartbreaking. Somehow it had cost her. It had cost her everything.
I fast-forwarded through the tape and saw the same group of kids behaving like idiots at the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps and in front of the Colosseum. My sister and Matty were always a little off to the side, talking together. Sometimes laughing. Not quite part of the crowd. Then the group performed with hundreds of other young musicians in front of an audience in an enormous, ancient-looking building with ceilings so high they weren’t on the TV screen, and pillars as big around as the living room I was sitting in. At one point, Lisa stepped forward from the rest of the group as she had in the airport. Dressed in white, she looked like an ethereal angel as she raised her violin and began to play. To the far right of the screen, I saw the tall conductor again, and even though there was quite a distance between him and Lisa, it was as though a fine thread ran from his white baton to her violin, coaxing every note from the instrument. This music I knew: Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor. My father listened to it all the time. The familiar piece used to drift through the rooms of our house until I was numbed by it, but I was anything but numb now, hearing Lisa play it. I swallowed hard, wanting both to turn off the tape and to play it over and over again.