Every Note Played(50)
But when Richard’s bombastic offense tires of wielding its sword and takes a seat, his defense is clearly visible, cowering in the corner. More than anything, he’s afraid of his father’s indifference. He wonders if his father already knows, if word of mouth has spread north to cow country, and Walt Evans is the one doing the snubbing.
Or his father doesn’t know and wouldn’t respond if he did. Richard imagines his father opening the envelope, reading the letter through once, crumpling the paper in his fist, and tossing it into the trash. Or he reads it, refolds it, and slides the letter into his coat pocket, where it will be forgotten along with some lint and a gas receipt. In all the fantasies Richard entertains about his father’s potential reaction to this letter, Richard’s mind won’t allow for the possibility of his father picking up the phone or showing up at the door. The father Richard knows would offer no words of shock, horror, empathy, sympathy, or love for his youngest son.
This is why Richard doesn’t print the letter.
He knows he’ll never send the others. He’ll never get what he wants from his father. What does he want? He wants his father to admit that he was wrong for making Richard feel as if he weren’t good enough to be in the family. He wants his father to tell him that he’s okay exactly as he is. He wants his father to say that he’s proud of him. He wants his father to say he’s sorry for showing no interest in his piano career, his wife, his daughter. In him. He wants a big fat heartfelt apology.
But Walt Evans is an old dog, and he’s not going to change, and he’s certainly never going to apologize. And it doesn’t matter now. Sorry won’t do Richard any good. What’s done cannot be undone.
Yet, Richard continues to write to his father. It feels good to get the words out—words Richard felt when he was six but didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate, words he wanted to yell when he was sixteen but didn’t have the courage, words he wanted to argue when he was twenty-six but didn’t have the composure, words he wanted to speak when he was forty-six but literally no longer had the voice. The letters he writes communicate what he could never say, every typed word carrying an ancient scar on its back, every typed sentence fracking a bevy of silenced wounds stored in his deepest, darkest core, releasing a lifetime of outrage and resentment. But it seems no matter how many sentences he writes, the injustices buried within him are never fully mined.
He considers writing another letter, but he lacks the energy. His neck muscles tire faster when sitting up at the desk versus reclined in his chair or propped against the back of his bed. It’s becoming conscious work to hold up his ten-pound head. His accuracy declines after typing only a few minutes, the cursor drifting down the screen as his head drops forward. He’s probably ready for one of those neck braces, the standard soft white collars people wear when they’ve been injured in an accident.
He opens the second letter instead. It begins as a résumé, a list of Richard’s achievements, appearances, and critical reviews (only the good ones). If he never sends it to his father, maybe Trevor can use it for Richard’s obituary.
He graduated with honors from Curtis. He was an associate professor at New England Conservatory. He’s played with the Chicago and Boston Symphony Orchestras; the New York, Cleveland, Berlin, and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras. He’s played at Boston Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Tanglewood, Aspen, and many more. His playing has been hailed as “inspirational,” “spellbinding,” and “possessing great virtuosity.”
I was a great pianist. Audiences all over the world applauded me. They gave me standing ovations. They loved me. Why couldn’t you applaud me, Dad? Why couldn’t you love me? Richard has never found a satisfying answer to either of these questions, but staring at his bio on the computer screen, he’s proven, at least to himself, that he’s worthy of a father’s love. There is something wrong with him, not me. It took Richard forty-six years and ALS to get that far, which feels like progress but is probably just shifting blame, the pea transferred to another shell under deft sleight of hand, the truth still hidden from everyone.
Maybe if he’d loved to play something more accessible to his father, if he’d been into playing Billy Joel or the Beatles, if he’d wanted to play in a rock ’n’ roll band in a pub instead of classical piano in a recital hall, if he’d also played football and baseball like Mikey and Tommy, his father would’ve approved. Walt hated classical music. They lived in a one-hundred-year-old three-bedroom farmhouse with thin rugs and thinner walls. Whenever Richard practiced, which was all the time, there was nowhere in the house that didn’t fill with sound. If Richard was playing Bach, the entire house was listening to Bach.
Walt Evans hated Bach. Ten minutes was about all he could tolerate before he either stormed out of the house to do yard work or got in his pickup and drove to Moe’s, the local bar. If for some reason he wasn’t allowed to leave the house, if Richard’s mother told them supper would be ready in a few minutes, and Walt was forced to endure a few more minutes of Richard’s practicing, he’d explode. “Would you stop with all the goddamn noise?!”
Richard opens another letter, and every familiar sentence, every ancient accusation, is a bugle call to his oldest, darkest suffering, summoning an army of resentment and hatred to rise up within him. You called me a pansy for playing piano instead of football. . . . You called me a fag for loving Mozart. . . . You threatened to hack my piano to pieces with an ax and use the wood for kindling. . . . You never came to my recitals. . . . You never accepted me. . . . You never even knew me. . . . You never loved me, Karina, or Grace.