Dissonance

by Lisa Lenard-Cook

  Late nights in the kitchen, she told me, you and she would sometimes talk. “They were just as late-night kitchen conversations should be,” she told me. You did not then seem a child but her treasured friend, someone who could see the dark secrets of her soul and love her in spite of them.

  “But she is also her father’s daughter,” Katherine would say, and then she would shake her head. She loved Leon; she loved him dearly, and yet she saw him for the narrowminded man he was. She saw this because she too had been narrowminded when she met him.

  “Anna will be all right,” I would tell her, though perhaps she could tell from my voice that I was not entirely certain. After she died, I worried about you constantly. I wanted to call you, to see you, but Katherine had said I must not. I pestered poor Carl Mayer incessantly, but Leon had banned him from your life as well. We to whom your mother was dearest longed to be there for she who was dearest to your mother. But it was not to be.

  But your mother was most of all stunned by your talent on the piano. “It leaves me speechless,” she said. “I can only grasp the curtain and look out to the canyon while her music takes flight around me.” I, too, heard you play, and so I know that this was not merely a mother’s pride speaking. Music speaks through you, Anna, and you must not stand in its way. I look for your name in the papers and do not see it, and can only hope that, though you may not be performing, you have not let your talent fall away unused.

  Sometimes, when I am in Santa Fe, I imagine that I see you. I imagine that you have grown to resemble your mother, that I will know you at once. If I were to see you on the street, I could not pretend not to know you. “Dear, dear Anna,” I would say. And you would answer, “My darling Hana,” your voice an echo of your mother’s.

  I miss her very much.

  But most of all I wish you well, Anna. Do not let your past haunt your present or your future. Remember, and forgive. There is time for little else.

  With my love,

  Hana Weissova

  I went to my suitcase and took out the folder with Hana’s Symphony. I hadn’t shown Raja the score, because, as she’d explained, “I can’t read music. It would mean nothing to me.”

  But hearing it would. I knew there was a pretty little spinet in the living room; perhaps it had belonged to Raja’s husband. I carried the music in and moved a lamp so that I could read it, then lifted the spinet’s cover and began to play.

  Raja and Paul came into the room and stood listening. I played the Symphony all the way through, changing the timbre as best I could to effect the final shift to what should have been a lone clarinet.

  In the silence left when the Symphony ended, I heard the sounds of Haifa’s night humming through the open windows. Raja moved to where I sat and brushed my hair with her fingers, then left the room. Paul stood by the window, looking out toward the city below us, its lights insisting themselves into the darkness.

  “Will you play it again?” he asked. In that moment, I loved him once again, and then my mother and my father, and the woman who had made it so.

  “I have so much to tell you,” I said.

  “I know,” he answered, not turning. “But first, please, again?”

  I lowered my fingers to the keyboard and began, again, to play.

  The seeds of fictions come from many sources. This novel owes much to a book that I first read in the fourth grade, Gerda Weissman Klein’s All But My Life. Mrs. Klein’s daughter was (is) my friend Leslie; her book was my introduction to a world far less benign than I had previously imagined.

  For this new edition, my gratitude goes first and foremost to Andrew Gifford, founder, mastermind, and maestro of the Santa Fe Writers Project, and his entire hardworking team. In addition to those I thanked when Dissonance was first published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2003, I must add some of its post-publication champions: Bob Arnold, Mary Bisbee Beek, Winn Bundy, Susan Farber, Donna Fliegler, Catherine Ryan Hyde, Connie Jacobs, Joe Milazzo, Marty Ronish, Shaila van Sickle, Donna Smith, and, as always, my husband Bob Cook and my daughter Kaitlin Kushner. I know I’ve forgotten many others. Those omissions are my error; please know that I am grateful to all who continue to believe in this novel.

  Lisa LenardCook is the PEN-shortlisted author of the novels Dissonance (originally published by UNM Press) and Coyote Morning (UNM Press), and the writing guides The Mind of Your Story (Writer’s Digest Books) and (with Lynn C. Miller) Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press), as well as numerous trade nonfiction and ghosted books. Her short fiction has appeared in Southwest Review, Rosebud, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. She is a faculty member at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, and a 2014 featured writer at the National Undergraduate Literature Conference in Ogden. With Lynn C. Miller, Lisa co-founded ABQ Writers Co-op, bosque (the magazine), and the Bosque Fiction Prize.

  www. lisalenardcook.com