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The Changing of Keys
The Changing of Keys
The Changing of Keys
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The Changing of Keys

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With his father dead, a gifted, fourteen-year-old pianist finds himself sent away from his Caribbean home against his will, to study classical music in the U.S. with a family friend he' s never met. His first angry, frightened step away from the controlling mother he' s never been able to reach becomes a sharp break with her expectations: he leaps into the dramatic and cutthroat world of opera. In this high-stakes milieu, his fierce desire to be a star fires both his brilliance and the dark distrust of women and of love that is the legacy of his childhood, a legacy that threatens his career, his impulsive marriage, and the young daughter he never wanted.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 17, 2024
ISBN9781646035182
The Changing of Keys

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    The Changing of Keys - Carolyn Jack

    Praise for The Changing of Keys

    Carolyn Jack delivers a powerful story of family and the trauma of familial dysfunction that can span generations. In beautifully rendered prose, she reminds us of the essential role the arts and creative expression play in making us fully human. This tale of love, loss, and human frailty will stay with you long after the last page.

    —John Grogan, international bestselling author of Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog and the memoir The Longest Trip Home

    How she can write! Here are grandeur and piercing moral insight. A very promising start to what will be a great career.

    —Benjamin Taylor, author of Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather and Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth

    "A lush, elegant aria of a novel, The Changing of Keys will transport—with gorgeous, tender lyricism—the reader into the mind of a musical prodigy in search of meaning…. David Copperfield meets Norwegian Wood, this novel will break your heart only to mend it in startling and marvelous ways."

    — Naheed Phiroze Patel, author of A Mirror Made of Rain

    Remarkable… I could hardly put it down. It’s so infused with feeling, atmosphere, and texture, and the innovative way of transitioning from father to daughter is as surreal as it is captivating. I am completely gobsmacked by the poetry and pertinent detail of the writing.

    —Donald Rosenberg, author of The Cleveland Orchestra Story: Second to None

    A wickedly smart and thoroughly engaging writer, Jack writes with verve. The enthusiasm she has for exploring the obsessions and desires that rule the lives of her characters is contagious.

    —Elissa Schappell, co-founder of Tin House literary magazine and author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls

    It’s precisely the kind of novel so many of us are pining for – a modern classic of a literary novel with an unexpected, glamorous setting and a devastating family history.

    —Ira Silverberg, literary editor and consultant

    With extraordinary literary style, Carolyn Jack deftly weaves the complexities of brilliant talent, the intense pressure of the world of opera, and the dark repercussions of a mother’s emotional neglect into a beguiling tale of heartache.

    —Morgan Howell, author of The Moon Won’t Talk

    "Carolyn Jack’s, The Changing of Keys is a bold and riveting story, told by a brilliantly unreliable narrator who both charms and dismays as he rises to fame in the world of classical opera. Chained to ambition, haunted by the past, he is a stunning character, tangled in complexities, surprising the reader at every turn."

    —Megan Staffel, author of The Notebook of Lost Things and The Causative Factor

    No word is out of place in this riveting portrait of a man trapped by his past and the ghost of a cold and wounded mother. Jack writes with elegance and clarity, and with a clear-sighted emotional force that compels us to care about an intractable character who demands love he cannot return and is gifted with a great talent he fails to nurture, but who remains unfailingly human in the midst of his consuming and lonely grief.

    —Thérèse Soukar Chehade, author of We Walked On

    The Changing of Keys

    Carolyn Jack

    Regal House Publishing

    Copyright © 2024 Carolyn Jack. All rights reserved.

    Published by

    Regal House Publishing, LLC

    Raleigh, NC 27605

    All rights reserved

    ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781646035175

    ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646035182

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2023950835

    All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.

    Cover images and design by © C. B. Royal

    Regal House Publishing, LLC

    https://regalhousepublishing.com

    The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.

    Regal House Publishing supports rights of free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of artistic works that enrich and define culture.

    Printed in the United States of America

    Dedication

    For Jean

    Quote

    This night a Child is born,

    This night a Son is given;

    This Son, this Child

    Hath reconciled

    Poor man that was forlorn

    And the angry God of heaven.

    I sang at Advent and wondered that one boy could be so spoiled and another so spurned by the same fathers. And then I ceased to voice at all what I’d no gift, and they no heart, to hear.

    I

    There was a time when the world was nothing but blazing sun. Other people measured the passage of days in terms of wet season and dry, cane planting and burning, but none of that meant anything to me.

    What I knew was sun and dark, the latter a nothing, a time in which I slept and did not exist, but the former an invasion by God’s eye, his blinding, relentless eye, which illuminated everything, turning the water in the bay a strange graphite blue and making every object leap from its background as if outlined in ebony pencil. The sun-world was extra-dimensional, unnaturally bright. A world of holograms. I used to think the sun could see right through me, exposing the bones inside, like Mother’s X-rays. Mother said God’s eye was everywhere.

    She never said his ear was everywhere. Maybe because she didn’t like to remind herself that hers were dying. That’s how I thought of them, anyway—fainting, withering little cochleae in the twilight chamber of her head, coughing their last in the penthouse sickroom atop her thin, tough, indefatigable body. Nothing else about her ever stopped. Certainly not her expectations. But the ears languished on in a kind of permanent invalidism that only made her vision sharper.

    We lived in those years on Duke of Gloucester Street, near the end where it almost touches South Cove. Ten feet beyond our hedge, the pavement turned to sand and became a path through the scrub palms that cluttered the shore nearly to the water’s edge. The palms weren’t tall enough to provide shade, but because I was so small, I could hide behind them and peek through their spiky fronds as if through my own fingers, sheltering a little from the prying sun when we went to bathe. I would watch Mother and my father sitting on a blanket with the radio they always brought down to the beach: my mother impassively upright in the wooden chair she preferred to sit on, small and unyielding, just like her; my father sprawled on his back with his shirt unbuttoned, exposing his soft, always-pasty stomach, his arms crossed over his face.

    They listened to opera. Mother could barely hear even the loudest voices, but in spite of that, she could tell when my father was humming along and would shush him curtly, as if seeing him enjoy the music offended her. She would guess at the names of the arias and he would grunt very softly—an almost imperceptible laugh in the sound—if she were wrong. She couldn’t detect it; it was his refuge, for no one wanted Mother to hear that she was wrong.

    But if she guessed right, he would reach up and pat her knee, and there was still tenderness in the touch. I remember that he patted her very gently.

    We went down to the beach nearly every weekend, as soon as my father had dismissed his last class and carefully dusted the harp and two pianos, locking the room behind him. He wouldn’t permit the janitor to touch the instruments; instead, he kept a stack of soft cloths in a cabinet and polished the smooth black wood, the yellow keys, and the ornate, gilded harp frame himself, singing a little or stopping to strike a few chords. When I was finally old enough to attend school, I would report to him at the end of the last day each week and watch him do this, impatient to get home and change and sink my feet into the sand at the water’s edge.

    I was eight when I stopped being able to remember his face.

    Before her hearing took to its bed, Mother had been something of a singer herself, a soprano with a small, clear, Christmas-carol sort of voice. She and my father met when she was twenty, after he became choirmaster of her church. I have always imagined them eying each other over their sheets of music, their want heightened by the film-score effect of the hymns and motets pulsing around them. I frankly don’t know what the attraction was, at least on her part, probably because I can’t recall him clearly. All I see of him in my mind anymore is those moments on the beach and in the schoolroom. He remains now too shadowy to exude any sexuality perceptible to the adult me. A mood is what he has become—a mood of reassurance that has irrevocably disappeared.

    Most likely, Mother was drawn in part to his musical gift and to his position of relative authority. I asked her once why she had married him and this is what she said: Conducting. That’s it. Conducting. I feel pretty sure she wasn’t implying that he conveyed any electricity.

    I never heard her say she loved him. I never heard her say she loved me, either. It seemed to be one of those things she thought no one needed to actually say, such as why it was important to practice scales. If you had to ask, you were an irredeemable ninny for whom an education was a waste of her effort.

    I did hear her say once that she missed him. Or something like it. I had wanted her to explain, shouting as I had to, how to count the 5/4 rhythm of a passage I was practicing. I was eleven, I believe. She started to reply and then stopped. Your father would know, she finally said. It’s the only time I remember her even obliquely admitting that she didn’t have every atom of the ability necessary to raise me to manhood.

    It gave me a curious feeling, half triumph, half terror. Even though I deeply resented her know-it-allness, even then, and knew it to be a dominating, arrogant pretense that she maintained through sheer, implacable, unpleasant will no matter how often we both confronted her fallibility, the sham had gradually become as dependably normal as it was irritating to me, and surely sustaining to her.

    To admit of a chink in this titanium armor was to suddenly face the possibility that the sun could burn out or that playing the piano could become boring. It was startling and unthinkable. Mostly unthinkable.

    I practiced a great deal after my father died. Mother didn’t have to urge me, although she did, of course, constantly. Playing accomplished a number of things at once: kept me on good terms with her, made me feel near to my father, allowed me to stay out of the merciless sun. I wouldn’t go to the beach anymore, which suited Mother as well. She now sat in that small wooden chair just outside the parlor door, on the screened porch, pretending to read scripture. Mostly, she listened to me endlessly play exercises and recital pieces.

    Well, listened. Felt me play was probably more like it, although I think, for a long time, she could pick up some of the forte right-hand tones. She had lost the left-hand ones years before, but for their vibration.

    When I was angry with her, I would play lightly, so she couldn’t feel them.

    She was determined that I would be a prodigy, I guess, and I obliged her by becoming one. A pale enough distinction—there wasn’t a lot of competition on our island, naturally, although the church had a good boy choir, most of whose older members had studied with my father. Still, even most of those boys practiced football a lot harder than they did their music. I might have, too, had Mother permitted me to play sports.

    I suppose you could say that I had an inclination for piano at that age, and it certainly helped me later. It was something I could do that Mother couldn’t. Not well, anyway. And it wasn’t singing, which she could. Once.

    I was taught by Simon Brownlea, the man hired to replace my father. By the time I was fourteen, I could play better than he and we both knew it. Mother would invite him home to dinner occasionally and he would play for her afterward, his graying blond hair falling over his spectacles as he thumped his way through the Grieg—again—or some Mozart. If he hit a wrong note, I would call out the right one and the sound of my voice always made him flinch.

    Which I enjoyed, of course. Oh, it wasn’t that I didn’t like him, exactly—I rather did. He was a good, encouraging sort. I learned a great deal from him. But he had the inescapable misfortune not to be my father, and by the time I surpassed him, I had begun to feel contempt for the smallness of his life and ambitions.

    I suppose I was beastly to him. I always teased him about his great success with the ladies. He wasn’t married, and as far as I knew from my teenaged snooping, had never even taken a girl to the movies. Of course, I hadn’t either, yet, but I was certain I had the potential, whereas he lived alone on the second floor of an old house owned by an old lady and took most of his meals with the spotty young biology teacher at Tantie Rhetta’s Tea Room, a fusty place that served stew and scones no matter how hot the weather. I had no use for such a pathetically dreary existence and let him know it.

    He was in love with my mother, you know. Maybe because she couldn’t hear how bad his playing was.

    Whenever he came to dinner, he would always bring her a bouquet of hibiscus that he’d probably pulled off his landlady’s hedge, or a packet of the dark chocolates she liked from the chemist’s, and she’d smile a tiny, dry smile at him and say loudly, the way she did, You’re too good, Simon, and he’d blush. I found it unbearable.

    Once I said, Oh, he’ll spare no expense to make you happy, isn’t that right, Mr. Brownlea? and he blushed in an altogether different way. Mother just looked at me. Her look could chemically alter bone marrow.

    Between her gaze indoors and God’s eye outside, I felt more and more like a lab creature in mid-dissection, held fast by two pins. I took to practicing at school every afternoon, even on Saturdays—there was always a match of some sort and the door nearest the shower room would be open. Brownlea was often about, performing odd chores in the music room, but he left me alone, generally.

    One afternoon, after he had gone out for his dismal daily tea with Mr. Dampson, I started poking about in the cupboards and found a stack of yellowed song books with my father’s name written on each one. They were all tenor arias, many of them ones I suddenly could remember my father singing at home. After I had gone to bed, as a small child, I would hear him singing at the piano—bits of Messiah, Rodolfo’s Che gelida manina from Bohème, Almaviva’s parts, some Verdi and Donizetti. I had forgotten that. I had forgotten the tunes until I saw them on the moist, rippled pages, the notes immediately singing for me what I had known before only by ear.

    So I took the books to the piano and played them all, all my father’s songs. I found I knew every bit of the Bizet, The Flower Song. It must have been his favorite, I knew it so well. Even when I tried the words, in bad French, I recognized them. I had not sung at the piano since my long-ago lessons with him, had not sung at all, and was oddly surprised to hear something like an adult sound exit my mouth in place of the boy soprano I had been expecting.

    I sat there in the sterile, humid choir room, as the light grayed with a pending rainstorm and the atmosphere thickened to the consistency of porridge and sang The Flower Song over and over in a voice like a balky transmission—now stalling out, now cracking and skipping into an unwanted higher gear, the brittle waver of it disappearing into the smothering tropical air and the sticky wood of chairs and walls—and what I heard were the voices on the radio and my father humming along.

    I didn’t tell Mother I had found the books. And I didn’t sing at home—home, where the predatory sun endlessly forced its way through every slit in the shutters and Mother sat with wire-tight sinews, seeming to sense every quiver of motion in the room.

    Very rarely now, I look at pictures of her from that time and realize all over again that she was pretty, fiercely pretty, with no soft, embraceable loveliness to her, but a taut intensity of angled bone and burning gaze, of sharp black lines of eyebrow, hair, and iris against the white of skin and eye—the kind of girl who would gladly go to the stake for what she believed. A dark Joan. And though she believed all too much in God, music was her real religion and the piano was the altar on which she sacrificed me. There was no singing in her house anymore.

    She made her announcement right after my third-year recital, when we were back at the house with Brownlea and a crowd of other boys and parents, drinking lemonade. It had been rather a grand day, as these things go. The hall at school had been packed: men in pale jackets, women in their silks and linens and hats, hushing the squirming, noisy, younger brothers and sisters—all of them sweating like cane cutters in the April heat, even though the drier winter was only just turning back into the swamp of sultry air that, by late May, would have everything on the island coated in tacky moisture. The hall, with its fissured plaster and dark, scarred wooden seats, usually looked somber in spite of the light that came through its arched windows, but the mums had all donated bouquets from their gardens and so the place looked positively festive. There was even a bunch of oleander sprays from Mother, in a vase beside the piano.

    Five of us performed: two singers, a violin player, a cellist, and myself. Mother had seen to it that Brownlea put me last on the bill. The others weren’t much to speak of—oh, the violinist did all right and the tenor was passable, I guess, even though he flatted out most of the low notes in the Schumann. I didn’t bother to listen much. I remember sitting in the room backstage, playing my piece over and over on the tabletop and wiping the sweat off my face with brown paper towels. I was performing the Beethoven Appassionata, and my fingers constantly repeated the relentless, tricky arpeggios of the last movement. I had good pianist’s hands—large, even then, with long, slender fingers. Rather like Mother’s, but ringless. I never could bear the feeling of anything on my hands.

    She came backstage a few minutes before I was to play, appearing at the door like my own personal Roman legionnaire, marching imperviously across the room full of boys and teachers to ask, in her very haute voix while she straightened my tie and collar, if I had pared my fingernails so they wouldn’t click on the keys.

    She, whose radar could pick up the slightest tremor of human movement, appeared not to notice the convulsions of snickers this produced. I flung her hands off and walked out to the corridor, where the next-to-last recitalist was just coming off the stage, followed by an entourage of parents and aunties and toadies. I remember his name: Colin Atcheson. One of those graceful, good-looking, all-round boys—his family let him play football as well as violin, despite the danger to his precious hands, and he did both pretty well. And here he was, surrounded by mates and his healthy father and his soft-spoken mother, calling, Good luck, then, to me as I walked past and I wanted to impale him on his own rosewood bow. I muttered, Piss off! under my breath as I climbed the stage stairs.

    Brownlea was waiting at the door and he immediately looked alarmed at my expression. Here now, what’s wrong? Can’t you tell me? Well, you can’t go out there with that ferocious look on your face, you’ll frighten the tots.

    A man of humor as pallid as his personality.

    Come on now, manage it a bit. Use it for the music, you know? Give Ludwig a good, controlled kick. I emphasize controlled.

    I looked at the floor.

    Oh, come—no sulks. You’re good at this. Go show them.

    He tried to pat my shoulder. I jerked away from him and threw open the stage door, hurrying to the piano bench. I barely bowed to the collection of mediocrity watching me and seated myself at once, almost simultaneously crashing out the first chords as if the keys were the triggers of so many guns.

    I played with vicious precision for the next twenty-five minutes.

    When it was over, I just sat there until some of the crowd ventured a timid handclap or two, and then I was on my feet and the audience was, too, looking a little windblown and stunned, as if I had diverted a hurricane through their tea party, but applauding madly as I took my bows. I finally went off and Brownlea thumped me on the back, saying, Marvelous! over and over and even Colin Atcheson came down the corridor and whispered, Bloody great job in my ear and I could tell he meant it.

    Mother said, Shall we go?

    How Mother. But at the house, she picked up her glass of lemonade and tapped on it with a spoon and I scarcely dared to breathe for hope and disbelief that she might compliment me at last.

    I welcome you all to my house, she announced. Her voice had never sounded so toneless. Especially the boys who performed today.

    Polite applause.

    I can think of no better occasion to tell you all that I have decided to send my son to the States at the end of the term. He will be studying piano in Chicago with my husband’s friend and colleague, Gunter Hellman, and beginning what I am confident will be an unsurpassed professional career.

    I think there was a gasp. I think it might have been my

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