I read the letter at the piano in my studio, with the sleet ticking against the glass and the old hymn open on the music stand in front of me. It was written in blue ink on cream paper in a hand I did not know, the hand of an old man, shaky and proud, and it was dated June of this year. Samuel Booker sat on the bench beside me, and Savannah stood behind us with her fingers over her mouth. Carter stayed by the door with his coat still on, as though he were not sure he was allowed to come in.
The letter said the following. In the summer of 1953, Charles Ashford, who was twenty eight, took advantage of a sixteen year old girl who worked in the kitchen of his father, and she had a child. He wrote that he was a coward, that he had paid his family to send her away, and that she had been told she would never be welcome again. He wrote that the child was born in the spring of 1955 and grew up in Frankfort and became a music teacher. And then in one plain sentence he wrote, “Beatrice Hollingsworth is my daughter, and I have known it for seventy years.”
I had to read the line twice. My mother, Margaret, never spoke of any of it. She raised me alone in a rented house on Ann Street, sewed dresses for the women of the church, played the organ on Sundays, and I had been told my father was a soldier who did not come home. I stared at the wall of photographs above the piano, my mother at forty, my mother at sixty, her mouth always pressed slightly closed, and I understood that mouth for the first time. It was not sadness. It was a lock.
A hidden song will wait as long as it must, and when it is finally played it has more power than the silence that hid it.
Samuel Booker took my hand. He said his own mother had cleaned the Ashford bedrooms, and she had told him the story in a whisper on her deathbed in 1990. He had kept the hymn all those years in a cedar box, in the hope that one day someone would ask. “I could not hand it to a Hollingsworth who did not know it was hers,” he said. “And I could not hand it to an Ashford.” He looked at Carter. “Until this young man married your niece and she started asking questions.”
Carter finally spoke. His voice was thin. He said that when his great grandfather died in August, his own father had found the will and the letter and told him to keep quiet, that the family name would be ruined. Carter had done what he was told, and he had told the pianist to use the service door because he could not bear to look at my face. “You have the eyes of your mother,” he said. “I saw it the first time you walked up the drive. I could not stand it.” He took off his coat and laid it over a chair. “I am so ashamed, Miss Bea.”
I did not forgive him on the spot. I told him so. But I also told him that shame was a better beginning than pride, and that I had spent thirty six years teaching nine year olds that a person can say sorry and begin again, and I was not going to stop believing it now. Savannah burst into tears. She crossed the room and knelt on the rug in front of my chair. She said, “Aunt Bea, I found the letter in his desk the day after the wedding. I should have given it to you that night.”
The will left me a share of the Ashford estate, a sum that took the lawyers six weeks to calculate and that made me sit down in their office with my hand on my chest. I did not want a mansion. I did not want a horse. I wanted the name of my mother on something, her real name, clean and bright. So I took the money and I started a fund, and the lawyers wrote it into the papers in capital letters. THE MARGARET HOLLINGSWORTH FUND. FOR THE GIRL IN THE KITCHEN. Music lessons for any child in Kentucky who cannot pay.
Samuel played the hymn at the opening of the fund. He is eighty eight, and his fingers are stiff, but he sat at my upright and played it through slowly, and I sang the words I had written to it the night before. About forty people came to the studio that Saturday, old students and new, church women and strangers, and the Ashford family sent a wreath of white roses and a card signed by every one of them, in different handwriting. I put it on the piano without reading it. I did not need to.
The following spring, Carter came into the studio on a Thursday afternoon with a small box under his arm. Inside was a metronome, an old wooden one, which had belonged to the old Mr. Ashford. “He wanted you to have it,” Carter said. “It was in the music room in the mansion. He used it when he was a boy.” I wound it up. It ticked slowly and evenly, like a heart. I told Carter that he could sit in the back during lessons if he wanted. He did, for months, and he never said a word.
I still teach the same thirty one students and nine new ones, and every Wednesday afternoon a girl named Tamara comes in with a violin case, shy and quick, the first recipient of the fund. She plays the hymn for me when she is ready, and I close my eyes and listen to my mother at sixteen, in a hot kitchen, humming something she could not say. When the last note fades, Tamara looks at me and asks, “Miss Bea, was she a good person?” And I tell her, “She was the best person I ever knew.”