The Changing of the Keys
Carolyn Jack
On sale: September 17, 2024
Regal House Publishing
Tormented by the emotional legacy of his cold,God-obsessed mother,
a musical prodigy begins sabotaging his career,his marriage,and his unwanted child.
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 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.
Excerpt
Only one light was on in the house when I arrived home, although it was by then fully dark outside.
It was the light over the piano.
At first, I thought Mother wasn’t there and I was briefly confounded, trying to imagine where she could be—she who no longer went anywhere in the evening except to the monthly church supper. And it wasn’t church-supper week. But then I saw her rise from her chair on the night-filled screened porch and place her Bible, which she could not have been reading, on the table next to her.
I waited, hoping she would speak. She didn’t. She stayed in the shadows, looking down at the book.
“Mother.”
Nothing. I didn’t believe she couldn’t hear me.
“Mother!”
She turned around briskly then and entered the living room. “You don’t have to shout,” she said. “Where have you been?” “I went for a walk.”
The tortures of Hades could not have wrung from me that I had sought Brownlea’s advice.
“Well, it’s long past teatime. I’ll fix something to eat. Cold beef all right?”
“I’m not hungry, Mother, I want…”
“You may not think you are now, but if you go to bed with-out a bite, you won’t sleep well. Now, what would you like? There are sardines and some…”
“Mother, I don’t want food! I want to talk to you!”
She stopped as if I had switched her off, gazing away from me at some distant point in the dim room, gathering herself. After a moment, she turned her head a little toward me and said quite calmly, “Then we had best sit down.”
Neither of us took the chair that had been my father’s.
I turned on another lamp and sat next to it at one end of the sofa. She did not choose to sit next to me, perching instead on the piano bench. The light behind her made it hard to see her face.
She waited. She was not going to help me start.
“Mother, why?” My voice cracked, angering me. I spoke more loudly. “Why?”
“Do you mean, why am I sending you to Chicago? I should think it would be obvious—you’ll need a teacher of the first rank if you’re to have a career.”
“But you’ve never asked me if I wanted a career. And why Chicago? Why not New York or London? Why should I study with this Hellman geezer? Who is he, anyway?”
“No slang, please. And I’ll thank you not to inundate me with questions.”
Her mouth tightened and she folded her arms over her prim, blue-cotton blouse. She shook her head as if a gnat were besieging her.
“My dear,” she said tentatively, trying out a foreign expression, “Gunter Hellman was at university with your father and, unlike him, went on to a distinguished international career. He plays with all the major European and American orchestras and is on the Chicago Conservatory faculty. The fact that you have not heard of him signifies only that you are fourteen, not that he is inconsequential.”
“But…”
“I beg your pardon. I was about to say that I had written to him two years ago to ask if he would take you as a pupil, and he said that when you were old enough to go to an American high school and if you were truly devoted to piano, then he would.
“I have prayed every night for the last year, hoping that God would grant you the passion and ambition to match your talent, so that you would not let it go to waste. It is a sin to waste great talent or to thwart it in any way. A sin.
She wasn’t looking at me.
Her fingers gripped the edge of the bench, turning her knuckles livid and making the pale blue veins strain against the skin of her hands.
“Gunter last wrote me a month ago to say that, if I thought the time was right, you could come to him this summer. After I heard you play today, I knew you must go.”
“But why didn’t you tell me? You never tell me anything! Why does everything have to be a secret?”
“You are told as much as you need to know. I can’t have you distracted from your music by details and half-formed plans that do not require your worry.”
“There’s nothing half-formed about this! You’ve been plot-ting the whole thing since I was twelve, you just said so! Why won’t you let me decide what my own future will be?”
Mother looked straight at me. Her eyes were as hard as jet beads.
“Your future is entirely up to you. I can’t earn your success for you or prevent your ruin. You must decide which it is to be.” She stood, as if ready to quit the house and me with it, to stride off with her sword and take up the cause of some worthier supplicant. I was angry and strangely terrified that she would leave altogether, who had never really come close. I held out my hand to stop her. She didn’t take it—she hadn’t taken my hand in years.
“But why aren’t you coming, too?” I said, suddenly pleading. “Why do I have to go by myself?”
She looked away. Was she crying? I had never seen her cry. She turned back to me, dry-eyed. “You will learn faster on your own,” she said quietly.
“What? About playing?”
“About everything.”
She coughed and stood up, pushing the piano bench in and turning off the lamp.
“You’ll be able to come home for the Christmas holidays,” she continued, already halfway to the door of her own room. “If you wish.”
She called goodnight without looking back.
I sat for a while, gazing around the room where I suddenly did not belong. I was to go; I was already gone. The knowledge of my impermanence had, in an hour, made me a ghost in my own home. Another member of the family who would leave nothing behind but his habitual imprint on a cushion.
Oddly enough, I now wanted my tea. I went to the kitchen, unearthed some bread and cheese, and finished them off, along with the rest of the lemonade. A kind of excitement was grow-ing in me, conjoined to the lump of dread. I was going to study with the best, be the best. Everybody would know my name. I would never again be locked away alone in silence. I would be surrounded by cheering audiences, blazingly visible in stage light far friendlier than the sun. I would succeed.
I rinsed my glass and knife, switched off the lamp in the liv-ing room, and brushed my teeth. The dark of my room seemed to drown all my hope. I lay in bed and listened to the waves in the cove, breaking against the beach.
Excerpted from THE CHANGING OF KEYS by Carolyn Jack © 2024 by Carolyn Jack, used with permission from Publisher Book Page.
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“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
About the Author
Carolyn Jack has won the Meringoff Prize for Fiction and The Westchester Review’ s Flash Fiction Contest. Her literary work has appeared in such periodicals as Literary Matters, the Blue Mountain Review, and Pen + Brush in Print. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and an award-winning arts journalist, she holds both an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts and an MA in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Find out more on her website and follow here on Instagram.