At his first lesson she did not ask him to play a song. She asked him to play a single line she wrote on manuscript paper, slowly, and then to play it again while she sang a second line underneath. He listened. He found the places where his notes had been waiting for hers. She sat back.
"All right," she said. "We won't waste each other's Saturdays."
They did not. Twice a week, after school, Denise drove him or, when the car was in one of its moods, sent him on the bus with a signed note and a watch set five minutes fast. He sat in Mrs. Keene's dining room while the radiator knocked and the street did whatever the street did without him. She taught him posture without vanity, pedal without fog, and the difference between loudness and strength. She taught him to count aloud until counting aloud became embarrassing, and then to count inside the embarrassment until the embarrassment fell off and the count remained. When he rushed, she made him play with a book balanced, not as a party trick, as a diagnosis. When he drooped, she said, "The phrase did not ask you to apologize for it."
He loved her in the uncomplicated way of a child who has found the adult in charge of the exact thing he needs. He also, sometimes, hated the metronome with a purity that impressed her.
By ten he was playing Bach inventions and a Mozart sonatina and the kind of hymns Mrs. Dall still requested when she came to hear him, because she had earned a request. Mrs. Keene added Chopin carefully, one prelude, then the nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9, No. 2, which she called beautiful and dangerous. "Beautiful," she said, "because it is. Dangerous because people clap for the perfume and miss whether you told the truth." Elijah liked the nocturne. He liked, more, the inventions, the feeling of two minds required inside one boy.
The Whitaker scholarship entered the house as a flyer on the bulletin board at the elementary school, half covered by a notice about picture day. Elijah's music teacher, Mr. Okonkwo, took it down, read it, and put it in Elijah's backpack himself.
"This is not a raffle," he said. "Read it with your mother."
The Whitaker School was a public magnet. Tuition was not the wall. The wall was the audition, and the prize, for piano, was a named scholarship: weekly lessons with the school's artist-teacher, summer study, maintenance and eventual replacement of a real instrument, and a seat in the piano studio if the academic application held. Twelve finalists across the instruments would play at the spring open house. Three pianists, perhaps, would be taken. The numbers were small in the way that made Denise sit down.