ld see the rouge
on her cheeks; her lips were parted and she bent forward. The next
time I chanced to look her way, near the end of the second movement,
she was crying into her handkerchief.

At that moment, as the caravan was fading into the distance, I had a
kind of revelation that I'll never forget. This is what it's all
about, really, I told myself. This is Jenny's life, and the kind of
emotions she can evoke in an audience are her special gift. Maybe I
had never really come to terms with the direction she had chosen. I
started to feel tingly and blurry eyed. If she, with her playing,
could bring tears to even one large woman in a worse-than-average
audience, she must also be bringing joy to another, and at least some
feeling to someone else; maybe everyone else. If she really wanted to
do that with a viola instead of a violin--bringing a new kind of life
to a little regarded solo instrument--I felt I could finally accept it.
Somehow, over the past three years, my opposition to her taking up the
viola had completely blinded me to the fact that she was actually
succeeding. It felt like her destiny beginning to unfold. I was
sitting on stage with my seventeen year-old daughter, actually
participating in her debut as a soloist. How many fathers have that
opportunity, I wondered. I felt a growing sense of privilege attending
the event, and I was elated by the time the third movement was over.
Jenny would fly away from me, of course, into some concert career,
climbing ever higher--the inevitable result of a child growing into an
independent woman with a great art to unleash on the world. Whether
she ever became a famous soloist or not, I thought at that moment, was
irrelevant. It was really the ambience that she lived for; not only
the brief moments of performing, but also the people around her--the
friends with whom she played and passed her time, the practicing, the
dedication; even Mr. Rossi, whether I really liked him or not. I could
hardly keep tears out of my eyes long enough to turn pages through the
end of the fourth movement.

When the music finished and the last blast faded into the walls, there
was fully ten seconds of absolute silence in the auditorium. What
happened to all the tiny tots? I almost wondered if the audience had
gone to sleep! The applause began from the front--the large woman held
her handkerchief between two fat fingers, and was applauding wildly,
ecstatically, leading the c