“Um.” I blew a black ripple across my cup. The steam retreated, came back.

“Would young people know him?”

“I am not the person to ask what young people would know.” I sipped. Too hot. “But . . . no. Young people would not know Alban Berg.”

“Eh. I figured.” Dad sighed, sitting next to me at the kitchen table—a slab of oak, the bottom etched with all our initials. “We need something fresh. Young.”

“Wasn’t Berg, like, early twentieth century?”

Dad waved his hand. “The aesthetic, though. You know what I’m saying.”

“Something to break up Mozart and Verdi.”

“Shake up. Nora’s words.”

I frowned. “I thought you were planning the opera season.”

“No, that’s all set, this is . . .” Dad’s voice drifted as he stood and shuffled away, head cocked.

I swirled my coffee and waited. This was Dad—as much as his beard or tuna melts or meandering pep talks. He was hearing Berg right now, trying to imagine how young it might feel to someone who wasn’t seventy-two.

Nora’s words from yesterday came to mind: of the moment. Amberley was trying to shake things up. Why? I could ask, but talking about Amberley hurt. Better to change the subject.

“What’s the deal with this Oscar kid?”

Dad leaned against the archway to the kitchen. “Incredible, right?”

“No, I mean . . . sure, but—what’s he doing here? What’s the plan, what’s he studying?” I swallowed my coffee. It burned my throat. “Piano, or . . . ?”

“No, no, no.” Dad chuckled. “Conducting. Composition.”

“But Amberley doesn’t have a summer program for—”

“He’ll study with me.” Dad knocked on the wall. “This is an exceptional case.”

“Is he really that exceptional?”

My voice sounded caustic. I hadn’t meant it to.

But Dad’s eyes had gone distant, like when he was conducting. “We popped by campus on the way from the airport.”

You picked him up from the airport. Yourself.

“We found Arnie, Cooper, and Li Chun all in the recital hall . . .”

Piano chair, violin professor, cello chair.

“And Oscar sat right down at the piano.” Dad laughed. “Like he wanted a place to sit, so why not there? And Arnie, you know Arnie . . .”

Dad made thunderclouds with his hands while I tried not to think about the last time I saw Arnold Rombauer, Saturday, April 12, 4:25 p.m., a stern silhouette on the other side of an audition screen.

“He said, ‘You gonna play that thing or just warm the bench?’ And Oscar started riffing, a fake polonaise. Pretty soon, everybody’s shouting requests. Mahler, Vivaldi, Shostakovich, Philip Glass, and by God, he nailed them all. Skewered them. A seventeen-year-old! I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

“But you were like that, Dad. You were composing at fifteen—”