Ally woke up with the words on her lips. She realized she had actually mouthed them aloud. It had been some time—long before the bombing, even before she and Chad had gotten serious, since she had had the dream that had her saying the sentence over and over again. It was only now that she realized it had been that long.
"Who's my father?"
It had been the special phrase that she'd held close to her and had brought out to see the light of day only when she was mad at her mother—when she wanted to see her mother's mood darken. When she had the feeling that her relationship with her mother was too out of balance and she wasn't being given the proper consideration. And her mother would always stop dead in her tracks, whatever she was doing. She'd pull herself up and say, "You don't really want to know. Making one up would be so much better than the reality. Albert Einstein can be your father if that will make you feel smarter."
Once when her mother had really been in a rage over botched hotel arrangements when the symphony was playing in Vienna, Ally heard Miranda swear about some hotel functionary and saying, "Those East Europeans are all alike."
Ally had asked "alike like who?" and Miranda had said, "Like your father."
Miranda had immediately realized what she had said and had instantly calmed down and left the room, returning a short time later after she had taken charge and brought order out of chaos on the hotel arrangements pretending that she'd said nothing untoward before she left. But when Ally started to return to her question, dazed that her mother had revealed this much, Miranda severely shushed her and moved the discussion and the action to something else. The first chance Ally got, though, she'd sought out maps and books that would tell her where Eastern Europe was. It turned out to be a much bigger place than would readily reveal who her father was.
Fathers had always been a taboo topic between Miranda and Ally—and Ally only brought the subject up when she wanted to irritate her mother. It wasn't until Ally's teens, though, that she really considered the topic in relationship to her own father. A father was never mentioned as a family role, and Ally lived such an isolated life from other children and from family situations that it just didn't occur to her much that families traditionally came with a set of parents.
She was very much aware that Miranda hadn't had a father of her own but that she'd been raised in the large townhouse of her mother's Manhattan robber baron father among an extended family existing almost entirely of women except for Miranda's grandfather, a stern, foreboding figure who left little doubt that Miranda and her mother were under his roof at his sufferance. When Ally was very young, Miranda would tell her stories about her mean great-grandfather that would curl Ally's toes.
Miranda had been home schooled, so Ally was as well. When she'd come of age, Miranda had been shipped off to Wellesley, so naturally Ally had been too. But Miranda had studied musical composition and theory and Ally had rebelled to the extent that she took up theater arts—primarily stage design and construction. Miranda never got to finish college, though. Early in her senior year, her grandfather died and she and her mother were shipped off to less-wealthy, dry-as-toast maternal relatives in Minnesota. Miranda spoke of them not at all in later life, and they were bland enough to slip off Ally's radar of family tree interest. It was only years later, after a lengthy internal fight in the family that no one bothered to tell Miranda or her mother about that they found that Ally's great-grandfather had inexplicably left the two of them millions in trust funds.
Long before this came into light, though, Miranda had to have a job to hold up her mother's and her end in the household, her mother never having been trained for anything outside of the house, and in 1964 she managed to land a temporary assistant job with the fifty-eight-year old conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony, August Donáti, a Hungarian-born conductor and composer. The two immediately hit it off and Miranda proved to be the perfect personal assistant and quickly received the job permanently. Donáti was on the move shortly thereafter, going first, to London to conduct the BBC Symphony, and then to Sweden to conduct the Stockholm Symphony and subsequently, in 1970, to Washington, D.C., and the National Symphony.
Miranda traveled the world with him, devoting her every waking moment to handling his personal affairs, seeing even more of him, some said, than did his concert pianist wife, Erica. Donáti was at the National Symphony until the late 1970s and then moved on to the Detroit Symphony. By that time, though, Miranda had somehow acquired a baby daughter of her own, born in 1976, and, even more surprising, didn't go with Donáti to Detroit. What she told people if they asked—and they certainly had to be either brave or stupid to dare to ask—why she hadn't gone to Detroit was that she'd had quite enough cold weather, thank you very much, when she'd lived in Minneapolis and Stockholm. Knowing how icy she could be even without the weather, people were content to accept this explanation.
She stayed in Washington, D.C., and became the rock for the new conductor of the National Symphony, the Russian-born cellist, Misha Recevich. Sometime in these years in Washington she had become close friends with Angela and Dennis Harris.
Rumors were rife that Miranda and Donáti were lovers. Conversely, some said, rather cattily, that Miranda was a man hater even in those days and that her bitterness had interfered with her close working relationship with the conductor, a relationship that had also strained Donáti's marriage. All of this, of course, is inevitable among high strung, intensely professional musicians, Angela Harris had taken Miranda under her wing. She then became such a substitute intimate friend that, whereas such spats normally would be patched up and Miranda and Erica should have become close again, Angela now was too fully in the picture. The wags said this was the real reason Miranda didn't go to Detroit—that she hadn't become comfortable with Ilse again and that Donáti couldn't take the two most-important women in his life sparring. One had to go, and Miranda was the one who bowed out.
Other speculators, pointing to the child, Alice, who had seemed to have just appeared backstage one day, opined that either the Donátis were not that pleased with Miranda with a child in tow or that, although refusing to even hint who the father was, Miranda felt she could not leave Washington, D.C., where the father lived.
Whatever the reason, Miranda transferred her miracle worker ways easily enough to the new conductor, Recevich. Since Miranda had first come to Washington with Donáti, the symphony had played in Constitutional Hall, the headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which, at the time, had the largest concert hall in the nation's capital. The Kennedy Center was built in 1986 and the symphony moved there. Miranda was never as comfortable at the new venue as she had been at the old, though, and she only stuck it out there for five more years, before, having recently learned that she was worth the millions her grandfather had left her, she was talking of retirement and looking for some appropriate, private and isolated, place to settle down.
The Harrises had just moved to the smaller Washington village near the Blue Ridge in northern Virginia, and Angela found the castle, which was of elegant European design, something that pleased the international traveler, Miranda. So, taking her young teen daughter with her, and contracting to work checking orchestral compositions at home to fill in the time she didn't spend developing the castle's formal gardens, Miranda moved into Banffy.
As Ally lay there, slowly waking up to a new day in Angela Harris's guest bedroom, she entertained the question of her parentage for the first time in more than a year. She had no trouble deciding why she was bringing up the question now. She just didn't know why she hadn't given the likelihood greater consideration before. The previous day she had had two encounters with the past that linked in a way that was so obvious to her now that she was flabbergasted it hadn't occurred before.
August Donáti. It must have been August Donáti who had fathered her, despite his age at the time. Sixty-year-old men were known to be able to father children. Not that he'd ever been in a position to be more than biological contributor of the necessary material, of course. It was all so obvious now.
And what had triggered this revelation from the previous day's events? First had been those silver cups. The initials "A.D." on the cups. She had seen the initials before, and her mother's companion cup, but they had meant little to her. The previous day, in her mother's living room in the castle, though, had been the first time in many years that she remembered there was an inscription on the reverse side, "Forgotten Never." The initials, of course, were those of the conductor. And then there was the phonograph record Lois had given her from her mother—what had seemed to be Miranda's most precious possession when she was fleeing a burning building. August Donáti had been the conductor of the works on that record.
