Margaret Whitman fell to her knees in a wet Chicago street, spilling coffee on a $4,000 charcoal Burberry coat.
Unbeknownst to her, she was kneeling before the son she had given up 22 years and four months earlier. She didn’t know who had taught him to play her song either. But by the end of that Friday night both those mysteries would be wide open and the answer would lead her to a man she thought she’d lost forever in 2003.
This is the real story of what happened when the music for violin stopped. Margaret wrote ‘Sparrow’s Return’ at three o’clock in the morning, six months pregnant and terrified, in Practice Room 14B at Juilliard, when she was 19. She wrote it for the child that was growing inside her. For a child she knew already she could not keep.
Her parents were plain about it. A baby would end her career before it began. The Whitmans had a name to defend. A dynasty of money . A world. The future they envisaged didn’t have space for a musician with a child and no husband.
The father of her baby was a 22-year-old composition student named Daniel Cross — gentle, brilliant and broke.
He begged her to have the baby. He said he would find a way. He told her music was not something you gave up on. Neither was a man. Margaret signed the adoption papers, of course. At three days old she gave her baby boy to a private agency, walked out of the hospital and never picked up a violin again. Neither did she ever see Daniel again. The same week he disappeared from Juilliard.
She put the song to rest. She buried the kid. She laid Daniel to rest. She built an empire from the ashes. Three hedge funds, two divorces, one Forbes cover. Then one October Friday night a 10-year-old boy with her eyes sang her song at a bus stop she’d passed a thousand times.
But what Margaret couldn’t see, what no one watching her come apart on that sidewalk could have seen, was the little faded photograph paper-clipped to the inside lid of the boy’s battered violin case. The picture was of a girl, maybe 19 years old, in a hospital gown, holding a newborn baby to her chest. The young woman smiled through her tears. A violin lay on the bed beside her.
It was Margaret, the young woman. Daniel had taken that picture just the day before she had signed the papers. For 22 years he’d kept it. Three months before he gave it To their son, With the violin, With the song, With one instruction: “Make it play where she works. “She’ll find you.”
Daniel was dying when he said it. Daniel Cross was never a well-known composer. For twenty years he taught music at a small parish school in Cincinnati, raising the son the adoption agency had quietly placed with him at four months old when the adoptive parents changed their minds.
Yes, Daniel had raised the boy. He’d looked for Margaret for 22 years, reading about her in magazines, watching her career from afar as it took off. He never contacted me. He thought she’d chosen the life. He had a respect for it. 6 months ago Daniel was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. The doctors said he had three months. He beat their estimate by twelve weeks, long enough to teach his son one piece of music to perfection. Long enough to stitch a little white card into the lining of the violin case with the address of Margaret’s office building. Long enough to tell their son. “Your mother was the most beautiful musician I ever knew. She didn’t leave, because she didn’t love us. She didn’t know how to choose us,” she left.
One Tuesday in September Daniel died. For three weeks straight every Friday night the boy, Eli, had been playing at that bus stop waiting for the woman in the charcoal coat to walk by. He’d seen her twice. She never gave up. When the music stopped that Friday night Margaret was speechless. She knelt on the wet sidewalk for close to a minute, her arm around Eli’s tiny hand on the violin bow, makeup gone, her custom coat ruined, her whole empire suddenly meaningless. Commuters started walking slowly. The city began to breathe again. The curb taxi pulled away.
Eli waited. Margaret found her voice at last, and the question came out in broken tones. “Where did you learn that piece?” ‘Who’s your daddy? With his free hand, Eli reached into his coat pocket, found the little white card stitched to his violin case, and gently folded it into her trembling hand.
“Daniel Cross” the card read. He kept his word. E.
Margaret read the words three times, before she understood. The sound that came from her was not a word when she made it. It was the breaking of a silence twenty-two years old. Eli saw her break down. Then he softly uttered the sentence he’d been rehearsing for 12 straight weeks:
Didn’t you know I was alive? he said. He told me to say he wasn’t angry. He told me to ask you. if you’d like to have dinner with me sometime. He left you a recipe. Margaret looked up at her son. Looked at him really for the first time. His father’s soft hands. Her mother’s hair, dark. Her very own eyes. She just nodded, speechless. For the first time Eli smiled. From his other pocket he pulled out a folded piece of paper, Daniel’s handwriting on it, a recipe for “Margaret’s Lavender Tea Cake—for the night she comes home.” Daniel it was written in 2003. That was how long he’d waited for.
Eli was surprised by what Margaret did next. She had missed her board meeting. She didn’t ring her assistant. She didn’t pick up her broken coffee cup. Instead she took up the violin. Margaret Whitman raised a bow to strings on a wet Chicago sidewalk for the first time in 22 years. And she played the second half of the song, the half that Daniel had never been able to compose. The half she had known only. Eli stood still, listening for the first time in his life to the missing half of his own song. Margaret finished and there was a man across the street watching them. He’d been right there the whole time. He carried a case for a cello. And he looked just like Daniel.
Part 3 coming soon.