This sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking memoir follows two creative academicsâa pianist and a poetâthrough their lives from the viewpoint of their only daughter. The reader gets to know them from their youth, in love and full of vigor and artistic self-expression, to their poignant efforts to hold on to their unique gifts and maintain their humanity in old age.
Kathryn Betts Adams, a social worker and academic gerontologist, depicts evolving family dynamics in lyrical prose through the decades she is immersed in her parents' vivid emotional lives. Her story culminates in a heroâs journey: shepherding her parents through their final years as they face chronic illness and diminishing capacities. Despite her professional expertise as a social worker, managing her parents' care proves overwhelming as the eldercare services available come up short, and she must make a series of no-win decisions for first one and then the other parent.
Grounded in insights about mental health, health, and aging, and overlaid with a deep devotion to music and words, The Pianistâs Only Daughter is the story of one familyâsâone daughterâsâexperience of the human condition. Readers will find much that resonates with their own experiences with aging and family relationships.
This sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking memoir follows two creative academicsâa pianist and a poetâthrough their lives from the viewpoint of their only daughter. The reader gets to know them from their youth, in love and full of vigor and artistic self-expression, to their poignant efforts to hold on to their unique gifts and maintain their humanity in old age.
Kathryn Betts Adams, a social worker and academic gerontologist, depicts evolving family dynamics in lyrical prose through the decades she is immersed in her parents' vivid emotional lives. Her story culminates in a heroâs journey: shepherding her parents through their final years as they face chronic illness and diminishing capacities. Despite her professional expertise as a social worker, managing her parents' care proves overwhelming as the eldercare services available come up short, and she must make a series of no-win decisions for first one and then the other parent.
Grounded in insights about mental health, health, and aging, and overlaid with a deep devotion to music and words, The Pianistâs Only Daughter is the story of one familyâsâone daughterâsâexperience of the human condition. Readers will find much that resonates with their own experiences with aging and family relationships.
In the buildingâs hallway, I can already hear faint piano music. When I open the unlocked door to the apartment, the full force of the seven-foot Steinway in a small space greets my ears. My white-haired father is hunched over the keyboard, perched atop a coffee table book and a sofa pillow, his piano bench raised to the maximum height, as he runs through Chopinâs E minor Prelude. In recent years, he has selected manageable pieces from his earlier repertoire to work on again. Despite his advanced ageânearly 90âI note with a certain pride that the piece sounds much like it always did when he and I were both considerably younger: beautiful. Itâs technically accurate, with expert phrasing and expressiveness.
After he finishes the short piece, he slowly looks around and sees me. With difficulty, he rises from the high bench and half shimmies, half dives over to the nearby loveseat, landing heavily. His cane rests against the wall near the front door, and his wheeled walker sits in the middle of the living room in front of the bookshelf jam-packed with music just next to the TVâbut he has used neither. I push the walker over towards him for the next time he needs to get up. He takes the TV off mute, so CNN comes on at high volume. âNow I have to go . . . you know,â he says, motioning towards the bathroom. âAgain!â
He struggles from the couch to his full 5 foot 2 inches, shrunk five inches from his former height, bent as he is. His spine curves with kyphosis, the name for that bent back and hump some older people get; his head thrusts forward, sideways, and downward. Gripping the walker, he glides purposefully to the bathroom while I start to put away his groceries and tidy his small kitchen.
My father has lived at a Brookdale senior living facility in West Hartford, Connecticut for over a year, in the Independent Living building. On this winter afternoon, I have brought him two shopping bags filled with the usual groceries he wants: Rice Krispies, vanilla almond milk, Ritz peanut butter crackers, bananas, Gatorade, individual servings of cinnamon applesauce, and soft-baked cookies.
I am my fatherâs major support person, backed up by my husband, Mark. And he needs quite a lot of support. Two or three times a week, I drive the couple of miles to see him, bringing groceries, sorting his mail, clearing up his dishes, and talking politics, where we are usually in close agreement. It gives some purpose to my everyday life that I otherwise might lack, though I suspect I might be able to find elsewhere. Married over thirty years, with two grown children out of the house, my career as a social worker and professor has been variously interrupted by childrearing, returning to school, and moves across the country for my husbandâs jobs. My area of focus in social work is aging and older adults, and in the past few years Iâve made especially good use of that knowledge and experience.
Iâm not exactly a young woman anymore, either, and my interest in aging extends to my own, as well as othersâ. Like my dadâs, my hair is mostly white, though concealed under the dark blonde hair color I use. Formerly just pear-shaped, Iâve lately gotten plump all over. My usual everyday outfit is jeans or leggings and loose tops, with supportive shoes to help my sadly splaying feet and arthritic knees. But I do make the effort to apply makeup before I leave the house. And periodically when I peer at myself in the bathroom mirror, I hold the skin folds of my chin taut against my earlobes, erasing the years with one small motion.
Dadâs only other child, my younger half-brother, Thomas [not his real name; this and several names have been changed to protect privacy] lives in another state. He hasnât answered our calls, texts, or emails for a few years now. Itâs a source of sadness for our father.
Dadâs sisterâwho had a tendency to blurt out exactly what she thoughtâonce said to me, âYour father was a much more involved dad to Thomas than he ever was to you!â
Well, that comment hurt. But I had to admit it was true. Our father saw himself reflected in his sonâs dark good looks, and in the musical talent that emerged as Thomas grew up. And during the rebellious teen years, they frequently butted heads over Dadâs high expectations.
When I was a child, our dad was a much younger man, often plagued by obsessions and depressionsâand lofty goals to be a great pianist. He had moved out by the time I was 14, leaving my mom and me to carry on with our own little family. Itâs no wonder he was more hands-off as a father.
In any event, Thomas is not in touch, and Iâm the one here now.
~~~
SCENE: A February evening around 7:30, a week or so past his 90th birthday, Dad calls on my cell. Itâs about the time he usually returns to his apartment from dinner in the congregate dining room.
âHi . . .â I answer simply, with a hint of expectation in my voice, somewhere between, What do you want? and Is everything ok?Â
He says he wanted to check in and let me know he is almost out of his milk.
âAh. Okay, sure, Iâll get that when I go to the store tomorrow,â I say. âHow was your dinner?âÂ
âThe salmon was good. But they moved my table again, and I was sitting right under a vent that blows air.â Â
âOh, thatâs too bad,â I murmur, looking over at Mark, who holds the remote for the muted TV we were watching. At this point, heâs about equal parts impatient and sympathetic with my fatherâs troubles.
âI really canât get warm,â Dad says. âIâm just so cold. Iâve got this hole in me . . . .âÂ
I know, I know, Iâm thinking. Iâve heard about it many times. He has a hernia that canât be repaired at this point because heâs not a candidate for surgery. Added to the effects of prior radiation treatments for two cancers, heâs left feeling abnormally cold in his abdomen. And Iâm left feeling frustrated that there is no good solution to this complaint he makes to me almost daily.
âIâm going to get into bed soon under the covers,â he finishes.
âThat sounds good. Hope you sleep well. So, Iâll see you tomorrow,â I say.
âThanks, Kate. I couldnât do it without you and Mark, you know.â
. . . Yes, I do know.
âWell, night-night,â he says. âLove you.â
âLove you, too, Dad.
Â
Part 1âKinderszenen
(Scenes from Childhood)
In my grandfatherâs cellar
I inhale deeply the scent
Familiar from my memory of childhood visits.
The air is heavy with family history
From long before I was born . . .
A specific heaviness in the musty-sweet air
Rising from the greenish depths
To fill the stairwell.
Â
                       ~ From My Grandfatherâs Cellar (1975)
Â
1: Jersey Outliers
Both of my parents were born in New Jersey during the Depression into archetypal 20th-century-childrenâs-book-American families: white, middle-class, Protestant, with a mix of Northern European heritage, mostly English and Germanâa touch of Greek on my fatherâs side for the dark wavy hair, Irish and Dutch on my motherâs for the pink skin tone. No one was rich, and although no one was desperately poor, everyone in those families was expected to live frugally and make sacrifices. Children in my parentsâ era werenât overly praised or doted on; they were supposed to respect their elders and keep their opinions to themselvesâor else.
~~~
My father, Donald, was born at home in his parentsâ bed in Absecon, near Atlantic City. He emerged in a caulâthe amniotic sac intactâlike a butterfly still wrapped in its shiny chrysalis. A sign that he was special. His mother, my Grandma Mina, once showed me the dried up remains of the caul in the little velvet box where sheâd kept it. Minaâs own ambitions had been thwarted. She was a talented pianist and singer whose mother had died in childbirth when she was a teen, leaving Mina to help with the new baby and other younger siblings. She married my grandfather, Wayne, right after high school. He worked as an optician in his familyâs eyeglass business, while Mina taught piano lessons at home and sang soprano solos at their Methodist Church.
Five years younger than his only sibling, a sister, Donald spent much of his childhood playing outdoors with his cousins. They got into all sorts of mischief riding their bikes around the neighboring Absecon meadows. Before the end of elementary school, Donald had broken his arm not once or twice, but three times. The last time, he fell out of a tall pine tree in the backyard. He went inside to tell his mother he was hurt, but she shushed him and made him go back outside till sheâd finished her chat with a neighbor. Mina finally came out to see him holding his painful arm.
âNot again, Donald?!â she tsked.
That family didnât hold back; they yelled. At unpredictable intervals during Donaldâs adolescence, Wayne would turn mean and call him names like âWormâ and âIdiot.â But at the same time, Mina began to recognize her sonâs musical gifts and Wayne joined in the pride at his accomplishments. By high school, Donald had outgrown the local piano teachers, was appointed accompanist to the school chorus, and mastered difficult repertoire. He became something of a star in the family and in the community around him.
His sister was expected to marry and stay close to her mother; she studied bookkeeping so she could get a good job. My father was expected to become a concert pianist. Â
~~~
In the north of the state, my mother had an entirely different kind of childhood. Eleanor Janeâlater just Janeâwas the middle child in her family, born in Scotch Plains. Her mother, Rennie, was the tenth child of an upstate New York Irish and Dutch farm couple. Born into no-nonsense, Rennie became a nurse. Janeâs father, also named Don, was from a more prosperous family that owned the Newark Steel Drum company, which he came to run with two of his brothers.
When her little sister Ann was born, tiny and with a mild birth injury, Jane was sent to kindergarten a year early. Sheâd remember her elementary school days as a blur; she felt like she could never catch up and fit in with older classmates. Ann recovered well and grew to become a regular playmate despite their four-year age difference. As an older woman, Jane the poet would write of these games and her memories of childhood in her poem:
When we were kids,
You were the pretend orchestra
Sitting on the steps and sawing away
To Beethovenâs Fifth Symphony
On your imaginary violin.
I, the distinguished conductor,
with my knitting-needle baton
Supplied the drama as well as the beat.
You were the Puritan congregation,
A whole church of captive listeners
To my brief but earnest sermon
And the intoning of âHere endeth the word.â
~ Jane Colville Betts, from Little Sister, (2007)
Their much-older brother shipped out to serve in Europe during World War II when Jane was turning eleven. Like many American children at the time, Jane helped her mother tend a victory garden of vegetables behind their house. The family lived under a pall of worry that their oldest might not make it homeâand then when he did, he was different. In a family with little tolerance for drama, my uncle suffered from battle fatigue, what weâd now recognize as PTSD and depression.
A conscientious child, Jane was also imaginative, extroverted, and sometimes sillyânot too different from the adult she became. As a teenager, she was a bit of a daydreamer who eagerly read classic novels like Girl of the Limberlost and Anne of Green Gables, stories that romanticized girls and young women doing brave things. She kept little notebooks filled with poetry and decorative drawings. But Janeâs conventional parents didnât have much appreciation for the fanciful things their daughter loved. Sympathetic adults outside the familyâthe high school principal and his wife who lived next door, and the young minister of their Presbyterian churchâencouraged her interest in books and her own writing.
My grandfather didnât believe that girls needed to go to college, but something gave my mother the wherewithal to recognize that she wanted to participate in intellectual life, and she stood up for herself. Her father relented when she chose a small womenâs college not far from home. She enrolled at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1948.
Jane thrived as a student on the quiet green campus where she majored in English. She loved the traditions there that now seem especially quaint, like circling the Maypole in white dresses and giving each girl a special nickname. The Chair of Wilsonâs English Department kindly critiqued her poems and stories, exchanged witty literary letters with her during the summers, and encouraged her to see herself as a poet and an English scholar. As a graduation gift, he gave her a rare 1922 Shakespeare & Company first edition of James Joyceâs Ulysses, a prized possession for the rest of her life.
Going directly on to get her masterâs degree in English at Columbia University in New York, Janeâs year at that much bigger school in the big city showed her the possibility of a life among poets and writers. Just 20 years old, she was slim and well built, with long, blondish hair, fair complexion, big pale blue eyes, and lovely white teeth. Yet she was refreshingly unselfconscious about her appearance. Itâs no wonder she found herself attracting the attention of men who were suddenly everywhere in her classes and the wider world, very different from her sheltered undergraduate years.
Once when I was in high school, I mentioned to my mom that we were reading a poem by E.E. Cummings for English class. At this, she off-handedly said that she had met him at a reading in New York during her time at Columbia and heâd taken an interest in her. âHe liked me,â my mom said, and rolled her eyes, meaning it in a certain way. Then, with a strangely coy seriousness, she added, âSomething happened.â She wouldnât share more.
This was her mysterious side, a hint at the inner life she kept concealed. I could only guess that disappointment and disillusionment at her encounter with the much-older poetâsomething in how he had treated herâmust have outweighed her excitement about being noticed by such a literary giant, or she might have told me the full story.
~~~
Rather than going to college, Donald studied with prominent piano teachers, commuting to Manhattan for weekly music lessons and classes. For spending money, he gave piano lessons to local schoolkids and played with dance bands in Atlantic City and up and down the Jersey Shore. With thick jet-black hair, big hazel eyes and dark lashes, a compact athletic build and an expressive piano playing style, he drew female admirers any time he performed.
When he was drafted into the Korean War, Donaldâs piano teacher Mme. Hedwig Rosenthal wrote a letter to the draft board, asking that such a talented young man be exempt from military service. He was not released from service, but as a result of that letter, Donaldâs reporting date was postponed two months to accommodate his planned New York debut recital. A review in the New York Times, subtitled Pianist Gets Deferment from Draft Board to Present His Recital at Times Hall, noted: âThe fact that he wanted to do his very best in his fleeting opportunity before being absorbed into the Army was apparent in the way he played. He put his soul into his performance.â (January 31, 1951).
During Basic Training, destined for combat infantry, a stroke of good luck changed Donaldâs life. On a smoking break at a train stop, he ran into an Army officer who knew him from music gigs back home. The chance meeting led to my fatherâs deployment orders being changed from combat in Korea to the Army band in Yokohama, Japan, where he would play clarinet and piano, welcoming foreign troop ships. Heâd dodged whatever tragedy might have been. During the year there, he performed Gershwinâs Rhapsody in Blue with the Yokohama Symphony Orchestra in concert. Far from home for the first time, he dated a Japanese girl, but left her behind when he shipped back to the States. I have one small black-and-white photo from his Army days. In uniform, heâs holding a lighted cigarette, smilingâhis stance full of confidence and swagger.
"The Pianist's Only Daughter" is an interesting read, a well-written memoir. However, it did not receive a five-star rating because memoirs often miss a critical piece of the puzzle. In sharing about one's life, it's essential to impart why the memories of another human's experience matter to the reader. What is the takeaway?
Some readers may not need to be led. Some readers can read into, infer, or determine what is being shared that they can apply. In contrast, other readers require messaging that leads them to understand more in-depth how they might be able to navigate complex relationships, torn family dynamics, challenging personalities, and the care and handling of aging parents.
How did the author reach the point of forgiveness for having a father who fell into temptation and had a roving eye his entire life? While the author felt her father had an underlying bipolar condition, the father's son thought he was a narcissist. Could they both be right?
Death doesn't resolve the issues of life. However, there is a letting go as you learn to live without the ones you cared for and took care of.
Despite the above critiques, what this book gets right is shared life experience. Kathryn Adams is certainly not the only one who cared for loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic, but hers is the first book I have read that has shared its difficulties.
I appreciated this author's dive back into history, briefly covering where each of her parents came from and how that shaped them, to how, in turn, their upbringing then shaped her own. I liked watching the author grow and become her person while battling with being known as and for herself and not merely her father's daughter.
I don't know many born into families with musicians at the helm. Do children of musicians share the same appreciation for music, or does having it surround you almost constantly each day become an annoyance? Does a person's presence, such as a grandiose father, dominate your own, stifling your personal growth, or can you flourish beside or despite them?
Kathryn Adams managed to look at her parents' achievements and forge her path. She earned a Ph.D. and tenure before moving from one side of the U.S. to another. While her journey has been fulfilling, it has also been difficult.
I most appreciate the over-arching theme that the author's journey marries words and music. While different from her parents, there are similarities to be drawn. While both of her parents have passed away, she can catch glimpses of her mother, for instance, when she says specific phrases or peers into a mirror with a similar expression of her late mother graced upon her face.
Wistful and endearing, sad and poignant, engaging and page-turning, this memoir is not stodgy or boring. It shows the highlights and lowlights of life and how other people's choices shape our own lives and the choices we, too, make. Life is beautifully complex, and most things are not linear or black and white despite many who wish for it to be differentâa solid four-star read.