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Chapter 1: Voyant
Watcher might be another word she could apply to herself. Socially,
it would make her more acceptable, but who wants to settle for a word
so bereft of nuance? Anyway, watchers have become as common as birds
in 1962, now that every man, woman, and child in America has a television
of their own. Those few citizens not spending their leisure time watching
TV are scanning the skies for orbiting chimpanzees or astronauts. Sylvia
prefers more intimate curiosities.
One evening, shortly after moving to San Francisco, Sylvia took a random stroll
down Van Ness Avenue and saw a symphony crowd billowing out of cabs and town
cars and up the grand stairway to the lobby of the War Memorial Opera House.
Although she was no more dressed for a concert than a woman walking her dog,
she let herself get swept along with the crowd and, with neither dog nor ticket,
climbed the stairs with the concertgoers and milled about the lobby, underdressed
but unrepentant.
She remembered how not long after the Second World War, as a seventh grader from
Sacramento, she visited the Opera House, where delegates of fifty nations had
drafted and signed the United Nations charter. She’d imagined herself as
a delegate from Ceylon, one of the exotic nations from which she had postage
stamps. Seventeen years later, as she milled about in the lobby without a ticket,
dressed in pedal pushers and a navy blue car coat, a voice in her head announced:
The delegate from Ceylon, Sylvia Bran.
In September, as the anniversary of her first year in San Francisco nears, Sylvia
gets an opportunity to attend a symphony concert at the Opera House. Her boss
at Myerson’s—“The grand piano store of the West”—offers
her a complimentary ticket. Although the ticket has a hole punched through it,
Sylvia is ushered through a velvet curtain to a freestanding upholstered chair
in a box of her own. She might as well be the queen of Ceylon.
At first, it is hard to reconcile the formality of the setting and occasion with
the casual, backstage banter that follows the musicians to their seats. Some
of them tune their instruments on the fly amid a cacophony of scales and eighth-note
passages. Then Inez Roseman appears onstage with her violin. Of course, Sylvia
doesn’t yet know who the exquisite violinist is, but talk about regal.
She wears her hair—a shade of blond that can’t have come out of a
bottle—brushed back, with a silver comb at each temple. Surely this tall
and graceful figure is cut from another cloth. The knots of standing musicians
seem to part for her as she makes her way, without a word, toward the front of
the first violin section. Is the stunning violinist contemptuous of her joking
colleagues? Do they despise her for acting as if she’s too good for this
world?
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