He was her uncle, a balding, gentle old man, tall and all bones inside his ill-fitting suit, with a big nose and a permanent soft, sad look in his blue eyes. He was sixty-six but looked eighty. Until that afternoon, he and Juliana had never met. He’d taken the train from Antwerp, where he was one of the world’s preeminent diamond cutters, and had taken his niece into his arms as if he’d known her all her life. He’d told her he owned all her recordings and liked to listen to them at dawn, when it was quiet. What a change from his younger sister! Wilhelmina Peperkamp was a stout, difficult woman. She lived in Delftshaven, one of the few sections of Rotterdam not demolished by the 1940 German bombings that had led to the capitulation of The Netherlands and the long Nazi occupation. Aunt Willie had been so annoyed at Juliana’s ignorance of Dutch that she’d refused to speak English for their first thirty minutes together. Catharina, Juliana’s mother and the youngest Peperkamp by thirteen years, had sat in quiet humiliation. She must have known-Juliana certainly did-that she was the one being criticized for not teaching her American daughter Dutch.

Juliana recovered from her surprise at seeing her uncle, and the indignity of being caught rubbing ice on her face. But she reminded herself that he was family. “Uncle Johannes, hello, what’re you doing back here?”

“I’ve brought you something,” he said in his own excellent English.

Juliana winced. Now? She had fifteen minutes to pull herself together for the second half of the concert. She snatched up a hand towel as her uncle withdrew a small, crumpled paper bag from inside his jacket. What was she supposed to say? The Peperkamps mystified her, and she wondered if her idea for a family reunion had been a good one after all. She’d already had to accept the mediocre instrument, the lousy acoustics, and, although the church was sold out, the comparatively small audience. But now the Peperkamps themselves were proving to be quite a handful. Her mother was obviously ill at ease with her older brother and sister, whom she rarely saw, and hadn’t had much to say since arriving in Rotterdam the night before. And Aunt Willie was impossible. After getting off to an inauspicious start with her niece, she’d snored through most of the first half of the concert.