The Piano: One Woman’s Search To Reconnect With Her Late Father

When she first set out on the quest to track down her late father’s piano, Adelaide Mestre wasn’t certain she would meet with success.

But truth be told, the journey was never as much about finding the instrument itself as it was about finding herself.

Mestre’s search began on New York’s Upper East Side, where she was born and raised, and it eventually led to Cuba, the country her father’s family fled after Fidel Castro came to power. The complicated story of Mestre’s journey, both to locate the Steinway piano and process her father’s suicide, which occurred when she was just 13 years old, is detailed in “Top Drawer,” a one-woman musical memoir of dysfunction and redemption.

The piece premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2011 and since then, Mestre has presented it at venues in New York, Miami and Boston. On April 7, Mestre will bring “Top Drawer” to Bay Street Theater as a fundraiser for the Sag Harbor Elementary School PTA. After being a longtime summer visitor, two years ago, Mestre and husband Eric Schwartz, relocated from New York to North Haven with their 8-year-old daughter, Lucia, to escape the pandemic. They are now full-time residents and Lucia is a student at Sag Harbor Elementary.

In a recent interview, Mestre evoked memories of her own youth, explaining that while growing up in Manhattan, she had a less than traditional childhood. For starters, both her parents were musicians — her father, Luis Enrique Mestre, was a pianist while her mother, Barbara Bliss Mestre, the socialite granddaughter of Midwestern department store magnate Marshall Field, was an opera singer.

“My father’s family fled Cuba in 1960. My father came to New York, married my mother and was a concert pianist,” Mestre said. “At some point, he gave up being a pianist, and that’s part of the story.”

Also part of the story is Luis Mestre’s homosexuality, which precipitated her parents’ separation and her father’s eventual suicide. Mestre noted that while her mother always knew that her father was gay, like many women of the era, it was a hurdle she thought could be overcome.

“Back then, I think a lot of woman felt, ‘I can cure him, my love will save him,’ and I think he felt the same way,” Mestre said. “‘I’ll find the love of a woman, get nestled in the security of a family, and this will all go away.’

“In those days, it was probably the rare person who had the courage to come out and live as a gay man,” she added. “My mother knew there had been experimenting with boys in boarding school, a dalliance in college. He went to Yale and there was some experimenting there, and he would take the train into the city from New Haven to go to gay bars — and then he could get on with his life.”

But that’s not at all how it worked out. Luis Mestre eventually came to terms with the fact he would never be one of the world’s great pianists and gave up his musical career to become an art dealer. He also came to terms with the fact that he was gay and moved out of the house he shared with his wife and daughter.

“When I was a baby, he was at home and my mother talked about us being very close when I was small,” Mestre said. “Then he went off to experiment with gay life and be with his lover. I’m not sure exactly what I understood about that. He was buying a country home with his best friend.”

From the time Mestre was 5 years old, her father was in and out of her life. Yet despite his decision to live as a gay man, Mestre noted that her parents loved each other deeply as artists and maintained a strong and enduring friendship.

“He would come and take me on dinner dates, as per the custody agreement,” Mestre said. “He was kind of gone, but still very much around, though there was something remote about him.”

Losing a parent at any age is traumatic, but losing her father to suicide when she was only 13 had a lasting and profound impact on Mestre. Much of what she has been dealing with in the decades since her father’s death are feelings related to an immense sense of guilt.

“His homosexuality was super hidden until I was 9. My dad, God bless him, took part in The Advocate Experience. It was like [Erhard Seminars Training] for homosexuals, these weekend seminars, and they wouldn’t let you leave,” Mestre recalled. “I would get these calls, ‘I just called you to tell you I love you.’ He came out, and for me there was almost a feeling of ‘I would have preferred you kept it a secret.’”

Mestre recalled that she felt shame, and the truth of her father’s sexuality threatened her feeling of social standing. So she eventually rejected him completely and didn’t want him to be a part of her life.

“I was mortified, embarrassed and scared to be connected to him and thought of him as a threat, in a way,” she said. “Then he killed himself and all my longing, pining and yearning was placed into him. I was not actively loving him when he died. I had guilt for that.”

Mestre noted that because her father was manic depressive, it’s impossible to know for certain how much of his suffering was related to being a gay man tasked with living an authentic life in a family that pretended he was straight.

“Also painful is that the man he left my mother for, left him,” Mestre said. “It was a devastating break up. As I understand it, he cycled into manic depression, and there is a lot of that in the family. I knew at some point Dad was coming unhinged. I saw that and it was very scary and complicated that I hated it and loved him at the same time.”

“My dad was becoming unhinged, and it was embarrassing and weird and uncomfortable,” she added. “I longed for him, but wanted him at a distance.”

But Mestre never had the opportunity to grow up and repair her relationship with her father. Instead, it ended the day he took his own life, just as she was entering her teenage years — that notoriously defiant and rebellious period of youth when even the coolest parents face rejection. She admitted that it was a horrible time for her to lose him and largely the reason behind her quest for his piano all those years later.

“What’s really sad is my dad, by all accounts, was extraordinary, charismatic and really special,” she said. “The way people remember him to me and speak of him fondly, his friends who have kept in touch with me, they send emails on his birthday, remember him on the day he killed himself.”

With her father’s death, Mestre found that her awareness of her Cuban heritage all but vanished as well. Though his family still lived in Miami, Mestre wasn’t interested in exploring their history or learning about what her grandparents went through in order to escape Castro’s Cuba.

“When I was growing up, there was nothing about diversity. It was all about assimilation and inclusion. You weren’t celebrating your Latin-ness — that was not a thing,” she said. “My dad was working to give me a sense of my history and wanting to teach me the language. But he had left the family and he was living a different life. I thought f--- you. He would try to teach me the piano, there would be huge fights and I’d scream and yell.

“I rejected it and then he died and I kept on rejecting it,” she added. “Part of my survival was, ‘I’m not going to speak to anything about that loss.’”

And for years, she didn’t. But as a college student, Mestre found she was struggling with relationships and profound feelings of loss. Then one day, while visiting her grandfather in Miami, he showed her photos of what the family had left behind in Cuba, including their home.

“He said, ‘This is what I lost,’ and he handed me these photographs,” Mestre recalled. “He takes one and starts to cry, telling me that this is the piano he bought for my dad.

“I thought, I have to go. I’m not sure how I’ll go,” she said. “No one goes to Cuba and certainly no one who fled Castro will go.”

But over time, restrictions on travel to Cuba eased and Mestre and a cousin were eventually able to visit the country of her father’s birth. While the story of what she actually found there is one that audience members will have to discover for themselves by seeing the show, it’s fair to say that the journey itself had a healing effect on her deep emotional wounds.

“It was the big journey — my holy grail — to get to my dad’s piano. It wasn’t until I was older that I wanted that connection to my Cuban roots,” she said. “I just knew I had to get to this piano. There was some sort of connection I imagined I would have by touching it, laying eyes on it. Because of the way he died, the traumatic nature, no one spoke of him. He was very much the thing not talked about. First, his homosexuality and then his suicide.

“I left Cuba feeling I get to claim it.”

In some way, Mestre also believes she was looking for a way her father could live in her life again. It was as if through the piano, she would reanimate him.

“I look at it now — it’s a touchstone,” she said, adding, “I read something interesting in The New York Times about complicated grief: ‘Psychotherapists say that grief is not a problem to be solved but a process to be lived through, in whatever form it may take.’

“My grieving was thwarted because of my age and the nature of his death. In a way, this has become a kind of process of grieving,” she added of her show, noting that the journey to find her father’s Steinway and the writing of “Top Drawer” was restorative on many levels, not just for her own recuperation, but that of her circle of Cuban relatives as well.

“Most everyone in my dad’s family came to see it and it was so healing,” Mestre said. “He lived in this uncomfortable place for them, and we had to put him away. They were dealing with their own pain that was awkward and sad, and one by one they all saw it.

“That has been probably been the biggest, most profound thing about doing this show — the way it made me get reconnected to my Cuban identity and my family, allowing me to feel their love for me, my love for them, and our mutual love for my father.

“It did a lot to bring him back.”

Adelaide Mestre presents “Top Drawer” at Bay Street Theater on Thursday, April 7, at 7 p.m. as a fundraiser for Sag Harbor Elementary School PTA. The performance is directed by Coco Cohn, with Doug Oberhamer providing piano accompaniment. Tickets are $40 at shespta2018.memberhub.com. Bay Street Theater is on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor.