Excerpt from the musicians daughter by susanne dunlap i tho - GED Practice Questions

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Excerpt from The Musician's Daughter by Susanne Dunlap.

I thought a lot, at the beginning, about my father playing the violin. I still remember the first time I ever saw a concert. I was very small, and we had just come to Esterháza, a magnificent palace in Sopron, Hungary, when the prince's household moved there from his winter palace, at Eisenstadt, near Vienna. I think it may have been the first concert Papa took part in there. I had a new dress for the occasion, and Mama looked beautiful. I don't think Toby was born yet, or if he was, he was a small baby and stayed in our rooms with a nurse.

The palace at Esterháza was so new that it still smelled of raw wood and paint. The rooms were very grand. I had never seen so many candles in one place before. And they were expensive wax candles, not foul-smelling tallow.

We stood to the side to watch the fine ladies enter. I thought they looked like dolls, their faces were so perfect. Later my mother told me that they painted them with white lead to make their skin artificially smooth and pale, and then rubbed rouge into their cheeks and lips, and drew lines of charcoal around their eyes so they would appear larger. And the headdresses--in those days the fashion was to have hair that towered up, stuck into place with diamond combs, with ribbons and pearls festooned around. And no matter what color it was naturally, ladies powdered their hair to snowy whiteness, so that the light of the candles was magnified by the glow from the people themselves.

And the men, too, were powdered and patched. Their gold buttons and lace were almost as gaudy as the ladies' finery. But the enormous panniers that held the ladies' skirts out to the side so far that they had to move sideways through doorways fascinated me most of all. I could barely be persuaded to turn my eyes to the orchestra when the concert started.

We were not seated with the guests. In fact, I think we were tucked away in an anteroom. The door was open so we could see through, and everyone pushed me forward to let me watch my father, who looked up now and again from the music and gave me a quick smile. The candlelight danced over the rich wood of his violin, the beautiful Italian instrument, and old Amati, that my grandfather had given him. Kapellmeister Haydn who was also my godfather sat at the harpsichord, smiling broadly all the time, waving one hand in the air to direct then putting it back on the keys and instead using his head, bobbing and nodding to bring the winds in, or to indicate the entrance for the cellos. He looked like the music,  remember thinking. I wish I could bring that particular sound to my mind, but it has since blended with countless other concerts. I'll always remember what it looked like, though. The light. The shimmering glow of everything and everyone.

That morning, the day after the bleakest Christmas I had ever spent, I had to deal with the awful reality of getting my father buried. He became a macabre object, now that his soul was gone. I tried to remember everything I could about him. Already some of his expressions seemed to have faded from my memory. The sound of his voice was very clear, though. I kept it in my mind as I watched the gravediggers dump his wrapped-up body into a large pit with a dozen other poor souls who lacked the money for a private grave.

It's not really Papa.

I dung to that thought. His spirit would never be buried.

His body was only the useless shell of flesh and bone that descended into the earth.

Yet when I thought about it, I had so little of him except insubstantial snatches of memory-memories, and the medallion Frau Morgen had found in my father's pocket.

I had put it on as soon as I had a private moment and worn it ever since. The medallion was not very large-barely as big as my thumbnail-and I had tucked it inside my bodice, thinking I might find an opportunity to ask Zoltán if he had ever seen my father with it before.

How does paragraph 1 fit into the narrative structure of the excerpt?