Piano For Four Hands
I enjoyed reading this story and have included it for my readers who were fortunate enough to grow up with a piano and music in our homes. It is a copyrighted work and reprinted here with the permission of the author, Marjorie Sandor.
My mother, who is the musician in our family, has waited years for a miracle: for one of us to get serious about the piano. I am her youngest and only daughter, and her tactical shift was so quiet I never guessed what was afoot. “Just tell me when you’re settled down, and I’ll send the piano,” she said, long distance, a little breathless, as if the migratory patterns of my generation left her slightly winded. This was the way her domestic magic worked: She waited until I married and set up housekeeping in a small Boston apartment and let me discover for myself that something was wrong, missing from our living room. “Of course,” she said casually. “You need the piano.” How far back had she planted the seeds of my adult longing? There was always a piano in our house when I was growing up, as much a part of daily life as any bed or kitchen table. While it was an obstacle in our games of tag, its bench a place to hide things, it was being secretly rooted in our memories, in our vision of what belongs in a home. My mother herself is an organist, and when we were growing up, she kept her Hammond organ safely out of the way of domestic traffic, in our best room, one forbidden to us. This was her private domain. The noises of kitchen and family room were distant, muffled against the ever-complicating Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. In the evenings, she dabbled in Bach, Franck, and Durufle. Then, like a good wife of her generation, she came down to earth and played tunes from South Pacific to keep my father happy. Once in a while she let me sit up on the bench with her and improvise dramatic scenes: “Storm at Sea,” I remember, and something called “Graveyard at Midnight,” in which I tolled heavy low notes on full vibrato, bringing myself to rapturous tears of invented grief. But mostly I lay on the fancy pale-gold carpet, watching her feet cross and speed over the pedals, listening to the deep trembling notes of the organ accompanied by the music of evening insects in our backyard. Each of us began piano lessons promptly at the age of seven; none of us blossomed. At fourteen, one of my brothers switched to guitar and got as far as “Norwegian Wood”; another one switched, too, and memorized the opening bars of “Classical Gas.” I was next. After a year of lessons, I suffered through a monumental one-page minuet, then strode to my mother. “Listen. I can play it good,” I said. “Well” she said quietly. “You can play it well.” That night, with the pencil kept at the piano for notes during lessons, I carved, in small, distinct letters, the word “well” into the soft wood. I was sent to my room, but for years after, I noted the little blemish with triumph and amazement at my own nerve, pressing my fingers over the grooves of my careful childhood script as if it were a battle scar, my first serious mark on the world. The upright was eventually delivered to my oldest brother’s house, after his first child was born-my mother was thinking ahead, as usual. Back at our house, perhaps figuring me safely past the age of impromptu wood carving, she ordered the Yamaha, an ebony baby grand. With a sigh, she directed the movers to put it deep in the belly of our house, in the carpeted basement room where we kept photo albums and relics of family outings. She did not suggest lessons; she simply shrugged and gave me the same resigned smile she’d fixed on the movers. She knew I would subject the beautiful instrument to the same three or four chords of folk rock. While I played, she waited patiently. Sometimes she sat behind me, quietly tapping out the tempo on her knee. “You have a good ear,” she’d say. “Someday you’ll see you don’t have to bang so hard.” When the baby grand arrived in Boston, it fit with uncanny ease into our living room’s bay window. It shone. It appeared to be waiting for something. I tried out a mournful Jackson Browne tune from the early seventies and was mortified by the monotony of the progressions that had gripped me as an adolescent. I was acutely aware that at any minute my mother might call and ask about my playing. I contacted a local music school and said shakily, “Beginning intermediate.” My teacher was a dark-haired Russian name Ludmilla, who prescribed violent medicine: Czerny’s “School of Velocity.” The first exercise in this book has no flats or sharps but is daunting nonetheless, with its command, presto!, and its strenuous arpeggios and cadenzas. It was penance for a lifetime of musical and filial neglect, and I took it up with a sinner’s compulsive certainty. My mother was pleased, in a careful, reserved sort of way. “You’re actually reading music,” she said as if this were one of the miracles in the desert-like manna or the burning bush. There was a little catch in her voice that surprised me. “What are you working on these days?” I asked. “Oh,” she said lightly, “my fingers are a little stiff. I stopped a while ago.” I was too stunned to answer, and, in her unfailing sense of domestic grace, she quickly added that she was of course keeping the organ for her grandchildren. “They love to bang on it so,” she said. In our new house, the piano was destined to fit only in one place, a low-ceilinged, “rumpus room” lined with books and family pictures. This is not the best place for a piano, with its broad Florida windows and a steamy private jungle of vines and sable palm all around. But we feel protected back there, comfortable; it is where, as a family, we spend our evening time. But for months that time passed with no Cznery, no Jackson Browne. The Yamaha itself was cluttered with little soft baby toys an pale laundry in heaps. My mother, who had come to see the baby, sighed, when she saw where we had put the piano. “I guess there really isn’t anywhere else,” she said. It was a day or two before she tactfully, almost shyly, mentioned the dust on the lid. “You should play,” she said quietly. “I always played when you slept.” It would be a long time before I managed to make good on this suggestion. But miraculously, one late afternoon, while my two-year-old slept, I found myself sitting at the piano with a book of Mozart sonatas, its pages gummed together from the humidity. Just beyond the big Florida windows, in the sable palm, in the oaks of our yard, the cicadas made a fierce, metallic racket, and suddenly it sounded like home, like the evenings of my childhood, when I lay on my belly watching my mother play. I was hunched over the keys, hair in my face, with the slumped posture of my teenage self, when I noted that I was reading. Breathing. Thinking. Start pianissimo, begin the crescendo here. A phrase repeated in a minor key resolved and came back major-depiciting Mozart’s love of parody in the midst of the sublime. Here were the forms, earthly and celestial, my mother had loved all her life and once made with her fingers. I wanted to call her and say, “Mother, listen,” but I made a little deal with myself: Get through the rondo first. That’s where I was, laboring along at half speed, when I heard my daughter waking up from her nap. A minute later she appeared at the door to the family room and scrambled up onto the piano bench with a single hoist, her feet flipping up behind her in the air like a seal flinging itself onto a warm rock. She pushed my hands off the keys. “Hannah play,” she said. What she wanted to play, it turned out, was the bass, the low, tolling bells and gloom of my old “Graveyard at Midnight.” I pressed my foot on the sustain pedal. And with a straight back and fat, greedy, beautiful hands, she banged away at the deepest notes in the world.
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