She Shall Play Carnegie Hall

It was an old upright piano, scuffed oak, a heavy instrument, bought used, pushed against the living room wall, the only place it would fit. The damper pedal worked, but not the other two. The child only found this out later because at three, her feet could not touch the floor. Some of the ivory keys were a sickly yellow, like smokers’ fingernails.

Her mother told her father that their daughter and only child, would, by God, play piano and she would start now, and this was because she herself had always wanted to learn as a child but was never given the opportunity.

At three!  The mother would gloat. She already sits with her back straight and touches the keys so gently! Never bangs on it as other children might do. Little tunes she hears in her head, I suppose. Sits for hours, when I’m in the kitchen, or on Sunday, when her father is gardening, the front door open for the neighbors to hear. The only piano on the block, along the row of tract houses, along the busy avenue. The mother knew this because she knew all her neighbors.

Lessons, official lessons with a teacher, Mr. Bigelow, began when the child turned five. An obese fellow who played the organ on Sundays at the Baptist church on Lake Street. He came to the house with beginner books and a soiled handkerchief that he dabbed every few minutes against his forehead. The mother did not like him – so uncouth. And the child was not learning fast enough. The mother made enquiries. There was a Polish woman, highly recommended, a Mrs. Jankowski, but the child would have to be driven there for lessons.

In her Polish accent, Mrs. Jankowski would patiently correct and guide, point and play the upper keys, and with her pencil, circle the flats and sharps, write in the precise fingers, and make crescendo and diminuendo marks for each measure. And the child learned quickly. She had a natural gift for piano the teacher told the mother, who waited in the car at the curb, reading a book, for the mother was not encouraged to sit in on the lessons.

A natural talent for the piano, the mother would beam at the child after lessons, who sat passively, not really knowing what this meant. We will increase your practice time. Practice brings perfection. And you must be perfect to play Carnegie Hall. To the child, Carnegie Hall was often mentioned by her mother, and thought this must be a wonderful song indeed.

Mrs. Jankowski held recitals at the YMCA downtown. The child was always listed second to last on the printed program. Mrs. Jankowski’s own son was last, so the mother did not complain. But she thought her daughter just as good. At seven, the child played Chopin’s Minute Waltz; at eight she performed Hunting Song by Felix Mendelssohn. Flawlessly and with ardent passion. Soon after, the child would also play her own complex compositions at her recitals, and her name was listed as both player and composer on the program, and the audience would murmur and nod and marvel with appreciation.

 But there were impromptu performances as well. While lunching with her mother at the naval dining hall filled with officers and mariners in starched uniforms and white caps, the mother took the child to the stage and asked if her daughter could play the piano there for the seafaring assembly. Shy, but obedient, the child sat before the black grand piano, enormous and imposing, and played Spinning Song with ease. When the crowd clapped and cheered, begging for more, she played one of her own, a barrelhouse she had dubbed Momma’s Twist. Laughing amid the flying hats and enthusiastic whistles, she curtsied, holding out the hem of her dress, her face crimson with both embarrassment and pleasure.

On the child’s tenth birthday, her mother and father told her they had a special surprise for her. She sat passively in the back seat, on a freeway where the cars went fast, and where there were factories and billboards, and then into a big city with towering buildings reaching skyward into the blue clouds. She leaned forward, looking up, her fingers intertwined on her lap. She marveled at these majestic skyscrapers, and they inspired piano notes in her head and her slender fingers moved to their wordless melody.

The afternoon sun was blindingly bright on the store’s windows when they at last stopped. We are here, the mother had announced, clutching her purse, and the father had taken the child’s hand and opened the shining glass door for her to go in first. The child had held her breath, or perhaps she forgot to breathe. In a room as large as her school auditorium there were pianos. Only pianos. They were of every kind, every shape, all new, all with keys of white ivory, gleaming from the sun streaming in through the windows. When the child remembered to breathe, the mother touched her shoulder and said, pick one out. Happy birthday, my little protégé who will someday play Carnegie Hall.

As her parents talked to the salesman, the child strolled among these magnificent instruments, each one splendid on its own, painted glossy black or made of elegant mahogany or lustrous rosewood. The room was fragrant with lemon furniture polish.

It did not take long to sit down on the cushioned seat of the one she wanted. The one in which someday she would play Carnegie Hall.

She rested her hands in her lap. It was the most beautiful piano she had ever seen. A luminous white baby grand. Then smiling with ultimate delight, lifted her fingers and played The Swan. The notes drifted up rich and pure, and echoed with sweet harmony in the great room, like angels singing. The child became lost in the fulfillment of the moment.

Her parents and salesman had turned.

No! And the mother had rushed over, motioning for her daughter to stop! Come away from this piano, pulling her daughter roughly to her feet. The mother laughed nervously at the salesman – children do not realize priceless things cost money. No, over here. This spinet is a Story and Clark. Sit at this one. They say these are the finest-made pianos. Is not the wood smooth, the keys shiny? A pretty thing, that white one – but too big for our house – Surely you must know that. The mother turned to business, then, for it was settled. With the salesman the mother arranged the payment and delivery of the square, maple-brown spinet.

***

The child, no longer a child, watched her father hang his head and grasp one of her mother’s hands. The hospital staff had closed the curtain, allowing them this time alone with the deceased. The woman-child, who was once thought of as her mother’s gifted child, felt sorrow for her father’s loss.

She stood at the foot of the mother’s deathbed, the blips of the machines silent, the screens dark. Even her father’s grief was unspoken, but this was not unusual for a man who had always kept his emotions hidden away inside.

She watched the mother’s slack face, so very old and gaunt, how her sickness had shrunken her features. And she lay so very still. At last, so very, very still. It seemed unusual that the mother did not speak or move, for one who had talked constantly and bustled about everything in life. The words she had said in those last minutes to the father had been angry and cruel. But it was the mother’s words to her daughter that were the unkindest.

Moments before she had died, she had dug her nails into her daughter’s arm. You never played Carnegie Hall. Such a disappointment! Such a failure! The mother had flung her daughter’s extraordinary hands aside as if they were nothing. All those hours of practice, all the money spent on lessons, all just a squandered waste, the mother gasped, falling back against the pillows.

Long ago, the child had learned that Carnegie Hall was not a song at all, but a magnificent New York stage for which the cream of the cream, the extraordinary and the legendary, and the best in the world would perform. I may not have ever played Carnegie Hall, the woman-child said to the mother, although she could no longer hear. And you may think me a disappointment and it has all been for nothing, and she swept away a painful tear from the mother’s cutting words.

But you showed me I had a gift and I thank you for that. Through your persistence, I learned. I now carry that gift within me, and will always play beautiful music, as you would have wanted to play yourself. I will play for the love of music until I can play no longer, until my fingers grow as gnarled and swollen as yours are now.

And the daughter lifted her mother’s one slack hand and kissed her fingers.