Hope Coulter

Piano entered my life when I was five. I want to say it was the outset of a period of change in my life, but when is that not the case? We’re always in the middle of flux. It’s just that most of the time we’re hardly even aware.

            My family had recently moved to a small city in central Louisiana, where we lived in a low, sprawling house beside a bayou. My father went to work every day, my older brothers to school, and my mother to ladies’ meetings, reappearing from these forays into the humid, sunlit grove I knew as home.

            Elsewhere in the world, disturbances were churning. Every afternoon a rolled-up newspaper would fly out of a passing car and land at the end of our long gravel driveway. I was the one who would bring it inside, carefully pulling off the rubber band to avoid being popped and spreading the paper open on our kitchen table. I ignored the front pages, with their gray-scaled photographs of battleships and handshakes, turning to the back section where the funnies were. I liked the comic strip about Nancy and her friend Sluggo, who were utterly black-and-white and utterly flat, and made jokes even I could get.

            Now and then my mother would call me into the living room, where I’d find her switching on the lamp that stood beside our brown Baldwin grand. While I climbed onto the piano bench and lined up my belly button with middle C, she would flip through John Thompson’s Easiest Piano Course and mash it open on the music rack in front of me.

            Mr. Thompson had embellished his primer with drawings of elves. Lesson by lesson I watched as elves clambered up clefs, reclined on rests, and labored to roll whole notes across the staff. Although the black and white stripes of the keyboard ran enticingly far to left and right, the elves’ drills kept me in between, marching up and down the same two octaves of lines and spaces.

            Sometimes my brother stopped off at the piano and showed me other things: how to play with my knuckles, how to play Chopsticks with two fingers at once. He taught me a song that used the highest and lowest notes of the piano:

            Giant, why are you so tall? (piped by the treble keys)

            Well, sir, why are you so small? (growled by the lowest bass)

Grown people laughed slightly when they heard this, so it must be a joke; but I felt it was a story as well—a tiny story with a hidden meaning I remained on the verge of grasping.

***

When school started I moved into the wider world. My days, which had been sunny and free-floating, casually daubed with kindergarten, turned into a long, enclosed partitioning, as if the hours from eight to three were roofed off from the sky. Along with other changes—from fat to slender crayons, from colorful rugs to hard desks—I learned I would now take real piano lessons twice a week. My teacher would be Mr. Tauber. My mother said, “He came here from Vienna.” 

            One Monday after school we drove down a brick street in the older part of Edgewood and parked in front of a stucco bungalow. The glass-paned door, veiled inside with white muslin, swung open at my mother’s knock to reveal a small woman with short, roughly cut blond hair. She wore rubber-soled shoes and a light-blue lab coat over her slacks. Her face was chiseled, tawny and smooth, with knobs of rosy cheeks that, when she smiled, almost hid her clear blue eyes. She greeted us in a thick accent and with a sweeping gesture invited us in.

            We stepped into a foyer furnished with white wicker and floral prints. To our right was a dim room where a couple of women reclined on cots, their eyes closed and their faces shiny with a gooey substance I could not identify. Later I would read the framed certificates on the wall that displayed Grete’s credentials from the Helena Rubenstein Institute in the art of skin care. Today she urged us toward the back of the house, down a hall to a threshold where she announced, “The studio—my husband.”

            The man who came forward to greet us was shorter than my mother, nearly round. He wore laced ankle-high boots, a tweed jacket and dress shirt, and a tie whose tip-ends were neatly tucked into his trousers. His head was rimmed with auburn hair, and his glasses befit a professor, horn-rimmed and wire-girded along the top and temples. Through the windowpane of their lenses his brown eyes smiled at me, kindly but keen.

            “Ah, Mrs. Carpenter. And this is—?”

“Anne.”

            “Anne.” He bowed over my hand like a prince, studying it as he straightened back up. Did he dislike my bitten nails and stubby fingers? He touched my fingers with his other hand. “The hands of a pianist,” he exclaimed. My cheeks got warm. “Many people think that for piano long fingers are better,” he said, looking at my mother now. “Aber, no. Long, thin fingers”—he turned loose and waved his hand dismissively, and in the air I saw hordes of long-digited pretenders falling back, disappointed—“they are for perhaps the cello. For piano, we look for short, strong fingers such as Anne’s, to make a more beautiful music, no?” 

            The studio contained a Baldwin upright and a long black Steinway, whose keyboards were set at right angles with a small wing-chair between. Against one wall was a sofa bed upholstered in green and gold, and near the window sat a side chair and a small table covered with a doily, two copies of Reader’s Digest, and a candy dish.

            I sat at the upright piano while Mr. Tauber frowned over my primary book, then thrust it back at my mother and turned his attention to me.

            “So. Where shall we begin? Do you know ‘Yankee Doodle’?”

            I shook my head no.

            “No? ‘Yankee Doodle.’ You don’t know this song?”

            “No sir.”

            His face darkened. A scowl flashed across, and he looked at my mother, poised in the side chair with her purse at her feet. “What is this ‘sir’?” he said. “This is not the army.”

            “Annie,” said my mother, “you know ‘Yankee Doodle’!”

            “I know what song he’s talking about, but I can’t pla—”

            “Yankee Doodle went to London, just to ride a po-ny,” sang Mr. Tauber softly. “Put a—what is it?”

            “Feather in his cap, and called it macaroni.”

            “Ah, so you do know!” He beamed, shifted his weight in his chair, and looked back at my mother. “She is cheeky, no? A little falsehood? She was just teasing.” He said the j like ch: chust. “Now, you know this song, I will teach you to play it on the piano. You know where is middle C?”

            “Yes s—.” My manners dwindled into a hiss, and I placed my finger on the C.

                                                                        ***

“Franz and Grete fled Vienna when Hitler took over,” I heard my mother saying on the phone. “They fled with nothing but the shirt on their backs.” I pictured them running hand in hand, wearing not their respective tweed jacket and lab coat but enormous, billowing shirts, like Hansel and Gretel in a storybook: mouths rounded in alarm, faces startlingly white against a dark forest.

            In due course they settled in Tel Aviv. They had a daughter, Ilse, who grew into a tall, willowy model, with her mother’s high cheekbones and golden hair, her father’s deep smile. Her photograph was made into a travel poster for Israel. A traveler from our town—a Jew on a wanderjahr—spotted the poster and became obsessed with her. He tracked her down and found her living in Tel Aviv with her parents. In a matter of days he wooed her, married her, and bore her back to America.

            “So romantic,” sighed the women of Edgewood.

            “Weird as hell,” grunted the men.

            “I cry seven weeks,” recalled Mr. Tauber. “In the street I wear dark glasses.”

            There was no question but that he and Grete would follow. Out of the Middle East, past the onion-domes of central Europe, over the cobalt Mediterranean and westward across the Atlantic, to the shores of the land of the free. They paused for a time in New York, where Mr. Tauber spent three days selecting his Steinway, and then down, down, to our town they came, to the little house on Harrison Street.

***

Each Monday and Thursday I trooped from the front room, where Grete puttered, bending and clucking, over the mummified ladies, back to where the smell of baking floated from the kitchen into the sunny studio. Mr. Tauber would turn from the lesson before me and greet me with his slight bow. “Have a candy,” he would say. “You must be weak from school.” The candies were hard, fruit-flavored discs, red, yellow, orange, and green, unlike anything sold in American stores. As you held it on your tongue, the outside would melt and release a tart syrup in the center. I would sit and wait, sucking on the candy, turning through the Reader’s Digests stacked on the table and rereading the biography of Beethoven on the back of my Für Elise. Ludwig’s father used to beat him to make him practice. Ludwig was angry, he was deaf. He was a genius.

            Mr. Tauber set me to playing elementary pieces: Scenes from Childhood, the Bach minuets, easy sonatinas. He explained scales and chords, sometimes halting in frustration or slapping the keyboard in search of an English word.

            After the lesson, as we drove home through the thickening dusk, my mother always listened to the news. “NBC News, Washington,” the announcer would say. The timbre of his firm, grave voice and the flourish of tinny chords that followed his sign-off conjured for me a vast, official city on the edge of the continent. I had hazy notions of history that took place far away from Edgewood, of distant and serious occurrences like the name of my Schumann piece, “Important Events.” “Why is Israel fighting Palestine?” I asked my mother. “What is a Democratic Convention? Why are we in a war?” The front page of our paper often had a picture from Vietnam—helmeted soldiers crouched in the bushes or wading in flooded fields. Every day I looked to see what they were doing. Sometimes they stuffed stretchers into a helicopter; sometimes they smoked cigarettes in the jungle.

            One evening when we parked in our driveway, my mother cut the motor but left the radio on. She made no move to get out of the car. 

            “Number one hundred sixteen,” said the announcer. “August twenty-third. Number one-seventeen: October twenty-second. Number one-eighteen…”

            “Mama? What’s this a—?”

            She shook her head hard to shush me. We sat listening, looking out into the bare pecan branches of our yard, black against the periwinkle sky. We waited until we heard, “The last number to be called for this lottery… one hundred ninety-five.” In the dashboard glow my mother’s face crumpled. We had not heard my brother’s birthday. He wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam, at least for now.

***

Struggles of learning took place at the brown upright. Only when a piece was polished and ready to perform did I move to the gleaming keyboard of the Steinway. At that point Mr. Tauber would abandon his chair and settle his rotund body on the day-bed. The mattress would dip under his weight, and the hem of his pants hiked up, exposing a width of black sock and pale shins. “Now, Anne-i-ly!” he would say, clapping. “We are in the famous concert hall! You are wearing a beautiful white dress with black pianos on it. The audience waits.” He dropped his voice, intoning dramatically: “‘Ladies and gentlemen… now plays the famous… the famous… ’” He smacked his forehead, mugging a memory lapse. “Eh—what’s your name?’”

            When I laughed, he beamed and glanced at my mother. “She understands chokes.” He resettled his attention on me. “Begin.”

            I played a measure and a half and heard a groan. “More tone, more tone, Anne-i-le! Ach…” I cast myself forward, sending tone into my finger-pads, crescendoing, decrescendoing. “Dah-dee, dah-deee-dah-dee,” he sang along. “It is nothing… yet it is everything.” I raised my shoulders and winged my elbows out. “Stop!” he roared. “Is too much!”

            I looked at him.

            “It is as if you say, ‘I go-o-o for a wa-a-aalk.’” He shook his head. “Is too much. Continue.”

            I started over.

            “What? You go back to Adam and Eve?”

            “I can’t start in the middle.”

            “Ach. Dah-dee, deedle-dee…more tone!”

            The Matinee Musical Club invited me to play at their spring meeting. Mr. Tauber, my mother, and I sat in chairs against the wall, waiting through the reading of minutes and the business report. I swung my feet in their Sunday Mary Janes, and my mother put her hand on my leg to make me stop. A lady in a pink dress played “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” proceeding mechanically through the melodies. Mr. Tauber shifted in his chair. Was he going to leap to his feet, saying, “More tone! More tone!”?

            When the woman finished, Mr. Tauber joined the polite applause but leaned across me to whisper to my mother, “She is not from Vienna. She is from… Gum Creek.” My mother snorted, and a gold cap winked from his smile. 

***

Christopher stopped going to classes. Though my parents pleaded with him to stay in school, he said this wasn’t the time for it. He and a friend moved to Austin and started an underground newspaper.

            “Of all things,” muttered my father.

            “But he’s working,” said my mother.

            “What are hippies?” I said. “What is Kent State?”

            When my brothers were gone I meddled luxuriously in their rooms, sniffing their aftershave and perusing their menagerie of records—the Animals, the Byrds, the Monkees. I slid my feet into their big loafers and boots, pulled their ties down from the horns of a cowskull on the wall and tried them on. Christopher received a spaniel puppy from his girlfriend and brought it home in a cardboard box. He couldn’t keep it in his apartment, he said. Its name was Daisy. I was thrilled with my new companion. I taught her tricks. She fetched everything. If I tossed something just over her head, she tracked it and leapt so eagerly that I was able to train this behavior into a flip. Her chest was full of curls, like the ruffles on Beethoven’s shirt.

***

The fitness craze had not yet arrived in Edgewood, and the only people who walked around town were folks too poor to own a car. Mr. Tauber walked the leafy blocks of his neighborhood, sometimes with Grete on his arm, sometimes alone. He was a spectacle, in his formal coat and tucked-in tie, his short laced boots that were not cowboy boots.

            One day during his walk, a woman called out from the steps of a tan brick building, “Would you like to come in and see my church?”

            “I replied, ‘No,’” Mr. Tauber told my mother. “Why would I want to see her church?”

            My mother shook her head.

            He added hastily, “Your church, Mrs. Carpenter, is lovely.” He had been there for concerts. “It is quite clean; one can eat off the floor. And I have been to the great churches of Rome, where one can see the dead Papsts. Aber, why would I want to go and see this church of this lady I do not know?”

            There came a week of revivals. Several churches in town had marquees that told of guest preachers, nightly services, the urgent need to repent and be saved. A classmate invited me and five other girls to a wienie roast at her church. I was expecting a bonfire, rounds of “Pass It On” under the night sky. Instead, after boiled hot dogs and Ruffles in the church hall, we were herded into the sanctuary, where a black-haired man preached about sin and hell for twenty minutes and then said that anyone who hadn’t been saved should come down front and kneel. One by one my friends started crying and went to claim Jesus. I stayed in my pew, struggling to remember what my Methodist Sunday school teachers had told me about sin and hell, and not coming up with anything.

            The organ played the same song over and over till only a handful of us unsaved were left. The minister came partway up the aisle, looking at me the way Daisy once looked at a turtle she found in the grass—wanting to pounce but somehow held at bay by that strange shell.

            Back home, when I burst into the living room, my family looked up in alarm. “What’s wrong?” said my mother. 

            “Am I going to hell?”

“For Pete’s sake,” said my father.

            “Of course not,” said my mother.

“God, your cheeks are red,” said my brother.

            That week we arrived at piano, as usual, while Pamela Rawles’s lesson was finishing up. She was Mr. Tauber’s oldest student, a sixteen-year-old with waves of shiny brown hair. The staves on her music were thick with little black notes that flew past my ears like butterflies. Her hair, full of static electricity, would not settle on her shoulders but hovered in the air as if it too was watching her fingers. She held the last chord and waited a moment before lifting her hands off the keys. 

            “You like?” Mr. Tauber said to my mother. “The Minute Waltz.”

            Pamela, taking the Chopin book off the piano, suddenly turned and said, “Mr. Tauber, before I go, I have to ask you something.”

            “What is it?”

            “Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?”

            I heard the ah of my mother’s gasp.

            “I do not,” said Mr. Tauber. His tone was cheerful, as if she had asked whether he had a toaster or a subscription to TV Guide.

             Pamela’s eyes widened and filled with tears, and she shook her head against the lightness of his tone. “Mr. Tauber, you don’t want to go to hell, do you?”

            “Pamela…” he bantered, “with you I would go anywhere.” I saw the smile curling on his lips. But Pamela did not understand chokes. Her face and neck were rosy, and a tear brimmed out of each eye as she picked up the rest of her music and left the room.

***

Pamela’s mother was one of the ladies who went to Grete for facials. Around town they were easy to recognize; their faces were subtly rouged, shiny as if coated with shellac. 

            “Pauletta Rawles isn’t going to Grete any more,” my mother said to her friend on the phone. She paced around the kitchen, tethered to the wall by a long coiled cord. “And she’s found a new teacher for Pamela. Her minister told her she shouldn’t do business with people who aren’t Christian.”

            My brother, who was eating cereal with me at the breakfast bar, said, “Jesus Christ.” Mom shot him a look.

            “Jesus was a Jew,” he said loudly. “Jesus!” He shoved his barstool back as he got up.

            My mother hung up and sat down in his place, a dark, absent look on her face.

            “Jesus was a Jew,” I said.

            She nodded and sighed.

            My brother slammed his cereal bowl in the sink. “How do you think Hitler came to power?” he said. “Because of people like the ones in this town, that’s how.” 

            They fled when Hitler came to power. They fled with just the shirt on their backs. They fled so they wouldn’t have to go to something called concentration camps, not the kind with Indian names and flagpoles and horseback riding but something different, involving activities so ghastly that no one would tell me what they were.

            One Saturday at the library, wandering through adult nonfiction, I pulled a Time-Life book off the shelf and began to page through. There were black-and-white photographs—the liberation of… unpronounceable words—but nothing I saw looked liberated. There were piles of pale and stick-like things, gleaming through ashes. Another picture, another indistinct heap, and on one stack … not two staring eyes, a nose, parted lips? Puzzled, I flipped back to other pictures. Here rows of soldiers marched with their legs stuck out; there a little girl in a coat, holding her mother’s hand, waited in line to get on a train. Her calm dark eyes looked at me. Sweetie, come along. It’s a big step, let me lift you up.

            But Mama, where are we going?

            To camp!

            A hand came down and closed the book. My father, in weekend shirt-sleeves and with books clamped under his arm, shook his head: “Honey, you don’t need to read this.”

            “But Daddy—”

            “Let’s go check out.”

***

My mother said, “At least maybe you can take that three-thirty lesson time.”

            Two weeks before, just as my lesson started, Linda DiStefano and her mother had stopped short in the studio doorway and regarded us with dismay. Last week, we had arrived for my regular lesson to find Jimmy Bledsoe settling his frame at the piano bench and running scraps of his Revolutionary Etude up and down the keys. Mr. Tauber groaned at the sight of the DiStefanos and reached for the brown paper sleeve on which he wrote the weekly schedule. I peered over his shoulder and squinted, trying to make the fine blue squiggles turn into names and times. “I thought we had the four-thirty,” murmured my mother.

            Mr. Tauber’s face wrinkled over the paper. He smacked himself in the forehead with the heel of his palm, and I noticed that his red hair was white at the roots.

            “Oh, Mrs. Carpenter—was ist das—”

            “It’s all right,” she said. “You go ahead with Jimmy’s lesson. We can run some errands and come back.”

            “Yes? Jimmy is one hour. You come back at five-thirty?”

            She nodded and smiled, but back in the car she shook her head and said, “Really, I think he’s losing it.”

***

I began to have headaches. My mother took me to the ophthalmologist, where I sat in a dark room and peered at figures on a radiant field. The doctor rolled back his chair and scribbled on a clipboard. A week later, when the optician slipped my new glasses onto my face, the world jumped into clarity. It was all so crisp—the man’s glistening part, the pores in his nose, the tiny labels on the sunglasses racked behind him. In the mirror my face was pale, the glasses like two enormous fermatas stamped over my cheeks.

            The optician handed me a case the color of a Band-Aid and said, “You’re all fixed up.”

            Outside, I saw that the sidewalk had pores too. It was like a precipice, tipping between dangerous drops on either side. The wires swooping down to the traffic lights looked razor-sharp. I felt sick.

            Everywhere I went, I could clearly see startled looks on people’s faces.

            “You look—cute,” said my father.

            “You’ll get used to them,” said my brother. “Pretty soon you’ll wear them all the time.”

             “Terrible!” said Mr. Tauber. “Take the spectacles off! You can see, Anne-i-ly. You can see.”

            I hid the glasses in the back corner of Daisy’s doghouse, where no one went but me. Including Daisy. I told my family I had lost them. All they did, after a bit of searching, was order another pair. 

***

One Thursday there was no pupil after me, and when my lesson was over Mr. Tauber and my mother fell into long conversations. I got restless and went into the back yard, which the Taubers called a garden, where I found an old ball to kick around, randomly humming:

                        Jeremiah was a bullfrog! Was a good friend of mine!

                        Never understood a single word he said—

            The screen door opened and Mr. Tauber called, “Do not leave the garden, Anne-i-ly! If the ball goes into the street, have me to get it for you!”

            “Okay,” I said, leaving the ball where it stopped. I climbed a few branches up into a crepe myrtle tree, then a few more. Giant, why are you so tall? Well, sir, why—There was a tap on the window and I looked down to see Mr. Tauber, white-faced, beckoning through the glass.

            Inside, he and my mother were still talking. At my entrance Mr. Tauber paused, leaving strange words buzzing in the air: Nazis… conservatory… Kristallnacht. He stroked my cheek with his knuckle. “Enough for today, no?”

            “What’s Kristallnacht?” I asked later. My mother answered slowly that the name came from the tinkle of glass. Bells, sparkly snow, ballroom chandeliers… ? No, my mother said, not like that. Breaking windows. A heaviness tugged at her eyes when she described shattered storefronts, bashed pianos, boots tromping upstairs toward huddled families. I still had the feeling she wasn’t telling me everything. Somewhere I believed there were people who did understand—authorities, officials, who knew how bodies came to be stacked like so much firewood.

            “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: forgive us, we pray, our manifold sins and wickedness,” we prayed at church.

“Not me,” I wanted to point out. “I didn’t do it.” But was that really the case? I wasn’t sure.

***

Three, there were always three: goats, pigs, brothers, going into the world to seek their fortune. They headed down a winding road, and in the door of the cottage they left behind there always stood a mother, flapping her handkerchief goodbye. Christopher, having gone into the world to seek his fortune, didn’t come home and he didn’t call home and my parents could talk of little else.

            “He’s probably fine,” said my second brother.

            “He’s probably broke,” said the third.

            “He’s probably underground with the newspapers.” They looked at me. “Like in a tunnel?” I said, and no one even bothered to answer.

            Christopher’s best friend, Jeff Plauché, hadn’t called home lately either, and his mother thought their phone had been shut off.

            One night on the news there was a story about an incident in Austin. “Turn it up,” said my mother. Police had been called out to disperse a demonstration. A wave of protestors bent back and forth the way my class did playing Red Rover. Their mouths were open, showing their young white teeth, and their long hair blew in their faces. Some held signs that said END THE WAR and some held hands and some held up their fists. One of them looked just like Christopher, only with a beard. My dad said it wasn’t him but my mother said yes it was.

            The phone wouldn’t stretch to the TV, so my mother said to me, “Go call Mrs. Plauché and tell her to turn on Channel Four.”

            A line of men in helmets, holding billy clubs, stared uncertainly at the young demonstrators. Then the scene shook like a snow globe, and when the motion stopped, two policeman were dragging away one of the long-haired boys.

            That week I went to my lesson alone. My dad dropped me off at the Taubers’ and went back to his office.

            Mr. Tauber looked over my shoulder down the hall. “Where is Mother?” 

            “She had to go to Austin to check on my brother.”

            “What is the matter with Brother?”

            I considered my answer: the scraggly lines of helmets, the uniforms bending over a curled figure. “Nothing,” I said. “We just haven’t heard from him in a long time. My mom wants to… bring him his birthday presents.”

            I looked pointedly at the candy dish, but Mr. Tauber did not offer me a sweet.

            “Frightening,” he said. “We will begin with ‘Frightening.’”

            After “Frightening” we did the D-flat scale. “Three in the left, two in the right. And the thumb—” he said, “the thumb, Anne-i-le, must go under—it waits: ah, how to say… ” He grabbed his head, muttered in German, slapped the keys in a discordant jangle.

            I must have looked worried, because he said, “Is not you, Annie. I simply…  Where is Mother?”

            “In Austin to check on my brother.”

            “Ah, yes. The brother is having difficulties?”

            I shrugged.

            “Right now in this country it is difficult to be young. Aber”—he smiled with only a twist of his lips—“it is also difficult to be old.”

            He stared for a moment at the keyboard and I wondered if he had asked me a question and my mind had wandered.

            “Annie!” he said. “Every major key has a… die Durparallele… Every major key has a minor key like a cousin. It is composed of… ”

            Lightly he struck some keys and riffled a scale up and down, then raised his hands and resettled them—“One, step, half”— in a different place and ran a new scale, a minor one.

            “So. For D-flat Major, the cousin minor is—what?”

            I shook my head. He sighed, passed his hand over his eyes, and scrabbled for his pen. He flipped over the lesson schedule and began muttering as he sketched. A sort of flower appeared, with bigger and smaller groups of sharps and flats arranged radially like petals. 

            He made a last few jabs, and the paper trembled as he held it out. “Within a piece,” he said, “the—related—minor is what the composer chooses for a different tone, a different color. You see?”

            “I think so…” I said obligingly.

            He scowled. “You do not see. Annie!” he commanded, and I turned my head to look him in the eyes. His old-fashioned glasses sat crooked across his face, and his shaggy eyebrows were now more white than auburn. But from the overhang of mottled tortoiseshell, his brown eyes looked piercingly out, a keen yellow light in their center, catching my gaze with his stern one. “For what use are the spectacles! Do not say this falsehood that you see when you do not see. This you must not do.”

             Shooing me up, he said, “Allow me,” and swept into position at the center of the bench. For a second I thought I saw him shaking out coat-tails behind. He held his hands over the keys for an instant and dove into a passage of intricate music. This he had never done before. A scrap of melody, maybe, some left-hand chords swinging along as a demonstration, but nothing like this glittering chain-link of swift notes. His fingers were a blur, his forearms rose and fell. He came up off the bench, then sank his weight into his left leg while his right foot stabbed at the pedal. It was like opening a foggy bus window and finding yourself beholding a sky full of rainbows.

            As I watched his face tilt over the keyboard, I suddenly saw Franz as he must have been when he was young: the same quick lips and beaked nose but with a smooth, high brow, the grooves of age vanished, the wisps of coarse hair turned thick and reddish-brown. It was a face alight with purpose, focusing energy and ambition on the keyboard. This was he, back in Vienna, filling the concert halls, his ability cresting: Now play… the famous…what’s your name?

            The music stopped. Mr. Tauber snatched up his hands. His face looked slick and he panted as though he couldn’t catch his breath.

            “Mrs. Tauber,” he said. “Go and get—”

            He stared so hard at the keyboard that I looked at it too to see if there was something on it. He wobbled and sagged toward the floor. One arm grazed the bench, knocking off my music books and the thin cushion that padded the bench, his fingers latching on to one corner. 

            “Mrs. Tauber!” I shouted. “Mrs. Tauber!”

            His hand held on, turning yellow-white around the knuckles with the strength of its grip, but his body rolled back along his rounded spine till his head bounced on the carpet. His eyelids fluttered.

            I ran toward the front of the house and nearly collided with Grete rushing up the hallway, her lab coat whisking past. By the time I got back to the studio she was kneeling beside her husband, holding his hands and pouring a murmur of words into his ear.

            In the hall was a niche where a black phone sat, a list of emergency numbers taped to it. I dialed for an ambulance. “The address, miss?” said the dispatcher. “What’s the address?”

I cried out at my ignorance and ran to Grete.

            “Your address, your address,” I said. Over Mr. Tauber’s chest her round blue eyes looked at me blankly, her lips forming words I didn’t know.

            “Ah!” I grabbed a Reader’s Digest and carried it back to the phone, reading the label breathlessly: “Seven oh five Harrison, it’s seven oh five Harrison.”

            Shortly afterward my father pulled up and saw the ambulance standing with its rear doors open. He ran up the porch steps two at a time but couldn’t come in because the medics were carrying out Mr. Tauber on a stretcher, his little boots pointing up, his eyes closed. Behind them came Mrs. Tauber, sprinting in her rubbery shoes to catch up and patting her husband as they all joggled through the front yard.

            Out onto the porch came Mrs. K-Kohn, tall in a smock and her face still glistening with a pale pink paste, and little red-haired Mrs. C-Cohn, with her face wiped clean and her smock folded over her arm. Mrs. C-Cohn said, “Annie, good job keeping your head in an emergency; your mama will be proud of you,” but Mrs. K-Kohn just kept going, “Did Grete have to leave right away? How long should I leave this cream on? Why didn’t Grete stay and get me straightened out?”

            My father smelled of pipe tobacco and leather when I threw my arms around him. His tweedy jacket was rough against my cheek.

            “He’s going to be all right, Annie,” he said.

            “How do you know?” I said. I hadn’t cried the whole time but then I started to cry. “How come—Are you sure?”

            Those were the only things I could say, and I didn’t mean just Mr. Tauber but also Christopher and my glasses and the world. All my father could do was answer helplessly, “It’s going to be all right.” 

            As it turned out, my brother was all right. He was sorry he had forgotten to call, but he’d been working long hours, and he and Jeff had forgotten to pay their phone bill. He sent presents home with my mother: for me a record album, and for Daisy a collar of knotted string that his girlfriend had made in a style called macramé. Daisy didn’t like her collar, but I closed the door to my room and played the album over and over on my plastic turntable till I knew each song by heart. I came to see that the strands of my life interwove, like the singer’s, in deep patterned tones of sky and light, threaded with darkness.

            That winter, after a short stay in the hospital, Mr. Tauber came back home. According to Grete, who told one of her ladies, who passed the story along to my mother, one moonlit night he got up and went into the studio. Grete followed, begging him to put on his bathrobe, but he didn’t seem to hear. He seated himself at the piano and plunged into one of the pieces of his youth—starting not from Adam and Eve, but in the middle. It was as though his body were seized by an electrical storm. His head tossed and his limbs quivered as his fingers flung out flares of music he hadn’t played in years and years. Then he wavered and his hands came to a stop like a music box running down and he crumpled over and died.

            My social studies book said that the peoples of the world sail to our shores, drawn by Lady Liberty’s lamp, then mix and become one in America’s great melting pot. This statement was accompanied by a picture of an enormous, tipping vat, ringed with fire, that threatened to spill molten metal onto tiny, shadowy figures in hard hats all around. Did they get used to the danger of the melting pot, I wondered, the way the construction workers in the facing picture—eating lunch on the beam of a skyscraper with their feet dangling over the canyon of the city—must get used to such sickening heights?

            People get used to anything, my father said. That is their tragedy. I was getting used to my formerly intolerable glasses, and if I took them off, I barely recognized the blurry face in the mirror. One day I would exchange them for contact lenses that would melt right into the surface of my eye.  

            Mr. Tauber, in his lace-up boots and with the fire of etudes inside, died unassimilated. But his grandson became a personal injury lawyer whose face is on billboards up and down the highway, and his granddaughter works in Dallas at a vocation she describes as “life coach and gratitude enthusiast,” proving another thing I learned in social studies, that in America anybody can grow up to be just about anything.

            Mr. Tauber used to touch my cheek and say, “She will grow up to be a professor,” a prediction I discounted as ridiculous until the day, decades later, when I did become a professor.

            Some things change and some things stay the same. Baptists keep trying to save people. The news is still full of shattered bodies. Mr. Tauber’s piano, which my parents bought from Grete after his death, sits in my living room. It was the instrument on which my own children learned their minuets and inventions. It still has its brilliant timbre, and every year the technician who services it comments that though the sound is marvelous, the old grand has a hard time holding its tuning.