The Piano

The Piano

Harry Buschman

We lived in a "middle class" tenement. It was a term we used to distinguish the almost invisible difference between ourselves and the poor unfortunates living in "lower class" tenements. If you lived in a middle class tenement you were racially segregated but ethnically mixed. Therefore, we lived in an ethnic stew made up of the same colored ingredients.

People who lived in middle class tenements had one thing in common, they felt superior to their neighbors living in other middle class tenements.

If a family had the misfortune to live in a lower class tenement they didn't feel superior to anybody or anything and their landlord collected his rent in the company of two armed guards.

There were no "upper class" tenements.

Our tenement was a five story building with a cellar. The word ‘basement’ was not yet a part of our middle class vocabulary. Each floor housed a family with its roots in a different part of Europe. The tenement was the spawning ground of the children of the twentieth century, the melting pot they boiled and bubbled in. The roots of their homeland survived only in the memory of the old folks. The roots of the families in our middle class tenement were as diverse as an Irish ‘grass’ widow on the top floor, my family, comprised of Germans and English on the fourth, a large Jewish refugee family from Poland on the third, and so on down the stairs to the Savino's on the first floor, whose three sons went to work in the uniforms of the sanitation, police and fire departments.

When we climbed the cracked linoleum stairs at dinner time, the smells from the kitchens would clash and reveal ethnic tastes in cooking – from oregano, blending to onions, and then garlic. The heated voices we heard from the floor below us and the ceiling above us were in languages we didn't understand, but from the temper of them we knew these people had problems just like ours.

The elders in these families were content to live here, but they would never make a commitment to citizenship. They would always be foreigners in a foreign land, and America would always be a foreign country.

We got along with very little. We would have been shocked to see the frills and extravagances that most people consider necessities today. None of us had electric light. None of us had central heating. None of us had a telephone, a television set or a radio. They were things we read about in the science section of the Sunday newspaper.

But strangely, many of us had a piano. In modern America today few families can boast of owning a piano, but they were common in the twenties. You could have your very own piano for the cost of moving it. No one bought a piano at a piano store. Like the kitchen sink, they were left behind when tenants moved away. Moving companies would ask you if you had a piano and their prices would double if you wanted to take it with you. It was a very large and heavy piece of furniture and difficult to winch out the window and lower to the street. Today you leave your refrigerator and your wall to wall carpeting, but in the twenties you left your piano.

Few families knew what to do with the pianos they inherited. Few people could play one, and almost no one could play one well. There were eighty eight keys to play with only ten fingers, and the fingers of men were blunt and broken from manual labor. Those of women were wrinkled, cracked and raw from the scrub pail. The piano was not a 'native' instrument – it was international, and the tunes of the homeland didn't sound the way they should on a piano. Balalaikas, banjos and concertinas sounded better to European ears, and fit the ethnic conception of a national musical heritage far better than a piano.

Our personal piano was a jet black Kranich & Bach upright. A poor man's piano. It was there to greet us when we moved in and became ours by default. It sounded more like a toy xylophone when I punched its crooked yellow keys, some of them refused to respond at all. Its black finish was interwoven with a fine network of surface cracks as though it had been through fire and flood.

Nevertheless, my mother was overjoyed, she took piano lessons when she was little and she couldn't wait to have it overhauled. She promised she would play it every day for us – as soon as her moving chores were done. It was an empty promise. Caring for us was a full time job and almost more than she could handle alone. But while she waited for the floor to dry or the bread to rise, she would often sit at it and do her chords in all the seven keys.

Her playing was ponderous and stately, regardless of the composer’s tempo. It was tentative and uneven – like the stuttering steps the bride takes on her walk down the aisle. She slowed Handel's "Largo" down to a turtle's crawl. "The Dark Town Strutter's Ball" and Chopin's "Minute Waltz" were hurdles she waded into bravely with tight lips and clamped jaws.

If she played in the evening we were trapped and mesmerized by her stubborn water torture rhythm. With all due respect, I have to say that my dislike for piano music today stems from the memory of my mother dragging out Chopin's "Minute Waltz" to the better part of an hour. I have heard many great pianists since then. From Rachmaninoff, to Horowitz, from Harold Bauer to Emil Gilels, and none of them have been able to erase the mental picture of my mother's head bobbing up and down from the music to the keys in a frantic effort to include every note, regardless of the composer's tempo. Marching music for turtles and snails.

I slept in the parlor on a fold-out sofa with the Kranich & Bach by my side. In the dim light of the kerosene stove it became a mythical dragon exposing a lower jaw of frighteningly wicked yellow teeth. In the middle of the night during changes of humidity and temperature the taut strings would relax or tighten and release discordant gong like sounds as though a family of unmusical goblins were living inside.

All our bedrooms were occupied by adults. Parlors were rarely used (a good reason for not calling them "living rooms"). They faced the street and the lady of the house would fling open the window and shout her orders down to the ice man or the vegetable vendor in the street below. But during family reunions, holidays and funeral get-togethers, the parlor was the entertainment center for corseted aunts and cigar smoking uncles from near and far.

Mother would sit down to play her piano on these occasions and those that could, would stand up to sing the old songs with her – each of them in his or her most comfortable key. The piano kept us more or less in tune (if not in time), until the guests grew weary of her implacable rhythm and found conversation more rewarding. Sensing the loss of her audience, my mother would begin to sing in a voice a full octave above her normal speaking range and loud enough to to make normal conversation impossible.

I learned from experience that when she did this the party was on the wane and the parlor would soon be mine to sleep in. Few people, kith or kin, could stand my mother's singing, and compounded by her plodding tempos they would soon get their hats and coats and say goodnight. The piano and I could then call it a day. My mother, frustrated once more, would reluctantly close the lid over the keys, and my father with a few deft strokes would magically convert the davenport into a bed for me. Later, in the darkness I would look over at the old black Kranich & Bach standing quietly against the wall and marvel at its ability to be an instrument of wonder in the hands of a gifted pianist, but to others, (like my mother) it could empty a parlor in fifteen minutes.

Our piano was a living thing. It had a soul that resonated with the slam of a door, a shout from an angry neighbor, the summer thunder and the bells of St. Theresa's. Certain of its strings would respond to the noises in a sustained and dissonant chord that would linger after the original sound died away. A sepulchral accompaniment to the music of life. With help from no one it played for me all night long. It played as well or better by itself than it ever did for my mother.

We left the piano behind when we moved. It would be nice to think that its new owners could make it play as it was meant to be played. It only sang for me in the dead of night. In the daylight hours it served as a place to stand our faded family snapshots and the bell jar with my dead Grandfather's watch inside. It accomplished all these things with grace and patience, but when mother sat down to play it was an instrument of torture.