Towards the end of my senior year in high school (the local high school, inferior in every way to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan), my parents announced that they would like to buy me a new piano as a graduation present. A baby grand, and I could pick it out myself. We went to a few piano showrooms in Brooklyn so I could acquaint myself with the varieties of piano. I spent hours pondering the differences between Baldwin and Steinway, the two pianos most used by professional musicians, for in the matter of a piano—unlike a high school—I had to have the best. Steinways were sharp-edged, Baldwins more mellow; Steinways classic and traditional, Baldwins romantically timeless; Steinways austere, Baldwins responsive to the touch. On the other hand, Steinways were crisp compared to Baldwins’ pliancy; Steinways were sturdy and dependable, while Baldwins sounded a disquieting tone of mutability. I liked making classifications. At last I decided that a Baldwin was the piano for me—rich, lush, and mysterious, not at all like my playing, but now that I think of it, rather like Mr. Simmons’.
I had progressed some since the days when I refused to consider going to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. If it was to be a Baldwin I insisted that it come from the source, the Baldwin showroom in midtown Manhattan. My mother suggested that maybe Mr. Simmons might be asked to come along, to offer us expert advice on so massive an investment. I thought that was a fine idea, only my parents were superfluous; the two of us, Mr. Simmons and I, could manage alone. My parents showed a slight, hedging reluctance. Perhaps it was not quite fair, my mother suggested, to ask Mr. Simmons to give up a Saturday afternoon for this favor. It did not take an expert logician to point out her inconsistency. I was vexed by their reluctance and would not even condescend to think about it. I knew it could have nothing to do with trusting him: over the years they had come to regard him as an exemplar of moral probity. Evidently the combination of his being so reliable and decent, so charming, and so black set him off in a class by himself.
I asked the favor of Mr. Simmons and he agreed, although in his tone too was a slight, hedging reluctance; I couldn’t deny it. But again, I could ignore it. I had a fantasy of Mr. Simmons and myself ambling through the Baldwin showroom, communing in a rarefied manner about the nuances of difference between one Baldwin and another, and I wanted to make this fantasy come true.
The Saturday afternoon arrived. I was excited. I had walked along the streets of Manhattan before, alone and with my friends. But the thought of walking down Fifty-seventh Street with an older man, clearly not a relative, chatting like close friends for all the sophisticated world to see, made my spirits as buoyant and iridescent as a bubble. Mr. Simmons came to pick me up in his car. I had the thrill of sliding into the front seat companionably, chatting like close friends with an older man. I wondered whether he would come around and open the door for me when we arrived. That was done in those days, for ladies. I was almost seventeen. But he only stood waiting while I climbed out and slammed it shut, as he must have done with his own children, as my father did with me.
We walked down broad Fifty-seventh Street, where the glamour was so pervasive I could smell it: cool fur and leather and smoky perfume. People looked at us with interest. How wondrous that was! I was ready to fly with elation. It didn’t matter that Mr. Simmons had known me since I was eleven and seen me lose my temper like an infant and heard my mother order me about; surely he must see me as the delightful adult creature I had suddenly become, and surely he must be delighted to be escorting me down Fifty-seventh Street. I would have liked to take his arm to complete the picture for all the sophisticated world to see, but some things were still beyond me. I felt ready to fly but in fact I could barely keep up with Mr. Simmons’ long and hurried stride. He was talking as companionably as ever, but he seemed ill at ease. Lots of people looked at us. Even though it was early April he had his overcoat buttoned and his hat brim turned down.
We reached the Baldwin showroom. Gorgeous, burnished pianos glistened in the display windows. We passed through the portals; it was like entering a palace. Inside it was thickly carpeted. We were shown upstairs. To Paradise! Not small! Immensely high ceilings and so much space, a vista of lustrous pianos floating on a rich sea of green carpet. Here in this grand room full of grand pianos Mr. Simmons knew what he was about. He began to relax and smile, and he talked knowledgeably with the salesman, who was politely helpful, evidently a sophisticated person.
“Well, go ahead,” Mr. Simmons urged me. “Try them out.”
“You mean play them?” I looked around at the huge space. The only people in it were two idle salesmen and far off at the other end a small family of customers, father, mother, and little boy.
“Of course.” He laughed. “How else will you know which one you like?”
I finally sat down at one and played a few timid scales and arpeggios. I crept from one piano to another, doing the same, trying to discern subtle differences between them.
“Play,” Mr. Simmons commanded.
At the sternness in his voice I cast away timidity. I played Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude,” which I had played the year before at a recital Mr. Simmons held for his students in Carl Fischer Hall—nowadays called Cami Hall—on Fifty-seventh Street, not far from the Baldwin showroom. (I had been the star student. The other boy, the musical genius, had gone off to college or otherwise vanished. I had even done a Mozart sonata for four hands with Mr. Simmons himself.) Sustained by his command, I moved dauntlessly from Baldwin to Baldwin, playing passages from the “Revolutionary Etude.” Mr. Simmons flashed his broad smile and I smiled back.
“Now you play,” I said.
I thought he might have to be coaxed, but I was forgetting that Mr. Simmons was never one to withhold, or to hide his light. Besides, he was a professional, though I didn’t understand yet what that meant. He looked around as if to select the worthiest piano, then sat down, spread his great hands, and played something by Brahms. As always, he played the notes. He pressed them down and made contact. He gave them their full value. He gave them himself. The salesmen gathered round. The small family drew near to listen. And I imagined that I could hear, transmogrified into musical notes, everything I knew of him—his thwarted career, his schoolteaching, his impeccable manners, his fervor, and his wit; his pride in his wife and children; his faraway brother; his anger, his melancholy, and his acceptance; and I also imagined him stripped to the waist and sweating. When it was over he kept his hands and body poised in position, briefly, as performers do, as if to prolong the echo, to keep the spell in force till the last drawn-out attenuation of the instant. The hushed little audience didn’t clap, they stood looking awed. My Mr. Simmons! I think I felt at that moment almost as if he were my protégé, almost as if I owned him.
We didn’t say much on the way home. I had had my experience, grand as in fantasy, which experiences rarely are, and I was sublimely content. As we walked down my block nobody looked at us with any special interest. Everyone knew me and by this time everyone knew Mr. Simmons too. An unremarkable couple. At home, after we reported on the choice of a piano, Mr. Simmons left without even having a cup of coffee. He was tired, he said, and wanted to get home to his family.
Later my mother asked me again how our expedition had been.
“Fine. I told you already. We picked out a really great piano. Oh, and he played. He was fantastic, everyone stopped to listen.”
My mother said nothing. She was slicing tomatoes for a salad.
“I bet they never heard any customer just sit down and play like that.”
Again no response. She merely puttered over her salad, but with a look that was familiar to me: a concentrated, patient waiting for the proper words and the proper tone to offer themselves to her. I enjoyed feeling I was always a step ahead.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said nastily.
“You do?” She raised her eyes to mine. “I’d be surprised.”
“Yes. I bet you’re thinking we looked as if he was going to abduct me or something.”
The glance she gave in response was more injured than disapproving. She set water to boil and tore open a net bag of potatoes.
“Well, listen, I’ll tell you something. The world has changed since your day.” I was growing more and more agitated, while she just peeled potatoes. Her muteness had a maddening way of making my words seem frivolous. She knew what she knew. “The world has changed! Not everyone is as provincial as they are here in Brooklyn!” I spit out that last word. I was nearly shouting how. “Since when can’t two people walk down the street in broad daylight? We’re both free—” I stopped suddenly. I was going to say free, white, and over twenty-one, an expression I had found loathsome when I heard my father use it.
“Calm down,” my mother said gently. “All I’m thinking is I hope it didn’t embarrass him. It’s him I was thinking about, not you.”
I stalked from the room, my face aflame.
I went to college in Manhattan and lived in a women’s residence near school. For several months I took the subway into Brooklyn every Wednesday so I could have a piano lesson with Mr. Simmons, it being tacitly understood that I was too gifted simply to give up “my music,” as it was called; I slept at home on my old block, then went back up to school on Thursday morning. This became arduous. I became involved with other, newer things. I went home for a lesson every other Wednesday, and soon no Wednesdays at all. But I assured Mr. Simmons I would keep renting the small practice room at school and work on my own. I did for a while, but the practice room was very small and very cold, and the piano, a Steinway, didn’t sound as lush as my new Baldwin back home; there was an emptiness to my efforts without the spur of a teacher; and then there were so many other things claiming my time. I had met and made friends with kindred spirits from the High School of Music and Art, and realized that had I listened to my mother I might have known them three years sooner. The next year I got married, impulsively if not inexplicably; to tell why, though, would take another story.
Naturally my parents invited Mr. and Mrs. Simmons to the wedding. They were the only black people there, among some hundred and fifty guests. I had long been curious to meet Mrs. Simmons but regrettably I could not get to know her that afternoon since I had to be a bride. Flitting about, I could see that she was the kind of woman my mother and her friends would call “lovely.” And did, later. She was pretty, she was dressed stylishly, she was what they would call “well-spoken.” She spoke the appropriately gracious words for a young bride and one of her husband’s long-time students. In contrast to Mr. Simmons’ straightforward earnestness, she seemed less immediately engaged, more of a clever observer, and though she smiled readily I could not imagine her having a thunderous laugh. But she fit very well with Mr. Simmons, and they both fit with all the other middle-aged and middle-class couples present, except of course for their color.
Mrs. Simmons did not know a soul at the wedding and Mr. Simmons knew only the parents of the boy genius and a few of our close neighbors. My mother graciously took them around, introducing them to friends and family, lots of friends and lots of family, so they would not feel isolated. I thought she overdid it—she seemed to have them in tow, or on display, for a good while. I longed to take her aside and whisper, “Enough already, Ma. Leave them alone.” But there was no chance for that. And I knew how she would have responded. She would have responded silently, with a look that meant, “You can talk, but I know what is right to do,” which I could not deny. And in truth she was quite proud of knowing a man as talented as Mr. Simmons. And had she not introduced them they certainly would have felt isolated, while this way they were amicably received. (Any bigots present successfully concealed their bigotry.) My mother was only trying to behave well, with grace, and relatively, she succeeded. There was no way of behaving with absolute grace. You had to choose among the various modes of constraint.
For all I know, though, the Simmonses went home and remarked to each other about what lovely, fine people my parents and their friends were, and how strange it was that they could spend a pleasant afternoon talking just as they would to friends, even though they were all white. How very strange, Mr. Simmons might have said, shaking his head in a puzzled way, taking off his tie and settling down behind his newspaper. It is a soothing way to imagine them, but probably false.
I had always hoped to resume my piano lessons someday, but never did. And so after the wedding Mr. Simmons disappeared from my life. Why should it still astonish me, like a scrape from a hidden thorn? There were no clear terms on which he could be in my life, without the piano lessons. Could I have invited the Simmonses to our fifth-floor walk-up apartment in a dilapidated part of Manhattan for a couples evening? Or asked him to meet me somewhere alone for a cup of coffee? At what time of day? Could my parents, maybe, have invited the Simmonses over on a Sunday afternoon with their now teen-aged children and with my husband and me? Or for one of their Saturday night parties of mah-jongg for the women and gin rummy for the men and bagels and lox for all? Could Mr. Simmons, too, have made some such gesture? Possibly. For I refuse to see this as a case of noblesse oblige: we were all the middle classes.
But given the place and the time and the dense circumambient air, such invitations would have required people of large social imagination, and none of us, including Mr. and Mrs. Simmons, had that. We had only enough vision for piano lessons and cups of coffee and brief warm conversations about families, business, politics, and race relations, and maybe I should be content with that, and accept that because we were small, we lost each other, and never really had each other, either. Nonetheless, so many years later, I don’t accept it. I find I miss him and I brood and wonder about him: where is he and does he still, on summer days, play the piano for eight hours at a stretch, stripped to the waist and sweating?
SOUND IS SECOND SIGHT
A FARMER OF AUSTERE habits lived some ways from town in a ramshackle farmhouse, and he looked as forlorn and ramshackle as his house with its weatherbeaten wooden slats and cracked shingles. Tall, taciturn, dressed in drab, loose-fitting clothes, he would gaze down at the ground as he walked. He carried a gnarled walking stick and let his mud-colored hair droop around his face, and so he appeared older than he was. Actually he was not old at all, nor crabbed as some believed, merely a solitary. Out of habit he kept his distance, and the people of the town thought it best to keep their distance as well.
His only companion was a greyhound dog, slender, blond, and frolicsome after the manner of her kind. She was fiercely devoted to the farmer and, unlike the townspeople, not frightened off by his gnarled walking stick or his silence or his gaunt, shielded face. Outdoors, in the fields or in town, the farmer and his dog were silent and undemonstrative, yet they had the air of creatures very much attuned and in comfort together. The townspeople were puzzled by the dog. Not a farm dog by any means. Not a dog that could be useful. Her very prettiness and uselessness seemed out of place in that stony countryside, and when she strutted down the main street she drew hostile glances. Rumors sprang up that the dog, for all her prettiness, had sinister powers; possibly even the farmer did. Her origins were mysterious: all anyone knew was that after vanishing for several days the farmer had returned with the dog perched in the front seat of his truck, sniffing in her disdainful way.
In fact he had found her in a nearby and larger market town. The dogcatcher had seemed hesitant to sell her: a well-meaning fellow, he hinted that the dog had brought bad luck to former owners, best leave her to her fate. But the farmer had a sudden craving for the pretty creature, whom he had spied standing in a corner of the yard apart from the pack of other animals; she reminded him of himself, isolated, the butt of nasty tall tales, perhaps even ill-treated when young, as he had been. She had an unearthly howl, the dogcatcher also warned, wild enough to rouse the dead. But she made no sound at all in her corner of the cluttered yard, so the farmer paid no heed and bought her.
Evenings, alone in the house, they romped together in front of the fire, the farmer bellowing
and laughing, the dog yelping and snapping playfully. She barked seldom. Her bark was indeed loud and piercing, almost a howl, and it was as if she held it in out of deference to human ears. Despite his carelessness about the outside of the house, the farmer kept the inside pleasant and tidy: the wood floors, with their wide planks, were swept clean, the logs piled near the fireplace had a sweet smoky smell, and the soft cushions on the floor were inviting. Besides all that, the dog got good food to eat; she made a contented, obedient housemate.
And then one day after spending almost a week away at the nearby market town, the farmer and his dog came home with a bright-eyed wife, who also excited curiosity among the townspeople, and a few of the more outspoken wondered slyly whether he had found her in the same mysterious way as he had found the dog. She was small and rounded, with rosy cheeks, milky skin, and black curls. She smiled indulgently at the confusion of the dog, who bristled when she stroked her blond fur. She laughed at the farmer’s long shield of hair and brushed it off his really rather handsome face with a tender gesture. Nor was she much bothered by the ramshackle appearance of the house, for she saw that the inside was cheerful and tidy. The vegetable garden behind the house was her delight: under the farmer’s care, tomatoes and beans and peas were flourishing in such abundance she could hardly pick them fast enough. The people of the town, who could find nothing to fault her with since she was unfailingly courteous and proper, were astonished that so sprightly a creature could be happy living with the taciturn farmer, yet she appeared quite happy. When the three of them walked down the main street, it was the farmer and his wife, now, who were silent and undemonstrative, yet seemed very much attuned and in comfort together. The dog fretted alongside. Occasionally she gave out her lacerating howl, which made passersby start, and startled even the farmer, who hastened to quiet her. The dog was not neglected—the farmer still stroked her and spoke kindly to her and took her along daily to the fields, but in the nature of things it was not the same.
Acquainted with the Night Page 6
