The Piano Tuner

by Peter Meinke

Alice stood up, walked to the narrow alcoved window, and sat down on the ledge. It was beginning to rain, and passersby hunched their shoulders and pulled their coats tight around their necks. She stared at her streaked reflection in the window, through which, it seemed to her, the dark apartments across the street were frowning.

  “Dan, do you love me?”

  Tap-tap.

  “No, Dan!” she cried. “Don’t do that! Tell me the truth. Do you love me more than any woman in the whole world?”

  Tap.

  Tap.

  Tap. Tap. Tap. Alice put the receiver on her lap and opened the window, the slanting rain spotting her dress, tapping in gusts across the slippery ledge and over the pane.

  Ruby Lemons

  “Ruby lemons,” Jack gushed all at once, turning from his typewriter. “High ruby lemons.” He smiled his crazy smile at Mr. Mason, shaking his head up and down. The monkey leaped from his lap to the top of the china closet without seeming to touch anything else. Three plates with pictures of churches on them were balanced on top of the closet and, leaning precariously against the wall, rolled back and forth as the monkey paced in front of them.

  “Pesky, get down here!” Aunt Dodo cried. “He means high bilirubins. Jack has always had a high bilirubin count and they don’t know what to do about it.” They all turned to Jack; he looked down and shuffled his feet.

  “He never gets it right,” continued Aunt Dodo, while Aunt Lottie and Aunt Gussie smiled at Jack and he smiled hugely back. “But it always comes out like real words. He’s a poet, is what he is.” Jack all but nodded his head off his thin shoulders. “Poetry,” he said.

  “You know what Jack calls Miss Pennyfeather? Mrs. Ferry Weather!” said Aunt Gussie. The three gray-haired sisters laughed and Jack joined them with an explosive snort. “Ferry Weather!” he said, and turned back to his typing. Mr. Mason tried to smile, too. The monkey swung back down and settled in Jack’s lap again, leaving the cups in the china closet swaying in unison on their hooks, like a line of chorus girls in hoopskirts. Two of the sisters had been chorus girls, if only briefly, and Aunt Lottie had been a lead singer in church groups and little theaters; they all were musical, even in their sixties and seventies. They liked nothing more than to gather around the small black spinet and sing the old songs again, with Aunt Lottie playing and Jack providing a surprisingly good, if erratic, male tenor. Jack suffered from cerebral palsy, but for some unknown reason music seemed to clear the blocked roadways of his brain and he could follow along with them, though he had a tendency to go on after the others had stopped, repeating, soulfully, “alive alive-o” at the end of “Cockles and Mussels” four or five times before realizing the music was over.

  They lived in a tall gray skinny house in St. Paul, somewhat isolated because of vacant lots on either side and a practice field in the back that belonged to nearby Hamline University. In the summer several huge lilac bushes gave it a festive air, but in the long winter the wind banged the house so hard that its curtains blew as if the ancient windows were open. There were three small bedrooms upstairs, one for each sister; the downstairs was a classic example of shotgun architecture: from the front, four rooms lined up in a row—the living room (with the piano), dining room, kitchen, and, in the back, Jack’s bedroom. He liked to sit at his window and watch the college girls run back and forth, flailing their field hockey sticks at the bounding ball. “Hole!” he would shout when one of the girls scored, as elated as she was.

  Jack was twenty-seven and his interest in girls was as much a topic of conversation in the house as the high number of bilirubins in his blood. In fact, Uncle Frank used to say, when he caught Jack watching the girls, “Bilirubins a little randy today, eh, Jack boy?” The sisters were more sedate and circumspect, though they tried to interest some of the girls in coming to play checkers with Jack, because he enjoyed their company so much, and the sisters thought it was healthy, someone close to his own age. But one of the girls had got frightened, over nothing at all, and this had brought Miss Pennyfeather and the shadowy disturbance of the State into their lives.

  Aunt Gussie, at sixty-four the smallest and youngest of the sisters, worked as a part-time librarian at Hamline, and the last girl she had brought home, a petite brunette sophomore named Thelma Freese, had been nervous from the start. Gussie had explained about the cerebral palsy and how Jack loved to play checkers and needed the company of young people, but his appearance had clearly startled her and, to be honest, Jack had been in one of his more manic moods. He had been one of those children who couldn’t swallow, the muscles of his tongue and throat working backwards to propel the food out instead of in, and he still looked starved: when he was animated, his thin, twisted body jerked about like an emaciated puppet.

  Most of the girls had been big tough farm girls from Minnesota who took his looks in stride and who could squeeze back when Jack surprised them with his powerful left-handed shake (although he could type with his right hand, he had difficulty raising it). As Aunt Lottie would say, these girls didn’t know diddly about checkers and didn’t expect to win, taking pleasure in Jack’s gleeful capture of their pieces. And when they said good-bye, after tea and homemade honey buns, the tears in Jack’s eyes were so genuine that they forgot their embarrassment at not understanding what he was saying, as he talked faster and faster, trying to hold them. Each one was beautiful to him, said Aunt Dodo; he fell in love at every single checker game he ever had, which is why they had to ration them severely. He was upset and moody for days afterward, mooning at his window, searching out his love among the strong-limbed, panting girls galloping back and forth across the hockey field.

  But Thelma got scared, or repelled, right away, forgetting to put out her left hand as Aunt Gussie had instructed her, then wincing with pain as Jack squeezed her hand backwards.

  “Jack’s been typing package labels and addresses for almost eight years now,” Aunt Dodo explained. “He works for a mail-order company and makes very good money.” This was not entirely true, the pay was pitiful, but the sisters were proud of Jack’s job and praised him for it. He was a slow typist, but faultless, a perfectionist: every address centered, every letter correct. And over the years his hands and fingers had grown strong, at least compared to the rest of his underweight and undersized body. His large pale head wavered on a stalk of a neck; beneath a high forehead his blue eyes were long-lashed and intelligent, with an upsetting ability to enlarge enormously at moments of excitement or frustration.

  “Do you like chickens?” Jack asked, in a rush. When he smiled, the gold in his teeth glinted. Any other girl, said Aunt Dodo, would have known he was talking about checkers, but Thelma seemed unable to make the tiniest leap of imagination, and this in turn made Jack self-conscious and nervous. Some of the other girls had put him so at ease that he was able to talk very well; long, complicated sentences came tumbling out, only slightly garbled. At times he was so pleased with what he said that he’d have to excuse himself and go look in the mirror, tilting his head as if thinking, So that’s what I looked like when I said that! But Thelma just looked puzzled no matter what he said, and turned helplessly toward the sisters.

  Perhaps to control herself, she played checkers with grim determination and intensity, growing more and more angry as Jack marched across the board, moving very fast and without apparent thought. Although Thelma was small she had prominent breasts and Jack stared at them with obvious enjoyment. This was a trait, the sisters claimed, that he picked up from Uncle Frank who, as he headed into his sixties, would sit on the porch watching the college girls go by on their bicycles. When a particularly pretty one passed, he would stomp his feet and bang his head on the porch railing.

  Thelma’s face turned a deep red and it was hard to say which emotion was causing it. In the third game, when she had jumped one of Jack’s pieces only to suffer a double-jump in return, she cried, “Stop looking at me like that,” so startling Jack that his arm twitched, sweeping the pieces off the board, and they clatter
ed and rolled on the parquet floor. The monkey leaped off his lap with a shriek and began scooping up the checkers with his long black clever fingers, carrying them to the top of the china closet. In the confusion Jack began to cry, his head on the table, his body wracked with convulsive sobs. Aunt Dodo wrapped her arms around him, but he only sobbed louder. Thelma jumped up, ran out of the house, and—Aunt Gussie found out later, when she returned Thelma’s abandoned jacket—complained to the dean about “that madhouse” on the edge of the campus. The dean had his secretary get in touch with the proper Social Service organization, and the end result was the initial visit of Miss Pennyfeather, which had not been an unqualified success.

  Miss Pennyfeather was really quite nice, though it was difficult to explain to her what Jack was doing in a house with three old ladies to whom he was not related and who had not adopted him. Wasn’t he dangerous? she wanted to know; he had badly frightened Miss Freese.

  “She frightened him,” Aunt Dodo huffed. “No one has spoken to him like that since he picked up Frank’s revolver five years ago!”

  “What?” said Miss Pennyfeather.

  Lottie’s husband had been a policeman, Aunt Dodo explained, pointing to the pair of handcuffs hanging from a hook on the side of the china closet, and one time Jack had picked up Frank’s service revolver. It was empty, of course, not like the time Lottie herself had picked one up, but when Jack playfully pointed it at him, Frank had walked up to the boy and slapped him across the face for his own good. Jack had cried for weeks, it seemed, but he got over it because he understood that Frank had hit him because he loved him. And no one had spoken sharply to Jack since that time.

  “We think Jack understands everything,” Aunt Dodo concluded. “He just gets it bottled up inside him.”

  Jack was the son of another policeman who had joined the St. Paul force about twelve years ago. Uncle Frank was the man’s immediate superior and soon found out that the boy was a source of despair, financial and otherwise, for his parents. They began bringing Jack over on weekends to be watched by the three sisters, and then eventually during the week, too, where he was cared for by Aunt Dodo, the oldest, who had retired from teaching at the age of sixty-two because of a goutish leg that made standing for long periods of time impossible. Aunt Dodo had taught typing, and she continued to do what came naturally to her: she taught Jack to type, to the great amazement of his parents, though not to Frank and her sisters. “She could teach the Pope to eat pork,” said Uncle Frank, who had mixed-up notions of other religions’ dietary practices.

  It was a perfect arrangement, emotionally and practically. At the time Aunt Dodo and Aunt Gussie, neither of whom had married, lived upstairs, and Uncle Frank and Aunt Lottie, childless, lived below. They were a passionate family, fond of music, politics, pinochle, checkers, and cribbage, not to mention the monkey Pesky, whom they had acquired when Lottie shot the organ-grinder. There had been burglaries in the neighborhood; Frank had been teaching her to use a small derringer when he was called to the phone, and the gun had gone off, according to Lottie, by some form of spontaneous combustion, shooting through the front window and wounding a passing organ-grinder named Ugo Pesti, whose name they thought to be Pesky until they saw it written down. They took him into the house for some first aid and saw him several times after that for the purpose of negotiation, the end result being a small settlement in cash and the purchase of Pesky, a stout capuchin monkey whose humorous expression and tonsured head gave him the look of a miniature Chaucerian friar.

  Frank had tried to protest. “What do we want with some damned African monkey swinging through the house by his tail?” he said. “We’ll all get fleas and start jibbering like Tarzan.” Here he beat his chest, and the monkey, either thinking he was being called or because Frank was the only other man, jumped on his shoulder and clasped him around the neck. It was the right move to make.

  The monkey sipped at, but scarcely lowered, the great reservoir of affection and energy the sisters possessed, so when Jack came into their lives he stepped into a void aching to be filled. Aunt Dodo, in particular, couldn’t get enough of him and Jack throve under her constant care. He had tended to be sickly, subject to fits and other disorders, but his health improved as she increased her time with him. Conversely, when Jack moved into the spare bedroom upstairs (ostensibly so his mother could get a full-time job), his parents’ marriage broke apart, as if he had been the cement that held it together. After a while they divorced and moved to another city, leaving Jack behind, though nothing much was said and no papers were ever signed: Jack was in his twenties after all . . . Not long afterward Uncle Frank died suddenly, within a week of retirement, and now, three years after that, the sisters lived on a combination of Social Security and small pensions, plus Gussie’s half-time salary. “But the house is paid for,” they said, seeing Miss Pennyfeather’s frown, “and Jack has a steady job, too.”

  Miss Pennyfeather pressed her pretty lips together and shook her head, causing Jack to imitate her, which he did quite well, narrowing his eyes like someone who knows there’s a mouse in the soup.

  “It’s not the money I’m mainly worried about, at least not yet,” she said, looking at the three gray heads lined up on the couch. “We could even help you on that score.” Miss Pennyfeather was sitting in the old black rocker and Jack was in his chair at the typewriter, Pesky sprawled on his lap. She began to explain, but Aunt Dodo covered her ears, so she stopped.

  Aunt Lottie covered her eyes.

  Aunt Gussie covered her mouth.

  There was a silence while Miss Pennyfeather considered what to say. Jack broke the spell by turning red and guffawing, banging his left hand on his knee so that Pesky leaped up to the china closet.

  “Get down here!” Aunt Dodo said, as the sisters lowered their hands. “Frank used to tell us it looked like three more monkeys in the house when we sat on the couch together, so we used to do that to tease him. I’m Hear No Evil.” She looked around at the others for approval.

  “Jack loves us to do it, so we try to do it at least once a day,” said Lottie. Jack was smiling, covering his eyes with his left hand.

  Miss Pennyfeather decided her best resource was her natural dignity. “What I worry about, frankly, are your ages.” She hesitated. “Is your ages. What will happen to Jack when you’re gone? He’s become dependent on you. What if you get sick? It seems to me you have very little leeway for emergencies. Who would you contact?”

  The sisters had no idea where Jack’s parents were. The mother had gone to St. Louis, Aunt Gussie thought. “But she didn’t even like Jack,” she whispered as Jack typed. “She was afraid of him. She didn’t think he could learn anything.”

  “When we taught him to play pinochle, she didn’t believe us,” Aunt Lottie remembered. “So we invited her over to watch. But she didn’t know how to play pinochle herself—can you imagine?—and insisted we were just throwing cards in a pile.”

  “Jack was so nervous and proud he kept dropping the cards,” Aunt Dodo put in. “Frank said he was doing it on purpose to throw us off our games.”

  “Well,” said Miss Pennyfeather, “I think we could find the parents. Maybe that’s the thing to do. It seems you’ve done an excellent job with him”—she smiled, standing up—“and Miss Freese was just a little over-excited. We just want to do what’s best for Jack, the same as you. What I’ll do now—I’m just what is called a preliminary field reporter—is to make a report, and you’ll be hearing from someone in the agency fairly soon. Thank you very much for the honey buns, they were delicious.” As she awkwardly backed out the door, the three sisters stared at her without smiling. Jack’s hands were frozen above his typewriter, and even Pesky seemed to be pointing an accusatory finger.

  Mr. Mason, the man from the agency, didn’t show up for almost four months, so they had almost talked themselves into believing that he was never going to come. But he came, finally, early in January when snow was banked high against the house, and the north wind shu
ddered against the doors and windows, so that they were sitting inside with heavy sweaters on, drinking tea and playing cards in the kitchen, which was the warmest room in the house. Jack was typing at the table set up between the dining and living rooms, wearing a long stocking cap that Pesky occasionally took a swing at. The Christmas decorations were still up. On the front door hung a lopsided circle of pine cones strung together.

  “Jack did that,” said Aunt Lottie, letting Mr. Mason in. A large heavyset man with a melancholy air about him, he shivered and kept his long dark coat on as the sisters settled on the couch, shifting and fluttering like birds in a nest. “He did a lot of the decorations.” The tree had no electric lights but had clumps of tinsel, cutouts of angels and stars, bright-colored paper chains, and a few ornate, though aged, Christmas balls.

  Mr. Mason had several reports: one from Jack’s doctor about the high bilirubin level in Jack’s blood, one from Miss Pennyfeather, and one from the agency reporting that Jack’s mother had still not been found and that Jack’s father didn’t know where she was. He was a night watchman in Chicago, had remarried, and his new wife had three young children. Jack’s father was happy with the situation as it was; and no wonder, said Mr. Mason.

  Aunt Lottie burped. “Cucumbers and radishes always repeat on me,” she said. Mr. Mason wasn’t sure the sisters had been paying attention. They were waiting for the bottom line.

  “What we’re concerned about,” he pronounced, looking at each sister in turn, “is that Jack be protected in case of emergencies. Suppose he starts having seizures again? This is always possible, with a high bilirubin count like his. And you don’t even have a car. Another problem is, is he realizing all of his potential? I know,” he hurried on, as the three old women stiffened as one, “that you have done wonders with him and have taught him a great deal. But we aren’t quite sure how much he knows or how much he can do.”