The Piano Tuner

by Peter Meinke

“He’s good at cards,” said Aunt Gussie, “and nobody can beat him at checkers! Would you like to try?”

  “Chickens,” blurted Jack from the typing table.

  “No, no,” said Mr. Mason, waving his hand. “Not now. I know how good you have been for him, but I have the feeling he would learn even more in a more”—he paused, searching—“educational environment.”

  There was a stunned silence. The sisters looked as if they had been simultaneously slapped. Jack’s typewriter stopped.

  “Goddamnit to hell,” cried Aunt Dodo, her thin white hair flying in the draught. “How can you talk like that? If you try to take that boy you’ll have to take me, too!” She stood up, lurching on her bad leg, and roughly grabbed Jack’s motionless hand. While Jack’s eyes bulged until they almost blew out of his head, she snatched Uncle Frank’s handcuffs off the china closet and snapped them over his corded twisted wrist and her mottled brittle one. She waved the key in her other hand.

  “I’ll swallow the key,” she shouted, her old voice cracking with fierceness. “I’m ready!”

  “Go to it, Dodo,” said Aunt Lottie, although the key looked entirely too large to go down without strangling her.

  Mr. Mason was not an unreasonable man. He looked nervously at Jack, who was changing color every few seconds. He was thinking many things at once. One was that maybe Jack was keeping these old harridans alive and would continue to do so. Another was, well, he could always keep track by a phone call every few months. The last, somewhat ungenerous, one was, simply, if they wanted him so much, they could have him. Save the State money. He would figure something out temporarily.

  “Very well then,” he said, with as much formality as he could muster. “Keep working with him. I’m going to send you some forms and I’ll expect a report every few weeks.” Gussie got up and opened the door for him without saying anything. The icy wind ruffled the Christmas tree, the drying needles dropping off and drifting across the floor. Mr. Mason stepped out into the world.

  Gussie pulled the door to and walked over to the typewriter where Aunt Dodo and Jack clustered in a state of shock. She took the key, opened the handcuffs, and hung them back on the china closet. Jack put his head against Aunt Dodo’s withered breast and they stayed there, the truest lovers in the world. Aunt Lottie sat down at the spinet; it was going to be a night for singing.

  “Lily robins,” Jack whispered. “Goddamnit to hell.”

  “Listen to him,” said Aunt Dodo. “Finally he gets something right.”

  The Ponoes

  When I was ten years old I couldn’t sleep because the minute I closed my eyes the ponoes would get me. The ponoes were pale creatures about two feet tall, with pointed heads and malevolent expressions, though they never said anything. What they did was to approach me slowly, silently in order to build up my fear (because I knew what they were going to do); then they would tickle me. I was extremely ticklish in those days. In fact, I could hardly bear to be touched by anybody, and the ponoes would swarm over me like a band of drunken and sadistic uncles, tickling me till I went crazy, till I almost threw up, flinging my legs and arms around in breathless agony. I would wake up soaked, my heart banging in my chest like the bass drum in the school marching band. This lasted almost an entire year, until the Murphy brothers got rid of them for me.

  Because the ponoes would come whenever I fell asleep, I hated to go to bed even more than most children. My parents were not sympathetic. Ponoes didn’t seem that frightening to them, nor were they sure, for a long time, that I wasn’t making them up. Even my best friend, Frankie Hanratty, a curly-haired black-eyed boy of unbounded innocence, was dubious. No one else had ever heard of them; they seemed like some sort of cross between elves and dwarfs. But where did I get the name? I think my parents felt that there was something vaguely sexual about them, and therefore distasteful.

  “Now no more talk about these, um, ponoes, young man. Right to bed!”

  “I’m afraid!” That year—1942—I was always close to tears, and my bespectacled watery eyes must have been a discouraging sight, especially for my father, who would take me to the Dodger games at Ebbett’s Field and introduce me to manly players like Cookie Lavagetto and Dixie Walker. I had a collection of signed baseballs that my father always showed to our guests.

  Because I was terrified, I fought sleep with all my might. I read through most of the night, by lamplight, flashlight, even moonlight, further straining my already weak eyes. When I did fall asleep, from utter exhaustion, my sleep was so light that when the ponoes appeared on the horizon—approaching much like the gangs in West Side Story, though of course I didn’t know that then—I could often wake myself up before they reached me. I can remember wrestling with my eyelids, lifting them, heavy as the iron covers of manholes we’d try to pry open in the streets, bit by bit until I could see the teepee-like designs of what I called my Indian blanket. Sometimes I would get just a glimpse of my blanket and then my eyelids would clang shut and the ponoes were upon me. It is possible, I suppose, that I only dreamed I was seeing my blanket, but I don’t think so.

  Sometimes I would give up trying to open my eyes, give up saying to myself This is only a dream, and turn and run. My one athletic skill was, and remains still, running. There were few who could catch me, even at ten, and today, premature white hair flying, I fill our game room with trophies for my age bracket in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races along the eastern seaboard. Often, toward the end of a race, I hear footsteps behind me and I remember the ponoes; the adrenalin surges again, and the footsteps usually fall back. But in my dreams the ponoes would always gain and my legs would get heavier and heavier and I’d near a cliff that I would try to throw myself over, but it was like running through waist-deep water with chains on and I would be dragged down at the edge. This, I suppose, with variations and without ponoes, is a common enough dream.

  My mother was more compassionate to me because at that time she too was suffering from a recurring dream. She would find herself lost in a forest, on a dark path. The ground was soft beneath her bare feet. With a vague but mounting terror she would begin to run; it soon became clear she was running on a carpet of toads and frogs. The path ended at a huge pit into which the frogs were tumbling, pouring. Whatever it was that was pursuing her approached and she screamed. Sometimes she would scream only in the dream and sometimes she would scream in actuality as well. But since her dream only came once a week, or even less frequently, she didn’t have the problem with sleeping that I did. Even she would lose patience with me, mainly because my schoolwork, along with everything else, suffered. Mother was very high on education and was determined that I was going to be the first member of our family to go to college. Norman Vincent Peale preached at a nearby church and the neighborhood was awash with positive thinking.

  During this year, since I scarcely slept in bed, I fell asleep everywhere else: in the car, at the movies, even at dinner, a true zombie. In the winter I liked to curl up on the floor near the silver-painted radiators, whose clanking seemed to keep the ponoes away. I would drop off at my desk at school, once clattering to the floor and breaking my glasses, like some pratfall from the Three Stooges, whom we watched every Saturday afternoon at the Quentin Theater. Eleven cents for a double feature, it was another world! But Miss McDermott was not amused and would rap my knuckles sharply with her chalkboard pointer. She was a stout and formidable old witch, and when she first came at me, aiming her stick like an assassin from Captain Blood, I thought she was going to poke my eyes out and leaped from my seat, to the delight of my classmates, who for weeks afterwards liked to charge at me with fingers pointed at my nose.

  We had moved from the Irish section of Boston to the Irish section of Brooklyn, and my father, Little Jack Shaughnessy, liked to hang around the tough bars of Red Hook where—he told me—there was a cop on every corner looking for an Irish head to break. My father was Little Jack and I was Little Jim (or Littlejack and Littlejim) because we were both short, but he was husky,
a warehouse worker at Floyd Bennett Airport. Though he was not a chronic brawler, he liked an occasional fight and was disappointed in my obvious fear of physical violence.

  “Come on, Jimmy, keep the left up.” He’d slap me lightly on the face, circling around me. “Straight from the shoulder now!”

  I’d flail away, blinking back the tears, the world a blur without my glasses, like a watercolor painting left in the rain. To this day, when I take off my glasses I have the feeling that someone is going to hit me. Oddly enough, it was fighting that made me fall in love with the Murphy brothers, Tom and Kevin, though love may not be exactly the right word.

  I was a natural-born hero-worshipper. Perhaps I still am. When I was young, most of my heroes came from books—D’Artagnan, Robin Hood—or movies, characters like the Green Hornet and Zorro, or real actors like Nelson Eddy, whose romantic scenes with Jeanette MacDonald made my classmates whoop and holler. I would whoop and holler, too, so as not to give myself away, but at night, fending off the ponoes, I would lie in bed in full Royal Canadian Mountie regalia singing, in my soaring tenor, “For I’m falling in love with someone, someone . . .” while Jeanette would stand at the foot of my bed shyly staring down at her tiny feet, or petting my noble horse, which was often in the room with us. This fantasy was particularly ludicrous as I was unable to carry a tune and had been dubbed a “listener” by Miss McDermott in front of the whole music class, after which I spent the term moving my mouth to the words without uttering a sound.

  The Murphy brothers were tough, the scourge of P.S. 245. Extorters of lunch money, fistfighters, hitters of home runs during gym class, they towered over most of us because they were older, having been left back several times. Tom was the older and meaner; Kevin was stronger but slow-witted, perhaps even retarded. Tom pushed him around a lot but was careful not to get him too mad, because there was nothing that Kevin would not do when in a rage, which became increasingly evident as they grew older. Pale, lean, black-haired, they wore white shirts with the sleeves rolled up and black pants and shiny black shoes: for brawlers they were very neat dressers, early examples of the Elvis Presley look, though they never looked as soft as Elvis. Most of the rest of us wore corduroy knickers, whistling down the halls as we walked, with our garters dangling and our socks humped around our ankles. Small and weak, I wanted nothing more than to be like the two fighting brothers, who seemed to me to resemble the pictures of tough soldiers, sailors, and marines that were posted everywhere.

  The Murphys had strong Brooklyn accents (they called themselves the Moifys), but the whole neighborhood was declining that way and the schools fought valiantly against it: accents were bad in 1942. I still remember the poem we all had to recite:

  There was once a turtle

  Whose first name was Myrtle

  Swam out to the Jersey shore . . .

  Tom Murphy would get up in front of the class (like many of the others), grinning insolently, scratching obscenely, ducking spitballs, and mutter:

  Aah dere wunce wuz a toitle

  Whoze foist name wuz Moitle

  Swam out to da Joizey shaw . . .

  We would all applaud and Tom would clasp his hands above his head like a winning prizefighter and swagger back to his seat. Miss McDermott never hit the Murphys—she had wise instincts—but tried to minimize their disturbance (distoibance!) by pretending they weren’t there.

  But there they were: they had cigarettes, they had the playing cards with the photographs that made us queasy, they wrote on the bathroom walls and the schoolyard sidewalks. Of course, they must have written obscenities, but in the fall of 1942 they mainly wrote things like KILL THE KRAUTS and JAPS ARE JERKS: they were patriotic. I thought of the change when I visited my daughter’s high school last week. Painted on the handball court was YANKEE GET OUT OF NORTH AMERICA.

  And, suddenly, Tom Murphy adopted me. It was like the lion and the mouse, the prince and the pauper. Like a German submarine, he blew me out of the water and I lost all sense of judgment, which was, in 1942, a very small loss. Perhaps it was because I was so sleepy.

  On rainy days when we couldn’t go outside to play softball or touch football we stayed in the gym and played a vicious game the Murphys loved called dodge ball. We divided into two sides and fired a soccer-sized ball at each other until one side was eliminated. The Murphys, always on the same side, firing fast balls the length of the tiny gymnasium, would knock boys over like tin soldiers. I was usually one of the last to go as I was so small and hard to hit; no one worried about me because I was incapable of hitting anyone else, and eventually would get picked off. But one rainy September week while our marines were digging in on Guadalcanal and Rommel was sweeping across Egypt the coach had to call the game off twice in a row because the Murphys couldn’t hit me before the next class started. They stood on the firing line and boomed the ball off the wall behind me while I jumped, ducked, slid in panic, like a rabbit in front of the dogs, sure that the next throw would splatter my head against the wall. Even when the coach rolled in a second ball they missed me, throwing two at a time. The truth was, I suppose, that the Murphys were not very good athletes, just bigger and stronger than the rest of us.

  The next day was a Saturday, and I was out in front of our house flipping war cards with Frankie, who lived next door, when the brothers loomed above us, watching. Kevin snatched Frankie’s cap and he and Tom tossed it back and forth while we crouched there, waiting, not even thinking, looking from one brother to the other. Finally Tom said, “Littlejim, go get me a licorice stick,” and stuck a penny in my hand. “Fast, now, get a leg on.” Mostroni’s Candy Store was three blocks away, and I raced off, gasping with relief. The thought had crossed my mind that they were going to break my glasses because I had frustrated them in dodge ball. I’m sure I set an East 32nd Street record for the three-block run, returning shortly with the two sticks: two for a penny, weep for what is lost. Tom took the sticks without thanks and gave one to his brother, who had pulled the button off Frankie’s new cap. Frankie still squatted there, tears in his eyes, looking at the three of us now with hatred. He could see I was on the other side. I sold Frankie down the river and waited for new orders.

  “Can you get us some potatoes?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think so.” Tom glared at me. “Maybe one.”

  “Make it a big one,” he said. “I feel like a mickey.” Mickeys were what we called potatoes baked in open fires. All over Flatbush you could smell the acrid aroma of charred potatoes.

  “My cap,” said Frankie. Kevin dropped it in a puddle from yesterday’s rain and stepped on it. Ruined. Frankie picked it up, blindly, holding it with two fingers, and stumbled up the steps to his front door. We lived in a row of attached two-story brick houses, quite respectable, though sliding, with a few steps in front (on which we played stoop ball) and a handkerchief-patch of lawn, surrounded by a small hedge. In front of our house was the lamp post by which I could read at night, and next to it a slender young maple tree that my father would tie to the lamp post during strong winds.

  I went through the alley to our back entrance and found my mother working in our Victory Garden of swiss chard, carrots, radishes, beets. My father went fishing in Sheeps-head Bay every Saturday, a mixed blessing as he would come back loaded with fish but in a generally unstable condition so we never knew what to expect. Today I was glad, as it would make my theft easy. My mother looked up as I passed. “Littlejim, are you all right?” She has always been able to look right into my heart as if it were dangling from my nose, a gift for which I frequently wished to strangle her.

  “Of course,” I said with scorn in my lying voice, “I’m just thirsty.”

  “Well, have a nice glass of milk, sweetheart,” she said, wiping her forehead and peering at me. I trotted into the kitchen and looked in the potato pail beneath the sink. There were around ten left, so I took a large one and a small one, stuck them in my shirt, and went out the front door. The Murphys were waiting down the street
by the vacant lot, the fire already going.

  Thus began my life of crime, which lasted almost eight months, well into 1943, for which I showed natural gifts, except temperamentally. I was always trembling but never caught. I graduated from potatoes to my mother’s purse, from packs of gum at the candy store (“that Nazi wop,” said Tom) to packs of cigarettes at the delicatessen: the owners watched the Murphys while my quick hands stuffed my pockets full of contraband. Under the protection of the Murphy brothers, who beat up a German boy so badly that he was hospitalized, who dropped kittens into the sewers, who slashed the tires of cars owned by parents who tried to chastise them, I collected small sums of money from boys much larger than myself. Like Mercury, god of cheats and thieves, I was the swift messenger for Tom and Kevin Murphy.

  I loved them. They needed me, I thought, not reading them well. What they needed was temporary diversion, and for a while I provided that. Kevin was virtually illiterate, so, beginning with the Sunday comics one afternoon, I became his official reader. He read (looked at) nothing but comic books—Plastic Man, Superman, Captain Marvel, The Katzenjammer Kids. Sheena, Queen of the Jungle was his particular favorite because of her lush figure and scanty clothing.

  “Get a load of that,” he’d squeak (Kevin, and to a lesser extent Tom, had a high nasal whine). “What the freak is she saying?”

  “‘Stand back,’” I’d read. “‘There’s something in there!’”

  “Freaking A!” Kevin would shout. He got terrifically excited by these stories.

  It was not long before I was talking like the Murphys, in a high squeaky voice with a strong Brooklyn accent, punctuated (in school) by swear words and (at home) by half-swear words that I didn’t understand. My mother was horrified.

  “What the freak is this?” I’d shrill at some casserole she was placing on the table.

  “Jimmy! Don’t use language like that!”

  “Freak? What’s wrong with that?” I’d say in abysmal ignorance. “Freak, freaky, freaking. It doesn’t mean anything. Everyone says it.” This is 1943, remember.