Black Piano: Miles in the Mix of Mourning

Here now in its Connecticut home, the black piano nestles in a corner of the dining room, which I like to call the music corner. On the surrounding walls are musical images: Della Robbia's Florentine dancing youths, Vincent Smith's print, "Riding on a Blue Note: 'Round Midnight." Atop the piano, besides the mail order catalogs which get dumped there, and the trays of cassettes which should be better housed closer to the audio equipment, are piles of music from three generations of family, music that just stuck to the piano like filings to a black magnet, and travelled with it into the present.

Poke in a pile and you'll find Grandma Burns's The New Blue Book of Favorite Songs, "new" in 1941, nearly an heirloom now. A little more digging unearths my mother's telephone-booksize collection of Beethoven Sonatas for the Pianoforte, with her college address and sorority affiliation (she was a Delta) neatly inked on the cover. My sister hasn't played this piano since the 1960s, and yet I find Kris Stepto's (she was "Kris" not Jan for about three adolescent years) Chopin Waltzes. My wife Michele and I didn't know each other when she was studying music in college, and yet Michele's Bach Riemenschneider is here with everything else, still tagged with a Stanford textbook sticker. And our boys: the music for piano and violin is Gabe's (he and Michele worked their way up to Vitale) and the bright red booklets with titles like Teaching Little Fingers to Play are Rafe's. These are relics, memories, of the pre-teen days before both boys, now young men, took up the acoustic guitar.

I, too, was a player of this piano and yet none of my sheet music remains. You will just have to believe that when I studied piano in the 1950s, with the teacher provided me, boys learned not the simpler Bach and such but items like the "Marines' Hymn" and countless cowboy songs, "Red River Valley," for example. I'm not there on top of the piano except perhaps in what a back issue or two of Living Blues might signify. Sometimes I vow that during my next leave from the university I will return to the piano; that when Mr. Deutsch comes in September to tune the piano after a summer's humidity, it will be a tuning for me, too. Perhaps that will happen this year. Meanwhile, I listen to Rafe play, amused by his new mutterings about "mastering" this instrument. Sometimes he impresses me with new sounds, new working-outs of something he is also exploring on guitar. Other times I am confounded by what it might all mean that all 6'2" of him is pouring itself into remembered exercises for "little fingers." What exactly is he remembering?

The piano arrived in New Haven in 1976 to our Chapel St. house, my mother having sent it to us along with a few pieces of outdoor furniture when she and my father moved to the high-rise apartment she would live in the rest of her life. I knew why they had no need of the outdoor furniture anymore, but the inclusion of the piano was a mystery. The apartment is spacious, especially in its living room; the piano, a special Steinway model designed for apartments, could have fitted most anywhere. And I don't think that being on the 28th floor was a real deterrent: professional movers can carefully move a piano anywhere, especially if the piano is compact. But the piano came our way, and we gratefully took it in, my feelings being quite like those when an aunt recently sent me all her family photos: if I am the one she wants to have these precious things, then so be it.

But I must admit that I wondered then, and am still wondering, what my mother...