"These Luchenbachs are very special, you know," he said. "Weren't many made quite like this one."
Katie couldn't help staring at his hand as he caressed the keys slowly, lovingly.
"You know this piano?" she finally asked.
"Oh yes, this little sweetie and I go way back . . . back to when my wife was pretty and my eyes were good." He chuckled and absently checked the clasps of his suspenders. "She was a real looker, Agnes was. Not so hot today, though, but then again, neither am I." He laughed outright. "No, I'm the piano man—or what's left of him," he said with a snaggle-toothed grin that Katie found no humor in at all.
"Have you always lived alone?" he asked abruptly.
"Yes," Katie replied before she realized it. "I mean, no, " she said quickly, and a little too loudly.
"We all live alone in a way, Miss Prescott," Trister said softly.
Katie sat silently, angry with herself and the flush of heat on her cheeks.
"Gifted people very often choose to live alone," he continued. 'You have a gift too, Miss Prescott, a talent."
"No, I don't," Katie said, but the words sounded far away.
Trister nodded his head and smiled, and Katie thought she heard him say, "Good, good," but was not sure. She felt small and cold and confused, and could not stop watching Trister's hands as he chocked and tuned, chocked and tuned.
"Oh, and Miss Prescott, you're missing a wire on the second B above middle C . . . right here." He reached out and played the note. "Can you tell the difference?"
He played an octave below and one above for Katie to compare. She was amazed at his complete command of the keyboard, his ability to find the right note without seeming to orient himself to the keyboard in any way. She remembered being drilled in theory by a teacher who demanded perfection and punished each incorrect note with a wooden ruler across the knuckles.
"When I replaced the keys I must not have noticed that wire." He gathered his tools and deftly replaced them in his case. "I'll call you next week and we'll set a date to fix it."
As he rose to leave, he knocked over his glass. It bounced, launching ice cubes across the living room floor. Katie knelt to retrieve the ice and to catch the rolling glass.
"Don't worry, it didn't break," she said.
"I know." Trister started for the door, but turned and looked down at Katie. Several moments went by as his left eye went down, to the left, and up behind the lid, over and over again. "Do you know what 'trister' means?" he asked.
The melting cubes were burning her palm with icy fire, and from her position on the floor, the piano man looked immense.
"It's from the Middle English word 'triste,' but it meant the same as tryst does today. A trister was the hunter who stayed hidden while the rest of the hunting party drove the game in his direction—he had a tryst to keep with his quarry, so to speak. Well, it most certainly was a pleasure. I'll be in touch." With that, he turned and tapped his way to the front door.
Katie remained kneeling for several minutes until she realized a number of things at once. Her hand was painfully cold, her knees ached, and she had left Mr. Trister on his own to make his way down the stairs to wait for his ride. She went to the front porch, but there was no one there. She didn't remember a door slamming or hearing a car pull away. The late-summer afternoon seemed unusually silent, and although the sky was a crisp, clear blue, the air felt threatening, as if a thunderstorm were about to break.
Pensively, Katie returned to the Luchenbach and cracked her knuckles to ease the constant tinge of arthritis in her left hand. She noticed that Mr. Trister had neglected to lower the top of the piano. Inside, written in pencil on the backboard, she saw names and dates:
KAUFMAN 6-4-79 ALLEN 8-6-78 SHUTTS 7-4-77 OTT 9-22-76 NELSEN 8-6-75
Katie stood on tiptoe and peered inside, but the list continued farther than she could see. She wondered why Mr. Trister hadn't added his name and the date to that day's tuning, then she remembered that he couldn't see the list. Damn that creepy old man, she thought, as she lowered the lid and then thumbed through a stack of sheet music.
Katie turned to page one of Richard Rodgers's Slaughter on Tenth A venue and struck the first chord. It sounded harsh and loud, like a handclap in a still, bare room. She stopped, frowned, moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue, and tried again. The striptease dance—allegretto. Fight between Junior and Misha— allegro. Junior dances with Vera's dead body—andante doloroso. Katie felt as if there was an invisible audience in the room, a thousand pairs of ears listening, appraising, judging. Once again it mattered. Once again her performance had to sound right, flow right, be right. Her back started to hurt; her hands ached, her eyes felt tired and gritty. The simplest sonata began to take enormous concentration. Her mistakes sounded louder now, more glaring, more frequent.
Soon, exhausted and angry, Katie tumbled onto the overstuffed blue and white sofa and slept fitfully, the beat of her pulse keeping time with a metronome that went down, to the left, and up, over and over again, while a voice whispered, "Good, good," so closely to her ear that she could feel its hot breath.
It was near midnight when she awoke, sprawled uncomfortably across the sofa, her mouth dry and cottony like the keyless piano in the store. Sofa cushions were strewn on the floor and she stumbled over them as she wobbled into the kitchen for a drink. Sipping tepid orange juice by the light of the refrigerator bulb, Katie felt as if she'd polished off a bottle of cheap whiskey during one of her depression drunks. She squinted across the counter, but no empty bottle of Chymes Canadian Royal mocked her as it had so many times before. I have a gift, all right, she thought bitterly. A real talent. You were right about that, Mr. Trister. I have talent. All dressed up and nowhere to go.
The tiny refrigerator light hurt her eyes. She closed the door and leaned against it in the dark while she finished her juice.
Seated at the piano once again, Katie felt across the keys in the dark. She went over each uneven edge with her fingertips, trying to understand why she had bought the Luchenbach in the first place. She hadn't felt this way since she left home, this combination of the exhilarating power of musical ability and the paralyzing fear that she just wasn't good enough. Not good enough for Carnegie Hall, not good enough for her parents, not good enough for anyone. We may all live alone in a way, Mr. Trister, but some of us are just plain alone, Katie thought.
She began to play, but there was no grace to her music—no lilting quality to the tones. She felt as if she were merely pounding the keys with slender mallets of flesh, and that the Luchenbach, angered by such treatment, was becoming less and less responsive. The action felt stiffer, the hammers flailed aimlessly, the strings refused to resonate; each note was swallowed up by the thick, hot darkness. Incomplete passages of Chopin, Bartok, and Clementi teased her ears and her fingers tripped awkwardly across the keys like clumsy dancers.
Finally, in tears, Katie tried to play children's songs with one finger . . . "Chopsticks," "London Bridge," "Mary Had a Little Lamb" . . . but she found that she was unable to remember even a simple tune from start to finish. It was as if the music was trapped inside her head, unable to come out, unable to be remembered. After a long silence, the barest hint of a melody whispered in her ear—familiar, but she couldn't quite grasp it. She began to follow it, note by note . . .
G, E, down to middle C, A, G, A, back to middle C, E,G, E, A, E,G, E...
Her index fingers pecked out the proper notes, matching the melody in her head . . .
F, G, F, E, F, D, down to G below middle C, up an octave to G, E ...
And while she played, head bent and eyes straining through the darkness at the back of her hands, another hand slid from beneath the hinged music desk and grasped her wrists in a cold, steely grip. Katie bolted backward, kicking at the piano and knocking the chair over, but the hand maintained its hold.
She tugged and lashed out in wild panic, grunting, panting, too afraid to cry out. The hand began to pull her toward the piano—sl
owly, so very slowly—and Katie fought to get away. She leaned forward, bit the hand, and gagged. It tasted of age and dust and death. And it was strong. Impossibly strong. It continued to pull her into the piano, inch by inch, oblivious to her struggle. Its cruel fingers pressed tightly into her flesh and the tuning pegs dug into her back as she was drawn into the cold labyrinth of wood and wire and metal teeth.
Then Katie heard something that made her stop struggling for an instant. A distinct humming. A voice humming. Finding her breath at last, she screamed for help, kicked, cried, and thrashed about inside the piano, becoming more entangled by the second. The wires cut into her arms like blades of ice and the little wooden hammers pummeled back at her agitated movements.
The humming grew steadily louder, and Katie suddenly stopped. It was coming from the thing that continued to draw her deeper into the piano . . . and when she recognized the tune—the same tune she had been trying to play, the same tune she had had to listen to over and over all afternoon—a sickening shiver raised each hair on end and tiny rivulets of cold sweat became itching, burning, unreachable rivers. In the darkness, two milky-white eyes opened and peered at her. One was stable; the other navigated a curious circle—down, to the left, and up. Katie felt a damp, callused hand begin to fondle her neck, so slowly, so tenderly. No matter how loudly she screamed, she could still hear "Mairzy Doats."
When it was silent at last, a gnarled fist grasping the worn stub of a number-two pencil poised at the top of the list of names inside the piano and, perfectly in line with the others and in the same, peculiar spidery handwriting, wrote
PRESCOTT 8-30-80
An editor does not dare puss up a story like this.
FOLLOWING THE WAY by AIan Ryan
Twenty years ago, in my senior year at Regis High School—a very fine and very private Jesuit preparatory school on the upper east side of Manhattan—vocations to the priesthood were the order of the day. As I recall, twenty-five or so of the one hundred and fifty members of my graduating class entered the seminary, most of them, not surprisingly, choosing the Society of Jesus. Not all of them are priests today. (For that matter, not all of the Jesuits who taught me at Regis are priests today.) But vocations were in the air in that school, then half a century old already, and I suspect that, even today, few boys pass through their four years of study without at least considering, however briefly, the possibility of the priesthood. I did. I think we all did. We had behind us, though immediate in our thoughts, a long and impressive tradition. And before us we had some very powerful male role models: priests whom we respected as teachers and scholars, men who had devoted their lives to God, to an ideal, and to us, men who were clearly happy in their work, and who were, at the same time, interesting. The exceptions—sadly and most notably, the headmaster of the school during my four years there—only emphasized the union of humanity and spirituality in the others. For a boy with the inclination, the lure was hard to resist.
Those boys who were so inclined naturally sought and found willing advisers among the priests and scholastics on the faculty. But the rest of us—a spiritually silent majority—were not overlooked by the ever-thorough Jesuits—oh, no—and, sometime during the first half of our senior year, each of us was invited into the office of the Jesuit student counselor for a private chat. (I should stress that there was no coercion here. At Regis we were seldom "ordered" to do things; rather, we were "invited.") I remember that, in my case, the priest—a kind, charming, very learned, and often sickly man named William Day—who will figure prominently in this chronicle of my vocation—engaged me in polite conversation for some minutes without raising the question that I knew very well was at hand. The idea was that, if I had been reluctant to acknowledge interest in the priesthood before now, this would be my golden opportunity. I said nothing, and the poor man—as he had no doubt done a hundred times in the previous two weeks—had to broach the subject himself. Had I, he wondered casually, ever considered becoming a priest? Yes, Father, I answered, I had. Ah ha, he said, nodding gently. You've thought about it? Oh, yes, I said. And what conclusion have you reached? It's not for me, I said. Oh, he said, I see, and stopped nodding. And why is that? he asked. Sex, I said. Apparently I said it with such conviction that he was thoroughly convinced of my thinking on the subject and ended the conversation there and then. But times and people change.
I went from four years with the Jesuits at Regis High School to four years with the Jesuits at Fordham University. The Lincoln Center campus was then only in the planning stage, and I was always glad I missed it. (Leave it to the Jebbies, we joked in the cafeteria, to luck into expensive real estate and a good address.) Like my classmates who accompanied me from Regis, I was happy to exchange East 84th Street for the Rose Hill campus in the north Bronx. The Third Avenue El still rattled past the campus then and the traffic was heavy and noisy on Fordham Road and Webster Avenue, but the campus itself was an island, a green and peaceful island apart from the world outside, firmly anchored in bedrock by the pylons of handsome Keating Hall, its gray fieldstone blocks and clock tower so quintessentially representative of American college architecture that fashion photographers and TV crews filming commercials were often to be found on its steps. It was a lovely place: the green expanse of Edwards Parade, the rose-covered trellis in the square beside Dealy Hall, the musty antique air of Collins Theatre, the richly detailed chapel that sang aloud to God, all of it peaceful and lovely.
The Jesuit priests there were much the same as those at Regis—a little more worldly, perhaps, a little wittier, a little more acerbic, a little more eccentric, but, in all that mattered, essentially the same. I admired them, admired the wit and the learning and the grace with which they moved through the world, the casual self-assurance, the flair. My father had died when I was a child and there were no other male relatives close by, so, lacking a model at home, and primed by four years at Regis, I naturally turned toward these men and sought to emulate them. It was not a bad choice.
I spent most of my time in college—intellectually, at least, and psychologically, I suppose—as a young gentleman in a nineteenth-century novel might have spent his time at Oxford. I wrote some poetry, submitted some stories to The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, and spent a great deal of time pursuing women. I read—in Greek—Plato and Aristotle and Euripides and, to lighten the mood, Sappho and the poets. (Xenophon and Homer had been amply translated at Regis.) Horace, Catullus, and Livy held sway in Latin class. Ronsard, Racine, Flaubert, Camus, Ionesco, were read in French; Dante in Italian; Chaucer in Middle English. I majored in French for three of the four years, studied linguistics and the gothic novel and early American literature and European history and "gentlemen's biology" and did some Russian on the side, in addition to the equivalent of full majors in philosophy and theology that were required of all under-graduates at the time. Most of my teachers were Jesuit priests.
One afternoon in the spring of my junior year, I was coming down the steps of Keating Hall when I met that same Jesuit who had offered me my golden opportunity to confess a vocation at Regis. I had heard through the Jesuit grapevine that he'd been unwell and was now at Fordham, taking courses and regaining his strength. It was a warm day—not warm by summer standards, but warm for April after winter's chill—but the priest was buttoned up tight in a black raincoat that obviously still had its winter lining in place. I knew him to be in his early forties, but a casual observer might have guessed him ten years older than that. Looks can be deceiving.
"Hello, Father Day."
He slowed his already slow progress up the shallow steps of Keating and mumbled the half-smiled greeting teachers offer former students whom they no longer recall. But I had stopped where I was and apparently something compelled him to raise his eyes to my face, and when he did so, he halted too. Eyes momentarily alive, he scrutinized my face.
"Regis," he said.
I smiled and said yes.
"Three years ago?"
"Yes."
&n
bsp; "Of course," he said. His eyes narrowed, and before I could remind him myself, he told me my name, as casually as if I'd last been with him yesterday.
These Jesuits, I thought.
I was about to ask him how he was, but he spoke before I could.
"Sex," he said, and we laughed together, remembering. "Most succinct answer I ever had," he said, "and a good one, a good one."
We stood on the steps, chatting easily and pleasantly. He seemed eager to know how I was doing at Fordham, what I was studying, who my teachers were, what plans I had for the future. In high school there had been much talk about "the Regis spirit," one manifestation of which was the invisible but substantial tie that links alumni whenever they encounter each other in the world in later years. It can make confidants of strangers, this common baggage of shared learning, assumptions, attitudes. Father Day, I knew, was a Regis man himself, and I was warmed by this tangible evidence of the Regis spirit in action. After a few minutes, he suggested that we go to the Campus Center for coffee—his treat—and since I had been heading there myself when we met, I readily agreed.
We sat for two hours, happily telling stories about mutual acquaintances at Regis, stories that often made us laugh as we compared quite different versions of the same events as seen from the sides of students and faculty. Then the conversation gradually drifted back to me and my life at Fordham and my future and I wasn't even surprised when Father Day inquired casually if I had ever thought again about the possibility of a priestly vocation. I had, of course. In a setting like that— spiritual, intellectual, psychological—one does. It was—and here I measure my words with extra caution— a not unattractive possibility. But, still, it was not attractive enough to win me over. My interest in that direction was based primarily on practical and pragmatic considerations, and definitely not on any "call from God to His service" that I had felt. He smiled understandingly when I told him I had thought about it but my conclusion remained the same.
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