Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  With the help of the more experienced stableboys, I soon picked up tricks of the trade: carrying a gooseneck lamp and extension cord on reading jobs (most music-stand lights won’t accommodate to pianos) and a pocket chess set or paperback book for killing time during long-winded after-dinner speeches; requesting ice water (heavy on the ice) from bartenders during breaks, drinking off the water, and replenishing the glass from my coat-concealed half pint for a tasty Southern Comfort on the rocks. From a Filipino busboy, of all people, I learned how to bring a piano’s flat notes up to pitch by strategically wedging folded cocktail napkins between the strings. I’d lift a cigarette-scorched piano lid and find a note from the previous pianist: “This box is a dirty dog. D and E above high C stick and a couple bass notes don’t work at all. If there’s a peculiar smell you can’t place I pissed in it closing night.”

  Complaints to management were usually futile. Catering managers and non-jazz club owners didn’t want to hear about defective instruments. The piano was invariably “tuned just last week,” or “Out of eighty-eight notes you got eighty-three in working condition; I wish I could count on that kind of percentage in my end of the business,” or “I’m sick of spending money on the goddamn thing, next time bring your own” (which a generation of pianists would be doing in the Seventies, trundling electric keyboards and fifty-pound speakers down hotel corridors like latter-day Willy Lomans). Keyboards sprinkled with missing notes can take the heart out of you; consider a gardener trying to work with the center teeth missing from his rake. At an after-hours club in Somerville I watched a black pianist dexterously hopscotching a string of non-playing notes using an aggressive stride technique. He called it his Jack-be-nimble style, developed over the years for dealing with “these rotten tomatoes,” and thought of his hands as leaping the candlesticks of dead notes. I expressed my sympathy and admiration for his resourcefulness. “There’re times you got to come on like Alexander the Great,” he told me. “You can’t let the suckers beat you down.”

  The Brigantine Club in Revere Beach was notorious for its rinky-dink atrocity of a baby grand. Ivories were discolored and chipped or missing altogether; the felts looked like they had been chewed by crazed rodents; the strings were coated with a whitish substance that could only be salt (on balmy nights did invisible sea mists waft through the open windows?); and the casing was studded with drink rings and cigarette burns. Early in the evening of my first Brigantine gig I punctured my thumb on one of the ragged ivories and began spotting the keys like a gored bullfighter dripping on the sand. I signaled the leader-saxophonist who was playing the lead on “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”; he wandered over, blowing as he walked; gazed at the keyboard, eyes bulging slightly, and wandered back to center stage, still blowing. (Musicians aren’t easily disconcerted; they’ve undergone too many bizarre experiences, witnessed too much craziness on the stand and out front. I once saw a woman at a drunken Gay Nineties brawl pour a schooner of beer into the bell of the tuba player’s horn. He gazed at her mournfully and kept on blowing—it sounded like frogs in a bathtub.) Between tunes a waitress handed me a bar rag, then quickly backed off. “You contagious?” she asked from a respectful distance. Naturally, I requested an explanation. “TB,” she said demurely. I said I knew I was thin, but not that thin. “Well, this movie I saw…” I knew the one she meant and instantly understood: Cornel Wilde as Frédéric Chopin coughing gobbets of red onto the gleaming ivories.

  During the break I bandaged my thumb and began wedging cocktail napkins between the salt-encrusted strings. An intelligent-looking bystander asked what I was doing. I explained, and he introduced himself: Dr. So-and-so, a gynecologist from Swampscott. In my inquisitive, small-town way I asked him what gynecologists always get asked by frustrated lechers: Don’t you get nervous examining all those beautiful chicks? His answer was eloquent and instructive (and possibly rehearsed): “My work is like that of the piano repairman who can only afford a modest instrument in his own home. When he hires out to a rich man to work on a magnificent concert grand, he does the best job he can and does not covet it. He understands it is beyond his reach.”

  I had occasion to return to the Brigantine two months later. Praying that the monstrosity had been replaced, I came fortified with Band-Aids and a liberal stash of Southern Comfort. Black Beauty stood in the window just as I’d left her, massive, bullying, unassailable. Disheartened, I lifted the top and found, Scotch-taped to the underside, a wry and piquant dissertation by a previous tenant: “This vintage instrument has a storied history. It was fashioned for Czar Alexander I of Russia in the fierce winter of 1857-58 by the craftsman Melinkov of Smolensk. Only small pedigreed animals from the czar’s private preserve had access to its innards during the long nocturnal hours, and even after a century’s lapse their musty fragrance and distinctive nibblings are still detectable. You’ll notice the instrument’s unusual sonority. Careful examination of the casing reveals the czar’s personal crest, an ingenious design of interlocking circles predating this century’s famed Ballantine rings and overlaid with a series of vertical grooves, each, by striking coincidence, approximately the size of an Old Gold.”

  Bandleaders will sometimes join forces and attempt to shame or coerce managers and proprietors into repairing a derelict. But it is a losing cause: many are beyond salvage and will hold a tuning only so long before reverting to their former primordial state. As Rudy’s first-call trombonist said to the Brigantine’s owner, “Here’s what you should do with this aberration: tune it, clean it thoroughly, refurbish the felts and hammers, polish the casing. Then hire a handyman to chop it up for firewood. And you know what you’d have?” The owner shook his head. “A bad fire.”

  Paradoxically, I encountered the rottenest tomato of them all at a sumptuous lawn party on a Wellesley estate. “Chinatown” was the motif. Paper lanterns strung in the poplar trees and silvered vessels of barbecued pork, chow mein, et al. warming over burners on red-clothed tables; a pagoda-roofed bar at one end of the wide lawn. We dressed accordingly: coolie hats and loose-fitting pastel cotton garments, intended, I gathered, to simulate the garb of rice-gathering peasants. Indian summer weather had prevailed for the past two weeks—blue and gold days and velvet nights—but on this night autumn fell like a clanging gate: a brisk fifty-five degrees and a good wind blowing. A half dozen electric heaters had been propped in the crooks of the tall trees.

  We got out of our tux coats, balled them up, laid them in the drum cases and donned our coolie shifts. The garments came in one size only, fitting the small guys like little girls’ dresses and making our beanpole bass player look like a night heron out of water. I played a trial run on the blond Baldwin spinet and—never mind my ears—didn’t believe my eyes. The keys went down and stayed down like the plug had been pulled on a player piano in mid-tune. With a sinking heart I took off the front and set it on the grass. The hammers I had struck were cocked back against the strings as if glued there, yet the tripping mechanisms and felts all appeared in good condition. I called over trumpeter-leader Tommy Tedesco, who was alternately blowing into his hands and blasting fat notes on his horn, trying to warm it. I pointed mutely to the depressed keys (Look, man, no hands). Tommy lowered his horn, chewed on a corner of his lip, and went off to find the hostess. Less than a minute later a skinny, alert-looking kid of about twelve approached. The guests were beginning to arrive, strolling through the mansion’s rear portal onto the illuminated emerald lawn.

  “I’m William. Mom says you have a problem.”

  “Watch.” I struck a full chord: ten more hammers shot back and stuck fast like flies on molasses.

  “Huh.” The kid stuck his head inside and poked around. “What are these metal things?”

  “No idea.”

  “But you’re the piano player.”

  “Right. Not a mechanic.” It was almost farcical; in what other profession are you so regularly sabotaged by the tools of your trade? Four hours of egg-foo-yung tunes on this abomination and I’d
be a shattered man, licking my lips and blinking vacantly into the night shadows.

  “I wonder if its being out overnight had something to do with it.”

  “The piano was outside all night?” I looked down at the grass; already the evening dew was dampening my shoes.

  “The guys who set up the tables and decorations moved it out yesterday afternoon. But we had a canvas over it.”

  “That wouldn’t have helped. The damp came from underneath and swelled the wood. It’s hopeless.”

  William’s face suddenly brightened. “Tell you what. I’ll stand here and free ’em for you.” By way of illustration he grabbed two handfuls of hammers and pulled them away from the strings. “See, now you’re back in starting position.”

  “You’re going to do that after every chord?”

  “Well, I’ll let you play for a few bars and accumulate a backlog.”

  We were looking brightly, kind of crazily, at each other. I was beginning to learn about the kids of the affluent: they were different, possessed of a special awareness and guile that had nothing to do with the streets. I’d already met ten-year-olds who were masterful con artists.

  “Tell you what you can do for me first. Bring me a stiff Southern Comfort on the rocks.”

  “We don’t stock it.”

  “Gin then.”

  “One double Beefeater over comin’ up.”

  We got under way, a motley crew of frigid coolies contriving chop-suey medleys—“China Boy,” “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” “Slow Boat to China,” “Japanese Sandman” (nobody would know)—out of range of the overhead heaters, shoes soaking in the damp grass. I’d play a bar or two, then lay out while William grabbed fistfuls of hammers and pulled them back in my face, announcing cheerfully each time, and driving me mad, “There you go, Mr. A., back to starting position.” Two or three times an hour he took off to fetch me a fresh gin from the bar. Tommy observed this traffic with growing unease, doubtless pondering his obligatory report to Rudy tomorrow, with someone else in the band finking if, out of friendship, he glossed over any indecorous exhibition on my part. But I’d worked under Tommy a dozen times and he knew by now that if I were going to get bombed, it would be a quiet, unostentatious, professional job.

  “Now you know how Lewis and Clark must’ve felt,” William said, depositing another gin and grasping a clutch of hammers.

  With the cold stiffening the horn players’ fingers and a piano chord infrequently punched in to no more advantage than a flung cowpie, every tune was starting to sound like “Donkey Serenade.”

  The shivering guests were beginning to desert the flagstone dance area, drifting back into the house, when Rudy put in his promised appearance. He sawed off a few bars on fiddle, wandered over to the piano, appraised the hammer situation (taking cursory note of the backed-up gin glasses), muttered, “Jesus Christ on a crutch,” and left.

  On my sixth gin, watching Tommy tuck his hands under his belt beneath the little-girl dress for warmth, I thought, Another year of Rudy, coolie hats, and assorted monkey suits, of moisture-sodden, rotten-tomato pianos, and I’d be reduced to a shadow of a man, devoid of talent, invention, and testicles. Might as well sew up ducks’ rectums in a meat market, or trade off with that waiter carrying a tray of fresh foo yung to the warming table; at least he wasn’t whoring, merely putting in his hours. He was doing his own thing (to cop a vacuous expression from a future decade) honestly, with purpose, invulnerable to shifting winds of fashion, ludicrous accouterment, and the whims of parvenu hostesses and ambitious bandleaders…

  “There you go, back to starting position.”

  And just after midnight, as William freed the hammers for perhaps the two hundredth time, I gave it up: sat with my hands in my lap, stuporous, gazing at the slender, shadowy pinnacles of trees tossing in a high cold wind as the band…played…on…

  “What’s the matter, Mr. A.?”

  “Out of gas, William. Beat. Cold and tired. Don’t care anymore.”

  “That’s okay, we all grow old sooner or later.”

  At one bell (a grandfather clock pealing faintly behind the diamond-paned windows) Tommy and company wrapped it up for the two diehard couples left on the flagstones with a final chorus of “Slow Boat to China”—the fifth time around for that serviceable ditty—and we shucked our coolie apparel and packed up. William helped the drummer with his cases and waved us off, standing amid the littered, sauce-stained tables under the Japanese lanterns: “So long, you guys, see you all later at that big tuning fork in the sky…”

  It would be sooner than William realized. The big fork sounded its knell for me before another month had elapsed. Rudy’s secretary phoned in mid-October to give me my week’s engagements. The last date was for Saturday night: Clearview Golf and Country Club, tux, eight to twelve. “And wear bathing trunks under the tux,” she added. I was sure I had heard incorrectly and asked for confirmation. She confirmed. I said, “Where are we playing, in the swimming pool? A fish pond? Is the club supplying aqualungs?” She testily repeated the information and hung up.

  I spent an uneasy week speculating on those bathing trunks. The fateful night arrived. “Gladiators and Charioteers” was the theme of the party, sponsored by the Junior League. Plaster statuary and colonnades amid the ferns; purple grapes cascading from six-foot papier-mâché urns; helmets and wreaths garlanding the heads of the tuxedoed and gowned revelers.

  At the first intermission Tommy Tedesco told us to bring our instruments—“Not you,” he smiled wanly at me; “Drummer, take two sticks, woodblock, and cowbell”—and we followed him to the downstairs locker room. Averting his gaze from us, frowning in concentration, Tommy undid the twine on the large clothing-store boxes, and the enigma was resolved: crepe togas. There was a moment of funereal silence.

  “Over the tuxes?” a tremulous voice piped.

  “Under. The tuxes come off,” Tommy said, removing his coat and his suspenders.

  “You’re pulling our legs.”

  “Let’s go,” Tommy scowled, unclipping his tie and unzipping his pants.

  “What happens if we don’t?” the second trumpet said, appropriating my question.

  In his canary-yellow bathing trunks Tommy looked at him incredulously. “Wha’ d’you mean? You have to.”

  These were family men, with kids in nursery schools and colleges. I was the least encumbered, but we were only seven pieces, three rhythm; without piano the band would go down in flames, and Rudy would do his damnedest to ensure that I never played another octave on a rotten tomato in the sovereign domain of the bean and the cod.

  “Next week it’s high heels and garter belts,” someone murmured resignedly, and the mass disrobing commenced, soup and fish shedding like black chrysalises.

  Musicians do not often see one another with their clothes off, nor should they. Never would you be likely to encounter a more goose-stippled, pale-fleshed, bandy-legged motley of bodies; never in a hundred years would you associate that locker room with the playing fields of Eton. The varicolored paper togas reached, contingent on the musician’s height, from mid-shin to mid-thigh. “Single file behind me, piano last,” Tommy said. “We go in with ‘Never on Sunday,’ three flats.”

  Upstairs, past the trophy cases and into the banquet room we wound, a Greco-Roman version of the Chinese dragon snaking among the tables with a clatter and tinkle and bray of horns. An excursion down Nightmare Alley to gargoyle smiles and decadent applause; all that was missing were the geek, the carny’s spiel, the barking of trained seals. The piano player in armed-forces parade bands is supplied a glockenspiel or helps carry the bass drum; that night at the Clearview Golf and Country I brought up the dragon’s rear, banging a cowbell with a drum stick. The nadir of a burgeoning career. Like Fitzgerald’s boat, beating on, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

  I jumped ship the following morning (a knife between my teeth for severing the life-line)—leaving word with Rudy’s secretary. Goodbye forever, old fellows and seals.
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  The last news I had of Rudy and his stable before I headed for San Francisco was in a Boston Globe account of a dinner-dance at the Copley Plaza Hotel. The society-page item concluded: “The scintillating music was provided by Rudy Yellin’s Orchestra. Enlivening the festivities were the antics of a member of the band attired in a colorful checkered vest who periodically got down on all fours and howled like a dog. The lovely flowers were courtesy of Baldoni-Heggins.”

  WRIGHT MORRIS (1910-)

  The plains of Nebraska figure largely in Wright Morris’s books. “The characteristics of this region have conditioned what I see, what I look for, and what I find in the world to write about.” Of his characters, he says, “I’m a spokesman for people who don’t want to be spoken for and who don’t particularly want to read about themselves.”

  Morris was born in Central City, Nebraska. He has written over forty works of fiction and nonfiction. In 1957, The Field of Vision won the National Book Award in fiction. In 1979, the Western Literature Association gave Morris its Distinguished Achievement Award. In 1981, Plains Song won the American Book Award for fiction, and the Los Angeles Times gave Morris its Robert Kirsch Award for a body of work.

  Morris has written three memoirs: Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe, 1933-34 (1983); The Cloak of Light: Writing My Life (1985); and Will’s Boy: A Memoir (1981).

  Will’s Boy covers the first nineteen years of Morris’s life. This part occurs between 1925 and 1930, when he worked with his uncle on a hardscrabble farm in Texas.