The Confessions of Frances Godwin (35 page)

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do now. The opera invitation was still on the table. Naples and Reggia Calabria. Stella wanted me to go, kept after me. What could I do?

What did I know for sure? What insights could I count on? I kept coming back to the same ones, kept going around in a circle.

“You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” I’d read that in a Sunday supplement. It’s the sort of insight that you can keep drawing on. You don’t just say “I get it” and move on. It stays with you. But Stella
was
happy.

“There’s more than bed to marriage.” If you don’t understand this one, you haven’t been married for more than six months or so.

“If what you’re doing right now isn’t meaningful, it won’t become meaningful if you keep on doing it forever.” Something Father Viglietti used to say.

But there was a fourth thing, too, not exactly an insight, but something that kept demanding to be heard, one that is this: that the
casta diva
experience was now at the center of my life. Beauty, and not just any beauty. The kind of beauty I recognized in Chopin and Brahms, in Vergil’s
lacrimae rerum
and in Catullus’s farewell to his brother; in the swallows that gather in the sky at the end of “To Autumn” and in the autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa; in the Caravaggios in the French church in Rome and in still lifes by Chardin, in the glimpse of 3C 273 we had through Professor Moon’s telescope back in 1980, right after my father died, and in the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp that had passed our way in 1997, right after Paul’s death. It was the kind of beauty I saw in the old house on Prairie Street before we moved in—empty but full of promise—and after we moved out—empty but full of memories. I wanted to be able to command this beauty, to call it forth under my fingers. I was still thinking of it as a kind of window I could open at will, the kind of window through which we can catch a glimpse of our true home. But now I believe I was mistaken about this, as I’ve been mistaken about so many things.

I tracked down our old Blüthner in a Pentecostal church in the Quad Cities, the Church of the Evangelical Brotherhood. The piano had needed some work when I sold it to a music store in Moline. Frank Johnson, who had tuned the piano for us, said, at the time, that I was lucky to get two thousand dollars for it. The music store had sold it to a church for (I found out later) five thousand. Fair enough. I bought it back for three thousand after lengthy and unpleasant negotiations. The piano looked fine, but it hadn’t been tuned in ten years. Middle C didn’t play at all. A lot of the notes repeated when you played them. The pastor went to his study to pray on my offer while I negotiated with the chairman of the Stewardship Committee. I never found out what God had told the pastor. I was out of there before he came back. The pastor, that is. The chairman of the Stewardship Committee had already folded up my check and stuck it in his billfold.

The piano was delivered a week later by a big, strong man wearing a Cubs hat, like Ruthy’s. It was strapped onto a dolly, a special self-propelled dolly. The elevator was too small, but this dolly could climb stairs, using a special track that the piano man laid down. I went to get my camera and by the time I got back the dolly had negotiated the landing and was almost at the top. I took several photos as the dolly moved, under its own power, down the deck and through the dog gate, and turned into the apartment.

I had spent the previous day moving all the books in the hallway, and the bookcases, into my bedroom and into the living room, to make sure there was room for the piano to negotiate the hallway. The dolly carried the piano into the living room. The moving man went back to his truck to get the legs. And the deck that holds the music. When he came back he gave a command with a little remote, like a TV remote, and the dolly turned the piano to a horizontal position. The mover attached the legs. The dolly set the piano down. The mover went back to his truck to get the lid and the lyre (the pedal assembly). The piano fit beautifully, angled into the bay window. Right where it belonged.

I wrote out a check for three hundred dollars, which seemed pretty reasonable to me, and the mover guided the dolly back down the long hallway and out onto the deck. Without the piano, the dolly fit nicely into the elevator.

That night, when I came out to get a drink of water, the piano startled me. I couldn’t see it itself, just a mysterious shadowy space, darker than the dark, like a black hole.

I showed the photos to the piano tech who came to look at the piano while I was in the process of moving the books back into the hallway.

“I hope he was fully insured,” he said. “Did he give you a proper bill of lading?”

“He gave me something,” I said.

“Humph,” he said.

The piano tech’s name was Karl Holm. He had retired to Galesburg, his hometown. He’d grown up on Mulberry Street, had apprenticed to a piano tuner, then worked as a piano tech at Lyon & Healy in Chicago, where Paul’s mother had bought the piano in the first place. When Lyon & Healy closed their retail stores, he tuned for the Swedish pianist Magnus Magnusson. Now he lived alone in the house he’d grown up in at the end of Mulberry Street. I drove by his house on the way to the grocery store. His father had known Carl Sandburg, and he himself could remember a time when the seven loft apartments were a sort of dormitory for railroad workers, and the Packing House parking lot had been a coal yard. The little barber shop at the end of the alley had been the coal man’s house.

He knew many of the great tuners, including Franz Mohr, Horowitz’s tuner. A Bible thumper. He didn’t know how Horowitz put up with him, but a lot of pianists did. He was the head tech for Steinway and a great tuner.

I made a pot of espresso as he explained what he could and could not do in the confines of the apartment. He could not refinish the cabinet in the apartment; he could not replace the cast-iron plate; he could not replace the sounding board or pin block. Fortunately, none of these things had to be done, and there were many things that he
could
do.

He jotted down a list as we drank our coffee, which I served on a little tray with sugar and little spoons.

What Mr. Holm proposed to do was this:

Minor repairs: glue loose joints, remove broken screws, repair loose screw holes.

Clean.

Replace strings, hammers, and tuning pins—which would have to be specially ordered. About three weeks.

Regulate. (I would have some decisions to make about tone and action.)

Tune. (More decisions.)

All these things could be done in the living room provided I didn’t mind letting him use the long harvest table, where I ate, for his work table. Regulating and tuning could be done in two days, but replacing strings, hammers, and tuning pins, which would have to be special ordered, would take much longer.

“Let’s do it,” I said. “It will be like hearing the music of the spheres.”

He didn’t laugh. “I’m a Pythagorean,” he said. “You have to be, to be a piano tuner. Though it’s more complicated than Pythagoras thought. If he’d had a piano instead of a lyre he would have had a better grasp of the problem of fitting fifths and octaves together.”

“Do you know that you can still hear the sound from the Big Bang?”

“I didn’t know that. What does it sound like?”

“You can’t actually
hear
it. It’s like the microwave background—outside the visible spectrum. These are sounds outside the audible spectrum. You need a computer simulation.”

He spooned the sugar out of the bottom of his cup. “I’ll tell you what’s really odd,” he said. “Do you have any idea what happens when you push down a piano key?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so. What happens is, you push the top of the key down. Then the back of the key goes up and pushes on a capstan. The capstan pushes on a wippen. The wippen pushes a jack. The jack pushes on the hammer knuckle. When the hammer is halfway to the string, the back of the key starts to lift the damper lever, and just before the hammer strikes the string, the jack toe hits the regulating screw. The jack slips out from under the knuckle so the hammer can keep going. The hammer strikes the string and rebounds. The knuckle lands on the repetition lever and pushes it down. Then the tail of the hammer catches the back check and stays put till the key is released.

“It’s like one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions. You remember Rube Goldberg?”

“You mean like the napkin that opens up when you lift your spoon?”

“Exactly. It’s fastened to strings that are tied to the spoon. When you lift the spoon .
.
. They’re called
Was-passiert-dann
machines in German.”

“My father used to like them.”

“All these things have to be regulated. Everything has to work together, like a Rube Goldberg machine. You have to level the keys, regulate the key dip, travel the hammers, align them to the strings, align the wipes to the hammers, regulate the jacks to the knuckles, adjust the hammer height, the hammer drop, the key stop rail, the damper stop rail, the hammer rail lift, the hammer striking line, the repetition spring tension
.
”

“What’s a wippen?” I asked.

He started to explain—“The wippen transmits the motion or the key to the hammer”—but I couldn’t follow. I was reminded of God’s explanation of baryonic oscillations.

He showed me the wippens in the piano, but they were crowded together so tightly I couldn’t really see the mechanism; but I could see that it had a lot of parts. “It’s another Rube Goldberg machine,” I said, “inside a Rube Goldberg machine!”

“Exactly, and the repetition mechanism is another, and the jack and let-off. Rube Goldberg machines in a Rube Goldberg machine. You’ll be able to see what I mean when I replace the hammers.”

I fixed another pot of espresso while he poked and prodded the piano, like a doctor auscultating a patient.

After coffee he asked me to play something on the electronic Yamaha. I was suddenly self-conscious. I couldn’t think of anything to play, so I played a C-major scale.

“Mrs. Godwin,” he said. “You can do better than that.”

I rushed through the opening of the Bach Fugue in C Minor from the
The
Well-Tempered Clavier.

“Slow down,” he said. “You’re not trying to catch a train. Bach said that the piano plays itself. All you have to do is find the right notes and press the keys. But the amazing thing is that a good pianist can transmit his own distinct interpretation by the way he strokes the keys.” He had shifted into lecture mode. “Horowitz and Rubenstein were both romantics, they both played Chopin, but totally differently. Horowitz had a clear concept of every piece he played, observing every nuance, every cadence . . . Rubenstein was more impetuous. But in both cases the soul of the pianist entered the body of the piano, if you know what I mean. But you can’t do it on this electronic piano. Just listen,” he said. “Play the top notes.” I played through the top octave. “There’s nothing up at the top. You’re not really hearing notes. There’s no way for the soul to enter the body. You can press the key or strike it, it doesn’t matter electronically. You can try to seduce the piano, or you can try to conquer it; it won’t make any difference. You need the Rube Goldberg machines.”

It was all becoming clear.

“The music of the spheres, though?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “And that’s what’s so amazing.”

Karl—we were now on a first-name basis—took the piano apart while he was waiting for new Swedish steel strings to arrive. He laid everything out on the harvest table. I took pictures. I wanted to document every step of the way. I wanted a record. Wanted to be able to see it. I photographed the pieces of piano—the action, the new hammers, the wippens, the jacks and knuckles, the agraffes (which anchor the strings), and the keys themselves, which were spread out at one end of the table, at the opposite end from the tools. Each one was labeled. They were all different.

I was not allowed near the piano without safety goggles while he was putting on the new strings. “Go read a book,” he said. It was difficult to take photos while wearing safety goggles, but I got some good shots. The living room was full of strange sounds, too, as Karl reamed out new bushings, hammered in tuning pins, tightened strings with a coil winder a little at a time. And it was full of strange smells, especially the animal-hide glue that he heated in a thermostatically controlled electric glue pot, and some piano “dope” that reminded me of the smell of the baby’s diaper in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Regulating a piano turns out to be like regulating the universe. You have to get the fundamental forces just right (the action, the repetition spring tension, the agraffes, the regulating screws), and you have to tinker with the constants: octaves, fifths, and thirds. These intervals are themselves stable, but they don’t fit together as neatly as you’d expect. A series of perfect fifths and perfect thirds will not fit perfectly into a series of perfect octaves. You have to make compromises. That’s why the sound of the early universe, the sound that God produced in the back of Saint Clement’s, sounded so indeterminate. The early universe needed to be tuned, like a piano, and according to Karl, there were lots of different ways you could do this—Pythagorean, just intonation, mean-tone temperament, equal tuning . . .