Twice a week throughout the school year, Arlene took piano lessons at the Shadyside YWCA. The other five days she practiced on the upright in the back parlor to the steady ticking of the metronome, lagging behind the tempo then rushing to catch up, tripping over tricky fingerings, making her way page by page through yet another red Thompson book. “Spinning Song.” “Blind Man’s Bluff.” “Dreaming.” The year culminated in an Easter recital they dressed for like church, at the end of which Henry, cued by their mother, approached the stage and presented Arlene with a bouquet of red roses even if she’d made a half dozen mistakes. When, one evening at dinner near the beginning of school, his mother asked Henry how he would like to take piano lessons like his sister, the question was rhetorical. She’d already signed him up.
A pleading glance at his father told him there would be no appeal. As in everything, his parents were agreed. Henry’s education, like Arlene’s, was his mother’s purview, and any further protest would be held against him. Henry stewed over his meatloaf, defeated. How long had they been plotting this?
He did his best to keep it a secret, knowing his friends would be merciless if they found out. The YWCA, as the name stated, was for women, meaning he’d be doubly shamed. Having donned an altar boy’s robes, he’d already been accused of wearing a dress, an insult which prompted a wrestling match that stopped when Chet Hubbard accidentally ripped Henry’s collar. At the sound of cloth rending, the circle of club members urging them on went quiet, as if a sacred rule had been broken. As Chet tried to apologize, Henry inspected the tear—glaring, irreparable—knowing what awaited him at home. The only thing he feared more than being called a mama’s boy was his mother.
Now he entered a world completely female, and strange. The teachers at the YWCA were students from the Frick Conservatory, high-strung young women who flocked from around the world to study with Madame LeClair, who’d studied with Liszt, who’d studied with Czerny, who’d studied with Beethoven himself, a lineage his mother trotted out for relatives and dinner guests alike, as if Henry or Arlene might be an undiscovered genius. To earn their room and board, Madame LeClair’s students helped the daughters of Pittsburgh’s rising middle class with their sight-reading and finger dexterity, bringing them along note by note, bar by bar. At the recital they rose to introduce their pupils, then sat back down in the front row to bear their inevitable flubs with serene equanimity. They stayed two years, occasionally three, before setting off for life on the concert stage, never to be heard from again.
Arlene’s teacher, Miss Herrera, was returning, but Henry’s was new. Miss Friedhoffer was German, a willowy strawberry blonde with a slight overbite whose ringless fingers spanned a full octave and a half. She was taller than his mother yet slender as a girl, which made her hands even more freakish. The practice room was a cell, just the piano and a chalkboard lined with staves on the opposite wall, no window. Miss Friedhoffer closed the door and took a seat beside Henry on the bench. To his confusion, she was wearing makeup, her cheeks rosy with blush. Her posture made her seem alert, a soldier at attention.
“Sit up straight,” she said, gently pulling his shoulders back. “Relax your elbows. Like so.”
At ten, Henry was unused to the company of young women, exotic or not. At school his teachers were his mother’s age or older, the girls in his class catty and standoffish. With her accent and her lipstick, Miss Friedhoffer was like someone from a spy movie. When she reached across him to fix his wrists, she smelled warm and yeasty, like fresh bread. On her neck she had a caramel birthmark the size of a dime, like a giant freckle. Under her pale skin a blue vein jumped.
“We play the C to begin,” she said, pointing a manicured nail, and Henry obeyed. “Good. So. You know the C is here, you are never lost. You know where you are, always.”
She pressed the key and sang, “C, C, C, C. Now you. Sing with me. Good. Now we go up a full step to D, here.”
At first when she patted the small of his back to make him sit up straight, he flinched. Soon he anticipated it, just as he looked forward to her shaping his fingers over the keys. He imagined when she was his age people made fun of her hands. Like a knight, he wanted to defend her from them. As he blundered his way through the major scale, he was aware of her humming along beside him, their legs nearly touching, and when the lesson was over and she let in the next student, he lingered at the door, his stiff new exercise book tucked under one arm, as if he’d forgotten something.
“Goodbye, Henry,” she said, rewarding him with a smile. “Practice well.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I will.”
On the trolley, he thought it was the first time he’d ever liked his name.
“How was your lesson?” his mother asked.
“All right.”
Later, over dinner, his father asked the same thing.
“It was okay.”
“His teacher’s pretty,” Arlene taunted.
“Is that right?” His father was amused.
Henry was caught off guard. He thought only he could see Miss Friedhoffer’s true beauty.
“Do you like her?” his father asked.
Any answer Henry might give would be wrong. He shrugged. “I guess.”
“Apparently she’s also German,” his mother said. She would never forgive them for killing his uncle.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” his father said.
“I’m sure she is.”
That his secret love was also forbidden added an operatic guilt to his yearning. To win her, he resolved to be a perfect student, except that without her there to inspire him, practice was drudgery, and despite his best intentions he quickly fell behind. Instead of looking forward to the bliss of Miss Friedhoffer’s presence, he began to dread disappointing her, and manufactured a series of suspiciously timed illnesses. After a meeting with Miss Friedhoffer, his mother charged Arlene with overseeing him. Now, five days a week, while he served his hour in the back parlor, she hectored him from the loveseat, looking up from her book if he went silent for too long, and day by day, page by page, miraculously, he began to improve.
“That’s very good, Henry,” Miss Friedhoffer said, turning to him. “You see what happens when you practice.”
When she looked into his eyes, he felt a paralyzing helplessness, as if she could read his mind. He imagined her taking him in her arms, her warm fragrance enveloping him, his cheek pressed against her slippery silk blouse. Instead, she licked a fingertip and flipped to the next page, an exercise meant to strengthen his left hand.
The truth could be hidden only so long. One gray Thursday in November as he and Arlene were getting off the trolley, Marcus Greer and his little brother Shep were waiting to get on. Henry was still in the sated, dreamy state that possessed him after a lesson, and didn’t have the presence of mind to hide his book. The red cover was a giveaway. Marcus nodded, leering, to let him know he’d seen, and the next day, after a long and restless night, Henry girded himself for the worst. He was early for school, the bell hadn’t rung yet. His friends were waiting in their customary spot at the top of the steps, by the flagpole. Out of a sense of poetic justice, he hoped Marcus would say something to him, but before Henry could reach them, Charlie Magnuson, who’d lost his front teeth riding his bike down the steps on a dare, shouted, “Hey, Mozart!”
In the principal’s office, when his mother asked him why he’d been fighting with a friend, Henry told the truth. “Because I have to take piano lessons.”
“That is not an answer,” his mother said.
“I know you don’t like going to lessons,” his father said later, the two of them alone in his office after dinner. He sat at his roll-top desk in his shirtsleeves. Spread across the blotter were curling blueprints for the building his firm was working on downtown. There was no chair for Henry, who stood like a prisoner, arms at his sides. “We all have to do things we don’t want to in life. We do them for the people we love, or for the greater good. Sometimes we do them for our own good, without knowing it at the time. Do you like going to school every day?”
Henry hesitated, unsure if he was supposed to answer. “No.”
“No, but you understand it’s for your own good. Your mother and I have good reasons for wanting you and Arlene to take lessons, so I suggest you make the best of it.”
Henry wanted to ask if he’d ever had to take piano lessons, but there was no point extending the pantomime. He’d paid his debts to all parties, and he was getting what he wanted. “Yes, sir,” he said, penitent, shook his father’s hand to seal the deal, and he was free.
That winter he lived to be with Miss Friedhoffer. The keenness she brought to the sky at dusk as he and Arlene waited for the trolley, the evening star caught in the wires. For Christmas he gave her a tin of cookies he’d iced himself and a card he’d drawn of a tannenbaum with Merry Christmas written in German. Für Fraulein Friedhoffer, he printed. He still didn’t know her first name.
For his recital piece, she chose Schumann’s “Spring Song,” whose loping tempo Henry struggled to control. He practiced extra after school, which pleased his mother. She wandered in from the kitchen with a dish towel and stood in the doorway, praising him each time he foundered. “It sounds wonderful,” she said, but she was his mother. He knew it wasn’t good enough. He needed to be perfect, and set the metronome swinging again.
Her name was Sabine. It was in the recital program, right beside his. She’d braided her hair for the occasion, and wore a sequined black gown as if she were going to perform. Backstage, in his church clothes, poring over his sheet music, he heard the murmuring of the crowd. The youngest students went first. In the past Henry had laughed at their mistakes; now he understood how cruel he’d been. One girl dropped note after note and returned in tears. Another stopped in the middle of a Chopin etude, lost, and had to be rescued by her teacher. Henry was next.
He’d never played for an audience before, and when Miss Friedhoffer finished her introduction and he walked out of the wings into the blinding lights, the applause startled him. It faded before he reached the bench, leaving just his footsteps. In the darkness someone coughed. At church he could hide behind Father McNulty and all the pomp and pageantry. Here everyone was watching him.
His score rattled as he propped it on the stand. By rote, he drew himself upright and located middle C, relaxed his elbows and wrists and arranged his hands over the opening notes. With her voice in his head, he counted himself in.
At home he’d gotten so he could make it through the whole piece with just some small wobbles, but that was with the metronome. Now he had to keep time by himself, and while he and Miss Friedhoffer had worked on this, he hadn’t practiced enough. As soon as he started, he felt his left hand falling behind and began to rush. He tried to hold back, summoning her humming to slow the tempo, but his fingers seemed to move of their own accord, unconnected to him. From a remote vantage deep inside his head, he watched himself play. The notes were correct, if hurried, and rather than panic, a stunned wonder flooded him, and he left himself entirely, his thoughts looping away, out over the audience, picturing Miss Friedhoffer in her black dress, and his mother and father, the whole darkened auditorium. He was there but not there. He could hear the piano, faintly, as from another room, though it was right in front of him, his blurred reflection caught in its polished finish. His foot tapped the time. His fingers rose and fell mechanically, pressing on through the piece, the familiar hills and valleys. Come back, he told himself, as if he could will it, just as he reached the last bars. He lifted his hands and the final notes resolved into silence. For a second he thought he’d gotten lost and stopped at the wrong place, that there was another refrain, and then the crowd broke into applause. As if waking up, he turned to see Miss Friedhoffer smiling and nodding at him. He’d done it. It didn’t seem possible, yet he had. In his relief he forgot to take his bow and walked straight into the wings, where Arlene awaited her turn with the older girls.
“Lucky,” she said.
He didn’t argue. He knew he was.
She wasn’t, but their mother presented them both with roses anyway.
Afterward, in the gym, there was a reception with punch and cookies. It was here, in his daydreams, that Miss Friedhoffer rewarded him with a kiss. Instead, she gave him a certificate and a new book he was supposed to work on over the summer. On the cover, in her perfect cursive, she’d written his name. At home, weeks later, when September seemed impossibly far away, he traced the loops with a finger and remembered her hands guiding his.
Again, he vowed to practice, but once school let out, he was at the park all day. August they spent at Chautauqua, where there was no piano, and even Arlene fell behind. He was resigned to disappointing Miss Friedhoffer when, a week before school started, his mother told him he would have a new teacher.
Miss Friedhoffer had returned to Germany. They didn’t know anything more than that.
He would have Miss Segeti, from Hungary, with whom, in his grief, against his will, he would also fall in love.
In high school he would have crushes he worshipped and despaired of, and real girlfriends who introduced him to guilty ecstasies, yet he never forgot Miss Friedhoffer. During the war, as his division ground through a bombed-out town in Alsace, they rolled over an old upright smashed to kindling in the middle of a street, the keys strewn like teeth across the cobblestones, and he wondered what had become of her. She would have been in her late thirties by then. She might be dead, buried under the rubble of a church like the one in Metz, the stench making them cover their noses as they passed. At night, wherever the column stopped, women infiltrated their bivouac, going from tent to tent, often with hollow-eyed children in tow. He imagined her pulling back his flap and recognizing him, and while they all knew the Army had regulations against it, he resolved to somehow find a way to save her.
After the war, when he and Emily were first dating, she played for him in her sorority’s high-ceilinged front parlor, her posture and slender fingers recalling the stuffy practice room and the smell of chalk dust. He knew the tune from a dozen recitals.
“Mendelssohn,” he said, taking a seat on the bench beside her.
“Do you play?”
“Not really. I used to take lessons when I was a kid.”
“It’s your turn.”
“No, it’s been years.”
“Please? For me?”
He arranged his hands above the keys and tried to bring back “Spring Song.” It unraveled after a few bars. He was surprised he remembered it at all.
“Don’t stop,” she said, and picked up where he’d left off, slowly, so he could join in. He’d never told her, so how could she know, when he kissed her neck, what she’d completed?
One morning shortly after running the stop sign, he was on his hands and knees in the kitchen, his head ducked under the sink, trying to remove the grease trap, when he recognized from the stereo in the living room the piece’s familiar opening notes. He set down his wrench and used the counter to haul himself to his feet and went to tell Emily, but her chair was empty. Rufus, curled in a ball by the fireplace, raised his head for a second, then subsided.
Their piano sat in the corner, topped with his mother’s old metronome from Mellon Street. Neither Margaret nor Kenny had appreciated their lessons, and eventually Emily tired of fighting them. While the grandchildren banged away on it at Christmas, the rest of the year it sat unmolested save for Betty’s biweekly dusting.
How long had it been since they played together? They used to sing duets. Button up your overcoat, when the wind is free. Take good care of yourself, you belong to me. At their parties everyone would gather round and belt out old favorites. That was ages ago, when the children were little. The neighborhood had changed. Gene Alford was gone, and Don Miller, Doug Pickering. Of the old gang, he was the last man standing.
He lifted the hinged cover and folded it back with a clack, exposing the keyboard, pulled out the bench and drew himself upright. Rufus came over to investigate.
“Let’s see what the old guy’s got left.”
He flexed his knitted fingers, settled and played the first phrase. Still there, after all these years. There was more, and he followed along, amazed at the reach of memory. Miss Friedhoffer would be proud.
On her way downstairs with the laundry basket, Emily stopped as if shocked, making both of them turn to her. “What in the world are you doing?”
“Practicing,” he said.