Allegro - Joanne DeMaio

No reasonable offer refused  - Bellicose Jones

editor’s note:  This is the first week of our new format. Author bios are now at the end of the  page followed by a brief note on the pairings, and a teaser for next week’s features....

Allegro,

Quick tempo; Cheerful

     My father used to play

piano.  He’d pluck out only

one tune, playing forte with

thick butcher hands that

didn’t know the difference

between forte and pianissimo. 

His foot pressed randomly on the

pedals, echoing the song through

our home.  We lived in a six-family

tenement house at the time, well

technically a five-family, because

my parents converted both the

first floor apartments into our

one home. 

     If you walked out the front door,

down off the porch and turned right

on the sidewalk, the massive, gray

stone, cathedral-like Sacred Heart

Church rose directly before you.

Our house was the first on the street, and Sacred Heart was positioned on the cross-street, facing us, the parish school behind the church.  The nuns wore long blue robes with black habits and big holy medallion necklaces.  This was where my education began, in Kindergarten with Sister Stanislawa.  The community was predominantly Polish, and Pani came regularly to our class to teach Polish lessons, no matter what your heritage

. 

     That parish had a great influence on me while we lived in our tenement house.  For five years I pretended to be a nun - evidenced by my pinning bath towels together, one hanging along my front, one down my back, secured by safety pins at the shoulders. We were a big family, seven in all, hammered at by a failing marriage and subsequent divorce.  So solace came where you found it.  That beautiful church saved us both, me and my father, somehow. While I pretended to be a nun, my father pounded out the hymn Ave Maria.

     That poor piano.  Following the divorce, my mother moved us kids to a hundred-year-old house in the hills of New Hampshire, little spinet piano in tow.  It was a house that, should you render it in a cartoon drawing, it might not sit straight on the foundation, and the second floor would be slightly akimbo to the first.  The thick woods of Robin Hood State Forest bordered our backyard, and in hunting season, gunshot sounded at random.  We’d walk on the trails, my siblings and I, calling out every now and then that we were not deer, so please, don’t shoot.  I’m almost sure there is a term for the rewards of faith. Guardian Angel, I believe it is, and was my reward for those years pretending to be a nun.  Our friends up the street lived in a tarpaper shack, with no permanent heat.  Another neighbor kept a bird farm in their yard, and we’d occasionally look at the peacock.  Around the corner, across from the dark forest was a huge cemetery that housed what we thought was a crematorium.

           In New Hampshire, with all this other excitement going on, we never played the piano.  It sat idle in a small, dark living room that I also don’t remember anyone ever using.  All I remember is the big wall mirror mounted above it falling behind the piano in the middle of one quiet night, somehow crashing to the floor intact but making a horrific nightmare noise in the process, piano meeting heavy mirror, forte.

            I’m not sure just exactly what those two years living at the edge of the woods were about, being only ten at the time and engrossed in wild raspberry bushes and in the stallion corralled across the street and New Hampshire things like that.  I was exploring a new planet, with forest clubhouses made from huge fern plants, and porcupine needles fanning from my dog’s muzzle, and classmates who you could tell, really, didn’t have hot water, or didn’t bathe regardless.  It felt like some kind of scientific study, hey, let’s try living like this now, until we ended up back in civilized Connecticut, back in that original marriage, with our spinet piano.  This time around, I don’t remember my father sitting at the piano.  This time around, the marriage lasted a year or two before my mother took only the piano to a little second floor apartment at the shore, leaving us all behind.  She learned how to play, but like my father, she too had a heavy hand, even knowing the difference between forte and pianissimo.  My mother was not emotionally demonstrative, which had a way of carrying over to her monotone piano playing.

            Somehow I managed to finish high school, tinker with college and founder into adulthood sans the piano.  Eventually, though, yes eventually, it landed in my married home.  The thing is, our family had too much baggage, no matter whose house you entered.  Oh, you? the piano must have thought when it came off the truck and saw me again.  Sigh.  My mother had replaced the piano with a newer model and she thought my daughters might learn to play, so Little Sadness was tucked into the small dining room of my ranch house.  That piano gave us so many chances to break out of who we were, of what defined us.  If only one of us might rip into it.  What an escape hatch we had, right in our midst.  But we didn’t know how to access music.  This is what I’d think to be one last chance.  My mother would come by on Saturday mornings to give lessons.  Her second husband waited at the table in my tiny kitchen with a newspaper and box of doughnuts, a one-hundred pound German Shepherd at his feet.  Mom, meanwhile, sat on the piano bench and put happy stickers on the pages of my daughter’s drill books to reward her efforts.

            She tried, she really did, to teach, or touch, it’s a matter of semantics, until one Christmas Eve, carol lyrics in hand, she fathomed a happy piano singalong.  But usually if you want a happy singalong, you can’t grumble all night about everything else, the prepared food, the pretty Christmas decorations, the company.  End of piano lessons.  End of trying.  It had been our way, I suppose, of holding onto something else.  But you could tell, besides all the family drama and the occasional cat sitting tolerant on it, the piano was not happy.  If you’ve ever heard a happy piano, you know what I mean.

            March 10, 2006.   Billy Joel lays into the piano at the Hartford Civic Center.  His identity moves back and forth between his body and his piano, the line of distinction blurred by music.  When he sits quietly at it between songs, he talks about the beautiful warm weather, and how he rode his motorcycle earlier in the day.  He tells the story of a fisherman he used to know.  The way he puts comments into his concert reminds me of Frank Sinatra, who I saw years ago.  Not in his music or his singing, but in the way he talks to the audience.  It is obvious he connects, especially with that piano sitting center stage, deferentially an armrest while he talks.  At the end of his show, he returns for an encore.  He is singing The Piano Man.  Fifteen thousand people look at Mr. Joel.  Each and every one of them lean toward him.  The embrace is immeasurable.  Mr. Joel quiets.  He is rapturously still and silent, sitting center stage at his grand piano.  And he listens.  That is all he does for these moments.  You can see it, on his face, what he is doing.  It is beautiful, to watch him listen, the keys still.  Fifteen thousand voices, unrehearsed, join in chorus.  “Sing us a song, you’re the piano man,” we sing, a soft cloud of music rising from the darkness.  “Sing us a song, tonight.  Well we’re all in the mood for a melody.  And you’ve got us feeling alright.”

            I thought my little piano would never come close to evoking a response from people.  No one would ever sit at it at the urging of someone pleading for a melody, their head tipped back in the pleasure of another’s desire.  The ad I wrote offered it away for $75, my last chance to break it free of the confines of this family.  A young father called, wanting to buy it for his daughters so that they might give music a whirl.  It was a perfect, late summer day, blue sky and all.  He arrived at my home with a couple other men and they lifted the little spinet gingerly and maneuvered it out my front door, down the two steps to the lawn.  They set it down on the green grass to study the piano moving situation before lifting it onto their truck.

            Sometimes a moment comes right before a great event transpires, when all the forces come together in beauty.  The moment is silent, but brimming.  Something is about to spill out of it.  I watched one of those moments, right before the piano was lifted, when the father sat at the piano bench, fingers floating over the keys, and without thought, broke into Marvin Hamlisch’s The Entertainer!  He laid right into it with that bouncing ragtime tune.  On my front lawn!  A concert.  My hands clasped in front of my huge smile.  Oh happiness!  Finally, my little piano!  After thirty-five years, I sold the past, not for want of trying.  And look what happened!  Allegro.  Allegro!

© Joanne DeMaio

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Joanne DeMaio is a writer living with her family in Connecticut.  An old Ticketron envelope filled with twenty years of concert stubs holds a lifetime of her stories.  Her work has appeared in Cezanne's Carrot, flashquake, The Hartford Courant, and other print publications.  She maintains the blog Whole Latte Life at joannedemaio.blogspot.com.

Bellicose Jones runs a junk store but prefers not to say where. “Bell” says he finds the unfinished story in stuff other folks toss out. He enjoys reading poetry and fiction by established writers and poets, as well as looking at Fauvist paintings, eating creole cuisine and listening to jazz. This is his very first publication credit.

WHY?

Both pieces either hint at or feature family in changing circumstances  and items and people passing out of one situation into another, into someone else’s hands, perhaps into a new life of sorts..... More obviously they both make use of the odd image of a piano on a lawn,.

NEXT WEEK:

JENN MONROE’S “FAULT LINE” with

HOWARD GOOD’s “EVERYTHING SIMPLE BECOMES COMPLEX”