William Gass - Middle C

Putting that piano back together, hauling it out of the street where it had fallen from a truck or otherwise been left to die, getting it over the curb, and carting it up a flight of stairs into a proper alcove in a splendid room became Joey’s daydreamed crusade, and to his later lessons with Mr. Hirk (cheaper at least) he brought an intensity and a commitment that impressed even that morose man and caused him to move his arthritic fingers as finally Joseph’s moved, up and down the scales, through tunes, in and out of motifs and their identifying phrases.

Nevertheless, Joey learned every note and stave in a wholly backward way. He heard a piece of music, then found by hit or miss, by hunt-and-peck, the combination that would reproduce it, forking about until he was able to bunch familiar combinations together almost automatically: in short, his fingers felt for the sounds he heard in his head, so that the score meant, at first, very little to him. Hum it and he would hit it was the motto of Joey’s music making. His skills were suitable for a saloon. He was a honky-tonk kid. Yet they led to — they fostered — his subsequent career.

Joey’s general schooling followed a similar pattern. He appeared to learn from the air rather than from any focused or ordered instruction. Algebra he nearly failed, chemistry as well, but he read like a pirate bent on prizes and plunder. He swallowed the contents of shopwindows; he kept up on the news, unnatural in an American youngster; and he browsed through mail-order catalogs like a cow in a meadow. So Joey was self-taught, but what self got taught, and what self did the teaching?

Mr. Hirk’s hoarse instructions, the tunes he fairly howled, the beat he banged out with a book upon the piano seat: none of these meant music. Mr. Hirk had been found living in penury at the edge of town, his livelihood, as meager as it had been, taken from him by the stiffness in his fingers and the popularity of the guitar, which could apparently be played by sociopaths without any further training, its magnified twings and twangs emerging from an electrical outlet as if the little holes spoke for appliances of all kinds and for unoiled engines everywhere. Perhaps Miriam pursued the problem with more determination than she did most things because her husband had possessed some small skill with the fiddle, and as a mother she wanted to find in her son something of that talent, since she saw in Joey otherwise nothing of his father that she wished to see, only his ability to mimic and to mock, especially after she had to endure the fury and flounce of Joey’s sister when he pretended to twirl her baton, pucker up to kiss her date, or slide about in a pair of socks to a tune she had never heard.

In any case, Miriam gossiped around until Mr. Hirk’s odd name came up. To Joseph it had to seem to be a motherly whim that became a parent’s punishment, because, quite apart from the lessons, which were by definition disagreeable, Mr. Hirk was a hideously misshapen man, bent and gnarly, with hands like two ill-fitting boots. He held a pencil by its unsharpened end and poked the keys with the eraser. The poking was so painful to Mr. Hirk it seemed that the sounds themselves were protests, and they were produced with rests between them marked by sighs and groans, not by signs or words of instruction: tangk aah tongk ooh tingk oosh . Perhaps Joey’s ear-to-finger method was the only one with a chance to achieve results.

For all Joey saw, Mr. Hirk’s house had just one square room whose several small windows were hidden by huge plants, a feature that Miriam found reassuring. Wide thick fleshy leaves intercepted what of the sun there was so that greenish shadows were the ghoulish consequence when the day’s light was bright. These shadows came in shades of several kinds and seemed to fall with great reluctance as if lying down on things the way Mr. Hirk had to — awkwardly, slowly, and with groans. A goosenecked lamp with a low-watt bulb hung over the playing surface, always on, always craning its brassy cord in the same curve, causing the black keys to cast in turn a smallish almost dainty darkness of their own. Yussel Fixel saw torn wires and a violence-infested space into which he was being asked to submerge his fingers, so at first he poked them in and out at great speed.

A few pieces of furniture that Joseph Skizzen would later recognize as in the style of mission oak gloomed in those corners the piano didn’t occupy, and his feet often scuffled with a rag rug. Dim walls held dimmer portraits up to failing eyes. Dust kept time, wafted as if on sound. Nothing was propitious. Yet when Joey lifted the lid of the piano bench as Mr. Hirk instructed him, he saw sheets of music whose character was heralded by the picture of a canoe on a moonlit lake or that of a lady in a dress with a preposterous behind, perhaps even hers, or a boy and a girl on a two-seated bike or, better, in a merry Oldsmobile. He practiced scales, of course, pursuant to the mastery of “Indian Love Call” or “Song of India” or “A Bicycle Built for Two.”

Perhaps Joey began by protecting the broken keys from the light that played over the board itself; or maybe “Song of India” was easy to remember, as was “Goodbye to Naples,” a tune in Italian Caruso sang when Mr. Hirk wound his Victrola. Joey would never understand how his pounding managed to make any music at all, nor would Mr. Hirk let on that his pupil had accomplished anything harmonious either, for he was always critical, although Joey’s facility must have astonished him. He taught doubled over as if in pain from what Joey and the piano played, so to be censorious he need only point to his posture. You must woo the keys, he would growl, poking them with his pencil. Here is your voice. The music must sing through your fingers. The tunes he used to tempt Joey into practicing were simple, from another age, before bombs, Joey ignorantly thought, when women wore fluffily cute clothes and lived in rose arbors or kept birds that were blue; back when the world rhymed and strummed, tapped its feet and tickled the ivories.

Mr. Hirk saw that Joey sat forward on the bench when he began to play, and this pleased him. Joey’s posture did not. You are not the tower of Pisa. Do not lean, do not lurch, do not slump, do not wiggle, Mr. Hirk would admonish. Only Pisa can prosper by tilting. Arms — arms at right angles — so — straight to the keys — see — back straight. Why must boys bend!

When you give another kid the finger — you know what I speak about — up-up-up yours, that sign? Mr. Hirk could not make the gesture. The thumb does not go up yours. The first finger does not go up yours. The middle finger — yes — because it does go up. It does. All alone it goes. So every note has a finger for it. Your hands do not reach the keys higgledy-piggledy, this way or that, but in the most efficient way to press down upon them — just right. The piano is a fancy gadget — hear that! — but you are not a gadget, and your fingers must be suitable, supple, suitable, strong yet tender, suitable, soft, as on a nipple, swift like a snake’s strike. Zzing!

Joey had one kind of harmony with Mr. Hirk neither of them understood. When Mr. Hirk showed him a clawlike fist, Joey knew at once he was to splay his fingers. Mr. Hirk didn’t think Joey’s reach was wide or flexible enough. When he banged with a book, Joey softened his touch, and when Mr. Hirk was still, so still he clearly meant to be still, Joey sped. The piano was small and seemed old as its owner. Its tone was weak and hoarse, with a scratchy undercoat. Yet the sounds it made were Joey’s sounds, and he adored them. They might have come from a record made before recordings had been invented.

“Daisy … Daisy …,” Joey would sing to his inner ear while his fingers felt for the equivalents. I am only pretending to play, he boasted, feeling that he was putting one over on his mom as well as Mr. Hirk. However, Mr. Hirk knew exactly what was going on, and to Joey’s surprise he approved. Suppose you are playing a Beethoven sonata — as if that could ever be, Mr. Hirk said. What are you going to remember — the notes? No. The tune. In your head is the tune like a cold. Then your fingers follow. And you play the notes.