He liked working at night. At first he’d worried that he would find it eerie, but it wasn’t long before he discovered he enjoyed being alone, in the hush of after-midnight, erasing the marks made during the day, getting everything neat and clean for the morning. The sloppy swishing of his mop was soothing in its monotony, and the fact that he had made the same movements thousands – maybe millions – of times before gave him the satisfaction of certainty. He plunged the mop yet again into the wheeled bucket, and dragged it backward with him a few more feet.
If he happened to come during the day, he felt out of place and uncomfortable. The buzz of rehearsal, shout of direction, and constant tramping of feet were unsettling. At night, although the theatre was filled with silence, he sensed a prelude to excitement. Alone in that great space, he felt like he belonged.
He finished mopping his last precisely squared section of floor, wrung out the mop, and settled it in its holder on the edge of the bucket. As he straightened up, he happened to glance through a backstage door, out into the hall itself.
The grand piano stood in solitary glory, placed slightly down stage right in preparation for the evening’s performance. Even though no footlights were on, a beam of fluorescence from the hallway laid a glimmering trail on the floorboards, leading directly to the instrument. He could see the gentle radiance of the white keys, floating in the darkness. A red exit light cast a ruby glow on the ebony woodwork of the raised fin, knifing upward.
He stepped onto the path of light, and his shadow slowly shrunk as he approached. The wheels of the bucket squeaked in soprano as it trundled beside him like a dog at heel. Coming to a halt next to the piano, the silence again encompassed him.
Carefully, he brushed off the seat of his coveralls with both hands, wrenching his neck around alarmingly to see if there was any stain on the material. He gingerly sat on the bench, a virtuoso’s arm length from the keys. Hesitantly, reverently, he stretched out his hand and caressed the shimmering wood. It felt like satin under his roughened palm, dried and cracked from many immersions in caustic water.
He closed his eyes, and was thirteen years old again.
His lack of a father had always set him apart from the other kids. Not like now, when not having a dad (or having two dads!) was pretty much taken for granted. Back then, things had been different. Not necessarily better, but different. It hadn’t helped that his mother sent him to school in clothing 4 sizes too big for him, hand-me-downs from an uncle only 5 years older.
By some miracle, he had been invited to the birthday party of a classmate. It had been a warm May day, so the party had been outside, but he had come in the house in urgent need of a bathroom. With relief he found the facilities, and was on his way back outside when he had been arrested by the music. He stood mesmerized in the hallway. To this day he had no idea what the song had been, or even if it truly was a song.
Following the flowing notes, he peered around the corner of an open doorway, and saw the elder sister of his classmate seated at a piano. It was an old upright, battered by reels and hammered by jigs, but now it sang sweetly under the fingers of a girl with blonde hair floating down her back, wearing a forget-me-not dress. Her shoulders flexed as her hands danced up and down, teasing tones of delicacy and strength from the yellowed keys.
Goosebumps rippled down his forearms, and when the melody ended, he had held his breath, hoping to hear more. But the girl stood up and closed the piano. He fled before she saw him watching her.
That night, the music had haunted his sleep. It was the accompaniment to a dream, in which he convinced his mother to send him for piano lessons, and he became famous, and moved her out of their ratty house into a mansion and, because he had made her happy, she had told him his father’s name. The dream had been so intense that when he awoke, he resolved to ask his mother when she came home from work to let him take lessons.
He entered the house after school, expecting it to be empty as usual. Instead, he found his mother hunched over the kitchen table, shoulders shaking. The factory was closing, and she’d lost her job. A couple of weeks later they moved to the nearby town where his grandparents lived, and moved in with them. He was allowed to finish school that June, but then his grandfather got him a job as a janitor at the mechanic’s shop where Granddad had worked for 40 years. In all the transitions and terror of this new life, the piano dream faded away.
Now, more than 55 years had passed. The mechanic’s shop had closed the year he had married Annie, but he’d been lucky and was taken on at the mill just before the first of his three sons had been born. When the mill had made him take early retirement a few years ago, Annie had suggested he find something to keep him busy. Stay out of her hair, was how she’s worded it, but with a smile. And so he’d ended up at the theatre.
He opened his eyes, stretched out his right forefinger, and gently pressed one of the glistening white keys. The clear, deep tone throbbed up through his finger, and struck a chord somewhere inside him. He heard the note echo softly through the hall, and wondered at the acoustics that caused it.
In his head, he could hear again the song the blonde girl had played on that day so long ago. He marveled at the recollection . . . each phrase, each theme, the rising to strength and the falling to softness . . . all contained in the single resonance his finger had just expressed.
With a smile, he rose from the bench. He carefully placed his left hand on the farthest, lowest note, and with one mighty stroke roused a crashing crescendo from every key.
As the theatre gradually regained its stillness, he grasped the handle of his wheeled bucket, turned his back on the piano, and strode slowly away.
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