I resolved that night to become a true boy and begin paying closer attention to how I might be considered normal. Once such a mistake had been made, nothing could be done. I couldn’t very well shorten my fingers and toes and invite further skepticism, but I could stretch the rest of me a bit each night and keep up with all the other children. I also made it a point to avoid Dad as much as possible.
The idea of the piano intrigued me as a way to ingratiate myself with my mother. When she wasn’t listening to crooners on the radio, she might dial in the classics, particularly on a Sunday. Bach sent my head spinning with buried reveries, conjuring an echo from the distant past. But I had to figure a way to mention my interest without Mom realizing that her private conversations could be heard no matter how quiet or intimate. Fortunately, the twins supplied the answer. At Christmas, my distant grandparents sent them a toy piano. No bigger than a bread basket, it produced but a tinny octave of notes, and from New Year’s Day the keys gathered a dusty coat. I rescued the toy and sat in the nursery, playing nearly recognizable tunes from distant memory. My sisters, as usual, were enchanted, and they sat like two entranced yogis as I tested my memory on the piano’s limited range. Dust rag in hand, my mother wandered by and stood in the doorway, listening intently. From the corner of my eye, I watched her watching me, and when I ended with a flourish, her applause was not completely unexpected.
In the fleeting time between homework and dinner, I picked out a tune of sorts, and gradually revealed my native talent, but she needed more encouragement than that. My scheme was casual and simple. I let drop the fact that a half-dozen of the kids in school took music lessons, when, in truth, there may have been one or two. On car trips, I pretended that the panel below my window was a keyboard and fingered measures until my father ordered me to cut that out. I made a point of whistling the first few bars of something familiar, like Beethoven’s Ninth, when helping Mom dry the dishes. I did not beg, but bided my time, until she came to believe the idea as her own. My gambit played out when, on the Saturday before Henry’s eighth birthday, my parents drove me into the city to see a man about piano lessons.
We left the twin toddlers with the neighbors, and the three of us sat up front in my father’s coupe, embarking early that spring morning in our Sunday clothes. We drove past the town where I went to school, where we shopped and went to Mass, and onto the highway into the city. Shiny cars zipped along the asphalt as we picked up speed, joining a ribbon of pure energy flowing in both directions. We went faster than I’d ever gone in my life, and I had not been to the city in nearly one hundred years. Billy drove the ’49 De Soto like an old friend, one hand on the wheel, his free arm thrown across the seat behind my mother and me. The old conquistador stared at us from the steering wheel’s hub, and as Dad made a turn, the explorer’s eyes seemed to follow us.
On our approach to the city, the factories on the outskirts appeared first, great smokestacks exhaling streams of dark clouds, furnaces within glowing with hearts of fire. A bend in the road—then all at once, a view of buildings stretched to heaven. The downtown’s sheer size left me breathless, and the closer we came, the greater it loomed, until suddenly we were in the car-choked streets. The shadows deepened and darkened. At a cross street, a trolley scraped along, its pole shooting sparks to the wires above. Its doors opened like a bellows, and out poured a crowd of people in their spring coats and hats; they stood on a concrete island in the street, waiting for the light to change. In the department store windows, reflections of shoppers and traffic cops mingled with displays of new goods: women’s dresses and men’s suits on mannequins, which fooled me initially, appearing alive and posing perfectly still.
“I don’t know why you feel the need to come all the way downtown for this. You know I don’t like coming into the city. I’ll never find parking.”
Mom’s right arm shot out. “There’s a space, aren’t we lucky?”
Riding up in the elevator, my father reached inside his coat pocket for a Camel, and as the doors opened on the fifth floor, he lit up. We were a few minutes early, and while they debated over whether or not to go in, I walked to the door and entered. Mr. Martin may not have been a fairy, but he was very fey. Tall and thin, his white hair long in a shaggy boy’s cut, he wore a worn plum-colored suit. Christopher Robin all grown up and gone to genteel seed. Behind him stood the most beautiful machine I had ever seen. Lacquered to a high black finish, the grand piano drew all of the vitality of the room toward its propped-open lid. Those keys held in their serenity the possibility of every beautiful sound. I was too dumbstruck to answer his inquiry the first time.
“May I help you, young man?”
“I’m Henry Day, and I’m here to learn everything you know.”