How it must have grieved him to devise for his prodigy grandson such a contraption as the pedal control. He played, as I have said, with good taste and distinction, with the best left hand you’ll ever hear, with superior style. In two years, I had progressed so far that I could match him, and he took pride in my talent, looked forward eagerly to the moment when I would surpass him, which he had not long before insisted was mere days away. He had to know that now I would never surpass him and that it would be a miracle if, with the grab knobs, I ever again played as well as he did. Yet he believed that I might, and he wanted me to believe. I had always loved him so very much, but at that moment I loved him as never before.
My mother and grandfather didn’t suggest that I play, although I knew they expected that I might try. I’d been away from a keyboard for eleven days. Ordinarily I would have been eager to get at it. But I didn’t ask them to help me shift from the wheelchair to the bench. I pled extreme weariness, a plausible excuse in the circumstances.
The physicians had declared that I possessed full upper-body function and strength. After the first waking moment in the recovery room following surgery, when for a disturbing moment I couldn’t feel my mother’s hands pressing around one of mine, I’d had no reason to suspect that I suffered from even the slightest loss of sensitivity or coordination in my hands. But on that first day home, with the additional challenge of the grab knobs, I was afraid to test the doctors’ declaration.
In the morning, I found my courage. Man, would I need it.
87
The first night in my new bedroom, I had lain in the dark, repeating softly in sets of ten a motivating mantra that I devised myself: “I am not like Tilton Kirk, I am not like Tilton Kirk.…”
In the second set, I emphasized the first word: “I am not like Tilton Kirk, I am not like Tilton Kirk.…”
Then I stressed the third word: “I am not like Tilton Kirk.…”
For the fourth set, I emphasized the name in a tone of contempt: “I am not like Tilton Kirk.…”
I don’t know how many hundreds of repetitions I whispered, but I fell asleep with those words on my tongue.
No doubt my mother would have been dismayed at me. Or maybe not. In the morning, I was the first out of bed. By the time Mom came downstairs, I had drawn a tub of hot water, bathed, and dressed, with a lot of fumbling. She found me at the grand piano, trying to play and work the grab knobs with my hands.
“Would you put on the extensions for me?” I asked.
She didn’t remark on my application to the challenge before me, though later I heard her singing in the kitchen as she prepared breakfast.
When Grandpa Teddy came downstairs, we three ate at the dinette table, and then he sat with me to show me some of his grab-knob-extension technique.
He was still on leave from his department-store gig that Friday, and I suspect he would have sat with me all morning if he hadn’t needed to collect Mrs. Lorenzo and her belongings. She had agreed to accept a position as my caregiver, manipulating my legs through the exercises that the therapist prescribed and otherwise looking after me. The position came with my former bedroom upstairs, a salary that might not have been much to start, and board.
After Grandpa left, I continued to practice with considerable frustration until by chance I looked up and, through a front window, saw Malcolm crossing the street. I swung off the piano bench, into the wheelchair, and opened the door when he rang the bell.
“Where’s your axe?” I asked.
Shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, looking down at me, he said, “I’d rather call it my saxophone.”
“Like hell you would.”
“Well, I would.”
Maybe he was aware of what Grandpa had done to the Steinway, but if he didn’t know, I wanted to prevent him from seeing the changes for a while. “Let’s sit on the porch.”
That July day was so hot and humid that birds wouldn’t fly and bees wouldn’t buzz. You could almost hear the street sizzling.
“How’re you doing?” I asked.
“I’ve been better.”
“What about your folks?”
“My folks? Makes me sound like Beaver Cleaver.”
“I’m just asking.”
“The old man is talking all the time about getting a promotion. Where do you go from lathe-shop foreman? Is there a lathe-shop king?”
“What about her?”
“She’s taken to smoking in bed. I expect to be immolated in my sleep. Which wouldn’t bother me.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Well, it wouldn’t.”
“If you’re gonna talk like that, I don’t want you here.”
“Throw me off the property, why don’t you?”
“Maybe I will.”
After a silence, he said, “You see that van parked down there by the Jaruzelski place? You know what it is?”
“A Ford.”
“Didn’t your mom and grandpa tell you what it is?”
“I don’t need them to tell me it’s a Ford.”
“It’s a police stakeout.”
“What’re they staking out?”
“Your place. In case your old man shows up or any of those crazy people he threw in with.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“That day I came to the hospital, before your mom saw me in the hallway there, she was talking to this cop, and I overheard what he was saying. The van’s been here ever since.”
The windshield was tinted. I couldn’t tell if anyone was in the van.
“Why didn’t they tell me?” I wondered.
“Probably they didn’t want to scare you. I don’t care about scaring you.”
“I don’t scare that easy anymore.”