The Piano Man

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

The Steinway sat silent after my father-in-law died. The sheet music—a Gershwin piece—lay undisturbed on the music stand just as he had left it.

My mother-in-law, Sheila, couldn’t play a note or read music, so she covered the grand piano’s glossy black lid with the evidence of a life well lived. Silver frames crowded together: a granddaughter in a cap and gown, a wedding under a tent somewhere warm, Sheila herself at eighty, smiling with groups of people, many of them familiar to me, or people I’d met over the years. The piano her husband had played his entire life congregated everyone she loved.

When Sheila died four summers ago at the age of ninety-six, after a short descent into the hell of dementia, it struck me hard that my generation was next in line. To avoid this existential rumination, I immersed myself in all the practical matters I could help the family with. There was an accumulation of books, papers, letters, more photographs, and furniture—the things she loved and cherished reduced to silent objects—all to contend with.

First, I had to decide what to do with the piano, which nobody in the family wanted. Who has space for a grand? I knew it would be a challenge to find a good home for an instrument that’s almost a century old.

I contacted the Steinway dealer in Montreal, but they weren’t interested. Without seeing it, they said a piano that old would have to be rebuilt. They expressed interest in its ebony wood frame and made a lowball offer.

I reached out to a local piano store and restoration shop, and the owner promptly came over to examine the instrument. He confirmed that, like those of us who have reached a certain age, the piano had many old, stiff parts. Replacements were in order. He offered an equally lowball figure.

Next, I telephoned a man whose yellowed business card for piano-tuning services I discovered inside the piano. I assumed my father-in-law had used his services at one point. I reached him at his home in Joliette, a town about seventy-five kilometres northeast of Montreal. I explained I had found his card tucked inside the piano.

“Mrs. Goldberg,” he replied, with the barest hint of a French accent, “I have so much work in my shop here that I would not be interested in coming to Montreal to look at your piano. I restore pianos for museums and music conservatories, and my hands are full. Besides, you have to understand that the traffic driving into Montreal makes me angry, so I avoid it.” He gave me the name of someone in Montreal, called Spike, to get in touch with.

Within an hour, the piano man called back. “Mrs. Goldbloom,” he said — getting my name right this time — “I have been thinking.” He’d placed the piano. He knew it.

“I have tuned and replaced parts on that piano several times over many years. The first time was in the late 1980s, when I changed the felts on the hammers. I used alcohol to soften them, and I didn’t notice, but drops fell on your mother-in-law’s white wall-to-wall carpet, leaving burns.”

Sheila called him the moment she found the burns. She’d get the carpet fixed, she told him, and let him know what it cost. A few weeks later, the carpet was fixed.

“We all make mistakes. Don’t worry about it,” she told him.

“I was so relieved because I had no money in those days to fix an expensive carpet. I’ve felt guilty about it ever since,” the piano man confided. “She was a very kind lady.”

He proceeded to give me more information about who might be interested in the piano and the types of interventions required. The piano would have to be rebuilt to attract the attention of a professional or classical pianist. It was a job that required a significant investment and over six hundred hours to change twelve thousand parts. It was the same information the others had relayed to me, delivered with a little more care and a lot more detail.

He said he would come to Montreal to tune the piano free of charge and maybe lubricate some parts because he had always felt bad about damaging the carpet.

“It’ll be easier to sell if it’s tuned,” he stated.

He had a great deal to say about pianos, and about Sheila, and, eventually, about a barn in Joliette. It took some doing to get off the phone — to thank him for his time and end the conversation.

“You needn’t feel guilty. You’ve repaid your debt with all the information,” I said as I hung up.

The next day, he contacted me again. “Alice, I have been thinking.”

We were on a first-name basis now. He wanted to buy the piano himself, rebuild it completely, and could be in Montreal the next day.

So the piano man braved the traffic he claimed to hate and drove to Montreal. And after examining the Steinway, he made a fair offer. He wanted to restore the grand dame to her full glory.

She will play again.

The piano man’s memories of Sheila had captured her exactly. She’d built a long career as a professor of social work and, after retiring, kept organizing her community as if she’d never stopped — well into her nineties, former students still called for her advice. She kept a full calendar: book club, film club, gym on weekday mornings, lunch and tea with a rotating cast of friends. She took the city bus everywhere rather than trouble anyone for a ride.

Then dementia took her mind, and something strange happened: she stayed herself. She grew distressed sometimes, but never at her caregivers — only at losing the independence she’d guarded her whole life. It upset her, too, when someone called for advice, and she no longer knew what to say. But she never once forgot a face. Anyone who walked into her room, she put down whatever she was doing, and her whole face opened into a smile, ready to talk.

I used to think I had a special relationship with her. It took me a while to understand that everyone who knew Sheila felt exactly the same way. At her funeral, her granddaughter said Sheila had a sixth sense — a superpower that enabled her to anticipate a person’s problem before they’d said a word of it.

Our family used to joke that she needed only fifteen minutes with someone before they were confiding their life story.

I was certain she knew the piano man’s.

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A version of this story appeared in 2022 in A Considerable Age. It has always been one of my favourite stories. This year, over the summer months, I will be republishing stories from six years of A Considerable Age, along with some new ones. Happy Summer.