The PIano

By Raanan Geberer

Published in 2009 on the "Mr. Beller's Neighborhood" web site.

The old upright piano, with its legend “Spector, New York City,” was in the living room from my earliest recollection until the day my father died. He must have brought it sometime in the early ‘50s, after he and Mom came back from a failed attempt to establish themselves in Israel, after Mom’s asthma got so bad that a doctor advised them to leave the country.

Mom’s asthma didn’t get much better in New York, however, and my father, increasingly, took to the piano and his other hobby, stamp collecting, to escape both his family and his troubled work life – in the early days, he was always changing jobs, by necessity. Dad would spend hours playing Brahms, Schumann, Clementi, Chopin. At the end, he would always start playing an old Russian folk song called “Two Guitars” and stare wistfully into space. It’s my belief that this was a song that he used to play, during his childhood, as a duet with his violin-playing brother, who died an untimely death in the late ’40s.

When I was eight years old or so, Dad started teaching me to play the piano. At first, I really enjoyed it. But it soon became clear to me that I had no say in what I played – I’d have to play what he wanted me to play. And if I played something incorrectly or made an insufficient effort, he’d yell: “You idiot! Wrong! WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!”

By the time I was 12, I told Dad I didn’t want to take lessons anymore, although I never stopped playing, on and off. Dad tried to teach my brother too, but my brother, more restless and angry and less tolerant of our parents, only lasted six months or so with Dad as a teacher. Over the years, my brother would pick up several different instruments – the cello, the saxophone, the bass, the guitar – but not the piano.

Anyway, that same year, when I was 12, the Beatles came to America. I would often go to the piano and try to play the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, Motown. This drove my father nuts. “That’s not music! THAT’S JUST BANGING!” he’d say. He’d take to locking the piano with a key he had, just so that I wouldn’t play it when he was in the house. And the worst of it was that my father definitely didn’t believe in the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” There was only one TV in the house, and it, too, was in the living room. Many was the time that I’d have to wait what seemed like an eternity until my father finished practicing piano for the night, until I could watch one of my favorite TV programs. It’s probably thanks to him that I never really grew to like classical music (Bach and Handel excepted).

I moved out of the house, then moved back, then moved out again, then moved back again, then moved out for good, but the piano was always there. The unsteady piano bench, with its wobbly legs, finally went the way of all wood, but the piano itself remained. In the early days he’d call piano tuners periodically, but when he got older, especially after my mother died, he let things go, and the piano’s sound became tinny. Still, he practiced every day.

Finally, in 2004, he died. One day, while going to Dad’s Co-op City apartment to clean up, I met a young pre-adolescent girl and her mother in the hallway. I told them Dad had died. “I knew it,” the girl said. “I haven’t hearing him playing his piano for a long time. I used to hear him every day! I knew all his songs!” I was a little thrown off – I don’t know if you can call a Bach fugue a “song” – but it soon occurred to me that he hand’t changed these “songs” in 35 years. Once, a friend had tried to give him some new sheet music – I remember “Mussogursky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” was one of them – and Dad tried to make a go of it, but he soon fell back on the tried and true. The pieces he played regularly were likely the same ones he’d played back in the East Bronx, during his childhood in the 1930s.

My brother’s son Joseph, a rock musician in his 20s, wanted the piano. He had, my brother told me, written many of his own songs on this piano. Joseph really loved my father and visited him all the time. Dad probably acted differently with his grandson than he had with his own children. At any rate, the movers soon came, and the piano was wheeled away after 25 or so years in Marble Hill and 35 years in Co-op City, gone to Queens and a new life.