Homer & Langley

MY EXPANDED REPERTOIRE came in very handy when I took a job playing piano for silent movies, where I had to improvise pieces according to the nature of the scene being shown. If it was a love scene I would play, say, Schumann’s “Träumerei,” if it was a fight scene, the fast movement of a furious late Beethoven, if soldiers were marching, I’d march with them, and if there was a glorious finale I could improvise the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth.You will ask how I could know what was up on the screen. It was a girl we had hired, a music student who sat beside me and told me sotto voce exactly what was going on. Now a funny chase with people falling out of cars, she would say, or here comes the hero riding a horse at a gallop, or the firemen are sliding down a pole, or — and here she would lower her voice and touch my shoulder — the lovers are embracing and looking into each other’s eyes and the card says “I love you.”Langley had found this student in the Hoffner-Rosenblatt Music School on West Fifty-ninth Street, and because in this time I am describing, the diminishing legacy of our parents due to some unfortunate investments had become apparent to us — which is why I had taken the job at this movie theater on Third Avenue, playing three complete shows from late afternoon into the evening, every weekend from Friday to Sunday — we did not pay her, my movie eyes, this girl Mary, only in coinage, we supplemented her small salary with free lessons given by me in our home. Since she lived with her grandmother and younger brother across town, on the far West Side, in Hell’s Kitchen in fact, in what had to be modest circumstances, her grandmother was only too happy not to have to pay for Mary’s lessons any longer. They were an immigrant family that had suffered major misfortune, both the girl’s parents having died, her father from an accident at the brewery where he worked, and his widow having succumbed to a cancer not long after that. And of course, eventually, to save her the streetcar fare, and because Siobhan had taken a liking to the girl, almost as if she were a daughter, Mary came to live with us. Her name was Mary Elizabeth Riordan, she was sixteen at the time, a parochial school graduate, and from all accounts the prettiest thing, with black curly hair and the fairest skin and pale blue eyes and her head held high with a straight proud posture, as if her slight frame should not indicate to an observer that here was a weakness that could be taken advantage of. But when we walked together to and from the movie theater, she held my arm as if we were a couple, and of course I fell in love with her, though not daring to do anything about it, being in my late twenties by now and beginning to lose my hair.I wouldn’t say Mary Riordan was an outstanding student of the piano, though she loved playing. In fact she was more than competent. I just felt her attack was not assertive enough, though when she worked on something like Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral, her sensitive touch seemed justified. She was just a gentle soul in all her ways. Her goodness was like the fragrance of pure unscented soap. And she understood as I did that when you sat down and put your hands on the keys, it was not just a piano in front of you, it was a universe.How easily and with such grace she accommodated herself to her situation. After all, what an odd household we were, with these many rooms that must have seemed daunting to a child from the tenements, and a serving woman who had instantly adopted her and given her chores as a mother would do, and a cook whose characteristic glower did not change from morning till night. And a blind man whom she led to and from his job, and an iconoclast with a loud cough and a hoarse voice who rushed out every day, morning and evening, to buy every newspaper published in the city.Often when I sat next to her for her lesson I would fall into a reverie and just let her play without any instruction at all. Langley fell in love with her too — I could tell by his tendency to lecture when she was present. Langley’s improvised theories of music did not persuade the two of us, who could transmogrify instantly into the sinuous skein of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” He would insist, for example, that when prehistoric man discovered that he could make sounds by singing or beating on something or blowing through the end of a fossilized leg bone, his intention was to sound the vast emptiness of this strange world by saying “I am here, I am here!” Even your Bach, even your precious Mozart in his waistcoat and knee britches and silk stockings was doing no more than that, Langley said.We listened patiently to my brother’s ideas but said nothing and, when nothing further was said, went back to our lesson. On one occasion Mary couldn’t quite suppress a sigh, which sent Langley mumbling back to his newspapers. He and I were competing for the girl, of course, but it was a competition neither of us could win. We knew that. We didn’t talk about it but we both knew we suffered a passion that would destroy this girl if we ever acted upon it. I had come dangerously close. The little movie theater was right under the Third Avenue El. Every few minutes a train would roar overhead and on one occasion I pretended I couldn’t hear what Mary was saying. Still playing with my left hand, I took my right hand off the keys and pressed her frail shoulder till her face was close to mine and her lips brushed my ear. It was all I could do not to take her in my arms. I was almost made ill by my heedlessness. I atoned by buying her an ice cream on the way home. She was a brave but wounded thing, legally an orphan. We were in loco parentis, and always would be. She had her own room up on the top floor next to Siobhan’s and I would think of her sleeping there, chaste and beautiful, and wonder if the Catholics were not right in deifying virginity and if Mary’s parents had not been wise in conferring upon her frail beauty the protective name of the mother of their God.