FATS ON KEYS
By Kate Lynch, 2015
The sound of a piano player stretching their fingers into Fats Waller chords halted my cadence. I stood and listened. The melody and the rhythm were on par for a few bars, then a mistake, a pause and another attempt at it. A door slam interrupted the rhythm. The back of the piano player’s head didn’t move. Again, the notes continued to crescendo. Stop. And start.
The front door at the top of the stoop, adjacent to the window I was peering into, opened. It was a thick wooden door, painted black. The numbers in a green patina read, 1237. Jasmine from flower boxes spilled down onto the sidewalk overpowering my senses with a thick, sweet smell. I had never seen jasmine bloom in the day, but had heard of it. Finally, a glimpse!
The piano player hadn’t stopped the frustrated attempt at the music.
I walked up the steep stairway, admiring the gargoyle wearing a cape, legs crossed, the book in his hands nothing but subterfuge, I realized, as his eyes met mine.
The well-oiled old door made no noise when I nudged it forth into the front hallway. My eyes rose to the expanse of air above me, stories high, capped with horizontal glazing and ironwork holding massive plates of glass afloat. There was more darkness than light in that hallway. The glass above was blacked out, I quickly saw. Areas where the paint had worn out, chipped off, allowed beams of light to hit the tile floor.
The music had stopped. I didn’t speak. The piano player didn’t query aloud - is there someone there? Looking into that piano room, the sunlight blinded me. I saw a back-lit sitting area, silhouettes of furniture, I assumed. The sheer window covering did little to protect the richly hued carpet, which stood apart from the shadows, strangely aglow. A glare penetrated my eye from the back corner of the room. A prism, it seemed. A breeze from the front door, still open, sped by. And with a delicate clink, the sound of shattering glass. I walked to the source of the sound in the far corner. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that it hadn’t been a prism, rather a glass ornament, now in pieces spread over the mosaic tile beyond the carpet's border.
With my back to the window, the room came into focus. The piano bench: empty. I walked past the heavy furniture toward it. The clunky upright had Fats Waller’s Alligator Crawl taped to it; tape on top and bottom, left and right. The piano was white, the duct tape sequestering the music, red. I hit a key. No sound. I hit another and another. I started to peck frantically on the high notes, the low notes, the black keys and then started to use the back of my forearm. Not a sound.
And then, Helen’s voice. I looked up from my position at the keys. There she stood.
“I’m glad you’ve come," she said.
Her hair, white, her lipstick, red, her countenance, placid and content, as it had always been.
I was stupefied to see her again.
“You live here now?” I asked.
“I do. For some time.”
“How is that you didn’t tell any of us?”
She chuckled. “Why should I have? Nobody was looking for me. I’ve had an eye on you, keeping tabs, I knew you were doing well.”
“Why are you wearing that?” I asked.
She wore a suit. The navy blue jacket was double breasted, and pulled tight across her chest, the row of buttons ready to launch. The skirt matched. It was proper. It came to her knees. The piping around the wrists of the jacket in white, and a star above the stripes on each side. A white blouse was buttoned to the top button, covering her chest, leaving only her sagging neck in view.
“You’ve never seen my uniform. This is what I wore in the Navy. It doesn’t fit as well as it did.”
“Why are you wearing it around this place? Does this brownstone belong to you?”
“Not quite.”
“Whose is it?”
“Well, you may have heard a piano tune,” she winked. “That was the owner playing.”
“I did. But the piano doesn’t play. And there’s nobody here. There was, wasn’t there? I saw from the street.”
“You shouldn’t make a habit of peering into strangers’ parlors,” she chastised.