From the age of 14 until I was about 17-and-a-half I took piano lessons with a young woman named Sally Prince Reynolds. At the beginning of that period she was nothing in particular to me-just my piano teacher, and nothing more. But at the end I thought she was the loveliest creature on earth, and my life seemed haunted by her existence.
She was about 28, a rather pale, thin-faced woman with red full lips and a great mass of black hair, usually put up in a bun on the top of her head, which sometimes seemed to give off an odor of apple-blossoms. She had begun teaching at the Yoder-Scheinfeldt Music School only a week or two before I started taking lessons, and at my first lesson she made a point of telling me this.
”So you see, Jerome,” she said, ”I`m as much of a beginner as you!”
”Oh,” I said. I felt as though she was patronizing me, and I didn`t like it. Sensing that, she made her manner more businesslike.
”Do people call you Jerome?” she said. ”Or do you prefer Jerry?”
”Jerry, I guess.”
”All right, then, Jerry, will you place your right hand on the keyboard so your thumb is at middle C?”
”I, um-”
”Middle C,” she said, moving her hand to show me where it was. ”Right here.”
The first day, I didn`t even know that much. I was a rank beginner, but she, despite the fact that she was new at Yoder-Scheinfeldt, was not a beginner at all. In Pasadena, California, where she and her husband had come from, she had been giving lessons for several years. They had moved to Washtoteka at the beginning of the summer because her husband had gotten a teaching job at the university. Her husband`s name was Ned. I think he taught economics.
Or perhaps sociology. At the memorial service for him a couple of years later, which I attended, I gathered that he had been quite well respected in his field. But before that he was always only a peripheral figure to me.
Mrs. Reynolds gave her lessons on the baby grand in her own livingroom, and sometimes while I was waiting in their front parlor for my lesson-sitting on the high oak bench of the antique organ that took up half the room-he would pass through, greeting me with a wink or feinting a punch to my arm. And sometimes on the weekends I would see him with her and their three children, the five of them reminding me of a family of ducklings as they paraded through downtown on their way to church or a movie or the library. He was a handsome, confident man and he was evidently a good husband and father-the very sort of man, in other words, the gods like to swat down for sport.
– – –
And her? How can I describe her? I see her quite clearly in my mind, as real and tangible as she was those Monday afternoons 30 years ago when she sat in her straightbacked chair beside me pursing her lips a little while she listened to me going through a Bach minuet. But to describe her-I would not know how to begin. And even to make the attempt would seem to me somehow profane.
Because in my mind she was this great beauty. And beauty is such a loaded word-so subjective and finally so indescribable. And meaningless anyway. If I say she was beautiful, what does that tell you about her? Nothing. And about me, nothing of importance.
What I remember most about her is little things. The shape of her fingers, for instance. They were rounded and tapering like the Mona Lisa`s-the shape women`s fingers used to be before Manet discovered they were all wrong. Those fingers brought music from the keyboard with such effortless grace that sometimes it put a catch in my throat. Sometimes she would put her fingers on top of mine to show me what I was doing wrong-not seductively, I should perhaps make clear, but only to show me how I should be moving them.
Another very minor thing that has stuck with me is her scent-not the apple-blossom smell of her shampoo, but some other more constant and underlying scent, which I was not even consciously aware of until 20 years later. A scent that I can only characterize as having been rather like that of iced tea. One afternoon about 10 years ago, while I was in the linens department of Maxwell`s in Kansas City, that scent came to me-from some clerk`s deodorant or hairspray?-and fired me back to adolescence as swiftly as being hit by a baseball bat. I was unsteady on my feet. I had to leave the store and sit down for a few minutes on one of the benches facing the parking lot. And for the rest of the evening I could think of nothing else but Sally Reynolds. When I got back to my motel I called a couple of airlines to find out about connections from Kansas City to Washtoteka. I had the time, and it would have been easy to go back. But I did not.
So what do we have? Beauty, tapering fingers and a scent like iced tea. How stupid such attempts at description sound! I would like to be able to pin her to the page for you: to describe her so that you would see her before you, so that you wo uld feel her beside you, so that you would feel the same emotions I felt when I was 17. But it is an impossibility. I cannot even pin her down for myself. Sometimes I am certain that her beauty was as great as Cleopatra`s. Other times, much less frequently, I tell myself there was nothing special about her at all: that she was nothing but a Midwestern piano teacher, and that all the beauty I think of when I think of her-a radiance, actually-existed nowhere but in my own mind.
– – –
She was a very good teacher, but at the time I did not know that. All I knew was that whenever I came for my lessons she seemed genuinely delighted to see me again; she always made me feel as though it were a great treat for her to have me there. How could I help responding? How could I help but do my best for her? One reason she liked having me there, I knew, was that I was such a change from her other beginning students, most of whom were tiny first-or second-graders who had to be coaxed every step of the way. But maybe it was more than that. She did alway s seem to believe in me, in my abilities, even when I was feeling negative about myself.
The first time she wanted me to learn a piece for a recital, for instance a simple exercise by Schumann-I remember telling her there was no way I could learn it in time.
”Well,” she said,”you can.”
I shook my head. ”I don`t think so, Mrs. Reynolds.”
She looked at me hard for a moment, then spoke with calm certainty, almost as though quoting facts from the encyclopedia. ”You can. There`s no point wasting time doubting yourself-I know you can do it. You pick things up with astonishing ease, and you obviously put a great deal of effort into your practicing, so where`s the problem?” And when I left my lesson that day I was as confident as she. I could do the piece. I would do it.
– – –
One night I had a dream about Mrs. Reynolds. First I was in my parents`
car with a girl named Dorcas-a mousy, quiet girl in my history class, to whom I had never said a word. We drove in the front door of a theater. The theater was dimly lit and part of its roof was missing. Everything seemed to be covered with a white dusty substance-a substance like cement or powdered clay. The car`s dashboard, I realized suddenly, was also a piano keyboard, so I reached out my fingers and began to play. I was playing something called the Porky Pig Sonata, which seemed to consist of the same five notes played over and over again. ”This doesn`t sound right,” I said, turning to Mrs. Reynolds. ”Are you sure this is by Prokofiev?
”Of course it isn`t by Prokofiev,” she said. ”It`s by Mendelssohn.”
She came up behind me and placed her hands on mine to guide my fingers through an arpeggio. I felt her body pressing against my back. Her warm, moist arms were around me.
In the morning the dream was still with me, and I did not want it to go away. I lay in bed for some time, going over it in my mind and trying to think what it had meant. Most likely it had not meant very much at all. I was practicing the piano an hour and a half every day at that time, and it wasn`t uncommon to find myself doing it in my dreams as well. And dreaming of women was not all that much a rarity either. But nonetheless this dream, innocent as it was, haunted me all day. It seemed somehow to contain a great truth, a truth that had never occurred to me before or that I had never allowed myself to face.
Of course the only truth the dream contained, as I finally realized, was a small and obvious one: that Mrs. Reynolds was a woman, and that I would like her to hold me in her arms. But still it struck me with the force of a revelation-a revelat ion that seemed to complicate life immeasurably. How would I ever again be able to think of her as a mere piano teacher?
As it happened, that was the day of my piano lesson. When I sat in front of her baby grand that afternoon I was self-conscious and awkward. My fingers felt heavy. My playing was very bad. I hung my head in shame.
”Is anything the matter, Jerome? Mrs. Reynolds said.
”No.”
”Your mind seems to be elsewhere. Are you tired?”
”I don`t know. Maybe.”
”Do you think you can give a little more time to practicing next week?” I didn`t answer. It wasn`t true that I had not given enough time to my practicing, and I was hurt by the insinuation.
”Will you?” she said.
”I practice an hour and a half a day.”
”I know, Jerome-I know you`ve usually been very good about giving a lot of time and effort to your practicing. Maybe you`re just having a bad day-do you think that`s what it is?”
”I don`t know,” I said.
She didn`t make any other negative comments-she knew me well enough by then to know that I was my own worst critic, and that I hated myself, despised myself, when my playing was not up to par. But I did increase my practice time anyway. From then on I tried to make it two hours a day. Looking back, I wonder at such devotion.
It was not long after that-it seems only a matter of weeks-that Ned Reynolds keeled over one morning, spilling a pot of lukewarm coffee on one of his colleagues, in the common room of the economics department. I heard about it that evening at dinner. It was a heart attack, my stepmother said, and he was dead before they got him to the hospital. My stepmother had heard this from the secretary of the Yoder-Scheinfeldt school, who had called to cancel Mrs. Reynolds` lessons for the next couple of weeks.
”We should send a card,” my stepmother said. She passed the peas to my father, who was cutting away the fat from the edge of his pork chop.
”What do you think about some flowers?” my father said. She spooned some applesauce onto her plate. ”I think that might be a little de trop, don`t you? We didn`t really know him, after all.” I felt sick with shock, and it seemed repulsive to m e that my father and stepmother should be able to accept this man`s death so readily-to talk about it as though it were just another everyday occurrence, and to keep shoveling their food away. I thought we should be mournful. But at the same time I was aware of a little voice inside me, a horrible little voice that snickered, Now she`s alone. Now she could be yours!
”How old was he?” I said.
”Reynolds? Oh, I imagine in his late 30s.”
”Isn`t that kind of young for a heart attack?”
”Yes,” my father said. ”But most likely he had a congenital anomaly of some sort.” I toyed with the food on my plate and tried to grasp the meaning of being dead. He was the first person I knew who had died. Why had it happened? Why to him?
