A Small Continuing Music

Thirteen Stairs

Thirteen. She had counted them at thirty and she counted them at seventy-one, as if a stair might have been added in the night, or taken away.

They never were. The fourth gave under her weight with a small complaint, the way it always had, and the ninth answered it, and the last — the high one, the thirteenth — she took with her right hand already reaching for the latch, the way a swimmer reaches for the wall before she has finished swimming. She climbed slowly now. There was no help for that. The cold had moved into the knuckles years ago and set up as a kind of landlord there, charging rent on every motion, so that to bend the fingers in the morning was to pay, and to straighten them at night was to pay again. Adagio, she told the stairs under her breath. Adagio, and no slower than you must. One. Two. The bakery breathed up the stairwell behind her, warm at her back, yeast and flour and the brown edge of crust, Ruth's four-o'clock loaves coming on. It had risen up those stairs every working day for forty years. She did not think she would know how to climb without it.

At the top she stood a moment with her hand on the door and let her heart settle. Then she went in.

The room took her the way it always took her, in one breath. It was not a large room and had never pretended to be — a low ceiling that a tall man had to mind, a single window over the square, a square of carpet worn to its weave in two places, the path between the door and the bench. The walnut upright stood against the inner wall where the damp could not reach it. She had chosen that wall in 1968 and been right about it, which was more than she could say for most of the choices of that year. The lid was up. She never closed it; a closed piano was a held breath. On the music desk a beginner's primer lay open to a page she could have played in her sleep, and beside it, propped against the rack where she could not pretend she had not seen it, a white envelope in a hand she knew.

She did not pick it up.

She crossed to the window instead and looked down at the square the way she looked down at it every afternoon, to take the temperature of the town. The maples along Bridge Street had begun to turn at their tips, rust coming into the green. The old picture house across the way had been a video store and was now nothing, a paper sign curling in its dark window. Somebody's dog lay in the last of the sun outside the hardware. Nothing climbed the stairs but the smell of bread and, presently, June.

She heard the girl before she saw her — the quick uncareful feet that no child ever learned to quiet, the thump of the fourth stair taken at a run, the ninth, the door. June Soto came in pink from the cold with her music in a plastic grocery sack because she had no case for it, and her coat was a man's coat cut down and still too large, and her eyes went first, as they always went, to the keys.

"You're early," Vera said, which was a kindness and they both knew it. June was early because the alternative to being here was being somewhere else.

"Ms. Acheson gave me a roll." The girl held it up, half-eaten, as evidence. "She said it was a second."

"Ruth's seconds are better than most bakers' firsts. Wash the butter off before you sit."

June ran her hands under the tap in the corner basin and dried them on her own coat and climbed onto the bench, and her feet, which did not yet reach the floor, found the rung Vera's husband-of-a-carpenter had nailed there in 1971 for a different child entirely. Vera lowered herself into the cane chair at the bass end, by inches, and arranged her hands in her lap where the girl would not have to look at them.

"Scale of C," she said. "Slowly. As if you meant each one."

June played it. She rushed the turn at the top the way she always rushed it, hungry to be down the other side, and Vera let her finish before she said anything, because a thing said before its time is only noise.

"Again. But this time, listen to the one before you play the next. You're so busy getting to the next note you never hear the one you're standing on."

"That's all of them, though."

"That's all of them. Yes." She almost smiled. "Tune to the true note, June, not the loud one. The loud one is easy to find. Anyone can find the loud one." It was Magda's, that line, the way half of what she said in this room was Magda's, handed down the way attention is handed down, from one careful person to one less careful and so on into the future where neither of them would be. June did not know it was Magda's. June was ten and thought it was Ms. Linden's, and that was right, too. By now it was both.

The girl played the scale again and this time she stood on each note a half-instant longer, and the half-instant was the whole thing, was forty years of teaching distilled into a half-instant, and Vera shut her eyes to hear it.

"There," she said. "You heard the difference."

"I heard it."

"Now. The little tune."

June found middle C with her thumb. Every beginner found it there. Forty years of thumbs had found it there, and the ivory had given way under all of them, worn through its yellow to the bare wood beneath, a small pale wound in the long white rank of the keys. Vera had never had it refaced. A man had offered once, a tuner from the city, scandalized; she had told him no so quickly he had taken a step back. You did not mend the place where the whole town had learned to begin. You left it, and you let the next child put her thumb in the print of every child who came before, whether the child knew it or not.

The little tune walked up the keyboard. Eight bars, C to C, a step at a time and then a small leap and then home — a going-up tune, she had always called it privately, because it went up the way the stairs went up, thirteen of them, climbing. She had written it in a single evening in the autumn of 1968 for a frightened girl named Annie Lowery who could not be made to play anything she did not first hear, and Annie had heard it and learned it in an hour, and so had every child since. June was still learning it. She had the climb but not the leap; her hand tightened before the interval, bracing, and the leap came out hard and frightened.

"Stop. Give me your hand."

The girl put her right hand in Vera's two ruined ones, trusting, and Vera turned it over and pressed her thumb very gently into the small muscle below June's own thumb until it let go.

"Here. This is where you're holding. You think the leap is far. It isn't far. It only looks far from where you're standing." She set the hand back on the keys. "Don't jump it. Walk to the edge and let go. The note will be there. It is always there."

June walked to the edge and let go, and the leap came clean, surprised out of her, and her face when she turned was the face Vera had been paid in for forty years — not money, the money was the grocer's and the rent's and gone, but this, the precise instant a thing that had been impossible became, between one breath and the next, easy.

"I did it."

"You did it. Again, so your hand believes you."

They went on. The hour was not a long hour but it held a great deal; it always had. She corrected the wrist, the high shoulder, the foot that wanted to keep time and threw the hands off doing it. She wound the metronome twice — the brass one, the old one, that stood on the sill where the light from the window struck the worn places where her own grip had polished it. Magda had put it into her hands in another city in another year. There are no small pieces, Vera. The first thing the woman ever gave her and the truest, and Vera had carried it home on the train with it wrapped in a slip because she had not trusted the case to hold. It ticked now, plain and certain, and June played to it and against it and finally with it, and for eight bars at the end the girl and the tune and the machine were one thing, climbing.

Then the hour was over. It was over the way hours are, all at once, with light still in the window.

"Tuesday," Vera said. "Practice the leap. Not a hundred times. Ten times, listening. A hundred times not listening teaches your hand to play it wrong a hundred times."

June gathered her music into the grocery sack. At the door she stopped. "Ms. Linden. Are you sick?"

The question came from nowhere and everywhere, the way children's questions did. "No," Vera said. "Why?"

"Mama said the bakery's closing. She said the whole building." The girl's hand was on the frame. "I just wanted to know where lessons would be."

"Lessons are here," Vera said, "on Tuesday, for you to come to," and it was the truth as she knew it at that moment, and the child took it and clattered down the thirteen stairs, the fourth, the ninth, gone, and the street door swallowed her, and the bread-smell came up into the quiet she left.

Vera sat a while in the cane chair.

Then she got up and took the envelope off the rack and carried it to the window to read it by the good light, because her eyes, like the rest of her, had begun to require terms.

It was from Carl. Carl Acheson, Ruth's brother's boy, who sold insurance two towns over and came at Christmas and stood in the bakery in a good coat with his hands in his pockets as if afraid the flour would mark him. The hand was careful and a little cramped, a man writing something he had practiced saying.

Dear Miss Linden, it began, which was wrong; she had known him since he was a boy with a cowlick and he had called her Vera at the last two Christmases, and the Miss Linden told her, before any of the words did, what kind of letter it was.

She read it once standing up.

Ruth was failing. He put it plainly, which she gave him credit for; the doctors in the city had said what doctors say, and Ruth had come home to say it her own way, and the long and short of it was that there would not be another spring of the bakery. The estate would need to be settled. The building — he wrote the building and then, a line later, the property, as if trying the words for fit — would be put up for sale, and a sale would mean the upstairs cleared. He was sorry to be the one. He hoped she would have the winter to make arrangements. By spring, he wrote. He was sure she understood. He remained, hers sincerely, Carl.

She read it a second time sitting down, to be certain she had not invented the kindness or the cruelty, and found she had invented neither. It was an ordinary letter. A practical man had written down a practical thing. The building must be settled. And under the floor, two rooms below, with the ovens going and the loaves coming on for a town that did not yet know it was losing its bread, Ruth was dying, and had not told her, and had let her find it out from the nephew in a good coat, which was so exactly like Ruth that Vera had to put the letter down on the bench and hold the edge of the piano with one hand until the room stopped tilting.

She did not weep. She had never been able to, at the worst things; the tears came easily at recitals, at a child playing past her own small ceiling, and stopped entirely at the things that took the floor away. She held the wood and she counted, low, the way she counted the stairs, one, two, until the count had carried her past the place where she might have made a sound, and out the other side, into the plain afternoon. By spring. Forty springs in this room, and now: by spring.

After a time she lifted the lid of the bench to begin.

That was how she said it to herself, to begin — as if the clearing of forty years were a scale to be practiced slowly, one note stood upon before the next. The bench was deep and she had never once emptied it. Programs, mostly. Recital programs in their hundreds, mimeographed purple going to brown, Pupils of Miss Vera Linden, Spring, the years climbing — '71, '74, the long middle decade when the mill went and half the names left town with it, '88, '99, last May's, the ink barely set. Names in their ranks the way the keys stood in their ranks. She lifted out a year's worth and set it on the floor and lifted out another, the bench giving up its strata, and somewhere down near the wood at the bottom, beneath the oldest of them, beneath the very first program she had ever printed, her fingers found a different paper — heavier, older, gone the soft yellow of a thing kept out of light too long.

She knew it by the weight before she had it free.

She drew it out. Manuscript paper, the expensive kind she had bought by the quire in another life, the staves ruled close and fine, and across the top in her own young hand, the hand before the cold got into it, a title struck through twice and never replaced, and below that the going-up tune — the same eight bars June had climbed an hour ago — and below that, variation after variation, the theme turned and turned and opened, a page, two, three, the writing growing surer and then, near the bottom of the fourth leaf, simply stopping. Mid-bar. A measure begun and not finished, the stave running on empty to the margin and over the edge into nothing, as if the hand had lifted to take the next note and had not, in forty-five years, come down.

She carried it to the window and held it up to the failing light so the staves went translucent and the notes stood out against the square, against the turning maples and the dark picture house and the dog gone now from the warm spot by the hardware. The city it was written in rose in her as she held it — not as a thought but as a sound, a single chord struck a long way off and a long time ago and never quite let go of, still sounding, still under the soft pedal of all the years, una corda, one string, quiet. She had begun it there. She had meant to end it there. She had ended, instead, here.

And clipped to the back of the last leaf with a pin gone to rust, where it had waited all this time for her to look, was the small stub of a railway ticket, the date stamped and faded but still hers to read: the train she had come home on, in the spring of 1968.

The Year the City Let Her Go

The city did not so much release her as set her down, the way you set down something you have decided, after long argument, that you do not want. There was no struggle in it. The train slowed at the river bend below Cresswell, the brakes sighing off their long pressure, and the platform came up to meet her smaller than she remembered — smaller, and grayer, and exactly the size it had always been. She had carried the place inside her for nine years as something she had outgrown. Now it stood there in the October light and outgrew her instead.

She stepped down with the city still in her hands. That was the part no one could see. The conductor took her case and set it on the boards and touched his cap, and to him she was a thin woman of thirty in a good coat gone thin at the cuffs, come home for a sad reason, of which there were always several in a town that size. He could not see that her hands had been, eleven months before, on a stage with the lights hot above them and four hundred people gone so quiet she could hear, between the movements, a man three rows back breathe. He could not see what they had done up there, those hands, or rather what they had refused to do, the way a horse refuses a jump — all four feet planted and the rider going over alone. She put them in her pockets. She had got into the habit of putting them away.

No one met her. She had not written which train. She walked up from the station past the woolen mill, which was running then, three shifts and the whole street smelling of lanolin and hot oil and the river, and she thought: it is all still here. The dime store with its gold letters. The picture house with WEDNESDAY DOUBLE on the marquee. The draper. The lunch counter where the men sat in a row like keys. She had wanted, at eighteen, to burn it down behind her. She had got on the city-bound train and not looked back and told Magda Brunner, who asked where she was from, nowhere, really, a town you've never heard of, and Magda had looked at her over the rims of her glasses and said nothing, which from Magda was a sentence with a verb in it.

Her mother was dying in the front room. That was the reason, the honest reason, and Vera held to it the way you hold a railing. There is nothing dishonorable in coming home to nurse a dying mother. It is the oldest good reason there is. If, underneath it, there was another reason — quieter, with no name she would say aloud — she did not go looking for it. A person can carry a thing for years and never once turn it over to see what is written on the bottom.

---

The dying took the whole long autumn and most of the winter. Vera learned the geography of it: the hours the pain woke and the hours it slept, the particular weight of a grown woman who can no longer turn herself, the smell that no window left open in November could carry off entirely. Her mother had been a hard, careful woman who counted the change in the grocer's hand twice, and she did not soften toward the end so much as wear thin, the hardness showing through like the warp through cloth. You gave it up, she said once, out of a long silence, her eyes on the ceiling. Vera, by the bed, did not pretend to misunderstand. I came home, she said. Her mother's mouth moved. Same thing, she said, the way you do it. Then she slept, and Vera sat counting her breaths — one, two, three — the way she counted everything, the way she had counted since she was small, because numbers were a banister you could put your hand on in the dark.

The money ran out in the new year. It ran out the way money does, not in a crash but in a slow uncovering of the bottom of things. There had been a little from the city — a little from the lessons she'd given there, the accompanying, the church work. There was nothing coming in now. The doctor was kind and still wanted paying. The grocer, Mr. Pelletier's father then, kept the book, but a book is a thing that comes due. Vera sat at the kitchen table one February night with the column of figures in front of her and understood, in the plain way you understand weather, that she would have to earn.

What she could do, she could do. She had nothing else. And so the metronome came up out of the trunk where she had buried it.

Magda had given it to her the spring before, the last spring, when it was already clear to both of them that Vera was not going back and neither would say it. It was brass, heavy, with a key in the side and the pendulum behind its little wooden doors, and it had kept the time of Magda's whole long exile — Vienna to Lisbon to here, a hand on it at every station. You will think, Magda said, pressing it into her hands on the platform, that what you go to do is small. A town. Children. Scales. She had not asked what Vera was going to do. She had simply known. Listen to me. Her accent thickened when she meant a thing. There are no small pieces. There is only small playing. A scale is the whole of music if you give it the whole of yourself. You understand? You tune to the true note — and here she struck the little fork she always carried, and held it up so its thin clean A hung in the cold air between them — not to the loud one. The world will always offer you the loud one. Tune to this. And Vera, who had failed on the loudest stage there was, had taken the brass weight of the thing and not been able to say a word.

She set it now on the kitchen table beside the column of figures. She wound the key. She let the pendulum go, and the small dry tick of it filled the cold room — tock, tock, tock — and it was the first sound in months that was neither the river nor her mother's breathing nor the clock that did not keep its own time. It ticked, and she thought: there are no small pieces. And she thought: I will take a pupil. And the thought sat in her like a stone swallowed.

The first was Annie Lowery, who was seven, and whose mother wanted her to have an accomplishment. They came in their good coats. Annie had a round serious face and a front tooth gone and hands so small Vera could have hidden them both in one of hers. Her mother paid fifty cents and looked relieved to set the child down somewhere for the half hour. Vera taught the lesson in her mother's front parlor with the dying woman two rooms away, and it was wrong — the piano out of tune, the child frightened of her, herself frightened of the child, of what it meant that she had come to this. She heard Magda in her head and could not believe a word of it. She took the fifty cents and paid the grocer and felt it as a defeat with a coin in it.

But there came to be a second pupil, and a third. Word goes around a small town like water finding its level. The Linden girl, that went to the city. She teaches now. And by March it was plain that the parlor would not do — the dying could not be done to the sound of scales, and the living could not stop — and plain too that she could not stay forever in that house with that bed in it. She needed a room. She told herself she needed a room for the year. Until the estate was settled. Until she was on her feet. Just for the year — she said it to the rental man, she said it to herself, she would say it, though she did not know this yet, for the next forty.

---

The only room she could afford was over the bakery on Bridge Street. It was new then, the bakery — Ruth Acheson had opened it that winter, a young widow not yet thirty with her dead husband's insurance money and a stubbornness Vera would not learn the depth of for years. The room above had been a storeroom. It had a window over the square and a low ceiling that Tomas Brandt, decades on, would graze with his cap, and a smell coming up through the floorboards of bread that took Vera, that first day, by the throat — the warm yeast rise of it, the burnt-sugar edge, a smell like being fed before you knew you were hungry.

Ruth met her at the foot of the stairs with flour on her forearms to the elbow and flour in one eyebrow and looked her up and down. "You're the piano one," she said. It was not a question. "Thirteen stairs," she said, jerking her chin up the narrow flight. "I've counted them every day this winter carrying flour. You'll count them too. Everybody counts them." She wiped a hand on her apron, which only moved the flour around. "Rent's by the month. I won't put a piano up those stairs for you and I won't carry it down, so think before you do it." Then, less gruffly, looking at Vera's face, at whatever was written there: "There's a window. Light all morning. A body can stand a lot with a window."

Vera climbed the thirteen stairs. She counted them; she could not help it; one, two, three — and at the turn the daylight came down to meet her, and eleven, twelve, thirteen, and she was in the room. It was empty and swept. The window held the square — the war memorial, the bare trees, the marquee of the picture house — in a frame, the way a held note holds a silence around it. Bread rose under her feet. She stood in the middle of the floor with her city case still in her hand and understood that she would put the piano here, the walnut upright that had been her grandmother's, and that she would haul it up these stairs somehow, and that this was where she would do the small thing now instead of the large one, and she waited to feel the defeat of it.

She did not feel it. That was what she could never afterward explain. She felt the light, and the warm floor, and the square framed and quiet, and something in her that had been standing braced for eleven months set down a little of its weight. Just for the year, she said to the room, aloud, to make it true. The room took the words the way a good room takes a note — without echo, without argument, holding it just long enough and then letting it go.

---

She got the piano up the stairs in April, four men and Ruth shouting directions from below, and tuned it herself over two evenings, the tuning fork between her teeth, A-440 humming in the bone of her jaw — the true note, Magda's note, the thing everything else must be brought to agree with. When it was done she played, alone, with the door shut, for the first time since the city: not the great piece, never that, but small things, easy things, a Bach two-part invention that went under her hands like water finding its old bed. Her hands did what she asked. In an empty room, with no one breathing three rows back, they always would. She did not let herself think about that. She shut the lid.

Annie Lowery was the first to climb the thirteen stairs as a pupil of the room. She came up counting them under her breath — Vera heard her through the door, eleven, twelve, thirteen, the small voice — and arrived pink and solemn with her music satchel held in both arms like a cat that might run. She was afraid of the piano. She stood as far from it as the small room allowed.

Vera knelt. Later she would do this ten thousand times and it would cost her, the kneeling, in the years when her knees went the way of her hands; but the first time it was easy, it was the most natural motion in the world, to go down to the height of a frightened child. She took Annie's right hand — the small cold fingers, the bitten nails — and she found the worn place that was not yet worn, the white key in the center, and she set the child's thumb upon it. "There," she said. "That one's yours. That's middle C. As long as you live, you'll be able to find your way home from there." Annie pressed it. The note came up clear and the child's whole face changed, the fear going out of it and something else coming in, the thing Vera would spend forty years calling people up these stairs to see come into their faces. Oh, Annie said. Just that.

That night Vera could not sleep. The day's lesson had left her with a problem she had not had in the city, where everyone arrived already able and the only question was how well. Annie could do nothing yet. She could find one note. And it seemed to Vera suddenly unbearable that the child should go home with nothing of her own — only scales, only the ladders other people had built — and so Vera sat at the upright in the dark with the square gone black in the window and the last warmth of Ruth's ovens coming up through the floor, and she wrote, on the back of an envelope, eight bars.

They were nothing. Eight bars in C, the right hand alone, the notes walking up the keyboard one to the next, C to D to E and on up, a step at a time, the way a child climbs stairs — both feet on each step before the next, careful, rising. A going-up tune. She wrote for Annie at the top and did not write her own name. It took her four minutes. It was the smallest piece of music she had ever made and the first she had made in four years, and she would teach it, she did not yet know, to every beginner who ever climbed to her, until it was the most-played eight bars in the history of that town and no one but her ever knew where it came from.

She taught it to Annie that Thursday. She set the small thumb on middle C — home — and showed her how to walk up, one finger, one note, one stair at a time. And Annie picked it out, slow and wrong and then slow and right, climbing the keys like a child climbing stairs, her tongue between her teeth, rising; and Vera stood by the window with the square below her and the bread warm beneath her feet and the brass metronome ticking on the lid, and told herself, as she would tell herself for forty years, that it was only for the year.