The Piano Maker (3 page)

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “All that stone and the hand-squared beams and wooden ceilings. All that joinery, like upside-down ships.”

“Yes, it’s beautiful. Mrs. Giroux, I’ll come right out with it. It’s not just the organ – it’s the choir, too. I don’t think I mentioned that when we first spoke, before you auditioned. The thing is, I also need help with rebuilding the choir, but I wanted them to hear you first. Now that they’ve done that, I know they’ll accept you. Some have spoken to me already.”

“Yes. I would be glad to help with that. Very glad. What happened to the choir?”

“The usual. Jealousies and strife ever since Adelaide died a few months ago. She was our organist and conductor. We’ve
been improvising ever since, and it’s not going well. But a congregation needs good music. It brings them together.”

“Well, I’d be glad to help, Father. Thank you for asking.”

“Good. Very good.” He stood up. “If you’d come with me to the office for a moment. The heating there is broken, and we don’t use the room except for the telephone and the filing cabinet. I’ll give you the choir list.”

He led the way down the hall, and in the office he closed the door behind her. He went to the filing cabinet and pulled out a drawer, but then he paused for a moment. He turned to her.

“Mrs. Giroux, please forgive me. There isn’t perhaps something more I should know about you? Before we go much further? Anything to prevent you from becoming active in our church?”

“I don’t think so, Father. Other than what I told you.”

“No? All right. Very well.”

He turned and lifted out a file folder. “This is a list of the former choir members. Maybe Mildred can help with that, making the introductions. She’s been active in the choir, and if she’s not too busy I think she’ll take the time. A rough diamond, our Mildred. One who speaks her mind, but a good, strong, honest person in the community, and a fine singing voice, as you’ll see.”

In her room she locked the door and then lay back on the bed with her boots on a towel. She could hear the ocean,
wind in the trees. She sat up and undid the laces, hook by hook down to the eyelets, and took off the boots and set them on the floor and lay back again with her feet under the towel now.

The room was clean and bare, and every single thing she owned except for her nightgown and toiletries and street coat was still packed away. Two hat boxes, one suitcase, one leather-and-wood trunk. The trunk sat with the lid open against the wall. Each evening she hung up the day’s clothes to air them, and she took out only what she would need the next day. In the morning she brushed the previous day’s clothes, folded them and put them away.

She lay on the bed with her hands on her stomach. Long hands and strong piano fingers with the nails kept short. She could feel her hip bones under her wrists, too close to the surface because she’d become thinner these past few years; thinner and wiser and able to endure solitude absolutely. She lay still, with her eyes closed.

Ever since the accident she had not been sleeping well. After the jail and the institution she’d taken to sipping a brown medicine given to her by a pharmacist in Montreal, but it had not helped with the dreams and had kept her groggy all the next day and wanting ever more of it, and so by an act of will she’d stopped. She found it was better simply to submit and lie quietly in the dark and wait for sleep.

She rose and stepped to the window. The tide was halfway, coming in or going out she could not tell. She saw a brown shore, seaweed and enormous rocks exposed.
A sailboat was rounding a distant point of land. More rocks and evergreens, with mist low among them.

She heard the church bell and counted twelve strokes. Noon.
Maybe this place
, she said to herself.
Saint Homais
.

THEY WERE NINE WOMEN
and five men in Lady Ashley’s living room, all in good clothes and the women with their hair nicely done. Mildred made the introductions. An upright piano stood against one wall – an English Broadwood in an oak cabinet – and Lady Ashley asked her to play something, to get things going.

She sat down, raised the fallboard and warmed up with a few chords and then played a bit of the Huron Carol, “ ’Twas in the Moon of Wintertime.” After a few phrases she went back to the beginning and looked over her shoulder and nodded at them to sing. Several knew the work, but one voice overpowered the rest. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw that it was Lady Ashley. She kept playing, and when she could free her left hand for a moment she gave the downward
sotto
sign. It still wasn’t very good, and she stopped and turned around. “We can work on that one,” she said.

Lady Ashley rang a hand bell, and a young maid in a
black dress and white pinafore brought tea and plates of small sandwiches from the kitchen.

They all helped themselves, and she sat on the sofa and answered their questions. She told them she’d been wanting to move away from the big city, from Montreal, for some time. Her husband had been killed early in the war in France. She’d lived in England and then in Canada the last dozen years. In Montreal she’d met Madame Sidonie Cabayé, who’d told her about the French Shore and Saint Homais.

Everyone smiled and nodded. They remembered Sidonie.

And yes, she told them: she had a daughter who had gone to school in Montreal and was at this time taking a radiology course for registered nurses in London.

“Claire is twenty-four,” she said. She searched her purse for the small leather folder with the photograph, and they studied it and passed it around and made comments about the grown daughter, one with a good profession in these times when even men had difficulty finding work.

At one point Lady Ashley rose abruptly and with a firm step left the room. Sir Anthony was in England on business, someone whispered. Wasn’t he always, whispered someone else.

That night it snowed, and it kept on snowing until the middle of the next day. A very early snow, everyone said. Father William saw her struggling with the car, and he and the sexton came with shovels to help. The
RCMP
sergeant
saw them from the road, and he parked his Ford and came to help also.

When the snow was cleared away from the wheels, she pulled out the choke and pumped the gas pedal and pushed the starter button. The engine hesitated but eventually it came to life, and the men slapped at the smoke and dropped the shovels and pushed. From the road she caught a glimpse of them in the mirror. The sexton and Father William were already walking away, but the policeman still stood looking after the car in a way she did not like. But the road was slippery and she had to pay attention, and the next time she checked the mirror he had turned away.

The snowplow had been through and she drove in second gear, with the worn-out pair of shoes on the passenger seat, past the school and the co-operative, past the government dock and on through a stand of pines to the building with the tall brick chimney.

In the front office she asked the girl if she could speak to Mr. David Chandler.

“You’re the piano player, ma’am,” said the girl brightly. “From the funeral. I recognize you. If you ever …” She blushed and stopped.

The girl was pretty in a way but there was something not quite right about one side of her face.

“If I ever what?” said Hélène.

“Oh, nothing, ma’am. You just go back out that door and turn left and you’ll see the sign down the brickway. That’s David’s shop. You can go right in, but maybe cover
your ears. It’s often noisy in there with all that screamin’ machinery he’s got.”

When she entered the shop he was standing at a sander, holding a workpiece to the belt with both hands. The dust that came off disappeared into the open mouth of the kind of suction machine that might have saved her mother’s life, had there been one at the Molnar works. Around the room stood drawing boards and machinery and work tables. Hand tools hung within their outlines on peg-boards. The workshop smelled of dry shaved wood, and for a moment it all took her back twenty years and more.

She walked between him and the window, and he looked up and nodded but kept on working. After a while he held up the piece and put callipers to it. He turned off the sander and the suction machine.

“Snow so soon,” he said. He glanced at her city coat and hat and the shoes she was carrying. “How can I help you, ma’am?”

She said she was new in town but that she’d heard from Mildred at the hotel that he’d made her favourite pair of shoes.

“Her favourite pair,” he said. “That’s nice to hear.”

She told him what she wanted, and he took the shoes and turned them in the light of the lamp over the work table.

“I can do that,” he said. “If you sit in that chair and take off your boots, I can measure you for the last. Just have a seat while I wash up.”

He went out through a door at the back of the room,
and she could hear water running. When he came back she was still standing.

“Could you not measure from the shoes, Mr. Chandler?”

“From the shoes. Well. It’ll be so much better from the foot. Always from the foot, because every foot is different in small but important ways. Like the insteps or the arches, and how much the foot widens when we put weight on it. And so for the shoe to fit properly, that’s how it’s done.”

He turned her right shoe in the light and put his hand inside.

“With this, all the more,” he said.

She sat down on a bench.

“Ma’am?”

“Yes, Mr. Chandler. Just give me a moment.” She looked around. “I spent most of my youth in a place like this. Much larger and more work stations, but the same wood smell and similar tools. My mother inherited a piano factory and she taught me the business. After she died I ran it for as long as I could. The war put an end to it.”

He stood listening to her. Waiting, she imagined, for her to come to the point.

“Interesting,” he said then. “And where was that?”

“In a town in northern France. Our make was called Molnar. We sent many to North America.”

“Molnar pianos?”

“Yes. You have one right here in your church. I played it the night before the funeral.”

“That was you? I wasn’t there, but I heard about it.”

She smiled at him. “Mr. Chandler,” she said, “this shoe business is my secret.”

“Well, ma’am. Your secret is safe with me.”

“Thank you. Besides the pair to replace these, I need two pairs of indoor shoes. An elegant pair with a very low heel, almost flat, for recitals, and one with a slightly higher heel for other occasions. All black. Would you be able to do that?”

“Once I have a last, I can make any kind of shoe you want. Ankle boots, half-shoes. The heels, certainly.”

He stood and waited. She sensed a firm kindness in the man, a courtesy and patience that made room for her concerns but also offered professional guidance.

“Mr. Chandler,” she said. “One day, will you show me how this suction machine works? Where does the dust go?”

“Ah. It goes into a canvas bag in the basement just under here.” He tapped his foot on the floor. “Once a month or so I have it emptied. I keep another shop for the leatherwork, in case you’re wondering. This shop is for engineered patterns and other woodwork.”

“Interesting,” she said.

She took off her hat and put it beside her on the bench, and when she could postpone it no longer she set the left foot first on a wooden box there and leaned forward and began to undo the laces.

THE LAST PHOTO OF HER
father had come from West Africa. His face looked tanned and there were hardly any wrinkles on it, just on his brow and at either side of his mouth. His laughing wrinkles, Mother called them. In the picture he wore a tropical shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he stood holding up a tall wooden blade for the sort of windmill he designed and installed for water and electricity in the colonies. The main building of Habitation Midi, with five grinning black faces on the veranda, was behind him.

When the picture had first arrived in a letter, she’d sat studying it in the light of her desk lamp, and she imagined him speaking to the people behind him and joking with them. She imagined them all laughing and being grateful for his windmills and water pumps. These people and others in those faraway places saw much more of him than she did, and she envied them.

The day the news came to Montmagny, she was in the yard helping the workers load kiln-dried wood onto the
cart that would take it to the milling floor. It was summer and she had on her pale-green printed dress and long leather work gloves because of the slivers.

A black motorcar arrived, and the driver stopped in the factory yard and shut down the engine. She watched a man get out on the passenger side and put on his hat and pull down his waistcoat.

“Where can I find Madame Bouchardon?” he said to no one in particular, and she turned and pointed at the wooden door across the yard.

The man walked there, and before he knocked he took off his hat and held it strangely close to his chest as though trapping a bird in it. He closed the door behind him, and within seconds she could hear her mother. The first scream was so loud that all the ducks flew off the millpond.

Mother’s older cousin, Juliette, came over, and while Mother was resting after taking the nerve medicine Dr. Menasse had given her, Juliette told Hélène that her father had been killed in Africa, in Côte d’Ivoire. There had been some trouble, the man from the Colonial Office had said, some sort of tribal uprising to do with tithes imposed by missionaries, and all of Habitation Midi had been destroyed and every living thing there killed. Even the dogs.

Juliette paused and dabbed her eyes. She said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. He was a good man, and he loved you and your mother very much. You must never forget that.”

“The missionaries?” she said. “But why? What did anyone do to them?”

“No one did anything to the missionaries, Hélène. And your father did nothing to anyone.”

“Was it the people on the veranda?”

“The what, dear?”

“On the veranda behind him. In the photograph.”