A rhythmically impaired daughter’s musical miracle

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/12/2023 (1024 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

December is a time for ceremonies celebrating the miraculous. The miracle I wish to share with you has to do with the piano.

Sister Mary Margaret gave piano lessons at the Sacred Heart Convent in my hometown and I was her student for many years. We approached each other with good will, insofar as I had no musical ability other than a facility with my fingers, and she had much compassion for my facility — and the impact of my forceful, musically gifted mother who, though Jewish, believed the convent capable of working miracles, even on behalf of her ungifted, tone-deaf daughter.

Sister Mary Margaret could see that I was stuck but trying. She had an upside-down smile that could have been a frown but really wasn’t, and an outfit not unlike a penguin’s, which is very much how I saw her when I began lessons at the age of eight, her habit running its white wimple across her forehead, creasing her skin so tightly I often ached to loosen its grip.

I also knew the crease would remain if the wimple were removed, just as the remainder framing her cheek, her chin and then fanning into her neckerchief would, if removed, retain its trace. Sister Mary Margaret was the forever bride of Christ and her vows were rings round every part of her being, including the cross circling under the black crepe veil, the hem of the cape that rounded her shoulders, the hoop of her pleated skirt.

She was in love with God and music. Her skin was translucent, her fingers so finely made they seemed like Dresden china, fingers tipped with a bluish tinge if the sun streamed through the windows and her hand lifted to turn the pages of the music. Her blue eyes shone inside round wire-rimmed glasses, the rims pinching the side of her face nearest me, the arm disappearing inside the stiff cloth where there was an ear for music I would never see.

Sister Mary Margaret grew strawberry-coloured fuzz along the border of her chin, though her eyebrows seemed never to have sprouted, and so I worried about her hair. Every Tuesday at 5:15, I studied her for 30 minutes and she studied me. We also studied music as best we could, even setting a metronome when the spirit moved us.

As the years progressed, my fingers grew less facile, my habit more withdrawn, for while I had initially very much wanted to play the piano, had begged for lessons, I had too little of the ability that would support that bit of dreaming.

Sister Mary Margaret, good-hearted and gentle, sat devotedly beside my piano stool knowing that I would consistently disappoint, that my mother’s understanding of miracles was flawed.

Even then, my mother and Sister Mary Margaret put me in music festivals (certainly the wrong word for what happened to most of the children who didn’t have what it took). They put me in festivals and I crumbled, fingers scrambling to get to the end of a piece I could not play and did not understand.

This one time, however, I am playing with three other girls, a quartet. Every Tuesday, a second piano is rolled in and the four of us attack our parts. We have no sense of the sound we should make. Memorizing our individual parts is almost more than we can manage, though the piece is as accessible as Sister Mary Margaret can find.

I know the notes I am supposed to play and if I look steadily up at the music, I can get to most of them. But that’s all. My consolation: there are four of us going up to the stage, all equally stiff and unbecoming in fancy dresses, and I am on the left, far from the audience.

I climb the stairs in the Armory Auditorium and walk into the last space on the second piano. I am feeling pretty protected because while it’s going to be awful, my mother can’t just blame the whole thing on me.

It’s the second, maybe the third bar and Gillian loses her place. Turning with wild eye and tears, she says “s—-” so we’ll stop, but we keep going. Gillian finds her way a couple of bars later, but by then, at varying paces, each of us has lost her way and it’s a disaster. Sound falling, a jumble of phrases, the audience gasping.

We have never played as badly or as grandly. Beverley, my partner, has become positively lyrical, manufacturing trills not in the music, and I poke her, smiling: “That’s lovely, Beverly, really it is.” Beverly beams.

All of a sudden, I decide I am going to play as I imagine Beethoven would play: I press into the keys, feel when they should move one to the next, start pedalling even though Sister Mary Margaret strongly advises against it. For these few minutes, I am free. I am playing my heart out.

When it’s over, two or three minutes of four different melodies, there’s an unexpected surge of clapping. Not just the polite “Thank god that’s done,” but a real enthusiasm.

These aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters have witnessed four girls — off-kilter and entirely unmusical — finding something that interests them. We rise at exactly the same moment and bow, smiling broadly, which is not the way we thought we’d end up, and we march — really, in perfect unison — and plop down into our seats in one movement.

The adjudicator hasn’t said a word. Cynthia goes up for the piece of paper, which has some lines on it later read as “Tried your best” and “Thank you.”

My mother comes down the aisle and hugs me. She has seen her daughter making phrases, has thought she must have made music. I know I have not, but I will remember this moment for the rest of my life — the illusion that made it seem as if I could play the piano.

There is probably a hot fudge sundae that follows, but more importantly there is this kindness my mother casts, this miracle, even if smudged a little by her sympathy for the other mothers when, arms around me and fixing her gaze at them over my shoulder, she observes, “My girl — the music was off, of course — but my girl, did you see the way she moved?”