The movers brought in the furniture. And there it stood, the prized purchase: a modest spinet, burnished brown wood warm to the eye, gracing the inside wall, an invitation to culture.
My mother looked down at my six-year-old self. 'Would you like to learn to play it?'
My eyes grew round. 'You mean I can touch that?'
'If you wash your hands first, yes.'
Thus inauspiciously began my lifelong love affair with the keyboard. I was unaware of the hopes, schemes, and general machinations behind this simple venture into music - nor did I guess at the sociological, historical, and even theological implications of this choice of instrument. I did not know, in modern parlance, that this piano business was, er, fraught.
To begin with, my maternal grandmother was a Methodist, and my mother was a Baptist. This means nothing to you. Methodism was our equivalent of High Church, which meant organ music, quiet organ music, and no hollering. My mother played a little piano, learnt at school, and wanted one. My grandmother put her diminutive foot down, no. Pianos were played in unsavoury places. In those days, you didn't play like Scott Joplin unless you'd learnt it where Scott Joplin learnt it.
Don't ask. It won't get past the profanity filter.
My father had no such objections: every home in the hills boasted either 'a' ol' piece of a pianner', or a pump organ, decorative, loud, and frankly horrible, possibly using foot power, possibly electrified by means of an old vacuum-cleaner engine hidden in the floorboards (we recycled back then). He was used to long sessions at these instruments, bellowing out old favourites such as 'Just a Little Talk with Jesus'. You got hot. You got sticky. You committed four-part harmony. You were happy.
My Aunt Mary was a virtuosa of the cheery stride style, and my grandmother's Uncle Hughes could plunk down at an out-of-tune converted player piano and ring the changes on a ragtime tune that would make a honky-tonk angel weep for joy.
My mother didn't weep for joy. She was out to make the pianner respectable. So there were Lessons.
My first piano teacher was a tall, slender, shy young man named William Kidd. I thought he was a genius, and secretly envied him his romantic name. Anyone less like a pirate could hardly have been imagined, though - he was reserved around us, for which I don't blame him. Seven-year-olds are not for delicate eardrums - it might have taken the real Captain Kidd to truly enjoy us. For a modest fee, our Mr Kidd imparted musical wisdom once a week after school. I treasured that hour, as one by one my fellow learners and I took it in turn to butcher 'The Spinning Song' and such - all except my good friend David, who of course zipped through it all with élan. (He is a composer now.) I suspect the hour was interminable for poor Mr Kidd, but he bore it with good grace.
I did learn something useful, though. When our class teacher wanted us to learn a song from the school songbook, David was able effortlessly, and with great bravura, to play the complex score - but none of the unmusical nitwits could sing it. I, on the other hand, merely plunked out the tune with a few stray chords, and the group belted the melody out lustily.
I was an accompanist. So be it. David listened to the music - I listened for the uncertain voices.
This music class business was not, however, teaching me what my mother wanted me to know: how to play hymns. A note for the musically sophisticated: by hymns, she meant 'The Roll Is Called Up Yonder' and 'Higher Ground', not that stuff they play in films about Eton. That's not a hymn, that's classical music where I come from.
As my sister was approaching the age when she, too, could learn to play, my mother engaged a piano teacher, the kind that came to your house. Thus Mrs Easley blew into our lives on a gust of enthusiasm. Mrs Easley was Assembly of God, but announced at the outset that her outlook was ecumenical, and she 'just loved Baptists'.
Gloss: the Assemblies of God were what my mother called 'holy rollies'. They believed in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which meant that they shouted a lot in church, and possibly spoke in tongues not acquired with the help of a Berlitz teacher. They stopped short of handling rattlesnakes, as this was the low country.
Mrs Easley was not only open-minded but knowledgeable in the ways of rousing piano music. It took her a few weeks to teach me the tricks of the trade - swing the bass, play the third verse and chorus in high octaves, throw in an ornament or two, pander to the bass section ('when the roll (when the roll) is called...'), and keep really good time. Then she moved on to what she regarded as her true calling, teaching classical music to beginner keyboardists.
About which she knew, alas, less than nothing. It would all have to be relearnt later, but in the meantime, I pounded out etudes - which Mrs Easley pronounced 'et-a-ludes'. I did exercises, the purpose of which was as much a mystery to this lovely woman as it was to me. I practised my recital piece, 'Zapateado', to which Mrs Easley gave a twist which would have made Andres Segovia tear at his hair, on two counts.
Accustomed to reluctant piano students, Mrs Easley insisted on a full hour of practice every day, and my mother, keen to get her money's worth, enforced this rigorously.
I would have needed no encouragement to remain at my post for an hour had it not been for my new baby sister. I needed practise, she needed a nap, and my mother needed a rest. So the door to the living room stayed shut.
And I was in a private hell.
The incipient schizophrenia which none of us understood had started to set in, leaving me with sensory impressions I had just enough intelligence to keep to myself. At sundown I would edge out of unoccupied rooms, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I awoke from ghastly and ridiculous nightmares, trying to control my thoughts. And I could not - simply could not - bear to remain alone in a room with photographs in it. The eyes, you see, the eyes looked at me...and I wanted to run.
I couldn't say this, obviously. It was silly, childish, and totally unmanly. So I sat at the piano, alone, sweating it out under the harmless, but utterly terrifying, oversized photo of myself and my sister, the kind every family from that period had, and still has, somewhere, a cliched moment frozen in time, oh look, that's what Uncle D. looked like as a kid, look, his front teeth are missing, and is that Brylcreem on his hair...?
Not looking at it made me even more nervous. I could feel the eyes boring into the side of my neck. But an hour was an hour, and duty was duty, and I needed the practise. I have never told anyone before this how much it cost to stay at that keyboard, all those afternoons.
The combination of doing something I loved - playing music - and something I hated - facing private demons - cured me forever, I think, of the fallacy of what we now call 'state-based learning'. By the time I got to zen, I understood what they meant by being able to meditate in a railway station. I had that part licked cold.
The living room was more welcoming when it was full of people, and my young parents liked to socialise. It was during pleasant soirees - steaks from the grill and iced tea, of course, did I mention we were Baptists? - that I discovered the genius behind my mother's choice of musical instrument.
The great thing about a piano in 1950s Memphis was, you see, what it was not. It was not an accordion.
All the mothers had ambitions back then, all had visions of musical children...and some wicked Harold Hill had blown in from Lawrence Welk country and sold all these hopeful young mothers a job lot of instruments from frozen hades. With instruction books, no doubt. This thing was not the friendly squeezebox Liam Clancy plays - no, it was that horrible thing that weighs half a ton and has a little keyboard on it, and a bellows, to give the child muscles, no doubt.
Whenever we went to visit my parents' friends, there would be an after-supper recital. Adults would sit with frozen smiles as little Timmy bravely shouldered his weap-, er instrument, grinned at his captive audience, and laboured away at 'Lady of Spain'.
Until he hit the first sour note, somewhere about bar five. Then he would smile apologetically...
...and start over.
Character was judged by one's ability to suppress groans as this went on and on, until Timmy miraculously got through it.
At our house, things were a bit different. My sister would play her party piece to polite applause (and she knew better than to stop at a wrong note), then the assembly would chat amicably as I played in the background. Anything, really, church meditation music, light classics, Stephen Foster, whatever took my fancy...my mother garnered lavish praise from a relieved crowd, and I stayed happily out of the limelight.
Accompaniment, you see. They half-listened to the music, while I half-listened to the conversation.
Mrs Easley finally put on her recital in a rented hall. We dressed to kill, suits and ties for the boys, frilly dresses for the little girls, the grown-up sixteen-year-old in her first daring strapless gown (yes, I noticed). We played more or less well, and even I tap-danced through 'Zapateado'. At least, we got through it without crying, falling off the piano, or starting over. Applause and photographs.
The best thing, though, as I remember it, was the look in my grandmother's eyes afterwards, and what she said, and the look on my mother's face when she said it.
'Well, that kind of piano music is all right.'
That time, I think, we were all listening to the music.
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