Steinway & His Sons

There are only two things your husband doesn’t let go to ruin in the wake of you. One is the 6x8 framed picture of you both in Prospect Park on your third date. In the photo you squeeze each other close and smile into a phone camera held by a stranger who probably never spared another thought to either of you, let alone suspected their photography skills would be immortalized on your living room wall for forty-eight years.

This photo hangs to the right of the only other thing your husband is meticulous in his upkeep of: a Steinway & Sons Model S baby grand made of tiger mahogany. It has never budged from the corner he painstakingly directed the movers to place it, thirty-two years ago when it came home in the back of a Mercedes delivery truck without him informing you beforehand. Fresh off the showroom floor across the Hudson. You helped him clear out a space for it without question; he’d talked about how much he wanted a Steinway ever since you met him. Now he had one. The way he smiled when he uncovered the keys later that night was more than worth getting over your resistance to change, especially in things as fundamental as a living room layout. You fell asleep to beautiful renditions of Tchaikovsky and Bach, sitting to his right on the bench with your head resting on his shoulder. You awoke the next morning in your bed, tucked in snugly. When you walked to the living room in nothing but your Calvin briefs, you found him asleep at the piano, sitting straight up with his pretty chin resting against his chest, careful not to lean on the keys. You sat next to him on the bench and watched until his eyes fluttered open, your presence enough to tempt him out of the deepest sleep. He leaned in, kissed you, then played Brahms as you made coffee.

Now, when you sit on your side of the piano bench and watch your home turn into the hovel of a widower, it doesn’t surprise you that the Steinway’s corner seems repellant to mess. It does, however, shock you that there’s trash piling up to begin with. Your husband was always the home keeper in the marriage. You were a bridge and tunnel businessman, working the ridiculous hours needed for a Black man to climb the corporate ladder in the Financial District. He was the premier Monacan concert pianist of the East Coast who only took a handful of gigs a year, though that handful always came close to equaling your yearly salary, bonuses included. He didn’t mind being your little maid, though. He was a clean freak and liked the foreplay it often led to whenever you’d come home with a loose tie and undone top button to find him naked, dusting your study.

But even the shock of his fall into slovenliness doesn’t compare to the day he sits down and begins to pluck out a melody on the Steinway you don’t recognize. The new sequence of notes catches your attention and doesn’t let go. You sit unmoving on the bench, in the indents left behind from all the years you spent beside him.

And you watch.

Your husband’s long, bony fingers are unsure as they move across the keys. Every other note he hits is wrong in some mysterious but intrinsic way you cannot deny. But this doesn’t stop him from going back and finding the correct one. He never writes down the music. He sleeps there on the bench, curled up with his head unknowingly in your lap, before starting from the beginning and playing every note perfectly all the way to where he left off the night before.

One morning, bathed in dusty rays slanting through the streaked Palladian window he installed himself as a ten-year anniversary gift, your husband begins by striking a perfect new note and stops. He cocks his head to the side, listening to it echo off the walls and junk surrounding him. Then he goes back to the start.

Your living room fills with runs, each gathering manic speed as hard-struck chords are followed by heart murmurs of caesuras that turn them lackadaisical. Crescendos build to a soul bursting head, until they reach a universal precipice, then a gentle decrescendo floats you back to earth like a leaf on the wind. Arpeggios follow with the dizzying step-like quality of Escher. All of this, strung together in your husband’s precise order and immaculate precision, would’ve brought an entire music hall to a stunned silence. Finally, he plays the note he started the morning with. The sustain pedal draws it out; an indulgent fermata hangs in the air.

When the sound eventually disappears, your husband doesn’t move.

You wait, watching those delicate, brown hands you know better than you knew your own. They hover above the keys, trembling. A sob rips out from his throat. Tears stream down his cheeks in crooked rivulets. Only then do you realize that you’re crying, too—something you never thought possible. Not in your current state.

He wrote an original piece only once before and nearly dropped out of his undergraduate music program when his peers berated him for it being ‘cliche’ and ‘trite’ and ‘just not that good’. He swore he would leave composition to the masters.

Fifty years later, the brain cancer hit you hard, and the hospital became your permanent residence. Fog fell over everything. Long periods passed where it was like you weren’t even there. But he was there. Always. In a rare moment of clarity, you asked him to write a song on the Steinway. He promised to start on it that night and would play it for you once you kicked cancer’s ass and came back home; a promise made as much for himself as it was for you.

You told him you couldn’t wait to hear it.

But he didn't get the chance to go home that night. And then, with the funeral to plan, he kept himself busy and out of the house as much as possible. When he finally did sit behind the keys again, he found his finger numb and uninspired.

He stares at you now, meets your eyes. The corners of his lips pull back into a weak smile, making waves across the mahogany skin of his cheeks and folding his forehead along the four lines that have always been there but somehow never wrinkled. It’s been years since you’ve seen that smile.

I’m sorry it took so long to keep my promise.

You see, I felt you come home with me the day I left your body at the hospital. But it took a while to be sure I hadn’t gone crazy. Your imprint never leaving the bench cushion gave all the confirmation I needed. I won’t tell anyone. And I won’t play this song I crafted for anyone else. I’m fine with that.

After all, I wrote it just for you and me and Steinway and his sons.

© 2023 D.K. Lawhorn

About the Author

D.K. Lawhorn (he/him) is a citizen of the Monacan Indian Nation and lives on his ancestral land in Virginia with his legion of rescue cats. His stories have appeared in ANMLY, khōréō magazine, HAD, and The Massachusetts Review. He was part of the Tin House Fall Workshop ‘22 and Clarion West ‘23. He is a graduate of Randolph College’s MFA in Creative Writing program where he concentrated his studies on Native American speculative fiction. Follow him on Twitter @d_k_lawhorn or visit his website at dklawhorn.com.