No MOre Piano Lessons, Barry Rachin [rooftoppers txt] 📗

Muriel Beagle was an awful piano teacher. An abomination! Which is why, Allan Swanson blew a mental gasket when his ex-wife asked if he would shuttle their daughter, Ruthie, to her Thursday afternoon lessons from late April straight through until the end of school. It had been an amicable divorce. Lois, who was newly remarried, seldom bugged Allan when he fell behind with child support payments or his share of their daughter's expenses. The only thing she asked was that he pitched in for the kid's music lesson. Being a professional musician, a saxophonist on the wedding-bar mitzvah circuit, it seemed crass not to oblige. Thirty minutes - that's all Mrs. Beagle allotted per lesson, and most days she started late or was interrupted by one of her bratty kids bursting in unannounced. Lost time was never recouped on the back end of the lesson, and once, the music teacher even took a cell phone call and it wasn't an emergency. So unprofessional!
In the divorce agreement, Allan got shared custody. Ruthie, who turned twelve on the third of the month, visited weekends and slept over straight through to Monday mornings. One afternoon three weeks earlier, she was playing the Love Theme from Doctor Zhivago. Reaching the bridge, her fingers stumbled over an eighth-note run. "You left out a beat."
"No I didn't." The child’s tone was brusque and dismissive. "I played it just fine."
"No, look… When you started the ascending triplets -"
"I've played the tune exactly the same for Mrs. Beagle," Ruthie insisted, "and she never complained. Not once!"
Check. Checkmate. What could he say? The piano teacher gave lessons in a claustrophobically small den just off the kitchen. At the following lesson, Allan sat outside the door in an equally tiny vestibule as Ruthie played through the delicate waltz. When she reached the bridge where the melody modulated down a minor third, Ruthie dropped a whole note. He waited for Mrs. Beagle to cut her off, to point out the musical indiscretion. Nothing! Further along, Ruthie fingered the major seventh on a dominant arpeggio. Allan cringed inwardly. The teacher let the musical mayhem pass without comment. A major seventh in a dominant chord - Allan almost lost his lunch.
"She's coming along nicely don't you think?" The lesson was over and Mrs. Beagle was standing in the door way with her arm draped around his daughter's shoulder.
The artistically-challenged piano teacher was young, in her late thirties with three children. With her close-cropped, dirty brown hair and an overbite Muriel probably hadn't won any beauty contests since elementary school. And, even in the short time that Allen had known the woman, she had begun putting on weight. Fastforward ten years into the future, she would have added a sedentary pound or two annually until her girlish figure was little more than a fleeting memory.
And then there was the matter of Mrs. Beagle's voice. The words came in a nasally monotone that never varied, neither in pitch nor intensity. She talked through her nose in a grating, infuriating, mind-numbing drone that made most everything she said seem utterly irrelevant. There was no variation in the cadence. She didn’t bunch her words together in a rush of exuberance when enthusing over some bit of musical minutia. Drip. Drip. Drip. Twenty-four-seven, the words meandered along like water dripping from a leaky spigot. Chinese water torture!

Saturday afternoon, Allen played a wedding at the Foxhill Country Club. The piano player, Herb Calloway, was something of a musical celebrity having recently come off the road with the Woody Herman big band. “That lick you played on the last two measures of Misty,” Allan was addressing the piano player as they picked their way to the back of the room after finishing the first set. The bridal party and wedding guests had taken their seats as the main meal was being served. At the rear of the function hall a table had been arranged for band.
“The polytonal run?”
Allan laid a cloth napkin over his tuxedo pants and reached for a roll. “I was wondering if you could write it out for me.”
A waiter approached with a bronze pitcher and began filling water glasses. Herb grinned good-naturedly. Heavyset with a mop of curly brown hair, he was far and away the most accomplished musician in the band, having recorded with a number of big name performers. “Sure, before when we start the next set,” he promised. “It’s just a grouping of two-five progressions repeated in various keys." He spread a napkin across the front of his tuxedo pants. "It also works with symmetrical patterns... fourths and whole tones, pentatonics and altered diminished scales.” He took a sip of water and reached for a warm roll.
Allan hadn’t a clue what Herb was talking about. He had heard the piano player finger a tricky run and then, on the final chord of the tune, the same series of notes oddly repeated but in a different tonal center before modulating back to the tonic F major chord. Herb Calloway was the complete package. He had the technical facility to pull off impossible runs and make them seen commonplace. Five minutes earlier in the context of a lush ballad, he had played a string of dissonant inversions, making the mysterious harmonies sound perfectly natural.
Allan could cobble together a respectable solo playing off the existing chord changes, but what Herb was doing – well that was taking things to the next level. Twenty minutes later back on the band stand, the piano player ran a series of broken arpeggios and leaned over. “Here let me show you.” He fingered a block chord in his left hand and ran an inverted pentatonic scale with the right. Dropping down a half tone from G to G-flat he repeated the theme. “Do you see what I’m doing?”
Allan was beginning to understand but only at the most basic level. “Create your own patterns.” He chose another series of melodic notes but this time dropped the chord a minor third away from the original and repeated the theme. “It works every time, because the listener's ear gets drawn away by the thematic material.” Herb kept negotiating his supple hands up and down the piano as he spoke, demonstrating the concept. The drummer, who was the bandleader, sat down at his traps. "The girl from Ipanema, and keep the volume down while they’re still eating.”


The next day, Allan took his car to be inspected. On the way home, he stopped by his ex-wife’s place. “About the piano teacher.”
“Yes,” Lois said anticipating his train of thought. “She’s quite horrid. We won’t be continuing much beyond the end of the school year.” Her response caught Allan off guard. “What with all the interruptions, Muriel never gives Ruthie a full lesson,” she continued, “and I don’t see where the girl has progressed very much in the six months she's been with Mrs. Beagle.”
Allan was pleased that his ex-wife saw the situation for what it was. “That mind-numbing voice!”
“Dear god!” Lois tittered and immediately broke into a zombie-like monotone, mimicking the piano teacher.
“We’re not being very nice are we?” Allan smirked sheepishly. The woman might have been a third-rate piano teacher with a schizoid drawl, but that didn’t make her a bad person.
“Do you remember,” Muriel added more soberly now, “that horrid Christmas recital?”

Mrs. Beagle arranged a piano recital for all her students the second week in December. There were elementary school age children thumping out melodies with one finger. No chords – the left hand was optional as were the other four digits on the right hand! No matter that the budding child prodigies, were in kindergarten or first grade – everyone got a shot at the brass ring! One ham-fisted Hispanic girl slapped at the keys creating a Bartok-like percussive effect that might have been intriguing except for the fact that she was slaughtering a watered-down version of Claude Debussy's Claire de Lune. Still later, in the hands of a manic eight year-old, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star assumed the abstruse unpredictability of a Hindemith, twelve-tone row.
Allan wasn’t being petty or overly harsh in his assessment of the next-generation Van Cliburns and Horrowtiz. He had attended a similar recital put on by a colleague in August. While the children played reasonably well, they too missed notes and pressed down errant keys, which was to be expected. With Mrs. Beagle's protégés the difference - and it was a profound difference - was that the students were completely clueless that anything was amiss. The flubs were not artistic errors, per se, but variations on the composer's original intent. Subject to interpretation, a bright tempo, allegro vivace marking might resemble a funeral dirge. Major chords degenerated into minor, turning the standard classical repertoire into a harmonic comedy of errors. Half the students should never have been allowed to get up on the stage; the rest ought to have been better prepared.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the ever self-aggrandizing Mrs. Beagle charged ten bucks a head for every guest who attended the pitiful performance. Allan footed the bill for both sets of grandparents and Ruthie's god-mother so, by the end of the recital, he had a vicious headache and was out sixty dollars! Now the charade was over. No more piano lessons. Once school was finished, so was Mrs. Beagle.

* * * * *

In early July an unfortunate incident occurred that sent Allan spiraling into a black funk. From early summer, he planned to take Ruthie to the Haxton Field Fourth of July fireworks display, but a nasty sinus infection coupled with a muggy heat wave left him disagreeable and out of sorts. "Maybe we could stay home and rent a movie," Allan suggested.
Ruthie's eyebrows rose halfway to the ceiling. "On the Fourth of July?" The issue was non-negotiable.
"I don't feel so hot."
"You can lie on the blanket and go to sleep." The girl pursed her lips. "We only get to see the fireworks once a year and, anyway, it was your idea."
It was your idea. That was the clincher. Over a month ago, Allan asked to take his daughter. Brandenberg put on one of the best fireworks displays in all of southeastern Massachusetts. If Allan weaseled out - pulled the plug on the festivities without a bona fide excuse - being struck by a bolt of lightning, losing a limb in a freak accident, falling on the third rail at the South Boston MBTA station - his ex-wife and daughter would treat him like a mental defective.
At seven o'clock, Allan collected the bug spray, blanket, a cooler full of soft drinks and munchies and they headed off for Haxton Field. "Do you feeling any better?"
What type of killjoy didn't like fireworks? "Yeah, I'm okay," Allan muttered. He felt rotten but didn't want to play the spoilsport. They were trudging up the street. The entrance to Haxton field was just beyond the senior housing complex. Allan blew his nose and a clot of greenish-yellow mucous lay streaked halfway across the handkerchief.
A busty brunette decked out in a tank top and cut off jeans was approaching from the opposite direction. What was she… sixteen years old? Seventeen, eighteen tops? "Put your goddamn eyeballs back in your head, pervert!" the fleshy girl chided brazenly, as they passed on the narrow sidewalk. A teenage boy who was accompanying her flipped Allen the bird and stuck out his tongue. Then the twosome immediately erupted in a fit of hooting and jeering. It was all