Thirty-One Years at the Piano

For thirty-one years, Margaret Ellery had sat at the same piano, in the same church hall, with her back to the same congregation, and she had never once minded. That is important to say first, because of what came after. People would later tell the story as though Margaret had spent three decades quietly suffering, a woman overlooked, waiting in the wings of her own life. And it simply was not true, and Margaret, who valued accuracy, would not let it be true even when the kinder version was offered to her. She had not suffered at the piano. She had loved the piano. She had loved the particular Tuesday-evening light through the high hall windows, and the smell of the old hymnals, and the moment before the choir began when twenty-odd ordinary people drew one shared breath. She had loved being the floor the music stood on. Some people are meant to be the floor. There is no shame in a floor, and Margaret had never felt any. So when she said, later, that something had shifted, she did not mean she had been unhappy all along. She meant that a thing she had set down very deliberately, as a young woman, a long time ago, had begun — quietly, without her permission — to ask to be picked back up. Margaret was fifty-eight. She had been the accompanist of the St. Brigid's choir since she was twenty-seven, which meant she had played for the funerals of people who had sung in the choir when she joined it, and she had played for the weddings of children she had watched be christened, and she had played, three times now, at services where the hymn was chosen by a family too stunned to choose well, and Margaret had played it anyway, beautifully, because that was the job and the job was a form of love. What almost no one knew — what perhaps three people still living knew — was that Margaret Ellery had once been able to sing. Not pleasantly. Not in the way that a great many people can carry a tune at a birthday. Margaret had had, as a girl, a real voice, a true and unusual one, the kind that made a music teacher go still and then careful. There had been a word said over her once, the word "conservatory," said by an adult who meant it. She had been seventeen. She did not go to the conservatory. The reasons were the ordinary reasons of that time and that place — a father who did not see the point, a mother who was ill, money, the firm gravity of a small town that expected a sensible girl to be sensible. Margaret had been sensible. She had taken a job, and married a kind man, and raised two children well, and at twenty-seven she had sat down at the St. Brigid's piano and put her hands on the keys and made, very privately, a decision. The decision was this: she would give the music to her hands and ask nothing of her voice ever again. The voice had been a door that closed, and she had watched it close, and she had decided — and this was the part she was proudest of, the part she would not let anyone reframe as tragedy — she had decided not to spend her life standing in front of a closed door. She had walked to the piano instead. She had built a whole rich life at the piano. Thirty-one years of it. The piano had been enough. Truly. For thirty-one years it had been entirely, sufficiently enough. And then, on a Tuesday in the ordinary October light, the church secretary stood up before rehearsal and announced that old Father Coughlin had finally retired the choir's longtime director, and that a new director would be starting next week — young, the secretary said, with a brightness that was working a little too hard, young, and full of ideas, and very keen to bring the music program "into the present day." Margaret sat at her piano with her hands in her lap, and felt, somewhere behind her ribs, in a room she had locked at twenty-seven and not opened since, a small and unmistakable knock. She did not know yet that the new director would change everything. She did not know that within two months she would be fighting, at fifty-eight, for the place she had assumed was hers until they carried her out of it. And she certainly did not know — could not have imagined, sitting there in the Tuesday light with her sensible hands folded — that the fight would end with Margaret Ellery, accompanist of thirty-one years, finally, at last, and entirely on her own terms, opening her mouth to sing. For now she only straightened the hymnals, and lifted her hands to the keys, and gave the choir its breath. But she had heard the knock. And Margaret had never, in fifty-eight years, been any good at ignoring a thing once she had honestly heard it.