The Sustain Pedal

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 23: The Sustain Pedal

The sustain pedal is the rightmost of the piano's three pedals, the pedal that lifts all sixty-eight dampers simultaneously so that every string is free to vibrate, free to resonate sympathetically with whatever note is struck, the entire two hundred and thirty strings becoming a single resonating body, a chorus of potential sound waiting to be activated by a single keystroke, and when the sustain pedal is held the piano becomes a different instrument, becomes not a collection of individual notes that start and stop when the keys are pressed and released but a wash of blended sound, notes overlapping, harmonics accumulating, the silence between notes eliminated, the spaces filled, the gaps closed, the piano holding everything it has been given, releasing nothing, the sound sustained beyond the natural duration of the strike, prolonged, extended, kept alive.

Clara was thinking about sustaining on the morning of Thanksgiving, which fell on the fourth Thursday of November, five weeks after the audiologist and two weeks after the conversation with Mrs. Ashford about what it meant to hear the fork clearly and not to hear the highest partials, and she was thinking about it because she was alone in her house on Southeast Yamhill, alone with the Knabe and the fork and the coffee and the morning, and the aloneness was not unusual — she had been alone on Thanksgiving for three of the four years since the divorce, had spent one Thanksgiving at Martin's with Martin's sister's family, a meal that had been kind and awkward in equal measure, the kindness of people who included the ex-wife because the ex-husband asked them to and the awkwardness of the ex-wife sitting at a table where she had once belonged and now visited, the relationship between belonging and visiting being a matter of the sustain pedal, of whether the note was held or released, and Clara had released herself from Martin's family when she released herself from Martin, and the release was correct, was appropriate, was the right thing, but the release left silence where the sustained note had been, and the silence was what Thanksgiving sounded like when you spent it alone.

She had not been invited to Martin's this year. She had not been not-invited — Martin had not called, had not mentioned it, and Clara had not asked, and the not-asking was both a kindness and a cowardice, a way of sparing Martin the obligation of inviting and a way of sparing Clara the vulnerability of wanting to be invited, and the not-asking produced the result that the aloneness was neither imposed nor chosen but defaulted to, the aloneness arriving the way a piano drifts out of tune, not by decision but by the gradual accumulation of small movements in one direction, the pitch shifting so slowly that no single day's change was perceptible and yet the cumulative effect was a piano that was flat by six cents across the board, uniformly displaced from where it should be, and Clara's Thanksgiving was displaced from where it should have been, from the table with the family and the turkey and the conversation, displaced to the kitchen table with the fork and the coffee and the rain.

She did not feel sorry for herself. She was not a person who felt sorry for herself, had not been trained to feel sorry for herself, had been trained by Leonard to regard the conditions of her life the way she regarded the conditions of a piano — as facts to be assessed and addressed, not as grievances to be nursed. The piano was flat. You tuned it. The weather was wet. You compensated. The holiday was solitary. You made coffee and sat at the table and did what you did every morning, which was strike the fork and hear the A and begin.

She struck the fork.

A440, in the kitchen, on Thanksgiving, alone. The sound was the same sound it always was, was not affected by the calendar or the aloneness or the rain, was the one fixed point, and Clara held the fork and listened and the fundamental was clear and the first partials were clear and somewhere above the tenth the partials faded into the background noise of the house, the refrigerator and the furnace and the rain, and Clara listened to the fading and noted it and did not dwell on it, because dwelling was not productive and because the fading was the fading, was the audiogram made audible, was the fact that she was learning to carry the way she carried the lever, as a weight that was part of the work, that accompanied the work, that was the cost of the work continuing.

She thought about Thanksgiving at the house on Ankeny, the Thanksgivings of her childhood, which had been small — Leonard and Clara's mother, Vera, and Clara, the three of them at the table in the dining room, the room that opened onto the living room where the Wurlitzer spinet stood against the wall, and the Thanksgivings had been quiet, had been Russian in their restraint, Leonard and Vera not having grown up with the American holiday and having adopted it the way they adopted English, competently but without the fluency of native speakers, the turkey cooked because turkeys were cooked on Thanksgiving but the cooking supplemented with borscht and black bread and the particular pickled vegetables that Vera made from a recipe she had carried from Leningrad in her memory because she had not thought to write it down and because, as she told Clara many times, a recipe written down was a recipe that had stopped being part of you and had become part of the paper, and Vera preferred the recipe to stay in her, in her hands, in the proportions she measured by feel and taste, the way Leonard measured pitch by ear, the information stored in the body rather than in the notation.

Vera had died in 2015, five years before Leonard, and Clara had been with her, had been in the hospital room on the last afternoon, and Vera had been conscious and had said, in Russian — Vera spoke English but reverted to Russian in the last days, the first language returning as the later language faded, the mother tongue outlasting the adopted tongue — had said something that Clara's Russian was not good enough to fully understand but that she understood partially, understood enough, understood the word for music and the word for hands and the word for remember, and Clara had held her mother's hand and said, in English, "I will remember," and Vera had closed her eyes and the closing had been — Clara did not know whether Vera had died at that moment or later, the nurses had come and the machinery had been consulted and the time had been recorded, but for Clara the moment was the closing of the eyes, the release of the sustain pedal, the dampers descending onto the strings, the sound stopping.

Clara had not thought about Vera in weeks. The hearing loss and the audiogram and the compensations and the concealing had occupied the space in Clara's mind where other thoughts might have lived, had filled the available capacity the way a loud sound fills a room, drowning the quieter sounds, masking them, and Vera had been masked, had been one of the quieter sounds in Clara's internal life, the memory of the mother less loud than the memory of the father because Leonard's legacy was the tuning, was the work, was the thing Clara did every day, and the daily doing kept Leonard's memory at concert volume while Vera's memory played at the level of a practice session, audible if you listened but not dominant.

But today was Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving had been Vera's holiday — not in the sense that Vera loved it, not in the sense that Vera was sentimental about the American tradition, but in the sense that Vera was the one who cooked, who set the table, who placed the napkins and the silverware and the borscht beside the turkey, who made the holiday happen while Leonard sat at the piano and played, because Leonard played on holidays, played the Russian music he had grown up with, the Tchaikovsky and the Rachmaninoff and the Mussorgsky, the music that was not holiday music but that was Leonard's music, the music he played when the calendar gave him permission to play rather than tune, and the playing was Leonard's version of celebration, was his contribution to the holiday, and the sound of the Wurlitzer playing Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor was, in Clara's memory, the sound of Thanksgiving, the sound of the holiday, the specific acoustic signature of that annual day.

Clara sat at the kitchen table and heard the memory of the Rachmaninoff and felt the memory's warmth, the warmth of the house on Ankeny with the turkey in the oven and the borscht on the stove and the Rachmaninoff on the Wurlitzer and Vera in the kitchen and Leonard at the piano and Clara — where. Clara at the table, at ten, at twelve, at fourteen, at sixteen, sitting with a book or sitting with homework or sitting with nothing, just sitting, listening to the Rachmaninoff, the dark, dense music filling the house the way the smell of the turkey filled the house, both of them rising from their sources and expanding through the rooms, the sound and the smell intermingling, the holiday a synaesthetic experience, music and food and family compressed into a single afternoon.

She went to the Knabe.

She opened the fallboard and sat on the bench and placed her hands on the keys and pressed the sustain pedal with her right foot, the pedal that lifted all the dampers, that freed all the strings, that opened the piano to its fullest resonance, and she played the opening of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor, the three slow chords — C-sharp, G-sharp, C-sharp, each chord forte, each chord held by the pedal, each chord sustained, the sound accumulating in the room, the Knabe's modest voice filling the small living room the way Leonard's Wurlitzer had filled the living room on Ankeny, and the Rachmaninoff was — Clara played the chords and heard them and felt them in her sternum, in the bones of her chest, the low frequencies powerful enough to be felt as well as heard, the bass that her hearing still owned, the frequencies that the audiogram showed as normal, and the Rachmaninoff lived in these frequencies, lived in the bass and the low mid-range, the music rooted in the bottom of the piano, and Clara could hear it all, every note, every chord, every harmonic, the hearing loss irrelevant here, in the territory of the Rachmaninoff, in the deep, dark, Russian music that her father had played.

She played the prelude through — the slow opening, the middle section with its rolling arpeggios, the return of the opening chords, the final fortissimo, the piano sounding as loud as its modest body could sound, the sound not concert-volume but room-volume, house-volume, the volume of a piano in a house on a holiday morning — and when she finished she held the sustain pedal down and let the final chord ring, the sound sustaining, the strings vibrating sympathetically, the piano holding the sound the way the pedal told it to, refusing to release, refusing to damp, the sound lasting and lasting until the energy of the strike was exhausted and the strings fell still and the room was silent.

She released the pedal. The dampers descended. The silence was complete.

She sat on the bench and thought about the sustain pedal, about the mechanism of sustaining, about the choice to hold a sound beyond its natural duration, and she thought that memory was a kind of sustain pedal, a mechanism that held sounds beyond their natural duration, that kept the Rachmaninoff ringing in the room after the piano had stopped, that kept Vera's voice audible after Vera's voice had ceased, that kept Leonard's tuning present after Leonard's tuning had ended, and the mechanism was not physical but neural, was the brain's capacity to store and retrieve, to preserve the sound in the auditory cortex after the sound had left the air, and the mechanism was reliable — more reliable than the ear, which decayed, which lost its high frequencies, which aged — the memory was reliable, held the sounds with a fidelity that the ear could no longer match, and the memory would continue to hold the sounds after the ear had lost them entirely, the memory sustaining what the ear could no longer perceive.

But memory was not hearing. Memory was the echo. Hearing was the sound. And Clara wanted the sound, not the echo, wanted the direct perception, the real-time reception of the vibration through the air and the ear canal and the ossicles and the cochlea and the nerve, the living chain of hearing that connected the source to the consciousness, and the chain was weakening at the cochlear link, the hair cells dying, the chain losing its strength at the one point that could not be repaired, and the weakening was the thing, was the fact, was the condition that no amount of sustain-pedal memory could compensate for, because memory was playback and hearing was live, and the live was the thing that mattered, the live was the tuning, the live was the work.

She closed the fallboard. She went to the kitchen and made more coffee and sat at the table and looked at the fork and the rain and the empty house and the Thanksgiving that was not a Thanksgiving but a Thursday, a day like any other day, a day without pianos to tune — the schedule blank for the holiday — a day in which Clara Resnikoff was not a tuner but a person, a fifty-two-year-old woman alone in a house with a piano and a fork and a memory of Rachmaninoff and borscht and a mother who said remember and a father who said the bargain is fair.

She picked up the phone — the landline, the phone with the better frequency response — and she called Martin.

The phone rang four times. Martin answered.

"Happy Thanksgiving," Clara said.

"Happy Thanksgiving, Clara. What are you doing."

"Sitting in my kitchen. I just played the Rachmaninoff."

"The C-sharp minor prelude."

"Yes."

"Your father used to play that on Thanksgiving."

"You remember."

"Of course I remember. He played it every Thanksgiving we were there. Your mother made borscht. You sat at the table and read."

"I wasn't reading. I was listening."

"You were reading and listening. You always did both. You could read a book and hear a piano at the same time. It drove me crazy. I thought you weren't paying attention."

"I was always paying attention."

Martin was quiet for a moment. Clara could hear, through the phone, the sound of his house — a television or a radio playing distantly, the murmur of voices, Martin's sister's family, the Thanksgiving that Clara was not part of.

"Come over," Martin said.

"You have your sister."

"My sister has room. She always has room. She has a twenty-pound turkey and six people. There's enough."

Clara held the phone and looked at the kitchen and the fork and the rain. The house was quiet. The Knabe was silent behind its closed fallboard. The Rachmaninoff was gone from the air, sustained only in memory.

"All right," she said.

She drove to Martin's house on Belmont, the house she had lived in for eleven years, the house that was Martin's now, and Martin's sister Patricia was there with her husband and their two teenage children, and Patricia hugged Clara at the door — a hug that was warm and slightly surprised, the hug of a person who had not expected this guest but who was glad of her — and the house smelled of turkey and stuffing and the particular warmth of a house full of people, the thermal signature of bodies and food and the furnace running to compensate for the door being opened and closed, and Clara entered the house and felt the warmth and heard the sounds — the conversation, the laughter, the television showing a football game that no one was watching, the sounds of a family on a holiday — and the sounds were in the range of frequencies that Clara could hear perfectly, the human voice between 300 and 3,000 hertz, the laughter between 200 and 2,000, the sounds of domestic life occupying the middle of the audible spectrum, the territory that Clara's ear still owned entirely.

She ate the turkey and the stuffing and the cranberry sauce and the pie, and she sat at Martin's table — the same table, she noticed, the table she had eaten at for eleven years — and she listened to the conversation and contributed to it when contribution seemed appropriate and was quiet when quiet seemed appropriate, and the balance between speaking and listening was the balance she always struck, the balance that was weighted toward listening because listening was what Clara did, was what Clara was, and the listening at Martin's table was not the listening of a tuner but the listening of a person, a human being at a table on a holiday, hearing the voices of people who were, if not her family, then something adjacent to family, something that occupied the same register, the same frequency range, something warm and present and sufficient.

After dinner Martin took out his cello — not the Gagliano, his own cello, a German instrument from the 1920s that he had played for thirty years — and he played the Sarabande from Bach's Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor, the dark suite, the melancholy suite, the suite whose sarabande was one of the saddest pieces of music Clara knew, and Martin played it in the living room with the family listening, the teenagers on the couch with their phones momentarily forgotten, and the cello's voice filled the room, the D minor sarabande unfolding in the warm house, the low frequencies of the cello's open C string resonating in Clara's chest, in her sternum, in the bones of her body, and Clara heard every note, every partial, every harmonic, the cello's sound entirely within her range, and the hearing was complete, was full, was undiminished, and the music was beautiful, and the beauty was enough.

Martin finished the sarabande. The room was quiet for a moment — the post-music silence, the silence of completion — and then Patricia said, "That was lovely, Martin," and Martin said, "Thank you," and the moment passed and the conversation resumed and the evening continued.

At nine o'clock Clara said she should go. She thanked Patricia and Patricia's husband and she thanked Martin and she walked to the door and Martin walked with her, and at the door Martin said, "Are you all right."

"I'm all right."

"The Rachmaninoff this morning. Alone. On Thanksgiving."

"It wasn't sad. It was — sustaining."

Martin looked at her. His face in the porch light was the face she knew, the face that was changing but continuous, and his expression was the expression of a person who heard what was said and what was not said, the musician's ear applied to speech, the ability to hear the harmonics beneath the fundamental, the overtones of meaning that the words did not contain but that the voice, through its timbre and its cadence and its particular quality of restraint, communicated.

"Call me when you need to," Martin said.

"I will."

She drove home. She parked in front of her house and went inside and the house was as she had left it — the coffee cups on the counter, the fork on the table, the Knabe behind its fallboard — and the house was quiet and the quiet was different from the quiet of the morning, was a quiet that had been preceded by the noise of Martin's family, the contrast making the quiet both quieter and less lonely, the way a rest in music is made more restful by the notes that precede it.

She went to the Knabe and opened the fallboard and pressed the sustain pedal and played a single note — middle C — and held the pedal down and listened to the note ring, the three strings of the unison vibrating, the sympathetic strings responding, the soundboard amplifying, the room receiving, and the note sustained, held, prolonged beyond its natural duration by the mechanism of the pedal, the dampers lifted, the strings free, the sound continuing.

She held the pedal for a long time. The note decayed slowly — the Knabe was a modest piano but its sustain was adequate, the strings vibrating for eight or ten seconds before the energy dissipated — and Clara listened to the decay, listened to the note becoming softer but not less true, diminishing but not detuning, fading but maintaining its pitch, the frequency constant even as the amplitude declined, the note the same note at a whisper as it had been at full volume, the pitch not affected by the loudness, the identity not affected by the diminishment.

She released the pedal. The dampers fell. The note stopped.

The silence was not empty. The silence was shaped by the note that had preceded it, was a silence that knew what sound was, that had been filled and was now unfilled, that carried the memory of the filling the way a room carries the smell of the meal that was cooked in it, the evidence of presence lingering after the presence itself had departed.

Clara closed the fallboard. She picked up the fork and held it without striking it. The steel was cool in her hand. The A was in the steel, waiting, stored, potential, the vibration not yet released, the sound not yet produced, the reference not yet established. She held the unreleased A and felt its weight and thought about sustaining, about the mechanism that holds the sound beyond its natural duration, and she thought that she would sustain — would hold on, would continue, would keep the sound going for as long as the pedal held, for as long as the strings vibrated, for as long as the ear could hear — and when the sustain ended and the dampers fell and the sound stopped, the silence would not be empty, would be shaped by what had preceded it, would carry the memory of the sound the way the room carried the memory of the Rachmaninoff, the way the fork carried the memory of every A it had ever produced.

She set the fork on the table. She went to bed. She did not strike the fork.

The A waited in the steel, sustained by the structure, held by the physics, the potential pitch stored in the mass and the stiffness of the tines, patient, permanent, available for tomorrow, available for every tomorrow, the one note that would not decay, that would not fade, that would not be damped, that was sustained not by the pedal but by the steel itself, by the unchanging properties of the metal, by the constancy that was the fork's gift and the fork's nature.

Clara slept. The fork waited. The rain sustained.