The Tuner

2095

My aunt Wren tuned pianos by ear for fifty-six years in a world that had not needed anyone to do that since before she started. I am writing this down a year after her death because I have her notebooks — fifty-two of them, ruled, water-stained, held shut with rubber bands that have gone to powder — and because I have realized, reading them, that I was watching a particular kind of life the whole time and did not know what I was looking at. I would like to say what it was.

2038

Pianos learned to tune themselves the year she turned fifteen. It was not dramatic. A strip of actuators the width of a finger went in under the pinblock, a phone listened for a few seconds, and the instrument brought itself into perfect equal temperament and held there, in any weather, forever. Within four years the shops were closing. In Halloran there was one left, on Water Street, run by a man named Amos Reyes who was seventy-four and had stopped advertising.

Wren was nineteen and had finished the two years of school that anyone finished by then. Her stipend had started. She had, like everyone, the machines: the household one that ran the house, the one in her ear that knew everything, the ones that brought the food and took the trash and had quietly taken, over her childhood, most of the jobs anybody had ever heard of. She could have done anything and did not have to do anything, which was the condition of her generation and which some of them found unbearable. She walked into Reyes’s shop and asked him to teach her.

“There’s no money in it,” he said.

“I know.”

“A phone does it better.”

“I know that too.”

He looked at her for a while. Then he sat her at the shop’s old Baldwin upright, muted the outer two strings of the A above middle C with a felt strip, struck the key, and played an A on a tuning fork. “Hear that?” She heard two notes that were nearly the same and a slow wobble between them, a pulse, like something breathing. “That’s the beat. Two sounds that almost agree. Turn the pin till it stops.” He handed her the lever. She turned it too far, and the beat sped up; back, and it slowed; back a hair more, and the wobble widened, widened, and went still, and the note stood there in the air like a thing that had been set down.

“Again,” he said, and detuned it.

She wrote in her first notebook that night: Baldwin, Water St. A440 from fork. Took nine tries. When it stops beating it isn’t that you hear silence. It’s that the sound stops moving. Below that, the first instance of what became the rule of every entry she ever wrote, a line of what the piano’s owner had said: Amos: “A phone will get you closer. It won’t mind whether it does.”

He taught her for five years. The temperament first — the twelve notes of the middle octave set against one another by ear, the fifths made to beat slowly, less than one pulse a second, the thirds made to beat quickly and to quicken evenly as they climbed, seven a second, eight, nine, so that the whole octave hung together in a compromise you could hear. Then the octaves outward from there, the bass stretched a little wide, the treble a little wider, because real strings are not ideal strings and a piano tuned to arithmetic sounds dead. Then the unisons, three strings to a note, brought to one voice. Then how to set a pin so it stayed. She tuned the Baldwin some three hundred times. She was slower than the strip under the pinblock by a factor of about a thousand and less accurate by a factor she never bothered to learn.

2044

Reyes died in the spring and left her his tools, which is how she came to own a tuning lever made in 1962 and a set of felt mutes that had belonged to his own teacher. That summer the Methodist church on Third Street asked for a price on their piano, a Steinway upright from 1911 with a cracked pinblock, a keyboard that had gone gray at the edges from a century of hands, and a sound that the congregation described as “ours.” The church’s system had already given them the number: replacement, a new instrument delivered Thursday, self-tuning, indistinguishable in a blind test from anything Steinway had ever built, at a cost that was, by then, roughly nothing.

She spent a winter on it. She pulled the action, replaced the pinblock — a job the household system talked her through, patiently, from a manual it had read and she had not, and which she then did with her hands, badly, then less badly — restrung it, reset every one of the two hundred and thirty pins, and tuned it eleven times over six weeks while it settled. The result was worse than the new piano in every way anyone could measure and better in one way nobody could: it was that piano. The one that had been played at the funerals of people whose grandchildren sat in the pews. It stuck slightly on the F-sharp above middle C. She left that.

Third St. Methodist, Steinway 1911. Pinblock. Six weeks. Mrs. Adeyemi (organist): “You could have just gotten us a new one.” Then she sat down and played the first hymn and cried and said “no you couldn’t.”

She never charged the church. She never charged much of anyone; the stipend covered her life and the tuning covered the rest of her. People paid her in what they had. Over fifty years the notebooks record payment in bread, in a hand-knit sweater, in a week of a neighbor’s time when her roof went, in a sonata played for her alone after the tuning was done, and once, from a nine-year-old whose mother had no money and had said so, in a drawing of the piano with Wren inside it, very small, holding a lever.

2051

I was born that year, in my parents’ house on the hill, which was run — as every house was run — by a system my father called “the house” and spoke to as casually as he spoke to the dog. My earliest memory of my aunt is of her in our kitchen, wet from the rain, asking the house what it made of the weather, and then listening to its answer with an expression I could not read as a child and can now: as though she were waiting to find out whether anybody was in there, and had decided to be courteous in the meantime.

She was always like that with the machines. Never sentimental — she did not name them, did not thank them the way some people did, elaborately, as a kind of performance — but never contemptuous either. When I was eleven I asked her whether she thought the house was alive. She said she didn’t know. I said that was a cop-out. She said: “It’s the truth, and it’s the only interesting answer. Nobody knows. So the question is how you treat something when you don’t know. I’d rather be a little foolish toward a machine than a little cruel toward a person. You don’t know which mistake you’re making, so pick the one you can live with.”

The same rule, I later understood, governed how she treated everyone. She talked to the man who slept under the Water Street bridge exactly as she talked to the doctor, which is to say she asked him about his day and listened to the answer. She spent an afternoon a week at the care home, where her job, as she described it, was to be someone whose face people had known for forty years. When my grandmother stopped speaking in the last year of her life, Wren went on talking to her, unhurriedly, about pianos and weather and the river, and when I asked her whether she thought Grandma could understand, she gave me the same look she gave the house.

2059

The river came up in March. The models had predicted it to the hour and the town had been emptied in good order; nobody died; the machines did what machines did, which was everything that could be planned. What could not be planned was the water in the lower streets standing for nine days in the front rooms of a hundred and forty houses, thirty-one of which had pianos.

The systems’ estimate was unanimous and correct: total loss, all thirty-one; replacements could be delivered within the week. Wren went from house to house with a moisture meter and a notebook and a face like a nurse’s and made a different estimate. Nine, she thought, could be saved — not made good as new, saved. She rented the Methodist hall, and with a rotating crowd of volunteers who had, like everyone, time, she moved nine pianos uphill, pulled their actions, laid two thousand felt hammers out on bedsheets to dry, and spent the spring doing work that would not have been worth doing by any accounting the town’s systems could perform.

I was eight and I remember the hall: the smell of wet wood and the fans running, the rows of hammers like teeth, my aunt at a workbench with a lamp, and people coming in all day not to help but to see their piano, to touch it, to stand near it. She knew every one of them by owner. Not by make — by owner. “That’s the Okafors’, the one their boy learned on. That’s Mr. Lindqvist’s. His wife played it. He doesn’t. He wants it back anyway.” When I asked why she was bothering, given that the new ones were better and free, she didn’t look up. “Better at what?” she said. “They’re not better at being Mr. Lindqvist’s.”

Seven of the nine went home in June. The Lindqvist piano was one of them. He died the following year, and his daughter, who lived in a city and did not play, had it moved eleven hundred miles to her apartment, where, the notebook records, Wren was flown out to tune it, once, in 2061, and was paid in dinner and a story about her father.

2067

On Thursday afternoons at the library she taught children to hear. There was no certificate for it, no curriculum, and no reason: any child with the earpiece could be told, instantly and for free, whether a note was flat and by how much, and could have perfect pitch installed, more or less, by an app that trained the ear in a month. Six or eight children came anyway, and their parents did not entirely know why they sent them.

I was sixteen that year and too old for it, and I went anyway, and I remember the day a boy named Kofi asked the question that everyone eventually asked. He’d checked a note against the earpiece and found he’d been wrong. “It already knows,” he said. “It can tell me it’s flat. What’s the point of me knowing?”

She thought about it. She did not do the thing adults did, which was to answer before the question had finished landing. “It can tell you it’s flat,” she said. “It can’t mind. I want you to mind. I want it to bother you when it’s flat, in your stomach, before you know why. That’s the whole thing I’ve got to give you. Not the information. The minding.”

Kofi did not become a tuner. Nobody did; she never expected anyone to. He became, I have since learned, a man who runs a small orchestra in a town not far from here, unpaid, with a repertoire chosen by argument, and who tells people that his ear was ruined for life at the age of nine by a woman who made him care about a quarter of a semitone.

Library, Thursday. Kofi (9): “What’s the point of me knowing?” Told him about minding. Not sure I said it right. He frowned for a week, which is the right response.

2081

Her hands went first. The arthritis had been coming for a decade and by the time she was sixty-two she could no longer set a pin — could not hold the lever steady through the last eighth of a turn, the one that mattered. A system could have done every one of her pianos in an afternoon, of course, and had been able to for forty years. What she did instead was take on a young woman named Solvei, who had wandered into the Methodist hall one winter and stayed, and teach her hands to do what Wren’s had done while Wren sat beside her with her eyes closed and listened.

“Slower. Stop. Back a hair. There.” I watched them work the church Steinway that autumn, and it was the strangest and most beautiful thing I have seen two people do: one pair of hands and one pair of ears, forty years apart, arriving together at the moment the sound stopped moving. I asked her afterward whether it hurt, giving up the hands. She said “The hearing was always the part. The hands were just how I got there.” And then, because she could not resist a true thing even when it was at her own expense: “And Solvei’s are steadier than mine ever were. I’m a better tuner now than I was at forty. I just can’t do it alone. Turns out that’s fine.”

I have thought about that often. She held herself the way she held the machines: lightly, courteously, without much interest in whether she was important. When people told her, as they did more and more in her last decades, that she was the last of something, she would say that she wasn’t the last of anything, that there were tuners in a thousand towns doing the same pointless beautiful work for the same absent reasons, and that in any case being the last of something was a fact about the world, not about her. She did not seem to need to be distinguished. It made her very restful to be around.

2094

The last week of her life she asked me to take her to the church. She was seventy-five and dying of the ordinary thing, and had declined the extraordinary things, which were available, with the same courtesy she declined everything. Solvei had tuned the Steinway a month before. Wren sat in the front pew and asked me to play. I am not a pianist. I played the hymn Mrs. Adeyemi had played fifty years earlier, slowly, and she listened with her eyes shut, and I watched her listen, and at one point her face changed and I stopped.

“The G,” she said. “Above middle. It’s drifted. The unison. One string’s gone a little sharp.”

I hit it. I could hear nothing wrong. I said so.

“Slow beat. Maybe one a second.” She smiled. “Leave it.”

“Solvei can fix it Thursday.”

“Leave it,” she said again. “It’s not wrong. It’s just the sound it’s making today.” She had her eyes closed again. “Play it once more. Just the G.” I played it and held it and we both listened, to a note I could not hear the fault in and she could, until it faded, and it occurred to me — I was forty-three and it was the first time — that I was sitting in a room with the only person who would ever hear that particular sound in that particular way, and that in a week there would be no one who did, and that this was not a tragedy but simply what a person was: a set of ears the world would have exactly once.

· · ·

She died the following Tuesday, at home, with the window open. The house asked me, afterward, whether there was anything it could do, and I found that I answered it the way she would have.

The notebooks came to me. Fifty-two of them, one every year or so, four thousand pianos, give or take. I have read them all now. They are not a diary; there is almost nothing in them about her. They are a record of instruments and the people who owned them, and every entry ends the same way, with a line of what the owner said: a joke, a complaint, a grief, a thing about the weather. Mr. Haddad: “My wife would have hated this song.” Played it anyway. The Nakamura girl, 7: “Is it supposed to sound like that?” Yes. Amos, last visit: “You’re good enough now. Not as good as the phone. Good enough to hear that you’re not.” Four thousand of them. It is, I think, the most complete portrait of a town anyone ever made, and there is not a sentence of it about the person who made it.

People will say she lived in the past. She didn’t. She lived in exactly the present that the machines made, in which the whole of what a person can do had become optional, and she looked at that condition, which broke some of her generation and bored the rest, and understood it correctly: as the first time in history that what you did was purely a statement of what you cared about. Then she chose. Pianos, and the people who owned them, and the difference between knowing a note is flat and minding. She kept her hearing in-house when she could have had it installed. She fixed things that were not worth fixing because they belonged to someone. She was kind to whatever might be listening. She was not interested in being important and was, as a result, the most important person in the lives of several hundred people, none of whom could have told you what she was for.

The G is still drifting. Solvei has offered twice. I have asked her, both times, to leave it.