A Note Below A
A standard piano has eighty-eight keys. The lowest is an A, at about twenty-seven and a half vibrations a second, which is right at the bottom edge of what a human ear will call a note instead of a rumble. I have tuned pianos in eastern Iowa for twenty-six years. I’ve seen every kind of strange instrument there is: player pianos, a pump organ with a mouse nest the size of a loaf of bread inside it, a Victorian square grand some fool painted turquoise. The upright in Ferenc Halasz’s front room has eighty-nine keys, and the extra one is below the A.
He called me in March. He was ninety, he said, and his regular tuner had died, and the piano needed doing before “the usual time,” which he said was the last week of April. He spoke very correct English with a Hungarian accent and he didn’t sound ninety. He gave me an address on the bluff on the north side of Dubuque, a tall narrow brick house that leaned toward the river like it was listening for something.
The piano was a Stieber & Sons, Milwaukee, 1911, according to the decal on the fallboard. Black walnut, carved legs, the ivory on the keys gone the color of weak tea. Nice instrument. Neglected but not abused. I sat down and played a scale and it was flat across the board, maybe thirty cents, the way old pianos go. Then I noticed the extra key.
It was at the far left end, past the low A, where the case usually ends in a block of wood. A single white key, narrower than the others, its ivory gray instead of yellow, and almost flush with the cheek block, as if someone had squeezed it in. I put my finger on it and Mr. Halasz, who was sitting behind me in a wingback chair with a blanket on his knees, said, “Please. Not yet.”
I took my hand away.
“The others first,” he said. “The eighty-eight. Then that one, last of all. I’ll show you.”
So I did my job. I took off the fallboard and the upper panel, and I set my mutes, and I started at middle A and worked out by octaves the way you do. It took about two and a half hours. The pins were tight, the strings were good, the soundboard had one hairline crack that didn’t buzz. While I worked, Mr. Halasz talked.
His father had bought the piano new, he said, in Milwaukee, and brought it here in 1920 when they bought the house. His father had been the one to have the extra key added, by Stieber himself, at the factory, at very great cost. The key went to a single string. “You’ll see,” he said. “When you open the bottom.”
When I’d finished the eighty-eight, I took off the lower panel, the kick board, so I could see the bass bridge and the bottom of the harp. That’s where I stopped.
There was a string there that doesn’t belong in any piano. It was attached to a tuning pin in its own iron bracket, bolted beside the main plate, and it was thick, thicker than any bass string I’ve ever handled, copper-wound and dark with age. It didn’t run up across the soundboard like the other strings. It ran down. Straight down from the bracket through a hole in the bottom of the piano case, through a matching hole drilled in the floorboards, into the dark under the house.
I got my flashlight on it. The hole in the floor was neatly bored and lined with a brass collar. The string went through it, taut as a bowstring, and down, out of sight.
“How long is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Halasz said. “My father didn’t know. It goes into the cellar and then into the floor of the cellar. There is a pipe. He had it put in before the piano. We think it was there before the house.”
“The string’s down there?”
“Something is down there,” he said, “and the string is tied to it.”
I’m a practical person. I asked him what he meant, and he explained it the way you’d explain a quirk of the furnace.
The house was built on the bluff over an old shaft, he said. Lead mines, from the 1830s. Dubuque is full of them. His father, when they bought the house, had found the shaft capped in the cellar and found that the cap hummed. A low hum, below hearing, that you felt in your teeth. It got worse in spring. Dogs wouldn’t go in the cellar. His mother had dreams. His father, who’d been a cantor in the old country and believed in very specific things, said that whatever was in the shaft was singing, and that when something sings you can’t stop it, but you can tune it.
“Tune it to what?”
“To sleep,” said Mr. Halasz. “A note so low it’s not a note. He had it worked out with Stieber. A string fixed at the bottom, to the thing, and the top to a pin, here, where he could adjust it. When it’s in tune with the piano, it sleeps. Every spring it goes flat. Every spring we bring it up.” He smiled. “My father did it for forty years, and I’ve done it for fifty. And I’m ninety, and my hands shake, and I can’t feel the pitch anymore. So: you.”
I said, “Mr. Halasz, with respect, it’s a piano string through a hole in the floor.”
“Yes,” he said. “Play the key.”
I played it.
You don’t hear it, exactly. You feel the house hear it. The note was so low that it registered as a kind of pressure, a pushing in my ears, like going down in an airplane. The windows buzzed in their frames. A glass on the sideboard walked an inch. And under that, under the floor, rising up through the soles of my shoes, came a second sound, an answer, a fraction off. Close to the note and not the same. The two sounds rubbing against each other made a slow beating, a wah… wah… wah, the way two strings do when they’re almost in tune.
I’ve spent my life listening for that beating. Your whole job is to make it slow down until it stops. I knew in about three seconds, with all my training, that the string wasn’t flat by itself. It was flat against something. Whatever was at the bottom of that string was sounding its own note, and it was a little lower than ours, and the string was being pulled down to meet it.
And the beating was speeding up. Which meant the thing below was moving further away in pitch. Falling. Waking.
“You see,” Mr. Halasz said, and his voice was steady but his hands were tight on the blanket. “Please. Quickly.”
I put the hammer on the pin. It’s an ordinary square pin, like any other. I pulled up.
The pin was stiff, which is normal, and then it moved, which is normal, and then for an instant something at the other end of the string pulled back.
I can’t describe it better than that. Any tuner knows what a string feels like through the hammer. It’s a live thing, a little, it has tension, but it’s passive. This had a hand on the other end. Not jerking. Just holding. The way you’d hold a dog’s leash when the dog wants to go somewhere and you don’t.
I pulled harder. I’m not proud of what I said. Mr. Halasz said, “Yes, yes, don’t stop,” and I didn’t. I brought the pin up a quarter turn, and another, and played the key, and the beating slowed, wah......wah......, and I eased it up the last hair, and played it again, and it stopped.
One note. One pure, enormous, silent note, and the house holding it like a held breath. Then that faded, and the glass on the sideboard stopped trembling, and I heard, for the first time since I’d come in, a car going by outside. The house had been so loud underneath that I hadn’t noticed it was drowning out the street.
Mr. Halasz wept. I packed my tools. He paid me four hundred dollars cash, which was twice what I charged, and asked me to come back next April.
He died in January. His nephew in Chicago called me in March, because Mr. Halasz had left a note pinned to the piano with my number and a date, and the house was going on the market, and did I want to buy a piano.
I said no. I said I would come and do the tuning anyway, as a courtesy, before the sale, and I didn’t charge him.
The string was flatter than it had been the previous year. A great deal flatter. When I put the hammer on the pin the hand on the other end held on harder, and it took me fifteen minutes to bring it up, and I had to brace my foot against the case. When it was done, I lay down on the floor beside the piano with my ear on the boards, and I could hear something down there, very faint, settling. The way a big animal turns over in its sleep.
The house sold in June to a young couple. I don’t know if anyone told them about the piano. I hope the nephew did. I drove past it in August and the front windows were open, and someone inside was playing “Heart and Soul,” badly, laughing, and it was the most frightening sound I have ever heard.
I’ve been back four times. I park down the block and knock and tell them I’m the tuner, the old man’s tuner, that it’s part of the house’s maintenance, like checking the furnace. They think I’m odd. They let me in. They let me do the eighty-eight first, and then I send them out of the room and do the last one.
It gets harder. The string is warmer every year. Last April, when I played the key, the answer came up from under the floor almost a whole step low, and when I set the hammer on the pin, something on the other end of the string pulled it down, deliberately, a quarter turn out of my hand, before I caught it. As if to say it knew there was somebody new on this end now. As if it wanted to find out how strong I was.
I’m fifty-eight. My hands are fine. I’m trying to find somebody to teach.