Für Lily (An original short story)
Lily had what the doctors referred to as “the full package”: high blood pressure, coronary disease (resulting, eventually, in a triple bypass and pacemaker) and diabetes. She also had wounds on both shins, which some doctors explained were the result of the diabetes, while others insisted they were due to poor circulation from the three-times-a-week dialysis treatments she received for her kidneys, failing under the stress of the high blood pressure.
And then came the fateful night when (call it brave, or call it what you will) – Lily decided to make a walker-free night-time "water run" from her room to the kitchen. The resulting fall - as the doctors at Mercy Hospital told her son, James, as he was filling out the admittance papers later that sleepless morning - was a slightly cracked skull and a hip broken in three places.
So it was a completely bed-ridden Lily for whom the music, one day, suddenly began, to her distress, to play.
James came home from work that afternoon to find his mother's sitting nurse, Peggy, waiting for him with a quizzical expression on her face.
"Mister James. … – that piano in your mother's room – did she used to play it?"
"The piano?" James asked. "No… no… that's a family heirloom from my wife's side. My mother never played an instrument in her life. Not that I know of, anyway. Why?"
"Well, today when I brought your mother her dinner, she was extremely agitated and kept insisting that she needs to go to the piano and play."
"Hm. Well, that's very strange." Shaking his head, James went to his mother's room and, after the usual greetings, sat down on the edge of her bed and, leaning in to push a few stray hairs off her forehead, nonchalantly inquired:
"So, Mom – what's all this talk about playing the piano?"
"It has to be finished. I have to finish it."
"Finish what?"
"The…" she looked up at him irritatedly, "the… the…."
"Prelude? Song? Sonata?" James tried to help.
Still unable to remember the word, Lily's face fell and she leaned back into her pillow and waved her hand wearily at no one in particular. "Yes, yes, one of those."
"Maybe what you want is to listen to some music? Is that what you want?" James tried to sound upbeat.
"No, I don't want to listen to music! I'm listening to enough as it is – I need to stop listening and finish it! Oh, for goodness' sake, never mind, leave me alone already!" She turned her face away to scowl at the window.
James exchanged glances with Peggy, whose expression seemed to mirror James' thoughts at that moment: how awful were the ravages of dialysis on an older person's mind. "Alright, Mom, you get some rest, then." He stood up and started toward the door.
Suddenly, Lily rose up in bed on one elbow.
"There! There it goes again!" she said, angrily.
James stopped. "There goes what, Mom?"
"The music, of course!" Lily spat, exasperated. "Listen – talalalala… lalalala… lalalala… lalalala…" she waved one finger in the air like a conductor, hissing and cracking along in a voice long-since given up on singing.
Leaning in toward his mother, James tuned into the atmosphere – and, sure enough, there it was: just the faintest tinklings of what, as far as he could tell, was Beethoven's "Für Elise." Someone, somewhere in the neighborhood – perhaps on their very block – was playing it!
That was when James understood how wrong he'd been about his mother. With all her frailties and failings, the one thing that remained, still, blessedly intact was her hearing. It was as if her body had collected together whatever remnants left of her strength and focused it all into her ears to, ever valiant, continue keeping her connected to the world that was slowly disengaging.
Suddenly, James had an idea. Gesturing to the nurse that he'd be right back, James hurried out of his mother's room, through the house and out into the street, pausing on the front steps only long enough to discern from which direction the, now, more identifiable sounds of a piano being played were coming. Several houses to the right, the tinkling sounds were so loud there was no mistaking it – someone inside was playing "Für Elise." And badly, too – the pianist was starting and stopping and starting and stopping, always stopping at the exact, same, spot: right where the melancholic melody transformed at ED#, charging its mellow flow with anxious pulses, right at the juncture where the right hand should modify its movements from playing one finger at a time to playing chords.
James stood for a while in front of the house listening through four startups and four abrupt curtailings and, irritated a little himself, now, finally walked up to the door and rang the bell. From inside he heard the tinklings stop abruptly and the sound of a woman's voice, coming nearer, saying, "No, Millicent, don't stop – even if that is your mother, you still have ten more minutes of practice time left to do. Remember what they say: ‘How do you get to ‘Carnegie Hall'? Practice, practice, practice!'"
"I'm so sorry to bother you," James ventured to the impatiently-expressioned, middle-aged woman who opened the door, "and I know this is going to sound odd… but I wonder if I could ask you for a small favor…."
James hurried home, smiling all the way. Back in the house, he found his mother still agitated and demanding a “finish” to it.
"Sure, Mom," he said, grinning, "just hold on a bit and it'll be finished. You'll see, it will."
At that moment the front bell rang and James went to get it, re-entering his mother's room moments later with the middle-aged woman from several houses down, no longer impatient-looking but beaming widely – and carrying a sheaf of papers.
"Thanks so much for coming, Mrs. Brooks. I know how busy you are, it's very kind of you. Please say hello to my mother, Lily.. And, there…" James gestured toward the great, hulking, old upright piano across the room in the corner, the family heirloom on his wife's side, "there it is."
"Oh, not at all, dear, it's my pleasure. And I have a few minutes till my next client. Hello, Lily..," said Mrs. Brooks as she moved quickly into the room and past Lily in her bed toward the piano. James turned to his mother, shrunk back into her pillow as far as she could get and eyeing this uninvited guest in her room with glaring suspicion. "And Mom – Mom, that's Mrs. Brooks. She's going to help you ‘finish it.'"
"Yes, Lily." Mrs. Brooks, now seated on the piano bench and arranging her sheaf of papers in the piano's music holder in front of her, called up into the air, "I hear you're a great lover of Beethoven. As luck would have it, Lily, so am I. So how fun I thought it would be if we could love Beethoven together!"
And with that, Mrs. Brooks lifted the hinged wooden keyboard cover, arranged her feet on the upright's pedals, flexed her fingers a few times and, placing them gingerly on the keys, squinted at the little scribbles on the first page of the sheaf propped up in the music holder before her… and began to play.
And, play she did. The piano was old and clunky and badly in need of tuning, and if you listened carefully, you could even tell where a few of its strings were probably broken – but it was still clearly "Für Elise" suddenly lilting through the room. And, just as suddenly, everyone else in the house began appearing in his mother's room.. His wife - Beth, his children - Jennifer and Burt, all lured away from their televisions and phone calls and video games by the beautiful music. Even the nurse, Peggy - her shift over, almost on her way out the door – returned to lean against the doorjamb, coat on eyes closed, smiling.
And as it came to the point in the piece where the gentle, dense, tinklings usually just stopped, Lily – still glowering suspicion toward the uninvited guest's back from across the room – suddenly rose up on her elbow, and hovered there, tense and waiting, waiting, waiting.
But, this time - for naught. For this time, the expected "stop" didn't happen. This time, the change from mellow and sad danced smoothly and confidently straight into whirlwind excitement and, then, back again to the mellow sadness of the opening, just as it was always meant to do.
As Mrs. Brooks played the last notes, Lily let out a small sigh, relaxed back into her pillows and, snuggling down, closed her eyes. Within seconds the reverberation of "Fur Elise's" final chords, still lingering in the air, were replaced by a tiny motorboat of Lili's contented little snores.
And, in the resulting silence, everyone in the room exchanged a smile -- light, like the first movement of "Für Elise."