The salute of the admiral was still in the air when I answered. “Mr. Weller, you asked how she knows me,” I said to the father of Chase. “Kathleen Rourke washed my airplanes at the age of nineteen because she could not pay for lessons. I taught her to fly for free, every Saturday, for two years.” I took out my phone and showed the receipt. “And that is a Steinway Model M, serial three eight two one one four, sold by your son to a dealer in Mobile for forty one thousand dollars. It was the piano of my wife. I sold Gulf Coast Aviation Academy in August for three million nine hundred thousand dollars.”
The face of Chase went from white to gray. “Bernard, I only moved it to a safer place,” he said, and no one in the room believed him. “A safer place that paid you forty one thousand dollars?” I asked. “Evelyn played that piano every evening for fifty years. Chopin, Gershwin and Amazing Grace on Sundays. When she passed, I could not lift the lid for a month. Lindsey asked to keep it so it would be played. It has not been played once since the day it left my house.” The admiral stood very straight beside me. The string quartet had put down their bows, and the champagne tower trembled slightly in the silence.
Lindsey stepped forward from the champagne tower with her hands over her mouth. “Daddy, I did not know. Chase told me the piano was in storage.” “I believe you, sweetheart,” I said. She turned to her husband with a look I had seen on the faces of student pilots who had just discovered the engine was out. The father of Chase, the old man who owns the yacht dealership, laid his hand on the shoulder of his son, and it looked less like comfort than restraint. “Son,” he said, quietly, “you will tell me everything tonight.” The admiral leaned toward my ear and murmured, “Commander, permission to speak plainly?” I nodded.
A Steinway baby grand sold behind his back gave one son in law the weekend to bring his father in law back to the gala in Pensacola.
Rear Admiral Rourke turned to the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to say a word about the man you have been asking to carry ice.” Two hundred people went silent. “Commander Ostrowski flew Navy jets for twenty two years. He trained more than four thousand pilots at his own expense, and I am one of them. Anyone in this room who thinks that service is a bag of ice has never earned it.” Then, before I could stop her, she called the entire ballroom to attention, and men in white dinner jackets, who a minute earlier had been laughing, stood straight as masts.
I gave Chase my terms privately, in the parking lot, under the sodium lights, beside his Mercedes. “By Friday you buy that piano back from the dealer in Mobile, and you pay for it yourself. If you cannot, your father has offered to cover it, and you will repay him monthly. You will deliver it to my house, with a professional tuner, at your own cost. And you will apologize to Lindsey, and then to me, and then to every man you made carry ice.” Chase nodded. For the first time since I had known him, he did not say a clever word.
The surprise came on Saturday. The pilots I had trained over forty years, a dozen of them, flew in from all over the Gulf Coast in their own airplanes, and they landed one after another at the old airfield. A crop duster from Atmore. An airline captain from Houston. A Coast Guard helicopter pilot from Mobile. They stood on the ramp with their caps in their hands. One of them, a gray haired woman named Dottie, said, “Commander, you taught me to land in a crosswind. We came to help you carry that piano.” I laughed until I had to sit down on the wing of a Cessna.
The money consequences were quick. The father of Chase, who owned the dealership, took a hard look at the books and found that his son had been running up commission advances against yachts that were never sold. He cut the pay of Chase in half, and then he moved him from the showroom to the dock to wash boats. The country club that had sponsored the gala quietly asked him to resign from the board. Chase sold his Mercedes within the month and bought a used pickup, and the neighbors noticed, and nobody said a word. Humility, I have found, tends to arrive in a pickup.
I did not want revenge. With part of the sale money, I started a fund in the name of Evelyn. The Evelyn Ostrowski Music Fund buys pianos, lessons and sheet music for the elementary schools of Escambia County. We delivered the first piano on a Monday morning, a used upright with a chipped leg. Thirty children crowded around it, and a little boy with missing front teeth pressed a single key and listened to it ring for a long time. I thought of Evelyn on the bench, her feet on the pedals, her head tipped to the music, and I could not speak.
The piano came home on a Friday, on a truck, with four men in moving blankets and a tuner who had played with the symphony. They set it in the old place by the window, where the sun comes through in the evening. Chase walked in last, carrying the bench. He set it down, stepped back, and said in a voice I hardly knew, “Bernard, I am sorry. I would give anything to take it back.” I said that he already had. The tuner struck middle C. The note rang out through the house, and I sat down on the bench and wept, and Lindsey held my shoulders.
On a warm Sunday evening in October, with the windows open and the Gulf breeze in the curtains, Lindsey sat at the piano and played Amazing Grace, slowly, badly and beautifully. Chase stood behind her with his hand on her shoulder. I closed my eyes and let the old melody fill the room, and for a moment Evelyn was in the doorway, as young as the day we met, tapping the beat against the frame. When the last note faded, Lindsey looked up. “Daddy,” she said, “was that all right?” I wiped my eyes. “That,” I said, “was cleared for landing.”
