Part 3 — Ask Archie
Archie finished the sentence for me because I could not. “The Steinway, Vernon. The last word is Steinway.” His voice shook a little. He took off his bow tie and held it in his hand, the way a man takes off his hat in church. In the back room of the Moose Lodge the dealer had gone completely still.
He told it in order, like a tuner listing the faults of an old instrument. In 2019 the mother of June, Edna, passed away in Biloxi and left a 1923 Steinway baby grand in a house by the water. June inherited it. Celeste and Duane drove over to help settle the estate, and a week later they told June that the piano had been ruined in a pipe flood and hauled to the dump. In truth, Duane had sold it to a dealer for $4,000 in cash to cover his debts, and he kept the money. That piano was worth $38,000.
“The dealer sold it to me,” Archie said. “I knew it at once. I tuned that instrument for Edna for thirty years. The dealer had no papers. I telephoned June the same week.” June, he said, asked him to buy it with a check she wrote and to keep it safe in the back of his shop on Howard Avenue. She did not want to start a war with her daughter in the last months of her life. She wanted the truth held in a safe place until someone could be trusted with it.
Celeste had her purse pressed against her chest, and her mascara had run. “Daddy, I knew,” she said. “I knew about the piano. I knew when June cried at the funeral, and I never said a word. I was so ashamed I could not look at it in the room.” I looked at my daughter. She was forty-four years old, and she looked like the girl who used to sit on the bench beside her mother with her feet not touching the floor.
Duane started to rise, and Purvis, a heavy man with a gold tooth, said, “Sit down, Duane.” Duane sat. The dealer put the cards away in a leather case. The men around the table lowered their eyes. I turned the letter of June over in my hands, and I saw something I had missed, in smaller pencil on the back. She had written, “Be kind to Celeste. She is not him.” My wife had known her daughter better than any of us, and she had spent her last strength forgiving her in advance.
The state attorney of Escambia County took it from there. Duane was charged with grand theft for the Steinway, with exploitation of an elderly person for the $17,300 taken from my account, and with attempted fraud for the boat title. He pleaded guilty in the winter. The judge gave him eighteen months in the county jail followed by five years of probation, and ordered him to repay every dollar, with the $4,000 from the Steinway going to the estate of June.
The church that bought the Baldwin turned out to be a small one in Gulf Breeze, and the pastor was a decent man who had paid Duane $2,800 in good faith. When he heard the truth, he drove the piano back to my house himself, with his sons, on a trailer, and he would not take the money back. “That belongs with you,” he said. I used the restitution check from Duane to pay him anyway, and he accepted it with a look that said he would give it to the poor.
Celeste left Duane the same night. She moved into the guest room of my house on Bayou Chico with two suitcases and a box of sheet music from her mother. We did not talk about Biloxi for a week. We cooked. We watched the pelicans. One evening she sat down at the Baldwin in the den and played Amazing Grace, badly, with her feet not quite touching the pedals, and she looked over her shoulder at me with the eyes of her mother.
Archie delivered the Steinway on a flatbed truck on a Saturday in April, with four men from the Moose Lodge to carry it. We set it in the living room, under the window, and he spent three days tuning it, humming, with a felt strip between his teeth. When he finished, the first chord rang through the whole house. I sat down on the sofa and put my hand over my eyes.
Duane told everyone that I had given the Baldwin to a church. I decided to make him an honest man. In May we carried the Baldwin into Warrington Baptist, where June played for forty years, and the pastor set it beside the pulpit. Celeste played the first hymn on it that Sunday, and the congregation stood. I do not play a note, but I stood with them and sang the words I knew.
Purvis found me in the parking lot of the Lodge the next week and handed me an envelope. Inside was a receipt marking the debt of Duane as paid by Duane, in full, out of his own pocket, with a note in bad handwriting. “Your boat is safe,” it said. I took Celeste out on the Grady-White that afternoon and let her steer the whole way around the bayou, her hair blowing, her face turned up to the sun.
I still dust the Steinway every Saturday, the way I did the Baldwin for years. I run the cloth along the lid and over the cracked ivory on the high C, which this one does not have, because it is a different piano. In a quiet room you can still hear it, if you are patient. A piano remembers every hand that ever touched it, and so does a father.
