The court hearing was held at the Knox County Probate Court at one o clock that very afternoon, in a high old room with brown woodwork and tall windows, and I walked into it on the arm of Ms. Ortega, who had decided on the spot that she did not care for the company I was being kept by. Brittany sat at the petitioner table with Phil Dorsey and a young lawyer in a shiny suit. The judge, a silver haired man named Harlan Moore, took one look at me and took off his reading glasses. “Mrs. Kessler,” he said softly. “Fourth grade. Mrs. Haskell. Recital in the Methodist church.”
I told him I remembered it well. He had played Heart and Soul with his sister and forgotten the second half, and I had gone up on the stage in my good green dress and finished it for him without a word. He grinned like a boy. Then the clerk called the case, and he put his glasses back on, and his face went back to the face of the law. “Counsel for the petitioner,” he said. “Proceed.” The young lawyer rose, fumbling a stack of papers. Brittany sat very straight, with her hands folded in her lap and her chin high, and not once did she look at me.
They called Dr. Hennessy first, by affidavit, and the lawyer read a short letter in which my old friend appeared to say that I was confused, forgetful, and unsafe. Dr. Hennessy, who had driven down from Columbus without being asked, stood up in the third row. “Your Honor, I never wrote that letter,” he said. His voice was shaking. “I have not examined Mrs. Kessler in eleven months, because she has not needed examining. My signature has been traced from a prescription pad. My records were picked up on Thursday by a young woman with a forged release.” A murmur went through the benches.
A tape recorder under the keyboard, an Amish jam seller on the witness stand, and a granddaughter who finally sat down at the piano.
I asked the judge if I might play something. He raised his eyebrows. “Mrs. Kessler?” he said. “This is a courtroom.” I said I was aware of that, and that I had a small recording I would like him to hear, and that it would take four minutes. Ms. Ortega put the cassette player on the clerk table. I pressed the button. Out of its tinny speaker came the sound of my own parlor, in April. Brittany voice, bright and quick on the telephone. “Phil, she cannot even tell me what day it is. Get me the form. Get the doctor name. We will have her in a home by August.”
Judge Moore asked me if I would like to say anything for the record. I stood, with Ms. Ortega at my side, and I said I was eighty four years old, that I was born in the house on East Gambier Street, that I had taught Chopin to children for sixty years, and that if anyone wished to examine my memory they were welcome to ask me the name of every student I ever had. There was a pause. Then someone at the back called out, Lucille Rhodes, 1963. Someone else said, Tommy Bell, 1971. Pretty soon the whole room was shouting names, and I answered every one.
The room was quiet in a way I have heard only a few times in my life, after the last chord of a piece when a child has played it right. Phil Dorsey stood up and said his name had been mentioned without cause. Judge Moore asked him whether he would like to hear the rest, and Phil, who had grown rather gray, sat down. On the tape there was more. A discussion of my house, which Phil had priced at three hundred and ten thousand. A joke about my piano, which they planned to give away to the first church that would carry it. And a laugh, which I knew very well, because it was mine, once, at her age.
Then the bailiff announced a witness I had not expected. Ruth Ann Miller walked in, in her plain blue dress and her white bonnet, carrying a jar of strawberry rhubarb in her two hands. She does not swear an oath, being Amish, so the judge permitted her to affirm. She said in her soft Ohio Dutch voice that she had been offered two hundred dollars to sign a paper, and that she had said no, and that she had said it again when the girl raised it to four hundred. “Your Honor, this woman has always known what day it is,” she said, nodding at me. “She is the sharpest person I know.”
Judge Moore dismissed the petition before lunch. He referred the matter of the forged records to the county prosecutor, in a voice I could have heard from the back of a church. Phil Dorsey was escorted out by a deputy, protesting. Brittany did not move. She sat at the table with her face in her hands, and her shoulders were going up and down. I walked over and put my hand on her hair. It was fine and soft, like her mother, whom I taught on the same piano thirty years ago. “Come home, Brittany,” I said. “We have to talk. And you are going to cry in my parlor, not in this one.”
She sat on my piano bench that evening, with a box of tissues and a cup of tea, and told me everything. The divorce. The lawsuit from her skin care company. The seventy thousand dollars she owed to people she was afraid of. She said she had looked at my house and seen the only way out. “Grandma, I wanted you to need me,” she said. “If you could not manage, then I would be useful.” I told her that was the saddest thing I had ever heard, and she wept again. Then I said there is a better way to be needed. I patted the bench. “Sit. Middle C.”
I taught her for an hour a day, all that winter, the way I taught the three hundred children before her, one note at a time. The prosecutor, at my request, agreed to a plan with restitution and community service, and Brittany spent her Saturdays at the Alcove washing dishes. By the first thaw she could play the first eight bars of Für Elise without a mistake. I stood behind her, and Ruth Ann Miller, who had come to the parlor for tea, set a jar of strawberry rhubarb on the music stand, and Brittany finished the line and looked up at me and said, “Grandma, I think I am sharp.”