The violinist stood at the front of the funeral home, with the case at her feet and the violin under her chin, and she did not play. She looked at my mother. She was perhaps forty, tall and pale, in a long black concert dress, with dark hair pinned up and a face of such stillness that it seemed carved. “My name is Elena Marchetti,” she said. “I am the concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra.” She lowered the bow. “My mother, in 1994, was a patient in a nursing home in Scranton, dying of a stroke. She could not speak. She could not move. She could hear music.”
My mother, sitting in the front row in her black wool coat, did not turn her head. “There was a piano in the sitting room,” said Elena, “badly out of tune. Every Thursday afternoon, a piano tuner came. He was not paid. He tuned it, and then he sat on the bench and played for an hour, quietly, old songs, for anyone who wanted to listen.” She glanced at the casket of my uncle. “He played for my mother. Every Thursday. For nineteen months. He sat beside her bed afterwards and held her hand and said nothing.” Her voice caught. “I was seventeen. I could not bear to be in that room. He was the only person who could.”
She put her bow to the strings, lightly, almost without sound. “When my mother died, the staff told me about the man. I went to find him. I stood in the doorway of his apartment over the pizza place on Lackawanna Avenue and I said, thank you. He said, young lady, what instrument do you play? I said, violin. He went to his closet, and he took out a small box. Inside was a tuning fork, a very old one, broken in half. He said, my teacher gave me this. It cracked the day I tuned my first Steinway. I have never had the heart to throw it out. He put it in my hand. He said, keep it in tune.”
A broken tuning fork worn on a silver chain was shown to a grieving sister by a concert violinist and gave one niece the afternoon to bring her mother back to the music of her brother.
She reached into her dress, and drew out a small silver chain, and at the end of it hung the two halves of the fork, joined with a thread of solder. She held it up. It turned slowly in the lamplight, throwing off a tiny gleam. “I have worn it at every concert for twenty nine years.”
My mother, in the front row, took a sharp breath. I turned and saw that she had gone white. Her gloved hands were clenched in her lap. “It has traveled to forty countries,” Elena said. “It was on my neck in Carnegie Hall. It will be on my neck tonight.” She looked at my mother directly. “I wanted you to know what your brother did.”
My mother made a sound. It was like the sound of paper tearing. She half rose, caught herself on the pew, and I took her arm. “I said,” she began, and could not finish. “I said he never figured out life. I said he did not have friends.” She stared at the violinist. “He never told me. He never told any of us. He sat beside a dying woman for nineteen months, and he never said a word.” The violinist nodded gravely, and the faintest shadow of a smile touched her mouth. “I think,” she said, “that is how he tuned a room. He listened until everything else was quiet.”
Elena lifted her violin again. “I would like to play something.” She closed her eyes, and she drew the bow across the strings, and a single long note rose into the room, so pure and sustained that I felt it in the roots of my teeth. It was a plain thing, an old folk tune, the sort of song a man might hum while he tuned a piano. She played it slowly, once through, and then again with more weight, and by the second pass the room was weeping. The old ladies who had been his customers. The music teachers. The boys from the Dunmore band, who held their instruments to their chests.
I looked at the upright piano in the lobby, which someone had wheeled in, and I saw a very old woman sitting at it with her hands on the keys. She was not playing. She was listening. Then, as the violin descended, her fingers began to move, softly, in a hesitant harmony, and the two instruments met each other in a place I had never known music could go. My mother covered her mouth. Her eyes were wide and wet and fixed on the casket. The tune ended. The last note hung in the air like a held breath, and then it faded, and there was no applause, only a long deep quiet.
Afterward my mother walked down the center aisle, slowly, alone, and laid her hand on the lid of the casket. I stood a few feet behind her. She did not say anything for a very long time. Then she bent, and with great tenderness she pressed her forehead against the polished wood. “Lou,” she said. “I could never hear you.” Her shoulders shook. “You were playing the whole time.” I put my hand on her back, and the funeral director, a quiet man, signaled the organist to begin, and the old hymn rose again, softly, in the far corner of the room.
We buried him on the hill above Scranton on a day of bright cold. Elena played at the grave. When the casket was lowered, she took the silver chain from her neck and laid it on the lid, and then she changed her mind, and lifted it again. “No,” she said, to herself. “I will keep it in tune.” She put it back around her throat. The next spring, my mother had the old piano from the lobby moved to her living room in Scranton. She hired a tuner. She sits at it on Thursdays and plays, badly, a song she says she is learning, an old folk tune, and when she hits a wrong note she smiles.