We called it a 'middle class' tenement. It was a term we used to distinguish the fine line of difference in living conditions between ourselves and those poor unfortunates living in 'lower class' tenements. If you lived in a middle class tenement, you and your family were racially segregated but ethnically mixed. Therefore, we were an ethnic stew made up of similarly colored ingredients. People in 'middle class' tenements had one thing in common: they all felt superior to their neighbors in the same building.
If a family had the misfortune to live in a 'lower class' tenement, they didn't feel superior to anything and their landlord collected his rent with two body-guards in attendance.
There were no 'upper class' tenements.
Our tenement was a five-story building with a cellar. The word "basement" was not a part of our vocabulary. Each floor housed a family with roots in a different part of Europe. The tenement was the spawning ground of the children of the twentieth century, the melting pot they boiled and bubbled in; the roots of the homeland survived only in the memory of the old folks. The roots of the families in our 'middle' class tenement were diverse: an Irish grass widow on the top floor, my family, comprised of Germans and English on the fourth, a large Jewish family from Poland on the third, and so on down the line to the Savino's on the first floor, whose three sons went to work in the uniforms of the sanitation, police and fire departments.
As you climbed the cracked linoleum stairs, the smells from the kitchens would clash and reveal foreign tastes in cooking, from oregano blending to onions, then garlic. The heated voices you heard from the floor below you and the ceiling above you were in languages you couldn't understand, but from the tone of them you knew they had problems just like yours. The elders of these families were resigned to living where they were, but they would never make a commitment to citizenship. They would always be foreigners in a foreign land.
We got along with very little. We would have been shocked at the frills and extravagances that most people consider necessities today. None of us had electric light -- none of us had central heating -- none of us had a telephone, a television set or a radio. They were the stuff of dreams.
But strangely, many of us had a piano. In modern America today few families can boast of owning a piano, but they were common in the twenties. You could have your very own piano for the cost of moving it. No one bought a piano at a piano store. Like the kitchen sink, they were left behind when tenants moved away. Moving companies would ask you if you had a piano, and their prices would double if you wanted to take it with you. It was a very large and heavy piece of furniture and difficult to winch down to the street from a fourth story window. Today you leave your refrigerator and your wall-to-wall carpeting, but in the twenties you left your piano.
Few families knew what to do with the pianos they had. Few people could play one. There were eighty-eight keys to play with ten fingers, and the fingers of men were blunt and broken from manual labor. Those of women were wrinkled, cracked, and dry from the scrub pail. The piano was not 'native' to most of us -- it was international, and the tunes of the homeland didn't sound as they should, regardless of how accomplished the pianist was. Balalaikas, banjos and concertinas fit the ethnic conception of our national musical heritage far better than the piano.
Our personal piano was a jet black Kranach & Bach upright. A poor man's piano. It was there to greet us when we moved in and became ours by default. It sounded more like a toy xylophone when you punched its crooked yellow keys, some of them refused to respond at all. Its black finish was interwoven with a fine network of surface cracks as though it had been through fire, ice and flood in rapid succession. Nevertheless. my mother was overjoyed, she had taken piano lessons when she was little and she couldn't wait to have it tuned. She promised us she would play it every day -- as soon as the moving in chores were done. It was a foolish promise, as caring for us was all she could handle. But while she waited for the floor to dry or the bread to rise, she would sit at it and try to do her chords in all seven keys.
Her tempo was slow and majestic, regardless of the music -- sluggish and uneven -- like the halting steps the bride takes on her walk down the aisle. She slowed Handel's "Largo" down to a crawl. "The Dark Town Strutter's Ball" and Chopin's "Minute Waltz" were hurdles she waded into grimly with tight lips and clamped jaws. When she played in the evening we were trapped and mesmerized by her stubborn water torture rhythm. With all due respect, I must say that my dislike for piano music today stems from my mother dragging out Chopin's "Minute Waltz" for the better part of an hour. I have heard many great pianists since then. From Rachmaninoff to Horowitz, from Harold Bauer to Emil Gilels. None of them have been able to erase the mental picture of my mother with her head bobbing up and down from the music to the keys in a frantic effort to include every note, regardless of tempo -- marching music for turtles and snails.
I slept in the parlor on a fold-out sofa with that Kranach & Bach by my side. The dim light of the kerosene stove would reveal it as a mythical dragon exposing a lower jaw of frighteningly wicked yellow teeth. In the middle of the night, during changes of humidity and temperature, the tortured strings would relax or tighten and release discordant gong-like sounds as though a family of tone-deaf goblins lived inside.
All our bedrooms were occupied by adults, and parlors were rarely used, (a good reason for not calling them 'living rooms'). They faced the street, and from their window the lady of the house shouted her orders down to the ice man and the vegetable vendor four stories below. During family reunions, holidays, and funeral get-togethers, however, the parlor was the entertainment center for aunts and cigar-smoking uncles from near and far. Mother would sit down to play her piano on such occasions and those that could, would stand up to sing the old songs -- each of us in his or her most comfortable key. The piano kept us more or less in tune, if not on time, until we grew weary of her implacable rhythm and found conversation more rewarding. Sensing the loss of her audience, she would begin to sing in a voice a full octave above her normal speaking range and loud enough to make normal conversation impossible.
I learned from experience that when this occurred, the party was on the wane and the parlor would soon be mine to sleep in. Few people, kith or kin, could stand my mother's singing and, compounded by her plodding pianistic talent, they would soon get their hats and coats and go. The piano and I could call it a day. My mother, frustrated again, would reluctantly close the lid over the keys, and my father, with a few deft strokes, would magically convert the davenport into my bed. Later, in the darkness I would look over at the old black Kranach & Bach standing quietly against the wall and marvel at its ability to be an instrument of wonder in the hands of gifted people, but to those of lesser talent it could empty a parlor in fifteen minutes.
It was a living thing. It had a soul that resonated with the slam of a door, a shout from an angry neighbor, the summer thunder and the bells of St. Theresa's. Certain of its strings would respond in a sustained and dissonant chord that would linger long after the original sound had died away. A sepulchral accompaniment to the music of life. It played for me all night long. It played as well or better by itself as it did for my mother.
We left the piano behind when we moved. It would be nice to think that its new owners could make it play as it was meant to be played. It only played for me in the dead of night. In the daylight hours it served as a place to stand our faded family photographs and the bell jar with my dead Grandfather's watch inside. It accomplished all these things without a murmur of complaint. But it complained bitterly when my mother sat down to play.