My 24 Guitars

In the 1950s, my paternal grandmother began to lose her hearing. She was late in midlife by then, and by the time she reached her 70s it was almost gone, reduced to shrill, high-pitched whistles and hums borne of disintegrating aural bones. A walnut baby grand Knabe — her prized possession, bought for her by my grandfather at the height of the Depression after she returned from a three-year abandonment of the household — sat gathering dust in the corner of their Brooklyn living room near the radiator, its soundboard cracking in the dry apartment heat. The piano could no longer be tuned, and although she could still play the Chopin that brought her to the stage of Town Hall as a 14-year-old prodigy, it sounded flat and tortured. But my grandmother could no longer hear it; she could only feel the vibration of the wood, the felted hammers, the pedals that could no longer be pressed. Her playing had been reduced to a memory, but her desire to play did not wane: Shortly before she died at 93, she dozed next to me in the backseat of my father’s Toyota while we were on our way to a family function, her eyes closed, hands spread wide on her lap as if on her piano’s yellowing ivory keys, muscle memory taking her fingers through the Nocturne Opus 9 that she knew in her sleep.