PART FIVE

One day when visiting Mr. Allen I met a young man who told me he was Mr. Allen's relative.

"Mr. Allen is a fine man," I said later as the young man and I walked downstairs together.

"Yes," he said, "and generous, too. I'll bet he's given away as many pianos as he's sold."

So, I thought, Mr. Allen and Boone had been alike in that regard.

"He's sick, you know," the young man went on. "We're going to walk in one of these days and find him dead."

On my next several visits I approached Mr. Allen's workshop with trepidation, but he always turned out to be so cheerful and busy that my fears for his health subsided. Although he had officially retired from business long ago, he still worked constantly, going from piano to piano, keeping them all in perfect tune.

One day when I arrived I found him cleaning the reeds of a melodeon, which is similar to a pump organ. I had once helped my father clean and repair the pump organ that had belonged to my great-grandparents, so I offered to help Mr. Allen with the melodeon. He stood at the back of the instrument while I sat at the keyboard. He would slip out a particular reed, clean it, and then carefully slide it back into place while I held down the specified key and pumped the bellows. The note would wheeze and complain until the reed slid home. Suddenly the tone would change into a warm vibrato, and Mr. Allen and I would share a look of triumph. When we finished the job, I played a hymn, relishing the richness of the sound. At the end Mr. Allen said, "Honey, if you were thirty years older and I was thirty years younger what a team we could make."

Occasionally he would take me on a tour through the storage loft that adjoined his workshop. This room, a vast dusky cavern, was like a setting from a surrealistic dream. The roof had recently been tarred, and the tar had leaked through the ceiling and solidified in long black stalactites. Mr. Allen, in his leather apron, looked like a subterranean gnome guarding his treasures. I had a suspended feeling in that loft, as though I had stepped through the doorway into another dimension, where time drifted like snow, where past events became as real as today's news.

"This is a parlor grand," Mr. Allen told me one afternoon as he removed a brocaded cloth from the top of a squat, square-topped piano as heavy as a banquet table. "Listen to the sustaining pedal."

Then he struck a G above Middle C, holding down the pedal, and the tone rang out and held -- and held -- and held. Mr. Allen grinned and said, "You should have seen the women at the parties in those days, with their hair piled high and their gowns sweeping the floor. The big thing then was not how well you could sing, but how long you could hold the note. They used to have contests, matching the singer against the sustaining pedal to see which one could last the longest."

He struck the key again, held down the pedal, and, clasping his hands dramatically over his breast, sang the note in a quavering falsetto, head thrown back, eyes disdainfully sweeping the suddenly visible crowd of frock-coated men checking their watches, mesmerized women clasping motionless fans. The crowd disappeared as Mr. Allen's worn-out voice cracked and he leaned, gasping, against the piano.