“He’s waiting, sweetie. This way!”

Hazel grabbed Zack’s hand, now bare, and pulled him along. Zack liked it that there were no other children in the lobby. He was made to feel special for it was late for a child to be up: past 8:30 P.M. Zack rarely became sleepy until past ten o’clock, sometimes later if he was listening to music on the radio. He was hearing music now, and it excited him.

“It’s a wedding. But I don’t see the bride.”

Hazel had stopped outside an enormous ivory-and-gold ballroom where, on a raised platform against the farther wall, a five-piece band was playing dance music. This was music to make you smile, and want to dance: “swing.” Strange that most of the dressily attired men and women in the ballroom were not dancing but standing in tight clusters, holding drinks, talking and laughing loudly.

Zack wondered if this-the wedding?-was the surprise.

The surprise could not be Daddy, he knew. Now that the pebbles were gone.

But Daddy himself is gone. He had to remember that.

Zack nudged Mommy in the leg. Such a young-looking mother like one of the female faces in the posters at the Bay Palace Theater, and in her purple jersey party dress it scared him she wasn’t any mother at all.

“Why do people get married, Mommy? Is it the only way?”

“The only way what?”

Zack had no idea. Hoping that Mommy would finish his thought for him, as often she did.

They were walking then swiftly along a corridor of brightly lighted shop displays. Jewelry, handbags. Hand-knit Shetland sweaters. At the end of the corridor was a dimly-lit room, shadowy as a cave: piano bar. Zack heard a piano being played. Here was his surprise! Hazel pulled him inside shivery and excited. Across the room a man was sitting at a beautiful gleaming piano, not a small upright like the piano in the Junior High auditorium but a “grand” piano, the kind with an opened lid. The man was playing music Zack knew from the radio, long ago on the Poor Farm Road: “jazz.”

A number of people were sitting at small tables scattered across the smoky room. At a bar, more customers sat on stools. Some were talking and laughing among themselves but most were listening to the pianist play his quick bright startling music. Zack felt the glamor of the Piano Bar, his heart beat hard with happiness.

There was a small round zinc-topped table reserved for Hazel Jones, near the piano! Hazel positioned Zack where he could watch the pianist’s hands. He had never seen such long, supple fingers. He had never heard such music, close up. It was astonishing to him, overwhelming. Zack guessed that the man at the piano could reach twelve keys-fifteen!-with his long agile fingers. He watched, he listened enthralled. It would be one of the great memories of his life, hearing Chet Gallagher play jazz piano that night in January 1963 at the Malin Head Inn.

“If It Isn’t Love”-“A-Tisket, A-Tasket”-“I Ain’t Got Nobody” Fats Waller style: pieces Gallagher played that night, that Zack would come to know in time.

At the break, Gallagher came to sit at Hazel Jones’s table. Zack saw that they were known to each other: Gallagher was the “friend.” In that instant he understood the logic of the new sheepskin jacket and boots from Sears, the newly installed telephone in their small apartment, Hazel’s air of secrecy and well-being. He would not wonder at this for he’d long ago understood that it was futile to wonder at the logic of adult behavior. It was not astonishing that Chet Gallagher should know Hazel Jones, but that Chet Gallagher, the man who’d only now been playing the piano, should wish to know him, shaking his hand, smiling and winking-“H’lo, Zack! Your mother has been telling me, you play piano, too?” Zack was too stricken to speak, Hazel nudged him and said in an undertone to Gallagher, “Zack is shy with adult men,” and Gallagher laughed, in a way that allowed you to see how fond he was of Hazel Jones. “What makes you think I’m an ”adult man‘?“

Gallagher had an oversized, oblong head like something carved out of wood. His dark, crinkled hair framed a bald front and his nose was long and narrow with amazing dark holes for nostrils. His mouth was always smiling. His head was aimed forward. At the piano, his spine had looked like a willow, easily bent. Gallagher wore the strangest clothes Zack had ever seen on a man: a black silk shirt with no collar, that fitted his sinewy, narrow torso snug as a glove; suspenders made of a showy iridescent-blue fabric, you would associate with a party dress like Hazel Jones’s. Zack had never seen any man with a face like Gallagher’s, he supposed was an ugly face and yet the more you stared at this face, the more attractive it became. Nor had Zack ever seen such kind eyes on any man.

Gallagher rose. Time to return to the piano. He’d brought his drink to the table with him, a clear-looking liquid in a tall glass. As he turned away, his hand drifted against Hazel’s shoulder lightly, in passing. Zack would fall asleep listening to Gallagher’s fingers moving up and down the keyboard in a wild antic rhythm that made his own fingers twitch in emulation: “boogie-woogie.”

I knew then that a man could love.

A man can love.

With his music, with his fingers a man can love.

A man can be good, a man does not have to hurt you.

Zack was wakened, later. The Piano Bar had closed. The bartender was cleaning up. Chet Gallagher had ordered roast beef sandwiches for them: four sandwiches for three people of whom one was a six-year-old child dazed with sleep. Of course, Chet Gallagher was famished. He would eat two and a half sandwiches, himself. He was thirsty, too. After his stint at the piano he was in a mood to celebrate. Hazel was laughing protesting it was late, after 2 A.M., wasn’t he tired, Gallagher shook his head vehemently-“Hell, no.”

Zack went eagerly to the piano. Had to stand, for the piano stool was too low. At first he just touched the keys, depressed them cautiously, hearing the sudden sharp, clear tones, the notes out of the piano’s mysterious interior that always excited him, the wonder that any such sound might exist in the world and that it might be summoned out of silence by an effort of his own.

That was the wonder: that sound might be summoned out of silence, emptiness. That he might be an instrument of that sound.

Gallagher’s voice came teasing and fondly familiar, as if they’d known each other for a long time: “Go on, kid. Piano’s yours. Play.”

Zack played the scale of F minor, right hand alone, left hand alone and both hands together. His fingers fitted the keys as if he’d played this beautiful piano before! The tone was very different from the piano he played for Mr. Sarrantini, though. It was far clearer, the notes more distinctive. Here, his fingers began to take on the movements and syncopation of Gallagher’s fingers, jazz rhythms, boogie-woogie. He heard himself playing, trying to play, one of the catchy melodies Gallagher had played earlier in the evening: the one that sounded like a child’s song-“A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” Out of this, too, he fashioned a clumsy boogie-woogie. Gallagher came laughing to the piano to lean over him. There was a smell of Gallagher’s breath that was sweetish-stale, smoky. “Jesus, kid. You play by ear, eh? Terrific.” Gallagher’s enormous hands descended beside Zack’s small hands on the keyboard; his long black-sleeved arms enclosed Zack, without touching him. His fingers that were so long and supple moved with authority up into the treble keys, down deep into the bass keys, lower and lower until the notes were almost too deep to hear. Gallagher was snorting with laughter, it was so funny that Zack’s child-fingers tried to follow his, slipping and faltering, striking the wrong notes, yet not giving up, like a clumsy puppy running after a long-legged dog. Zack’s face was warm, he was becoming excited. Gallagher struck the keys hard, his hands leapt. Zack struck the keys hard, too. His fingers stung. He was becoming overly excited, feverish.