It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime. At times our mother put her arms around us both, and then guided our hands so we could clang down hard on the keys. I can still after all these years sit in the museum of those afternoons and recall the light spilling across the carpet. I used to think of the notes still trilling through the bones, as if they could skip from one to the other, over the breakage. When she finished playing she would lightly rub the back of her wrist. We never knew the origin of the break: it was something left in silence. Our mother played with a natural touch, even though she suffered from a hand which she had broken many times. She kept a small radio on top of the Steinway in the living room of our house in Dublin and on Sunday afternoons, after scanning whatever stations we could find, Radio Éireann or BBC, she raised the lacquered wing of the piano, spread her dress out at the wooden stool, and tried to copy the piece through from memory: jazz riffs and Irish ballads and, if we found the right station, old Hoagy Carmichael tunes. One of the many things my brother, Corrigan, and I loved about our mother was that she was a fine musician.
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