The Nine-Finger Piano Player

JANUARY, 1954

The sign on the door originally read: interview room, but someone had scrawled psych. eval.” on a piece of cardboard and taped it over the sign. The trustee pushed open the door and Andy Gall shuffled into the room, his hands manacled in front of him. The room was roughly ten by ten with a small window in the center of the south wall. The window had six individual panes and the relentless blast of steam-heated air from a register high up on the north wall had succeeded only in melting a small circle of frost in the center of each. Beads of condensation slid down the glass and formed tiny pools on the concrete window sill. Through the window Andy could see only a sad forsythia bush, stripped of its leaves by the brutal January cold.

A fat and sweaty little red-haired man turned from the wall he was painting. “Have a seat,” the man said, gesturing with his paint brush. A few drops of paint shot from the end of the brush and landed on the corner of the small metal desk in the exact center of the room. The little man pulled a rag from his back pocket, wiped up the drops with a distracted air, and went back to his task.

Andy sat in the wooden chair with his back to the door. When the prison was constructed a big iron ring had been poured into the concrete floor. Had he been a real threat, they would have manacled his feet as well, and fastened them to the iron ring. But Andy wasn’t a real threat, just a kid really, although he would turn twenty in another month, having done nearly half of a three-year stretch for breaking and entering. He watched the man paint for a few minutes, turning the faded and peeling old sea foam green to gunmetal gray. He didn’t know much about painting, but it seemed to him the guy was doing a lousy job, not even taking the time to scrape away the loose paint. He was dressed oddly for the task as well. Instead of painter’s coveralls he wore dark green dress pants and a rumpled white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. Splotches of gray paint dotted his clothes and arms.

Andy blinked his eyes rapidly, the oppressive heat in the room was a physical weight on his chest. Droplets of sweat began to form at his armpits. A small flame of dread had ignited in the pit of his stomach that morning when they told him he had to see the shrink. The feeling was all too familiar—it came unbidden whenever he had to face any type of authority figure. From his youngest days, Andy had fantasized—wished, really—that these people who held sway over him might miraculously die before he had to face them. His father, a teacher or principal, the juvenile court judge, the District Attorney—all of them met their end in his daydreams.

This particular one seemed fairly harmless, but he had an office and wore a white shirt even while painting. In young Andy’s worldview, that signified power. He pressed his manacled wrists against his stomach as if to dampen the fire within.

Finally the man reached the corner, completing one wall. Grunting with satisfaction he stuck the brush back in the can and uncapped a small bottle of turpentine. Wiping his hands clean on a rag, he took the only other chair in the room, facing Andy across the desk. Up close the man appeared older—his eyes were rheumy and tired looking and his ginger hair was shot through with gray.

“Better, don’t you think?” the man said, cocking his head toward the painted wall.

“I guess.” Andy wished the man would quit wiping his hands on the turpentine rag. The smell was starting to give him a headache.

“Symbolic more than anything, I suppose,” the little fat man said, finally tossing the rag in the corner of the room. “Out with the old, in with the new. That sort of thing.” He clapped his hands once and smiled optimistically in Andy’s direction.

When Andy remained silent, the man’s smile faded and he sat back in the chair, lacing his hands across his generous stomach. “You do know there’s a new governor about to be sworn in, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Andy said, suspicious, wondering what that had to do with anything.

“What’s his name?” the little man asked with a smirk, and when Andy just shrugged the grin widened. “Robert B. Meyner, Democrat,” the little man said with a sort of reverence. Andy remained silent, and the man rubbed a hand through his thinning hair. “Do you know what happens when a new governor takes office?”

“No.” There would be changes, of course. Andy knew that, and the guy had alluded to changes just a moment ago, but until he knew who exactly this guy was, he wouldn’t comment. He’d learned that much at least during the last seventeen months.

“He makes changes,” the man said. “New heads in all state departments. Treasury, Police, Education….”

“Prisons?” Andy said and then wished that he hadn’t. Don’t help this guy, he told himself, until you know what he wants from you.

“Exactly.” The little man smiled and his jowls shook a bit as he nodded confirmation. He put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and pulled the drop cloth away from a small filing cabinet next to his desk, revealing a pile of folders, some crisp and new and some worn and dog eared. Andy’s folder was on top, pitifully thin when compared to most of the others. “Andy Gall,” the little man said, pulling a single sheet of paper from the file and studying Andy over the top of it. “Hunky?” he asked.

“Hungarian.” Andy had no reason to feel any pride in his heritage, nor any connection at all with the old country, but the man’s attitude was irritating to say the least.

“Yeah, I can see that,” the odd little man continued. When you first came in I thought you might be Italian, but your nose is too big.”

Andy was used to being mistaken for Italian—in fact a lot of people said he favored Dean Martin. He had even tried to do that little spit-curl thing that Dino did with the front of his hair, but Andy’s was too coarse and naturally straight. He was just slightly over five feet eight and had gone from teenage skinny to merely thin over the past year and a half inside.

The little man sat up suddenly, rummaged about on his cluttered desk and unearthed a prism-shaped nameplate, which he polished with his shirtsleeve before placing it on the front of the desk. The plaque told Andy that he was being interviewed by Dr. Benjamin Hadley.

Andy straightened instinctively, bringing a self-satisfied grin to the doctor’s face. He waved the sheet of paper in Andy’s general direction.

“Not much of a file on you,” he said. “How often have you been evaluated?”

“Evaluated? For what?”

Dr. Hadley sighed, and again he laced his hands across his stomach. “So,” he said, and then stopped. “What I was talking about a few minutes ago? About changes, with the new governor coming in? Well, Governor Meyner doesn’t take office for another couple of weeks, but the old Director of Prisons—John Collins—he knew his days were numbered so he retired early. See?”

“I guess.”

“Hmn,” the doctor pursed his lips. “Not much of a talker, are you? Anyway, Alfred Driscoll— he’s the outgoing governor—and Governor Meyner reached an agreement on a new director.”

“You?”

“Me? No.” The doctor answered quickly, but it was clear he was flattered.

Andy had only asked out of surprise. The one time he’d been in the room before—for his entry interview—there had been a picture of the old director on the back wall. It was gone now, presumably to be replaced with the new director’s picture when the painting was complete. Andy remembered vividly the man’s stern hawk-nosed face seeming to glare directly at him. Doughy little Dr. Hadley was a far cry from that.

“No,” the doctor said again. “The new director is Dr. Horace Jennings.” He paused, waiting for Andy to recognize the name or comment in some way but Andy remained silent. He wanted to ask why a doctor had been picked to run the prison system, but didn’t. In his experience, everyone wanted something and whatever the little man across the desk wanted, he would get it with no help from him.

“Well,” Hadley said. “Jennings appointed me as Chief Psychologist for this prison and I aim to make some changes around here.” He swept his arm back in the direction of the freshly painted wall. “And not just decorating.” He chuckled and winked, as if they were sharing a little secret. Again, Andy didn’t know how to react to this, but this time the doctor didn’t seem to notice. He checked his wristwatch, scanned the sheet of paper quickly, and frowned.

“It’s obvious you’ve not had a proper psychological evaluation, and I don’t have time to do one now, but I think I could take a stab at a diagnosis.” He peered at Andy over the top of the sheet of paper. “You don’t belong here,” he said, and Andy laughed in spite of himself. “What’s so funny?” The doctor asked, a suspicious frown clouding his face.

“Well, if I’m innocent, why am I here?”

“I didn’t say you were innocent.”

“But you just said I don’t belong here.” Despite his best efforts Andy found himself being pulled into the dialogue.

“Right, right,” the doctor said quickly, as if Andy had said something profound. “Look,” he said, putting his glasses back on and leaning forward over the desk. “I haven’t got the time to properly explain all this. God knows I wish I did. The thing is, look at your crime. You broke into a grocery store just a few months after your eighteenth birthday. If you had committed the crime just three months earlier, you would have been sent to the reformatory in Annandale.”

“I’ve already been there.”

“What?” The doctor scanned the paper, turned it over and looked at the blank page on the back. “It doesn’t say anything about that here.”

“It’s true.”

“It should be on this paper. In your file.” The doctor looked at him accusingly but Andy just shrugged. Hadley’s eye flitted about as if the missing information must be somewhere else in the room. He put his hand on the phone, but drew it back without picking it up.

“That is crucial information,” the doctor said finally. “Completely changes my diagnosis.”

The door opened and the trustee, a small confused man with thinning gray hair, entered with his hat in hand and his head bowed. He turned to the side, exposing his neck like a dog that had been kicked repeatedly. Andy had always felt a little sorry for the guy, though he wasn’t sure why.

“What?” the doctor barked, and the trustee flinched.

“Your next, uhm….”

“Client, Edward. We call them clients.”

“Okay, your next, uhm, client is here, Dr. Hadley.”

“Just have him wait.” The doctor looked at his watch again. “We’ll be through here in a few minutes.”

“Yessir.” The trustee backed from the room.

Hadley put the paper in the folder and closed it. “My diagnosis is that you suffer from Arrested Development Syndrome,” he said, the words coming in a rush.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t have time to explain it entirely.” The doctor glared at the door. “Essentially it means that some traumatic incident in your childhood, more likely adolescence, arrested … stopped … your development into adulthood. In your case…. How old were you when you went into Annandale?”

“The first time?”

The doctor’s head snapped up, but he recovered quickly. “Yes,” he said. “The first time.”

“About sixteen, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Yeah. Well, there was a problem with my birth certificate.”

“What sort of problem?” the doctor tented his hands, his time crisis forgotten for the moment in light of this new development.

“Not with the certificate itself, really. It was my father.”

“Oh?” Hadley perked up quite a bit at that bit of information.

“He didn’t think I should go to school. Kept me out the first year. Mom had to threaten to leave him.”

“He didn’t want you to go to school? Fascinating. Just you? You have any brothers or sisters?” The doctor looked toward Andy’s closed file again, as if wondering if he might have missed this piece of information.

“I’ve got two sisters, but I’m the oldest. One’s thirteen, the other eleven. Once I went to school, I guess he couldn’t keep them back.

“But why didn’t he want you to go to school?” The doctor clicked his pen and pulled a blank sheet of paper to him.

“I don’t know.” Andy shrugged again, feeling his face flush and seeing the look of disappointment on the doctor’s face. “I guess I was six when I went to kindergarten, but I thought I was five, so I always thought—I was always told—that I was a year younger than I really was.” His face burned with the embarrassment and he lifted his right hand, laying the cold steel of the manacle up under his chin in hopes of cooling down a bit. “So, when I went in that hardware store that night, I thought I was still seventeen. Benny and Sam, they were almost nineteen at the time, so I went in you know, figuring if I got caught, they’d just send me back to Annandale.”

“You figured that?”

“Well, no. It was Benny’s idea.”

The doctor let that hang in the air for a moment, but there was no need. Andy had gone over it in his mind a million times and it always came out the same. The two older boys—men, actually—had taken advantage of his inexperience, his stupidity.

“This Benny and Sam,” the doctor said after a bit. “Were they caught?”

“No. They took off when they heard the sirens.”

“Why didn’t you take off as well?”

Andy sucked in his cheeks and blew out a breath. “I was stuck in the transom,” he said.

“So, your friends. Did they know you were really eighteen?”

“No. Nobody did. Except my parents, I guess.”

“Interesting. How was it discovered? Who found out the truth?”

“Well, the D.A.—the Assistant District Attorney that was in charge of my case—made my folks come up with my birth certificate. I don’t know why.”

“Doing his job, I suspect,” Hadley said, mostly to himself. “But, what’s done is done. Nothing to be done about it now. You do know why you’re here, right?”

“Well, yeah. I got caught trying to rob that store.”

“Not that.” Hadley’s eyes narrowed, as if he suspected Andy of putting him on. “Why are you here today? In my office?” Before Andy could put together a response, the little man rushed on. “Your parole hearing is Thursday. The seventh. Two days from now. You did know that, right? They did tell you that?”

“Well yeah, but….”

“But what?” The doctor drummed his fingers impatiently on his desk.

“Well … everybody knows that you don’t get out on your first try.”

The doctor’s mouth dropped open. “Everyone knows that, do they?” He pulled the yellow pad close and scribbled something on it, shaking his head in wonderment at the bit of information that Andy had given him. “Well,” he said, so suddenly and with such fervor that Andy twitched involuntarily. “Well,” he said again. “Mark my words, you will be getting out. You will be released on your first try. I can’t right all the wrongs that have been done here under the previous administration.” He paused for a quick smile that Andy supposed was intended to show modesty and then hurried on. “So, what is your plan?”

“My plan?”

“The plan for your future.” The doctor’s face reddened a bit. “They’re going to ask you about your plan for the future. You have to have a plan for your future.”

“Really?” Andy didn’t have a plan for his future. Never had. Had never really needed one. He did have a dream, though—a dream he had so far revealed to no one.

“Well?” the doctor demanded, his fingers drumming harder and faster now and the redness in his face deepening.

“I want to play piano,” Andy said, and felt the heat return to his face.

“Play the piano?” The doctor’s eyes narrowed again. “That’s not a plan. That’s a hobby.”

From long practice, Andy Gall took his innermost thoughts and scrubbed them clean, devoid of desire or any other emotion, before he allowed the words to escape his lips. What he wanted to say was that he had to play piano. That it satisfied some base need—that when playing, he felt as he imagined it might be like to take junk—the liquid fire that came from deep within his chest, the warmth that flowed down his arms to his fingers as they struck the keys. From the moment he played his first note on the old Bohemia in the recreation room at Annandale, he was captivated. Now, the hour a day that he was able to practice on the big and equally battered piano in the A-Wing Rec Room was the only time that the feeling of dread, the feeling of loss that lay in the pit of his stomach eased a little.

In fact, his first real emotion upon being arrested for the attempted hardware store robbery was a sort of peace at the thought of returning to a place where he could play music without fear of ridicule from his friends. On the outside he might be called a queer or worse, and yet on the inside, among men far tougher than any of his friends on the street, no one seemed to find it unusual that he played music, and no one had ever said a word to him about it, one way or the other.

“I’m going to California to play piano.” Andy set his jaw as if daring the doctor to contradict him, but it almost seemed as if he hadn’t heard him.

“California,” Hadley said after a while, half question and half statement. He stopped drumming his fingers and sat back in his chair, deflated as surely as if someone had pricked his little round belly with a pin.

“You realize, don’t you?” he said after a while. “That it’s completely out of the question? Going to California, I mean.” The doctor spoke gently now and quietly, as if to a small child. You will have to report to a parole officer in….” He glanced at Andy’s file. “In Passaic, within three days of your release, and you will have to report to him periodically for the next two years. So you can see that your … plan … to go to California, is clearly out of the question.

When it was clear that Andy had nothing more to say, the doctor spoke with a kindness that only deepened Andy’s humiliation.“Look, just make something up. You worked in the bakery here, didn’t you? Tell them you’re going to get a job in a bakery. They’ll buy that. I’m not saying you should lie, you understand. The want ads are full of jobs right now. Eisenhower’s got the country humming along on the right track. There are bound to be some jobs for bakers. People have got to eat, you know. Go home, back to your parent’s place and get some kind of job. Keep your nose clean, and two years will go by before you know it.”

“I can’t go home,” Andy said, and instantly regretted it. What was it about this odd little man that made him unable to keep his mouth shut?

“You can’t go home,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “Son, you don’t have a choice. Is that clear? Damn, I wish you were staying in for a while. I could do wonders for you.” He shook his head again and stuck Andy’s folder into a desk drawer.

“Edward,” he yelled, and the trustee was through the door before the sound of his voice had faded from the room. “Take this man back to his cell and bring in my next client.”

“Yessir, Dr. Hadley.”

By the time Andy reached the door the doctor was rifling through another, much thicker, folder.