A door crusted with soot cracks open. A tall, gaunt man stands on the other side. He inspects me with wide eyes, hand steady on the door knob.
“Can I help you?” he wheezes.
“Hi,” I say, mustering all the cheer I got. “I’m a neighbor, and I’m a real estate agent.”
His hand on the doorknob tightens. The door inches toward me.
“How long have you lived here?” I say.
“Oh, let me see, a long time, geez, maybe 50 years.”
“Wow. That is a long time. And, I can tell, you’ve preserved this home well.”
“It’s exactly the way it was when I bought it.”
He pauses, then shyly says, “Want to see it?”
“Sure.”
I cross the threshold into a dimly lit interior. All the curtains are drawn. A silent reverence hangs thick, and I see why. Before me stands a Steinway grand piano, shoehorned into a tiny living room. There’s not a mote of dust on its gleaming filagreed surface. Some type of apparatus is attached to the center over the keys.
It’s a player piano.
“Wanna hear it play?”
“Sure.”
After he explains how it works, something about baffles and pneumatic pressure, he turns to a glass door cabinet packed with Ampico scrolls. The perforated paper directs the piano. There’s everything from Broadway to Mozart.
I take a seat on a floral patterned sofa, and he gets one of the rolls out and sets it up. Soon I’m listening to a perfect rendering of a Lizst etude. It’s an era gone by, when the piano was the family gathering place after dinner. The player piano met its demise with the advent of the phonograph. Production ceased in the 50s.
This grande dame has been restored to perfection.
In fact, everything in this living room is a restoration, frozen in time, like a diorama at a natural history museum.
Tiffany lamps hold incandescent light bulbs, not a CFL or LED in sight.
Beside me, a chrome plated, stand up ash tray glows red at the base. At the top are four stations, one for holding cigarets, another for the lighter – Pull it out, and there’s a lighter fluid soaked wick. Touch it to the metal ball station and a spark discharges. Voila! A flame! – another with a spinning top holds the ashes. Function and form married in harmony.
A wall mounted phone holds a receiver on a stirrup. I pick it up. There’s a dial tone. I half expect an operator to chirp up and ask me for a number.
He shows me a restored phonograph. The wood casing alone is a marvel of craftsmanship. It mechanically flips over a 78 vinyl album. When completed it slides it under a stack of others and plays the next one. It’s able to play up to two hours of continuous music.
A night club singer croons. The record is remarkably unscratched. The sound is warm and resonant.
There’s a massive tube radio with AM and short wave; a stand alone piece of furniture. Inside the cabinet, he removes a mirror sharp chrome cover and reveals more chrome, cylinders covering each radio tube. He says it’s hard to get a clear signal anymore because there is so much frequency interference in the air nowadays.
He is a quiet revolutionary taking a stand against constant change. In his domain he surrounds himself with the deeply familiar, never to be updated, never to be changed. Why would he? The love he has poured into each possession reflects back to him.
Genius and art from a world gone by, that player piano outplayed anything I ever heard.
“I worry what will happen with all this when I pass,” he says.
“Do you have family?”
“I never married. No kids. I have a brother who’s married with two kids, but I don’t think they’ll want it. I have a lot of stuff.”
Did I mention the Packards in the garage?