"Give it the day," Nora said. "Give it two, if it wants them."
"And the cover?" he asked.
"The cover," said Mrs. K, from behind her, in the voice of a woman countersigning her own treason, "goes to the cleaners. And does not come back."
The piano had been Eleanor's, which in that house meant it had been the house's second hearth. Under the dust sheet it was a good upright, dark wood, its top still marked with the faint rings of a hundred cups of tea set down by people listening. Nora had the children help her fold the cover β Jack solemn, Maisie disappearing entirely inside the operation at one point and being retrieved β and then Mr. Abernathy opened the lid and set about the long diplomacy of bringing two hundred strings back into agreement with each other, and the house, all day, sounded faintly of a struck note. One. Then another. A chord tried and taken back. Maisie kept appearing in the music room doorway like a cat, drawn by a machine she didn't remember being hers.
By evening the tuner played a scale, slow, up and down, and nodded once, and packed his case in the satisfied quiet of a man who has talked an old friend out of a long silence.
"It wants playing," he said. "They go sulky if they're only furniture. Play it and it'll stay honest."
Nora began the next morning, the way she began everything β as if it were simply what mornings were for. She put Maisie on the piano stool with her feet swinging a foot off the pedals and taught her the geography: the groups of two black keys, the groups of three, the doorbell notes in the middle where the songs lived. Maisie learned with her whole face. Within the week she could pick out, with one finger and enormous deliberation, the tune Nora had been humming over the washing-up β and the afternoon she first strung all seven notes together in a row, she sat up very straight and said, "Again," to no one, and did it eleven times.
Jack's position on the piano was that it was Maisie's department. He maintained this from the doorway, where he could regularly be found at lesson time, motionless, with his shoulder against the frame and his hands in his pockets in a posture of complete indifference that did not survive one single scrutiny.
"You're on guard duty," Nora observed, on the fourth day.
"I'm just passing."
"You've been passing for twenty minutes. The door is not under threat, Jack. The piano, however, could use a rhythm section." She went to the kitchen and came back with two wooden spoons and the big stockpot, upended, and set them on the music room rug without ceremony. "Cutlery drums. Every orchestra has them. The job's yours if you want it. It involves a certain amount of noise, which I know is against your religion, but a soldier adapts."
He looked at the pot. He looked at the spoons. Somewhere in him the sentry and the nine-year-old held a short, fierce negotiation, and the nine-year-old won on points.
"I'll need to keep time properly," he said gravely, picking up the spoons. "Maisie rushes."
"I do not," said Maisie, and hit two notes at once, hard, in rebuttal, and the lesson dissolved into the first real musical chaos the room had held in two years β one-finger melody and stockpot percussion, both dreadful, both getting steadily less dreadful, Nora conducting with a teaspoon and correcting nothing that wasn't asked about. Through the open door the noise went down the hall and into the bones of the brownstone, past the kitchen, where Mrs. K was discovered by Shay to be standing quite still with a dish towel in her hands, listening, with her eyes wet and her jaw set like a woman refusing to comment.
It was on the Friday that Marcus came home early.
He heard it on the steps, through his own front door β the piano, alive, in his house, playing under small wrong-fingered hands the tune that had lived in these rooms more than any other: the song Eleanor had played after dinner, the one she said lowered the blood pressure of the entire street. He stood in his hall with his coat half off and listened to his wife's song come down the corridor carrying his daughter's mistakes and his son's drumming, and Shay, behind him, found somewhere else in the house to be, at a speed that would have shamed a younger man.
The music room door was open, the way all the doors in that part of the house were open now. Marcus Doyle β who owned the door, the room, the piano, the house, the street's opinion of the house, and the fear of half of Boston β stood in the hallway outside it for a full minute with his hand raised, a man rehearsing a thing he'd once done ten thousand times without thinking.
Then, for the first time in two years, Boston's most feared man knocked on a door inside his own house.
The music stopped. A small voice, his daughter's, called out from the stool, in the new household tone Nora had installed in her like a window: "Come in β we're just in the middle."
Marcus opened the door.
"I'm not interrupting," he said, to the room, to the piano, to the woman at the teaspoon. "I heard β I was only β " He looked at the stockpot, at his son frozen with the spoons raised, waiting to find out whether noise needed permission after all.
"Downbeat's yours, Jack," he said. "You were keeping good time."
Jack brought the spoons down like a boy laying a wreath, and Maisie found her seven notes, and Nora lifted the teaspoon, and Marcus Doyle stood in the doorway of his own music room and did not come in and did not leave, and listened to the whole song through, to the end, standing up, like a man at a door he was finally β note by wrong, beautiful note β being let through.
Chapter 11: Frankie's Move
Frankie Doyle gave the order the way he gave all his orders, like a man doing arithmetic out loud for people too slow to follow it in their heads.
"Not the old man," he said. "Not the family. The business. The yard on Rutherford, the trucks, the fence. I want Marlowe to open his newspaper tomorrow and learn that Boston has started charging him rent." He set his glass down on the bar of the Anchor, in Charlestown, and looked at the three men across the table one at a time, the way his brother looked at men β Frankie had learned the look without learning the patience that was supposed to go inside it. "No bodies. Nobody dies. We are not animals. We are a message."