I’ve only noticed recently how pompous it is that we have a room in our house that is referred to as “the music room.” I’m not sure which Rattray was pretentious enough to decide it was “the music room” just because there is a baby grand piano in there and a hi-fi stereo, but it should really just be called “the other side of the living room.”
Dimly, in a dusty shelf at the back of my memory, I can see my grandmother in there, sitting — very upright; she had regal posture — before a typewriter at her big newspaper publisher’s desk, from which she dispatched endless letters to the world. The piano, in my very early childhood when I came to this house to be looked after and forced to eat scrambled eggs by this upright grandmother, was an upright, too, that stood against the wall in the other half of the living room, facing the fireplace. I can only just remember learning how to play “Chopsticks” on it. It was my upright grandmother, I think, who decided that the place beside the kitchen where we eat breakfast was “the sun porch,” and the upstairs room into which the children were supposed to disappear to study the world atlas and play with puppets was “the playroom,” but if my grandmother wasn’t responsible for the baby grand, which she wasn’t, I think I have to blame my mother for “the music room.” In younger days, my mother fancied herself an opera singer, and the records that revolved everlastingly, seven nights a week on the turntable in the music room, were typically, you know, Prokofiev or the Vienna Philharmonic under Carlos Kleiber performing Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4.
This music room is not used much anymore. My son does go in there a few times a week to teach himself to play a song called “Golden Hour” on the baby grand, but no one touches the stereo these days (even though we keep insisting we love vinyl record albums) or sits for long, boring hours on the saggy old white duck-cloth couch looking closely and dreamily at the pictures of Confederate soldiers in “The Civil War as Photographed by Matthew Brady,” one of the heavy art and photo books that fill a big bookshelf (even though we keep insisting we still love books).
The only day when anyone sits around in the music room is Christmas Day, because that is where the tree is.
The music room in this house is what “the parlor” was to Americans in mid-20th century: the room that time forgot.
The music room has become our own personal dustbin of history, the cupboard into which the teenagers throw stacks of completed homework and looseleaf paper covered in geometry problems that they pull from their heavy black backpacks at the end of each school day. There are piles of discarded school papers three feet high on the piano bench and radiator cover. Also, unused board games, stacked high: No one plays Risk or Parcheesi or Clue anymore. Also, unwanted musical instruments, picked up in elementary school and abandoned: a green electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, an electric keyboard, maracas. Also: Christmas presents, mostly books in fact, that were unwrapped and then forgotten. I bought “Tender Is the Night” for my daughter with naive hope in my heart and there it sits, 12 months later, atop the paperback edition of “1984” that some other optimist bought for Teddy.
Teddy is upstairs right now watching animé and coughing. He is home from school with flu, or maybe it’s strep throat. Nettie won’t be home from boarding school for Christmas break for another two weeks, so I decorated the tree (which I wrote about last week) alone today. Out of “the store room” upstairs came the inherited ornaments I like so much, the Shiny Brites and blown-glass champagne bottles and brigantines and sailor’s heads. About the only thing I like about modernity is the invention of LED. I twined the tree in tiny LED lights and will let them burn in the music room, day and night, until Epiphany.