Joyce Zeiss

Dad never told me that the nuns smacked his knuckles with a ruler when he didn’t hold his violin in the correct position during his afterschool lessons. I learned that from my Aunt Jessie. Despite the corporal punishment, he learned to play the violin. I had never heard him play , but when I decided I wanted to join my junior high orchestra, he pulled the musty gray case from the top shelf of the coat closet, undid the latches on the side, and opened the lid.

“I played this in high school,” he said as he lifted the violin from its case. Adjusting the shoulder rest, he placed the violin under his chin.

“Can you still play?” I ran my fingers over the strings on the bow.

“Don’t touch the horsehair. Hand me the rosin.”

I peered in the case and spied a hard yellow rock. He ran it over the horsehair.

Then he plucked the violin strings one at a time to tune them, adjusting the pegs. His eyes narrowed and his back straightened as he bent his elbow and began to play a scratchy melody, moving the bow from one string to the next in a seesaw motion as his big hands searched like a blind man for the familiar notes. “Flow gently, sweet Afton,” he sang as the song emerged from the violin like a hidden pearl.

I borrowed his second-hand violin and struggled through four years of lessons. When I reached high school, I quit. Years later when Mother died, Dad and the violin came to live with me. Once again, it lay in the back of a closet, untouched.

Then I met a fiddler named Jackie at a retreat who promised me that I too could learn to fiddle. I searched in the back of that closet pushing aside Dad’s suit still hanging there a year after his death, the scent of his English Leather aftershave and Irish Spring soap still clinging to it. I opened that peeling case and pulled out the violin. The strings had escaped their pegs and coiled rebelliously across its neck, the bridge tilted, and the horsehair on the bow dangled from one end like a young girl’s hair blowing in the breeze.

I presented my violin in its coffin-like case to Mr. Stein. “This was my father’s. Can you repair it?” Next to all the expensive violins in the store, mine looked like a beggar. Mr. Stein lifted the violin from the case. “Get rid of this. It’s full of bugs. But the violin can be repaired. Leave it here for a month.”

I clutched the handle of the tattered case and skipped down the steps of the  shop. I could hear my father’s voice as he played for me and sang “Flow gently, sweet Afton.” The notes might be scratchy, the voice a bit flat, but the song was sweet and the memory sweeter.