“The Piano Tuner’s Wives”
by William Trevor (1995)
from After Rain (1996)
In just a little over a month we learn what author will take home the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though I enjoy the speculation and then looking into the winner’s work, I usually don’t get too worked up about the Nobel. It is, after all, another book prize with an impossible mandate. Not only is it unlikely my choice will win, but so vast is the field of candidates that, if I’ve heard of the author, I’ve usually never read the winner’s work. But this year, spurred by Alice Munro’s recent short story “Amundsen,” I find myself getting worked up to not only make a cheer for “my choice” but also to actually feel some disappointment if my choice doesn’t win. I cheat and have two choices: Alice Munro or William Trevor.
Thinking about this caused me to go back and revisit one of my favorite William Trevor stories: “The Piano Tuner’s Wives.”
When I started reading William Trevor, I didn’t get him. I felt there was more there, but for some reason I wasn’t accessing it. It wasn’t until relatively recently that I began digging into his work and found that I, for whatever reason, can engage with it. Now I can’t get enough. Now he’s one of my favorite authors, someone worth getting worked up over when others dismiss him. “The Piano Tuner’s Wives” was one of my early entrance points.
It is a relatively short story that showcases Trevor’s ability to layer time. When it begins, well, let’s let Trevor’s beginning show how it begins:
Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man; Belle married him when he was old.
There was a little more to it than that, because in choosing Violet to be his wife the piano tuner had rejected Belle, which was something everyone remembered when the second wedding was announced. “Well, she got the ruins of him anyway,” a farmer of the neighborhood remarked, speaking without vindictiveness, stating a fact as he saw it. Others saw it similarly, though most of them would have put it differently.
This opening introduces the two time frames we’ll be dealing with. Owen Dromgould, the piano tuner, married his first wife Violet around forty years ago; now he’s marrying Belle, who, we’ll see, replays that first marriage day often. It doesn’t help that the weddings take place in the same place. As Trevor moves through this wedding, he moves back and forth, sometimes in the same sentence:
“I will,” he responded in the small Protestant church of St. Colman, standing almost exactly as he had stood on that other afternoon. And Belle, in her fifty-ninth year, repeated the words her onetime rival had spoken before this altar also. A decent interval had elapsed; no one in the church considered that the memory of Violet had not been honored, that her passing had not been distressfully mourned. “And with all my earthly goods I thee endow,” the piano tuner stated, while his new wife thought she would like to be standing beside him in white instead of suitable wine-red. She had not attended the first wedding, although she had been invited. She’d kept herself occupied that day, white-washing the chicken shed, but even so she’d wept. And tears or not, she was more beautiful — and younger by almost five years — than the bride who so vividly occupied her thoughts as she battled with her jealousy.
Yes, Belle is certain that she was the more beautiful, but her beauty did her no good due to one fact: the piano tuner was blind. And since he chose the plain Violet, it seemed to Belle “that the punishment of blindness was a punishment for her, too.” Jealous and bitter, Belle never married until this day late in life when she finally got Owen to herself. But time has changed things, even though the past has not gone away. For one, when she was nineteen, she thought her beauty could be a sacrifice: “[a]n act of grace it would have been, her beauty given to a man who did not know that it was there.” But at this late stage, does she have beauty to sacrifice?
The story continues to move back and forth in time but without ever losing its place, fully representing how Belle’s mind is working as she marries and begins her life as the piano tuner’s wife. She should be happy herself, now, but she is “haunted by happiness.” That wedding day forty years earlier continues to occupy her thoughts. The blind piano tuner cannot help but speak Violet’s words as he describes things he never has seen for himself. There is no consolation.
That Belle was the one who was alive, that she was offered all a man’s affection, that she plundered his other woman’s possessions and occupied her bedroom and drove her car, should have been enough. It should have been everything, but as time went on it seemed to Belle to be scarcely anything at all.
These beautiful sentences respect Belle — how truly difficult it must be — even as they show her quietly destroy her marriage. In just a few pages, we see the years layered on years, events from the past still touching the present in complex ways that baffle. After all, as bitter as Belle was, she didn’t marry the piano tuner to retroactively annihilate his first marriage, and she feels guilty when she sees the effects of her actions, but she cannot stop and we dare not judge her.
“The Piano Tuner’s Wives” is a masterpiece.
I agree with virtually everything you say here. Although, slightly differently: when I first read Trevor I thought he was brilliant; then I went off him for some inexplicable reason (over exposure?); now having just read this I want to re-read a load of his stories. So thanks.
Lord, a beautiful cover!
But I’m tiring of so many books titled “X’s Wife” or “X’s Daughter.”
Nice overview of this story and Trevor’s talents.
To pick up on something Trevor the blogger and/or Charles May said in discussion on Munro, I think this Trevor is somewhat like Munro in that each story creates an evocative mood and provides an emotional insight while at the same time demonstrating the ambiguity or unknowlableness of many aspects of our experience.
I remember this story as giving me a deep sense of the complexities of human relationships. If I remember correctly, there’s an aspect where the second wife deliberately misrepresents things to the piano tuner that the first wife described to him in a certain way and the piano tuner has a sense she’s doing this and just accommodates it. That’s a great insight into how loving relationships always have layers of complexity that aren’t reflected in the kind of simpler stories we all grow up with.
Yes, Jon, your recollection is correct. I find Belle’s actions reprehensible and understandable, and while I think that the piano tuner knows what she’s doing, surely he doesn’t know for sure; thus, she casts a shadow over his first marriage while creating one for her own marriage. I love that she feels guilty for this but simply cannot stop herself, so troubled has she been for an entire lifetime.
I also wanted to point out how well Trevor takes a seemingly inconsequential and boring relationship and pulls one aspect out to create a great, insightful story. He once said in an interview I listened to that while other people look around a restaurant and see a bunch of boring people, he thinks about just how fascinating those peoples’ lives, with all their unknowable terror and tenderness, must be. His sensitivity to the subtle stuff we usually cannot even recognize in our own lives and relationships is showcased in this story here.
Back in the day when there was still a Border’s, a friend and I walked around the store in an attempt to collect as many books as we could with a title that was structured “The (choose a profession that will be held my a male)’s (wife, daughter).
Oh my. The Heretic, Bloodletter, Bonesetter, Rockstar, the Tutor and their daughters. The Shoemaker, Tiger, Runaway Pastor (?), Soldier, and their wives. (Amazon just helped me refresh the list).
One question…why these these books about women and their facticity?
There certainly are plenty of book titles that follow that formula. I enjoy following the YA market in part to see what trendy title formulation is on now.
To be fair to Trevor, this story was published well before most you reference above, and this is one of hundreds of short stories he had written. But, more, this story truly is about the two wives of the piano tuner. I cannot think of a better title for this short piece because this one gets to it succinctly (as do the first sentences), and that isn’t the case for the few others I’ve read from the list you have.
Ah, titles. Regardless, you should read the story!
I certainly will! Thanks
I keep waiting to post here for the RIGHT words to come… and they don’t. So I need to close this tab and move on.
But Jon said something that really moved me: “each story creates an evocative mood and provides an emotional insight while at the same time demonstrating the ambiguity or unknowlableness of many aspects of our experience”.
And now the story…
This is Belle’s story. Without her, there would be nothing to tell. Sure, maybe a little blip in a local paper about a blind piano tuner who’s wife made his career possible. What makes a story is the second wife. That would be dull, too, but it is how she is haunted by the first woman. Despite the deep love and concern of the husband, she cannot shake that she was rejected. And then punishes him for her feelings.
THAT’S a story.
I loved the details, so expertly placed, that took us just where we needed to go to understand each woman and the piano tuner. The word choice was exquisite. In describing Belle’s experience, Trevor uses words like: reject, usurp, punish, regret, mistake, disappointment.
And what Violet sees differs from what Belle sees and shares. Violet is not moving from a mindset of scarcity so she can share of the beauty she sees – even in her former rival.
So much within the story points just to the emotion – to the decisions made from places of heart.
I was impressed, moved, and sold on another author discovered through The Mookse and the Gripes.
William Trevor is definitely on the shortlist of authors I’d like to sell on The Mookse and the Gripes, so I’m thrilled you’ve started getting acquainted with him!
After some years, I today reread this story before reading the review and comments. I had noted it as one I especially liked. As I read, I continually thought, “oh yeah, I remember…, ah, I know what’s coming!” I don’t reread much past reading, too anxious about what I *haven’t read; but I’m now finding rereading fun, anticipating these discussions, even though they were left behind long ago.
A technical point struck me immediately upon reading this discussion, one that may critically affect our interpretation of the story:
The narrator tells us Owen was a young man when he married Violet, an old man when he married Belle. Owen married Violet in 1951. Belle was in her 59th year, which is 58. Owen had married her a “decent interval” after Violet’s death. Shall we say maybe 1, even 2 years? Or might it be 5 years? Much more? You tell *me.
Violet was 5 years older than Belle, so she maybe died at 60 or 61? Or 64? Was Owen older? An “old man”, 65 at least, or is “old” younger than that? Younger than Violet? But that would make him in his 50s!
Don’t give up on me, there’s a good reason for all this…
Is a young man 25? Even 30? Or is it 18 or 21? In that case, unless Violet is at least 5 years *older than Owen, Belle would have been a young teen, not normally a candidate for marriage–am I wrong? But the author doesn’t mention such a thing, an important point, had that been the story.
To the point:
I remember Esso in the 1950s. In 1977, it took down its last signs. I had to look that up. That’s 26 years after Owen’s first wedding.
If Belle married Owen only a year after Violet’s death, and told him within a year of their marriage that there was a Texaco now; and if it was really still an Esso, how old, then, were the “old” and “young” man, with under 25 years between? Or was it a lot more than 25 years?… *You do the math from here. I feel as if I’m doing another Lydia Davis!
So was Belle really lying when she told Owen what things looked like? Or was Violet painting a colorful, fanciful picture she felt would please Owen? One that Belle truthfully corrected? And too, how much may have changed since Violet’s descriptions?
Did Violet decide not to tell Owen the Esso was gone, maybe for sentiment’s sake? By avoiding Doocey’s, was Belle maybe sparing Owen the pain of learning that the Esso had been gone for years and Violet hadn’t told him?
If Belle was being truthful, was it still cruel of her to dispel Owen’s treasured memories–or fantasies, “dreams”? Or was she justified in deciding the past is the past, and now is now?
Maybe Belle shouldn’t have marred his memory-dream of Violet herself. That much I feel is true either way.