Chapter 29 CHAPTER 29

The first time I saw him, I was too frightened to say anything and too awestruck to touch him. He was not a freak or a devil, but perfect in every way, a beautiful boy. After the long wait to meet him, I found myself overcome by the sudden change, not so much his physical presence, his arrival after being hidden away, but the change in me to something more sublimely human. Tess smiled at my confusion and the look in my eyes as I beheld him. "You won't break him," she said. My son. Our child. Ten fingers, ten toes. Good color, great lungs, a natural at the breast. I held him in my arms and remembered the twins in their matching yellow jumpers, my mother singing to me as she scrubbed my back in the bathtub, my father holding my hand when we climbed the bleachers at an autumn football game. Then I remembered Clara, my first mother, how I loved to crawl under the billows of her skirts, and the scent of witch hazel on my father Abrams cheek, his feathery mustache as he pressed his lips against my skin. I kissed our boy and considered the ordinary miracle of birth, the wonder of my wife, and was grateful for the human child.

We named him Edward, and he thrived. Born two weeks before Christmas 1970, he became our darling boy, and over those first few months, the three of us settled into the house that Mom and Charlie had bought for us in the new development up in the woods. At first, I could not bear the thought of living there, but they surprised us on our second anniversary, and with Tess pregnant and the bills mounting, I could not say no. The house was larger than we needed, especially before the baby came, and I built a small studio, moving in the old piano. I taught music to seventh graders and ran the student orchestra at Mark Twain Middle School, and in the evenings and on weekends, when I didnt have to mind the baby, I worked on my music, dreaming of a composition that evoked the flow of one life into another.

For inspiration, I would sometimes unfold the photocopy of the passenger list and study the names. Abram and Clara, their sons Friedrich, Josef, and Gustav. The legendary Anna. Their ghosts appeared in fragments. A doctor listens to my heartbeat while Mother frets over his shoulder. Faces bend to me, speaking carefully in a language I cannot understand. Her dark green skirt as she waltzes. Tang of apple wine, sauerbraten in the oven. Through a frosted window, I could see my brothers approach the house on a winters day, their breath exploding in clouds as they share a private joke. In the parlor stands the piano, which I touch again.

Playing music is the one vivid memory from the other life. Not only do I recall the yellowing keys, the elaborate twisting vines of the scrollwork music stand, the smoothness of the rosewood finish, but I can hear those tunes again, and feel the sensations he felt while playing—strike these keys, hear these notes resound from the depths of the machine. The combination of notes makes up the melody. Translate the symbols from the score to the corresponding keys, and keep the right time, to make this song . My one true link to my first childhood is that sensation of bringing the dream of notes to life. The song echoing in my head becomes the song resounding in the air. As a child, this was my way of unlocking my thoughts, and now , a century or more later, I attempted to create the same seamless expression through my composition, but it was as if I had found the key and lost the keyhole. I was as helpless as Edward in his preverbal life, learning to communicate my desires all over again.

Being around our tiny speechless boy reminded me of that lost life and made me cherish the memories Edward created every passing day. He crawled, stood, grew teeth, grew hair, fell in love with us. He walked, he talked, he grew up in a moment behind our backs. We were, for a time, the perfect happy family. My sisters married that ideal picture. Mary, who had a baby girl, and Elizabeth, who was expecting her first, were the initial ones to point out the curiosity. The extended family had gathered at my mothers house for dinner. Edward was about eighteen months old, for I remember watching him carefully as he waddled up and down the porch steps over and over again. Charlie and the twins husbands watched the last few minutes of the game before dinner, and my mother and Tess guarded the hot skillets, so I was alone with the girls for the first time in ages, when one or the other led off with her unsolicited opinion.

"You know, he looks nothing like you." "And hardly a thing like her." I looked at Edward as he pulled up leaves of grass and tossed them into the still air. "Look at his chin," Liz observed. "Neither one of you has that cleft." "And his eyes arent either of your two colors," said Mary. "Green as a cats. He didnt get those eyelashes from our side of the family. You have such adorable long eyelashes, yes, you do. Too bad hes not a girl." "Well, theyre not Wodehouse eyelashes either. Take a good look at Tess." "All mascara."

"And the nose. No so much now, but later, you'll see. Thats a beak on him, poor little man. Hope my child doesn't get that nose." "No Day ever had a nose like that." "What are you two saying?" My voice was so loud, I startled my son. "Nothing." "Kinda odd, don't you think, that he doesn't look like his parents?" At sunset my mother, Charlie, and I sat on the porch watching the moths dance, and the matter of Edwards appearance arose again. "Don't listen to those two," my mother said. "Hes the spit and image of you, with maybe a little Tess around the eyes."

Uncle Charlie sucked on a pop bottle, burped softly. "The boy looks exactly like me. All my grandchildren do." Eddie tottered across the floorboards and threw himself at Charlies legs, and finding his balance, he roared like a tiger. As he grew older, Edward looked more like an Ungerland than a Day, but I did my best to hide the truth. Maybe I should have explained all to Tess, and perhaps that would have been the end of my torment. But she bore the snide remarks about her son with grace. Days after his second birthday, we had Oscar Love and Jimmy Cummings over for dinner. After the meal, we fooled around with an arrangement that I had written hoping to interest a chamber-music quartet in the city . Of course, we were one player short, with George long gone in California. But playing with them again after a few years was easy and comfortable. Tess excused herself to go to the kitchen to check on a lemon meringue pie. she was gone, he wailed from his playpen, banging his fists against the slats.

"Don't you think he's getting a bit too big for that?" Oscar asked. "He can be a bit of trouble after dinner. Besides, he likes it there. Makes him feel safe." Oscar shook his head and fished Edward from behind the bars, bounced him on his knees, and let him finger the keys of the clarinet. Seeing my single friends react to my son, I couldn't help but feel that they were weighing their freedom against the allure of family. They loved the boy but were slightly frightened of him and all he represented. "Drawn to the stick," Oscar said. "Thats one cool kid. You'll want to stay away from the piano. Too heavy to carry around."

"Sure hes yours?" Cummings asked. "He looks nothing like you, or Tess, for that matter." Oscar joined the fun. "Now that you mention it... look at that split chin and those big eyes." "Cmon guys, cut it out." "Chill out," Oscar whispered. "Here comes the old lady." Tess delivered the dessert, oblivious to the turns of our conversation. I should have brought up my festering doubt, made a joke of it, said something in front of her, but I didnt. "So, Tess," Jimmy said, balancing his pie plate on his knee, "who do you think Eddie takes after?"

"You have a speck of meringue at the corner of your mouth." She picked up our son and held him in her lap, stroked his hair, and pressed his head against her breast. "Hows my little man?" Edward stuck his hand straight into the pie, pulled up a clump of yellow goo, and crammed it in his mouth. She laughed. "Just like his daddy." Thank you, my love. She returned my smile. After the boys said good night and Edward lay sleeping in his crib, Tess and I washed the dishes together, staring out the kitchen window. The stars shone like pinpricks in the cold black sky, and the hot water in the sink, along with the roaring furnace, gave the room a steamy languor. I put down the tea towel and, from behind, wrapped my arms around her, kissed her damp warm nape, and she shivered. "I hope you didn't get too mad about Jimmy going on about how Eddie doesn't look so much like either one of us." "I know," she said. "It's creepy." For a split second, I thought she suspected something was awry, but she spun herself around to face me and grabbed my face with her rubber gloves. "You worry about the strangest things." She kissed me, and the conversation went elsewhere. A few nights later, Tess and I were asleep in bed, Edward down the hall in his room. She woke me by shaking my shoulder and speaking harshly in a sort of shouted whisper. "Henry, Henry, wake up. I heard noises downstairs " "What is it?" "Would you listen? Someones down there." I grumbled that it was nothing. "And Im telling you, someone is in the house. Would you go check?" I rolled out of bed and stood there for a moment, trying to rouse my senses, then headed past Edwards closed door to the top of the stairs. I did not see, but had the sensation, that a light had gone out downstairs and that something moved in a blur from one room to the next. Anxious, I took the steps one by one in a sort of hypnotic trance, sorting through my drifting emotions as it became darker and darker. At the bottom, I turned into the living room and switched on the lights. The room appeared unchanged except for a few photographs on the walls that were slightly askew. We had hung a kind of family gallery, pictures of our parents, images of Tess and me as children, a wedding photo, and a parade of portraits featuring Edward. I nudged the frames back in line and in the same moment heard the deadbolt turn at the kitchen door. "Hey, who's there?" I yelled, and sped out in the nick of time to see the backside of an imp squeezing through the opening between the door and the jamb. Outside in the cold, dark night, three figures sped across the frosty lawn, and flicking on the floodlights, I called for them to stop, but they had vanished. The kitchen was a mess, and the pantry had been raided of canned goods, cereal and sugar, and a small copper saucepan, but not much else A bag of flour had burst when they squeezed through the door, leaving a dusty trail dotted with footprints. The oddest sort of break-in by a bunch of hungry thieves. Tess came downstairs and was shaken by the disturbance, but she shoved me. out of the kitchen to put it back in order. Back in the living room, I rechecked our belongings, but they were all there—the TV, stereo, nothing of value gone. I examined the photographs more closely. Tess looked almost exactly the same as she had on our wedding day. Sergeant William Day stared out, frozen in the past in his military dress. From the corners of her eyes, Ruth Day watched her son, hardly more than a child with a child, yet full of love and pride. In the next frame, there I was, a boy again, looking up and full of hope. But, of course, that wasn't me. The boy was too young. And in that instant, I realized who had come and why. Tess came in and laid her hand on my back. "Shall we call the police? Is there anything missing?" I could not answer, for my heart was pounding wildly and an overwhelming dread fixed me to the spot. We had not checked on our son. I sprinted up the stairs to his room. He lay asleep, knees drawn up to his chest, dreaming as if nothing had ever happened. Watching his innocent face, I knew at once that he was blood of my blood. He almost looked like the boy I still see in my nightmares. The boy at the piano.