by Noah Bly
He sniggers. “No, thanks. I’d like to live through the day.”
“Ah.” I fill my mug with hot water and sit at the table. “So I see you’ve already been exposed to Caitlin’s temper.”
He shrugs. “Not really. She’s just kind of intense, that’s all.”
I drag the tea ball through the hot water by its chain and listen to it ping against the sides of the mug. “What did she say to you?”
He’s standing with one foot on top of the other and leaning his shoulder on the door frame. He won’t meet my gaze. “Nothing, really. She was just mad because I was late to class the other day.”
“You didn’t happen to mention you were renting my attic apartment, did you?”
His eyes touch mine, then dart away. “No, it didn’t come up.”
I snort. “You’re a terrible liar, Alex.”
He crosses his arms in front of his chest. “I’m not lying to you.”
“Hmm.” I drum my fingers on the table and enjoy watching him squirm, but his face starts to darken and I finally decide to let him off the hook. “It’s fine, dear. You better hurry or you’ll be late for class.”
He sighs and runs a hand through his messy red hair. “All she said when I told her I’d moved in was to wish me good luck. But she acted like I’d just stabbed her favorite puppy with an ice pick.”
I take out the tea ball and set it down on a cloth napkin. “It’s taken her years to perfect that look. She used to trot it out for everyone from paperboys to state senators, but now she seems to reserve it specifically for people who make the mistake of mentioning my name when she’s in the room.”
He looks unhappy. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Don’t be silly.” I take a sip of tea and wince as it burns my tongue. “I’m rather pleased to find out I can still annoy Caitlin like that, even from a distance. I’d hate to think she’s forgotten me entirely.”
He dabs at his nose with the cuff of his shirt. “How come she’s mad at you?”
“I don’t recall.”
There’s a long silence. He’s watching me closely and I start to get irritated. I get up and open the refrigerator, keeping my back to him.
He finally shifts his weight in the doorway and clears his throat. “Well, I guess I better take a shower.”
I look over my shoulder. “You might want to think about shaving, too.”
He scratches his scraggly chin. “I did just a few days ago. I think it looks cool this way.”
I scowl. “Run along and play, dear. Hester’s busy.”
He grins. “Okay. See you later, then.”
I try to maintain the scowl but I can’t. His grin gets bigger and he turns around and disappears up the stairs. I can hear him using his long legs to jump over two or three steps at a time.
Ten minutes after Alex leaves the house, the phone rings. I’m still in the kitchen, washing my breakfast dishes and listening to NPR.
I wipe my hands on a towel and pick up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Mother? Why are you home?”
My breath catches in my throat as I turn down the volume on the radio. “Good morning to you, too, Paul. Why shouldn’t I be home? I live here.”
“That’s not what I mean. Why aren’t you teaching today?”
I lean my backside against the counter. “Is that any of your business?”
A pause. “Fine. That’s not why I’m calling anyway. I talked to Dad this morning.”
The sun pouring in through the window behind me is warm on my shoulders and back. “I see. My condolences.”
“Don’t be snide. He told me what you did. You’re behaving contemptibly.”
I watch my long shadow shift on the tin wall in front of me as I straighten. “How nice. Let me get this straight. You’ve been utterly ignoring me for what, the best part of a year? You’ve snubbed …”
His deep voice, so much like his father’s, comes out flat. “I haven’t been ignoring you.”
“Hush, dear. Don’t interrupt.” Anger flares in my chest. “You’ve been a busy little boy this year, haven’t you, son? Let’s review what you’ve been up to, shall we?”
“Don’t try to make this about me, Mother.”
I talk over him. “You’ve snubbed me time and again on the streets of Bolton and in the halls at the Conservatory. You’ve bad-mouthed me behind my back in faculty meetings. You had your teaching studio moved to a different floor to get away from me. You’ve spoken to at least three of my students and managed to convince them to switch to another teacher.”
My heart is pounding furiously. “Help me out, here, Paul. Am I forgetting anything? Oh, yes. I almost left out the best part. You also wrote a letter to the dean last semester asking her to consider dismissing me!”
I take a deep breath and fight for control. “There’s a lot more I could mention, but let’s get to the point.”
He snorts. “Already?”
I glare at the phone. “Very funny. The point, my darling boy, is that after all this time, and all of your endearing little shenanigans, it seems you’ve now decided—on the strength of your father’s word, no less—to reconnect this morning for the sole purpose of scolding me. Am I understanding you correctly?”
I listen to the silence on the line and sigh. “How sweet. It warms a mother’s heart.”
“You’ve treated me worse than I’ve treated you,” he says quietly. Through the receiver I hear a car horn in the background, then a burst of static from his cell phone. He must be driving somewhere. His voice gets stronger. “And you’ve treated Dad far worse than that. What’s this nonsense about a new tenant?”
I kick at the linoleum floor with the toe of my slipper. “I’m not going to discuss this with you. You’ve obviously already decided to take your father’s side again, no matter what I say.”
He coughs his patented two-pack-a-day smoker’s cough. “It’s a bit hard to take your side when you’re always in the wrong. Ever since Jeremy …”
I slap the counter with my palm and bite back a scream. “Don’t you dare finish that sentence. I don’t fancy spending the rest of my life in prison for homicide.”
The coldness of his laugh stuns me. “I shouldn’t worry about that, Mother.” He coughs again. “You already got away with killing one child, remember? I’m sure you can manage it again.”
I hurl the receiver at the wall and it explodes into fragments.
The two things my mother said to my brother and me more often than I can count as we were growing up were, “Don’t even think about going near that with your grubby little fingers,” and “Put that down immediately before you break it.”
Perhaps that’s why my oldest memory is of the first time I dared to touch her dearly loved piano.
I was two or three years old at the most, but I remember sitting beside her on the piano bench as she played me a lengthy song. I sat without moving from beginning to end, watching with fascination as her fingers sank into the keys and music flowed from the soundboard and spilled into the living room around us. The piano was an old upright Steinway my mother had been given as a wedding present, and though I must have heard it a thousand times before that day—she practiced every evening for at least an hour—I’m quite sure it was the first time she’d ever allowed me to be so close to it.
When she took her hands off the keyboard, she turned to me and asked, “Wasn’t that pretty, sweetheart?”
I didn’t know the name of the piece she was playing, of course, but later on I learned it was Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante defunte. I remember nodding up at her, then I reached forward before she could stop me and began thunking out the initial ten-note phrase of the melody, just as I’d heard it. Mother grabbed at my wrist, but three pitches had already sounded before she could make contact and suddenly her fingers froze in mid-air and hovered over mine, like a falcon tracking a wild rabbit.
Those seconds are etched in my mind. I remember the feel of the cool, smooth key
s under my fingertips, and the lilac smell of my mother’s perfume, and the glorious timbre of the notes I was somehow producing, one at a time, just by touching this strange wooden box in front of me. I remember trying not to breathe, because I was sure if I did I’d forget what I was doing, and I’d never be able to make such amazing sounds again.
I think it’s significant that before that evening, I have no memory of being alive. I try to conjure up something else, now and then—a caress, a bright color, a sigh—but there’s absolutely nothing to latch onto before that lovely, aching melody of Ravel’s streamed out of the piano and nudged me into consciousness.
When I finished, I remember Mother gasping, “Dear God in Heaven,” but following that I have to rely on her account of what happened. She says she taught me a C major scale and arpeggio, then carried me to my room and tucked me into bed with a kiss before scampering off to share the news of my talent with my father, who was down in his basement workshop attempting to build a lazy Susan for our dining room table.
Knowing my mother as I did, however, I’m rather certain she omitted the part of the story where she first made sure to scrub the keys of her Steinway and remove all traces of my repulsive toddler-grubbiness before heading downstairs.
I’ve often tried to picture that conversation between my parents. Father was the most unexcitable man who ever lived, and I’m absolutely positive Mother’s enthusiasm would have made no impact on him. So I imagine him standing there with a hammer and a few misshapen blocks of wood in front of him, pretending to listen as she prattled on and on. Eventually she would have run out of words, though, and he would have been expected to say something. When nothing was forthcoming, Mother no doubt got exasperated.
“Harold.” I can almost hear her. She always said his name as if he were a kindhearted but hopelessly stupid preschooler. “I’ve just told you Hester is a musical genius. Are you just going to stand there?”
Father would have pursed his lips and tried to respond with some kind of appropriate sentiment. “Well, now. Isn’t that nice. Say, do you think I should use white pine for this lazy Susan, or would you prefer something darker?”
It was usually about this time in their discussions that Mother began pulling at her hair with both hands. It’s a wonder she didn’t have bald patches all over her scalp. I sometimes suspected (based on one such occasion where I was present and could swear Father winked at me when Mother wasn’t looking) that he did this kind of thing on purpose, just to watch her face turn different shades of red.
Be that as it may, from that moment on, when I wasn’t in school or eating a meal, I spent nearly every waking hour of my childhood at the piano.
Mother continued to teach me for four years. She was an accomplished pianist in her own right, but by the time I was seven I could play everything she could, so she began driving me to Boston twice a month for my lessons with Joshua Feldstein at The New England Conservatory of Music. At first, Mother always sat in on the lessons, and late at night after we were back in Connecticut and I’d been put to bed, I’d hear her attempting to practice whatever it was Joshua had taught me earlier that day. She kept that up for about a year, but each month she got farther and farther behind, and finally one evening I heard her pounding on the keys in frustration. I listened as Father tried to comfort her, but she wasn’t having any: she told him to go away and leave her alone. A few minutes later she slammed the lid down and began to sob. I lay awake in the darkness of my bedroom, torn between childish pride because I knew I’d surpassed my mother, and sorrow because she knew it, too, and was hurt by it.
She stopped attending my lessons, and I never heard her play the piano again. I think she may have practiced when I was out of the house, but she couldn’t bring herself to let me hear her after that. I asked her dozens of times to play duets with me, but she always refused, saying, “No, dear, I’d rather just listen to you.” She was never mean about it, or resentful, and she often sat in the room while I was practicing, and praised and applauded me on a daily basis. But I always felt bad, because I knew that though she loved me and took considerable pride in my accomplishments, there was nothing she wanted more in the world than to play as I did.
But what could I do? The gift was mine.
I have been asked many times in my life if I wished I’d had a more conventional upbringing. People want to know if I balked at all the practicing, or if I craved more friendship and romance than what I had, or if I ever had any desire to just run out of the house, away from the piano, and flit about in the sunshine like a normal girl.
I tell them I don’t remember, but I’m lying.
When I was eleven years old, I won my first national competition playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. I still have the reel-to-reel recording of that performance; it’s one of my best. While my peers were tanning themselves on the beach and guzzling Coca-Cola at the movies, I was making music like few people ever get a chance to make it. While school acquaintances quarreled with their boyfriends and consulted each other about what outfit to wear next Tuesday, I was casting spells over audiences in every major city in the world, and resurrecting Liszt and Brahms and Tschaikovsky from their respective graves.
I’ve heard music critics argue that child prodigies are nothing more than highly skilled mimics, with clever fingers and a good ear for aping the subtleties of more mature musicians, but I can tell you that even at eleven I had my own distinct style that had nothing to do with anything I’d heard or been taught. My musical “voice” (and what I had to say with it) has always been my own.
Whatever else I’ve been called in my life—and the list is endless—no one has ever accused me of being unoriginal. Not even Arthur or my children.
How can I tell you what it was like? What words will serve? For a time, my fingers were full of magic. Sometimes it felt as if I could make a stone dance, or a tree do somersaults, or a river run backwards. I knew the power of walking onstage to bored, polite applause from an audience that had never heard me play, and within the space of an hour, transforming their indifference into a boisterous standing ovation at the end of my performance. On countless occasions, I moved thousands of men and women to tears, and I made them beg for more when I was through, always demanding—and getting—at least three curtain calls before I’d consent to an encore.
God, I loved it all so. And not just because it fed my colossal, preadolescent ego. I also loved it (and I’m fully aware how naïve this sounds) because it gave me a chance, night after night, to make something beautiful, and to share it with the world. Laugh if you will, but I felt like a conduit between heaven and earth. And I never once took it for granted, because my mother was always with me, standing offstage with a wistful look on her face.
So here’s the simple truth: I would no more exchange those early years of my life for a “regular” childhood than I’d trade a twelve-ounce filet mignon for a can of pickled pig’s feet. Arthur accuses me of false modesty for not being more forthright about this, but since there’s no way to say something along these lines to people without coming off as even more of a pompous ass than he is, I lie to them instead, and tell them I don’t remember.
Of all my children, Caitlin has always been, by far, the brightest. In her chosen field—English Literature—she’s a respected and widely published scholar, and she’s also a surprisingly effective teacher (in spite of a notable lack of patience), as evidenced by her winning Pritchard University’s coveted Teacher of the Year Award three times in the last five years. Her critical essays frequently turn up in prominent magazines like The New York Review of Books and Harper’s, and she’s considered one of the top experts in the world on both Milton and Donne. She does a great deal of traveling as a guest lecturer to various institutions around the country, where she’s wined and dined and treated as royalty, and ever since she assumed the chairmanship of her department seven years ago, the number of English majors at Pritchard has nearly tripled.
She’s equally impressive outside
her work. Her lifelong hobby of oil painting has always earned her enormous praise, and a few years ago a small but posh contemporary art museum in Chicago even purchased half a dozen of her still lifes to hang in its foyer for a season. Besides that, she can also cook as well as almost any professional chef; her specialty is Italian food, and her dinner parties, though extravagant and far too formal, are the stuff of local legend.
What’s not so well known anymore is how good an athlete she is. When she was a young woman she was formidable at both tennis and soccer, and to see her swim was like watching a plump white seal slice through the water. She was preternaturally good at skiing, too, even though she only did it once, on a rare family vacation to Montana.
That particular trip was an ill-conceived notion Arthur dreamed up thirty-some years ago during a long and irritating Christmas break. He’d jammed his fingers at the end of the term and was unable to practice for a few days, and without access to his beloved violin he couldn’t tolerate “just sitting around the house.” Somehow he got it in his head that a ski trip was the answer to his boredom.
I told him he was out of his mind. “What about Paul? Have you forgotten what he’s like whenever he leaves Bolton? We’ll have to sedate him to even get him in the car.”
“Nonsense. He’ll be fine.” Arthur always pretended that Paul’s strange aversion to travelling wasn’t a problem. He was the same about Jeremy’s morbid fear of heights, and Caitlin’s bizarre daily craving for peanut butter and mustard sandwiches.
My children were, and are, the most neurotic people on the planet.
“Right,” I muttered. “We’ll get somewhere in the middle of Nebraska and he’ll start screaming for us to take him home. We’ll have to abandon him at a rest area to get any peace.”
He ignored me and I watched him dig our suitcases out of the closet, noticing that his stomach was slightly bigger than when we’d first met.
“Stop that at once, Arthur,” I demanded. “You’re not thinking clearly. Even if Paul doesn’t have a meltdown on the way, you can’t hold a ski pole with your fingers like that, and I’m not about to take the chance of destroying my other wrist, too. What do you expect us to do when we get there?”
