“Then don’t talk about anything,” Adam says. “Just talk. Just tell me something.”
And so I describe the pumpkin my father bought from the Luchterhands, so big Sam and I could both sit inside it. “After my mother took the picture,” I say, “my father told me to get out of the pumpkin so she could take one of Sam alone. He asked if Sam could fit inside all the way, and when Sam scrunched down, my father fit the top back on and sat on it so Sam couldn’t get out. We hadn’t carved the face yet. At first, Sam was laughing, and my mother and I were laughing too, but my father put his finger to his lips. Then we heard Sam say something, and then he screamed, and the whole pumpkin began to shake. He was three or so, and my mother was pulling at my father and saying, Gordon, please, you’re scaring him, and my father was laughing and saying she should lighten up. After a while, Sam stopped making noise and it got very still, so my father said, All right, and he lifted up the top. Sam had wet himself, and so my father spanked him.”
The baby shifts inside me, a twinkling sense of motion. I try to imagine all the things to come: first steps, first words, wet kisses, lengthening limbs and complicated rages, slamming bedroom doors, car doors, front doors leading to the sidewalk, to the street, to the town and the whole wide world. I know my mother believes that by bringing Sam back, she can finally put things right. I want to believe that too. But here are the shapes of my brother and his friends moving through my room on careless tiptoe. Here is my brother’s face, close to mine. Here I am looking into his cool stare and finding nothing that I recognize. How will I feel if, someday, I look into my own child’s face and see that same flat stare? Adam puts his arm around me; I touch his sandpapery elbow.
“I finished the jack-o’-lanterns,” he says. “You want to see?”
I get up and follow him out of the bedroom. The long hallway leading toward the living room seems like the tunnel we are told to expect when approaching death, the walls pulsing with a peculiar glow, the light at the end drawing us closer, close. The living room is alive with jack-o’-lanterns: flickering on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, leering from the log grate below, hunkered down in a row along the coffee table, balanced on the wide windowsill. Now I see that Adam had these places in mind when he chose the pumpkins this afternoon; no longer awkward or oddly shaped, each one seems perfect, tucked neatly into the book-shelf, snuggled in the cat’s round wicker bed. I turn to let the shadows lap their way around my body. The pumpkin smell thickens the candle’s scents: pine, vanilla, lavender, rich enough to eat. I’m dizzy with their odor, their color, Adam’s arms spinning around me like a welcoming web, snug and warm.
“Sometimes I still believe in God,” I say.
Adam shakes his head, his rough cheek scratching mine. He holds me tighter. “I can’t even imagine what it’s like to believe in something like that.”
The jack-o’-lanterns keep their silence, eyes brimming with light, and I’m a small child sitting beside my mother as she drives along the web of rural highways leading home. Which way is north? I ask, and my mother points straight ahead of us.
How do you know?
I just do.
But how?
In the distance, in the wide spaces between smudged clumps of trees, shapes appear and fade like ghosts: here the peaked roof of a farmhouse, there a fat silo, the horizon seamless as the silent fields, sealed for the season beneath a bitter crust of ice. I notice places where deer have pawed away the snow, tearing at the dead winter grasses, the last of the maples and fruit trees stripped bare by hungry mouths. But I can’t see north, and my mother never can explain to me how she feels it, how—like Adam—she was born with a perfect sense of direction. You can blindfold her and spin her around, and she’ll still be able to tell you north, southeast. West. West again.
Back by Dark
* * *
(1984-1987)
Eight
My favorite practice room at the Peabody Conservatory had windows that reached from the floor to the ceiling. I liked to open them all, though it was bad for the piano, and stand on the sill overlooking Charles Street and the George Washington Monument. Below, pedestrians walked along the cobblestone sidewalks: well-dressed people and homeless people pushing shopping carts, people holding the hands of children, people of different races and ages, people I would never see again and would not remember having seen. Even though we shared a city, a neighborhood, a street, we’d always be strangers. Sometimes one of them would look up, see me standing in the open window; once, a young man cupped his hand to his mouth and hollered, “Jump!” For a moment, I thought it was Sam; it could have been Sam. But by the time I ran down the three flights of stairs and out onto the street, he was gone. I saw Sam everywhere: in the grocery store, feeding seagulls at the harbor, waiting in line at the Morris Mechanic Theater, boarding a bus that wouldn’t wait when I waved my arms. Nights, I’d stand in the practice room window, the skyline lit up with orange-tinted pollution, and I wondered if he was out there somewhere, watching me back. Perhaps he was waiting outside my practice room, and when I came out he’d grab my purse, my watch, my portable metronome. You got anything else? he’d say, just as he had that night in Horton. Sometimes I imagined receiving an envelope with Elise’s ring inside. And a note, unsigned, of course: I’m sorry. The other boys made me. I can explain.
But no envelope came; no one was ever waiting outside my practice room door. In Horton, someone reported having seen Sam at the Laundromat in Fall Creek; someone else claimed he was in Milwaukee, hiding out from the law. There was a rumor that the police had enough evidence to charge him with Mrs. Baumbach’s assault, but that wasn’t true—there was no evidence at all, and Mrs. Baumbach could not remember enough about that night to make a coherent statement. In September, several weeks after I’d left for Baltimore, two of Sam’s Milwaukee friends were picked up for questioning. Though there was nothing to connect them to Mrs. Baumbach, they were eventually charged and convicted of robbing both Becker’s Foodmart and Dr. Neidermier’s house. Under oath, they swore no one else had been with them. My mother, jubilant over this new evidence of Sam’s innocence, sent me a clipping from our local weekly. When I saw the pictures of the two men, I recognized the two friends Sam had led into my room. I balled up the clipping and stuffed it in the trash. I tried to forget I’d seen it.
My parents had hired their own detective to look for Sam, someone recommended by a missing-children organization in Milwaukee. Saint John’s Church took up a special collection to pay for an ad that ran in newspapers across the Midwest. But by now he’d been gone for over two months, and the police said there was little more they could do. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t alive either. He was in limbo, in a strange purgatory, and I was in my own. Had something awful really happened to him? Or was he merely hiding out somewhere? Should I grieve, should I be angry? When people at school asked me, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” I didn’t know what to say.
I called Horton twice a week, waiting in line for the pay phone at the end of the dormitory hall. My mother acted as if Sam would be back at any moment. She changed the sheets on his bed once a week so that they wouldn’t smell musty, and when athletic socks went on sale at Sears, she bought him a dozen pairs. “You know how he goes through socks,” she said. My father developed ulcers, and one day, stooping down to pick up a newspaper, he slipped a disk in his back. At fifty-nine, he’d decided to retire from Fountain Ford at the end of the year. “Ready to come home yet?” he’d say. “Want your old dad to come get you?” Each time I talked with him, he sounded more wooden, resigned.
He hadn’t wanted me to attend a school outside the state, but by the beginning of my junior year of high school, I had won several regional competitions, and my teacher, Mr. Robertson, believed I had a shot at attending one of the better conservatories: Eastman or Peabody, Curtis or even Juilliard. With my mother’s permission, he took me to see a pianist named Peter Kozansky. We met in Kozansky’s studio, on the east side of Milwaukee;
it had two grand pianos, built-in bookshelves, and dozens of flowering African violets. I’d never been inside such a beautiful room. “Impress me,” Kozansky said, and he paced the hardwood floors as I played the first movement of a Prokofiev sonata. I wasn’t fully convinced I wanted to study music as a profession, even though everyone seemed to think it was my destiny. I was, according to Mr. Robertson, “big on emotion and short on intellect,” and I knew that further study would involve the dry mathematics I hated. So when Kozansky said, “Enough,” I was quietly relieved—until I saw that he was smiling. Would I do him the honor of becoming his youngest student? His lessons cost one hundred dollars an hour, far more than I could pay, but he brushed my concerns away with one expressive hand. He’d see me twice a week, and I would pay twenty dollars per lesson. If that was too much, I would pay less. I said I would have to ask my parents.
“Two lessons a week,” my father said that night at supper. “Do you forget what they tell you the first time?”
Sam wasn’t eating. He pushed the food around on his plate, breaking it up into little piles.
“Don’t tease her, Gordon,” my mother said. “This is a great opportunity.”
“Who’s going to pay for this great opportunity?” my father said. Once, that would have been enough to put an end to the discussion, but now that my mother had her own income, she could pay for my lessons if he wouldn’t—and all of us knew it. “Goddamn it, Sam,” he said suddenly. “Would you stop acting like a three-year-old and eat your food?”
“Can I have ten dollars?” Sam said. “It’s for school.”
“You can come to work for me, how’s that?” my father said. He wanted Sam to detail cars at the lot on Saturdays and Sundays.
“You spend all this money on Abby because she’s a girl,” Sam said. “If I have to work, she should have to.”
“We spend all this money on Abby because she’s a hard worker,” my father said, switching sides.
Now my mother jumped to Sam’s defense. “Sam’s a hard worker too.”
“Then he can prove it to me at the lot. This Saturday, sport, eight to three.”
“You can’t make me,” Sam said.
“Wanna bet on that, son?”
I excused myself from the table, cleared my dishes, and went into the living room to practice. Perhaps Sam and my father continued their fight; perhaps my father pulled Sam out of his chair, knocking his plate to the floor. Perhaps my mother was screaming, “Enough! Enough! Can’t we just once have a quiet dinner like a normal family?” Or perhaps not. As soon as I touched the keys, I wasn’t aware of anything but the music I created. It was the same thing I felt when I prayed, a warm feeling of purpose, completeness, rightness. My grandmother said it was a state of grace.
But at Peabody, all of that changed. I spent eight hours every day in a practice room, in addition to ensemble rehearsals, ear-training classes, more classes in composition, conducting, foreign languages. I’d sit down to play the piano, and instead of losing myself in melody, I identified sequences, fumbled notes, forgot passages. For the first time in my life, I doubted my ear and relied on sheet music; at night, when I knelt down to pray, no words came. I slept in on Sunday mornings. I skipped classes, missed rehearsals, failed to complete my weekly piano assignment. One night in December, I climbed all the way out of the practice room window and lowered myself down to the ledge, where I sat with my feet dangling over Charles Street. My breath left my mouth in dreamy clouds. Christmas trees and menorahs shone in the windows of the apartments across Monument Square; streetlights glistened with wreaths. I listened to the sounds coming from the other practice rooms—a frenzied clarinet, a stubborn bassoon, dozens of violins—and then, with equal interest, I listened to the drawl of traffic, the occasional blaring car horn, the voices of pedestrians, who passed briefly into my life and then continued out of it. I’d been raised to believe that every least thing in our lives happened for a reason, and these reasons were born like seeds within the infinite mind of God. But what was the significance of the woman who walked below me now, wrapped in a long purple coat, carrying a black satchel? What was the meaning of my brother’s disappearance, the long, bitter complaint my parents’ marriage had become, my own musical talent, which, I knew now, was neither extraordinary nor miraculous? I’d met lots of people who could play the piano as well as I did, and they didn’t have dead aunts to guide them. Some of them didn’t even believe in God. And at that moment, I realized two things: I no longer believed in the Church, and I didn’t want to study music anymore. The knowledge hit me with the same unquestionable intensity Harv had described when he’d talked about his vocation. I shivered, my hands gripping the ledge. What was I going to do??
“How’d it go tonight?” Phoebe said when I came back to our room. It was only midnight; I’d reserved the piano until one. She was lying in her bed, reading Arthur Rubinstein’s autobiography.
“All right,” I lied. I felt changed, brittle, empty. Maybe I was just tired, and I’d feel different in the morning. Maybe I should call Harv, now a seminarian at Marquette, or even Kozansky—although his advice had always been: “The moment the piano fails to exhilarate you, go into real estate.” I undressed, lay down on my bed, threw an arm across my eyes to block out the light.
“What’s wrong?” Phoebe asked.
“I’m sick of everything.”
“Me too,” she said, and she turned out the light. “Hang in there. It’s only two weeks till winter break.”
Whenever Sam and I came in from playing in the fields, from wandering through the pines, from riding our bikes up and down the long gravel driveway, it was always my mother we looked for. We were her children, the way the dishes in the kitchen were her dishes. If my father was there, we’d ask him, “Where’s Mom?” pushing past as if he didn’t count, as if we barely noticed he was there. Perhaps he was only trying to get our attention, to force us to interact with him, when he’d answer, as he so often did, “She’s hiding.”
“No, where is she?”
“I’m serious. She got sick of you both and ran away.”
“Da-ad.”
“She’s never coming back.”
“I’m right here,” my mother would call from the laundry room in the basement, from the bathroom, from her bedroom. “Gordon, you shouldn’t tease them like that.”
One day, we came home from school to find my father sitting at the kitchen table. This was odd; he rarely got home before suppertime. “Where’s Mom?” we asked. She’d recently started her job at the Sell It Now!, but we knew she wasn’t at work because it wasn’t one of her scheduled days. When my father, in an odd, wobbly voice, told us that she’d been taken to the hospital, we didn’t believe him. “No, really, where is she?” we asked, waiting for him to tell us she was hiding, to hear my mother’s footsteps coming from the back of the house, to listen to her scold, Gordon, stop your teasing.
“I told you,” my father said, and then he said that her appendix had burst, that she’d had emergency surgery and was very, very sick. Sam giggled nervously, because my father simply didn’t talk this way, with his face close to ours, with his voice nearly breaking. “C’mon, Dad, where’s Mom?” he said, and my father jumped up and spanked him, first with his hand and then with the decorative wooden spoon my mother kept hanging on the wall. “Don’t joke around with me,” he shouted. “I’m warning you kids, this is no time for jokes.”
In my room, we spoke in whispers. By now I believed my mother really was in the hospital, but Sam could not be convinced. “She’s here,” he said. “We just have to find her.” His eyes were red from holding back tears. He searched under all the beds, in the hall linen closet, in the big cedar chest filled with keepsakes that we were forbidden to touch. There was no sign of my mother anywhere; in fact, her nightgown and bathrobe were missing from the hook behind the bathroom door. Sam would not give up. He slipped down the stairs and made a stumbling run for the barn. From the window, I watched as he squeezed between t
he warped double doors, reappeared, then disappeared briefly into the smokehouse. By the time my father called us downstairs for supper, Sam was back in our room.
I couldn’t remember my father ever cooking before. He served us at the dining room table: toast, summer sausage, butter, milk, soft-cooked eggs, Cheerios, and two Flintstones vitamins apiece. Halfway through the meal, Sam excused himself and went into the kitchen. From the noises he was making, I knew he was still looking—in the tall cupboard that held the garbage pail, in the coat closet, in the mudroom. When he finally came back to the table, he was carrying the dull scissors my mother used for cutting garden flowers. His spanking had left him sore: I could tell by the way he moved, step by careful step. But something else was wrong: He looked different, older, deadly calm.
“What are you doing with that?” my father said. “Sit down and finish your supper.”
“Where’s Mom?” Sam demanded, and he raised the scissors over his head like a murdered in a cartoon. I felt everything I had eaten swim up into my throat and lodge there in a pulsing, sour knot.
My father blinked at Sam, then easily faked him out with his left hand while grabbing the scissors with his right. He tossed the scissors into the kitchen. “Jesus Christ!” he said, clamping Sam’s hips between his knees and pinching his arms to his sides. They were eye-to-eye, mouths hanging open. Sometimes my father would challenge Sam to a wrestling match, and Sam—knowing he would not be allowed to refuse—charged violently. My father would let him twist and grunt for several minutes before offhandedly pinning him against the carpet. “Uncle,” my father would say, until Sam repeated the word.
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