“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 Abram’s cheek, his feathery moustache 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 didn’t 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 winter’s 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 marred 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 mother’s 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 aren’t either of your two colors,” said Mary. “Green as a cat’s. He didn’t get those eyelashes from our side of the family. You have such adorable long eyelashes, yes, you do. Too bad he’s not a girl.”
“Well, they’re not Wodehouse eyelashes either. Take a good look at Tess.”
“All mascara.”
“And the nose. No so much now, but later, you’ll see. That’s 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.”