Sitting in her stiff, scratchy taffeta dress, not knowing what to do with her face, Eleanor found the concerts more boring than church. Music made no sense to her. She couldn’t remember melodies unless they had words. She never knew when to clap. When she was twelve, she was allowed to go by herself. Realizing that a good portion of the audience stayed only for the first half of the concert, Eleanor started leaving at the interval and going to movies, taking the concert program to show her mother. The year 1950 was a spectacular one for movies, a lucky break for a good girl on the lam. She saw: Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, Born Yesterday, A Streetcar Named Desire, Strangers on a Train, Rashomon. She also saw duds: Father of the Bride, Cheaper by the Dozen, Cinderella, King Solomon’s Mines, Quo Vadis, Harvey. Harvey almost put her permanently off Jimmy Stewart. The others confirmed her early prejudices against Technicolor, toga sagas, domestic comedies, and Disney. Dud or hit, she always stayed till the end, as a rebuke to the Philharmonic, a “counterpoint of honor.”
The boys, musically, ran the gamut. Harry and Will liked the Stones, Patti Smith, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, the Police, Dylan, Springsteen. Mostly, they listened; occasionally, they went to concerts. Tom liked country, the Doors, the Stones, Motown, and the Beatles. He took guitar lessons for two years but gave it up. “I’m no good,” he said, comparing himself with Jack. Jack heard the album Bird and Diz when he was five, at a friend’s. He came home and said to his mother, “I need you to buy me all of Dizzy’s records. And all of Bird’s. I also need a record player and a horn.” At six, he started lessons. He played the trumpet, he later explained, because he loved Coltrane and Parker too much to play the saxophone. “I cry when I hear a great sax. It’s like a human voice,” he said. “Chet, Dizzy, Miles, Louis, they make me glad to be alive.” Sam was the only one who loved classical music. It started early. He would toddle unevenly into the library, where his father was reading, and point to the stereo. Rupert would put on a record. As the music filled the room, Sam would sit on the floor leaning against his father’s legs. He never fell asleep. Songs and chamber music were his favorites. His father bought him a Cambridge Soundworks radio for his sixth birthday and tuned it to WQXR. Unlike Harry, Will, and Tom, Sam couldn’t listen to music and read or do homework. He was like Jack that way. “Music invades my brain,” he said. He hated background music. All music was foreground. When he hummed, as he often did while working on some project, he didn’t notice he was doing it. “My brain does it by itself,” he told his mother.
For his eleventh birthday, Sam asked his father if he could have a subscription to the opera. He had heard Carmen on the radio and was transported. Over a late dinner at his in-laws’ a week later, Rupert mentioned it.
“I got tickets for us both to Rigoletto, Traviata, Madame Butterfly, Billy Budd.”
“Sam’s a little fairy, isn’t he?” Mrs. Phipps said. “Too bad. I wonder where it came from.” She looked at Eleanor.
Rupert turned to his father-in-law. “You’ll excuse me, Edward,” he said.
Rupert then turned to his mother-in-law. “You stupid cunt.”
—
The Falkes boys all had a wide streak of single-mindedness; it made them successful and, to varying extents, self-absorbed. Jack’s single-mindedness was extreme, crossing over to obsession. Unable to think about anything other than jazz, he talked about little else. No family occasion passed without Eleanor’s mother remarking in his hearing, “All play and no work makes Jack a dull boy.” She would laugh as she said it, pleased with her joke. “Is it worth a Granny slap-down?” Rupert said. “Do you mind when Granny says that?” Eleanor asked Jack. “Granny is not nice. We all know that,” Jack said. “She picks on Sam more than she picks on me. It’s OK.”
In their single-mindedness, the boys were like their father. Rupert could do multiple things: litigate, negotiate, sail, sing, read, but he could only do one of them at a time. If he was interrupted in the middle of a task, even an unpleasant one, like bill paying, he grew testy. “Is it important?” he’d ask. Father and sons thought that multitasking was for the butterfly-minded. They made a permanent running joke of it. Harry said he could eat and read at the same time, but not pie and economics. Will said he could breathe and argue. Sam could hum and titrate. Jack said he could fart and chew gum. Tom said he could barely do one thing at a time, let alone two.
Eleanor could make a sandwich and do LEGO, sing and drive, push a stroller and settle a quarrel, listen and wipe a nose. Testiness wasn’t an option. Is constant and instant availability to the needs of boys the same thing as multitasking? she thought.
In eleventh grade, Harry read Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox. For his class project, he devised a ten-point scale, running from 1 (hedgehog: knowing one big thing) to 10 (fox: knowing many things), as a test of the two categories. The night before his project was due, he did a pilot study on his family, plotting them along the axis: he was a 5; Will a 4; Sam a 3; Jack a 1; Tom, hypothetically, then only eight, a 5. He presented his results at dinner.
“This is very interesting,” Rupert said. “Where do your mother and I go?”
“You’re a 5, I think, like me. We don’t like interruptions, but we cope,” Harry said. “Mom’s an 8, maybe a 9. A fox.”
“Is that your way of telling me I’m a multitasker?” Eleanor asked, always aware she had been raised to be good at nothing.
“It’s not an insult,” Harry said. “You’re always doing at least two things at a time. You don’t mind being interrupted.”
“How do you know I don’t mind?” she asked.
The boys stared at her. Rupert stared at her.
“No,” she said. “I’m not an 8 or a 9. I’m a 1, a purebred hedgehog, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle herself. All I do is all of you. That’s what I know. One big thing. Boys.”
Harry considered her objection. “The extremes meet. Is that it?” he asked.
“No,” Eleanor said. “Synecdoche.”
“I don’t understand,” Harry said.
“All the things I do are simply parts of the whole,” Eleanor said.
Later that evening, catching her alone, Sam asked his mother whether she ever wished she were something other than a mother. Eleanor winced inwardly. None of the others would have asked that question; none of the others would even have thought of it. She felt her old sense of guilt about Sam rising. Breathing slowly to tamp it down—what use was guilt, after all?—she unexpectedly felt a wave of irritation with his brothers.
“Not ‘other’ than a mother. Never. Perhaps ‘in addition,’?” she said to Sam.
“What would you do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’m almost forty,” she said. “I’ve never worked.”
“Is that why you had five children?” he asked.
“I had five children because I was lucky. I could afford five children. I had household help. I thought it was a good idea. Dad thought it was a good idea. I was an only child; he was an orphan. We like having all of you around. Dad would have had more. I think his fantasy was eleven, a cricket side.”
“What do you do during the day when we’re not home?” Sam asked.
Eleanor didn’t answer at once. Sam waited.
“I go to movies,” she said.
“I thought you shopped,” Sam said. “I thought you were bored.”
“Mothers are often a mystery to their children,” Eleanor said.
“Do you go to movies alone?” Sam asked.
“Sometimes I go by myself, sometimes I go with a friend,” Eleanor said.
“Do you have a favorite movie?” Sam asked.
“Smiles of a Summer Night, The Third Man, Casablanca, The Sorrow and the Pity,” Eleanor said. “I don’t run to favorites. In anything.”
“Not even Harry?” Sam said. In a family of five boys, there was a lot of jockeying for attention, and Harry had a way of elbowing to the front.
“Cheeky boy,” Eleanor said, ruffling his hair. “Only his first two years.”