“Can I?” he said, and Joan said, “Of course,” and when Daniel gently touched the baby’s face, his confusion fell away.
“He’s so soft.” Joan laughed. “Just like you, my love, when you were his age. The way you still are.”
Daniel looked out the window at his playground. “When can I show him the sandbox and the swings and the jungle gym? When can he hang from his knees, like me?” Martin lifted Daniel into his lap. “A few years, buddy. Then he’ll want to do everything with you.”
The next day, Daniel insisted on feeding his baby brother, this infant he was already imagining as his friend, eager, even, to boss around; not knowing that someday Eric would neither heed nor follow, would leave Daniel in a silent, stormy race for dominance that Eric would know nothing about.
*
It was difficult to pry Daniel away from the baby. His new life in kindergarten could not compare. He did not want to leave with Fancy each morning, came running in at noon, insisting on knowing everything that happened in his absence before he would agree to eat his lunch. “Tell me the whole story of this morning,” he would say to Joan, “and don’t leave anything out.” And she described it all—the feedings, the diaper changes, the naps, the drools, the songs Fancy had sung, what part Joan was up to in the book she was reading to Eric. During her late, heavily pregnant months, Daniel’s favorite bedtime tale was hearing how Joan read to him when he was a tadpole, making her recite the names of those books he heard from inside her belly.
When Eric had been home for several weeks, Daniel said, “Mom, I’m going to make a list and you have to read those books again to Eric. I’ll listen too, if I have time.”
His seriousness made her realize she had not read to Eric in utero, as she had with him, and that whatever Eric heard during those nine pregnant months when she read to Daniel tucked up in his bed, was unintentional, secondhand, an afterthought.
Daniel included the Palliser and Trollope series; Balzac’s Lost Illusions; Maugham’s The Painted Veil; all the Dawn Powells, and so many more, but her Rare Baby stories weren’t on his meticulous list. Those stories were in the past and she wasn’t going to read them to Eric, but Daniel had heard them until he was four and, childishly, Joan wanted to know why he had left them off.
One afternoon, when Joan was in the recliner, Eric in her arms sucking hard at a bottle, Daniel ran in. “Where are you?” he demanded. “We’re starting the chapter called ‘The Two Dukes’ in Trollope’s Phineas Redux.” “I remember that chapter, it’s a good one,” he said, and Joan thought he had to be pretending, wanting to impress her, as he liked to do, by demonstrating his smarts. He often joined her in the nursery, sitting on the stool while she read to Eric, frequently telling her he remembered that scene or that character, when so-and-so did this or that, but it was always a recollection after the fact. Still, if Daniel was telling the truth, then he remembered everything, which had to include her Rare Baby stories, and Joan wondered why he never mentioned them.
*
The weekend after they celebrated Eric’s first birthday, Joan was on her knees in one of the gardens, her hands thrust deep into the rich earth, packing in mail-order tulip bulbs, thinking about whether she owed her parents a note. They had sent an unexpected birthday card to Eric, with a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill inside. The card had been devoid of preprinted sweetness, just Eleanor Ashby’s truncated “Good Luck” in English, rather than in the professed French of her soul. And Joan couldn’t figure out whether her mother meant the sentiment sarcastically. And if she did, whether it was directed at Joan, or at one-year-old Eric, who was another grandson her parents had no interest in meeting. But all that internal debating ceased when Fancy ran toward her, calling out, “You’ve got to come quick. Nothing’s wrong, but hurry.”
Daniel was in the baby’s blue-walled nursery, the color suggested by Fancy. “Blue is the color of the mind,” she had told Joan and Martin. “Blue is soothing and will foster the new one’s intelligence, communication skills, serenity, logic, coolness, reflection, and calm. Pick a strong blue to stimulate clear though. The flip side of blue, or choosing the wrong blue, is a child who is cold, aloof, lacks emotions, or is unfriendly.” Martin had laughed, but Joan thought the buttercup yellow they had chosen for Daniel’s room was, perhaps, responsible for his wonderfully balanced nature, his early ability to read, his voracious love of books, his easy laughter, his ease falling instantly to sleep at bedtime; and at Olinsky’s Paint & Hardware, Joan and Martin had selected Imperial Blue, like the velvety background of a star-laden night.
Daniel had dragged the nursing recliner over to the crib, in which Eric sat holding the stuffed giraffe Fancy had given him as a birthday present. His brown eyes were so round as he stared at his big brother. Daniel was holding the blank notebook he’d asked Joan for a week earlier. From where she stood, she could see that at least two pages were covered in words he had written himself.
Joan put a finger to her lips and Fancy nodded, the two of them staring into the room through the jamb of the open door.
“Henry is a very small squirrel with ocean-blue eyes. His fur is gray and so is his bushy tail. He lives in a park that has lots of trees. One of those trees is a weeping willow and that is his home, in a hole in that tree, where he lives all alone. Sometimes that makes him very, very sad. Sometimes he cries at night when he remembers he once had a mother and a father and a baby brother, all of them gone one day, leaving him behind. He gets mad, too, when he remembers they didn’t even leave him a note, just left him to try and do his best by himself. On his sixth birthday, he woke up wondering how to make the day special, when he wouldn’t have any presents or balloons. He scrambled out of his hole, his bushy tail waving, and he looked all around the park. In the pond in the middle, he saw a baby duck swimming around, and he ran straight there. The duck was so little with feathers that looked like snow. ‘Hi, Duck,’ Henry said. ‘It’s my birthday and I want to know if you want to play with me.’ Duck said, ‘Okay. Come swimming with me.’ Henry said, ‘I don’t know how to swim. But wait. I’ve got a great tail, and my feet are sort of like flippers, and maybe they’ll keep me from sinking. So here I go.’ And then Henry was in the pond with the duck and they splashed and played together for hours.