"And those fingers."
I looked at my hands, and in comparison with other children's, my fin-gers were exceedingly long
and out of proportion.
"I think he'll be a pianist. Billy, we ought to have him at lessons."
"And toes."
I curled up my toes in my bed upstairs.
"And he seems to have grown not an inch or put on not a pound all winter long."
"He needs some sun is all."
The old man rolls over toward her. "He's a queer lad, is all I know."
"Billy ... stop."
I resolved that night to become a true boy and begin paying closer at-tention to how I might be
considered normal. Once such a mistake had been made, nothing could be done. I couldn't very well
shorten my fingers and toes and invite further skepticism, but I could stretch the rest of me a bit each
night and keep up with all the other children. I also made it a point to avoid Dad as much as possible.
The idea of the piano intrigued me as a way to ingratiate myself with my mother. When she wasn't
listening to crooners on the radio, she might dial in the classics, particularly on a Sunday. Bach sent my
head spinning with buried reveries, conjuring an echo from the distant past. But I had to figure away to
mention my interest without Mom realizing that her private conversa-tions could be heard no matter how
quiet or intimate. Fortunately, the twins supplied the answer. At Christmas, my distant grandparents sent
them a toy piano. No bigger than a bread basket, it produced but a tinny octave of notes, and from New
Year's Day the keys gathered a dusty coat. I rescued the toy and sat in the nursery, playing nearly
recognizable tunes from distant memory. My sisters, as usual, were enchanted, and they sat like two
entranced yogis as I tested my memory on the piano's limited range. Dust rag in hand, my mother
wandered by and stood in the doorway, listening intently. From the corner of my eye, I watched her
watching me, and when I ended with a flourish, her applause was not completely unexpected.
In the fleeting time between homework and dinner, I picked out a tune of sorts, and gradually
revealed my native talent, but she needed more encour-agement than that. My scheme was casual and
simple. I let drop the fact that a half-dozen of the kids in school took music lessons, when, in truth, there
may have been one or two. On car trips, I pretended that the panel below my window was a keyboard
and fingered measures until my father ordered me to cut that out. I made a point of whistling the first few
bars of something famil-iar, like Beethoven's Ninth, when helping Mom dry the dishes. I did not beg, but
bided my time, until she came to believe the idea as her own. My gambit played out when, on the
Saturday before Henry's eighth birthday, my parents drove me into the city to see a man about piano
lessons.
We left the twin toddlers with the neighbors, and the three of us sat up front in my father's coupe,
embarking early that spring morning in our Sun-day clothes. We drove past the town where I went to
school, where we shopped and went to Mass, and onto the highway into the city. Shiny cars zipped
along the asphalt as we picked up speed, joining a ribbon of pure energy flowing in both directions. We
went faster than I'd ever gone in my life, and I had not been to the city in nearly one hundred years. Billy
drove the '49 De Soto like an old friend, one hand on the wheel, his free arm thrown across the seat
behind my mother and me. The old conquistador stared at us from the steering wheel's hub, and as Dad
made a turn, the ex-plorer's eyes seemed to follow us.
On our approach to the city, the factories on the outskirts appeared first, great smokestacks
exhaling streams of dark clouds, furnaces within glowing with hearts of fire. A bend in the road—then all
at once, a view of buildings stretched to heaven. The downtown's sheer size left me breathless, and the
closer we came, the greater it loomed, until suddenly we were in the car-choked streets. The shadows
deepened and darkened. At a cross street, a trol-ley scraped along, its pole shooting sparks to the wires
above. Its doors opened like a bellows, and out poured a crowd of people in their spring coats and hats;
they stood on a concrete island in the street, waiting for the light to change. In the department store
windows, reflections of shoppers and traffic cops mingled with displays of new goods: women's dresses
and men's suits on man-nequins, which fooled me initially, appearing alive and posing perfectly still.
"I don't know why you feel the need to come all the way downtown for this. You know I don't like
coming into the city. I'll never find parking."
Mom's right arm shot out. "There's a space, aren't we lucky?"
Riding up in the elevator, my father reached inside his coat pocket for a Camel, and as the doors