The Stolen Child(15)

"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