The Stolen Child(74)

decided to get my master's degree. Before it's too late. I don't want to end up an old maid who never

went after what she wanted."

I wanted to tell her age didn't matter, that I loved her then and would love her in two or twenty or

two hundred years, but I did not say a word. She patted me on the knee and nestled close, and I

breathed in the scent of her hair. We let the night pass. An airplane crossed the visual field between us

and the moon, creating the momentary illusion that it was pasted on the lunar surface. She dozed in my

arms and awoke with a start past eleven.

"I've got to go," Tess said. She kissed me on the forehead, and we strolled down to the car. The

walk seemed to snap her out of the wine-induced stupor.

"Hey, when are your classes? I could drive you in sometimes if it's dur-ing the day."

"That's a good idea. Maybe you'll get inspired to go back yourself."

She blew me a kiss, then vanished behind the steering wheel and drove away. The old house stared

at me, and in the yard the trees reached out to the yellow moon. I walked upstairs, wrapped up in the

music in my head, and went to sleep in Henry's bed, in Henry's room.

What possessed Tess to choose infanticide were a mystery to me. There were other options:

sibling rivalry, the burden of the firstborn, the oedipal son, the disappearing father, and so on. But she

picked infanticide as her thesis topic for her seminar in Sociology of the Family. And, of course, since I

had nothing to do most days but wait around campus or drive around the city while she was in classes, I

volunteered to help with the research. After her last class, she and I went out for coffee or drinks, at first

to plot out how to tackle the proj-ect on infanticide, but as the meetings went on, the conversations

swung around to returning to school and my unstarted symphony.

"You know what your problem is?" Tess asked. "No discipline. You want to be a great composer,

but you never write a song. Henry, true art is less about all the wanting-to-be bullshit, and more about

practice. Just play the music, baby."

I fiddled with the porcelain ear of my coffee cup.

"It's time to get started, Chopin, or to stop kidding yourself and grow up. Get out from behind the

bar and come back to school with me."

I attempted not to let my frustration and resentment show, but she had me culled like a lame animal

from the main herd. She pounced.

"I know all about you. Your mother is very insightful about the real Henry Day."

"You talked to my mother about me?"

"She said you went from being a carefree little boy to a serious old man overnight. Sweetheart, you

need to stop living in your head and live in the world as it is."

I lifted myself out of my chair and leaned across the table to kiss her. "Now, tell me your theory on

why parents kill their children."

We worked for weeks on her project, meeting in the library or carrying on about the subject when

we went out dancing or to the movies or dinner. More than once, we drew a startled stare from nearby

strangers when we ar-gued about killing children. Tess took care of the historical framework of the

problem and delved into the available statistics. I tried to help by digging up a plausible theory. In certain

societies, boys were favored over girls, to work on the farm or to pass on wealth, and as a matter of

course, many females were murdered because they were unwanted. But in less patriarchal cultures,

infan-ticide stemmed from a family's inability to care for another child in an age of large families and few

resources—a brutal method of population control. For weeks, Tess and I puzzled over how parents

decided which child to spare and which to abandon. Dr. Laurel, who taught the seminar, suggested that

myth and folklore might provide interesting answers, and that's how I stumbled across the article.

Prowling the stacks late one evening, I found our library's sole copy of the Journal of Myth and

Society, a fairly recent publication which had lasted a grand total of three issues. I flipped through the

pages of this journal, rather casually standing there by my lonesome, when the name sprang from the

page and grabbed me by the throat. Thomas McInnes. And then the title of his article was like a knife to

the heart: "The Stolen Child."

Son of a bitch.

McInnes's theory was that in medieval Europe, parents who gave birth to a sickly child made a

conscious decision to "reclassify" their infant as some-thing other than human. They could claim that

demons or "goblins" had come in the middle of the night and stolen their true baby and left behind one of

their own sickly, misshapen, or crippled offspring, leaving the parents to abandon or raise the devil.

Called "fairy children" or changelings in En-gland, "enfants changes" in France, and " Wechselbalgen"