CHAPTER 23
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I should have fessed to Tess at the start, but who knows when love begins? Two trary impulses pulled at me. I did not want to scare her away with the geling story, yet I loo entrust all my secrets to her. But it was as if a demon shadowed me everywhere and clamped shut my mouth to hold iruth. She gave me many opportuo open my heart and tell her, and I came close once or twice, but each time I hesitated and stopped.On Labor Day we were at the baseball stadium iy, watg the home team take on Chicago. I was distracted by the enemy ru sed base.
"So, whats the plan for The Coverboys?"
"Plan? lan?"
"You really should record an album. Youre that good." She attacked a hot dog thick with relish. Our pitcher struck out their batter, and she let out a whoop. Tess loved the game, and I e for her sake.
"What kind of album? Covers of other peoples songs? Do you really think anybody would buy a copy when they have the inal?"
"Youre right," she said between bites. "Maybe you could do something new and different. Write your own songs."
"Tess, the songs we sing are not the kind of songs I would write."
"Okay, if you could write any musi the world, what kind would you write?"
I turo her. She had a speck of relish at the er of her mouth that I wished to nibble away. "Id write you a symphony, if I could."
Out flicked her too her lips. "Whats stopping you, Henry?
Id love a symphony of my own."
"Maybe if I had stayed serious about piano, or if I had finis<bdi>..</bdi>hed music school."
"Whats stopping yoing back to college?"
Nothing at all. The twins had finished high school and were w. My mother certainly did not he few dollars I brought in, and Uncle Charlie from Philadelphia had begun to call her nearly every day, expressing an i iiring here. The Coverboys were going nowhere as a band. I searched for a plausible excuse. "Im too old to go baow. Ill be twenty-six April, and the rest of the students are a bunch of eighteen-year-olds. Theyre into a totally different se."
"Youre only as old as you feel."
At the moment, I felt 125 years old. She settled bato her seat and watched the rest of the ballgame without another word on the subject. On the way home that afternoon, she switched the car radio over from the rock station to classical, and as the orchestra played Mahler, she laid her head against my shoulder and closed her eyes, listening.
Tess and I went out to the pord sat on the swing, quiet for a long time, sharing a bottle of peach wine. She liked to hear me sing, so I sang for her, and then we could find nothing else to say. Her breathing presence beside me, the moon and the stars, the singing crickets, the moths ging to the porch light, the breeze cutting through the humid air—the moment had a curious pull on me, as if recalling distant dreams, not of this life, nor of the forest, but of life before the ge. As if ed destiny or desire threatehe illusion I had struggled to create. To be fully human, I had to give in to my true nature, the first impulse.
"Do you think Im crazy," I asked, "to want to be a poser in this day and age? I mean, who would actually listen to your symphony?"
"Dreams are, Henry, and you ot will them away, any more than you call them into being. You have to decide whether to act upon them or let them vanish."
"I suppose if I dont make it, I could e bae. Find a job. Buy a house. Live a life."
She held my hand in hers. "If you dont e with me, Ill miss seeing you every day."
"What do you mean, e with you?"
"I was waiting for the right time to tell you, but Ive enrolled. Classes start in two weeks, and Ive decided to get my masters degree. Before its too late. I dont want to end up an old maid who never went after what she wanted."
I wao tell her age didnt 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 aled close, and I breathed in the st 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 asted on the lunar surface. She dozed in my arms and awoke with a start past eleven.
"Ive got to go," Tess said. She kissed me on the forehead, arolled down to the car. The walk seemed to snap her out of the wine-iupor.
"Hey, when are your classes? I could drive you in sometimes if its during the day."
"Thats a good idea. Maybe youll 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, ed up in the musi my head, ao sleep in Henrys bed, in Henrys room.
ossessed 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 proje infanticide, but as the meetings went on, the versations 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 poser, 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.
"Its time to get started, Chopin, or to stop kidding yourself and grow up. Get out from behind the bar and e back to school with me."
I attempted not to let my frustration ament 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 ht. Sweetheart, you o 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 dang or to the movies or dinner. More than once, we drew a startled stare from nearby strangers when we argued about killing childreook care of the historical framework of the problem and delved into the available statistics. I tried to help by digging up a plausible theory. Iain societies, boys were favored irls, to work on the farm or to pass oh, and as a matter of course, many females were murdered because they were unwanted. But in less patriarchal cultures, infanticide stemmed from a familys inability to care for another child in an age of large families and few resources—a brutal method of population trol. 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 iing answers, and thats how I stumbled across the article.
Prowling the stacks late one evening, I found our librarys sole copy of the Journal of Myth and Society, a fairly ret 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 Mes. And thele of his article was like a ko the heart: "The Stolen Child."
Son of a bitch.
Mess theory was that in medieval Europe, parents who gave birth to a sickly child made a scious decision to "reclassify" their infant as something other than human. They could claim that demons or "goblins" had e in the middle of the night and stolerue baby a behind one of their own sickly, misshapen, or crippled offspring, leaving the parents to abandon or raise the devil. Called "fairy children" or gelings in England, "enfants ges" in France, and "Wechselbalgen" in Germany, these devil children were fis and rationalizations for a babys failure to thrive, or for some other physiental birth defect. If one had a geling in the home, one would not be expected to keep and raise it as ones own. Parents would have the right to be rid of the deformed creature, and they coul<tt>.t>d take the child and leave it outside in the forest ht. If the goblins refused to retrieve it, then the poor unfortunate would die from exposure ht be carried off by a wild thing.
The article reted several versions of the legend, including the twelfth-tury French cult of the Holy Greyhound. One day, a man es home and finds blood on the muzzle of the hound trusted to guard his child, ehe mas the dog to death, only later to find his baby unharmed, with a viper dead on the floor by the crib. Realizing his error, the mas a shrio the "holy greyhound" that protected his son from the poisonous snake. Around this strew the legend that mothers could take those babies with "child siess" to such shrines in the forest and leave them with a o the patron saint and protector of children: "A Saint Gui, pour la vie ou pour la mort."
"This form of infanticide, the deliberate killing of a child based on its slim probability of survival," wrote Mes,
became part of the myth and folklore that endured well into the eenth tury in Germany, the British Isles, and other European tries, and the superstition traveled with emigrants to the New World. In the 1850s, a small mining unity iern Pennsylvania reported the disappearance of one dozen children from different families into the surrounding hills. And in pockets of Appalachia, from New York to Tennessee, local legend fostered a folk belief that these children still roam the forests.A porary case that illustrates the psychological roots of the legend s a young man, "Andrew," who claimed under hypnosis to have been abducted by "hobgoblins." The ret unexplained discovery of an uified child, found drowned in a nearby river, was credited as the work of these ghouls. He reported that many of the missing children from the area were stolen by the goblins and lived unharmed in the woods nearby, while a geling took each childs plad lived out that childs life in the unity. Such delusions, like the rise of the geling myth, are obvious social protes for the sad problem of missing or stolen children.
Not only had he gotteory wrong, but he had used my own words against me. A superscript notation by "Andrew" directed the readers to the fine print of the footnote:Andrew (not his real name) reeled off an elaborate story of a hobgoblin subculture that, he claimed, lived in a nearby wooded area, preying on the children of the town for over a tury. He asserted also that he had once been a human child named Gustav Ungerland, who had arrived in the area as the son of German immigrants in the mid-eenth tury. More incredibly, Andrew claims to have been a musical prodigy in his other life, a skill restored to him when he ged ba the late 1940s. His elaborate tale, sadly, indicates deep pathological developmental problems, possibly c some early childhood abuse, trauma, lect.
I had to read the last sentence several times before it became clear. I wao howl, to track him down and cram his words into his mouth. I ripped the pages from the journal and threw the ruined magazio the trash. "Liar, faker, thief," I muttered over and over as I paced bad forth among the stacks. Thankfully I entered no one, for who knows how I might have vented my rage. Failure to thrive. Pathological problems. Abandoned children. He gave us gelings no credit at all and had the whole story backward. We went and snatched them from their beds. We were as real as nightmares.
The ping of the elevator chimes sounded like a gunshot, and through the open doo<bdo></bdo>r appeared the librarian, a slight woman in cats-eye glasses, hair drawn ba a bun. She froze when she saw me, rather savagely disheveled, hut she tamed me when she spoke. "Were closing," she called out. "Youll have to go."
I ducked behind a row of books and folded Mess pages ihs, stuffing the packet in my denim jacket. She began walking toward me, heels clig on the linoleum, and I attempted to alter my appearance, but the old magic was gohe best I could do was run my fihrough my hair, stand up, and brush the wrinkles from my clothes.
"Didnt you hear me?" She stood directly in front of me, an unbending reed. "You have to go." She watched me depart. I tur the elevator to wave good-bye, and she was leaning against a n, staring as if she knew my whole story.
A cool rain was falling, and I was late to meet Tess. Her class had ended hours before, and we should have been on our way bae. As I rushed dowairs, I wondered if she would be furi..ous with me, but suxieties were nothing pared to my aoward Mes. Beh the streetlight on the er stood Tess, huddling under an umbrella against the rain. She walked to me, gathered me us cover, and latched on to my arm.
"Henry, are you all right? Youre shaking, baby. Are you cold? Henry, Henry?"
She pulled me closer, warmed us a us dry. She pressed her warm hands against my face, and I khat cold, wet night was my best ce to fess. Beh the umbrella, I told her I loved her. That was all I could say.
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