Henry, Himself E-Book

Stewart O'Nan

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 522

Beschreibung

Soldier, son, lover, husband, breadwinner, churchgoer, Henry Maxwell has spent his whole life trying to live with honour. A native Pittsburgher and engineer, he's always believed in logic, sacrifice and hard work. Now, seventy-five and retired, he feels the world has passed him by. It's 1998, the American century is ending, and nothing is simple any more. His children are distant, their unhappiness a mystery. Only his wife, Emily, and dog, Rufus, stand by him. Once so confident, as Henry's strength and memory desert him, he weighs his dreams against his regrets and is left with questions he can't answer: Is he a good man? Has he done right by the people he loves? And with time running out, what, realistically, can he hope for? Henry, Himself is a wry, warmhearted portrait of an American original - a man who believes he's reached a dead end only to discover life is full of surprises.

Leseprobe

‘Stewart O’Nan excels at portraying the dilemmas and desires of ordinary people . . . A wise, tender and humorous writer, he portrays outwardly unexceptional people with rich inner lives defined by doubt and anxiety, affection and hope. Henry, Himself is a beautiful book with a touch of the ineffable about it, and the best novel I have read so far this year.’ – Seattle Times

‘O’Nan, with some of his most gorgeous writing, [provides] Henry instances of unexpected grace . . . This novel is a lovely tribute to the enduring mystery of an ordinary life.’ – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

‘O’Nan has returned to the mode that marks his best work, capturing America’s shaky middle class with dignity . . . Tracking Henry’s subtle interplay with [his wife] Emily, and the unspoken mysteries that concern him, O’Nan reveals a rich inner life.’ – Minneapolis Star Tribune

‘Henry is 75, trying to decide whether his utterly decent life means utterly nothing, and you’ll fall for him – utterly.’ – The Listener

‘Engaging and immersive . . . One of O’Nan’s gifts is his ability to craft his characters with such uncanny attention to detail that the reader comes to care for them as the author does . . . [A] poignant, everyman story.’ – Book Page

‘Henry, Himself is a character-driven novel, the quiet story of a man from the greatest generation who finally learns at 75 to stop worrying about his past and any mistakes he may have made and to start living for the moment.’ – The Missourian blog

‘As usual, this profoundly unpretentious writer employs lucid, no-frills prose to cogently convey complicated emotions and fraught family interactions. The novel makes no claims for Henry or his kin as exceptional people but instead celebrates the fullness and uniqueness of each ordinary human being. Astute and tender, rich in lovely images and revealing details—another wonderful piece of work from the immensely gifted O’Nan.’ – Kirkus (starred review)

‘Charming, meditative, gently funny, and stealthily poignant portrait [of Henry] . . . O’Nan elevates the routines and chores of quiet domesticity to a nearly spiritual level in his lingering attention to details . . . Like Richard Russo and Anne Tyler, O’Nan discerningly celebrates the glory of the ordinary in this pitch-perfect tale of the hidden everyday valor of a humble and good man.’ – Booklist

Also by Stewart O’Nan

FICTION

City of SecretsWest of SunsetThe OddsEmily, AloneSongs for the MissingLast Night at the LobsterThe Good WifeThe Night CountryWish You Were HereEveryday PeopleA Prayer for the DyingA World AwayThe Speed QueenThe Names of the DeadSnow AngelsIn the Walled City

NONFICTION

Faithful (with Stephen King)The Circus FireThe Vietnam Reader (editor)On Writers and Writing by John Gardner (editor)

SCREENPLAY

Poe

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Allen & Unwin

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2020 by Allen & Unwin

First published in the United States in 2019 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Copyright © Stewart O’Nan, 2019

The moral right of Stewart O’Nan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Allen & Unwinc/o Atlantic BooksOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Internal design by Meighan Cavanaugh

Paperback ISBN 978 1 91163 034 0

E-Book ISBN 978 1 76087 085 0

Printed in

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my father

and his father before him

The autumn windon its waysets a scarecrow dancing

BUSON

In Memoriam

HIS MOTHER NAMED HIM HENRY, AFTER HER OLDER BROTHER, a chaplain killed in the Great War, as if he might take his place. In family lore the dead Henry had been a softhearted boy, a rescuer of stranded earthworms and fallen sparrows, presaging his vocation as a saver of souls. Salutatorian of his seminary class, he volunteered for duty overseas, sending home poems and charcoal sketches of life in the trenches. At church the stained-glass window that showed a barefoot Christ carrying a wayward lamb draped about his neck like a stole was dedicated in loving memory of the Rt. Rev. Henry Leland Chase, 1893–1917, the mock-Gothic inscription so elaborate it verged on illegibility, and each Sunday as they made their way to their pew up front, his mother would bow her head as they passed, as if to point out, once more, his uncle’s saintliness. When he was little, Henry believed he was buried there, that beneath the cold stone floor of Calvary Episcopal, as below the medieval cathedrals of Europe, the noble dead moldered in cobwebbed catacombs, and that one day he would be there too.

When Henry was eight, his mother enrolled him as an altar boy, a vocation for which he betrayed no calling, picking at his nails inside his billowy sleeves through the weighted silences and turgid hymns, afraid he’d miss his cue. He had nightmares of arriving late for the processional in his baseball uniform, his cleats clicking as the holy conclave paraded down the aisle. The cross was heavy, and he needed to stretch on tiptoe with the brass taper to light the massive Alpha-Omega candle. Funerals were the worst, held Saturday afternoons when all of his friends would be at their secret clubhouse deep in the park. The grieving family huddled beside the casket, praying with Father McNulty for the repose of their loved one’s soul, but once the service was done and the candles snuffed, the funeral director took charge, bossing around the pallbearers like hired porters as they lugged the box down the front steps and slid it into the hearse. Invariably Henry pictured his uncle, his nose inches from the closed lid, on a train crossing bomb-pocked French farmland, or in the dark hold of a ship, cold water gliding by outside the thin steel skin of the hull. He had so many friends and well-wishers, the story went, that the visitation—in their grandparents’ front parlor, where his sister Arlene taught Henry to play “Heart and Soul” on their Baldwin—lasted three days and nights.

Arlene was named after Arlene Connelly, his mother’s favorite singer, which Henry thought unfair.

To avoid confusion, among company his mother called him Henry Maxwell and his uncle Henry Chase, a nicety her side of the family dispensed with, christening him Little Henry.

Henry—though not one to make a fuss—would have preferred a nickname of his own choosing, something rough and masculine like Hank or Huck. He thought Little Henry was bad luck, and in private moments, rooting through his father’s workbench in the cellar for a spool of kite string, or on a rainy day, hiding from Arlene in the lumber room beneath the eaves, or after midnight, climbing the boxed back stairwell with a filched sticky bun, he felt watched over by a ghost neither kindly nor malevolent, merely a silent presence noting his every move like a judge. His mother never said precisely how his uncle had died, leaving Henry, with a child’s dire imagination, to picture, in a flash, a German shell catapulting a rag doll of a doughboy through the air, scattering his limbs over a cratered no-man’s-land, one arm caught in a coil of barbed wire, the hand still clutching a small gold cross.

On his mother’s dresser, in a silver frame that captured fingerprints, surrounded by other, less interesting relatives from before Henry was born, stood a bleached Kodak of her brother on the dock at Chautauqua, proudly holding up a glistening muskie. Each time Henry snuck into his parents’ bedroom to puzzle over this snapshot as if it were a clue to his future, he remarked that the fish, like his uncle, was long dead, while the dock and cottage were still there at the water’s edge, awaiting them every summer like a stage set, but exactly how these facts were related he couldn’t say, only that he felt vaguely guilty looking at the young and happy not-yet-reverend Henry Chase, as if he’d stolen something from him.

Pedigree

THE PITTSBURGH MAXWELLS—NO RELATION TO THE AUTOMAKERS or coffee company—came from the moors of North Yorkshire, with the main concentration around Skelton. Originally sheepherders and tenant farmers, after the signing of the Magna Carta their descendants filtered into the village proper and became at first guildsmen and then merchants, one, John Lee Maxwell, ultimately serving as a tax collector and deacon in the Church of England. Generations later, an intrepid or maybe disgraced scion of that line, John White Maxwell, sailed on the Godspeed for the Virginia Colony at Jamestown, there taking as his wife the fourteen-year-old Susanna Goode. This according to a genealogy compiled by a retired pharmacist from Olathe, Kansas, named Arthur Maxwell, a pair of which Emily, whose AOL address had been included in a mass email the week of Thanksgiving, purchased sight unseen as Christmas presents for their two grown children, Margaret and Kenny. Rather than gilt-edged, leather-bound keepsake editions, what arrived by regular mail in a crushed Amazon box several days after the children had packed up the grandchildren and as many leftovers as Emily could foist on them and fled were two overstuffed three-ring binders of cockeyed photocopies riddled with errors both typographical and factual, including the incorrect year of his uncle’s death.

Henry made the mistake of laughing.

“I’m glad you find it amusing,” Emily said. “I paid good money for these.”

“How much were they?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m getting it back.”

He doubted that was possible but nodded thoughtfully. “It’s fascinating stuff if it’s true. It says here we were horse thieves.”

“I’m not happy. It was supposed to be a big gift. It’s too late now anyway. At this point I’m thinking I should just send them back.”

They’d been married nearly fifty years, and still he had to smother the masculine urge to counsel her on how the world worked. At the same time, agreeing with her too readily would be seen as appeasement, a worse offense, and so, as he often did on matters of little import, he chose the safest response, silence.

“Nothing?” she asked. “You have no opinion whatsoever.”

He’d forgotten: He wasn’t allowed to be neutral.

“I think it’s interesting. Let’s keep one for ourselves at least.”

“Honestly,” she said, backhanding the page she was reading, “I could do this. I’m going to send him an email.”

The holidays were hard on her. It didn’t have to be the genealogy, it could be Rufus throwing up on the carpet, or some passing comment of Arlene’s about the mashed potatoes. Lately the smallest things set her off, and though in her looser moments she freely admitted that she’d always been a terror, an only child used to getting her way, as her husband he feared her impatience hinted at some deeper frustration with life and, by extension, their marriage. In this case his hope was that she would cool off and eventually relent, that the bother of repacking the binders and running them over to the post office would outweigh her anger. Her moods were fleeting, and the man had obviously done a lot of work. As if tabling the issue, she set the box out of the way, upstairs, on the cedar chest in Kenny’s old room, where it stayed well into the new year (1998, incredibly), until one day at lunch she asked if they had any packing tape.

“Did you get your refund?”

“Only after I bugged him a million times. He said we could keep them, but I’m not going to. He’s got to understand he can’t do this to people.”

“Right.” So, his copy too. A traitor, he’d enjoyed finding out more about his Kentucky cousins, and General Roland Pawling Maxwell, the hero of Yorktown.

“I didn’t want to tell you, they were sixty dollars apiece. For sixty dollars they should be nice, and they’re not.”

“I agree,” he said, honestly shocked at the price. For all their differences, they were both thrifty.

“It’s a shame, because there were other ones I could have ordered.”

“It was a nice idea.”

“If you want to try, have at it. I’m not doing that again.”

“At least you got your money back.”

Again, he was missing the point. She’d wanted to do something special for the children and it had turned into a debacle.

He would never understand why she took these defeats to heart. There was nothing you could do about them.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Why? It’s not your fault. Just let me be angry. I’m allowed to be angry.” He had to run out later and grab some new wiper blades for the Olds. The post office was right on his way.

“That would be helpful,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”

He didn’t mind, though, alone in the Olds, cruising down Highland with the defroster going, he glanced over at the box on the seat beside him and frowned as if she’d tricked him.

Near Miss

HE’D LIVED IN HIGHLAND PARK HIS ENTIRE LIFE, SO HE COULD be excused if he thought of the stop sign at Bryant—installed over a decade ago—as new, but in truth, that afternoon he never registered it. He was still picking at the knot of Emily’s unhappiness when he realized a school bus was pulling out in front of him, tall as a boxcar, and that he’d ram it broadside if he didn’t stop. Too late, the driver saw him and honked, and at the last second Henry jammed on the brakes. The tires screeched and the nose of the Olds dove. The box flew off the seat, smacked the dash and bounced around the floor.

He was short by a couple of feet. He was lucky the road was dry.

“Damn it,” he said, because he was at fault. The sign was behind him. He hadn’t even seen it.

The driver threw up his hands and glared.

“Sorry,” Henry said, and held up his own as if he meant no harm. Above him, children who might have been first graders peered down from the windows, pointing and making faces, bouncing on their seats like trampolines. He was the excitement. It was on the local news every night, the old fart who hit the gas instead of the brake and ended up inside the dry cleaners.

Henry expected the driver to jump out and yell at him, but the bus eased forward, clearing the intersection, and kept going. The car behind it waited for Henry to take his turn.

He nodded. “Thank you.”

He wanted to protest that he was a careful driver, not like Emily, who couldn’t see at night and four-wheeled over curbs, and the rest of the way to the post office and then coming home he concentrated, lips pinched, eyes darting to cars peeking from side streets. It was one slip, but all it took was one, and he worried that it might have happened before, he just hadn’t noticed. Near the tail end of his life, his father couldn’t see well. When they visited him, all four corners of his bumpers were smudged with different-colored paint. He refused to give up his license, even after being stopped repeatedly by the police for driving too slowly. After he died, Henry rolled up the garage door of his condo and discovered the whole front of his Cutlass was pushed in, as if he’d hit a wall.

His father had taught him to drive in the park, on the winding road that circled the reservoir. “The more room between you and the other fellow the better,” his father said. “You don’t know what he’ll do. All you can do is stay as far away from him as possible.” Henry had tried to pass along this wisdom to his own children, but they thought they knew everything from taking driver’s ed. As a teenager, Kenny totaled their station wagon on black ice one New Year’s Eve, breaking Tim Pickering’s leg, while Margaret, coming home late from a party, took down a section of the Prentices’ fence that Henry made her pay for. He’d hoped their accidents might teach them a lesson. He wasn’t sure they had.

This time at Bryant he stopped at the sign. When he got home, he three-pointed the Olds at the end of the drive and backed it into the garage perfectly straight, waiting for the rear tires to kiss the two-by-four he’d rigged.

Emily was at the kitchen sink, peeling carrots.

“How was the post office?” she asked.

“Uneventful.”

It was only as he was hanging up his keys that he remembered the wipers.

Hide-and-Seek

WHILE HENRY NEVER CONSIDERED HIS FAMILY RICH, THEIR house on Mellon Street, like many built in Highland Park around the turn of the century, had stained-glass windows on the stair landings and servants’ quarters tucked beneath the eaves. By the time he was born, the servants were gone and the third floor given over to storage, the gas and water capped so that in winter frost rimed the inside of the panes. Here, among the dusty bassinets and rolled rugs, the banished lampshades and cast-off fashions from the Roaring Twenties, he and Arlene played house, making pretend meals in the kitchen, taking pretend baths in the tub. Queen Arlene ruled by divine right of being firstborn. According to her whim, they were mother and baby, or teacher and student, or husband and wife (this involved hugging and talking seriously across an imaginary dinner table), and sometimes they played a game in which she was the maid and he the butler, innocently replacing the rooms’ former occupants. Eventually, no matter what the scenario, Henry lost interest, and Arlene would have to assuage him by agreeing to play his favorite game, hide-and-seek.

He liked hiding because he was good at it. When she was at school and there was nothing to do, he practiced on his own, fitting himself into steamer trunks and wicker hampers, crouching in the musty dark, listening to his heart and the skittering of mice. He could even squeeze himself into the oven if he took out the rack.

“I give up,” Arlene called from the hallway. “Come out, come out, wherever you are. C’mon, Henry. I said I quit.”

He waited until she went downstairs before reappearing. He knew better than to give away his best places.

As prey, Arlene was obvious, too impatient. She hid behind doors or in closets, waiting till the last second to leap out, shouting. He crept along, holding his breath, his fingers curled into claws before him, braced for attack, and still he shrieked.

The house was still there. His parents had held on to it too long, well into the seventies, selling only after his father had been mugged and their car stolen. The new owner chopped it into apartments and paved the backyard for parking. Since then the porch had rotted off, replaced by precast concrete steps that gave it a barefaced look. The stained glass was gone, and the slate roof, the ornate gables now clad with vinyl siding. A few years back it was offered as a sheriff’s sale in the paper for eight thousand, tempting him, but there were crack houses on the block, and summer nights, sleeping with the windows open, they heard scattered clumps of gunshots from the far side of Highland, like the rapping of a hammer. Day or night, he avoided Mellon Street, and while Grafton was holding its value, he feared that eventually he and Emily would face the same dilemma.

“Or you will. I’ll be dead by then.”

“That’s not funny,” she said.

At seventy-four he was five years older than her, and overweight, his cholesterol a problem. There was no question he would go first. When they were younger it had been a joke, what she would do with the insurance money. Now she scolded him.

“I’m just trying to prepare you.”

“Don’t,” she said. “You’re not dying any time soon.”

“You don’t know,” he said, “I could go at any minute,” but she’d turned away, her face averted, hurt.

“Please stop.”

He apologized, massaging her shoulders, wrapping his arms around her, a cue for Rufus to push between their legs like a referee breaking up a clinch.

“Someone’s jealous,” he said.

Emily clutched at him. “You know I hate that.”

“I know.”

“I worry about you and all you do is make fun of me.”

“I don’t mean to.”

“I don’t think you have the slightest clue what it does to me when you say things like that. If you did you wouldn’t say them.”

He could see her side, and promised to be more considerate, though part of him maintained his innocence. Wasn’t it better to laugh at death?

It was almost dark out. She had to get dinner started, and released him. He retreated to his workbench in the cellar—just like his father, he thought— where he was prepping the mailbox for Chautauqua that Kenny and Lisa had given them for Christmas. The old one (who knew how old) had rusted through, eaten away by the seasons, and as Henry clipped the stencils and taped them to the smooth new metal, he was aware that this one, like the cottage, would outlive him. His father had died alone in his condo in Fox Chapel, stubbornly independent to the end, though they’d offered him Kenny’s room. Cleaning out his apartment, Henry found a fat biography of Teddy Roosevelt on his nightstand he’d almost gotten through. As if in tribute, instead of adding it to the library sale pile, Henry took it home with the idea of reading it. It was upstairs somewhere, the bookmark still holding his father’s place.

Overhead, Emily crossed and recrossed the kitchen. You don’t have a clue, she accused him, but he knew. He wasn’t sure why he did it. He wasn’t trying to be cruel. At some point—he couldn’t pinpoint when—the joke had become the truth, unfunny. He’d have to remember that, and after the other day he wasn’t sure he could. He pried open the can of Rustoleum and mixed it with a stirrer, churning the glossy white like heavy cream, took up a clean brush and bent to his work, intent, steadying his arm against the edge of the bench, patiently filling in the numbers, giving them a thick coat so they’d last.

Spring Song

TWICE A WEEK THROUGHOUT THE SCHOOL YEAR, ARLENE TOOK piano lessons at the Shadyside YWCA. The other five days she practiced on the upright in the back parlor to the steady ticking of the metronome, lagging behind the tempo then rushing to catch up, tripping over tricky fingerings, making her way page by page through yet another red Thompson book. “Spinning Song.” “Blind Man’s Bluff.” “Dreaming.” The year culminated in an Easter recital they dressed for like church, at the end of which Henry, cued by their mother, approached the stage and presented Arlene with a bouquet of red roses even if she’d made a half dozen mistakes. When, one evening at dinner near the beginning of school, his mother asked Henry how he would like to take piano lessons like his sister, the question was rhetorical. She’d already signed him up.

A pleading glance at his father told him there would be no appeal. As in everything, his parents were agreed. Henry’s education, like Arlene’s, was his mother’s purview, and any further protest would be held against him. Henry stewed over his meatloaf, defeated. How long had they been plotting this?

He did his best to keep it a secret, knowing his friends would be merciless if they found out. The YWCA, as the name stated, was for women, meaning he’d be doubly shamed. Having donned an altar boy’s robes, he’d already been accused of wearing a dress, an insult which prompted a wrestling match that stopped when Chet Hubbard accidentally ripped Henry’s collar. At the sound of cloth rending, the circle of club members urging them on went quiet, as if a sacred rule had been broken. As Chet tried to apologize, Henry inspected the tear—glaring, irreparable—knowing what awaited him at home. The only thing he feared more than being called a mama’s boy was his mother.

Now he entered a world completely female, and strange. The teachers at the YWCA were students from the Frick Conservatory, high-strung young women who flocked from around the world to study with Madame LeClair, who’d studied with Liszt, who’d studied with Czerny, who’d studied with Beethoven himself, a lineage his mother trotted out for relatives and dinner guests alike, as if Henry or Arlene might be an undiscovered genius. To earn their room and board, Madame LeClair’s students helped the daughters of Pittsburgh’s rising middle class with their sight-reading and finger dexterity, bringing them along note by note, bar by bar. At the recital they rose to introduce their pupils, then sat back down in the front row to bear their inevitable flubs with serene equanimity. They stayed two years, occasionally three, before setting off for life on the concert stage, never to be heard from again.

Arlene’s teacher, Miss Herrera, was returning, but Henry’s was new. Miss Friedhoffer was German, a willowy strawberry blonde with a slight overbite whose ringless fingers spanned a full octave and a half. She was taller than his mother yet slender as a girl, which made her hands even more freakish. The practice room was a cell, just the piano and a chalkboard lined with staves on the opposite wall, no window. Miss Friedhoffer closed the door and took a seat beside Henry on the bench. To his confusion, she was wearing makeup, her cheeks rosy with blush. Her posture made her seem alert, a soldier at attention.

“Sit up straight,” she said, gently pulling his shoulders back. “Relax your elbows. Like so.”

At ten, Henry was unused to the company of young women, exotic or not. At school his teachers were his mother’s age or older, the girls in his class catty and standoffish. With her accent and her lipstick, Miss Friedhoffer was like someone from a spy movie. When she reached across him to fix his wrists, she smelled warm and yeasty, like fresh bread. On her neck she had a caramel birthmark the size of a dime, like a giant freckle. Under her pale skin a blue vein jumped.

“We play the C to begin,” she said, pointing a manicured nail, and Henry obeyed. “Good. So. You know the C is here, you are never lost. You know where you are, always.”

She pressed the key and sang, “C, C, C, C. Now you. Sing with me. Good. Now we go up a full step to D, here.”

At first when she patted the small of his back to make him sit up straight, he flinched. Soon he anticipated it, just as he looked forward to her shaping his fingers over the keys. He imagined when she was his age people made fun of her hands. Like a knight, he wanted to defend her from them. As he blundered his way through the major scale, he was aware of her humming along beside him, their legs nearly touching, and when the lesson was over and she let in the next student, he lingered at the door, his stiff new exercise book tucked under one arm, as if he’d forgotten something.

“Goodbye, Henry,” she said, rewarding him with a smile. “Practice well.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I will.”

On the trolley, he thought it was the first time he’d ever liked his name.

“How was your lesson?” his mother asked.

“All right.”

Later, over dinner, his father asked the same thing.

“It was okay.”

“His teacher’s pretty,” Arlene taunted.

“Is that right?” His father was amused.

Henry was caught off guard. He thought only he could see Miss Friedhoffer’s true beauty.

“Do you like her?” his father asked.

Any answer Henry might give would be wrong. He shrugged. “I guess.”

“Apparently she’s also German,” his mother said. She would never for-give them for killing his uncle.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” his father said.

“I’m sure she is.”

That his secret love was also forbidden added an operatic guilt to his yearning. To win her, he resolved to be a perfect student, except that without her there to inspire him, practice was drudgery, and despite his best intentions he quickly fell behind. Instead of looking forward to the bliss of Miss Friedhoffer’s presence, he began to dread disappointing her, and manufactured a series of suspiciously timed illnesses. After a meeting with Miss Friedhoffer, his mother charged Arlene with overseeing him. Now, five days a week, while he served his hour in the back parlor, she hectored him from the loveseat, looking up from her book if he went silent for too long, and day by day, page by page, miraculously, he began to improve.

“That’s very good, Henry,” Miss Friedhoffer said, turning to him. “You see what happens when you practice.”

When she looked into his eyes, he felt a paralyzing helplessness, as if she could read his mind. He imagined her taking him in her arms, her warm fragrance enveloping him, his cheek pressed against her slippery silk blouse. Instead, she licked a fingertip and flipped to the next page, an exercise meant to strengthen his left hand.

The truth could be hidden only so long. One gray Thursday in November as he and Arlene were getting off the trolley, Marcus Greer and his little brother Shep were waiting to get on. Henry was still in the sated, dreamy state that possessed him after a lesson, and didn’t have the presence of mind to hide his book. The red cover was a giveaway. Marcus nodded, leering, to let him know he’d seen, and the next day, after a long and restless night, Henry girded himself for the worst. He was early for school, the bell hadn’t rung yet. His friends were waiting in their customary spot at the top of the steps, by the flagpole. Out of a sense of poetic justice, he hoped Marcus would say something to him, but before Henry could reach them, Charlie Magnuson, who’d lost his front teeth riding his bike down the steps on a dare, shouted, “Hey, Mozart!”

In the principal’s office, when his mother asked him why he’d been fighting with a friend, Henry told the truth. “Because I have to take piano lessons.”

“That is not an answer,” his mother said.

“I know you don’t like going to lessons,” his father said later, the two of them alone in his office after dinner. He sat at his roll-top desk in his shirtsleeves. Spread across the blotter were curling blueprints for the building his firm was working on downtown. There was no chair for Henry, who stood like a prisoner, arms at his sides. “We all have to do things we don’t want to in life. We do them for the people we love, or for the greater good. Sometimes we do them for our own good, without knowing it at the time. Do you like going to school every day?”

Henry hesitated, unsure if he was supposed to answer. “No.”

“No, but you understand it’s for your own good. Your mother and I have good reasons for wanting you and Arlene to take lessons, so I suggest you make the best of it.”

Henry wanted to ask if he’d ever had to take piano lessons, but there was no point extending the pantomime. He’d paid his debts to all parties, and he was getting what he wanted. “Yes, sir,” he said, penitent, shook his father’s hand to seal the deal, and he was free.

That winter he lived to be with Miss Friedhoffer. The keenness she brought to the sky at dusk as he and Arlene waited for the trolley, the evening star caught in the wires. For Christmas he gave her a tin of cookies he’d iced himself and a card he’d drawn of a tannenbaum with Merry Christmas written in German. Für Fraulein Friedhoffer, he printed. He still didn’t know her first name.

For his recital piece, she chose Schumann’s “Spring Song,” whose loping tempo Henry struggled to control. He practiced extra after school, which pleased his mother. She wandered in from the kitchen with a dish towel and stood in the doorway, praising him each time he foundered. “It sounds wonderful,” she said, but she was his mother. He knew it wasn’t good enough. He needed to be perfect, and set the metronome swinging again.

Her name was Sabine. It was in the recital program, right beside his. She’d braided her hair for the occasion, and wore a sequined black gown as if she were going to perform. Backstage, in his church clothes, poring over his sheet music, he heard the murmuring of the crowd. The youngest students went first. In the past Henry had laughed at their mistakes; now he understood how cruel he’d been. One girl dropped note after note and returned in tears. Another stopped in the middle of a Chopin etude, lost, and had to be rescued by her teacher. Henry was next.

He’d never played for an audience before, and when Miss Friedhoffer finished her introduction and he walked out of the wings into the blinding lights, the applause startled him. It faded before he reached the bench, leaving just his footsteps. In the darkness someone coughed. At church he could hide behind Father McNulty and all the pomp and pageantry. Here everyone was watching him.

His score rattled as he propped it on the stand. By rote, he drew himself upright and located middle C, relaxed his elbows and wrists and arranged his hands over the opening notes. With her voice in his head, he counted himself in.

At home he’d gotten so he could make it through the whole piece with just some small wobbles, but that was with the metronome. Now he had to keep time by himself, and while he and Miss Friedhoffer had worked on this, he hadn’t practiced enough. As soon as he started, he felt his left hand falling behind and began to rush. He tried to hold back, summoning her humming to slow the tempo, but his fingers seemed to move of their own accord, unconnected to him. From a remote vantage deep inside his head, he watched himself play. The notes were correct, if hurried, and rather than panic, a stunned wonder flooded him, and he left himself entirely, his thoughts looping away, out over the audience, picturing Miss Friedhoffer in her black dress, and his mother and father, the whole darkened auditorium. He was there but not there. He could hear the piano, faintly, as from another room, though it was right in front of him, his blurred reflection caught in its polished finish. His foot tapped the time. His fingers rose and fell mechanically, pressing on through the piece, the familiar hills and valleys. Come back, he told himself, as if he could will it, just as he reached the last bars. He lifted his hands and the final notes resolved into silence. For a second he thought he’d gotten lost and stopped at the wrong place, that there was another refrain, and then the crowd broke into applause. As if waking up, he turned to see Miss Friedhoffer smiling and nodding at him. He’d done it. It didn’t seem possible, yet he had. In his relief he forgot to take his bow and walked straight into the wings, where Arlene awaited her turn with the older girls.

“Lucky,” she said.

He didn’t argue. He knew he was.

She wasn’t, but their mother presented them both with roses anyway.

Afterward, in the gym, there was a reception with punch and cookies. It was here, in his daydreams, that Miss Friedhoffer rewarded him with a kiss. Instead, she gave him a certificate and a new book he was supposed to work on over the summer. On the cover, in her perfect cursive, she’d written his name. At home, weeks later, when September seemed impossibly far away, he traced the loops with a finger and remembered her hands guiding his.

Again, he vowed to practice, but once school let out, he was at the park all day. August they spent at Chautauqua, where there was no piano, and even Arlene fell behind. He was resigned to disappointing Miss Friedhoffer when, a week before school started, his mother told him he would have a new teacher.

Miss Friedhoffer had returned to Germany. They didn’t know anything more than that.

He would have Miss Segeti, from Hungary, with whom, in his grief, against his will, he would also fall in love.

In high school he would have crushes he worshipped and despaired of, and real girlfriends who introduced him to guilty ecstasies, yet he never forgot Miss Friedhoffer. During the war, as his division ground through a bombed-out town in Alsace, they rolled over an old upright smashed to kindling in the middle of a street, the keys strewn like teeth across the cobblestones, and he wondered what had become of her. She would have been in her late thirties by then. She might be dead, buried under the rubble of a church like the one in Metz, the stench making them cover their noses as they passed. At night, wherever the column stopped, women infiltrated their bivouac, going from tent to tent, often with hollow-eyed children in tow. He imagined her pulling back his flap and recognizing him, and while they all knew the Army had regulations against it, he resolved to somehow find a way to save her.

After the war, when he and Emily were first dating, she played for him in her sorority’s high-ceilinged front parlor, her posture and slender fingers recalling the stuffy practice room and the smell of chalk dust. He knew the tune from a dozen recitals.

“Mendelssohn,” he said, taking a seat on the bench beside her.

“Do you play?”

“Not really. I used to take lessons when I was a kid.”

“It’s your turn.”

“No, it’s been years.”

“Please? For me?”

He arranged his hands above the keys and tried to bring back “Spring Song.” It unraveled after a few bars. He was surprised he remembered it at all.

“Don’t stop,” she said, and picked up where he’d left off, slowly, so he could join in. He’d never told her, so how could she know, when he kissed her neck, what she’d completed?

One morning shortly after running the stop sign, he was on his hands and knees in the kitchen, his head ducked under the sink, trying to remove the grease trap, when he recognized from the stereo in the living room the piece’s familiar opening notes. He set down his wrench and used the counter to haul himself to his feet and went to tell Emily, but her chair was empty. Rufus, curled in a ball by the fireplace, raised his head for a second, then subsided.

Their piano sat in the corner, topped with his mother’s old metronome from Mellon Street. Neither Margaret nor Kenny had appreciated their lessons, and eventually Emily tired of fighting them. While the grandchildren banged away on it at Christmas, the rest of the year it sat unmolested save for Betty’s biweekly dusting.

How long had it been since they played together? They used to sing duets. Button up your overcoat, when the wind is free. Take good care of yourself, you belong to me. At their parties everyone would gather round and belt out old favorites. That was ages ago, when the children were little. The neighborhood had changed. Gene Alford was gone, and Don Miller, Doug Pickering. Of the old gang, he was the last man standing.

He lifted the hinged cover and folded it back with a clack, exposing the keyboard, pulled out the bench and drew himself upright. Rufus came over to investigate.

“Let’s see what the old guy’s got left.”

He flexed his knitted fingers, settled and played the first phrase. Still there, after all these years. There was more, and he followed along, amazed at the reach of memory. Miss Friedhoffer would be proud.

On her way downstairs with the laundry basket, Emily stopped as if shocked, making both of them turn to her. “What in the world are you doing?”

“Practicing,” he said.