The Stolen Child

by Keith Donohue

  “But the fellow falling asleep in the armchair? If I try hard, I can recall my father’s face.”

  “Might as well be anyone. Or no one at all.”

  “And the baby?”

  “They’re all one to me. A bother with no teeth but all the time hungry. Can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t share a smoke. You can have them. Some say a changeling’s best bet is a baby—there’s less to learn—but that’s moving backward across time. You should be going forward. And heaven help us if we ever had a baby to look after for a whole century.”

  “I do not want to steal any child. I just wonder whose baby that is. What happened to my father? Where is my mother?”

  To make it through the cold season, we nicked ten blankets and a half-dozen children’s coats from the Salvation Army store, and we ate small meals, subsisting mainly on weak teas brewed from bark and twigs. In the dull light of January and February, we often did not stir at all, but sat alone or in clumps of two or three, dripping wet or stone cold, waiting for the sun and the resumption of our lives. Chavisory grew stronger by and by, and when the wild onions and first daffodils appeared, she could take a few steps with bracing assistance. Each day, Speck pushed her one painful pace forward. When she was well enough for us to move, we fled that miserable dungheap of memories. Despite the risks, we found a more suitable hidden home near water, a mile or so north of the new houses. On windy nights, the noises from the families carried as far as our new camp, and while not as secluded, it afforded us adequate protection. As we dug in that first day, restlessness swept over me. Smaolach sat down beside me and draped an arm across my shoulders. The sun was falling from the sky.

  “Ní mar a síltear a bítear,” he said.

  “Smaolach, if I live to be a thousand years, I’ll never understand your old language. Speak English to me.”

  “Are you thinking of our friends, late and lamented? They’re better off where they are and not suffering this eternal waiting. Or is there something else on your mind, little treasure?”

  “Have you ever been in love, Smaolach?”

  “Once and only once, thank goodness. We were close, like every mother and son.”

  “Luchóg said my mother and father are gone.”

  “I don’t remember much of her. The smell of wool, maybe, and a harsh soap. Mint on the breath. A huge bosom upon which I laid my . . . No, that’s not right. She was a rake of a woman, all skin and bones. I don’t recall.”

  “Every place we leave, part of me disappears.”

  “Now . . . my father, there was a strapping fellow with a big black moustache curled up at the ends, or maybe it was my grandfather, come to think of it. Was a long time ago, and I’m not really sure where it was or when.”

  The darkness was complete.

  “That’s the way of life. All things go out and give way to one another. ’Tisn’t wise to be too attached to any world or its people.”

  Mystified by Smaolach’s philosophy, I tottered off to my new bed, turned over the facts, and looked at what crawled beneath. I tried to picture my mother and father, and could not recall their faces or their voices. Remembered life seemed as false to me as my name. These shadows are visible: the sleeping man, the beautiful woman, and the crying, laughing child. But just as much of real life, not merely read about in books, remains unknown to me. A mother croons a lullaby to a sleepy child. A man shuffles a deck of cards and deals a hand of solitaire. A pair of lovers unbutton one another and tumble into bed. Unreal as a dream.

  I did not confess to Smaolach the reason for my agitation. Speck had all but abandoned our friendship, withdrawing into some hard and lonesome core. Even after we made the move, she devoted herself to making our new camp feel like home, and she spent the sunlit hours teaching Chavisory to walk again. Exhausted by her efforts, Speck fell into a deep sleep early each night. She stayed in her burrow on cold and wet March days, tracing out an intricate design on a rolled parchment, and when I asked her about her drawing, she stayed quiet and aloof. Early mornings, I’d see her at the western edge of camp, clad in her warmest coat, sturdy shoes on her feet, pondering the horizon. I remember approaching her from behind and placing my hand on her shoulder. For the first time ever, she flinched at my touch, and when she turned to face me, she trembled as if shaking off the urge to cry.

  “What’s the matter, Speck? Are you okay?”

  “I’ve been working too hard. There’s one last snow on the way.” She smiled and took my hand. “We’ll steal off at the first flurries.”

  When the snow finally came days later, I had fallen asleep under a pile of blankets. She woke me, white flakes gathering in her dark hair. “It’s time,” she whispered as quietly as the delicate susurrus through the pines. Speck and I meandered along familiar trails, taking care to be hidden, and waited at the edge of the forest nearest the library for dusk to arrive. The snowfall obscured the sun’s descent, and the headlights of the few cars on the road tricked us into going too soon. We squeezed into our space only to hear footfall overhead as the librarians began to close for the night. To stay warm and quiet, we huddled beneath a blanket, and she quickly fell asleep against me. The rhythm of her beating heart and respiration, and the heat from her skin, quickly lulled me to sleep, too, and we woke together in pitch black. She lit the lamps, and we went to our books.

  Speck had been reading Flannery O’Connor, and I was wading in deep water with Wallace Stevens. But I could not concentrate on his abstractions, and instead stared at her between the lines. I had to tell her, but the words were inadequate, incomplete, and perhaps incomprehensible—and yet nothing else would do. She was my closest friend in the world, yet a greater desire for more had accompanied me around for years. I could not rationalize or explain it away for another moment. Speck was engrossed in The Violent Bear It Away. A bent arm propped up her head, and she was lying across the floor, her hair obscuring her face.

  “Speck, I have something to tell you.”

  “Just a moment. One more sentence.”

  “Speck, if you could put down that book for a second.”

  “Almost there.” She stuck her finger between the pages and closed the novel.

  She looked at me, and in one second my mood swung from elation to fear. “I have been thinking for a long, long time, Speck, about you. I want to tell you how I feel.”

  Her smile collapsed. Her eyes searched my relentless gaze. “Aniday,” she insisted.

  “I have to tell you how—”

  “Don’t.”

  “Tell you, Speck, how much I—”

  “Please, don’t, Henry.”

  I stopped, opened my mouth to form the words, and stopped again. “What did you say?”

  “I don’t know that I can hear that right now.”

  “What did you call me?”

  She covered her mouth, as if to recapture the escaped name.

  “You called me Henry.” The whole story unraveled in an instant. “That’s me, I’m Henry. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

  “I’m so sorry, Aniday.”

  “Henry. Not Aniday. Henry Day.”

  “Henry Day. You weren’t supposed to know.”

  The shock of the name made me forget what I had planned to tell her. Myriad thoughts and emotions competed in my mind. Images, solutions to assorted puzzles and riddles, and unanswered questions. She put down her book, crossed the room, and wound me in her embrace. For the longest time, she held on to me, rocking and soothing my fevered imagination with the lightest touch, caressing away the chaos.

  And then she told me my story. The story told in these pages was all she could remember. She told me what she knew, and my recollections of dreams, visions, and encounters filled in the rest. She told me why they kept it all secret for so long. How it is better not to know who you really are. To forget the past. Erase the name. All this revealed in a patient and heavenly voice, until everything that could be answered was answered, no desire left unsatisfied. The candles burned out, we had ta
lked so long, and into darkness the conversation lasted, and the last thing I remember is falling asleep in her arms.

  I had a dream that we ran away that night, found a place to grow up together, became the woman and the man we were supposed to be. In the dream, she kissed my mouth, and her bare skin slid beneath my fingertips. A blackbird sang. But in the morning, she was not where I expected her to be. In our long friendship, she had never written a single word to me, but by my side, where she should have been, lay a note in her handwriting. Every letter is etched on my mind, and though I will not give it all away, at the end she wrote, “Goodbye, Henry Day.”

  It was time for her to go. Speck is gone.

  • CHAPTER 29 •

  The first time I saw him, I was too frightened to say anything and too awestruck to touch him. He was not a freak or a devil, but perfect in every way, a beautiful boy. After the long wait to meet him, I found myself overcome by the sudden change, not so much his physical presence, his arrival after being hidden away, but the change in me to something more sublimely human. Tess smiled at my confusion and the look in my eyes as I beheld him.

  “You won’t break him,” she said.

  My son. Our child. Ten fingers, ten toes. Good color, great lungs, a natural at the breast. I held him in my arms and remembered the twins in their matching yellow jumpers, my mother singing to me as she scrubbed my back in the bathtub, my father holding my hand when we climbed the bleachers at an autumn football game. Then I remembered Clara, my first mother, how I loved to crawl under the billows of her skirts, and the scent of witch hazel on my father Abram’s cheek, his feathery moustache as he pressed his lips against my skin. I kissed our boy and considered the ordinary miracle of birth, the wonder of my wife, and was grateful for the human child.

  We named him Edward, and he thrived. Born two weeks before Christmas 1970, he became our darling boy, and over those first few months, the three of us settled into the house that Mom and Charlie had bought for us in the new development up in the woods. At first, I could not bear the thought of living there, but they surprised us on our second anniversary, and with Tess pregnant and the bills mounting, I could not say no. The house was larger than we needed, especially before the baby came, and I built a small studio, moving in the old piano. I taught music to seventh graders and ran the student orchestra at Mark Twain Middle School, and in the evenings and on weekends, when I didn’t have to mind the baby, I worked on my music, dreaming of a composition that evoked the flow of one life into another.

  For inspiration, I would sometimes unfold the photocopy of the passenger list and study the names. Abram and Clara, their sons Friedrich, Josef, and Gustav. The legendary Anna. Their ghosts appeared in fragments. A doctor listens to my heartbeat while Mother frets over his shoulder. Faces bend to me, speaking carefully in a language I cannot understand. Her dark green skirt as she waltzes. Tang of apple wine, sauerbraten in the oven. Through a frosted window, I could see my brothers approach the house on a winter’s day, their breath exploding in clouds as they share a private joke. In the parlor stands the piano, which I touch again.

  Playing music is the one vivid memory from the other life. Not only do I recall the yellowing keys, the elaborate twisting vines of the scrollwork music stand, the smoothness of the rosewood finish, but I can hear those tunes again, and feel the sensations he felt while playing—strike these keys, hear these notes resound from the depths of the machine. The combination of notes makes up the melody. Translate the symbols from the score to the corresponding keys, and keep the right time, to make this song. My one true link to my first childhood is that sensation of bringing the dream of notes to life. The song echoing in my head becomes the song resounding in the air. As a child, this was my way of unlocking my thoughts, and now, a century or more later, I attempted to create the same seamless expression through my composition, but it was as if I had found the key and lost the keyhole. I was as helpless as Edward in his preverbal life, learning to communicate my desires all over again.

  Being around our tiny speechless boy reminded me of that lost life and made me cherish the memories Edward created every passing day. He crawled, stood, grew teeth, grew hair, fell in love with us. He walked, he talked, he grew up in a moment behind our backs. We were, for a time, the perfect happy family.

  My sisters marred that ideal picture. Mary, who had a baby girl, and Elizabeth, who was expecting her first, were the initial ones to point out the curiosity. The extended family had gathered at my mother’s house for dinner. Edward was about eighteen months old, for I remember watching him carefully as he waddled up and down the porch steps over and over again. Charlie and the twins’ husbands watched the last few minutes of the game before dinner, and my mother and Tess guarded the hot skillets, so I was alone with the girls for the first time in ages, when one or the other led off with her unsolicited opinion.

  “You know, he looks nothing like you.”

  “And hardly a thing like her.”

  I looked at Edward as he pulled up leaves of grass and tossed them into the still air.

  “Look at his chin,” Liz observed. “Neither one of you has that cleft.”

  “And his eyes aren’t either of your two colors,” said Mary. “Green as a cat’s. He didn’t get those eyelashes from our side of the family. You have such adorable long eyelashes, yes, you do. Too bad he’s not a girl.”

  “Well, they’re not Wodehouse eyelashes either. Take a good look at Tess.”

  “All mascara.”

  “And the nose. No so much now, but later, you’ll see. That’s a beak on him, poor little man. Hope my child doesn’t get that nose.”

  “No Day ever had a nose like that.”

  “What are you two saying?” My voice was so loud, I startled my son.

  “Nothing.”

  “Kinda odd, don’t you think, that he doesn’t look like his parents?”

  At sunset my mother, Charlie, and I sat on the porch watching the moths dance, and the matter of Edward’s appearance arose again.

  “Don’t listen to those two,” my mother said. “He’s the spit and image of you, with maybe a little Tess around the eyes.”

  Uncle Charlie sucked on a pop bottle, burped softly. “The boy looks exactly like me. All my grandchildren do.” Eddie tottered across the floorboards and threw himself at Charlie’s legs, and finding his balance, he roared like a tiger.

  As he grew older, Edward looked more like an Ungerland than a Day, but I did my best to hide the truth. Maybe I should have explained all to Tess, and perhaps that would have been the end of my torment. But she bore the snide remarks about her son with grace. Days after his second birthday, we had Oscar Love and Jimmy Cummings over for dinner. After the meal, we fooled around with an arrangement that I had written hoping to interest a chamber-music quartet in the city. Of course, we were one player short, with George long gone in California. But playing with them again after a few years was easy and comfortable. Tess excused herself to go to the kitchen to check on a lemon meringue pie. When Edward noticed she was gone, he wailed from his playpen, banging his fists against the slats.

  “Don’t you think he’s getting a bit too big for that?” Oscar asked.

  “He can be a bit of trouble after dinner. Besides, he likes it there. Makes him feel safe.”

  Oscar shook his head and fished Edward from behind the bars, bounced him on his knees, and let him finger the keys of the clarinet. Seeing my single friends react to my son, I couldn’t help but feel that they were weighing their freedom against the allure of family. They loved the boy but were slightly frightened of him and all he represented.

  “Drawn to the stick,” Oscar said. “That’s one cool kid. You’ll want to stay away from the piano. Too heavy to carry around.”

  “Sure he’s yours?” Cummings asked. “He looks nothing like you, or Tess, for that matter.”

  Oscar joined the fun. “Now that you mention it . . . look at that split chin and those big eyes.”

  “C�
�mon guys, cut it out.”

  “Chill out,” Oscar whispered. “Here comes the old lady.”

  Tess delivered the dessert, oblivious to the turns of our conversation. I should have brought up my festering doubt, made a joke of it, said something in front of her, but I didn’t.

  “So, Tess,” Jimmy said, balancing his pie plate on his knee, “who do you think Eddie takes after?”

  “You have a speck of meringue at the corner of your mouth.” She picked up our son and held him in her lap, stroked his hair, and pressed his head against her breast. “How’s my little man?”

  Edward stuck his hand straight into the pie, pulled up a clump of yellow goo, and crammed it in his mouth.

  She laughed. “Just like his daddy.”

  Thank you, my love. She returned my smile.

  After the boys said good night and Edward lay sleeping in his crib, Tess and I washed the dishes together, staring out the kitchen window. The stars shone like pinpricks in the cold black sky, and the hot water in the sink, along with the roaring furnace, gave the room a steamy languor. I put down the tea towel and, from behind, wrapped my arms around her, kissed her damp warm nape, and she shivered.

  “I hope you didn’t get too mad about Jimmy going on about how Eddie doesn’t look so much like either one of us.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s creepy.”

  For a split second, I thought she suspected something was awry, but she spun herself around to face me and grabbed my face with her rubber gloves. “You worry about the strangest things.” She kissed me, and the conversation went elsewhere.

  A few nights later, Tess and I were asleep in bed, Edward down the hall in his room. She woke me by shaking my shoulder and speaking harshly in a sort of shouted whisper. “Henry, Henry, wake up. I heard noises downstairs.”

  “What is it?”

  “Would you listen? Someone’s down there.”

  I grumbled that it was nothing.

  “And I’m telling you, someone is in the house. Would you go check?”