Chapter 9 Tanglewood #2
Sophie and Lily cleared while Phoebe unpacked her violin and Wyatt adjusted his cello pin.
Then in the living room the two tuned together, Wyatt in a straight-backed chair, Phoebe on her feet, leaning like a sunflower.
“This is a fiddle tune, but we adapted it,” Wyatt said. “Boil Them Cabbage Down.”
The family were all sitting except for Lily standing at the kitchen door.
When Phoebe started playing, Lily forgot the sponge in her hand.
Phoebe’s fingers were flying, her bow weaving up and down.
Her eyes were on Wyatt the whole time, and when she took the melody he answered with a smile.
Phoebe doubled up her notes and Wyatt followed.
He sped up and she dashed after him. Pretty soon, they were racing, faster and faster until they tied at the end, lifting their bows to applause and laughter.
“What would you be boiling the cabbage for?” asked Sylvia.
“Soup?” Phoebe suggested.
“Holishkes?” mused Sylvia, thinking of stuffed cabbage. You boiled the leaves to wrap ground beef mixed with rice and minced onion.
“I don’t think so, Mom,” said Richard. “Wrong recipe.”
“How do you know?”
“Wrong culture.”
“Let’s have another,” Lew told the musicians.
They played “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and then “Ole Dan Tucker.” Wyatt sang the verses, his voice deep, his bow choppy under Phoebe’s filigree.
“Ole Dan Tucker was a fine old man. Washed his face in a frying pan. Combed his hair with a wagon wheel. Run away with a toothache in his heel.” When he came to the chorus, Wyatt nodded for everyone to join.
“Get out of the way for ole Dan Tucker. He’s too late to get his supper.
Supper’s over and dinner’s cooking. Ole Dan Tucker just astandin’ there lookin’. ”
Are they really my own cousins? Lily thought, as she stood there looking. Are they in my family? They are so happy.
They were both generous, but Wyatt especially.
He did not forget the dollhouse. He knelt on the floor and examined all the beds, the dressers and the tiny lamps, the potbelly stove and copper pans.
The stamp-sized cookbook Lily and Sophie had crafted themselves two years before.
One recipe for chocolate cake, one staple for a binding.
He said, “How did you write so small?” His own hands were huge; the fingertips on his left were notched from practicing.
It was a perfect afternoon, except that Sylvia decided they had to go to Tanglewood that evening.
“Noooo,” Lily mourned, as she and Sophie trudged upstairs to change.
In this family you couldn’t lie outside on the grass; you had to sit in chairs, while the orchestra performed for hours.
Just when you couldn’t take it anymore, a woman and a man and then another woman would stand and sing, and everyone would read translations in the program, like the High Holidays, on and on forever.
Sadly, the girls pulled on thin white cardigans and slipped their phones into their dress pockets.
They wore gold lockets from their grandmother because she liked to see them.
The lockets opened on tiny hinges, so you could fall in love and put a picture inside, but of course, both hearts were empty.
“Phoebe and Wyatt are coming.” Sophie tried to look on the bright side.
“They aren’t even in our section!” said Lily, who had been listening on the stairs. At such late notice, their grandmother couldn’t get seven seats together.
—
“No complaining,” Richard warned. He drove the girls, so he had a chance to lecture, while Lew drove everybody else. “And no phones.”
“What about your phone?” Sophie shot back from the passenger seat.
“Watch it,” he growled, by which he meant your tone, your attitude, your disapproving glances, the resentment you are learning from your mom, or from your friends.
But when he glanced in the rearview mirror, Sophie seemed hurt.
Lily looked shaken. Too much, he thought.
Too angry. Too many rules. And then with a pang, What am I doing?
I’m ruining their lives. Debra left me, he defended himself silently.
But in their words and in their eyes, the girls said, We don’t care who started it—which was what he always said to them.
Silently, the girls followed Richard to the gate where the others waved at them.
Of course, they were early because Lew insisted on being early for everything.
He always said, Why rush? Which meant you rushed at home and then you waited.
As for Sylvia, she liked to watch twilight settle on the grounds.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Sylvia looked out at the sweeping lawn.
“Yes,” Lew agreed as always, surveying the scene.
The picnickers were out with lawn chairs and checked tablecloths and champagne flutes and wicker baskets. The air was perfect, warm, but dry. This was not a humid, buggy evening.
“Look. Tablecloths,” Phoebe said to Wyatt.
The whole scene was so elegant. Phoebe had changed into an Indian gauze dress, and Wyatt wore a clean black T-shirt.
Like pilgrims they had washed the dust from their cracked sandals.
They had been busking for so long in parking lots and diners and on concrete steps. Now they were walking on lush grass.
Phoebe saw the tree first. It stood alone on the broad lawn, a great oak with many trunks, a grove unto itself. When she ran up, she could not tell whether the tree was several grown together, or whether it had split into this labyrinth of trunks and roots. “How wide is it?” she asked.
“Let’s reach around it in a human chain!
” said Wyatt, who had worked three summers at Eden Village Camp.
He took Phoebe’s hand on one side, and Lily’s on the other.
“Look how big it is. What do you think?” he asked Lily.
He meant, What do you think the circumference is?
But she could not guess. The world changed in all dimensions when he took her hand in his. “We need everybody!” he called out.
Not everybody joined. Sylvia and Lew and Sophie held hands, but Richard hung back to take pictures on his phone.
He caught Lily smiling and Sophie childlike again.
Lew reached for Phoebe. Sophie stretched her hand out to her grandmother.
Each to each in the cool evening light. The old wanting to be young, the young wanting to be older.
The tree standing in the center with so many trunks you couldn’t tell which was first and which was last.
Wyatt said, “Everybody reach around the tree. Okay, it’s five people around!”
“Is that an objective scientific measure?” asked Lew.
“Objective but unscientific,” Wyatt answered.
Richard was still taking pictures, even as the magic circle broke. If only there had been more time—but bells were chiming for the concert, and Sylvia started fussing that they would be late.
—
The concert began with a Mozart piano concerto that seemed to Lily like floral curtains rippling.
She sat between her dad and her sister, and she couldn’t move.
She was trapped in her chair listening to an endless melody.
Piano cascading. Orchestra chiming in. She would have been all right if she had known when the piece would end, but every time the musicians took a breath they started up again.
If Wyatt and Phoebe had been sitting with her, Lily could have watched them listen—but they had seats so far away they were invisible.
All Lily saw was the back of her grandparents’ heads.
Sophie’s head was down. Was she listening hard or sleeping?
Lily bent her own head to see if Sophie’s eyes were closed.
No. She was awake. Lily looked again, and that was when she realized her sister had her phone hidden in the folds of her dress. Sophie was peeking at her messages.
“You’re so busted,” Lily whispered, scandalized and envious.
Sophie pinched Lily’s arm.
“Ow!”
Immediately, Richard turned on them. “She was…” Lily began her whispered defense.
“She is such a…” Sophie said.
“Shh.” Richard cut them off.
Too late. Their grandmother whipped around. Someone else turned too—a stranger, pained and furious.
Sylvia glared at Richard and he heard her silent reproach. Do something. Make them stop. For shame. Because of course it was his fault his daughters did not know how to behave.
Even now, the girls were whispering, fighting quietly.
The stranger shushed them.
Lew turned, mouthing, Take them out.
In the pause between movements while the audience was coughing, Lily felt an iron hand on her thin shoulder. Sophie felt it too.
Their father frog-marched them into the night.
“You’re hurting me,” Lily pleaded.
Their dad propelled them across the lawn past picnickers and candles flickering. He marched them to the gate where you could still hear notes of the piano, cascading like beads onto a tile floor.
“Give me your phones.” Richard faced his daughters in the parking lot beside their car.
“Dad!” Sophie protested.
“Now.”
“I’m sorry,” she told him. Too late. He wrested the phone from Sophie’s hand.
Then he turned to Lily. She protested, “I wasn’t using mine!”
But he took it anyway. He did that thing he always did, punishing equally, even when it wasn’t fair.
“I didn’t do anything,” Lily protested. “I didn’t even touch my phone.”
Richard ignored her. “What is wrong with the two of you? Why can’t you sit and listen?”
They looked at him with pale faces, and Lily began to speak. “Because it’s…”
“What?”
In a small voice she said, “Boring.”
Then for a moment he did not know what to say.
He found the music boring too—but he couldn’t admit it.
In the war between children and adults he had pledged allegiance to the parental side.
“I don’t care if it’s boring,” he said at last. “Sitting at that concert is the one thing your grandmother asked you to do. Didn’t I tell you no phones? ”
The girls said nothing.
“Didn’t I?”
Their silence infuriated him.
“Get in the car.”
They got in and closed the doors and he leaned against his SUV and missed his children.
He missed the feeling they were really his.
He missed fatherhood, which was now a time-share.
He missed his whole life, and he thought, I was happy before all this.
It wasn’t true. He had not been happy, but he had been unhappy in a different way.
He took a deep breath and gazed at the drivers who stood outside their buses smoking. Then he opened his car door and took his seat.
He drove in silence, conscious of the girls, white and scared in the rearview mirror.
When they reached the house, he got out and the girls followed timidly.
He looked at his sad daughters and returned their phones.
Thanks, Dad, they said.
“I won’t take it out at a concert again,” said Sophie.
For a minute they stood with him, and he spoke softly.
“I’m sorry I lost my temper—but you embarrassed me!
” He knew from couples counseling that I’m sorry but is not the greatest apology.
You should just say I’m sorry period. But simply saying I’m sorry did not convey what he felt for his daughters. His fury and sympathy with them.
The girls climbed the stairs and hid up in their rooms while he sat on the porch scrolling on his phone until he saw Lew drive up with Sylvia, Phoebe, and Wyatt.
Richard was sure Sylvia would mention Sophie and Lily.
Then he would have to apologize and justify himself.
He might have to say, Look, they’re just kids.
They know nothing about Mozart, okay? He imagined saying, Yes, they were out of line but that’s not necessarily an indication of my parenting abilities.
This was an extreme situation! Also, you were the ones insisting on bringing them. But he did not need these retorts.
Walking up the porch steps, Sylvia did not mention the girls. Lew didn’t either. Everyone was talking about Schubert, in the second half. How the symphony began to build. How it kept you in suspense. “It’s got this great edge,” Wyatt was saying as they walked inside.
Phoebe said, “It’s like a cliff.”
“I wish you could have heard it,” Sylvia told Richard, mildly, as though she had forgotten why he’d left.
Wyatt was singing something for Lew, demonstrating the progression of the chords. The house was lively, and Lew was opening champagne.
“What a performance,” Lew said.
Only late at night, after a second and third bottle, did everybody go to bed. Lew and Sylvia went first, and then Richard retired to his room on the second floor.
Phoebe and Wyatt went up last of all. Phoebe stumbled on the stairs to the third floor, and Wyatt laughed softly, “You’re tipsy.”
“No, I’m not,” she countered, cozy and lightheaded.
“Hey, who is this?” Wyatt said when they reached the upper landing.
“Lily?” Phoebe peered at the little girl wrapped in her blanket. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been sitting here?”
Lily didn’t answer. Then she said, “A while.”
“You should sleep.”
“I know.”
“What’s wrong?” said Phoebe, but Wyatt darted her a look because they both knew. They had heard at intermission. “Have you tried counting something?”
“It doesn’t work,” said Lily.
“Yeah, it really doesn’t,” Wyatt agreed, as though he had been her age once too.
Phoebe started to say something else, but she couldn’t help yawning, and Wyatt kissed her shoulder. He said, “You should go to bed,” and she turned to go, but he stayed with Lily a moment longer. He did not forget her. “Listen,” he told Lily. “Go back to your room, and I’ll play for you.”
Phoebe paused on the landing to warn, “You’ll wake everybody up.”
“Just very quietly.” Wyatt spoke to Lily. “Go lie down, okay?” She didn’t answer, but she stood with her blanket draped around her shoulders. He said, “Lie in your bed and wait.”
She glanced back at him, and her look was wistful, almost disbelieving, but she did as he said. She padded to her room, slipped under the covers, and lay on her back, staring at the slanted ceiling.
No sound. For a long time, all was still, and then she heard heavy footsteps on the stairs.
Was Wyatt carrying his cello? Was he on the landing?
She heard him open his bedroom door and close it.
Then a murmur and soft tuning. And finally, his music—not like the bluegrass in the afternoon, or the cascading piano.
Music of the trees. The sound of leaves unfurling.
Richard heard it in his bedroom below and wondered, Why is he practicing now?
Sylvia heard it in her bed and said, “Lew? What is that?”
“Bach,” said Lew, mostly asleep. “Turn off the radio.”
But Lily heard vines growing all around her. Over and around her bed, they twined like thorny fairytale roses. She lay still with her eyes closed, surrounded by the woody sound, and she needed nothing. She missed no one. She was safe and dreaming. Hidden for a hundred years.