Free The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue Page A

the girls’ toys or barked his shin on the piano bench as he passed. Weather permitting, he worked outdoors every weekend, replacing shutters, painting the house, rewiring the chicken coop. He was absent from the hearth, unwilling to listen. With Mary and Elizabeth, he played the doting father, still dandling them on his knees, fussing over their curls and dresses, fawning at the latest primitive drawing or Popsicle-stick hut, sitting down at the table for tea parties and the like. But he regarded me coldly, and while I cannot read minds, I suspect he felt at odds with my passion for music. Maybe he felt art corrupted me, made me less a boy. When we spoke, he would chastise me for a neglected chore or chide me for a less than perfect grade on a test or essay.
    As he drove me home from the trolley station one Saturday, he made an effort to engage and understand. On the radio, a football game between the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame and Navy unfolded. One of the teams scored a touchdown in a spectacular fashion.
    “How about that? Did you hear that?”
    I looked out the window, tapping out with my right hand a melody on the armrest.
    “Do you even like football?” he asked.
    “I dunno. It’s okay.”
    “Do you like any sport at all? Baseball? Basketball? Would you like to go hunting someday?”
    I said nothing. The very thought of being alone with Billy Day and a shotgun frightened me. There are devils out in the woods. We let a few silent miles pass beneath us.
    “How’s come it’s nothing but the piano night and day?”
    “I like music. And I’m good.”
    “You are that, but honestly, did you ever stop to think you could try something else for a change? Don’t you know there’s more to life than music?”
    If he had been my true father, I would have been eternally disappointed in him. The man had no vision, no passion for life, and I was grateful that we were not actually related. The car passed through the shadows of trees, and the glass in the window darkened. I saw in my own reflection the mirrored image of Henry’s father, but I only appeared to be his offspring. Once upon a time, I had a real father. I could hear his voice:
“Ich erkenne dich! Du willst nur meinen Sohn!”
His eyes danced wildly behind his owlish spectacles, and then the phantom memory disappeared. I sensed Billy Day was watching me from the corner of his eye, wondering what on earth happened? How did I get this for a son?
    “I’m thinking that I’m starting to like girls,” I volunteered. He smiled and tousled my hair. He lit another Camel, a sure sign he was content with my answer. The subject of my masculinity never came up again.
    A basic truth had escaped by accident. Girls hovered on the surface of every situation. I noticed them in school, ogled them in church, played to them at every concert performance. As if they jumped from the shadows, girls arrived, and nothing was ever the same. I fell in love ten times a day: an older woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties in a gray coat on a gray street corner; the raven-haired librarian who came every Tuesday morning to buy a dozen eggs. Ponytailed girls jumping rope. Girls with charming accents. Girls in bobby socks and poodle skirts. In the sixth grade, Tess Wodehouse trying to hide her braces behind her smiles. Blondie in the funny pages; Cyd Charisse; Paulette Goddard; Marilyn Monroe. Anyone curved. Allure goes beyond appearances to the way they grace the world. Some women propel themselves by means of an internal gyroscope. Others glide through life as if on ice skates. Some women convey their tortured lives through their eyes; others encircle you in the music of their laughter. The way they become their clothes. Redheads, blondes, brunettes. I loved them all. Women who flirt with you: where’d you get such long eyelashes? From the milkman. Girls too shy to say a word.
    The best girls, however, were those who liked music. At virtually every performance, I could pick out from the