Peter takes a leave from the museum to stay home and raise his infant girl. When Maddy returns from work each night to swallow up Sara, Els fusses. Careful; you’re scaring her. Wash your hands first!
The sea slug learns to locomote, shoving herself across the floor on four floppy limbs. Her lips burble and whir, like her mother’s humming in embryo. Peter takes his girl everywhere, in a papoose strapped across his chest. He sings to her all day long. He sings her to sleep each night, as she chants along and reaches for the pitches where they float in the air. “Hot Cross Buns” and “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider”: What more music could a person ever need?
From the start, she’s her own creature. Everything goes in her mouth. What can’t be eaten is there only to test her will. And Sara won’t be thwarted. She’s born a conductor, and the world is her orchestra. She cues the giant adults with her index finger: You: get over here! Me: over there! Life is a puzzle to shift and slide until the solution, so clear already in this infant’s mind, comes free.
Her parents find the bossy Von Karajan game hilarious, the first few hundred times. Then exhausting. Then a little scary. One tough night, after a two-hour epic bedtime war of attrition, Peter and Maddy lie slumped against each other, wasted zombies. The air is stained with baby reek — spit-up and talcum. Peter gazes up at the plaster-cracked ceiling, an alternate notation system he can’t read.
She has a will.
Maddy flops backward on the bed. And she always finds a way.
Plays me like a Strad.
Me, too. How’d she learn that so fast?
Look at us. Remember when the hardest thing in the world was writing a grant?
Maddy breathes out, her soubrette long gone. Not the life you were hoping for, is it?
No, Peter agrees, a little surprised. It’s far more.
”But my lamps were blown out in every little wind. And lighting them, I forget all else again.” (Tagore)
He starts to write again. A scribbled gesture one day, then a theme, then a few measures. Over several months, he sketches a short scherzo for small ensemble. In the wilds of stay-at-home fatherhood, music changes. His little tricks and signatures soften and expand. He’ll sit working at the electric piano in the corner of the bedroom while his daughter plays on the other side of the wall, rapping at her tiny xylophone, imitating him, chanting the pitchless pitches of infancy.
He crosses over into her room, and she blooms. She slaps the mallet on the shiny metal keys in ecstasy.
What are you saying, Sary-bear?
The name makes her rap faster, gladder. The keys ring out — red, purple, sea-green.
What’s that? Say it again!
She shrieks and strikes at all the keys in the rainbow.
Wait. I know! You’re saying. .
He helps her hold the mallet. They touch the keys together in the magic order. He sings.
There once was a girl named Sar-a!
She laughs and grabs her hand free, hits the keys that she’s already hearing.
She comes from the present er-a!
She hums hard, whacking as many keys as she can reach.
The future had better beware-a!
Yes, she screeches: That’s it. That’s exactly what I’m saying.
He goes back into his bedroom, to his own keyboard, where he steals from her, those scattered fa-do-sol-la fragments of deep origin. She toddles in, tries to help, pushes keys for him. No, darling, he says. This is daddy’s piece. But it isn’t, really. Everything is hers.
By day’s end, he has the start of a new berceuse, which he tests on her at bedtime. She’s the only hearer the piece may ever have. Who else would listen to such a thing? It’s too wild for the billion lovers of radio tunes, too blissful for the handful who need their music recherché.
But his daughter likes the song, and she’s all the audience he needs. Sara is his experiment in what the ear might come to hear, when raised on sounds from a happy elsewhere. She giggles at his sudden melodic turns. Her face crinkles in puzzled glee. Her turn now to ask him: What are you saying? But it’s only music on a summer’s evening, even as a bouncy ballpark organ floats into the window, blown through the air from Fenway, the bat’s crack, the distant whispered roar of a crowd, and a berceuse that leaves the saucer-eyed girl squealing in primal delight.
Outside the apartment, there are gas lines, wildfire inflation, the Middle East heading to Armageddon again. But inside, their days bring the real dramas. A cough. A fever. A fall against the coffee table that makes her bite through her lower lip. Two short years ago, he wanted to write music that changed what music was. Now he just wants to keep his daughter from changing too much, too fast.
Pushing Sara’s stroller through the Victory Gardens, Els sees with terrible clarity the hubris of his twenties. He can’t for his life imagine why he ever signed on for the full Faust ride. For years, he’s struggled to write something thorny and formidable, as if difficulty alone ensured lasting admiration. Now he sees that what the world really needs is a lullaby simple enough to coax a two-year-old to lay down her frantic adventure each night for another eight hours.
On the playground near the art museum, Sara stands and chants to the sky: “This Old Man.” The words are babble, the rhythm rough, and the melody little more than a crayon smear. But to Els, the old man is as recognizable as God. Rebelling is itself a passing fashion, as fragile as any. Hemlines rise and fall, but the present is forever convinced it has found the Tailor’s pattern. The manifestos of Peter’s twenties — the movements and lawless experiments, the crazy climbs up onto the barricades — feel like a tantrum now, like his daughter refusing to take her nap. Who can say what the academy champions these days? Els has been away too long to know. But he knows that cool will give way to warm, form to feeling, as surely as a leading tone tilts forever toward the tonic. Music cut from new whole cloth? No such material. The emperor will always be as naked as a jaybird, as nude as Sara slapping the waves of her bath, shrieking those patty-cake melodies she makes up on the spot.
The girl is in love with music. At four, she blossoms with solfeggio. By four and a half, she stumbles through the Mozart Sonatina in C with what strikes her besotted father as real feeling. She plays for him, improvised instruments: Horns made of rubber shower hose. Oatmeal boxes strung with rubber bands. The game must always go a certain way, and she never gets tired of playing.
What am I saying, Daddy? she demands, and lays into the piano with every finger she has.
He listens. You’re saying, “Okay, Mom; I’ll eat green food.”
Yes! Maddy calls from the kitchen.
No! Sara shouts, and tries more furious chords.
I know! You’re saying, “I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”
Wrong! she says. Try again! And her tune goes as frantically jagged as anything Els has written.
Wait, he says, tipping his head to hear. Keep going. I almost have it. You’re saying, “I’m loved, and life is good!”
The music collapses, suddenly bashful. She turns her face away from him, her mouth crumpled in a shy maybe.