The Stolen Child (28 page)

I knew. That man had what had been intended for me. The robber of my name, stealer of my story, thief of my life: Henry Day.

•                    CHAPTER 33                    •

I
had been one of them. My son had met one face-to-face on the other side of the country, and there was no telling to what lengths they would go to follow us. The changelings had come for Edward that night years before, and by going downstairs I had scared them off. But they would be back. They were watching us, waiting for my son. He would not be safe as long as they prowled near our home. Edward would not be safe with them in the world. Once they fixed on a child for the change, he was as good as gone. I could not let Edward from my sight, and took to locking our doors and latching our windows every evening. They circled around my imagination, infected my rest. The piano offered my sole relief. By composing, I hoped to steady my sanity. False start followed false start. I struggled to keep those two worlds separate.

Fortunately, I had Tess and Edward to keep me grounded. A delivery truck pulled into our cul-de-sac on my birthday, and Edward, at the window, shouted, “It’s here, it’s here!” They insisted that I remain in the bedroom with the shades drawn until my gift could be brought into the house, and I dutifully complied, mad with love at my son’s jumpy exuberance and Tess’s sexy, knowing smile. On the bed in darkness, I closed my eyes, wondering if I deserved such love in return, worrying that it might be stolen should the truth ever be revealed.

Edward bounded up the stairs and hammered on the closed door. Grabbing my arm with his two small hands, he pulled me to the studio. A great green bow stretched across the door, and with a curtsey, Tess presented me with the scissors.

“As mayor of this city,” I intoned, “I’d like my distinguished son to join me in the honors.” We cut the ribbon together and swung open the door.

The small organ was not new or elaborate, but it was beautiful from the love given. And it would prove enough for me to approximate the sounds I was after. Edward fiddled with the stops, and I took Tess aside and asked how she could afford such a luxury.

“Ever since San Francisco,” she said, “or maybe since Czechoslovakia, I’ve been wanting to do this for you. A penny here, a dollar there, and a woman who drives a hard bargain. Eddie and I found it for sale at an old church up in Coudersport. Your mom and Charlie put us over the top, you should know, but we all wanted you to have it. I know it’s not perfect, but—”

“It’s the best gift—”

“Don’t worry about the cost. Just play the music, baby.”

“I gived my allowances,” Edward said.

I embraced them both and held tight, overcome by fortune, and then I sat down and played from Bach’s
The Art of the Fugue
, lost again to time.

Still enamored with the new machine days later, I returned with Edward from kindergarten to an empty and quiet house. I gave him a snack, turned on
Sesame Street
, and went to my studio to work. On the organ keyboard sat a single sheet of folded paper with a yellow sticky note affixed to the surface. “Let’s discuss!” she had scribbled. She had found the passenger list with the names of all the Ungerlands, which I had hidden and locked up among my papers; I could only imagine how it wound up in Tess’s hands.

The front door swung open with a screech and banged shut, and for a dark moment the thought danced through my mind that they had come for Edward. I dashed to the front door just as Tess inched her way into the dining room, arms laden with groceries. I took a few bags to lighten her load, and we carried them into the kitchen and danced around each other in a pas de deux, putting food away. She did not seem particularly concerned about anything other than the canned peas and carrots.

When we were done, she brushed imaginary dust from her palms. “Did you get my note?”

“About the Ungerlands? Where did you get the list?”

She blew her bangs out of her eyes. “What do you mean, where did I get it? You left it on the sideboard by the phone. The question is: Where did
you
get it?”

“In Cheb. Remember Father Hlinka?”

“Cheb? That was nine years ago. Is that what you were doing? What possessed you to investigate the Ungerlands?”

Total silence gave me away.

“Were you that jealous of Brian? Because honestly, that’s a little crazy, don’t you think?”

“Not jealous, Tess. We happened to be there, and I was simply trying to help him trace his family tree. Find his grandfather.”

She picked up the passenger list and her eyes scanned it to the end. “That’s incredible. When did you ever talk to Brian Ungerland?”

“This is all ancient history, Tess. I ran into him at Oscar’s when we were engaged. I told him we were going to Germany, and he asked me if I had the time could I stop by the National Archives and look up his family. When I didn’t find them there, I thought maybe his people were from someplace else, so I asked Father Hlinka when we were in Cheb. He found them. No big deal.”

“Henry, I don’t believe a word you’re saying.”

I stepped toward her, wanting to enfold her in my arms, desperate to end the conversation. “Tess, I’ve always told you the truth.”

“But why didn’t Brian just go ask his mother?”

“His mother? I didn’t know he had a mother.”

“Everyone has a mother. She lives right here in town. Still does, I think. You can tell her how jealous you were.”

“But I looked her up in the phone book.”

“You’re kidding.” She crossed her arms and shook her head. “She remarried years ago when Brian was in high school. Let me think. Her name is Blake, Eileen Blake. And she’d remember the grandfather. He lived till he was a hundred, and she used to talk about that crazy old man all the time.” Giving up, she headed for the staircase.

“Gustav?” I shouted after her.

She looked over her shoulder, scrunched up her face, found the name in her memory. “No, no         .         .         .         Joe. Crazy Joe Ungerland is Brian’s grandfather. Of course, they’re all crazy in that family, even the mother.”

“Are you sure we’re not talking about Gustav Ungerland?”

“I’m going to start calling you Crazy Henry Day.         .         .         .         You could have asked me all about this. Look, if you’re so interested, why don’t you go talk to Brian’s mother? Eileen Blake.” At the top of the stairs, she leaned over the railing, her long blonde hair falling like Rapunzel’s. “It’s sweet you were so jealous, but you have nothing to worry about.” She flashed her crooked smile and set free my worries. “Tell the old girl I said hello.”

B
uried to her neck in fallen leaves, she stared straight ahead without blinking, and the third time I passed her I realized she was a doll. Another had been lashed with a red jump rope to a tree trunk nearby, and dismembered arms and legs poked up at odd angles from the long, unmowed grass. At the end of a string tied to a chokecherry limb, a head hung and rotated in the breeze, and the headless body was stuffed into the mailbox, anticipating Saturday’s postman. The masterminds behind this mayhem giggled from the porch when I stopped the car in front of their house, but they looked almost catatonic as I walked up the sidewalk.

“Can you girls help me? I seem to be lost,” I said from the bottom step. The older girl draped a protective arm across her sister’s shoulder.

“Is your mommy or daddy home? I’m looking for someone who lives around here. Do you know the Blakes’ house?”

“It’s haunted,” said the younger sister. She lacked two front teeth and spoke with a lisp.

“She’s a witch, mister.” The older sister may have been around ten, stick-thin and raven-haired, with dark circles around her eyes. If anyone would know about witches, it was this one. “Why do you want to go see a witch, mister?”

I put one foot on the next step. “Because I’m a goblin.”

They both grinned from ear to ear. The older sister directed me to look for a turn before the next street corner, a hidden alleyway that was really a lane. “It’s called Asterisk Way,” she said, “because it’s too small to have a real name.”

“Are you going to gobble her up?” the smaller one asked.

“I’m going to gobble her up and spit out the bones. You can come by on Halloween night and make yourself a skeleton.” They turned and looked at each other, smiling gleefully.

An invasion of sumac and overgrown boxwood obscured Asterisk Way. When the car began to scrape hedges on both sides, I got out and walked. Half-hidden houses were scattered along the route, and last on the left was a weathered foursquare with
BLAKE
on the mailbox. Obscured by the shrubs, a pair of bare legs flashed in front of me, racing across the yard, and then a second someone rustled through the bushes. I thought the horrid little sisters had followed me, but then a third movement in the brush unsettled me. I reached for my car keys and nearly deserted that dark place, but having come so far, I knocked on the front door.

An elegant woman with a thick mane of white hair swung open the door. Dressed simply in crisp linen, she stood tall and erect in the doorway, her eyes bright and searching, and welcomed me into her home. “Henry Day. Any trouble finding the place?” New England echoed faintly in her voice. “Come in, come in.”

Mrs. Blake had an ageless charm, a physical presence and manner that put others right at ease. To gain this interview, I had lied to her, told her that I had gone to high school with her son Brian and that our class was organizing a reunion, tracking down classmates who had moved away. At her insistence, we chatted over a lunch she had prepared, and she gave me the full update on Brian, his wife and two children, all that he had accomplished over the years. Our egg-salad sandwiches lasted longer than her report, and I attempted to steer the conversation around to my ulterior motive.

“So, Mrs. Ungerland         .         .         .”

“Call me Eileen. I haven’t been Mrs. Ungerland for years. Not since my first husband passed away. And then the unfortunate Mr. Blake met with his strange accident with the pitchfork. They call me ‘the black widow’ behind my back, those awful children.”

“A witch, actually         .         .         .         I’m so sorry, Eileen. About both your husbands, I mean.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be. I married Mr. Blake for his money, God rest his soul. And as for Mr. Ungerland, he was much, much older than I, and he was         .         .         .” She pointed to her temple with a long, thin finger.

“I went to Catholic elementary school and only met Brian in ninth grade. What was he like growing up?”

Her face brightened, and she stood up so quickly that I thought she would topple over. “Would you like to see pictures?”

At every stage of his life—from the day he was born through grade school—Brian Ungerland looked as if he could be my son. His resemblance to Edward was uncanny, the same features, posture, even the way they ate corn on the cob or threw a ball. As we paged through the album, my conviction increased with each image.

“Brian used to tell me pretty wild family stories,” I said. “About the Ungerlands, I mean, the German ones.”

“Did he tell you about Opa Josef? His grandpa Joe? Of course, Brian was still a baby when he passed away, but I remember him. He was a crazy loon. They all were.”

“They came over from Germany, right?”

She sat back in her chair, sorting through her memories. “It is a sad, sad story, that family.”

“Sad? In what way?”

“There was Crazy Joe, my father-in-law. He lived with us when we were first married, ages ago. We kept him in a room off the attic. Oh, he must have been ninety, maybe one hundred years old, and he would rant and rave about things that weren’t there. Spooks, things like that, as if something were coming to get him, poor dear. And muttering about his younger brother, Gustav, claiming that he wasn’t really his brother at all and that the real Gustav had been stolen away by
der Wechselbalgen.
Changelings. My husband said it was because of the sister. If I remember, the sister died on the passage over from Germany, and that plunged the whole family into grief. And they never recovered. Even Josef, still imagining spirits after all those years.”

The room began to feel unusually warm, and my stomach churned. My head hurt.

“Let me think, yes, there was the mama, and the papa, another poor man. Abram was his name. And the brothers. I don’t know anything about the older one; he died in the Civil War at Gettysburg. But there was Josef who was a bachelor until he was pushing fifty, and then there’s the idiot brother, the youngest one. Such a sad family.”

“Idiot? What do you mean, idiot?”

“That’s not what they call it nowadays, but back then, that’s what they said. They went on and on about how wonderfully he could play the piano, but it was all a trick of the mind. He was what they would call an idiot savant. Gustav was his name, poor child. Could play like Chopin, Josef claimed, but was otherwise quiet and extremely introverted. Maybe he was autistic, if they had such a thing back then.”

The blood rushed to my head and I began to feel faint.

“Or maybe highly strung. But after the incident with the so-called changelings, he even stopped playing the piano and completely withdrew, never said another word for the rest of his life, and he lived to be an old man, too. They say the father went mad when Gustav stopped playing the music and started to let the world just drift right by. I went out to see him once or twice at the institution, poor dear. You could tell he was thinking something, but Lord only knows. As if he went off to live in his own little world. He died when I was still a young newlywed. That was about 1934, I think, but he looked older than Moses.”

She bent over the photo album and flipped through to the front of the book. She pointed to a middle-aged man in a gray fedora. “There’s my husband, Harry—that’s crazy Joe’s son. He was so old when we married, and I was just a girl.” Then she pointed to a wizened figure who looked as if he was the oldest man in the world. “Gustav.” For a brief moment, I thought that would be me, but then I realized the old man in the photograph was no relation at all. Beneath him there was a scratched image of an elderly woman in a high collar. “
La belle dame sans merci.
Gone well before my time, but were it not for his mother holding things together, that would have been the end of the Ungerlands. And then we wouldn’t be sitting here today, would we?”