BY EARLY NOVEMBER he had gotten a steady, contracted job playing downtown in the orchestra of the Hotel Sterling. The Sterling was an impressive venue, and its ballroom showed off the plasterwork of a Viennese opera house across its high ceilings. By the end of the month he managed to get August hired to play three nights a week for the supper-and-dance crowd until eleven o’clock, and each day after school they spent an hour going over new music, learning the grand sound of a sixteen-piece group playing tight fox-trot and one-step rhythms for the city’s smart dancers. During the first month, August had written quick and playful alto-sax duets into a dozen existing arrangements that earned the respect of the other musicians. Sam noticed a change in his own playing during the first two months at the Sterling, and decided it was working with August that made his fingers limber, his timing more on the mark.
He encouraged Lily to sing, but whatever spark she’d had for that was gone. She willingly played simple tunes on the oak Knabe every day, and he half expected to come home and find her working patiently through a more complicated fox-trot. What he did hear as he was coming up the walk one afternoon was a simple Chopin waltz. The piano bench had come loaded with a beginner’s set of classical music, and Lily treated the pages as her private treasure. The simplest Bach pieces soon began coming together under her fingers. When August pointed out the classical structure of piano rags, she started to practice a few basic ones, and “Dill Pickles” mixed with the first Bach Two-Part Invention in her morning sessions.
One day in mid-February of 1923 he handed Linda an envelope full of five-dollar bills for the month’s household expenses, and she took it and pressed it against her stomach.
“You might have to start including an extra fiver.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m pregnant.”
He pulled her close. “You can have whatever I’ve got.”
“I know.”
“Don’t worry about anything. We’re doing swell.”
Lily walked in leading wobbly Christopher by the hand and looked up at them. “Why’re you hugging?”
He put a hand on top of her braided hair. “You’re going to get a new sister or brother, kiddo.”
She gave them each in turn a distant look, then dropped Christopher’s hand and walked out of the room without a word.
“So, it’s like that,” Linda said. “It’s going to take years.”
He stepped back and looked into the other room, where Lily sat holding a doll on the piano bench. It was an old doll dressed in seersucker. “She’s ours now.”
“She might understand it, but she doesn’t feel it. You of all people should know.”
“What?”
“Can you speak German to her? Are you a cheerleader for smart and funny music who can make her love singing so much she couldn’t imagine doing anything else?”
LATE SUMMER of 1923 saw the birth of Lisette, fair-skinned with a healthy shock of fine black hair. Because he was home now, he could hold the child every morning and watch her blossom day by day through the subtle changes: the strengthening of her eyes, the discovery of her own fingers. He had missed much of this with Christopher, and giving her her afternoon bottle was a daily marker that made him feel even more of a father. He bought a camera and recorded the first smiles, the first time she chose a toy and grabbed it up, and as he reviewed the photographs taken over the spread of months, he was always surprised at where she’d started and how much she’d changed.
Christopher was a year and a half when Lisette was brought home, and though he looked up to August and tolerated Lily’s bossing, he seemed to sense the blood bond with his sister, and when she was in Sam’s lap, he wanted up on the other knee. When he was two, Sam found him on the bedroom floor, holding one of Lisette’s baby books upside down, pretending to read to her. He motioned for Linda to come out of the kitchen and see.
“They’re just playing,” Linda said. Then she watched his eyes. “It’s what it’s like between brothers and sisters. It’s what you missed, honey, and now you can see it. All you want.”
It was a blossoming year for August as well, who earned high marks in a school that was full of musicians, rawboned German kids playing accordions and Italians with their clarinets and drums, and when he was playing in the Sterling orchestra, the other musicians watched him during his solos, his animation and precision building fire under their own notes. He kept getting taller and began smoking cigarettes, but when Sam saw him slip a silver flask into his jacket one evening, he demanded that he hand it over. Though the boy was sullen about it for a few days, there was no rift between them that couldn’t be bridged by the music.
Lily, though, by her fifth birthday had become an island unto herself. Through her sixth and seventh Sam taught her, treated her as his own, and paid for lessons when it became clear that she was an artist rising beyond what he knew. Sometimes when she was practicing, he would sit beside her and take over the left hand. Another child might have looked up and smiled, scooted closer or moved away to make room, but Lily treated him as if he were an anonymous brown sparrow that had landed on her bench, and she kept her eyes on the music, stretching her growing fingers out to the sharps next to his hand, but never touching him.
His own children were slobbering babies crawling over him like puppies, and he took his time with them, but they needed no convincing that they were part of his life. Lily went wherever the family went, downtown for doughnuts, to church, out to the lake for a picnic and a swim. She played with the younger children and cared for them, but at any idle moment she would seem to be elsewhere in her thoughts, separate, more like a visiting child than a member of the family. Watching her, Sam would feel a subtle lack of connection. He was making decent money, August was contributing half his salary to the family, and things, he realized, were good for him. Really good. But sometimes when he looked into Lily’s blue eyes, he knew he’d never really found her.
One night, when she was six, he was reading her a bedtime story and noticed she wasn’t paying attention. “What you thinking about?”
“My parents.”
“What about them?”
“I’m praying for them.” She turned her sharp eyes on him. “Do you pray for your family?”
He looked away, embarrassed. “You want to finish this story?”
“I heard it already.” She turned toward the wall, but he knew her eyes were still open.
OVER TIME, Sam settled into the rhythms of work and home, his salary covering food, rent, and all the other expenses of a family of six, but there was seldom much left over to place in savings. His life was running in a straight line with no surprises, and he was glad, as he’d had enough of them. Then, in October 1926, Linda handed him a letter postmarked from Lyon, France, addressed in an unassuming scrawl.
He looked up from his newspaper. “What’s this?”
His wife shrugged. “It was in with the rest of the mail. Who do you know in France?”
He tore the letter open and inside were five pages written in sound English, and by the end of the first sentence he knew who it was from and sat straight up in his kitchen chair, holding the pages in both hands. It was signed Amélie Melançon. She was now eighteen and studying to become a teacher. She hadn’t been able to write him before because she’d been displaced for a long time and hadn’t lived at any permanent address until now. She’d stayed in her abandoned village for three months, then moved through a series of orphanage schools that American relief organizations had set up.
“Who’s it from?” Linda turned from where she was cutting up onions for the noon meal.
“That little girl I injured in France.”
“My God. What’s she say?”
“She wanted to thank me.”
“For what? Blowing her finger off?” She banged a spoon on the edge of her skillet.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was something I told her? Who knows? Anyway, she seems to be surviving all right.”
Her sentences were densely packed with both information and feeling, painstakingly composed. He read the letter through three times. Near the end she wrote:
When I think of that final blast, I marvel that it was followed by a messenger who tried to comfort me. I think often that is the way it ought to be. If each artillery shell had an escort, each bullet, each aerial bomb was followed by a soldier who would arrive and look around and ask “Is everyone all right? How can I help?” then war would not last so long or be so bad. When I look at my right hand today, I could feel sorry to be maimed, but instead I have nine reasons for gratitude. Monsieur Chanceux, if you had not blown apart my house, I might have starved or lost heart. I’ve learned to take the good with the bad and want to thank you again, not for the explosion, but for your wonderful visit.
That night the boat whistles down on the riverfront moaned through the fog, keeping him awake, so he got out of bed and planned the letter he’d write back. He would tell her how often he’d worried about her over the years, and about how his life had veered so far away from where he thought it would go. He sat there at the kitchen table until one o’clock, then returned to bed and dreamed he was in France again, walking down a frozen road in a feathery snowfall. He came to a plastered house with a thatch roof and left the lane to knock at its door. Amélie answered, still eleven years old, and held out her hand. He took it slowly, his forefinger joining the place where her little finger had been, settling there as if it completed her-then he woke up, startled at her touch still trembling on his skin. He turned on the bedside light.
“What is it?” Linda said.
He stared at his right hand and rubbed it with his left. “I was having a dream.”
She yawned and turned toward him. “What about?”
He opened his mouth, but he couldn’t turn such a dream into words. Finally he said, “About coming full circle.”