The Nobodies Album (29 page)

“You just have no clue,” he says. “The things you’re sorry for are not even close to the things you
should
be sorry for.”

And this is where I could get myself into trouble. Because it makes me mad. I feel defensive. I want to yell at him that I did my best. I want to yell until I cry and he feels guilty for upsetting me.

But I don’t. I keep my voice calm. “Fine, then. Let’s talk about it. I’m not a mind reader. Tell me what I should be sorry for.”

He looks at me steadily and speaks slowly and clearly, as if he’s reading aloud. “‘They were exactly the wrong two to die.’”

I look down at the table, resist the urge to cover my face with my hands. It’s only happened a few times that someone I’m speaking to has quoted my own writing to me, but my reaction always surprises me. There’s a jolt of something very close to shame, or maybe a better word would be “exposure.” It’s a moment of imbalance, the private made public, but only for one of us in the conversation. It’s like being caught stealing, or kissing someone you shouldn’t. And always, slapped face-to-face with my own choices about phrasing and cadence, I wonder if there’s a way I could have said it better.

So when Milo takes that line from
Tropospheric Scatter
, rips out the careful stitches I’d hoped would keep it in place, and lays it down before me, the sorrow I feel first is not for the pain I’ve caused him but for the imprecision of my own words.

Because it’s—okay, it’s a jarring line. It’s supposed to be shocking, it’s supposed to be something a parent might think privately but would never speak out loud. But it’s not as horrible as it sounds. What I meant, if we strip away the pretext of fiction and acknowledge that I was talking about my own family, was that I wasn’t up to the task of raising this particular child by myself. What I meant was, he deserved better, and if it had been Mitch who lived instead of me, he would have gotten it.

My career as a teacher of writing has been sporadic and not particularly enlightening for either me or my students. But it’s taught me something about talent and raw potential, and I’ve learned that the most damning epithet I can pin to a writer (only in my head—I’m more diplomatic on paper and in discussion) is “competent.” It means that the author is not completely without talent—it’s not the kind of ludicrously bad writing that you can dismiss entirely—but there’s no life to it, no spark. Everything’s right where it should be—here’s the characterization, here’s the shape of the narrative, here’s the climax—but it’s missing something vital. There’s a hopelessness to the idea of a competent writer. I’ve known bad writers who have gone on to become good ones, but I’ve never known a competent writer who was able to pull herself up above that ledge.

I was a good mother to Rosemary. To Milo—or at least so I believe most of the time—I was never more than competent.

There have never been any questions about whether I love Milo, whether I like the person he is, whether I respect and admire him and want him to succeed. And if I were to take a quiz in a magazine, ticking off boxes for all the quantitative criteria of motherhood, I’d probably earn a respectable score. Did I feed him and clothe him, soothe his nightmares, keep his body safe? Check. Take his secrets seriously, fight teachers who couldn’t see his talents? Cook food that he liked, make up stories I knew would make him laugh? Yes. All of it. I would die for him; I would go hungry so he could eat; I would accept physical pain in his place.

But children are people, right from the moment they’re born, and in every human relationship there’s a question of compatibility. It’s quite separate from the matter of love. It’s about fit and friction, the carpentry of daily interaction. Some joints dovetail easily, while others scrape at every contact.

But here’s what I failed to get into that sentence in
Tropospheric Scatter
, here’s the casualty of my provocative phrasing and my economy of eight words: being his mother stretched me and remade me, and I wouldn’t change anything about it. He was not the child I expected. But—and it took me years to understand this, maybe even until he’d almost disappeared from my life—he was the child I needed to have.

Milo’s waiting for me to answer, and when I try to double back over the path I’ve just followed in my mind, all I manage is, “I’m so sorry.” I pause for a long moment. “If I could rewrite it, I would.” I’m about to go on, to tell him the rest, but his expression stops me.

He’s leaning against the bookshelves, deflated but not so angry. He looks at me as if he’s searching for something but has no expectation of finding it. “It wouldn’t matter,” he says, shaking his head. “It wouldn’t change anything.”

He walks out of the room, leaving me by myself.

And I know. I know that he’s right.

•  •  •

My first novel—the one I wrote for ten years, the one that was never published, even after I’d had success with other books—was called
Hamelin
, and it was inspired by the story of the Pied Piper. There’s some evidence that the legend may be based on real events; it’s mentioned in the town chronicle as early as the thirteenth century, and a stained glass window from the same time period, now lost, is said to have shown a man in colorful clothing playing a flute, surrounded by children dressed in white, like angels. At this distance, no one knows if there was a real man who stole away the town’s children, to lead them on a crusade or slaughter them in the shadow of a mountain, but scholars think it’s unlikely. It may be that the Pied Piper is a symbolic figure, representing plague or landslide or one of the many other calamities that might empty the air of small voices. It’s also possible that in a time of starvation or crisis, a decision was made to send away the village’s weakest inhabitants. Or it may be that “children” doesn’t mean children at all but simply refers to a group of citizens—children of Hamelin—who left to find their fortune elsewhere. The one thing most historians agree on is that whatever happened, it probably had little to do with pest control; the rats didn’t enter the story until three hundred years later.

What interested me at the time—I began writing the book when I was newly married, shortly before I became pregnant with Milo—was not the story’s empty spaces but the vividness of the details that do remain. The street where the children were last seen, where even after seven hundred years visitors are asked not to sing or play music. The parents sitting in church, unaware that they’re living the last minutes of their life
before
. The number of children lost: one hundred and thirty. The date: the twenty-sixth of June.

Such rich material. And I had no idea what to do with it. I rewrote it more times than I can remember now, trying out different voices, different styles. But I couldn’t find a way in.

Thinking about Milo now, balanced as we are on the edge between regret and absolution, it occurs to me that in all that time, I barely considered a detail that belongs squarely in the center of the story. In many retellings there’s one child who remains in Hamelin after the others have gone. In some versions he’s deaf and can’t hear the music; in others he’s lame and falls behind in the procession. He’s the one who tells the adults what has happened, and he’s the one who complicates their grief. He’s the anomaly. The one who makes it a lie for them to say,
A man dressed in colorful rags came to town and took all our children away
.

What happened to that boy after the twenty-sixth of June? Was he cherished? Was he seen as a blessing? By his parents, maybe, though it’s likely they’d lost other children, and it wouldn’t be surprising if they sometimes wished they’d been allowed to keep one of the stronger ones instead. A son who could help with backbreaking work, a daughter who could keep the house. And in the festival of mourning that must have followed that day, those parents might have found themselves excluded, resented. How dare they weep when they were the only ones in all of Hamelin whose house held a sleeping boy every night?

But I didn’t mean to talk about the parents. I was thinking about the boy, left impossibly alone. Horrified, neglected, guilty. And maybe even jealous.

There have been times in the past eighteen years when I’ve thought about the parallels: the empty streets of Hamelin and the empty rooms of my house. There have been times when I’ve wondered—knowing it’s overblown and superstitious, but not able to dismiss it—whether it’s possible that by writing about one, I brought the other into being.

There’s no
Hamelin
in
The Nobodies Album
, no original ending and no new one. Since the novel was never published, I didn’t see the point of including it. But I wonder now if maybe this is the book I needed most to revisit. And for nobody’s eyes but my own.

Excerpt from
HAMELIN
By Octavia Frost
Unpublished, 1983–1992; one possible ending, of many

AFTERWARD

THE MOTHERS

Frau Körtig yelled because she couldn’t stand the quiet of her house. Frau Vogel was unaccustomed to washing clothes without anyone pulling at her skirt or splashing hands in the water. Frau Arbogast kept cooking too much food. Frau Millich refused to stop sewing linens for her daughter’s trousseau.

Frau Braun forgot to add sugar to the plum cake. Frau Schmitt grew so thin her husband was afraid he would crush her while they slept. Frau Koch had nightmares. Frau Finzel had visions of God.

Frau Maier gave birth to a boy three weeks after the children vanished, and every time she nursed him, she wept. Frau Guss prayed every night for a new baby. Frau Schonberg wouldn’t let her husband touch her. Frau Weiss was glad that the children could no longer get in her husband’s way when he was in a temper.

Frau Hoster never stopped waiting for their return. Frau Jagels took to her bed.

Frau Kollmeyer would never admit it, but there was a piece of her that felt it was a relief.

THE FATHERS

Herr Finzel had a pain in his belly that none of the apothecary’s herbs could soothe. Herr Arbogast was cold even in the sunshine. For the first time he could remember, Herr Bauer had no desire to eat.

Herr Hoster forbade his wife to speak any of their names. Herr Schmitt was drunk for a month, and nearly sliced open Herr Braun’s throat as he shaved him. Herr Schonberg spent his evenings carving wooden dolls that no little girl would ever play with.

Herr Weiss roared at the housewives who lingered at his stall, pinching the ducks and geese to find the ones with the plumpest breasts. Herr Jagels put sawdust in the bread dough to stretch the grain and was sent to the pillory with one of his own loaves tied around his neck. Herr Kollmeyer stopped bathing until his wife tried to sponge him down in his sleep.

Herr Maier held his new son—just born, his body freshly washed and rubbed with salt—and couldn’t stop his hands from shaking.

THE ANIMALS

The horses were skittish. The dogs whined and searched. The cats slept without anyone grabbing their tails. The songbirds sang. The pigs looked for scraps in the street.

And slowly, slowly, the rats began to return.

THE PIPER

The Piper held no grudge. As far as he saw it, he had taken his payment in full.

THE CHILDREN

Johannes hopped. Ursula twirled. Alfons stopped just long enough to step away from the path and pee.

Franziska was getting tired and wondered if the grown-ups would come soon to take them home. Emmerich wondered if there would be sweets where they were going.

Gabi was giddy that she wouldn’t have to do any chores today. Ingo saw a cloud that looked like a new lamb.

Heiner had never been outside the city gates before. Jutta picked up Harald, who had started to cry. Rudi thought maybe he had heard this music before, but wondered if it might have been in a dream.

Ebba smiled shyly when Thomas began to walk beside her. Leonhard hoped Mutti and Papi wouldn’t be angry he had gone.

They walked through the valley and up the steep rocks, and when they got close to the peak, they stood and held one another’s hands. The piper played, the mountain broke open, and the children danced inside.

Notes on
HAMELIN
From Octavia Frost’s notebook,
November 2010

Begin at the end: The long line of children, disappearing from view. The boy on his rough crutches, rags tied to the wood in the places where it rubs his body underneath his arms. How long before he stops trying to catch up?

Give him a name. We’ll call him Theodor. Nine years old. He has to be nine.

Call up the pictures first. Milo, tall for his age, the top of his head already at my chin. Milo in the backseat of the rented car, reading a book while Rosemary tries to take his attention away from it. Milo laughing as Mitch steals a lick from his ice cream cone.

No, start further back: Milo barefoot, in shorts and a sun hat, smiling in his stroller. Milo barely able to stand, hugging a dog that’s bigger than he is. Milo a baby in my arms.

It takes him a long time to get back to the church. Hard, even, to get the door open without losing his balance. The grown-ups, the parents, turning at the noise. He has to get the words out fast, before they look at him like he’s done something wrong. Before he sees that they never expected anything else from him.

It was always Mitch whom Milo called for when he had a nightmare, when he needed help with something. For quite a long while after we were the only two left, there were always a few times a day when he would yell out “Daddy!” without thinking about it. Before he remembered there was only me.

Theodor’s first memory: he’s trying to walk, though he’s already past the age when he should have been able to do so, and he worries that this means he’s done something wrong. He uses the wooden chest in their bedroom to pull himself up, and for a minute he’s seeing the world from a new place. But then he topples, and bangs his chin on the wooden corner as he goes down. He howls, as much from humiliation as from pain. His brother, Erhard, addresses the chest in a loud voice: “You stupidhead! You made Theodor fall!” And he hits it hard with the flat of his hand until Theodor has to stop crying because he’s laughing so hard.

“Daddy and Rosemary died.” For almost a year Milo spoke these words all the time, to everyone, a hundred times a day. He raised the subject with the woman who gave him broken cookies at the bakery and with the man standing behind us in line at the bank. A piece of paper hung on the wall in his therapist’s office, with the words written all over it, urgent and overlapping: “Daddy and Rosemary died Daddy and Rosemary died Daddy and Rosemary died.” It was his greeting and his good-night prayer. A riddle. An invocation. A taunt.

It created some awkward moments; there are some stories no one wants to hear. But I understood. It was a way of whittling down his grief into something he could control. Something he knew how to hold.

Don’t make him a saint. He’s a little boy, and he’s lost as much as any of them. He’s angry, and he’s lonely. He yells when his mother gives him soup that burns his tongue. He laughs when his father gouges a toe on a loose nail in the floor. Sometimes it’s an accident, and sometimes he does it on purpose, to see if he can get that look: the one that says they’d be happier with a house as empty as everyone else’s.

We were half a family, the two of us sliding along channels that didn’t quite meet. If it had been Rosemary, I would have known what she needed. Her grief would have been straightforward: sadness and guilt, spread open like pages.

But Milo was a whirlwind of anger and terror. His pain was a pressure he needed to push against. He didn’t want to be held close, to have soft words murmured against the top of his head. He wanted to fight and roar and crush. He wanted to find out how much power he held. If it was enough to make other people feel as bad as he did.

He’s better off, Theodor thinks, than some of the other children would have been if they’d been the one left behind. Most of the others don’t even make sense on their own. Would Ursula Schmitt resort to pulling her own hair if Rudi Hoster weren’t there to do it for her? Would Heiner Weiss cut off a dog’s tail so he’d have someone to tease?

Children have their own logic in the same way that primitive cultures have their own cosmologies. It may seem flawed to those of us outside; we think we’ve advanced beyond it. We are sophisticated enough to know that the world doesn’t rest on the back of a turtle. But to a child, it’s airtight in its internal consistency. It’s not something you can argue with.

When Theodor thinks about that day, he knows he should have seen what was coming. Knows he should have been able to prevent it. It wasn’t an ordinary day, even if it had seemed so at the time. He should have noticed that the sky was an unusual shade of blue. Should have known that something was different by the way the air was so still.

So many signs: his foot had been itchy; he’d seen a dog carrying a dead goose, stolen from the poulterer’s stall; when he and his brother and sisters walked toward the square, he could see that their shadows all touched, while his stood apart. It provides little comfort, but he knows that if it happens again, he’ll know what to look for.

What is the right way to respond to a child tearing the pages out of a bird-watching guide, because if it hadn’t been for the birds and the binoculars, he wouldn’t have been fighting with his sister at the moment she lost her balance?

There weren’t that many options. I knew not to scold him or tell him to stop. I did one of the following things, just one. Did I (a) walk away, leaving him to destroy the book in private? (b) stand in his doorway with my face in my hands, wondering whether or not to let him see me cry? Or (c) sit next to him on the bed and say, “Let’s get rid of this thing. What do you think about burning it?”

Never mind which one is true. Tell me which one would have changed things. Tell me which one would have led us, inevitably, to an ending other than this one.

Still not getting it right. Try this:

The day they went away was like a death and a birth all at once. That doesn’t sound the way he means it to; he’s not breaking it down into anything as clear as sorrow or joy. He knows that birth and death are not the pure events people think them to be. He remembers when his youngest sister, Lena, was born, how angry she was to find herself in the world. And the lovely look on his grandfather’s face the morning that he finally didn’t wake up.

    I tried, but that’s not what you want to hear.

    There are no pictures of Milo smiling between 1992 and 1994.

When he knocks over a basin of water, when he wakes yelling from a nightmare, he sees it in his mother’s face: she is the only one in all of Hamelin who has to face such trials.

He has no doubt that they’d think of him fondly if he were gone. He’s seen it happen with the others. There’s never any talk of Erhard’s stubbornness or Hannelore’s temper fits. How Ingo was selfish and Ebba told tales. Here, they had been as much trouble as Theodor is. Gone, they’re good and sweet and … loved.

While you’re going through it, you don’t know which things are going to be important. You don’t know what they’re going to remember. Which matters more: that I let him stay home from school because he’d been awake with nightmares, and we made pancakes and went to the movies? Or that I yelled at him in front of two of his friends because he spilled soda on some of my notes? That I spent more on his presents that first Christmas than I had on everybody combined the year before? Or that I asked him what the hell was wrong with him when he dumped all the dirt from a potted plant onto the floor?

The adults simply mourn that the children are gone. Theodor burns to know what’s become of them. His parents say things that don’t make sense—they’re inside the mountain, the Piper took them to a wonderful place. For a while he believes it.

He wonders what it’s like there. Do they get to hear that music all the time? Perhaps they’ve formed their own town, a whole new city of children. He imagines them serious: Elke sweeping the dust over a threshold, Rudi and Georg learning trades. They would all need to work together; they would all need to be useful. They would have new roles, becoming far more important than the children they’d been when they were here in Hamelin, putting dolls to bed and drawing in the mud with sticks.

I pieced together a hasty religion, hoping it might bring him comfort. I spoke about heaven as if it were something I believed in. But he was always able to trip me up. He wouldn’t accept a heaven with no hell, a god without a devil. No matter how carefully I thought it through, I couldn’t come up with a story he’d believe.

He would have gone with them if he could. The music … if the adults could have heard it, they’d understand. It was like nothing else in the world.

In his dreams, the Piper comes back for him, just for him. “Come along,” he says. “We’ll go as slowly as you like.” Whatever happened to the other children—whether the inside of the mountain is beautiful or terrible, or something in between—he wants it to happen to him, too.

The Piper leads him out of the city. The mountain cracks open. But he can never see inside.

It was all clear to Milo. Everything had changed, and if the rest of us couldn’t see it, it was because of our own lack of vision. If the world could withstand a breach this great—if an organism as complex as a family could be cut in half and still asked to live—then what was the point in following any of the smaller rules?

One of the many days when I was called in to school to pick him up early, I found him on a bench just inside the door, being held on a teacher’s lap. His arms were crossed in front of his chest, and she had her hands on his wrists. It looked like a hug, and I was glad to see that someone was providing comfort, consoling him, my poor desperate boy. Until I got closer and realized she was restraining him. She was holding him in place.

He’s bent under the double shame: that he let them go, and that he didn’t go with them.

His plate, full every day. His mother, bewildered to see him there.

Looking at a dead bird in the street, he can’t find a way to see it as anything other than what it has become: an object, empty, still.

Some days he knows they’re not in the mountain at all.

I will never fully know what Milo lost. There were games he and Rosemary used to play together, games no one else knew the rules to. Jokes he and Mitch shared, conversations I wasn’t a part of.

And now there are songs that no one would have otherwise heard. Books that no one would have read. It doesn’t make it worth it—of course not. Never. But it serves a purpose. You need a hard surface to rest your paper against. Without it, you end up writing on air.

He remembers something from when he was smaller. A neighbor of the family had become ill, and it seemed inevitable that he would die. The priest went to the man’s house to speak solemn words, to smear oil on his flesh. Then the family waited. But the man didn’t die; he got better. Only now that he’d been given the rites of the dead, he was no longer allowed to be a part of the living world. He couldn’t sit at meals with his family; he couldn’t eat or drink. He had to keep his feet bare. And Theodor heard his parents say that he and his wife could no longer share a bed.

He didn’t live long, but for a time he was a curiosity in the town. The walking ghost. The not-quite-dead. Not so different from what Theodor is now.

I remember once, driving down a busy street, I saw this brief tableau: A woman pushing a stroller on the sidewalk stopped abruptly, her body tense and frustrated. As people moved around her, she lifted the baby with one hand, pulled her shirt up roughly with the other, and put the child to her breast. I could see, written in her movements,
Fine. You win. I’ll expose myself on the street if that’s what you want
.

It’s hard to get that balance right: the child’s needs and the mother’s, generosity and self-preservation. “Motherhood” is not a synonym for “sacrifice,” but neither is “sacrifice” a synonym for “submission.” It’s something that mother and child need to work out. It’s something that the two of you have to learn together.

He can’t be all of them. He isn’t enough. Even before, when he only had to be himself—even then he wasn’t enough.