Two-Part Inventions by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Read Free Book Online Page A

it.”
    The melody lasted long, with much climbing and descending, but Suzanne listened intently and made it stay in her head the whole way through. Reproducing it was easy. The hard part was keeping it all in her head, like a story with many turns of the plot.
    She couldn’t understand why her mother got so excited. Gerda dropped her towel, hugged and kissed her and fussed over her. Then she asked her to play other tunes, simple ones: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “Frère Jacques.” All perfect! The ear of a musical genius! Gerda couldn’t stop exclaiming. How could she not have known until now? True, Suzanne could
carry a tune remarkably for a four-year-old. But everyone in Gerda’s family could sing. Even the boys could sing, though they had never shown any interest in music; their piano lessons had been given up after two pointless years of fumbling scales and arpeggios. But this, Suzanne at the piano. This was special.
    She couldn’t wait to tell Joseph when he came home from work. He grunted, skeptical as he always was of Gerda’s enthusiasms, of most enthusiasms except those regarding business ventures. She was undaunted. Just wait and see, she said. Wait till after supper. In her state of exaltation, Gerda had left the chicken in the oven too long. Joseph and the boys, Fred and Gary, who were nearly fourteen, pronounced it dry.
    â€œWhat does it matter? It’s only a chicken. Dry!” Gerda said scornfully, though she was usually sensitive to comments about her cooking. “Do you realize what this means? She has a natural gift.”
    After supper, Gerda made Suzanne play for her father and brothers, who seated themselves patiently in the living room, indulgently, then listened in growing wonder. Tune after tune, with one finger: “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” In the midst of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” there came a whistle from the kitchen, ascending to a screech. Suzanne stopped; it was an adversarial music, ugly and unremitting.
    â€œGerda, the teapot,” Joseph said.
    â€œOh, I forgot all about it.” She’d been sitting entranced. She rushed into the kitchen and the noise stopped.
    â€œWell, how about that,” Joseph Stellman said at last. “How
about that. Come here and let me look at you,” he commanded Suzanne, and she obeyed. He placed his hands on her shoulders and scrutinized her, as if he could locate on her face some physical source of the music. Then he hugged her roughly. “That was very good. That was really something special.”
    He was a hulk of a man, hairy, solid, and muscular, with thick impassive features in a face that looked always in need of a shave, and hazel eyes that studied the world with wary discontent, as though from long experience he expected it to fall short of his requirements. The youngest child of a large immigrant family, he chided his sons constantly for their lack of ambition. Drive, he called it, reminding them that America was the land of opportunity. “Look at FDR. You’re probably too young to remember, but he was a cripple. Did he let that stop him? No. And you have your legs and arms and brains, so use them.”
    He had taken pride in the birth of twin sons, as if the doubleness implied his superior potency, and from the start nursed the desire that they be special. Special. It was a word he used often, for people in the news, feats of diplomacy or athletics, popular entertainers. Most people were run-of-the-mill. Ordinary. Ordinary himself—and he knew this—he had contempt for the ordinary in public life. His sons disappointed him, easygoing good-natured boys, average students who didn’t appreciate their privileged lives—Joseph’s early years had been anything but privileged, in a cramped apartment on the Lower East Side—boyishly predictable in their