Wolfgang had filled the bathtub so high, even the slightest of movements sent water trickling over the lip onto the bathroom floor. He wanted nothing more than to soak his weary bones after the outing with McVain. He rested against the edge of the tub, doing his best to stay still as the water sloshed over his body. A sliver of moonlight found its way through the trees outside into the bathroom.
Wolfgang’s first vivid memory of his childhood was of a bath. He had been five years old. He’d accidentally knocked Charles Pike’s latest fugue from the Llewellyn piano, scattering the pages to the floor and completely out of order. When he took off running, he tripped on one of the house’s numerous throw rugs and banged his face on a dining room chair. That he didn’t remember. His father’s screaming voice he remembered, as well as the bath his mother had given him to calm him down.
Wolfgang still remembered the feeling of sitting naked in the tepid water, shivering, his teeth chattering. He sat with his legs drawn in and his knees upright, his lowered chin resting on bony knees. He stared below at his penis as it buoyed in the water, not wanting to look anywhere else but down. He needed to pee but didn’t want to get out of the tub. The blood from his nose hit the water in red swirls, spreading out between his thighs. His nose throbbed. On the corner of the sink was the Bible. His mother had read from it while the bath water was running. Her voice blended in with his father’s ranting from the other room, and the combination made him want to cry even more.
His mother, Doris, hovered above, leaning so far over the side of the tub that her long red hair grazed the water. Her nightgown hung loosely from her body. Her barely concealed breasts drooped inches from his face, hanging in the folds of that nightgown he’d become so accustomed to smelling every morning when she’d hug him. She plunged the washrag into the bath water, squeezing it and wetting his hair, rinsing it free of suds. She washed his back, humming one of her made-up tunes.
She always hummed after one of his father’s tirades; they never spoke about it, but the melody was her way of calming Wolfgang. She would smile for him, too, but behind the smile there was sadness. Even at age five, he’d known.
Louisville’s Central Park, designed by the famed architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the same man who designed New York City’s Central Park, rested on seventeen acres that included a colonnade, a wading pool, and walking trails. Wolfgang’s childhood home rested on the outskirts of the park. It was a two-story structure with stucco siding, a steep roof, and arched doorways. To Wolfgang, it looked almost like a medieval cottage from a fairy tale, especially the small dormer windows and the brick chimney rising above the roof. Wood dominated the interior of the house: the old flooring, with its whorls, splintered planks, and tiny holes and cracks, most of which Doris had covered with various throw rugs. The wall separating Wolfgang’s bedroom from his parents’ was wood as well.
Every sound and smell carried throughout the house—bacon frying in the morning, potato soup in the evening, and most certainly the sound of his father’s music. The sound of the Bach and Beethoven fugues from one of his eight violins, Mozart resonating from the piano, and Charles’s own creations on the clarinet and flute. These were the two constants of Wolfgang’s early life: his father’s music, which, like his father, could go from soft to raging in a matter of seconds; and then his mother’s humming, always dependable, always calm.
Wolfgang had pieced together his parents’ history as he grew older, though they rarely talked about the past. Doris Pike was a pretty woman, slight of build and twenty years of age when she’d given birth to her only son in the winter of 1898. Charles cried the first time he held his newborn boy and immediately named him Wolfgang after his favorite composer. “He held you for ten minutes, rocking you, playing with your fingers, so tiny!” Doris had told him once.
But then, as babies do, Wolfgang started crying.
“Stop that,” Charles told him. “Stop that sound.” Wolfgang continued to cry. Charles glanced over his shoulder toward his wife. “Why does he do this? I don’t understand. I’ve done nothing to him….” Wolfgang began wailing. Charles stood, on the verge of dropping the newborn baby, and placed him on the bed beside Doris. “Here, you take him.” And then he wiped his hands on his slacks and exited the hospital room.
When Charles did hold Wolfgang as a baby, he’d hand him off as soon as the crying started. He just couldn’t take it. He’d walk around the house with his hands over his ears, and many times, he’d open the front door and leave them alone. Doris would never admit as much, even when Wolfgang pressed her, but he imagined how his father must have raged when Wolfgang cried at night.
Wolfgang had never seen his mother cry in front of them. She only cried behind closed doors, alone in their bedroom when no one was watching. After Wolfgang was born, Charles often left them alone at night. He became consumed with his new membership at the Pendennis Club, the city’s prestigious men’s social establishment. Every Monday and Wednesday night, he’d told Doris he was going to have drinks with colleagues at the club on Walnut Street. He even mentioned their names, how they’d play cards and smoke pipes and cigars and talk politics. He was moving up that social ladder. He was going places. But his apparent success left her feeling alone and vulnerable, because it brought with it a coldness between them, colder than before their child was born.
At night, Wolfgang would spy on his parents through the hole in his bedroom wall. He would spy on both of them while they were in bed, his mother reading while Charles wrote his compositions, his inkwell placed carefully in the folds of the unmade bed. On most nights they were silent. Not a single word passed between them. Occasionally Doris would look up from her book and watch Charles write, but Charles was too involved in his own world to look up. She’d return to her book, and all Wolfgang heard through the wall would be the turning of her pages and the scribbling of his pen.
But on other nights his father was different. As Wolfgang grew older he realized those nights coincided with the ending of whatever his father had been writing. Those nights made Wolfgang smile. If his father ever found out he’d been spying, oh, what trouble he’d be in—but he couldn’t help himself. It was part of the thrill, the fun, the danger. He’d lie on his stomach, prop his elbows atop his stacked pillows, and peer through the hole in the wall. Some nights, Wolfgang watched his father lovingly hold his mother as they danced along the limited floor space of their bedroom—from the bed to the dresser, from the dresser to the bathroom door, and then back to the bed—moving to a rhythm Charles would hum, smiling as he’d clutch her small hands and hold her close. The sound of their feet shuffling across the dusty floorboards always stayed with Wolfgang, as would his mother’s giggle.
Charles was tall with a thick chest, strong forearms, and a head of black hair always worn pulled back from his forehead. He had large, droopy ears like an elephant. His eyes were magnified by dark, bushy eyebrows that hung wildly above them. Charles always dressed in a suit, morning, day, and night, changing only before bedtime. When they danced, Doris came up to his chest. Often Charles rested his head atop hers. Some nights they would laugh. When his father tickled his mother, Wolfgang always sprang back. At that point, even he knew his secret spying must stop. He’d rush to bed and clasp his hands over his ears until the grunting ceased.
But most nights it was silence.
***
The Light of Christ Church was only a few blocks from their home, and they attended as a family three times a week. His mother often prayed with her eyes closed. Wolfgang knew she wasn’t asleep only because her lips moved. His father prayed so loudly during the services, it was as if he was trying to pray over Minister Ford, who was pretty boisterous himself. In hindsight, Wolfgang realized that his father probably thought he could out-preach Minister Ford. Probably figured he could do it louder and more clearly than the robust man in suspenders. One Sunday, Charles had leaned down during the service and whispered to Wolfgang, “I don’t think he’s saving as many souls as he thinks he is.” He looked out the window. “The city is teeming with heathen Catholics badly in need of saving. That’s who he needs to be preaching to.”
Wolfgang always sat in between his parents; one loud, the other silent. He liked going to the weekly services because, unlike at home, Charles was engaged in what was going on at church, and thus his moods were much more predictable. And there was something about hearing Minister Ford’s voice reading the scripture that made Wolfgang feel safe. Minister Ford might not have been saving enough souls to make Charles happy, but the deep pitch of his voice never failed to draw Wolfgang into the scripture, even at a young age. When most of the other kids his age were daydreaming or sleeping during the service, Wolfgang was focused on the words. And when the congregation wasn’t praying from the Bible, they were praying through music. Wolfgang liked the purple robes of the choir, and he one day envisioned singing with them. By age seven he not only wanted to sing with the choir, but he also imagined himself leading them. And he wouldn’t have minded touching those giant organ pipes while he was at it.
One Sunday, while they walked home from church, Wolfgang asked his father about singing with the choir.
But of course Charles Pike only laughed. It was Wolfgang’s opinion that his father tried to out-pray Minister Ford, but it was
everyone’s
opinion that Charles Pike thought himself better than the choir leader and that he was too good for the job.
***
Charles was a musician and composer, and though Wolfgang loved the music he played throughout the house, he realized as he grew older that his father was a frustrated man: never quite good enough, apparently, to make a living with his art. Instead, he spent his days working for Henry Pilcher & Sons, manufacturing pianos and other musical instruments. “Just until my career takes off,” he always said, promising Doris repeatedly that one day they would move to Vienna to open his music store, one of his many dreams. But the local venues he booked somehow never translated into bigger opportunities. It wasn’t him, Charles would mutter, it was them. They were all fools. They were simply not on his level. When he was denied a spot in the Louisville Quintet Club, he raged at Doris about the hack who was chosen instead. When the Philharmonic Orchestra did not call him back after his third, his fifth, his tenth audition, he blamed everyone but himself.
Wolfgang knew it wasn’t for lack of talent; his father was a man with brilliant ideas. To a boy like Wolfgang, his father’s music could certainly rival Mozart and Beethoven! But even Wolfgang could see his father was often his own worst enemy. His intensity was off-putting at best, frightening at worst. So there Charles’s brilliance stayed, buried deeply.
He’d drink more, and the more he drank, the more distant he seemed to get. And paranoid. The curtains over the downstairs windows were always closed, but Charles would peek out numerous times each night. At least twice every hour, he’d walk away from his writing, push the curtain aside, and watch the dark street. When Wolfgang was seven, he asked, “Is someone coming over, Daddy?”
“I don’t know, Wolfgang.”
“Then why do you keep looking out the windows?”
Charles knelt down and placed his hands on his son’s shoulders. “You never know if someone will come by and steal your ideas.”
“How can somebody steal your ideas?”
Charles returned to the piano. “Go to your room and read the Bible, Wolfgang. The King James Bible will explain how stealing is a sin.”
Charles evidently didn’t see lying as a sin. He’d been telling lies for years, lies about why he was excluded from certain orchestras, why his work wasn’t being performed, and his most incredible lie: his membership at the Pendennis Club.
One winter evening when Wolfgang was six, Doris bundled Wolfgang in a coat and scarf, and they followed far behind Charles as he strolled along the downtown streets, wandering aimlessly in and out of the fuzzy glow of scattered lampposts. His arms moved as he walked, conducting to tunes in his head. But when he turned on Walnut Street, he passed the Pendennis Club, stopping in the middle of the street to stare up toward the lit rooms of the mansion, where shadows passed like phantoms. He continued on toward Green Street, where he didn’t even look up when propositioned by two ladies. That street was full of women, and Doris attempted to shield Wolfgang’s eyes from most of them, though he couldn’t quite understand why. Meanwhile, Charles continued without hesitation. He entered an establishment called the Baroque, a two-story brick building, and sat at a table next to the foggy front window and ordered a drink as if he’d been doing it every Monday night for years.
“I knew it,” Wolfgang’s mother had muttered. Then she looked down at her son and smiled, as if everything was just fine. “Wolfgang, I don’t believe your father is ever telling the truth. Do remember this evening.” They stood there for a few moments, Doris peering into the Baroque as the men played cards and dice, as Charles drank alone.
Then she turned and led Wolfgang home.
***
Every evening, Wolfgang got down on the floor of his bedroom. On his hands and knees, he pulled back the woven throw rug and peered through the cracks in the planks. The living room was directly below. It was his father’s work area, his life earnings saved in the form of music. Musical instruments were scattered everywhere like discarded clothing—a piano against one wall, his eight violins sitting like little children across the cushions of the couch, two cellos propped against another wall, a trombone resting on the seat of a straight-backed reading chair, two clarinets and three flutes in the middle of the floor, and a piccolo atop the piano next to three lit candles and his well of ink. Atop his podium sat his latest symphony or fugue, his latest opera or requiem, all weighted down by a harmonica he’d play when all else failed.
From the crack above, Wolfgang watched his father. Charles dipped the quill of his pen into the ink and carefully scrawled notes on the page, starting and stopping abruptly, then placed the pen sideways between his teeth and lifted one of his violins to play. He waved the bow of his violin like a sword, facing imaginary attackers, frustrated, happy, or drunk. During these times, Doris stayed in the kitchen or read in her bedroom as her husband shuffled around the cluttered floor, pulling and pushing the bow at every conceivable angle against the taut violin strings, sweating profusely, strands of hair coming undone from his braid and dangling over his unblinking eyes, his face red with strain. The face of a crazed man, Wolfgang had thought.