heart had opened wide for Daniel, with an unexpected and boundless adoration for her firstborn, but she knew instantly that Eric would not hold the same sacrosanct place, that he would never want what she could offer. And although her immediate reflex was to deny the notion of unequal maternal love, she realized that motherhood might also include what falls away.
THE ALTERATION OF PLANS
On a hot windy day that tore the clouds apart, Joan and Martin brought Eric home. The pink roses out front had died while she and the baby were in the hospital, and carrying him up the brick walk, through that dead arbor, seemed like a funeral procession.
Framed by the opened front door, Daniel clutched Fancy’s hand, still dressed in his camp clothes, his face peeking out from behind her wide flowered skirt.
He had a sweet, confused look on his face, a tremulousness about what was happening. He looked at his mother’s belly, no longer as enormous as it had been when he felt a leg, a hand, the kicks, squealing when the skin rippled, like waves on a lake, when the baby somersaulted around. Joan and Martin and Fancy had each explained the concept, that what was inside of Joan would eventually come out, that Daniel would have a brother, and now the baby was here, at the doorstep, about to enter their home, changing the nature of their threesome, their foursome, forever.
Fancy’s face was all lit up, her big front teeth shining, that gap between them like a secret.
Joan settled on the couch, and Fancy said, “A cause for celebration. Mr. Martin bought a nice bottle for a toast, and there’s ale in the fridge for your milk.” Fancy did not know yet that Joan’s milk was of no use.
Daniel clung to Fancy’s hand until she said, “Master Daniel, climb up and take your first look.” When Fancy was nervous, formal appellations preceded their names.
He let Fancy go, kicked off his small tennis shoes, and climbed up on the couch.
“So Daniel, this is Eric,” Martin said, and Daniel stared up at his father, then back to the baby.
“Can I?” he said, and Joan said, “Of course,” and when Daniel gently touched the baby’s face, his confusion fell away.
“He’s so soft.” Joan laughed. “Just like you, my love, when you were his age. The way you still are.”
Daniel looked out the window at his playground. “When can I show him the sandbox and the swings and the jungle gym? When can he hang from his knees, like me?” Martin lifted Daniel into his lap. “A few years, buddy. Then he’ll want to do everything with you.”
The next day, Daniel insisted on feeding his baby brother, this infant he was already imagining as his friend, eager, even, to boss around; not knowing that someday Eric would neither heed nor follow, would leave Daniel in a silent, stormy race for dominance that Eric would know nothing about.
It was difficult to pry Daniel away from the baby. His new life in kindergarten could not compare. He did not want to leave with Fancy each morning, came running in at noon, insisting on knowing everything that happened in his absence before he would agree to eat his lunch. “Tell me the whole story of this morning,” he would say to Joan, “and don’t leave anything out.” And she described it all—the feedings, the diaper changes, the naps, the drools, the songs Fancy had sung, what part Joan was up to in the book she was reading to Eric. During her late, heavily pregnant months, Daniel’s favorite bedtime tale was hearing how Joan read to him when he was a tadpole, making her recite the names of those books he heard from inside her belly.
When Eric had been home for several weeks, Daniel said, “Mom, I’m going to make a list and you have to read those books again to Eric. I’ll listen too, if I have time.”
His seriousness made her realize she had not read to Eric in utero, as she had with him, and that whatever Eric heard during those nine pregnant months when she read to Daniel tucked up in his bed, was unintentional, secondhand, an afterthought.
Daniel included the Palliser and Trollope series; Balzac’s Lost Illusions; Maugham’s The Painted Veil; all the Dawn Powells, and so many more, but her Rare Baby stories weren’t on his meticulous list. Those stories were in the past and she wasn’t going to read them to Eric, but Daniel had heard them until he was four and, childishly, Joan wanted to know why he had left them off.
One afternoon, when Joan was in the recliner, Eric in her arms sucking hard at a bottle, Daniel ran in. “Where are you?” he demanded. “We’re starting the chapter called ‘The Two Dukes’ in Trollope’s Phineas Redux.” “I remember that chapter, it’s a good one,” he said, and Joan thought he had to be pretending, wanting to impress her, as he liked to do, by demonstrating his smarts. He often joined her in the nursery, sitting on the stool while she read to Eric, frequently telling her he remembered that scene or that character, when so-and-so did this or that, but it was always a recollection after the fact. Still, if Daniel was telling the truth, then he remembered everything, which had to include her Rare Baby stories, and Joan wondered why he never mentioned them.
The weekend after they celebrated Eric’s first birthday, Joan was on her knees in one of the gardens, her hands thrust deep into the rich earth, packing in mail-order tulip bulbs, thinking about whether she owed her parents a note. They had sent an unexpected birthday card to Eric, with a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill inside. The card had been devoid of preprinted sweetness, just Eleanor Ashby’s truncated “Good Luck” in English, rather than in the professed French of her soul. And Joan couldn’t figure out whether her mother meant the sentiment sarcastically. And if she did, whether it was directed at Joan, or at one-year-old Eric, who was another grandson her parents had no interest in meeting. But all that internal debating ceased when Fancy ran toward her, calling out, “You’ve got to come quick. Nothing’s wrong, but hurry.”
Daniel was in the baby’s blue-walled nursery, the color suggested by Fancy. “Blue is the color of the mind,” she had told Joan and Martin. “Blue is soothing and will foster the new one’s intelligence, communication skills, serenity, logic, coolness, reflection, and calm. Pick a strong blue to stimulate clear though. The flip side of blue, or choosing the wrong blue, is a child who is cold, aloof, lacks emotions, or is unfriendly.” Martin had laughed, but Joan thought the buttercup yellow they had chosen for Daniel’s room was, perhaps, responsible for his wonderfully balanced nature, his early ability to read, his voracious love of books, his easy laughter, his ease falling instantly to sleep at bedtime; and at Olinsky’s Paint & Hardware, Joan and Martin had selected Imperial Blue, like the velvety background of a star-laden night.
Daniel had dragged the nursing recliner over to the crib, in which Eric sat holding the stuffed giraffe Fancy had given him as a birthday present. His brown eyes were so round as he stared at his big brother. Daniel was holding the blank notebook he’d asked Joan for a week earlier. From where she stood, she could see that at least two pages were covered in words he had written himself.
Joan put a finger to her lips and Fancy nodded, the two of them staring into the room through the jamb of the open door.
“Henry is a very small squirrel with ocean-blue eyes. His fur is gray and so is his bushy tail. He lives in a park that has lots of trees. One of those trees is a weeping willow
