blessed baby

On Monday night after a dreary day laboring over student evaluations for the English department, Pen taught a Family Home Evening lesson about God’s decree that Adam earn bread by the sweat of his brow. Eagerly unfurling his handcrafted chart of chores, he explained a schedule of weekly allowances, $1 for the boys and 50¢ for little Cat, half of it, after tithing, to be put away as savings for “something big.” Cat beamed as Father itemized her very own new jobs, feeling grown up, and imagined the first silver stars in their gummy firmament beside her name on Father’s important-looking chart. Apple just listened gloomily as Father laid out his vision. Fox groaned pitifully on his chair, twisting in mental torment, as though he already felt the salt sweat of forced labor trickling down his wan face.
Cady, who favored a more ad hoc administration of duties, said nothing. Breathing was still difficult for her. She had been back to the emergency room with a respiratory relapse, after another of her household projects, involving spray paint. When a gray unending rain cornered everyone inside, the house interior seemed dreary and echoed with shouts and quarrels. She alternated between despair and hope, still made her plans each morning for the day, but by night could barely haul into bed with a quick prayer under the covers to “help me stay together” and plunge into exhausted slumber.
The four oldest children came down with chicken pox. Cooped indoors, the boys moped and got crazy, until Cady, at wit’s end, let them outside with instructions to stay away from other children, “rather stupid of me, surely,” she noted in her diary later. Next morning she woke to quarreling children around her bed, baby Weez in the crib crying, and then the telephone ringing. It was an irate neighbor, who edgily began, “I feel I should share our distress with you,” then complained her daughter had been exposed by Pianos to chicken pox. Humiliated, Cady apologized. The people next door too were already complaining, that the Piano kids were noisy. Feeling unpopular in this new place, Cady baked cookies and walked plates to offended neighbors.
Her many church assignments and household projects were invariably interrupted or delayed by child matters. When she laid carpet on the stairs to dampen the clatter of feet, kids clamored to hold the tacks and help her hammer. She started to patch her tablecloth on the sewing machine in the basement, but baby needed nursing, Cam’s diaper erupted, and then Apple asked to make shoes out of scrap material. She stopped to help him cut, sew, thread elastic through a casing. By the time she untangled the spools Cam had knotted, it was supper time. The telephone rang again, this time someone from Church prodding her about a tardy Sunday school assignment; she felt the burn of a mild condescension from this efficient professional man in his child-remote office at Harvard Business School, evidently feeling at the top of his game, while she languished near the bottom of hers.
Although the Piano road was littered with small frustrations and baffling detours, it was well lit by the Church and fellow traveled by friends and family. Pen could not swear he knew the way was true and divine, but most of the time it seemed true, and he stayed the course. On Fast Sunday, his family drove up from Connecticut to witness him stand, in meeting, feeling inwardly awful and unworthy yet at the same time convinced he was doing something important. Holding the new baby Piano before the congregation, he gave her a name and a blessing.
 
JUNIOR PIANO
At grade school, Apple wrote the story of his life.
“When I was born,” he began, “I cried and cried because babies always cry. I was good sometimes, and I was bad sometimes. And I had blocks that I built towers with. I claped when I finished building a tower.
“When I was about 11 months I began to walk. When I ate I was like a pig. When I was about 1 I began eating peas and stuff like that.
“It was 1974. Mom was going to have a baby. I was three years old. I didn’t want a new baby. I wanted to be the only kid in the family. So I would go up and start poking him. So mom would have to go up on the table with a chair.
“It was 1975. I was 4 years old. Mom was going to have a baby. This time I didn’t care if I had a baby because I was youst to it. It was going to be Cat. I was a big help. I brang pampers to her.
“And one day I even went ice skating [with my class]. That was my first time I ever went iceskating. So I had to stay over by the wall. Once in a while miss sullivan would come over and skate with me.
“It was September 16, 1977. Mom was going to have a babie. It was 11 p.m. when Cam was born.
“When I was six years old I moved to Belmont. It was a house that I was going to live in. It had 3 bedrooms. 1 bathroom. And a playroom. (That’s where the toys went) And a living room. And a dining room. And a study. (It was my dad’s). And a kitchen.
“It was April 18, 1979. I was 7 years old. Mom was going to have a babie. It was Weez.”