Zack saw with his shrewd child’s eye that Mr. Sarrantini was impressed by Hazel Jones. At least in Hazel Jones’s presence, he would behave in a more kindly manner with his pupil.

Scales, scales! Zack tried to be patient with the tedium of “fingering.” Except there was no end to scales. You learned the major keys, then came the minor keys. Didn’t your fingers know what to do, if you didn’t interfere? And why was timing so important? The formula was so prescribed Zack could hear every note before his finger depressed it. Even worse were the study pieces (“Ding Dong Bell,” “Jack and Jill Go Up the Hill,” “Three Blind Mice”) which provoked his fingers to swerve out of control in derision and mockery. Recalling the boogie-woogie piano pieces that made you smile and laugh and want to get up and jump around they were so playful, making-fun-of other kinds of music, he’d been so captivated by long ago hearing on the radio in the old farmhouse on the Poor Farm Road he wasn’t to think of for that would make Mommy unhappy, if Mommy knew.

If Mommy knew. But Mommy could not always know his thoughts.

Here in Malin Head Bay, in their apartment above Hutt Pharmacy, there was a plastic portable radio Mommy kept on the kitchen table. Restlessly turning the dial seeking “classical music” but encountering mostly loud jokey talk and news broadcasts, jingly advertisements, pop songs where the women were breathy-voiced and the men were bawling, and static.

He would play pieces by Beethoven and Mozart one day, Mommy said. He would be a real pianist, on a stage. People would listen to him, people would applaud. Even if he didn’t become famous he would be respected. Music is beautiful, music is important. In Watertown, there was a “youth concert” every Easter. Maybe not next Easter-that would be too soon, she supposed-but the following Easter maybe he might play at this concert if he followed Mr. Sarrantini’s instructions, if he learned his assignments and was a good boy.

He would! He would try.

For nothing mattered more than making Mommy happy.

Arriving twenty minutes early for his lesson with Mr. Sarrantini so that he could listen to the pupil who preceded him, a ninth grader whose spirited playing Mr. Sarrantini sometimes praised. She was one who executed her scales dutifully, doggedly; kept to the metronome’s pitiless beat almost perfectly. A husky girl with bristly braids and damp fleshy lips whose book was the blue-covered My Third Year at the Piano; she sounded as if she were playing piano with more than ten fingers, and sometimes with her elbows: “Donkey Serenade,” “Bugle Boy March,” “Anvil Chorus.”

At home Zack had no piano upon which to practice. This shameful fact Hazel Jones didn’t want anyone to know.

“We can make our own keyboard. Why not!”

They made the practice-keyboard together, out of white and black construction paper. They laughed together, this was a game. Between the keys they drew lines in black ink to suggest cracks. Zack’s hands were still too small to reach octaves but they prepared the keyboard to scale. “You’re practicing not just for Mr. Sarrantini, but for all of your life.”

Now, making supper, Hazel glanced over to watch Zack’s hands moving over the paper keyboard. He was a demon, executing scales!

“Sweetie. Too bad those damn keys don’t make any sound.”

Without pausing in his playing Zack said, “But they do, Mommy. I can hear them.”

8

Now they were no longer keeping-going there was danger. Even in Malin Head Bay at the northern edge of the state by the Canadian border hundreds of miles from their old home in the Chautauqua Valley there was danger. Now that Zacharias Jones was enrolled in elementary school and Hazel Jones was working six days a week at the Bay Palace Theater where anyone could walk up and buy a ticket there was danger.

He, him was the danger. His name unspoken he had become strangely powerful with the passage of time.

It was like a fair, cloudless sky. Here at the edge of the lake you glanced up to see that the sky has become suddenly mottled with cloud, thunderheads blown across Lake Ontario within minutes.

His mother’s games! Out of nowhere they came.

He would struggle to comprehend the nature of the game even as he was playing it. For always there were rules. Games have rules. As music has rules. Where such rules come from, he had no idea.

The Game-of-the-(Disappearing)-Pebbles.

Fifteen pebbles of varying size and shapes Hazel placed on the windowsill of the largest of the windows overlooking the alley behind Hutt Pharmacy. One by one, these disappeared. By early winter only three remained.

It was a rule of the game that Zack could note the absence of a pebble but not question who’d taken it, or why. For obviously his mother had taken it. (Why?)

In later years Zack would understand that these were childish games of necessity, not of choice.

They’d gathered the pebbles on the stony beach by the bridge to St. Mary Island. One of their favorite walking places, at the edge of the St. Lawrence River. The pebbles were prized as “precious stones”-“good luck stones.” Several were strikingly beautiful, for common stones: smooth and striated with colors like a kind of marble. Zack never tired of staring at them, touching them. Other pebbles were not beautiful but dense and ugly, clenched like fists. Yet they exuded a special power. These Zack never touched but took a strange comfort in seeing on the windowsill each morning.

In no discernible order, over a period of months the pebbles began to disappear. It seemed not to matter if a pebble was beautiful or ugly, one of the larger pebbles, or smaller. There was a randomness to the game that kept Zack in a state of perpetual uneasiness.

Obviously, his mother was taking the pebbles away. Yet she would not admit to it, and Zack could not accuse her. It seemed to be an unspoken rule of the game that the pebbles disappeared during the night by a kind of magic.

It was an unspoken rule, too, that Zack could not remove any of the pebbles. He’d taken one of the beautiful pebbles away to hide under the mattress of his bed but Mommy must have found it there for it, too, vanished.

“If he doesn’t find us by the time all the pebbles are gone, it’s a sign he never will.”

He, him. This was Daddy-must-not-be-named.

Now that Hazel Jones was an usherette at the movie theater, she had a way of speaking in mimicry of certain Hollywood actresses. As Hazel Jones she could allude to things that Zack’s mother would not wish to allude to. There was Mommy who’d had another name in that time living in the big old farmhouse on the Poor Farm Road close by the canal where he’d played and there was Daddy who’d had a name not to be recalled for Mommy now would be very upset, he lived in dread of upsetting Mommy.

There is Mommy now. Mommy will be all to you now.

And so whatever Hazel Jones said in her airy insouciant way was somehow not “real” yet it could be used as a vehicle for “real” speech. As one might speak through the mouth of a mask hidden by the mask.

The other game was the fearful game. For he could never be certain that it was a game.

Sometimes on the street. Sometimes in a store. In any public place. He would sense his mother’s sudden apprehension, the way she froze in mid-speech, or squeezed his hand so that it hurt, staring at someone whom he, Zack, had not yet seen. And might not see. His mother might decide no, there was no danger, or his mother might suddenly panic and push him into a doorway, pull him into a store and hurry with him to the rear exit, paying no heed to others staring at them, the white-faced young mother and her child half-running as if in fear of their lives.

Always it happened so quickly. Zack could not resist. He would not have wished to resist. There was such strength in Mommy’s desperation.