and distance. I knew glass behaves rather like a slow-flowing liquid; over time, gravity drags its molecules downward. I touched my own just-beginning-to-sag jawline and thought how gravity was beginning to do its work on me, at age thirty-nine.
That Amsterdam day four years ago, I was not only excited but also upset. I had spent the morning of our arrival from the States by visiting the Anne Frank House. The remnants of Anne’s innocence—sepia photographs of movie stars pinned to her bedroom wall—and the horror of what had been done by the Nazis screamed that the world I called home was too terrible a place to abide.
A line from Handel’s Messiah haunted me: “But who may abide the day of His coming?” In a scrambled way, I thought of Hitler as a kind of Antichrist, and of course millions of people did not abide the day of his coming. Some people—Muslim thinkers—have said that Western civilization ended with all that preceded and comprised the conducting of World War II. Some say that in our beginning are the seeds of our ending, but I believe, more optimistically, that in our endings are new beginnings.
Of course I would not attempt to talk with Thom about the Anne Frank House or the Nazi atrocities until after luncheon, when we were alone. Although I had left the orthodoxy of the Christian religion long ago, I had been spiritually moved, and that was what I wanted to discuss with Thom. I knew the profoundly disturbing Anne Frank House was sacred to the human spirit.
To try to settle myself (my self, not just my nerves, teetering between my stunned wonder at Thom’s scientific discovery and the horror of human willingness to kill fellow humans), I had walked an extra block before I started down Prince Street toward the Blue Tulip. I suppose that decision to take the time, despite being late, to soothe my agitation into a smoother coherence saved my life.
Thinking of the Holocaust, I remembered when my fifth-grade class had visited the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. My school friend Janet Stimson had pointed at the balcony and said, “Murder. That’s what happened here. Real murder.” Despite Janet’s words, I had been unable to grasp that reality—the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in my hometown. That morning in Amsterdam, at the Anne Frank House, I had felt the edges of murder. Like a thin sizzle crossing from ear to ear, real murder seemed to skewer my mind.
And yes, because of the reality of mass murder, I wanted Thom to buy himself a grand piano. I would tell him that much at lunch—just lean over and whisper in his ear. “You don’t have to perform in Carnegie Hall,” I would whisper, “to deserve to play on a concert grand.” Painfully, I wondered as I walked what childish ditties Anne Frank might have sung when she was five or six. At that age she had been a friend of Thom’s mother. Playing tea party, the little girls had lifted thin Dresden cups and saucers over a toy table to their dolls. Equally innocent, one had lived a full life, married, had a brilliant son, and one had not.
Perhaps, I mused as I walked—You’re late, you’re late, for a very important date—Thom and I might have a child: a daughter named Sarah Anne, for Thom’s mother and Anne Frank. Late thirties was by no means too late to have a child.
A dark-skinned man wearing a loosely wrapped white turban leaned over the high windowsill and looked down to check the progress of the piano’s ascent. He might have been from India or Africa. I wondered if Martin Luther King Jr. had visited Africa, the continent of his ancestors and of all our ancestors for that matter, if science is to be believed, before he met death on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. I had the impulse to wave at the man, up there, but decided distraction would be unwelcome. His face seemed carved and soberly set. In the interior of my heart, I gave a discreet little wave. He reached out to touch the cable, almost as though he were twanging a single vertical string of a bass fiddle.
The piano continued to mount the sky. Strangely, it didn’t stop at the high open window, though the man reached out his dark arms through the space to guide it in. The piano continued to rise till the metal loop at the top of its sling slammed against