Eric Goodman
Writing Sample
from Child of My Right Hand
Sourcebooks, 2004.
Simon could sing before he could talk, a little
boy soprano, louder and more resonant than children twice his age.
It sounds odd, but even at twelve and fourteen months, he was barrel-chested
and big-muscled, especially his thighs and calves. Middle linebacker,
I’d fantasize, or a tight end like my brother, as I watched
Simon toddle after his rubber ball with the joy he had for the enterprise
then, the blond Little Lord What’s His Name curls we didn’t
cut until he was two, the way he’d put the ball to his mouth
and suck on it as if to taste its secrets or perhaps to tell it
his, before he chucked it back at me, left-handed.
He was prone to ear infections and slow to speak. Until he was five, my boy lived on amoxycillin like a honeybee on nectar. Ten day runs of the bubble-gum flavored antibiotic, three teaspoons a day. Then he’d finish, and the ear infection would return, his little hand to his ear, Simon standing in his crib, screaming, and let me tell you, you could hear him down the hall. What lungs! Our first-born, and we were trying to be perfect parents, not pick him up for every little thing. He’d shake the bars, screaming, and you could hear every word though from twelve to eighteen months, when his first set of ear tubes was inserted, his vocabulary diminished. Imagine trying to hear under water, an ear, eye and throat doc explained later. Or listening through gauze. Mommy, Daddy! Mommy! Man, you could hear him down the hall.
Not perfect pitch, he’d say, years later, but almost. I remember him at two and a half, after we’d returned from Genna’s sabbatical year in Strasbourg, belting out, “Fre-re Jac-ques, fre-re Jac-ques, dormez-vous, dormez-vous!” the sustained note in the second vous, pure and distant as the light of a new moon, Simon smiling his cherubic, round-cheeked grin while he sang, glad to be the center of attention, even then. I remember him at three in the college pre-school, singing, “Row, row, row your boat” so loudly the other kids stopped singing. And I remember the looks on their parents’ faces, not the last such looks we’d see, explaining, with a sniff, that some little boys were louder than others.
Genna and I used to wonder where this prodigious
sound came from because neither of us were musical. Physically,
Simon resembled us both: my chest and 17-inch neck, Genna’s
coloring and dusky blond hair which in Simon darkened through adolescence
until he began dying it. But the voice? We speculated it was the
legacy of Genna’s biological dad, and not just because my
field is the history of science and I’m predisposed to think
that way. We assumed a genetic link, a biological explanation, if
you will, for complex instinctive and performative behavior because
Simon’s gift was always there, hard-wired, the little boy
who could sing before he could pronounce the words.
“Mommy,” he said one night when he was four, sitting
up in bed while Genna sang a lullaby. Simon with this amazing voice,
and our second child, Lizzie, not quite one, but already beginning
to talk.
“Mommy,” he said and pressed his hands to his ears.
“Don’t sing!”
We laughed about that for years, even Genna, who was family famous for being unable to carry a tune. Mommy, don’t sing, as if her voice hurt his ears, which it probably did. Mommy, don’t sing!
That’s how I remember Simon, a sweet little
boy of three and four, with this astonishing sound coming out of
him, his instrument as we later learned to call it, before all the
rest, although there were signs even then. That’s my training,
to make sense of the unknown, to create a coherent narrative from
available fact. Is this science? Of a personal sort. Is there speculation?
You bet. As soon as a child is old enough to be out of your sight,
there are things a parent can’t know, influences beyond conscious
control. What we might have done differently, could have or should
have, if only we’d been paying close enough attention.
What I want to remember, and I do, you can hear him, Listen, is
Simon singing at two and a half, Are you sleeping, Are you sleeping?
Dormez-vous, his French and English all jumbled together, but there’s
no mistaking that high, perfect note. Like the sun, like first light.
For he is sleeping. Il dort.
And this is Simon’s song.
from In Days of Awe
Knopf, 1991
Jewish Joe Singer was in trouble. In his own mouth, he tasted of dishonor.
And what did dishonor taste like? Brussels sprouts. Tears. Fermentation.
Guilty thoughts followed behind, trailing his father's smile, his
gray fedora. Shaking hands, Joe was guilty. Phoning blind Bessie.
Pissing in the Pacific, ocean blue. And this: rage attached his
sweet slumbers. Remember, Joe, remember. It was as if--and this
thought occurred to Joe, though not for the first time, on Independence
Day while jogging at surf's edge on Hermosa Beach, Callifornia--as
if he'd changed contexts. Born to a boy's adventure tale, he'd landed
ass-up in tragedy.