RIVER'S EDGE
By Marie Bostwick

I don’t trust memory – not really. My mind is a storehouse of wordless snapshots from childhood, pictures without context or captions, still frames of silent movies that seem so true but whose veracity cannot be counted upon.

I remember sitting in the back garden near a bush heavy with blooming lilacs holding a white kitten in my lap, giggling with delight as the kitten extends a tiny sandpaper tongue and begins licking my hands. The picture is clear in my mind, but I do not trust it. Did I have a kitten? Father never mentioned it and in the photographs of our garden in Alexander Platz there are no lilacs, only serviceable shrubs and rows of rosebushes, spiny and blooming in season exactly as they were supposed to. I cannot imagine Father allowing anything as unruly and independent as lilacs to take root in his garden.

I remember too, a day in the park, Father smiling and humming as he carries me in his arms. I feel the brass buttons of his dress uniform pressing circles into my chest as I snuggle close to him. Mama and I in matching white linen dresses, her eyes bright and glowing with good health, her figure shapely, a bit plump even. Her hands soft and teasing, her fingernails pale pink ovals as she playfully slaps Father on the wrist in scolding response to a joke I don’t understand but laugh at anyway. If I close my eyes, I can conjure the picture into being, but I do not trust it. Were we ever so happy? Was there a time, a time when we were as carefree as any other young family strolling in the park on a sunny afternoon? I suppose it is possible, but I can’t quite bring myself to believe it. I may have imagined the whole thing.

But there is one childhood memory that I am certain of. I was very young but I remember the day Mother taught me to play with utter clarity. I always loved to listen to Mother play. Sometimes I sat across from her, rapt and still, in a chair of green tufted velvet, watching her hands float above the keys, graceful and fluid as swimmers moving through clear water. Other times I would lay stomach-down on the floor, as close to the foot pedals as possible, to feel the notes rumble and treble through my every part of my body. Every day I spent hours listening to the music Mother made but until that day, I never so much as touched the piano myself, not because anyone had said I mustn’t but because somewhere inside me lay a belief that Mother was a magical being and only her touch could make the heavy black box sing so beautifully.

Her cough was worse that day. Sitting in the green chair, I grew impatient as she stuttered through my special song, “Fur Elise”, starting and stopping to clear her throat. Finally her shoulders started convulsing and she pushed the piano bench back and leaned down, coughing violently, her handkerchief held tight to her mouth. I jumped up from my chair and ran to her side, thumping her back with my little fists trying to free her from the invisible obstruction but my efforts seemed to make no difference.

“Mother!” I cried and thumped her back even harder than before. “Are you all right? Tell me what to do!” I begged.

She just shook her head silently and waved a hand to motion me back to the green chair, but I wouldn’t leave her side. Finally the fit passed and her shoulders dropped more evenly as she took in deep breaths of air, becoming herself again. She sat up and pulled the cloth away from her mouth to show a ragged circle of red, cruel and unseemly against the ladylike linen and convent made lace of her handkerchief.

“Mother! You’re bleeding!”

“No, Darling,” she murmured, folding the hankie quickly to hide the stains. “I’m fine. I was just coughing too hard, that’s all. It brought up a little blood. Nothing to worry about, Elise.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. I’m just a bit tired, that’s all. Playing the piano is hard work, and I get tired more easily these days.” She smiled so sweetly and reassuringly that I didn’t think to ask her why that was. She chucked me under the chin playfully. “I can’t always do all the work, you know. You’ve watched long enough, my love. It’s time for you to start playing and me to start listening.”

She walked slowly to bookshelf, chose a couple of thick leather volumes that she stacked on the piano bench, and perched me on top of them so I could reach the keyboard. She sat down next to me and let her hands hover over the keys. “Watch,” she said and gave me my first piano lesson.

Completely bypassing nursery songs and scales, Mother began teaching me Beethoven’s “Fur Elise”. She played through the entire composition. Urging me to watch her fingers carefully, she played through the first eight bars twice more, then told me to try.

Surely that first attempt was halting and punctuated with mistakes. After all, I couldn’t have been more than four years old, but in my memory the music flows from my fingers unbidden, unerring, an untapped spring of music gushing from my fingertips, spilling into the room and quenching a thirst I’d never known I had. Somehow I understood that it didn’t matter if I never spoke again because the piano would always be able to express what I felt more completely than words. Words, like memory, can’t be trusted. You never be sure that you’ve chosen the right ones or that they were heard correctly. Music isn’t like that. It cannot ring false. Music doesn’t try to describe the heart: it is the heart. It says exactly what it means. It cannot dissemble or be misunderstood.

This was a revelation as my fingers rocked rhythmically from ebony to ivory and back. I finished the phrase, beaming with the joy of my discovery and looked to Mother for approval and her acknowledgement that like her, I too, was a magical being. She rewarded me with a smile and a rare, delicious peal of laughter, silver and bright, a sound like pearls and new coins pouring a generous stream into my open palms. Her pale, delicate face was suddenly unlined and glowing, mysteriously there seemed to be more of her, as if a new layer of flesh had suddenly been added to her thin frame. She was the Mother of my memory again, pink and healthy and strolling through the park where every day was happy and gilded with promise.

I laughed too, giddy with my newfound power - the power to banish sickness and age, the power to make Mother well again. I played through the phrase again without being asked. It was even easier than the first time. Mother laughed again, and I joined in, the sounds of our shared delight filling the dark corners of the room and making them light.

“That was beautiful, Liebling,” she said in the soft, breathless voice I still hear in my dreams. “I was right. You could only be called Elise. When Herr Beethoven sat down to compose this, he surely had you in mind.”