Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Read Free Page B

father came down the stairs for the review. Sometimes he straightened the comb or moved Phyllis over to the other side of the clothes.
    “Very good, very good,” he would say, as though it were an army inspection. “At ease,” and he would give me a wink and I knew I had passed.
    On the final occasion that my father and I performed our drill, Ute and Oliver Hannington had been invited to be our audience. She, of course, refused. Shethought it was pointless and childish. Oliver Hannington was there, though, leaning against the wall behind my father when he blew the first three whistles. Ute was in the sitting room, playing Chopin’s “Funeral March.” At first, everything went well. I gathered all the items and went down both sets of stairs in double-quick time, but I made an error in the laying out, or maybe my father, in his excitement, blew the second whistle too soon. I ran out of time and the mittens were not on my hands when the two men came down the cellar stairs. With my pulse racing, I stuffed the mittens under my legs. They itched the skin where my shorts ended. I had let my father down. I wasn’t fast enough. The mittens became wet beneath my thighs. The warm liquid ran off the chair and pooled on the white linoleum beneath me. My father shouted. Oliver Hannington, standing behind me, laughed, and I cried.
    Ute rushed down to the cellar, swept me up into her arms, and let me bury my face in her shoulder as she carried me away from “those absolute awful men.” But like the closing credits of a film, my memory of that scene ends as I am rescued.
    I cannot remember Oliver Hannington leaning in his indifferent manner against the cellar shelves with a smirk on his lips after I wet myself, although I’m surethat he did. I have imagined but I didn’t see him take the cigarette from his mouth and blow the smoke upward, where it would have crept along the low ceiling. And I didn’t notice how red my father’s face became after I let him down in front of his friend.

3
    At the end of June, Ute went back to work. I’m not sure if she had simply had enough of being at home with us, or she craved a more attentive audience; it wasn’t because she needed the money. “The world wants me,” she liked to say. Perhaps she was right. Ute had been a concert pianist—not one of those second-rate piano players who is part of a third-rate orchestra. Ute Bischoff, at eighteen, had been the youngest-ever winner of the International Chopin Piano Competition.
    On rainy afternoons I liked to sit on the dining room floor and take out her records from the sideboard. It never occurred to me to listen to them. Instead I played my album from the film of the Railway Children over and over until I could recite it by heart and examined the cardboard sleeves of Ute’s music in minute detail: Utesitting at the piano, Ute taking a bow on stage, Ute in an evening gown and a smile I didn’t recognize.
    In 1962 she had played under the baton of Leonard Bernstein in the opening concert at Philharmonic Hall in New York.
    “Leonard was ein Liebchen,” she said. “He first kissed me, and then he kissed Jackie Kennedy.”
    Ute was lauded and feted; she was handsome and young. When she was twenty-five and on a tour of England, she met my father. He was her stand-in page turner, and eight years her junior.
    For the three of us, their meeting became one of those stories that every family has—often repeated and regularly embellished. My father shouldn’t have been at her concert at all. He was a ticket taker, covering someone else’s shift when Ute’s regular page turner tripped over a purchase line backstage and smashed his nose into the counterweight. My father, never squeamish, was wiping the blood from the floorboards with a rag when the stage manager tugged on his sleeve and asked in desperation if he could read music.
    “I admitted I could,” said my father.
    “But that was the big problem,” said Ute. “My page turners must