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as he worked the keys, that kind of
crazy-eyed focus on the task that could obliterate
     
all distractions, even the very instrument under his hands. Does he
even hear the music, she thought, arching toward him as he labored
above her. Does he even see my face?
     
This was something she had never anticipated before she was
married, the painful, physical struggle he seemed to wage with himself
in the course of their joining. She had thought it would all be
whispered endearments, only pleasantly breathless. She was surprised
to learn that there was labor in it, pain and struggle as well as
sweetness.
     
There was still more music to listen to after they had fallen apart.
She thought she was beginning to recognize some refrain, or maybe he
was just going over the same notes. With her eyes to the ceiling she
said, “It’s a baby grand.”
     
Her husband turned his head on the pillow. He might have been
startled to find her there. He frowned, and then hesitated, and then
whispered, disbelieving, “You can tell already?”
     
There was one window in the corner of the bedroom, its sill worn
to velvet, looking like velvet even in the weak, winter morning sun
that came from beneath the wooden blinds and marked the new day.
Another day. She grew giddy with laughter, convinced as she was, and
would remain, that there was portent in his misunderstanding, that
their child’s life had indeed begun at that hour. Their baby grand, first
of four.

II
     
E
thinned and ebbed at the edge of the beach that was just beyond the
trees. ITHER THE WIND kept them all away or the entire population took
to heart the notion that the beaches were closed after Labor Day.
In the deserted parking lot, on a Sunday morning that was only, after
all, in mid-September, the wind moved a thin scrim of sand across the
bleached asphalt, brushed it along the ground in wide, crossing arcs
that thinned and ebbed in much the same way the beige sea foam
    The wind took the sound of the slammed car doors, the slammed
trunk, and sailed it off like a black scrap, over their heads, back toward
the long highway and the crowded towns and the churches on shaded
avenues choked with parked cars. It took their voices, too, but more
gently. The parking lot was empty and so there was no need to cry out
after the children as they ran ahead.
    “Not a soul,” Mary Keane said to her husband, the wind lifting
her words, tossing them gently back over her shoulder, the way it
moved the colorful tails of the scarf she had tied under her chin. In her
arms she had bundled a wool blanket and a tufted pillow and a stuffed
bear, and her husband stepped in front of her to take everything from
her arms at once, leaving only the bulge of her belly under the green
canvas car coat.
    “They’re all in church,” he said and saw the
flush of guilt, or of
wind, on her broad cheeks. The wind lifted his own thinning hair—
those long strands he combed back over his crown—made it stand,
briefly, on end.
    Something done right—at least so far—this suggestion of his,
whispered to the ceiling this morning, his hand on her thigh. That
they skip Mass just this once and head to the beach.
    Some weeks ago, a tropical wave had slipped o
ff the African coast,
as if (he’d thought, reading the account) the continent itself had
shuddered, and moved into the waters of the south seas, stirring the
ocean and the air and the various inhabitants of small islands and
southern shorelines, until finally it woke him this morning at dawn
with the sound of the wind in the eaves, with some memory or dream
of the Ardennes, and a hankering to see what the shudder of a
continent did to the waters off Jones Beach.
    Across the ceiling of his bedroom, the dawn had appeared to be
made up of reflected light, light that moved with the rise and fall of
the wind as if it were light reflecting off water—although the house
was ten miles from any shore, smack in the substantial heart of his