Infinite Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

he made atonal apologies and pursued his studies with new conviction, often tacking up and checking off neat to-do lists in capital letters, and ultimately landed at Duke on a full scholarship. Following one sixteen-hour return for Thanksgiving, during which he spoke only to ask after salt and pepper, he expressed implicitly that his need for family—had it ever been there—was no longer extant. Edith and Declan were to him like a house he had once rented.
    Declan took pains to keep up with Owen’s professional pursuits, but Edith stopped sending birthday cards after five years without a thank-you note or a call, and often recalled breastfeeding her son, how much less urgently he had sucked than his sister, how infrequently he’d cried.

D IAGNOSES OF W ILLIAMS S YNDROME were rare then—one in twenty thousand births, sources would note much later—and Lydia quickly lost the energy required to say, “There is something different about my son, yes, but he does not belong here.” “Here” being among these other children labeled as impaired, sedate and taciturn compared with Paulie.
He is six years old and understands and uses words like magnetic and illuminate,
she always felt like asserting.
He remembers whole songs after hearing them just once.
    She began homeschooling him after the third failed experiment in an institution for “children like him,” undertaking the mission as if it were as natural as breathing, forever designing lessons and searching for signs that he’d absorbed them. She tried and tried with numbers, with zippers and shoelaces, and later rewarded him (and herself, she admitted) with narrative and music, the environments in which he thrived. When Seymour returned home, she smiled up at him wearily as Paulie yelped and covered his father in kisses. Love grew a bigger mystery by the day.
    It was only after a sudden and ambitious cancer finally nullified the electricity of Lydia’s thoughts and the generosity of her limbs that the heartfelt profiles of others like Paulie appeared in the
Times
, on hour-long specials on NPR. That the experts marveled, as Lydia had, at the bubbling wit of those with Williams syndrome, the unflagging affection and trust, the proclivity towards music and song; at the inability to complete the simplest puzzle, to understand the way quarters became a dollar. That studies identified an array of likely comorbidities. More often than not, congenital heart disease. Anxiety. Hypothyroidism. A shortened life expectancy.
    Seven years after Lydia’s death, while sifting through staticky radio stations on an autumn drive home, Seymour stumbled across a program that came through the airwaves as clear and bright as a gong: it told the story he’d sat in the middle of without hope of understanding, and he pulled the car over to the shoulder and gripped the leather steering wheel, and was, for a full fifty-three minutes, still.

W ITH THE FADING OF THE NINETIES , Edward had watched both himself and the crowds at the clubs changing. They were more tired and less willing to laugh, and he, equivalently, felt less and less like teasing their Coors-addled brains. His hair grew long from neglect, and he alienated most audiences, though he garnered a minuscule cult following of people who dubbed him “the lost comic” for the way he wandered across the stage, gaping at the spotlights as though they were cryptic signs in a foreign tongue. He couldn’t explain it except to say that
it
had simply ceased, burned off like an atmospheric layer—“it” being whatever had lived in him that had drawn punch lines from human behavior, that had identified the rhythm stitched between silence and speech, between precipitation and execution. The clubs eventually withdrew their offers, at least those he hadn’t severed ties with of his own profanity-strewn accord, and his friends took to rolling their eyes at his endless string of clichéd ontological concerns. They would come over and he would