That summer, Eleanor had her best crop of tomatoes ever. In late August, she picked four bushels, with the plan of taking out the pressure cooker the next day to make a winter’s worth of spaghetti sauce. The garden had yielded a good crop of basil, too. She set the tomatoes in baskets in the kitchen, planning to work on the sauce that afternoon when the day cooled off.
She left Cam in charge while she drove into town to buy canning jars. Even before she set foot in the house, she could feel—all the way out where she parked, by Cam’s woodshop, that something had happened. Maybe it was the uncharacteristic stillness, the quiet.
One step into the kitchen and she saw it all, what looked at first like a crime scene. Her son had gotten into the tomatoes. It had probably started with a single one—a big, juicy Jet Star, maybe, or anEarly Girl, poised on the top of the overflowing basket calling out to him. He had probably only intended to fling that one tomato, but once he’d done this, the thrill of throwing it and the desire to keep going had been too much for him. By the time Eleanor stepped into the room, her four bushel baskets were empty. Tomato juice, tomato seeds, tomato skin covered the cupboard doors and walls. Her son stood there in the center of the room, his face containing, simultaneously, a look of rueful regret and ecstasy.
“I couldn’t help it,” he told her, shaking his head so his curls bounced wildly, his face like that of an angel.
Cam ambled into the house in the aftermath of the tomato disaster, his mellow demeanor unaltered. “Hey, buddy,” he said, swinging Toby high over his head as Eleanor, on the floor, mopped up tomato seeds and skins. “Looks like you had yourself some fun.” He stripped off his son’s clothes, then his own, and stepped outside to turn on the sprinkler. From her place at the sink, wringing out the mop, she watched them dance. Her two darling redheads.
Toby had only recently turned three when he saw a show on television featuring a child prodigy violinist from China named Mei Mei Ling, playing a piece of music called the Wieniawski Polonaise. The moment Mei Mei set down his small violin, Toby told Eleanor he needed one of those.
The first time Toby mentioned his desire for a violin, she imagined it was probably a fleeting whim, though even then he was not prone to those. His passions were clear and abiding—snails and other crustaceans, rock collecting, long hours spent studying Tintin books, swimming in the brook down the road every chance he got, and chasing their boats of cork people downstream—and it had been Eleanor’s experience that once Toby developed an interest, rather than diminishing, it only intensified.
In the case of his rock collecting, he filled his pockets daily with stones found on their property and, when they ventured out on hikes, beyond—so many rocks that the floor of his room was lined with specimens from his collection. The first thing Eleanor did now, before washing his pants, was to empty the pockets of that day’s latest finds.
Likewise, he had a terrarium filled with snails, and knew all their names. On the seventeen-hour car trip they made once (once, and never again) to visit Cam’s parents on Amelia Island, he had occupied himself for the entire drive with a library book about the species of snails found in South America.
He brought up the topic of the violin again that night when Eleanor put him to bed, and again at breakfast. He volunteered to sell his Troll collection—also, if necessary, his Ninja Turtles and Smurfs—as a way of earning money to buy the instrument. He promised to take on jobs. When they’d set out in the car later that day, to do errands, he asked Eleanor, “Are we going to get my violin now?”
In the end, they bought him a one-quarter-size instrument and signed him up for Suzuki lessons. Because Eleanor had no time to study with him, as she would have done in earlier days, Alison agreed to go to lessons with her brother and learn the violin alongside him. Within a couple of weeks he had surpassed her and she lost interest in the lessons, but it didn’t matter. Toby was happy practicing alone.
His location of choice for doing this, on account of the acoustics in the room, evidently, was their bathroom—which was problematic, since they had only the one. Many times, when Toby had installed himself in the bathroom to work on his scales, one or another of them would end up hammering on the door needing to use the toilet.
“Come on in,” he said. “I don’t mind if you see me play.”
He had books with sheet music for simple pieces, but found them insulting. “I want that one we saw on TV,” he told Eleanor. Meaning the Wieniawski. Cam had located a recording of the piece (though not, as Toby would have preferred, performed by the child prodigy from China) at a store in Boston. Toby asked them to put the record on for him multiple times every day.
Sometimes now Eleanor would find him standing in front of the record player, listening, tossing his wild red hair like a conductor he’d seen on television one time, a look on his face of the most intense concentration.
Though his Suzuki teacher followed a conventional approach to learning the violin, Toby had developed his own method for masteringthe particular piece of music he loved. From listening to the record he had worked out the first eight or ten notes of the Wieniawski. He played them over and over. Every day he tried adding two or three more notes.
Eleanor liked to stand in the bathroom doorway, just taking in the sight of him—her strange, miraculous, web-footed, red-haired son, whose fingers barely reached across the neck of the small violin.
He didn’t seem to be aware of her presence. More often than not, at these moments, or when one of his sisters, having given up on privacy, came in to pee, Toby would keep playing his instrument while one of them sat on the toilet. Maybe he noticed. More likely he did not.
“Damn Wieniawski,” Cam said one afternoon, coming in from the woodshop to the ever-present sound of Toby’s practicing his piece.
“He’ll either end up in Carnegie Hall or San Quentin,” Eleanor said. One thing they knew, he would have a life like nobody else’s.
Eleanor was in the garden, shoveling a load of manure onto her squash hills. Suddenly Cam was beside her.
“I thought you were giving the children a bath,” she said.
“I took off their clothes and turned on the sprinkler,” he said. “It accomplishes the same effect.”
“We’d better get back to them,” she said. It never took Toby long to find trouble.
“We’ll go back,” he said. “I just needed a moment.”
She had a shovelful of manure in her hands. Dirt on her face no doubt. She was wearing her old overalls, and she must have smelled of cow manure. “What’s the matter?”
“I just wanted you,” he said.
He put his arms around her. He pulled off the bandanna she had used to hold her hair back. He pressed his mouth against hers and kissed her hard. A phrase came to her, something Sylvia Plath had written in her journal long ago, about the night she met the man she would marry, Ted Hughes—the father of her future children—describing how, that night,he kissed me bang smash on the mouth andripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband.That was how Cam kissed Eleanor that afternoon in the garden.
Eleanor knew the rest, of course. Sylvia Plath had babies. Ted Hughes had an affair. Sylvia Plath ended up with her head in the oven.
That wouldn’t be Eleanor and Cam’s story. Only the kissing part.
