AUTOHARP

My mother’s first instrument is the clarinet. Abetting the marching band, she poses in a single black-and-white photograph in hat and cape, the costume making her face and torso into a stranger’s in the outdoor heat. The reedy taste of the instrument doesn’t disturb her. She is eleven and childish and has already lost a parent. The specter of a doctor’s misplaced hands imperceptibly shadows the narrative of her future self. I will learn the stories of these violent men before I know this cheerful child. I will be younger than she is and will be learning at home to play the recorder, the tepid notes ringing against the sloped ceiling and the single window of a small bedroom. 

#

Evidence in early color shows this same stranger with a more opulent-seeming means of producing sound. The flute in a toddler’s hands is an antique toy, like a silver rattle or an engraved set of alphabet blocks in a house that has none of those things, the blue velveteen of the case mottled with impressions from the instrument’s miniature keys. My mother is all arms and legs in the apartment she shared with a roommate before becoming pregnant with a baby she could keep and moving to the house at the junction of two interrupted roads. At the house today there is an eagle above the front door; the right-hand neighbor’s yard is lined with pretended wagon wheels. The stink of patriotism pervades the neighborhood, its cracked throughways and scraggly trees. The apartment was disordered, hosting a single plant propped against a shelf stocked with leaning books. The barefaced flautist in the second photograph perches herself on a couch draped with a bedspread in an unflattering hue. Her forearms and triceps have the strong shape I recognize and have worried over for myself. I never notice it on her until I reconsider the image, taking in its earnest cacophony from an angle of uninterrupted grief.

#

The one time I star in a school play, they cast me as the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I have for my own reasons cut my hair up to my chin, and I am deemed sufficiently boyish to play a young man. They give me a cap and a smock and leggings in diverse shades of muddy brown, which I wear like a caricature of a troubadour or a medieval peasant. I carry the recorder and bring it intermittently to my lips. The other ten-year-olds follow, up and down the steps of the music room, which has the chemical smell of new carpet. Later I will read that on the Bungelosenstrasse the playing of music is still forbidden.

#

In the year or so before her suicide, my mother takes up the harp. It isn’t something she has the money for, and it gives her an unsettling kinship with the angels I don’t know she wants to resemble. The wooden and stringed monstrosity becomes a piece of my mother with disorienting speed, so that after the memorial for her absent body, people who barely knew her describe watching her play in earlier decades: the happiness they think it gave them, the admiration they think they felt.

#

The closest I’ve gotten to a harp outside the house I shared with my mother is the cord zither I plucked at with a guitar pick while away from her, my father’s narrow face across the table. We’d slide colored sheets of paper in and out beneath the thin strings and I would follow the trains of notes that extended across them, each monophonic sequence blossoming like a constellation before doubling back on itself to end on the tonic, for a sense of something like home. Then I was as young as three or as old as seven; the divorce had happened early. Then a hurricane or a snowstorm would loom, would interrupt the rhythm of our plucking and before I could blink I would be delivered back to where I’d come from, the fan belt squealing. My stomach would twist as I thought of the objects I might have left behind without meaning to.  

#

Auto: self, on one’s own. The autoharp is famed as much for arresting sound as for making it; its chord bars perfectly mute unwanted strings. The instrument’s etymology doesn’t begin to capture the kind of aloneness I experience without my mother’s purposely disappeared body.