Chapter 9
NORTON THORP
Norton Thorp was born in Moscow in the spring of 1963, the only child of a middle-aged American diplomat who was serving his country in the Soviet Union during the cold war and a much younger Russian ballerina. Norton’s parents never married, and when Donald Thorp left Moscow to return to the United States, taking his four-year-old son with him, Marina Golikova, the child’s mother, stayed behind, ostensibly for professional reasons. And so Donald’s younger sister Therese, a divorcee with no children of her own, became for all practical purposes Norton’s second mother—and part-time father as well, for Thorp’s assignments abroad kept him separated from his son most of the time.
Therese was comfortably well off thanks to the generous divorce settlement that her attorney and for a while also lover, Morris Pringley, had managed to extract from her former husband. She was a pleasant, cultivated woman in her thirties with no particular talents or ambition but with a cheerful disposition that the breakdown of her marriage had not dampened. In her providential new role as Norton’s surrogate mother she appeared to have found her purpose in life, and henceforth devoted herself to her nephew’s upbringing with the zeal and abnegation of a missionary.
Norton was no ordinary child. From the moment he was reunited with his mother—his premature birth had confined him to an incubator for three weeks—he began to show unmistakable signs of precocity. He was an extremely alert baby, who slept little and cried even less, his sparkling green eyes constantly scrutinizing his surroundings, absorbing every detail and keeping track of the slightest movement, and with his attention always sharply focused as soon as anyone talked to him. At nine months, he talked in complete sentences. He would speak in Russian with his mother and his live-in nanny but would only use English to communicate with his father. Donald would often read aloud to his son, who would sit up quietly beside him and insist on looking at the written words as if to check the accuracy of his father’s version of the story.
By the age of three Norton spoke English and Russian fluently, with a vocabulary well beyond what might be expected from a child or even a young adult, and by the time he started kindergarten he could already read English without hesitation. He kept in touch with his biological mother mainly by telephone, and the monthly conversations the two of them had carried on separated by an ocean and a continent helped to refresh his Russian. He also acquired a good knowledge of French from some old picture books that had belonged to his paternal grandmother Thérèse-Marie Thorp (née de Sèvres), a French aristocrat after whom his aunt had been named. Soon after majoring in French literature at the University of Michigan, the young Therese had spent one year in Paris perfecting her French, and she now welcomed the opportunity to have someone, even a young beginner, with whom she could speak it once again.
Music, especially but not exclusively classical music, was a central element of Therese’s universe. She would invariably have the radio or the four-track stereo system playing as she went about her daily chores and also in the evenings, which she usually spent alone reading or watching television while the music played in the background. She was vice president of the Ann Arbor Baroque Music Association and regularly attended concerts and other musical events but, apart from a few appearances with the university choir in her student days, she did not feel the need to experience music as a performer. Despite having been brought up in such a propitious environment, Norton never manifested any real interest in music, let alone in playing an instrument. Some gentle nudging on the part of his aunt, who would have liked him to take piano lessons, produced no results. Morris, Therese’s former lover, would occasionally drop in and more often than not also stay for dinner, but he would no longer stay overnight. Their brief affair, now a thing of the past, had been replaced by a passionless but sincere companionship in a mutual attempt to fend off an all-too-real sense of loneliness.
Therese was an excellent cook. Her French background probably had something to do with the ease and assurance with which she could combine the most heterogeneous ingredients and produce a surprisingly delicious dish that she was happy to share with a delighted Morris. The young attorney was no gourmet but he could certainly appreciate a fine meal, especially one that couldn’t compare with the typical American fare. It was after one of those intimate dinners that the first of the “incidents,” as they would later refer to them, occurred.
Morris had just turned thirty-five, and to mark the occasion Therese had decided to cook him something special: a four-course Middle Eastern meal. The afternoon rain had cooled the air and the late autumn evening threatened to be rather chilly but the table for two had nevertheless been set outside, on the patio adjacent to the large kitchen where Therese had once again worked her culinary magic.
Young Norton—he was then barely five—had already been fed, bathed, kissed good night, and tucked up in his bed for the night when Therese and Morris sat down to enjoy their exotic feast. It opened with the appetizers, an assortment of dips that included grilled eggplant and lemon puree, a spread made from feta cheese spiced with chili pepper and garlic, and meat cooked in tomato and red wine sauce. An entrée of burghul and potato cakes with lamb and apricot filling was followed by the main course: swordfish baked in a lemon and paprika sauce and served on a bed of pilaf rice.
Wine had been steadily flowing throughout the extravagant meal. Dessert—figs in their syrup topped with whipped cream and pistachios—was still to come and the mood was light around the candle-lit table.
“So where did you dig up the recipes for those exotic and probably aphrodisiac dishes? And don’t tell me you made them up yourself.” Morris was teasing her, as he usually did when he was slightly intoxicated.
“No, I didn’t make them up—this time. And I didn’t add any funny stuff either. I found the recipes in the book of the One Thousand and One Nights” she replied, quite happy to play the game.
“C’mon, there are no recipes in the Arabian Nights book, only the stories that Scheherezade spins so that the king’s curiosity will prevent him from having her head chopped off.”
“Oh, yes there are—in the original Persian version, that is. Scheherezade not only tells King Shahryar fabulous tales; she also cooks the most exquisite dishes to keep him happy. In fact, she owes her salvation to her cooking rather than to her storytelling. It’s there, recipes and all, in the Persian version. But it got lost in the modern translations.”
“And you would want me to believe that you can read Persian?”
Under the starry sky, the patio was now almost completely dark. The kitchen lights behind them had been dimmed to the point of extinction and only the wavering flame of the half-consumed candle on the table illuminated the playful exchange of pleasantries between the two friends. They could hear the music, a piano sonata or something of the sort, coming from the patio of the adjoining semi-detached cottage.
Therese was the first to realize that something was not right. John and Ethel, the elderly couple living next door, were out of town for the week—she had gone over in the afternoon to water the plants and check on the house. There were no neighbors around; the music came from inside the house—her own house. She remembered having played a record of Arabic music to add to the atmosphere, but the portable record player had automatically shut itself off, and besides—and this was the most disturbing part—what her well-trained musical ear was detecting was not a recording but the live sound of a real piano.
When Morris finally caught up with Therese she was standing in the living room partially blocking his view, but in the diffused lighting he could still make out the silhouette at the back of the room. In a corner, near the bay window, there stood a boudoir grand piano that Therese had inherited from her mother. The massive black instrument had been silent for years but not totally neglected, for Therese had it dusted every fortnight and occasionally tuned, out of a self-imposed obligation to properly care for the instrument that had meant so much to her mother. And now someone—a very small someone—was playing it.
“Norton? What . . .” Therese could not finish the sentence. She was trying to decide which one of her senses not to believe: her hearing or her sight. Norton was sitting on the piano stool in his bright-colored pajamas, his little legs, too short to reach the pedals, dangling in the air while his small hands flew over the keyboard, pressing and releasing keys with the skill and assurance of an accomplished pianist. Therese and Morris just stood there, bewildered and petrified, listening to Norton’s consummate rendition of what some part of Therese’s brain recognized as the third movement of Mozart’s piano sonata K.331 in A major, popularly known as the “Turkish Rondo,” with its typical broken chords lending emphasis to the main beats.
When they later talked about the incident, they could not agree on how long it had lasted but they did remember having been mere witnesses, two silent, motionless, and unbelieving witnesses, throughout the whole unreal experience. They also recalled how it had ended: Norton climbing down from the stool after he finished playing the piece, holding on to the seat while his bare little feet reached the carpet, and then picking up the toy giraffe he had abandoned near the piano, curling up on the carpeted floor, and finally falling asleep hugging his stuffed companion.
After much reflection, hesitation, and discussion with Morris, Therese decided against telling Donald, at least until she could figure out some kind of explanation for what had taken place that night. But the true reason for her silence was a fear of being separated from Norton, since her brother might not wish to continue to entrust his son to someone prone to nocturnal hallucinations, caused by god-knows-what intoxicating substance.
The day following the incident Norton was his usual good-humored self, eating, playing, and generally behaving in the most normal fashion. When Therese played a recording of Mozart’s Turkish Rondo on the stereo, making sure that Norton was around to listen, the boy’s reaction was no different from his customary response to music in general: one of total indifference.
The much sought-after explanation would never be found, their combined efforts to shed some light on the incident notwithstanding. Therese read a great deal about visions, hallucinations, and paranormal phenomena and the biography of Mozart and other infant prodigies; she even delved into pseudo-scientific and esoteric literature on spells and witchcraft, but stopped short of asking her parish priest about the possibility of Norton having been possessed by some evil, if talented, spirit.
Morris, for his part, conducted his own inquiry into the intricacies and unpredictability of the human brain, looking for a physiological or psychological explanation for the mystery. Without disclosing too much about what had really happened, he had tried, unsuccessfully, to have a psychiatrist friend of his prescribe an encephalograph for Norton, hoping it would reveal some physical clue. He had also suggested questioning the boy under hypnosis but Therese would have nothing to do with it, fearing the adverse side effects it might provoke in the child. She had always considered hypnosis a kind of mental rape that could permanently alter the subject’s personality.
Two years after the incident Therese and Morris had gradually resigned themselves to remaining forever ignorant of its true nature. The unexplained event had become their bonding secret, and with the detachment afforded by time they were now able to joke about it. “Maybe it was our conversation about the one thousand and one nights. We may have accidentally conjured up some genie who granted your wish that Norton played the piano,” said Morris. “At least you are no longer blaming my cooking,” replied Therese, “even if you have decided to stay away from Middle Eastern food.” They laughed. Given that nothing out of the ordinary regarding Norton had happened since that special night, they had reached a kind of closure—a feeling that was to be shattered some ten years later, when the second “incident” occurred.