From that day, she did not call Terese into the parlor when Jack fussed. She would stop her music to tend to him, though she would already be wistful for the next day’s session with her piano. But he was her best friend, then, and she didn’t begrudge him his demands. When he was old enough to sit up, she brought him up into her lap while she played, and he watched her fingers dance over the keys and kicked the rhythm against her knees.

“Beethoven?” she asked him now, hitching him up on her lap, which was getting too small for him, thanks to his increasing size and the baby growing inside her. She loved the smell of his hair, the heat of his little body pressing against hers; she didn’t like to think of the day when she could not hold him in her lap while she played.

“Beethoven!” he replied, bouncing excitedly. And so she began: the heavy chords of the opening of the Sonata Pathétique. She felt the baby inside her kicking, and, as the grave music swelled, so did the fear in her throat. This baby would be born soon, in only a couple of months. Her recollection of Jack’s birth was still visceral. She could still smell the blood. Equally vivid was her recollection that, even as Terese had placed the swaddled new baby in her arms for his first feeding, she had decided he would be her only child.

But how to prevent another had been a mystery. The day after Jack’s birth, when Dr. Seguin came to check on her, she asked what could be done, but he just patted her hand and said she should leave the matter to God. He said that having babies was as natural as breathing. But if that was true, why did Wilma hear of so many women who died in the process? The best she could manage was to keep John from her, but three months after Jack’s birth she could hold him off no longer. She did want to be a good wife, but she had cringed as he moved on top of her, imagining the inevitable consequences. She kept from weaning Jack as long as possible—the women at church whispered that this was one means of staving off another baby—but that only made her the spoils in a war between father and son, and she felt herself torn between the two of them, Jack squalling for the milk of her breasts, John angry that the baby had command of her body. Wilma dreaded the battle with John beginning again when the new child was born—not to mention that now Jack, too, would likely resent the competition for her attention.