On Wings of Song

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When he was five Daniel Weinreb’s mother disappeared. Though, like his father, he chose to regard this as a personal affront, he soon came to prefer the life they led without her. She’d been a weepy sort of girl, given to long disconnected speeches and spells of stifled hatred for Daniel’s father, some of which always spilled over onto Daniel. She was sixteen when she’d married, twenty-one when she vanished with her two suitcases, the sound system, and the silver flatware in a service for eight that had been their wedding present from her husband’s grandmother, Adah Weinreb.

After the bankruptcy proceedings were over — they’d been going on for a good while even before this — Daniel’s father, Abraham Weinreb, D.D.S., took him a thousand miles away to live in the town of Amesville, Iowa, which needed a dentist because their last one had died. They lived in an apartment over the clinic, where Daniel had his own room, not just a couch that made up into a bed. There were backyards and streets to play in, trees to climb, and mountains of snow all winter long. Children seemed more important in Amesville, and there were more of them. Except for breakfast, he ate most of his meals in a big cafeteria downtown, and they were much better than his mother had cooked. In almost every way it was a better life.

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