The Second Movement
Miscarriage belongs to the family of quiet losses.
Most happen in the first trimester, before it’s customary to tell people about a pregnancy. It’s meant to be practical and kind, this custom, and it is in a way. If the worst happens, the more people who knew you were pregnant, the more people who might stop you at the bar or the grocery months later to ask after your nonexistent baby, who must be babbling by now. People you might not want to see you cry while clutching a cocktail you wish you weren’t allowed to drink. People who might ask for details with an expression more of intrigue than empathy. People who might insist “it’ll happen when it’s meant to” or “it’s all part of God’s plan.” As though you were mistaken in thinking yourself ready enough to be a parent. As though God thought it better to give babies to that woman on the news who drowned both her daughters. To that man two counties over who shot his three baby boys.
“Wait until you’re in the second trimester ‘safe zone’ to tell people you’re pregnant,” goes the common advice. “In case you miscarry,” goes unsaid. “And if you do,” this implies, “speak nothing of it.”
For the person who was pregnant, a special kind of guilt can creep in and grasp at the throat. During and after each of my losses, one doctor or another would tell me, “Nothing you did or didn’t do caused this.” And yet, I’d turn my attention to memories of the people who’d said, “Don’t stress! It’s not good for the baby!” To the overtime I’d worked in the early, tender weeks. To the mead I’d had just before my first positive pregnancy test. To my at-times unregimented vitamin regimen. To the pronouncement I’d made to my high school classmates more than twenty years before that I didn’t want to be a mother.
For the partner of the once-pregnant person, there can be a sense that the grief does not belong to them, is not theirs to speak of, is smaller by comparison. For men, there is, perhaps, that nagging notion that they are meant to “fix” everything. Control everything. In July of 2022, in the hospital, the morning after I was induced to complete my first miscarriage at 15 weeks, as we waited for my patient-release paperwork to go through, as we listened for the knock on the door from the nurse who would usher us from the only room in which we would ever hold our daughter, my husband, Brad, apologized for crying. “I’m supposed to be taking care of you,” he said.
For months, he had kept up with the tending.
After the happy news in spring, he’d told me, “Take care of what’s happening inside your body. Let me take care of what happens around it.” He’d swept the kitchen floors and made what meals I could stomach. Kept the pantry full and the cat box tidy. Put out the seed and suet in the morning and brought them in at night. And once the summer had come and we’d learned the end was coming, he’d soaked the tomatoes and held the weeds at bay. Coaxed life from the earth and me outside, outside of myself, to see it. He’d held steady the rhythm of days.
. . .
Can I say it was humid and hot in Dayton, Ohio, in July of 2022?
Not with absolute certainty.
In that month and those that followed, my attention turned inward to my first pregnancy and loss, and I noticed little about the world outside my body. But knowing what I know of life in Ohio from the almanac and three decades of living here, I can conjure an approximate image of that miserable season.
So, let’s say that in July of 2022, like most Julys in Ohio, the humidity hovered around 70% and the temperature around 84, which is to say that the air hung below the trees like swaths of damp cotton and grasped at the skin of every animal.
Someone once told me that in Ohio the skies feel lower than in other parts of the country, but in July of 2022, they must’ve hovered so low you could feel the weight of them on your shoulders. Now and then, their cloudbellies must’ve sagged and split open, spilling out thick, heavy drops of warm rain, and the throat of the earth must’ve gagged and sputtered against the deluge and spit slimy puddles across the trails and roads, which filled with the eggs of mosquitoes.
The mosquitoes I do remember. Over Fourth of July weekend, one plunged its proboscis just below my ribcage, where the flesh turns soft, and left a half-dollar-sized welt that lingered well into autumn. When it was still fresh and pink, a doctor asked where I’d gotten it. I don’t remember which doctor, or which appointment, as there were so many in July of 2022 that the month sometimes seemed seamless hours of dressing and undressing, of strange, gloved hands and waiting—hip bones balanced on a hard edge. But at this appointment, as I lay back against the exam table and my paper gown slipped open, the doctor saw the welt, smiled, and asked, “Were you naked when you got that?”
“No, no,” I said and laughed for her benefit.
“I dunno,” she persisted. “It looks like there’s a fun story behind it.”
But surely, considering the reason for that appointment and every other, she could’ve guessed that I had no fun stories from that summer; and surely, she knew as well as I did that Ohio’s mosquitoes don’t wait for you to strip down to prod you.
The true story of that mosquito, which I never told the doctor or anyone, was that she came for me hours after Brad and I learned that our baby would not survive. Turner Syndrome, the lab results said. A nearly-always-fatal condition. We received the news by email. It was the end of my first trimester. Brad built a fire, and we sat beside it for hours in a womb of fireglow, gingko, and honeysuckle, and when she—because all blood-sucking mosquitoes are shes—announced herself, I let her take what she wanted. Maybe this body can still be useful, I thought. Maybe I’m just too tired to fight.
The weeks of waiting to miscarry that followed must’ve sounded like every other July in our part of Ohio: Care and longing. The whir of mowers and hedge clippers. The flit-flit-flit of sprinklers. The yearning cadence of toads. Cicadas must’ve hummed in trees above and crackled from earth below, desperate to make something of their single, frenzied season.
But in July of 2022, I heard little save for that lone hungry mother buzzing in my ear. Two heartbeats, then one. The sound a house makes at night when only one creature lies awake inside of it. And one night, music from the kitchen.
Brad was at the stove, watching vegetables from his garden sizzle in oil. “You should listen to this,” he said from the doorway, a request left unspoken. I joined him. The music was “Concierto de Aranjuez” by Joaquin Rodrigo. He’d heard it years before, he told me, during a presentation by a man we both knew. It hadn’t meant much to him then, but he’d recently remembered a story about its second movement—the composer and his wife losing their first baby. A honeymoon in Spain. A hard winter in France. He called my attention to the slow steady strum of the guitar. How it sounded like a heartbeat. How it beat ever more slowly until the final notes, ascending.
“I think you’ll find,” the presenter had said, “that those times when you seem to be at a complete loss for words, it’s this music that can pick up right where words leave off.”
There, in the kitchen, we held each other and cried.
. . .
It was March before I sought out more about the concerto. By then, I was pregnant again but didn’t yet know it.
For being one of the most famous concertos ever written for guitar, there wasn’t much to find. It premiered in 1940 and took its name from the gardens of the Royal Palace of Aranjuez in Spain, where the composer had spent happy days with his wife, Victoria Kahmi de Rodrigo.
According to program notes from a 1970 New York Philharmonic performance of the work, Rodrigo meant for the concerto “to sound like the hidden breeze that stirs in the tree tops in the parks…” A write-up by the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra credited him with writing that “in its notes one may fancy seeing the ghost of Goya, held in thrall by melancholy—in its themes there lingers the fragrance of magnolias, the singing of birds, and the gushing of fountains.”
Nearly every article made reference to how, for decades, its somber second movement, the Adagio, had been presumed to lament the bombing of Guernica until, near the end of her life and Rodrigo’s, Kahmi declared its true focus the stillbirth of their first daughter.
I sought out words about the loss from the composer himself and found instead a piece by a Rodrigo biographer, Graham Wade, entitled “The Truth About Rodrigo’s ‘Concierto de Aranjuez.’” Under a subheading that appeared in all caps, “Separating Myth from Fact,” he wrote:
“Another pervasive myth is that the slow movement was a cry of pain written concerning Victoria’s miscarriage in the spring of 1939. Many tears have been shed ’round this myth and much passion expended. But the story contradicts information in a letter Rodrigo wrote in 1943.”
The excerpted letter—whose recipient and original context went unspecified—stated that Rodrigo had written the concerto at the suggestion of friends, and that its second and third movements had come to him all at once one morning months before the stillbirth. “If Rodrigo could retain in his memory everything relating to the Aranjuez,” Wade concluded, “it would seem strange that the loss of a child was not mentioned.”
I imagined him writing with a smug grin on his face. Standing in our kitchen the night I’d first heard the concerto. Smirking at our “tears shed” and “passion expended.”
I ordered a copy of Victoria Kahmi de Rodrigo’s memoir. It arrived the day before I learned I was pregnant again. I scoured its pages for words to fill the sinkhole in my chest. I found only a few short paragraphs. One confirmed that the idea for the concerto originated at a meal with friends. Another that Rodrigo composed the second and third movements before the loss. Still another recounted the testimony of a family friend who’d looked after Rodrigo while Kahmi recovered in the clinic:
“Later [the friend] would tell me how [Rodrigo] would spend the long hours of the night at the old piano, unable to sleep and that she heard from her room a melody as full of sadness and longing that it truly gave her chills. This melody would become the ‘Adagio’ of the Concierto de Aranjuez. He was playing it for the first time, wrapped in darkness.”
I read and re-read these passages, trying to make sense of the chronology.
At the end of my first week of knowing about the second pregnancy, I learned I would likely miscarry again. The following day, I scoured what few filmed interviews of Rodrigo I could find and squinted at dubious subtitles. I found an eBay listing for a $100 Rodrigo biography in Spanish and wondered whether I’d retained enough of the language from high school to justify the expense. I found a promising link to a BBC Radio piece from 2009 called “The Sound of Magnolias,” but it led to a page stating the program was no longer available. I submitted an inquiry through a contact form and received no answer.
I told Brad none of this.
Eventually, months later, I would find a 1995 Minnesota Public Radio interview with Rodrigo’s friend Pepe Romero, who said of him, “He did not really like so much, or did not used to like to say what it really represents. But the Aranjuez actually was written at what they called the worst time of their life. They had just lost their first baby. And the whole second movement was his way of conversing with God.”
But for the length of spring, I gave up on Rodrigo and his ghost of Goya, Aranjuez’s fountains and the smell of magnolias. Ours were in bloom, but I paid them little attention. The crooks of my arms purpled with bruises from needles. My ultrasounds showed an unchanging black void inside of me.
May brought a loss familiar yet all its own. I bled in soft, quiet places. Brad tended to seedlings and to the ravenous appetites of new, wild mothers who peeked their heads from branches and brush, sniffing the air for danger. One night I heard the concerto playing in the room where he slept. I went to the door and listened but left it unopened.
When summer came again, with its hiss of insects and rain, neither of us knew what to say about it. But one evening in late July, on the anniversary of our first loss, Brad led me outside—outside of myself—to a shaded table between a scraggly old juniper and a dying Crimson King. He put on the concerto and let the sounds of Aranjuez’s whispering treetops rise into the branches overhead. We were in a garden in Spain, then, and in our own backyard. In someone else’s season of loss and in our own. High above us, cloudbellies sagged and split open, spilling out warm, heavy droplets upon the leaves, and soon, beneath them, the words poured out of us.
We each told our version of the summer before and sat in each other’s gardens. What details we’d forgotten, we replaced with those around us. The frenzied cicadas. The air warm and damp on our skin. And there, I found the answer. How music written in one moment becomes music for another. How one year replaces the next. How those lost carry on.
Karen Maner is a nonfiction writer, a proud Daytonian, and a level nine gnome rogue. Her essays have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. Her work also received an Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Intro Journals Project award (2013) and made the “Notables” list in Best American Essays (2014). She has appeared on stage as part of PechaKucha Dayton, Bloom Creative, the Rebel Goddess Warrior art series, and, most recently, as a collaborating artist for Dayton Dance Initiative’s CoLab II.