Music for Wartime Page 21

  Melanie flipped through the stack of remaining records and found an Etta James one from 1973. Only a Fool. She pushed it carefully to the back wall. “I think Vanessa would have liked her, too.”

  Out of all the things in the bag, Jed had settled on the stale cigarettes. He dumped them on the small floor in front of Etta. “These’ll be cool. I can get some height, once I glue it all. Oh, and look. The typewriter won’t fit, so I want to set it out for people to type their thoughts. Like this.” He pushed the Smith Corona, and the TV table it sat on, in front of the house. He waited for her reaction.

  In a previous life, she’d have kissed him right then. She’d have led him to the bed. She wondered, though, not for the first time, if she’d ever really want someone again. What was the point, when you could never know him even a little bit?

  There was a piece of yellow paper in the roller, so Melanie walked around and started typing. The keys were loud and deep. It’s beautiful, she wrote. Let’s go get something from Zsuzsi.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t bring herself to leave. But she found herself somehow invested in Jed’s project now, and its completion might feel like closure. She’d never answer her million questions or sort through all Vanessa’s things, but she could see the last room of the little museum filled. She slipped her shoes back on.

  When they knocked at apartment B it was László who answered. He waved them toward the kitchen table, turtling behind with his walker. Zsuzsi wore a bathrobe over a nightgown, and she stopped washing dishes to sit with them, rubbing lotion into her palms. Jed explained the project—“a memorial to the ones we lost,” he called it—and asked if there was any small object she’d like to contribute. Melanie was taken aback by how vigorously Zsuzsi nodded, by how quickly her eyes filled. She grabbed Jed’s forearm. “This I have been waiting,” she said. She disappeared into another room while Jed and Melanie looked at each other bewildered and László eased himself into a kitchen chair.

  She came back cupping something between her palms, and waited for Jed to extend his own. It was a stuffed gray mouse, worn moleskin stretched over a lumpy plaster body.

  László let out a monosyllabic shout, angry rather than startled, then mumbled to Zsuzsi in Hungarian. She shot back, repeating something firmly until he was calm. She brought him a glass of water, and he reclined to stare at the ceiling, his head too heavy for his long, thin neck. Melanie wanted nothing more than to leave—she should have known this was a mistake—and she was surprised that Jed seemed so planted in his chair, waiting out the storm as if it were a real one from which he was responsible for sheltering the little mouse.

  “This comes from my sister. She also is murdered by the gas, but many many years.”

  Zsuzsi pronounced “gas” like “guess,” and Melanie fixated on this just as she’d fixated all week on Vanessa’s possessions instead of Michael’s death. They were killed by the guess.

  “László, he is okay. I tell you a whole story. Because you know that the gas comes back for a reason. Yes? And here you are this beautiful couple full of life. Do you see what it means to have your life in front of you?”

  Jed said, “We do,” and he put his free hand solidly on Melanie’s knee. It was half a gesture of restraint, and half a display for Zsuzsi: Yes, we are a couple if you say we are, and we will stay a couple till you’ve finished your story.

  László was fuming but quiet, drinking his water now like a shamed child, and Zsuzsi leaned close to Jed. “All my life I think, the gas will come back. And here we are almost to the grave until it does.”

  Jed said, “But you got out safely. That was so long ago.” There was that empathy again, beaming from him like a light. Melanie wondered if this was how every day was for him, near-strangers confessing seventy-year-old secrets just because of those clear eyes, that forward hunch.

  “In 1944, in October, I am standing in the line at the train station. They have in the lines families, and a line for the old men, and a line for the women with no rings, so here is me and here is my sister Kata who is seventeen, and I am twenty-four. Back when I am eighteen I am singing soprano at the state opera in Budapest, and I am called the ingenue. Many flowers, many men. But then 1939 I am no longer a star. I can sing at the Jewish music hall only. Five years pass, and I am in the line, and everywhere is crying and pushing, and László, he recognizes me. I have never seen him. He is only nineteen years old. Do you understand?”

  Melanie shook her head, and was glad when Jed did too. “No.”

  “He is a music lover. Every week he goes to the concert hall or the opera, and he remembers me from five years. I have at this time hair to my waist, all black. And he says to the other men, ‘We make a mistake. This woman is not a Jew, this woman is with me.’ So he takes me from the line, and the last time I see my sister is she is getting on the train.”

  Zsuzsi put her face into her hands, almost an embarrassed gesture, and once Melanie reassured herself that Zsuzsi wasn’t crying, just bracing herself and collecting her breath, she tried to process the story. Jed had taken his hand off her knee and now it hovered over his own lap, as if he might need to catch something in a moment. László just sipped his water.

  “Many years later, our old neighbor sends me this.” She meant the mouse. “It is my sister’s but she gave to the neighbor boy when he was crying. And they send it then back to me.”

  Melanie was the one to talk. She worried that Jed, in all his patience, wouldn’t ask the question. And one more unanswered question would explode her. “Are you saying your husband was there in the . . . he was in the capacity of a soldier?”

  Zsuzsi lifted her head. “He already loved me, from the opera. He knows my name, and he tells all the men this is his girlfriend. He does not save me just to save someone. He saves me because Cupid has hit.” She tapped her own rib cage. “He is musician too. At school he was studying the piano. Even now he plays. Frenkly, this is one blessing: The stroke takes from him the language of English, but leaves the language of piano.” She hit her palm on the table with conviction, as if this were the salient point of the story. “We spend three weeks together, and then he sends me to his cousin in Holland, and then I am on a boat to Norway, and he meets me in Toronto after the war and we are married.” She was talking again to Jed, and Melanie considered that she might need to readjust the look of horror on her own face. She settled for covering her mouth and nose with both hands. “He was Arrow Cross. Do you know what is Arrow Cross?” They both shook their heads. “I will put this way: They take it upon themselves. Without the Germans there yet, they take it upon themselves. But when the Germans come, Arrow Cross is still helping. This is when we meet.”

  “And you stayed with him?” Melanie said. She couldn’t help it. “This is the same person? Him?” She refrained from gesturing, so that László could remain in the dark. He was contemplating his empty glass.

  “I fell in love. Maybe it makes no sense.”

  “Not really,” Melanie said, but only under her breath.

  Zsuzsi said, “But I had no children with him. Is like the two of you. You are a beautiful couple, and you should not care what are the rules of married and not married and who is widow. You know: Not everyone survives.”

  Melanie wasn’t following anymore. Was she the widow? Was Vanessa?

  “And now you see: The gas comes back for us. We are gone in Cleveland and the gas comes back, and instead it finds other people. It finds your beautiful friend.” Zsuzsi began sobbing into her hands, and Jed found the right moment to touch her shoulder. Melanie, near panic herself, looked across at the old man, at the absent way he observed his crying wife. She wondered what Zsuzsi had told him to calm him down—if she’d lied to him about the mouse, or even about Jed and Melanie. Told him they were doctors, psychologists. She studied his face: his caved-in mouth, his long, unruly eyebrows. His blue eyes milky with cataracts.

  Zsuzsi looked up
at Melanie. “You forgive yourself now for moving on. It is good your affair has ended, yes? Those two go together to their grave, and you are here and finding love. But I know from the first time I see you that you worry you make this happen, that your sins made come the gas. And I tell you this story because you need to know it was not from you. It was from me.”

  Melanie opened her mouth to say, “No, I never had an affair, I had an engagement and a betrayal and a collapsing of my universe, no, you’re very confused,” but Jed shot her a look—a gentle glare, a blaze of green—and it was like an emergency transfusion of clarity. This story is not about you, the look said. Shut up.

  “You cannot help that you fall in love with that man,” Zsuzsi said.

  “No. No, I couldn’t. We don’t choose, right?”

  Zsuzsi nodded vigorously. “Who is ever to choose?”

  László started coughing, a thick cough that rattled his whole body, his hands braced against the table, and Jed jumped up to get him more water. He put the glass in front of him, but the cough continued with such intensity that he couldn’t stop to drink. Zsuzsi rose and stood behind him, lifting the glass to his mouth, and he breathed some water in, then dribbled it out into his white stubble. Eventually, the coughs spread out and stopped. He said something to Zsuzsi and waved her away.

  Jed said, “It’s late.” And it was. It was dark outside. (The band would have been starting to play right now. Melanie had almost forgotten.) The mouse was still nestled in Jed’s palm. He said, “Are you sure you want me to take this? I’ll show you the memorial when it’s done.” But László was coughing again, and Zsuzsi was back at his side. Jed and Melanie slipped out of the kitchen, out of the apartment, up to the second floor hall, where Vanessa Dillard’s door was still ajar from what Melanie had thought would be her quick farewell trip to Jed’s.

  He was saying, “I can’t paint over the mouse. I couldn’t do it. But that’ll be cool, right? It can be the only unpainted thing, like it’s the rawest and it stands out.”

  Melanie nodded and said, “I think I’m stopping here. I need to get off this ride now.”

  “I mean, wow. It’s called Stockholm syndrome, right? Do you think she’s really loved him all this time?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “I mean, talk about compartmentalizing. Ha! Okay, so does that mean he was a Nazi? Is that the same thing? I mean it sounds, like, as bad or worse than Nazi.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, God. Oh. Why are you crying? Hey.”

  She wiped at her nose and tried to unscramble her brain. “It was true down there, that look you gave me. What Zsuzsi said had nothing to do with me. We think we’re part of the story, but we’re just the tangents. It’s the same thing I’ve been—you know? In there.”

  Jed looked horrified. “I don’t understand, but I know that’s not true!”

  Melanie leaned against the wall and wondered how she could possibly still have tears left when she was so very dehydrated. “I’ll put it this way. You look into that dollhouse. Okay, that wasn’t fair, not a dollhouse. The museum, the memorial. You look into it from outside, and you have a few little relics, and you try to put a narrative around them, decipher them, but really you’re never going to know. Are you satisfied with that? Standing on the outside looking in?” He was quiet, and she worried she’d offended him. It was easy to forget how young he was. She said, “I’m sorry. I mean, maybe that’s the role of the artist.”

  Jed’s voice was as kind as any nurse’s, any teacher’s: “I think it’s the role of the survivor.”

  “Oh.” It was the point of his whole project, and she’d missed it completely. “Oh.”

  Why was she always five steps behind?

  He smiled, and she knew then that he would have slept with her, if she’d wanted. He would have taken her up to his apartment and made her feel young and unbetrayed again for one night. Of course he would have. It wasn’t so complicated. But he was still holding that little mouse, fragile and gray, and she didn’t want him to put it down for her or anyone. She wanted it to go straight to the waiting little room, in front of Maria Callas and home, at last, to the land of forgotten and remembered and misconstrued objects—after seventy years, at last. And she wanted to go home and sleep for a week.

  Outside, there was a cascade of sirens—someone else’s emergency—and then they passed.

  She said, “Good night, good night, good night,” and Jed started up his last flight of stairs, the mouse cupped in his hands, until she could see only his feet, then nothing.

  It was, by design, her final image of the building. She sealed it there, like a movie director watching the dailies and selecting from among hundreds what would be the film’s closing shot: here, at the perfect angle, a beautiful man from below, fragile relic in his rough hands. Mouse equaling survival, et cetera. Sirens in the night. Fade to black.

  She locked Vanessa’s door, leaving the Evidence box inside. Her sisters would be glad to handle the apartment’s sale, the transfer of personal effects, the donation of furniture to the women’s shelter.

  It wasn’t quite true, she knew, that there was nothing for her in Zsuzsi’s story. The woman had managed—not just eventually, but right there on the spot in 1944—to forgive the most heinous acts of her lifetime, all for the sake of love. Or at least self-preservation. And here was Melanie, who knew that the rest of her life would be defined by the degree to which she could forgive Michael. This was the role of the survivor as well: the passing of judgment, the issuing of pardons. But she didn’t even think she ought to forgive Michael. She could only note, with slight astonishment, that at some point in the recent past she had managed to forgive Vanessa Dillard completely. Wasn’t that a triumph of sorts?

  She walked down the stairs, trying to be exactly like someone in a film, an actress with a mark to hit, a single motivation, a paycheck on the other side of the front door.

  She almost made it.

  From inside apartment B, piano chords vibrated, delicate but insistent, and above them hovered a cracked soprano. A ravaged voice, a Stradivarius left in the rain.

  It was down by the Sally Gardens my love and I did meet

  She crossed the Sally Gardens on little snow-white feet.

  Was this what they did, then, every night? This couple that should not have been a couple, this inexplicable by-product of the twentieth century’s worst moment? They gazed at each other and sang Irish love songs? Melanie pictured snifters of brandy. László’s clouded eyes, emanating a love that couldn’t really have been any different than any other human love in history, could it? There were seven billion love stories on the planet, but when you cracked them open, if you ever cracked them open, didn’t they all have the same unoriginal love at their core? She wanted to ask. She wanted to demand an explanation.

  But the door was closed, and so she could not see and she could not ask. She walked down the steps and onto the street, and the song continued.

  She bade me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree

  But I was young and foolish and with her did not agree.

  Both of them were singing now. Dear God, what was that? What was she meant to do with that? Both of them were singing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Appearances, as always, are deceiving. This book, appearing a year after my last novel, is in fact the product of thirteen years’ labor; the oldest words in here were written in June 2002. To look at my own table of contents is to see those thirteen years—and the people who carried me through them—in glorious Hollywood-style montage. (My first snail-mail rejection letters, the monolithic Dell I used to write on, Harkness tables full of sharp workshoppers, kind editors, two babies who aren’t babies anymore, mountains of drafts, utter despair and brave students and artists’ colonies and friends who toast survival.) My entire career—my entire adulthood—has happened in this coll
ection.

  Infinite thanks to Kathryn Court and Lindsey Schwoeri, my brilliant and patient editors; Holly Watson, Angela Messina, and Carolyn Coleburn; Emily Hartley; Lynn Buckley; Veronica Windholz; and all the scouts and book reps and other footsoldiers. If I could afford to, I’d send flowers every day to Nicole Aragi, the best agent who ever agented, and Duvall Osteen, the best assistant who ever assisted.

  Almost all of these stories had their first homes in literary journals. It was 2003 when David Hamilton of The Iowa Review sent me my first acceptance letter, but the fact that he wrote it in purple fountain pen helps my feeling that this happened centuries ago. A decade later, Harry Stecopoulos, now at the Iowa helm, published “The Museum of the Dearly Departed” and edited it with a sharp eye. R. T. Smith at Shenandoah not only published “The Worst You Ever Feel” but gave me a job back in college and an introduction to the literary journal landscape. Rob Spillman edited “Peter Torrelli” for Tin House under extraordinary circumstances, for which he deserves some kind of plaque. Boundless thanks as well to Emily Stokes and the very patient fact-checker Jacob Gross at Harper’s; Stephen Donadio and Carolyn Kuebler at New England Review; Ladette Randolph and guest editor Tony Hoagland at Ploughshares; Phong Ngyuen at Pleiades; Sascha Feinstein at Brilliant Corners; Garrett Doherty and Anthony Varallo at Crazyhorse; Jonathan Freedman at Michigan Quarterly Review; and Jordan Bass at McSweeney’s.

  One night in March 2008, while my first baby slept in a basket on the floor (at a time when I couldn’t imagine ever being able to prioritize writing again), Heidi Pitlor of The Best American Short Stories sent me the single best e-mail of my life. Neither this collection nor my career would look the same without her support then and over the following years.