Karl bounded up the steps and greeted his uncle and my mother and gave Ariel a peck on the cheek and said to her, “All set?”
“You two go on,” my mother told them. “I’ll drive Emil home.”
Karl took Ariel’s hand and drew her off the stage. As he passed where we stood in the aisle he said, “You guys are on your own getting home.”
On the stage my mother and Brandt stood together and I had the sense that she was waiting for her sons to leave so that she could be alone with him. She wore a pair of dungarees and a blue denim shirt over a white top and she’d bunched the shirttails around her waist and tied them in a loose knot in a way that I’d seen Judy Garland do in a movie about show people.
“Frank,” she said to me in a dramatic tone, “you and Jake better get started if you’re going to make it home before dark.”
Jake in obedience turned without a word and started out of the auditorium. The lights had begun to wink off leaving the seats in darkness. I remained a moment longer, certain that something in that auditorium was unfinished.
From the stage my mother said, “Go on, Frank.”
I followed Jake into the lobby which was lit now by only a few dim overheads. My brother said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
I pointed down the hall. “That way,” I told him. “I’ll wait here.”
The door to the auditorium stood open and the acoustics inside were excellent. My mother and Emil Brandt were in deep conversation on the stage and even in the lobby where I stood waiting for Jake I could hear every word.
Brandt said, “It’s a beautiful piece she’s composed, Ruth.”
“She’s learned a great deal from you, Emil.”
“She was born with talent. Yours.”
“She’ll do a lot more with hers than I ever did with mine.”
I heard a simple melody tapped out on the piano and then Brandt said, “Remember that?”
“Of course. You wrote it for me.”
“A present for your sixteenth birthday.”
“And two days later you were gone to New York without a word of good-bye.”
“If I knew then what I know now maybe I’d have made different decisions. Maybe I wouldn’t have this face of mine and I would still have eyes and I would have children like yours. She’s so much like you, Ruth. I hear you in her voice, I feel you in her touch.”
“She adores you, Emil. And I will always love you.”
“No, you love Nathan.”
“And you.”
“Differently.”
“Yes. Now.”
“He’s a lucky man.”
“And you, Emil, are a man much blessed too. Can’t you see that?”
“I have moments of such darkness, Ruth. Such darkness you can’t imagine.”
“Then call me, Emil. When the darkness comes, call me. I’ll be there for you, I swear it.”
In the course of their conversation I’d drifted slowly to the auditorium door and I could see them on the stage. They sat together on the piano bench. My mother’s hand was pressed to Brandt’s left cheek, the one bubbled with thick scar tissue. As I watched, Brandt’s own hand rose and covered hers.
“I love you,” he said.
“You look so tired,” she replied, then took his hand and kissed it gently and said, “I should get you home.”
She stood up. Like a man old beyond his years, Emil Brandt rose with her.
• • •
“What’s it mean? Skag?”
Jake lay in his bed in the dark on his side of the room.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. I’d been lying there awhile in my own bed with my hands behind my head staring up at the ceiling and thinking about the blonde with the red bathing suit and trying my best to recall exactly the image of her breasts when she bent over on the rock that afternoon.
“Is it something bad?”
“It’s nothing.”
“The way that girl at the quarry said it it’s something.”
I was surprised that Jake brought it up. Except for being worried about what punishment Morris Engdahl might be contemplating for us he hadn’t talked about the incident at the quarry. In a way I’d been glad. I’d been hoping the whole skag thing had gone over his head. It hadn’t.
I considered trying to detour his wonderment but I knew that when Jake was after something he stuck with it until he was satisfied and I was concerned that he might try getting the answers from our parents and that would be disastrous on so many levels that I finally settled on dishing him the truth. Or as much of the truth as I understood.
“It’s a girl with loose morals,” I said trying, I suppose, to frame it in a kind of Victorian way because it sounded not so terrible.
“Loose morals,” Jake said. He was quiet for a while then asked, “What did he mean when he said the rich boy was putting it to her?”
What the words brought to my mind was an incident I’d observed earlier that spring when I’d gone with my father to visit a member of his congregation, a man named Kaczamarek who had a large farm with lots of livestock. While my father stood in the yard and spoke with Kaczamarek, I wandered down to the pasture where there were horses grazing. As I watched, a roan stallion approached and mounted a black mare. His penis was the size of my forearm and it disappeared entirely inside the rear of the mare. When the mating was finished he slipped from her back and returned to his grazing as if what had occurred was of no great importance.
I tried to wipe that image from my mind.
“He meant they were making out,” I said. “You know, kissing and stuff.”
“Kissing’s not bad, is it?”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
“Have you ever kissed a girl?”
“Yeah. Well, actually no. She kissed me.”
“Who?”
“Lorrie Diedrich.”
“What was it like?”
“It was quick. I didn’t feel much.”
“You didn’t kiss her back?”
“It was at the fair last year,” I explained. “She’d been licking a licorice ice cream cone and she had this black mustache. She looked like Groucho Marx.”
Downstairs I could hear my mother playing the piano, going over and over the music for Ariel’s chorale on the Fourth. She always got nervous before the performances she directed and playing seemed to help.