We traveled the world together. We built a business from nothing. We met great musicians, witnessed spectacular performances. Increasingly, and then for years, Charlie was happy—the kind of hardworking happy he had been in those Santa Fe days, all dusty under the church organ. We were partners the whole way.
My father did come home, and reopened the store. People had room for music in their lives again. Fifteen years later he became one of the first people in Chicago to sell the new electrified guitars from Leo Fender. Likewise with the B-3, an organ Hammond built for gospel music, which instead became popular for blues and soul. Soon he owned music shops all over town.
Frank came home, too, opened a three-bay garage in Wicker Park, married a great chesty tough girl named Marie, and they had a troop of boys. As gas stations became convenience stores, he went into that business with my dad as an investor, and made a comfortable life for his family. Maybe even rich. I’m not saying the war didn’t touch Frank, sure it did. Years later, Marie had to put one of those accordion gates across the top of the stairs, because of his nightmare sleepwalking.
As for my mother, she was kinder to my father, as promised, and did one thing to spoil him every day. Coffee in bed, a love note hidden in the cash register. They added up. When I visited, I could see my parents were happier. She continued reading and doing crossword puzzles, but quit smoking. Too late, though. Lung cancer took her at age fifty-four. A decade later my father had a series of strokes, then died in his sleep.
At the reception after the funeral, a familiar-looking man came over to give his condolences. “Tom Beatty,” he said, shaking my hand. “Sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks for coming, Tom.” I hesitated. “Do I know you?”
He shook his head. “You knew my brother Chris.”
“Of course I did. Chris Beatty. How is he?”
Tom blinked at me. “Chris was shot down, in January of nineteen forty-five.”
“I am so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“Turns out you were his only girl,” Tom said. “I hope you were nice to him.”
“Nice as I could be,” I answered.
“He told me you broke his heart.” The man had a set to his jaw. Was this some sort of reckoning? I was at my father’s funeral, for Pete’s sake.
“Not quite.” I gave him a kinder face than I was feeling. “Anyway, I was a kid.”
“Yeah.” Tom nodded. “We were all kids.” He bowed and moved away.
For a minute I was alone, and allowed myself to consider what aspects of Chris had stayed with me over the years. Not my brief infatuation with a guy who probably didn’t really care about me, not my long guilt for emotional infidelity, but actually what he said in that first feverish burst of words at the dance: that life is short, we never know when our time will be up, so we can’t waste a single opportunity.
“Here you go.” My husband appeared with a glass of water. “Who was that?”
How had he known I was thirsty, when I myself hadn’t noticed? I raised the glass to him. “Charlie, I love you.”
He kissed my cheek. “You, too, sweetie.”
After taking a big swallow, I answered: “Brother of a high school chum.”
That was 1962, the last time I went to Chicago.
We never returned to New Mexico either. But I have seen pictures. They tore down most of the old buildings. Which were sick with radiation. Today Los Alamos is a prosperous little city. A bridge, with security gates like a highway tollbooth, spans a ravine to the national laboratory that still operates there. It looks like an office park, only without corporate logos on the buildings.
Most of what remains from that time is irony. Oppenheimer was investigated as a possible Communist, and lost his security clearance. In a farewell speech, he said, “The time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”
Meanwhile kids were taught, in case of a nuclear attack, to duck under their school desks, though half a mile from a detonation the temperature reaches nearly six thousand degrees. Desks wouldn’t do much good. Not ironic enough? Holloman Air Force Base, where the Trinity test observation planes were based, has served repeatedly as a training ground for the Luftwaffe.
It’s enough to make an old woman wonder: Who is an ally? Who is an enemy? Do we have to kill millions of people every few decades to figure that out?
Nambe, New Mexico, is now a park, with dams, waterfalls, and a reservoir. The place Charlie and I conceived our one and only time is now underwater. And Stanford, the school that cured Charlie of physics forever, is home to the last instrument he designed.
The ultimate irony, of course, is that the terror invoked by atomic weapons has actually, inexplicably, created a new form of peace. A tense one, yes. Dangerous, fragile, untrusting. Each new nation that obtains this immense power seems less likely to exercise restraint with it. Nevertheless, since Nagasaki in August 1945, the atomic bomb has been a threat only, a bluff never called. So may it forever remain.
The marionette on the bench who was torturing Charlie’s legacy finally reached the end of the Widor. He extended the final C-major chord, holding it twice as long as the score required. I wanted to yell “Let it go,” but at last he did, and while I sat back with relief, the place went mad with applause.
Oh, but he was changing music books already. Dear heaven, he was going to play another. I felt claustrophobic at the idea of it. Until I heard the first notes.
It was Buxtehude’s Prelude in C Major, a true classic, composed by the man who taught the organ to Bach. An opening of melody played across several octaves, with rests that let the room ring, a sequence of chords to announce that everything so far had been mere introduction, a passage of light notes, as if to prove the composer was capable of being cheery, and then the full thrall of the instrument.
At once it became clear: This silly man at the console had been toying with us. He was excellent. His attacks were bright as trumpet blasts. His figures were robust and certain. His filigree was spotless.
And when the mighty passages came, the power and the glory, he knew exactly what kind of machine he was driving. All of us, every person in that room, had the bone-shaking, heart-quaking experience of a Charles Fish organ at the height of its might, 4,488 pipes in complete command.
I could feel Charlie, too, his integrity and patience, his humility and genius, as if he were sitting beside me. We had spent four decades together, I knew his steadfastness like no one else. I could hear it in that instrument.
When the piece ended I was the first on my feet. But in seconds everyone was giving the man a standing ovation. He took his annoyingly excessive bows, the university organist said something about a reception, and people began filing out. I sat to catch my breath, winded, as if I’d run a race. Which in some ways I suppose I had.
Anna reappeared, followed by a boy her age who had long black hair and the thinly grown beard exclusive to undergraduates. I was tempted to suggest he wait a decade and try again, but I noticed the camera on a strap around his neck.
“Would you mind terribly?” she said. “Maybe you could sit at the organ?”
“That I do not mind in the least.”
Up close, the console was gorgeous. With care, it could still be so in three hundred years. Charlie had used his innovation of reversing the keyboard colors: instead of the natural keys being white and the accidentals black, as on pianos, this organ had dark keys for naturals and white for the accidentals. It looked opulent.