Giles waved Charlie on. “We’ll get it straightened out.”
“All right,” he said. “If you’re sure.” He returned to the bus, watching the guards pat Giles down. As the last passenger to reboard, Charlie happened to glance to his right, where the guard was opening the gate. All at once the weight of the situation fell on him: in a few seconds he would venture into a place he knew nothing about, to work for people he had never met, and he was not allowed to tell anyone about it.
“Rough trip?” the bus driver asked.
“A bit,” Charlie allowed.
“You’ll settle in quick. My advice is to stick to your knitting.”
Charlie started up the bus steps. “That’s the second time I’ve heard that.”
The driver closed the door. “Won’t be the last either.”
Charlie took a seat, the guard waved them on, and he rolled into Project Y.
19.
My mother put a plate of meat loaf before me, then sat at the table across from me. “He’s probably getting there about now.”
I was no fan of meat loaf. In fact I considered it the most boring meal on earth. Which she knew perfectly well. But I was still all diplomacy. I felt her anger at me still simmering, and I had no intention of bringing it to another boil.
“How awful,” I said, “to be traveling all this time.”
Since Charlie Fish kissed me in the Great Hall of Union Station, I’d had two workdays, five meals, and a good night’s sleep. He had probably needed every one of those eleven sandwiches. I was not about to bring that up again either. I ate the meat loaf like a good, dutiful daughter, and it was not an act.
Apparently, meanwhile, all the organ buyers of Chicago were on Charlie’s train too. The first day, after the taxi brought us from Union Station, we did not have a single customer. I practiced for hours, and was interrupted by the little bell jingling not once.
The next day we had foot traffic, folks test-driving a Hammond, and one fellow who played an accordion at absolute top volume, before banging it down on a piano bench and saying it was too loud.
The rest of the week? Tire kickers, a man who was visibly drunk, a woman asking directions to the library. One dad brought in his ten-year-old princess, who was too shy to sit on the spinet model’s bench, yet he scowled the entire time I demonstrated. Finally I cajoled her into playing a Tinkertoy tune, which I praised triple what it deserved. When she slid off the bench, he took her hand and they left without a word.
It didn’t matter that I learned the latest show tunes. That I tightened my introductory patter down to three sentences. That I became an expert on lipstick application, a doyenne of the sales floor dress, an ambassador of welcome to every person who opened the door of Dubie’s Music and made the little bell ring. No one was buying. Or haggling. Or putting down one thin dime of a deposit.
And from Charlie? Silence. All of my sales energy had to be faked, to hide how blue I was. I’d wake up thinking about him, how he made me laugh and opened the door and always insisted I go first when we’d spoken at the same time. I dwelled on memories of him asking for a slow song and watching with soft eyes while I played. On and on like that, until it was an effort to get myself out of bed.
I came down for breakfast, not speaking till I had a piping hot cup of coffee. My mother was reading the morning paper, but I could tell she had one eye on me.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” And she buried her nose back in the paper. “Not a thing.”
I counted on work to revive me. Retail can be fun if the customers pour in and the register runs and the goods move along. When a whole city loses interest in your store? When hours go by without a walk-in? And you’re only there out of duty to your family, when you’d rather be at a conservatory improving on the organ? There’s a reason retail halfway rhymes with jail.
Was it the war? How could it be? We were finally winning in the South Pacific, capturing the Marshall Islands, for example. Hitler was on his heels too. I knew that because one night my mother interrupted her before-dinner cigarette and forced me to read the evening news: the British air force had bombed Berlin.
I put the paper down. “Why do you think business is so slow?”
She laughed in surprise, a billow of smoke snorting out. “That is not what I expected you to say. Germany matters, you know.”
“Of course it does. But honestly, why do you think?”
She considered. “Maybe people are too tired to make music. Or too sad.”
“But they need it more than ever. Yesterday in the grocery I heard two different people whistling ‘As Time Goes By.’”
“Whistling isn’t putting money down on an instrument you have to learn to play, especially one that’s not easy. Organs might be too hard for now.”
It was my turn to ponder. “Maybe we should start carrying harmonicas.”
She picked the newspaper back up. “That, my girl, is a smarter suggestion than you realize.”
But we didn’t. Instead the days stretched long, spring dragged its heels, and customers were as rare as lottery winners. One afternoon I did the closing, while my mother bought groceries and went home early. Which meant that she saw the mail first. When I came home, in the middle of the kitchen table there sat a letter, addressed to me and postmarked Santa Fe. Still sealed, too, though I could imagine my mother’s temptation.
I snatched the envelope and bolted upstairs, practically tearing it open on the way. In my room I closed the door and sat on the bed.
“Dear Brenda, How are you?”
I have always hated letters with questions in them, even if they are asked purely for manners’ sake. Don’t people realize there is no way to answer? I scanned down Charlie’s scrawl, looking for where the meat of it began.
“I live in a . . .” and after that it was blacked out.
“I’ve made a new friend, a chemist named . . .” and the same censoring.
“Our work is like alchemy. Each day we . . .” and blacked out again.
The back side was worse. By the time I finished page two, and reached Charlie’s sign-off—“Take care, and please say hello to your mom”—all I knew was that he was working hard, the food was decent, and the weather was great. The weather.
I trudged down the stairs like I’d experienced some kind of defeat.
“How’s Charlie?” my mother asked, standing at the sink with her back turned, as if that would prevent me from knowing how crazy curious she was.
“He says hi,” I answered, and like a perfectly cruel daughter, I said no more.
Dear Charlie: I’m fine, but don’t bother asking in the future, okay? Because I could have yellow fever and pneumonia put together, and get over them both before your next letter reached me. Also what do all the blacked-out parts mean? Are you giving away military secrets as a hobby?
All these years later, I sit in a rocking chair on the terrace of my assisted-living facility, and debate which is a greater wonder: That I thought this opening was somehow funny? That in my mind it conveyed to Charlie how desperately I wanted to know everything about his life in Santa Fe? That I thought the tone contained enough familiarity for him to sense my deep affection? Or that he saved it, actually kept it in his papers like something important—though reading it later caused me pangs, to see how prickly I could be, while he was alone and so far away?