What he was actually doing, I still had no idea, and that ate at me. Why the secrecy? How could a math and soldering guy possibly be involved in something that required such high security? I could not begin to imagine.
I sealed my reply in the morning, news about the slow sales and the loud accordion guy, trying to make him sound comical. It may have come out mean. I left it in anyhow.
When I asked my mother for a stamp, she gave me five. “It’s good of you to write back so promptly.”
“What are the extras for?”
“You have lots more free time than Charlie. You don’t have to take turns. You might want to write him again before you receive his next letter to you.”
“Oh, I might?” I scoffed. “We’ll see.”
“No harm in a suggestion,” she said. “Proud girl.”
I flounced out to the mailbox, dropped the envelope in, and headed to work. It was a sunny spring day, birds and flowers and a dog that writhed on its back in the grass of a little park. For some reason, that dog about floored me. By the time I reached the store, it had sunk in: this was going to be my life for the foreseeable future. Not movies, but mail. Not soft kisses, but licking envelopes.
As I unlocked the front door, I felt the blues come over me like never before. Charlie was gone. Till who knows when. And I, who still had home and family and friends, had mailed him a letter full of trite and bratty things. I would have to send a better one right away. As soon as I got home that evening.
I wandered around the store, switching on the church model, which had seen so little use there was dust on the console. As it warmed up I wiped the organ with a chamois cloth, so lightly the keys did not play. My mother declared that random notes were the opposite of professionalism: never touch a key until you mean to. But as I settled onto the bench, my elbow hit a B-flat—a quick bleat, and I swear it pulled at me.
I opened a few stops, wanting a reed sound, and played that B-flat again, this time on purpose. Why did the note seem so different? So poignant? I had played B-flats in pieces since I was four years old, no weightier than any other note. One of my standard audition pieces was in the key of B-flat. Yet this time it meant something more.
My left hand played an octave lower, another B-flat, and then arpeggiated the major chord: B-flat, D, F. It sounded plaintive. Sincere. Without any plan, my left hand moved on to spell out a G-minor: B-flat, D, G. The chords had two of their three notes in common, the difference between them was small. But I went back and forth—slowly, in a solemn procession—B-flat to G-minor, and it was like the organ knew how I felt.
I was the kind of musician who did not compose, who disliked improvisation. The risk of hitting a wrong note was too great. But those two chords expressed my emotions better than words. While my left hand alternated between them, my right hand played, five times, a slow, quarter-note D, followed by rest.
Simple, obvious, but it worked. The music said what I wanted to say. B-flat, G-minor, and the high, ringing D that linked them. It was like a march. I was the drummer boy and the fife player, both, and the wounded soldier limping home too—all made possible by the unique power of the organ. With strings, there’s a moment when the bow reaches its end and has to change direction. With horns and woodwinds, sooner or later the player has to breathe. But an organ note can simply continue, tirelessly, while two chords pass feelings back and forth: yearning, longing; affection, sorrow.
When my mother came bustling in, I switched the organ off. She paused at the door, aware that she had interrupted something. Then she continued into the office, where she did paperwork for the rest of the morning. And the chords continued playing in my heart.
The afternoon was quiet as the week before, spring advancing, but this year without graduation-present customers and wedding-gift parents. My first anniversary at Dubie’s Music approached, and a job I’d been loving had turned to mud.
Where was Charlie? What was he doing? Why had I sent such a trivial reply?
On the way home, I saw a couple kissing against a building. Some kids chased each other around a tree. A pigeon trotted along with its head bobbing, staying in my path without flying away for a full block. But nothing could make the sun come out.
At home I went straight to my room, fishing out the stationery that I saved for thank-you notes and special occasions. I parked myself at the little desk and began.
Dear Charlie,
Please forgive my last letter. It was terrible and petty. This is all new to me. As it is to you, too, of course. So I will make dumb mistakes until I learn better.
Since you left Chicago, the music is gone. No one pops into the store. There’s no you to learn new pieces for. Spring is happening all around me but I do not feel it. In your letter you used the word “alchemy” and I do not know what it means. This is a secret I have kept from you: Sometimes you use words I don’t understand. I do not want to pretend anymore.
I sat back, astonished. Every sentence contained a confession. Reading this note after the last one, and thinking I had gone stark crazy. I slid the paper into a drawer, and went downstairs.
My mother was in the kitchen. Feeling like I’d be terrible company, I went to the living room—where the piano sat with the cover open like an invitation. I slid onto the bench, fiddled with classical pieces, started a ragtime tune that made me feel like an imposter, and finally gave in to what I wanted to play.
Two chords from my left hand, while that mournful D wafted high above. Back and forth, that one note as my mooring, I let myself drift.
Maybe I had never really felt anything before. I didn’t remember being upset when Frank and my father went away, though I sure missed them now. Charlie seemed to have opened a door in my heart, and behind it was a room full of melancholy.
I cannot say how long I sat there, repeating myself on those keys. As evening came on, the room grew dark and eventually the reverie broke. When I stopped playing, the immediate sensation was not of relief or catharsis, but embarrassment: my mother had been in the next room that whole time, listening to me carry on with my two chords.
I marched into the kitchen, ready to say I don’t know what. She was sitting at the table, the newspaper crumpled in her lap, tears streaming down her face.
It stopped me like a crossing guard with his hand up. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m not all right, and neither are you.”
“What do you mean?”
She wiped her face roughly on her sleeve. “Little girl, we need to change some things around here. Both of us. We can’t keep on like this.”
20.
Every day began with Midnight kneading Charlie’s stomach. Other fellows in the barracks fed her scraps, or poured her basins of milk. A few found catnip somehow, and left a little pile for her to squirm against. But each night, she chose Charlie’s bed.
Midnight’s rounds were famous all over The Hill. No fence could contain her, nor guard control her. She spent daytimes wandering around the technical area, immune to speeding trucks, and passed her nighttimes prowling—which worried the boys more, because the canyons were yowling with coyotes. Every ten days or so she limped in with a wound in her side or scratches on her face, the cause unknown.
Once the barracks fell quiet, and light spilled in the windows from a bare bulb outside the entry, Midnight would make her way inside. After visiting several bunks in the long room she would reach Charlie’s, two-thirds of the way down on the left, onto which she would jump soundlessly, tongue-wash her paws of the day’s dust, snuggle herself against the small of his back or the bend of his knees, and become tiny in sleep until the sky pinked and the first risers stirred. Then she would stretch fore and aft, yawning wide with her small teeth showing.