One morning she left the newspaper on the kitchen table while I sipped coffee, and I was bored, and scanned the headlines: The US Navy had torpedoed the Lima Maru of Japan. Two thousand seven hundred and sixty-five men had died.
That was the population of my whole high school, times four. I pictured our gym, packed for a basketball game, and tried to conceive of four times that many people. I knew those sailors did not all die at once, too, the instant the torpedo hit. No, they were in the middle of the ocean, and their ship sank and pulled them right down with it. They fought for air, they knew what was happening, they drowned.
It was gruesome, and fascinating. The maps and numbers of the war stopped being abstract. I could conceive of four gymnasiums of people. Destruction had come within the grasp of my imagination.
The very next morning, I read that the US Navy had torpedoed the Petrella. Two thousand six hundred and seventy men drowned. I began following the news, especially submarines: stealth, a water missile streaking across open sea, the surprise explosion, the devastating result. I could picture it all. I craved news of the next success.
Three weeks later, down went the Sakito Maru, taking 2,495 men to the bottom. My school times four, again and again.
Charlie had to be part of it. Of course, New Mexico was an odd place to develop ocean weapons. But to me, that made the idea all the more canny. Something in Charlie’s math was useful to underwater warfare. Essential, perhaps.
In April the Yoshida Maru #1 took a torpedo and sank with 2,649 souls. The next day I received a letter from Charlie.
I hope spring has arrived in Chicago. It has been warm here already for weeks. They say the snow was insufficient this winter, and we may have water shortages. I would be okay with that if I could stomach the milk. Meanwhile, my work has intensified, and I don’t get outside as often as I used to. But the square dances continue and they improve my mood. If only I could have one dance with you . . .
As usual, there were many blacked-out parts. I read the remaining words as if they were code, as if Charlie was communicating a special message only I would understand. Did dances mean successful sub attacks? Was not getting outside his way of describing the span of days without a sinking? What was the significance of bad milk?
A girl could drive herself crazy. But my mother had already decided we would not be going loco. If she said there would be changes, it had the weight of law. So: Dubie’s Music was now open half days. We were not, she insisted, going to sit around all day despairing. Anyone who wants an organ badly enough will come in the afternoon.
We still had precious few customers, but somehow it did not feel as offensive, or as personal, if I only had to occupy myself for four hours at a time. When customers did arrive, I was in better humor.
One result of the reduced hours was that my organ playing, which had settled into a steady plateau when I was applying to conservatories, broke free. I would never play in the league of the instrument’s giants, whose performances in the 1920s had drawn thousands. But I had definitely surpassed the amateur level. If the war ever ended, if I ever found a way to pay for Oberlin, if my acceptance there was still valid, I no longer worried that I would be out of my league.
One afternoon my mother came out of the back office as I practiced. “Brenda,” she said, a mess of papers against her chest, “I bet there aren’t three churches in Chicago with someone of your skills. You keep right on working.”
She returned to the office, while I sat speechless. Not only had my mother spontaneously praised me, she also gave voice to my secret opinion of myself. The unusual thing is, it wasn’t bragging. An organist’s skill can be measured as easily as the time a runner needs to run a mile. Repertoire tells all. And the piece that had my attention the most? Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
“Toccata” means touch, and that particular work required a great variety of touches: the trumpeting opening notes like a call to attention, flights of spriteliness, deep Germanic bombast. There were vast washes of chords, too, with Bach’s brilliant arpeggios going nonstop in the high notes. Not to mention a finger-bender of a fugue in the middle, the melody like a bird flitting this way and that, then repeated in the other hand, then in harmony, then sideways. Oh, and the call and response passage, that was like a soloist with his choir. Bach used the full instrument, every inch of its span. Technically the Bach toccata was not an especially difficult piece, but for me the fugue part was impossible. I needed a proper teacher but also relished my solo attempts.
My mother spent her free mornings at an armory, the Eighth Regiment’s brick castle up by Thirty-Fifth Street. She refused to say what she was doing. Of course I nagged her to tell me. One night at dinner she’d had enough. “Suppose some Nazi guy grabs you and drags you into an alley.”
“I’d kick him in the shins,” I snapped back.
“Not if he had a gun you wouldn’t. And he puts the pistol barrel to your throat and says, ‘Tell me what your mother is doing at the armory.’”
“I would say I have no idea. She won’t tell me.”
She crossed her arms in victory. “And that is how it must stay.”
The other change we made, at her insistence, was nightlife. Mine. She stayed home like always, her companions a book and a pack of cigarettes. I could gauge how good a novel was by her ashtray. The fewer the butts, the more the story had captured her attention. But she urged me to go out, to rekindle my friendships.
I told her I was fine, but actually I was scared. Would fun create a distance between me and Charlie? What would I do about the interests of boys—which were natural, but might come as a test I did not want to take?
Greta solved the problem. She’d been in my class: big-boned but gorgeous, with bright green eyes. Greta had curly hair so black, in certain lights it looked blue. With a roaring contagious laugh, that girl was fun as a carnival. She called one Wednesday and invited me to Casablanca.
“Seen it, thanks,” I said. “Twice.”
“Me too,” she laughed. “Five times. But I’m ready to make it six.”
“Who all is going?”
“You and me, like old times.”
I glanced across the kitchen, where cigarette smoke rose from behind the evening paper. I did love that movie, how it was both funny and serious.
“Sure,” I said. “You bet.”
By the time Greta arrived, she’d found the four other girls from our regular gang, and we marched off to the theater together, a warm spring night with my pals. But I also noticed, when my mother answered the door, the presence of the other girls did not surprise her. “Hello, ladies,” she’d said, like she’d been expecting them.
Well, and so what? Maybe she asked my friends to get me out of the house. We loved the movie, hollering the best lines, Greta squeezing my arm when Rick tells Ilsa, “We’ll always have Paris.”
No one shushed us. Everyone in the theater had seen it before. When Rick said the last line, it seemed like the entire place shouted along: “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
So it began. Out most nights: movies, bowling, long walks by the lake. I shouldn’t have worried. I missed Charlie no less. And I had something to put in my letters. In June the Allies invaded Normandy, newspapers filled with heroism and sacrifice. I did not sense that the beginning of the end might have arrived. Later that month, an American ship sank the Toyama Maru, and 5,400 Japanese died. Almost as many men as we’d lost in all of D-Day, gone from a single torpedo.