Which didn’t mean that he shouldn’t be a man, but maybe I did not have to tell him so. Life as a young woman—admittedly a headstrong one—felt like threading an endless succession of hurdles. All I’d wanted was to study in a conservatory and find a solid guy. Was that too much to ask?
The night before I’d decided to stay in, rather than go bar-hopping with Lizzie and the girls from the boardinghouse behind ours. Charlie would not arrive till the afternoon, his letter had said, because of work. But I wanted all my wits.
No one was at the breakfast table, which was a relief because by then my presence caused Mrs. Morris no end of aggravation. If I tried being extra polite, she recoiled like a dog resists a leash. If I played some new hymn on Sunday, she would all but bare her teeth. That day there was bread, cheese, and dark coffee. I opened the paper and out of habit could not help looking for submarine exploits.
I had an extra reason, anyhow. Lizzie’s husband was training for the invasion of Japan that fall. He wrote once a week: California was sunny, he was getting in excellent shape, and there was fresh fruit everywhere. But medics’ orders are to run to a wounded soldier’s side, even in the middle of battle. So Lizzie refused to read the paper. She said it scared her too much. I did the reading for her, and delivered good news whenever I could. The Akitsu Mara, 2,246 dead. The Mayasan Maru, 3,456 drowned.
Only years later did it occur to me how odd that was, that I considered thousands of deaths to be good news. I suppose that is one of the things war does, turns your ideas of right and wrong upside down. Death, for any reason, is no cause for celebration.
That April morning, the paper was mostly about Okinawa, where a battle had begun ten days before. It seemed as terrible as Iwo Jima—which lasted five weeks and cost 6,800 American boys. From Europe, though, the news was thrilling. Prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp had overpowered their remaining guards and killed them. Already the Soviets had liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. Allied troops were within fifty miles of Berlin too. If the European war ended soon, maybe Lizzie’s husband would not have to be in the invasion. I had no reason for this theory, only hope on my friend’s behalf.
I left the table to go dress, and saw that the door from our stairs into the house had been left open, as had the back door. That allowed a cooling breeze to blow through, but when I passed the living room I saw that the wind had pulled a section of the newspaper apart, spilling pages all over the floor. I went in and began picking them up.
All at once there was a great row from outside, behind the house. I tucked the pages under a flower vase and went to the window. It was only open a few inches, but I could hear everything. Reverend Morris was shouting at the top of his lungs, while Mrs. Morris tried to hang laundry on the line.
“Damnation and hellfire, woman,” he boomed, his big voice louder than ever. “How many times must I tell you?”
“I can’t let these things stay dirty any longer,” she said.
But the minister yanked a shirt from her hands and balled it against his chest. “I don’t want to see it. Do you hear me? I won’t see it.”
Mrs. Morris turned away and began clothes-pinning a sheet to the line.
“Don’t you ignore me,” he bellowed. His neck did that tic to one side, chin tilted. “I am speaking.”
“What do you want me to do?” She turned and I saw that her face was shining with tears. “Is it wrong to wash his clothes and put them away nicely?”
“Put them away?” he yelled. “I will never put any part of him away.”
Reverend Morris looked around, taking in me at the window, the girls watching from across the back lot, his wife standing next to a laundry basket, looking like she’d just been slapped. With one last roar he grabbed the clothesline and yanked till it snapped. Sheets and shirts fell to the ground.
Then I heard the back door open; he was coming inside. I bolted up the stairs.
Lizzie was standing in the hall, facing out the window.
“You saw all that?” I asked.
“Everyone within half a mile heard it too.”
“Do you know what’s going on?”
“Oh, Brenda.” Lizzie moved past me and sat on the bed. “I’m not allowed to tell.”
“Is it really all that terrible?”
She nodded and said no more.
“You can tell me,” I insisted.
But she shook her head. “Actually, I can’t. It’s not mine to tell.”
“So frustrating.” I went to the window and Mrs. Morris was below, reaching up, attempting to knot the broken clothesline. Did everyone have a secret that caused them pain? The thin rope fell, but she bent to grab it, stretched upward, and tried again.
All of this took place in my morning before Charlie. Sometimes life is a heart filled to the brim. So I went wandering, and of all places, I found my way to the church.
Reverend Morris had given me a key to the side door, to practice the organ or conduct choir rehearsal. That Saturday the door was already open. I hadn’t been there since Wednesday, so I knew I was not to blame. But that was only part of my concern.
I peered around in the gloom, but no one was inside. In the nave, I called loud and plain: “Hello?” It reverberated in the stone chamber. “Anybody here?”
When there was no answer, I decided someone had simply forgotten to lock up. Perhaps the minister, perhaps Mrs. Sanchez—the lovely local woman who dusted the stone floors every Friday. Often I’d heard her singing to herself, a soprano high and light, but could not convince her to join the choir. Whenever I asked, she ducked her head shyly and redoubled her stroking of the floor with the silent dust mop.
I switched on the organ, pulling a few stops into action, and heard a new cipher. Already I’d had to forgo one manual, thanks to an A-flat key that would not stop playing, whether I touched it or not. Now there was one in the second manual, G above middle C. So not only were two keyboards broken, but the notes were dissonant with each other. If the ciphers started up in the middle of a song, together they would ruin it.
I changed stops to silence both manuals, and confined myself to the remaining one. Normally I like to make contrasts with the stops, for example giving a background chord in reeds, while the melody plays in a high, clear flute. With one manual, there could be only one sound. It would be like playing a violin with one string: You might get all the notes, but reaching them would have you running up and down the neck all day.
I felt at a particular disadvantage because I wanted to work on the Bach toccata. Someday I might apply to Oberlin again, and I ought to keep ready. I opened the sheet music, checked my posture, and began.
The opening was an announcement, a trumpet declaring the arrival of a king. Next, the melody was doubled with another octave. But in a few bars, the piece became complex, layered, and Bach’s brilliance took over. Intervals I’d never encountered anywhere else not only happened often, but made sense and propelled the music in new directions. Too soon I reached the difficult fugue passage in the middle. The coda at the end was a madness of tempo changes, but the fugue was where I stalled. Nearly all of it was in sixteenth notes. I dropped to half tempo, I tried one hand at a time, I closed my eyes and envisioned the correct motions. No dice. I dropped to quarter tempo, as though the fugue were a dirge, a funeral march. Suddenly there emerged a song of sorrow, a mourning that Bach had hidden beneath the clip-right-along version. The more I played that passage at quarter speed, the more I imagined a man in 1700s Germany, hugely successful yes, but still someone who knew something about sadness.