Music for Wartime (35 page)

In 1940, after his first visit to the nation that would one day be his home, my grandfather wrote that the anti-Semitic movement could never truly gain hold in America because of the percentage of citizens who held foreign birth certificates, and whose ethnicity could therefore not be confirmed. It was a land of anonymity.

Ten years after the picture was taken, my grandfather died in a Honolulu hospital, following six years lost in a sea of Alzheimer’s that erased the recent past, obliterated the entire notion of future, but left intact the events of half a century ago. Toward the end, he refused food. His beard grew to his knees.

Between 1941 and 1944, over half a million Hungarian Jews died at the hands of their countrymen and the Germans. Many, before the deportations even started, died from a thousand less infamous killers—those diseases particular to the hungry and cold and poor, to those with no way to earn a living.

Sixty-five years before the photo, twenty-three years before the prison cell, twenty years before the penning of the law, János followed a beautiful girl up a tree and toward the little wooden platform there. They climbed forever, weightless, into the sunlight. She was his cousin, with a wit that put his to shame. She would be his first wife, the mother of his only child. I cling to her life like a raft.

What will strike me most, twenty-seven years later, staring at this thing, is its profound and static silence. Rectangles of photographic paper are always silent, but this one particularly so. Eight children still and focused, mouths closed in tight lines. My father and grandfather looking up, reaching up, into the muting humidity. My sister stretched along the horizon, my mother presumably silent behind the lens.

After the war, in the Buda Hills, a group of escaped Nazi prisoners put their one Russian speaker at the front of the line. When they were stopped at the pass, he explained in flawless Russian that he was a Soviet soldier transporting these German prisoners. The real Russians asked him to count back from one hundred. His foreign tongue, so capable counting forward, was tripped up in reverse. The men were executed.

A week later, I would find the bomb in the tree house. It would live in the corner with the pine needles another two years, till the sun bleached it silver. When I was feeling brave, I’d nudge it with the toe of my sneaker. I was never entirely convinced that it wouldn’t, one day, explode.

T
here had been a leak.

Deep in the basement and then through the walls and floors of the building, gas had poured, scentless, at two a.m. After the fire trucks and news trucks and gawkers had dispersed, after one body had been sirened away and eleven more secreted out under sheets, the building sat empty for a week. The only survivor died in the hospital, never having woken. All twelve of them, that meant, died in their sleep. There had been no calls to 911, no bodies sprawled halfway to the door—just the mailman’s cry for help the next morning after three poisonous minutes at the lobby mailboxes. Despite the earnest reporters’ enunciation of “deadliest” and “perfect storm,” the public was not as horrified as it pretended. “That’s really the way to go,” people murmured to their TVs.

On the eighth day, the hottest of July, the old Hungarian couple returned from Cleveland and stood staring at the yellow tape, suitcases by their sides, taxi waiting to be paid. They hadn’t heard.

In seven law offices across Chicago, seven apartments passed to the survivors of the deceased. One of those beneficiaries, Melanie Honing, was a wiry little woman who had in fact never met the occupant of apartment D. Hers was a deeply awkward conversation with the lawyer. Early in their meeting she picked his stapler off his desk and held it in her lap, opening and closing the top. He didn’t stop her. Apartment D had been co-owned by Vanessa Dillard, who’d lived there the past twelve years, and Michael Salvatore, the man who’d been found in her bed beside her. He was the beneficiary of her will, as well as the disaster’s sole survivor, for all of an hour. Whether there’d truly been hope of resuscitation or if the paramedics had just fixated on their one chance to avoid total failure, they defibrillated him all the way to the hospital. Because of that later time of death, the apartment and its contents had passed to Michael. Michael Salvatore’s will in turn left everything to Melanie, the woman he was to have married nine weeks after the leak.

“I know this is sensitive,” the lawyer said. He was a sweet, serious man, but in that moment Melanie imagined ripping the white mustache off his face. “You aren’t required to claim anything of Ms. Dillard’s. Her family in Wisconsin has made notes of the personal effects they’d like, although you understand you aren’t legally obligated. Her will was quite basic.” He picked at the edge of a folder. “As Mr. Salvatore’s executor you can get in there pretty quickly. As soon as six weeks. I imagine you’ll want closure.” Her uncle, the one who’d done up their wills as an early wedding present when he’d passed through Chicago that spring, had volunteered to be here with her, to “speak lawyer” with this other attorney. But Melanie had wanted whatever privacy she could still manage.

“She was his ex-wife,” Melanie said. “You figured that much out.”

“And you were his fiancée. I can’t imagine how—”

“But he’d told me she was dead.”

The lawyer let out a descending whistle, blinked hard.

“I even looked her up online once, the dead wife, and all I found in the city was this living woman, this film producer. I figured it was a different person.” She refused the Kleenex he held out. “He told me she died in a car crash in 2003. And I didn’t know his friends, not the old ones. I mean, they sent Christmas cards. But now I realize I never met anyone who’d known him more than ten years. The thing is, why would I have counted? We only dated eleven months.”

The lawyer scratched his chin, pen in hand, leaving a streak of blue down his cheek. He said, “We take most everything at face value. Otherwise how could we get by?”

Melanie had promised her sisters they could help. But she couldn’t stand the thought of their pity, their mercifully hiding things from her—and so one morning two months after the leak, a week before what had been her wedding date (Melanie had thrown out her calendar, with all its circled reminders for salon appointments, bridal luncheons), she drove down from Highland Park alone. Noble Square was a postage-stamp neighborhood just west of the Kennedy, one she’d never set foot in. One she’d never even heard of. As she entered the building, a young man with shoulder-length hair rushed out past her, nodding. On the ground floor someone was cooking bacon and blasting the TV. She found apartment D on the second story, and the key—miraculously, it seemed—fit the lock.

She stood on Vanessa Dillard’s welcome mat and stared through the open door. She saw brown plants on the windowsill, and felt a dull anxiety that there might also be a dead cat somewhere. She didn’t see one, but she saw a blue couch and sunlight and dishes still on the counter. A print of an O’Keeffe painting, the one of white jimsonweed.

Melanie waited for some dramatic feeling to wash over her. But she hadn’t registered much emotion that summer, unless numb was an emotion. Grief would be an embarrassing surrender, considering the new facts. Rage was inappropriate, given Michael’s death. The two reactions had stalemated each other. She was an abandoned chessboard.

She walked in.

Here is all she’d learned in the time since the leak: It was true that Michael and Vanessa were married from 1998 to 2003, as he’d told her. It was true they’d met in college. She produced educational films. She was survived by a mother, a brother, a niece.

Here is what Melanie learned in her ten-minute search of the apartment: Vanessa had no pictures of Michael on display. She had beautiful shoes. She was asthmatic. She read crime novels. Her bra size (one still hung on the shower rod) was 34B. She liked James Taylor and white wine and Japanese art. She chose photos of herself with her head turned, smiling. Her hair was wavy and chestnut and long.

The sheet lay bunched at the foot of the bed, but this might have been the work of the EMTs. Melanie suddenly wanted to sit, and although there couldn’t have been gas still in the apartment—not with people living here again and a new furnace and updated ventilation—she imagined she could smell it, and that she was passing out or maybe dying. She took her key and sat out in the hall, head between her knees.

She clung to a possibility her friends had offered: What if Michael had come over just that once, to tell Vanessa he was getting married? And then when the leak started he felt so tired that he lay on the bed. (In this scenario, her friends helpfully surmised, he still co-owned the place only to take care of her, the woman he’d once loved.) But why, then, had he been there at two a.m. on a weeknight? Why had he told Melanie this woman was dead? Why hadn’t Vanessa changed her will? Michael’s personal effects, handed over at the hospital, weren’t clues: a T-shirt, boxer briefs, running shorts. What he slept in, but also what he exercised in. She’d been given no shoes.

The man she’d seen before—the one with the long hair—came up the stairs, moving like a sleepy and comfortable animal. He started up the second flight, then saw her and turned back. “Do you need help?” he asked. “You want me to go in there for you?” He seemed recently practiced in his grief counseling.

He sat beside her and told her his name was Jed, that he was a grad student at the School of the Art Institute, that his grandparents had left him their apartment. “I threw away their sheets.” As if the fact would make her feel better. Oddly, it did. “I’m using their furniture, but I couldn’t keep those.”

She said, “Could you just stand here? Stand in the doorway and wait for me.”

He did, and Melanie went back to the bedroom and around to the far side of the bed. She knelt on the floor and looked underneath. Michael’s shoes. His khaki pants, belt still in the loops. His blue striped shirt. His bag.

Jed, in the hallway, heard what sounded like a scream held underwater for years that had finally, violently, bubbled to the top.

When Melanie returned two days later, she walked up to the third floor to thank Jed for the Kleenex and to return the umbrella he’d loaned her when she started home in the rain. He invited her in, and she was glad for the delay in getting back down to the empty cardboard box she’d left outside apartment D. Jed was a lovely distraction. At thirty-eight Melanie figured she had a good fifteen years on him, though, and she shook herself of the notion that his grin was a flattering one. He divided a beer between two glasses painted with oranges.

He said, “How goes the aftermath?”

“I like that word.”

Jed gestured around the apartment, by way of a tour. He’d pushed most of his grandparents’ furniture against the north wall to make a studio space by the southern windows. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “It’s a little boring, compared to yours.” She’d told him, between sobs the other day, the basics of the story. “I did find an old bottle of antidepressants. That’s the only surprise up in here.”

They sat on a red velveteen couch with wooden armrests too ornate to rest their glasses on. Jed had gathered his hair with an elastic, a look Melanie hadn’t seen much lately. Her own college boyfriends all had long hair, and maybe this was why she felt so instantly comfortable with Jed. That and the way you could tell just by looking that his blood pressure was low, that he slept well at night.

Melanie said, “You don’t mind living this far from school? From your friends?”

“I’ll be honest with you. There was a, uh, ill-timed
tryst
, let’s call it, with my roommate’s sister. It was a good time to move.” He laughed and shrugged.

It was momentarily beyond Melanie’s comprehension, how silliness between young single people could necessitate a move across town. Had she once cared about things like that?

He said, “How much hunting are you going to do in there?” He waited, squinting his eyes and widening the hole in the knee of his jeans with one finger. He was pure empathy, and she almost couldn’t stand it. She might cry again, or run out the door.

Instead she said, “The problem is I don’t know what I’m digging for. I mean, I don’t know what physical objects I’ll find, but beyond that—I don’t know if I’ll find peace, or just more disturbance.”

“Like what if they had a kid.”

“They didn’t.”

“Right. Sorry, right.” He looked lost. “Have you tried talking to the Hungarian couple downstairs? The guy doesn’t speak English, but his wife does, and they’ve been in the building forever.”

She said, “The ones they interviewed in the
Trib
. The ones who didn’t know.”

“László and Zsuzsi. It’s like Zsa Zsa, but different vowels. She was an opera singer. Holocaust survivor, too.”

“Yeah. The article said that, about the Holocaust. Can you imagine? I just—it’s hard to explain, but I think I need to compartmentalize. Whatever was wrong with my fiancé, that was one thing he clearly did very well.”

“Compartmentalize?”

“I’m just here to sort objects.”

“Listen,” he said, “speaking of which. I’ll take anything you don’t want. I’m doing a project.” The grin was back, and he led her past the kitchen to what had once been his grandfather’s study. Jed lifted the flap of a cardboard box and pulled out a handful of LPs, their jackets sun worn and softened. “These are from Brooke, on the ground floor. She lost her aunt. She kept the collectible ones, but this crap”—a mangled Burl Ives—“is more valuable to me.” He showed her a manual Smith Corona, a bag of old shoes, a stack of
TV Guides
, and a chess set, from the inheritors of apartments C, F, G, and H. “I’m sure your person’s family wants her stuff. But if there’s anything extra, or anything you can’t deal with. I’m crazy about this project.”