Music for Wartime (38 page)

Jed said, “It’s late.” And it was. It was dark outside. (The band would have been starting to play right now. Melanie had almost forgotten.) The mouse was still nestled in Jed’s palm. He said, “Are you sure you want me to take this? I’ll show you the memorial when it’s done.” But László was coughing again, and Zsuzsi was back at his side. Jed and Melanie slipped out of the kitchen, out of the apartment, up to the second floor hall, where Vanessa Dillard’s door was still ajar from what Melanie had thought would be her quick farewell trip to Jed’s.

He was saying, “I can’t paint over the mouse. I couldn’t do it. But that’ll be cool, right? It can be the only unpainted thing, like it’s the rawest and it stands out.”

Melanie nodded and said, “I think I’m stopping here. I need to get off this ride now.”

“I mean,
wow
. It’s called Stockholm syndrome, right? Do you think she’s really loved him all this time?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“I mean, talk about
compartmentalizing
. Ha! Okay, so does that mean he was a Nazi? Is that the same thing? I mean it sounds, like, as bad or worse than Nazi.”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, God. Oh. Why are you crying? Hey.”

She wiped at her nose and tried to unscramble her brain. “It was true down there, that look you gave me. What Zsuzsi said had nothing to do with me. We think we’re part of the story, but we’re just the tangents. It’s the same thing I’ve been—you know? In there.”

Jed looked horrified. “I don’t understand, but I know that’s not true!”

Melanie leaned against the wall and wondered how she could possibly still have tears left when she was so very dehydrated. “I’ll put it this way. You look into that dollhouse. Okay, that wasn’t fair, not a dollhouse. The museum, the memorial. You look into it from outside, and you have a few little relics, and you try to put a narrative around them, decipher them, but really you’re never going to know. Are you satisfied with that? Standing on the outside looking in?” He was quiet, and she worried she’d offended him. It was easy to forget how young he was. She said, “I’m sorry. I mean, maybe that’s the role of the artist.”

Jed’s voice was as kind as any nurse’s, any teacher’s: “I think it’s the role of the survivor.”

“Oh.” It was the point of his whole project, and she’d missed it completely. “Oh.”

Why was she always five steps behind?

He smiled, and she knew then that he would have slept with her, if she’d wanted. He would have taken her up to his apartment and made her feel young and unbetrayed again for one night. Of course he would have. It wasn’t so complicated. But he was still holding that little mouse, fragile and gray, and she didn’t want him to put it down for her or anyone. She wanted it to go straight to the waiting little room, in front of Maria Callas and home, at last, to the land of forgotten and remembered and misconstrued objects—after seventy years, at last. And she wanted to go home and sleep for a week.

Outside, there was a cascade of sirens—someone else’s emergency—and then they passed.

She said, “Good night, good night, good night,” and Jed started up his last flight of stairs, the mouse cupped in his hands, until she could see only his feet, then nothing.

It was, by design, her final image of the building. She sealed it there, like a movie director watching the dailies and selecting from among hundreds what would be the film’s closing shot: here, at the perfect angle, a beautiful man from below, fragile relic in his rough hands. Mouse equaling survival, et cetera. Sirens in the night. Fade to black.

She locked Vanessa’s door, leaving the Evidence box inside. Her sisters would be glad to handle the apartment’s sale, the transfer of personal effects, the donation of furniture to the women’s shelter.

It wasn’t quite true, she knew, that there was nothing for her in Zsuzsi’s story. The woman had managed—not just eventually, but right there on the spot in 1944—to forgive the most heinous acts of her lifetime, all for the sake of love. Or at least self-preservation. And here was Melanie, who knew that the rest of her life would be defined by the degree to which she could forgive Michael. This was the role of the survivor as well: the passing of judgment, the issuing of pardons. But she didn’t even think she
ought
to forgive Michael. She could only note, with slight astonishment, that at some point in the recent past she had managed to forgive Vanessa Dillard completely. Wasn’t that a triumph of sorts?

She walked down the stairs, trying to be exactly like someone in a film, an actress with a mark to hit, a single motivation, a paycheck on the other side of the front door.

She almost made it.

From inside apartment B, piano chords vibrated, delicate but insistent, and above them hovered a cracked soprano. A ravaged voice, a Stradivarius left in the rain.

It was down by the Sally Gardens my love and I did meet

She crossed the Sally Gardens on little snow-white feet.

Was this what they did, then, every night? This couple that should not have been a couple, this inexplicable by-product of the twentieth century’s worst moment? They gazed at each other and sang Irish love songs? Melanie pictured snifters of brandy. László’s clouded eyes, emanating a love that couldn’t really have been any different than any other human love in history, could it? There were seven billion love stories on the planet, but when you cracked them open, if you ever cracked them open, didn’t they all have the same unoriginal love at their core? She wanted to ask. She wanted to demand an explanation.

But the door was closed, and so she could not see and she could not ask. She walked down the steps and onto the street, and the song continued.

She bade me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree

But I was young and foolish and with her did not agree.

Both of them were singing now. Dear God, what was that? What was she meant to do with
that
? Both of them were singing.

Appearances, as always, are deceiving. This book, appearing a year after my last novel, is in fact the product of thirteen years’ labor; the oldest words in here were written in June 2002. To look at my own table of contents is to see those thirteen years—and the people who carried me through them—in glorious Hollywood-style montage. (My first snail-mail rejection letters, the monolithic Dell I used to write on, Harkness tables full of sharp workshoppers, kind editors, two babies who aren’t babies anymore, mountains of drafts, utter despair and brave students and artists’ colonies and friends who toast survival.) My entire career—my entire adulthood—has happened in this collection.

Infinite thanks to Kathryn Court and Lindsey Schwoeri, my brilliant and patient editors; Holly Watson, Angela Messina, and Carolyn Coleburn; Emily Hartley; Lynn Buckley; Veronica Windholz; and all the scouts and book reps and other footsoldiers. If I could afford to, I’d send flowers every day to Nicole Aragi, the best agent who ever agented, and Duvall Osteen, the best assistant who ever assisted.

Almost all of these stories had their first homes in literary journals. It was 2003 when David Hamilton of
The Iowa Review
sent me my first acceptance letter, but the fact that he wrote it in purple fountain pen helps my feeling that this happened centuries ago. A decade later, Harry Stecopoulos, now at the
Iowa
helm, published “The Museum of the Dearly Departed” and edited it with a sharp eye. R. T. Smith at
Shenandoah
not only published “The Worst You Ever Feel” but gave me a job back in college and an introduction to the literary journal landscape. Rob Spillman edited “Peter Torrelli” for
Tin House
under extraordinary circumstances, for which he deserves some kind of plaque. Boundless thanks as well to Emily Stokes and the very patient fact-checker Jacob Gross at
Harper’s
; Stephen Donadio and Carolyn Kuebler at
New England Review
; Ladette Randolph and guest editor Tony Hoagland at
Ploughshares
; Phong Ngyuen at
Pleiades
; Sascha Feinstein at
Brilliant Corners
; Garrett Doherty and Anthony Varallo at
Crazyhorse
; Jonathan Freedman at
Michigan Quarterly Review
; and Jordan Bass at
McSweeney’s.

One night in March 2008, while my first baby slept in a basket on the floor (at a time when I couldn’t imagine ever being able to prioritize writing again), Heidi Pitlor of
The Best American Short Stories
sent me the single best e-mail of my life. Neither this collection nor my career would look the same without her support then and over the following years.

Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Richard Russo, Geraldine Brooks, Dave Eggers, and Kevin Brockmeier kindly chose stories included in this collection for anthologies. I’m still geeking out about this.

These stories have benefited from innumerable readers and volunteer editors over the years. Notable among them: Rachel DeWoskin, Gina Frangello, Dika Lam, Emily Gray Tedrowe, and Zoe Zolbrod gave me invaluable edits on “The Miracle Years of Little Fork” and “Good Saint Anthony Come Around” as well as writerly friendship as this book came together. A lifetime ago, David Huddle encouraged early drafts of “Suspension,” “Acolyte,” and “The Worst You Ever Feel.” He also made me, in a thousand ways, a better writer. Julie Snyder, Ben Calhoun, and Sarah Koenig at
This American Life
put a dent in my bucket list by letting me read “The November Story” on air—but more important, Julie Snyder’s edits helped improved the story tremendously. Years ago, before this book looked anything like it does now, someone got me a well-intentioned but premature introduction at Chronicle Books. They wisely turned down what was an inchoate collection, but an editor there named Brianna Smith took the time to write me back and suggest that the stories might eventually coalesce around some of the themes she’d noticed—notably, music or war.
Oh.

Some further debts: The violinist Kathleen Thomson kindly read both “The Worst You Ever Feel” and “Cross” for musical accuracy; remaining mistakes are mine. A childhood friend, Elizabeth Pulbratek Randisi, went and grew up into an estate planning lawyer and gamely helped me figure out the inheritance details in “The Museum of the Dearly Departed.” Any lingering plausibility issues are no reflection of her excellent legal skill. Alex Ross’s 2009
New Yorker
article “The Music Mountain” launched my obsession with the Marlboro Music School and Festival, and allowed me to imagine the place that would hover in the background of “Cross.” At a dinner one night, Brian Bouldrey told me a story about the composer István Márta; I went back to my hotel room and wrote “The Singing Women.”

This book would not exist yet if it weren’t for the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ragdale Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

I was blessed to be born into a strange and artistic family, one that I’m still struggling, in many ways, to understand. But I was handed more stories than I could ever decipher or use, and—more important—I was instilled from the beginning with the understanding that the arts were, while perhaps not the best way to make a living, the best way to make a life.

Jon Freeman is now married to a busy writer but used to be married to someone with delusions of being a writer. I’m not sure whether my neuroses were greater now or then, but he’s put up with all of them and edited the hell out of every story here. This book is for him.

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