We Are Not in Pakistan (24 page)

The flag jutting from the side of the building is parallel to the ground.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph — doesn't that jackass know what that means? It's at half-mast.”

Larry is the only man who can set that flag back to its proper forty-five-degree angle.

His building key opens the garage and the maintenance shed. He chooses a stepladder about six feet high. He lugs it back outside, places it beneath the flag and climbs up level with its two-socket bracket on the wall.

The end of the flagpole rests in the lower socket, instead of the upper. Larry grabs, twists, and yanks it out.

Larry is flat on his back on the lawn. How did he get here? The pain in his chest might have something to do with it. The coloured guy is leaning over him. “Hey! Hey! You okay, mister?”

He remembers, and right as the coloured guy is punching cell phone buttons for help, gasps out, “You — the flag … it … was … half-mast.”

Dark hands cover Larry with a gasoline-smelling jacket that says “Security” in large gold letters. “The flag?” says the coloured guy. “Yeah — for my brother. He was blown up yesterday.”

“Your … brother?”

“Yeah, maybe the day before, but I got the call yesterday. Wasn't doing nothing but trying to show him some respect.”

A landmine, he tells Larry. Under his brother's Humvee. Blew a hole in its armour, flipped it over into a Baghdad canal. His body will be coming home next week.

Larry wants to tell the security guard about Eddie, but now wheels are rolling beneath him and obits scrolling before his eyes. He wonders if his name is listed there, but all he sees are stars.

Faces collide and combine in his mind. Grandpa cranking up the telephone, Trudy the day Eddie brought her home from the USO. Eddie with his Rhett Butler moustache, waving from the SS
Paul Hamilton,
the moment before the explosion. And there's the guy who called him a mick fifty-seven years ago.

When he opens his eyes again, everyone has gathered around
him. Trudy, the coloured security guard, the kike in number 109, the kraut in number 111, Ann Bernstein, the peacenik from number 102, his son, Ronan and some young Mexican woman who must be Maria. And Larry is, like the flag in the anthem, still there.

As he is wheeled off the ambulance, Dr. Bakhtiar comes forward. Warm brown hands buttress Larry's cold clammy hand. Right this minute, Larry needs this raghead's skills, his experience and all his compassion.

So this time, Larry doesn't pull away.

Jon's obit mentioned Fay Anne. She hadn't been back in Madison for years. Probably hadn't heard her dad's last composition before, either. When Gino entered from the sunny back garden, stepping through the French window, she was curled up on the couch, reading. “Nocturne for a Blue Day” welled from the Bose speakers — the part where the melody crept like a vine along a wall.

Her book thumped to the carpet, and she started from the couch.

“It's me,” said Gino, awkward and guilty as a burglar, though he'd come through that window hundreds of times. “Jon always left this window unlatched for friends.”

He switched his tuning case to his left hand, held out his right.

She relaxed and slipped her feet into wedge sandals.

Jon would have called any woman wearing shoes like that a lesbian.

She came up, shook hands. A small hand, unlike Jon's.

“Thought I'd stop in about the piano.” Gino gestured at the white shape of the Schimmel concert grand dwarfing the couch. All week since Jon died, he had to keep doing everything he'd always done for Jon, along with anything Jon might have forgotten
or that needed to be done. And concert after concert, on tour or at home, Gino's job was to keep each string in Jon's piano vibrating in harmony.

“Gino. Sure, come in.” Fay used the remote to turn the volume down, but he didn't need sound to hear the music, its seeming calm, its underside of pain. Maybe it would replace the auditory hallucination induced by the current hit on his car radio, “My Heart Will Go On.”

Fay was taking in Gino's silver — okay, grey — hair, the suspenders holding up his black jeans, probably thinking he could have used suspenders for his saggy face.

She had a genuine tan — the only tans in Madison before spring break would be the tanning-bed kind. One shoulder beneath the beige knit turtleneck and cashmere sweater was set higher than the other, one hip beneath her cotton skirt seemed set too low. Rings on every finger, gold watch, tennis bracelet. Gino noticed jewellery, which, according to Camille, most men didn't.

Gino muttered the same bumbling condolences he and Camille had tried at the funeral dinner.

Even her little pot-belly fit poorly with her slender frame. Five babies, she told Camille and Gino during dinner, a boy and four girls, all from her first marriage. None of them musical, and not a one who'd trekked to Wisconsin for their grandpa's funeral.

Gino followed Fay in, picking up the smell of her perfume. And cigarettes. Had to be Fay, Jon gave them up back in the sixties.

At the funeral dinner, she had lit one and tossed the match into the leftovers on her plate. Truth was Gino didn't like to see her smoke because it made her look old. And if Fay was old … well, Gino'd be even older. A year up on Jon, so Gino always felt responsible for him and his family.

He put the smoking down to grief and listened for wavering notes, as he did with instruments. Somewhere in this huskyvoiced,
fiftyish woman was the little girl who used to call him Uncle Gino. A little girl dressed in a wine velvet tunic, frilled white socks and black patent leather shoes who warbled, “Oh Give Thanks to the Lord for He is Good,” back when Jon played at weddings and funerals.

By the time coffee and wedges of sweet clay-like cheesecake showed up, Fanny — Fay Anne — had told Gino, Camille and everyone else within earshot she was now called Fay. And that she wasn't sure she'd attend the family gathering to discuss Jon's estate next week, and that she lived in some town in California with only one streetlight, where the streets were all cul-de-sacs.

Why did she have to live in California? Well, they say it's the place to be. She sure didn't like the folks there — called them health nuts.

“People are getting that way here too,” said Gino. “More kids jogging by Lake Monona, sailing around Lake Mendota every day.”

Fay reached for a pink packet of fake sugar and said she didn't believe the human body was made to be shaken around that way. Gino laughed as if she'd made a joke, but it got him thinking. What the heck was the human body made for, and how did hers stand having five babies and his Camille's not a one? And if guys like Jon, indestructible through endless nights of composition followed by days of practice and travel, were checking out, just how long did he and Camille have to go?

Now setting the tuning case by the piano, Gino asked if Fay was doing okay. She was doing okay. Would she be all right? She would be all right.

“That's good,” he said. “Your dad and I were friends so long, I can't get used to him not being here.” A friendship closer than brotherhood, Jon called it.

“Yeah, you probably knew him better than I did.”

Uh-huh.

He took his tuning fork from the case and approached the Schimmel, rolled back its quilted cotton drill cover, lifted the great white wing and the keyboard lid. He bared the keys under the scarlet felt strip and sat down.

Fay clicked the mute button and “Nocturne” went silent. But it lingered in Gino's inner ear, playing itself out in the background. The piece always spoke directly to him. Heck, to any listener.

It came to Jon at night, of course, in London, after a recital English music critics dubbed “eccentric” in the next day's newspapers. Interviewed after the debut of “Nocturne,” Gino said, “After the concert, we went for a walk on Hampstead Heath, and I could feel a part of Jon was absent. It was like watching God at work, patterns forming, flowing and being discarded before his eyes until the whole stood ready and all he had to do was write it down. A few clues would surface as he hummed a phrase or two — that's all.”

The reporters lapped it up. And Jon was pleased. Gino didn't mention the months of scrapped notes and preparation preceding the actual creation, or that Jon had stayed awake three days and nights writing the first draft, or that it was another year before the piece was refined and ready for performance.

Gino explained Jon's music in program notes and longer notes for record sleeves, then his CD jacket copy. He gave quotes “from Jon” to magazines. He organized his upgrade from audiotapes to CDs. Even persuaded one of Jon's students to make him one of those new computer billboards where anyone in the world could learn about Jon. A web site, uh-huh. He had done the best he could for Jon; a wife could have done no better.

“Knew Moira too. Kind. Gentle. A good woman.”

Fay said, “My mother's motto was peace at any price. I swore I'd never be like her.”

Gino placed his tuning wrench on the strings. Every piano has nuances, a few delicate hammers, a few touchy pins or a slightly
thinner section in its soundboard. No one knew this Schimmel like Gino, but it could still surprise him.

“Unlike my brother Earl, who trades on my father's name — never could understand that.”

Gino reached into the tuning case, grasped a tangle of red and green felt temperament strips, selected a green one, and threaded it through C, isolating the sound of a single string.

“When I was in school, Mom kept track of the finances and my father would go out and buy extravagant presents for her. I used to go with her to Gimbel's, where she'd try returning them without a receipt. Usually she ended up juggling money to pay for them.”

Gino smiled.

Peace offerings. That's what we called them.

The richer the offerings, the merrier Jon's memories. And Gino's.

“I forget what you went to school for …” he said. He forgets a lot of things these days. And sitting in Jon's seat was bringing back Jon's note-head figure, that large head jutting forward from an erect body. Bringing back how Jon's hands and heart moved and music leapt from the page, from two dimensions to four.

“Earl was studying business, and Dad told me I'd flunk the math if I did the same, so I took theatre. I figured drama comes naturally to our family. When my youngest followed my lead, I told her, you have ten per cent talent and ninety per cent chutzpah, whereas when I went on stage, I had ninety per cent talent and ten per cent chutzpah.”

Gino struck his tuning fork and tightened till C rang pure at 523.3 cycles, then began tuning relative to the note. Jon used to say music is created for the human ear, so Gino tossed away Strobotuner and software ads promising pitch-perfect notes for each key. And he didn't tune dead-on like the modern fellas, because the maestro liked all the notes relative. Jon was no synthesizer,
reading notation like a fundamentalist reading his Bible — he played to each audience differently.

Was that from talent or chutzpah? Both. Had to be both. If he had to guesstimate, he'd say fifty-fifty.

He plinked on, listening for the telltale wa-wa-wa of quarter-tones. Jon was too sick to play in the last couple of months — the spring weather must have affected the instrument.

“Anyway, I gave up the theatre,” said Fay. “Got tired of ketchup sandwiches. I said, I'm outta here.”

“When were you last back here?” he asked. A memory of Fay as an adult might help connect his cute little girl image to the woman before him.

“Fifteen years ago, when Mom was in the hospital,” she said. “Nineteen eighty-three.”

Gino had comforted and stood by Jon when Moira died, but darned if he could remember seeing Fay that year.

“Didn't stay in this house, because Dad was practising for a tour. Stayed with Earl and his wife. You know Catharine? When Mom died, she tried to make me go along with their ideas.”

Jon and Earl had wanted Moira buried, and Fay had wanted her cremated.

“Why should I go along? I said. Burial is a stupid tradition. It makes no sense, takes up land. Besides, she was buried her whole life. She was a star pianist at the conservatory when they met, but Dad always treated her as if she didn't know anything about music.”

“What did Catharine say?”

“Catharine said I should agree with Earl because he'd been so helpful and loyal to my parents. She meant, whereas I had followed my husband to California. Ha! Well, the Spanish Inquisition thrived in the name of being helpful and loyal, so I said, Tough. Deal with it. My sister-in-law told me it would hurt Earl's manhood and my dad's if Mom were cremated. I said, you can hurt
someone's feelings or religious ideas, but
manhood?
No, it would hurt his manhood, she said. So I said Tough. Deal with that too, because, you know, I didn't want peace at any price. See, unlike Earl, I always wanted to think for myself, always said I'd keep my soul my own. But Dad and Earl wouldn't listen and buried Mom anyway. So after her funeral, I was outta here.”

Jon and Gino had left Madison too, after Moira died. Jon had been complaining that audiences in the US were pale-faced and greying. Or ruined by rock, pop or whatever simple rhythm stuff it was that Michael Jackson started. He needed extravagantly subsidized concert halls and more patronage than he could beg from the National Endowment for the Arts. That tour, his most successful ever, lasted a whole ten months, and, as Gino told the press, “His grief seemed to pour through the music.”

Gino tuned, repaired, packed, wheedled, booked, scheduled, rescheduled and coached, while Jon premiered his seventh symphony. Gino did everything Jon forgot to do, and, oh yes, he even called Fay from West Berlin to wish her happy birthday “from Jon.”

Gino reminded her of the phone call.