by Alex George
It was Lomax who was the curator of these dreams. This stranger brought hope to my family, and with it, peace.
NINETEEN
By then Joseph was sixteen years old. He enjoyed being a workingman, and was pleased that his job at the restaurant meant he no longer had to go to school. His favorite time of the day was early in the morning. He quietly performed his chores, folding napkins, cleaning silverware, and setting tables. He relished the solitude. When the doors opened and the outside world swept in, he would not have another moment to himself.
Alone, he often sang to himself. His angelic treble had deepened to a warm and rich tenor, just like his father’s. Joseph had begun to sing the songs and arias that he had heard Frederick perform in that same room. The music had been buried somewhere deep within him, and now it emerged, note-perfect, after years of silence.
One morning he was singing snatches of Rigoletto as he swept the floor of the dining room. Lomax emerged yawning from the kitchen, and leaned against the door frame, watching. When Joseph finally noticed him, he stopped at once.
“You never told me you could sing,” said Lomax.
Joseph looked sheepish, and then grinned.
“You ever thought about serenading your pretty little neighbor?”
“Cora?” Joseph looked doubtful.
Lomax nodded. “She might like to hear that.”
Of course, Joseph knew the story of Frederick’s musical ambush of his mother, that Sunday afternoon in Hanover. He stood in the middle of the floor, lost in thought.
That night Joseph crept out of the house just before midnight. Lomax was waiting for him by the gate.
“You ready?” he asked.
Joseph shook his head. “Not really.”
Lomax patted him gently on the back. The Leftkemeyers’ house stood in darkness. They walked around the side of the building until they were standing beneath a window. “This the one?” whispered Lomax.
Joseph nodded. “I think so.”
“What you goin’ to sing, anyway?”
“‘Nessun dorma.’”
Lomax looked at him.
“It’s Italian,” explained Joseph. “It means ‘Nobody sleeps.’”
“You don’t know nothin’ in English?”
“But this is from Turandot.”
“Look, it could be from Tallahassee for all I care. But this girl don’t speak Italian, far as I know, and—”
Joseph touched Lomax’s arm, suddenly calm, confident. Puccini had pedigree when it came to this sort of thing. “I think it’ll work,” he said.
Lomax shook his head. “Nobody sleeps, huh. Well, let’s hope you got that bit right.” He squeezed Joseph’s shoulder. “I’ll be over there.” He pointed to a nearby tree. “And remember, don’t say nothing. Just let the music do the work.”
“So I just sing the song and then disappear?”
“Right.”
“And what if she doesn’t recognize me?”
“Oh, don’t you worry about that.” Lomax grinned. “Now go sing.” And with a wave he retreated into the darkness.
The night air was warm and still. Joseph gazed at the sky, wondering whether Frederick was up there somewhere, willing him on. Finally, he turned toward Cora’s bedroom window, quietly humming the opening bars of the aria to make sure he had the pitch about right. He crossed his fingers and took a deep breath.
Lomax couldn’t see anything from behind the tree. As he stood in the darkness, waiting for Joseph’s song to begin, it occurred to him that none of the women he had ever known were at their sweetest or most romantically inclined when unexpectedly woken up in the middle of the night. As the minutes passed, he became increasingly apprehensive. Finally, he poked his head around the tree trunk and squinted toward the Leftkemeyer house.
Joseph stood in a patch of moonlight beneath Cora’s window. His body weaved in gentle rhythm. One hand rested on his chest, the other was raised up to the heavens. Lomax watched as his lips formed all those beautiful Italian words.
Not one sound came out of my father’s mouth.
The next night they tried again. And the next. For a week Lomax watched as Joseph fought for control of his mutinous vocal cords. Each night my father would finally retreat, his face hot with tears. Not even the ardor of first love could free him from his old phobia of public performance. Perhaps that should have been no surprise. Cora Leftkemeyer was the most important audience of all.
Joseph was devastated. His silence became a prison from which he could not escape. The strain of his nightly frustrations began to show. His eyes became ringed by dark shadows of exhaustion. He yawned as he took orders and ferried plates to and from the kitchen, his mind still trapped beneath Cora’s window. To make matters worse, his father’s ghost had settled on his shoulder. Joseph wanted to live up to Frederick’s legacy. He longed for his own story to tell about Puccini.
Lomax was soon wishing he had never suggested the idea. He loved Joseph, and he couldn’t bear to watch him suffer. Joseph continued to make his nightly pilgrimage alone. The hopelessness of the situation revealed a stubborn streak within him. He had no plan except to carry on, in the hope that one night his voice would finally emerge from his throat, fluttering into the night air like a magical bird in a fairy tale.
Luckily, Lomax didn’t believe in fairy tales.
It was a Sunday afternoon in September. Joseph had been singing silently beneath Cora Leftkemeyer’s bedroom for almost a month, and he looked wretched. He was sweeping up the first fall of leaves from the maple tree at the bottom of the yard, and he sang as he worked. Lomax and Jette watched him from just inside the kitchen door, where they could not be seen.
“He has a fine voice,” said Lomax.
“Just like his father,” murmured Jette.
They were silent for a moment as they listened. “Miss Jette,” said Lomax, “why are you hiding?”
She turned to look at him. “Didn’t you know?” she said. “Joseph can’t sing in front of people.”
“He can’t?”
“Not if he knows they’re there.”
“He never told me that,” said Lomax thoughtfully.
“It’s a long story.” Jette was silent for a moment as she remembered storming out of the Nick-Nack before Joseph’s first public performance. No measure of regret could ever unpick the past. All that beautiful music was inside him, and she had trapped it there for good. She had always considered her furtive listening penance for what she had done. “His voice is so beautiful.” She sighed. “Where are you going?”
“Be right back,” said Lomax.
A few minutes later Lomax was leading a wide-eyed Cora Leftkemeyer across the yard toward her future.
He motioned for her to stop behind a small row of tightly clustered spruce trees. He held his index finger in the air. “Listen,” he whispered. Joseph was invisible behind the wall of green, but his voice floated through the air. The melody was sweet and clear and true. The two of them stood silently behind the trees, listening to my father sing. They must have looked an odd sight. Lomax towered over the girl, whose skin was as white as his was black. He wore his usual old shirt and tattered overalls. Cora was still dressed in her best church clothes. After a while Lomax pointed to a spot where she could look through a small gap in the trees. Cora moved forward and stared through the branches. Then she did not move for some time.
Finally she stepped back and turned to Lomax. “Why have you brought me here?” she asked. Her cheeks were flushed.
“Miss, do you know who that is?”
“He’s my neighbor’s son.”
“Your neighbor’s son, that’s right.” Lomax nodded. “His name is Joseph Meisenheimer. He’s a friend of mine.”
The two were silent for a moment as they listened some more.
&
nbsp; “Why have you brought me here?” asked Cora again.
“Go to your bedroom window at midnight tonight,” said Lomax softly. “Look outside. See what you see.”
That night, Cora Leftkemeyer hid by her bedroom window and watched Joseph perform his silent tribute. She stood quite still, her fingers coiled tightly around the fabric of the curtain. It was a cloudless evening, and in the light of the moon Cora could see his lips moving soundlessly. She remembered the voice she had heard that afternoon, rich and clear, full of beauty and hope.
The following evening, Cora knew that sleep was a million miles away. She made a careful chink in the curtains and stared out of it, waiting. The Leftkemeyers’ garden was cast in ghostly shadows, as still as the clock on her wall.
When Joseph finally appeared beneath her window, she felt her heart tumble. Once again, when he opened his mouth, no sound emerged. But it no longer mattered.
Cora Leftkemeyer could hear his song.
TWENTY
That first night, as Cora had stared down at the strange young man weaving silently below her bedroom window, bathed in silver moonlight, a whole new world suddenly burst into view. Joseph’s display of devotion ignited a flame deep within her. The following morning she stood furtively by the kitchen window, waiting for a glimpse of Joseph as he left for work. She gazed at him as he yawned down the street toward the restaurant, and was unable to think about anything else.
They had never spoken a single word to each other.
Joseph would have probably gone on singing silently beneath her bedroom window for the rest of his life, but Cora was in no mood to wait. She watched him sing for one more night. The next evening she marched across the lawn.
Lomax had not told Joseph about his conversation with Cora, and so when my father opened the door and saw her standing there, he stared at her in mute amazement. Cora stared right back. In the moonlight Joseph’s features had been largely hidden by shadows. When she gazed into his astonished face, any lingering doubts that she may have had vanished. She took a step forward and held out her hand.
Joseph reached for her fingers. “You’re here,” he said.
“I’ve been watching you,” breathed Cora. “I’ve been hearing you sing.”
The time that followed was rich with the unsullied bliss of first love. Cora and Joseph spent every evening together, going for long walks through the woods or sitting on the back porch drinking iced tea. They talked forever, an endless river of conversation, meandering across whole worlds. When it was time for Cora to cross the lawn back to her house, they lingered endlessly, reluctant to give each other up to the solitude of the night.
Each day Joseph found himself mesmerized afresh, agog at the news that Cora was here, with him.
She begged him to sing the song he had performed beneath her window. He refused at first, sure that the music would never come, but he was helpless to resist her entreaties for long. One evening he reluctantly agreed to try. He stood up, cleared his throat, and looked into her eyes. A deep breath—and then the melody emerged, ringing with crystalline beauty. Cora gazed up at him in delight. When he had finished, she stood up without a word and kissed him softly on the cheek. After that he sang for her every day—the same songs that Frederick had performed twenty years earlier, as he had serenaded Jette on the streets of Hanover. Cora listened, enchantment illuminating her beautiful face.
After years of silence, love set all that music free.
When Jette finally learned the details of Joseph’s unorthodox amorous campaign beneath Cora’s bedroom window, she could not help feeling proud of him, despite her misgivings. Lomax was a different matter, though. When she discovered that the nocturnal serenades had been his idea, and that it was he who had led Cora across the yard that Sunday afternoon, she confronted him.
“How are you going to feel when she breaks his heart?” she reproached him.
Lomax was unrepentant. “Who says she will?”
Jette shook her head. “This will end badly, you’ll see.”
“Have you seen how happy he is, Miss Jette?”
Jette snorted. “That’s what worries me. He can’t think straight. And they don’t even know each other!”
“You didn’t know your husband when he sang through the hedge at you.”
“Well,” said Jette, “that was different.”
“Hmm. Funny how it’s always different.” Lomax scratched his head. “Look, Miss Jette, I love your boy,” he said. “I don’t want to see him hurt any more than you do. But I seen the look in his eye when he talks about that girl. He’s pinned his whole life on her. Right or wrong, that’s how it is. Smart or dumb, that’s how it is. Not for me to judge. So what was I supposed to do? Turn away and let his dreams go up in smoke?”
“You could have told me what was going on.”
Lomax shook his head. “It was already hard enough for Joseph to do what he did. If you had told him no, he never would have even tried.” He paused. “I won’t say I’m sorry for what I did. But I didn’t do it to hurt you. Matter of fact, I wasn’t thinking about you at all. I was thinking about him.”
“But what if this is all a terrible mistake?”
“Miss Jette,” said Lomax softly, “you got to let him go.”
Understanding hit Jette like a low punch to the gut: from now on her relationship with her son would be defined by her inability to save him from his own mistakes. She resolved to accept Joseph’s choice, bravely and without fuss. Her own mother’s refusal to welcome Frederick into their family had chased them halfway across the world. She promised herself that she would not make the same mistake.
And so, as the romance between Joseph and Cora shyly blossomed, Jette dived gamely into the fray, extending invitations left and right. Every week the two fractured families ate together at her dinner table, where she served up her most popular dishes from the restaurant.
Jette did her best to like Cora, but maternal instinct clouded her view. The prim little girl from next door still struck her as cool and aloof. But weeks passed, and then months, and her bleak predictions of her son’s heartbreak did not materialize. She had to admit that she had never seen Joseph so happy. When he announced one evening that he had asked Cora to marry him, and that she had accepted, Jette had the grace to admit (at least to herself) that she might have been mistaken.
Instead a new fear clouded the horizon. Jette was sure that Cora thought herself too grand for a small town like Beatrice. She became convinced that as soon as the young couple was married, Cora would announce her desire to return to Kansas City, or beyond.
Martin Leftkemeyer’s concerns were quite different. He was not worried about the prospect of imminent abandonment, nor was he unhappy with his daughter’s choice of mate. In fact he liked Joseph a great deal. It was the rest of his family that was the problem.
My grandfather had come to Beatrice in search of sanctuary. He needed to escape the memories of Cora’s mother that lingered in the large, sad house in Kansas City where they had lived. He had stayed by his wife’s bedside and watched as the influenza extinguished the light from her eyes. There was nothing he could have done to save her, and his powerlessness against the random brutality of fate flattened him almost as much as the loss of the woman he adored. Suddenly he was a frightened man. The busy streets outside his front door now hummed with invisible threat.
Our quiet little town had seemed a perfect antidote to the violent clamor of the big city. His desk at the bank was always immaculately tidy. He paid meticulous attention to detail. The never-changing paperwork offered comfort in its bland functionality, a dour buttress against unpredictability. Boxes ticked, blank spaces filled: this, at least, he could control.
Unsurprisingly, then, Jette’s capacity for benign chaos made Martin fretful. Her cheerful exuberance put his careful, well-ordered existence under threat. T
hose weekly festivals of starch at the Meisenheimer dinner table were a particular torment. He suffered quietly through Jette’s effusive hospitality, and would stagger home at the end of every visit, giddy with relief to have survived. Martin loved Cora more than anything in the world, and he wanted her to be happy. But her marriage to Joseph sounded the death knell for any lingering hopes he may have had for a tranquil life.
Jette’s reservations about the union were mild in comparison to Rosa’s first flagrant hostility toward Cora. Nobody would ever be good enough for Rosa’s darling brother. My devoted aunt had spent her whole life trying to get Joseph to love her back, just a little, and she could not stand the thought of being eclipsed completely by the pretty girl from next door. And so she hated Cora, unable to forgive her for stealing Joseph away.
One day Cora and Joseph arrived at Jette’s house while Rosa and Lomax were immersed in one of their afternoon chess games. Cora watched them play. Rosa ignored her, frowning at the board in concentration. Lomax, though, grinned at her. “You ever play chess, Miss Cora?” he asked.
“I used to,” said Cora. “But a long time ago.”
“Perhaps the two of you should play.” Lomax sighed, gesturing at the pieces before him. “She’s beating up on me. Again.”
Rosa looked up for the first time. “Would you like to play?” she asked Cora.
Cora smiled at her. “Finish this game. You and I can play tomorrow.”
Rosa spent the next day imagining the look on Cora’s face as she inflicted a crushing defeat on the unwelcome interloper. Victory at the chessboard would never win Joseph back, but it would be sweet, all the same. When Cora sat down opposite her, looking uncertainly at the pieces, there was a merciless glint in my aunt’s eye.
Half an hour later, Rosa surveyed the board in disbelief. Her forces had been decimated. Cora had played with stunning, sustained aggression. Rosa had been unable to mount a single attack of her own. To her horror she felt the hot prickle of incipient tears behind her eyes. Cora hadn’t just outplayed Rosa, she had destroyed her. My aunt had been completely outclassed, and she knew it. Her tears were tears of envy and admiration.