by Cat Winters
A sudden jolt of music—that jazz band again—shot through Daniel’s window, so loud, so close, that I could differentiate each individual instrument: a cornet, a clarinet, a trombone, drums, and a piano.
I unhooked the last button and asked, “What song is that?”
Daniel turned his left ear toward the window. “‘Tiger Rag.’ Also by the Original Dixieland Jass Band.”
“Why does it sound so much louder tonight?”
“They must have the windows open in the lodge.” He glanced back at me. “Do you want me to open my window so you can hear it even better?”
“No! I don’t want anyone out there to hear . . .” I straightened my blouse so it wouldn’t hang cockeyed over my exposed Sears and Roebuck brassiere, which was the wildest thing about me, truth be told. Corsets and I had never agreed with each other because of farmwork. “Can you play it?”
“What?”
“The song? Can you play it on your guitar?”
With his hands on his waist, he swiveled his upper body toward the blond instrument leaning against the wall. Across the street, a new song commenced—a bouncier jazz number.
“You want me to play music for you?” he asked.
I nodded. “Could you? I want to hear how jazz sounds on a guitar. I’ve never heard it before, but I bet it’s the berries.”
He hesitated a moment, his hands still on his hips, his eyebrows raised, but after another nod from me, he sauntered over to the guitar. With gentle hands, like a father lifting a child from a crib, he picked up the instrument and settled down on the edge of the bed with the curve of the wood nestled against his lap. I stood there, not removing a single article of clothing, and watched him fiddle with the knobs on the neck as he tuned the silver strings.
He sat up straight and shifted himself toward the window, and I witnessed the music from the band work its way into his body. The transformation started at the top of him—his head bobbed, his eyes closed halfway. Then his shoulders rocked. He tapped his foot. His fingers lit upon the strings, and he joined right in and played that song as if, in an instant, he had become a long-distance member of the band.
I pinched my blouse shut between my right thumb and index finger and wandered over to his side of the bed, where I watched him strum with his head gently swaying.
“‘Joe Turner Blues,’” he said in his German accent, not stopping a beat, “by Wilbur Sweatman.”
I perched on the far corner of the bed, and his lowest notes rumbled down through the center of my chest to the bottom of my stomach, vibrating through that guilty hollow that burbled inside me. He caressed those strings until his grief seemed to bleed straight out of his soul, and I wished my father and brother could have heard him.
The last note finished with an abrupt absence of sound, but then the band trumpeted their way into a brand-new song. Daniel placed the guitar back in its resting spot in the corner.
I rose to my feet and let my blouse fall back open.
“Nein.” He stepped toward me and, with delicate fingers that sent a tease of a chill down my spine, he refastened the buttons of my blouse, one by one, starting from the bottom of the garment. Our breaths blended in with one another, and the music spoke through our silence. His hands stopped before reaching the topmost button, and he pressed his left palm against my collarbone, running his thumb across the base of my throat with a touch butterfly soft.
“This . . .” He sighed against my neck. “This used to be my favorite part of a woman’s body.”
I exhaled a breath that must have brushed against his own neck, across the rope burn, and I wondered if I cooled some of the sting. “It’s not your favorite part anymore?” I asked.
His eyes met mine. He kept his thumb on that small breadth of my skin. “Do you think I can take away your own pain? Is that why you keep coming here?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know why I keep coming. I just . . .” My chest rose and fell below the spread of his palm. “There is a pain in me. A knife blade”—I balled my hand against my stomach—“wedged in my gut. I want to be rid of it. I want to finally live.”
“You don’t think that you’ve lived?”
I shook my head and swallowed. “I know I haven’t. I’ve barely left my parents’ house these past several years. I’ve never been with a man quite like this, and I’m . . .” I turned my eyes away from his. “The world’s about to end. I can feel it in the marrow of my bones. I’m worried I’m about to miss out on a few things in life that shouldn’t be missed.”
He removed his hand from my skin. “Don’t do anything here for the sake of your father and brother. They’re not worth it.”
“It wouldn’t be for them.”
“Are you sure about that?”
I stepped away from his touch and lifted my brown skirt and black petticoat above my knees. “Are you familiar with English-speaking poets, such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman? Or Robert Herrick?”
He pinched his eyebrows together. “Why?”
“They all warn of the coming of death and teach us to embrace this world before we leave it.” I slid my long cotton drawers down my legs and pulled them over each of my stockinged feet. “Shutting myself away from life, steeling myself against pleasure and pain, it’s gotten me nowhere.”
Before Daniel could say a word in response (his mouth hung open in an astonished dog sort of way), I kicked off my shoes. I then crawled across his bed on my hands and knees and lay back against the warm blue quilt, stirring up the smells of wood dust and spiced shaving soap. I closed my eyes and breathed in all of his scents—let my head fill up with them—while the drums and the horns of the jazz band pulsed through my blood.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked. “You don’t know me at all . . .”
“I’m not sure in the slightest.” I opened my eyes. “But it might be fun, and I would sell my soul for anything that’s the complete opposite of death right now.”
“But . . .”
“I want to try it, now that I’m here. Show me what all the fuss is about.”
Daniel pulled his suspenders off his shoulders and tugged his white undershirt over his head, which made that raw red line on his neck stand out all the more. He slid toward me on the bed with a rustle of the quilt.
“Kiss me, please,” I said, and I held his chin in my right hand, feeling the soft prickle of fresh stubble.
He leaned down and kissed my stomach, right above the guilty part, and I unclenched my hands and steadied my breathing. He then moved on to the length of my ribs and my breasts, as well as the spot at the base of my throat that he called his former favorite. His mouth didn’t reach my lips; he didn’t unbutton my clothing. He simply kissed my curves through all the layers of cotton and batiste and lace, and his hand reached up beneath my skirt. I closed my eyes and let my legs fall open, arched my back against the mattress, felt the knife blade loosen. The music pounded in my ears and wiggled its way through my torso and my hips, and when he was on me—in me—it was all I could hear and feel and taste. The headboard tapping against the wall, the beat of his breath against my ear, the electricity on my tongue, my strange, throaty cries. We were music. We were jazz.
We were alive.
Chapter 8
I blew out of that apartment with the speed of a gale whipping through rows of rustling cornstalks. Daniel slept, and I simply fled in a panic, sobered up by the fear of conceiving a Boche baby I would now have to explain to the rest of the world.
The band played “Jelly Roll Blues” again, and I struggled to keep my footsteps a muffled patter beneath the roar of the music blaring across the “Friendliest City in America.” I buttoned up my coat and peered over my shoulder, expecting the shine of headlights at any moment.
“Ivy,” said a voice from the shadows.
I sucked in my breath and came to a halt on the sidewalk across the street from the Chamber of Commerce.
A pair of round lenses glinted off the light of a streetlamp. Lucas, we
aring his same charcoal-gray coat and hat from the other day, stepped out from his camouflaged position against the dark bricks of the music store. He looked just like a child playing detective.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
I kept my fingers on the top button of my coat. “What does it matter?”
He shrugged. “I just want to know what you’re doing out at this late hour? Billy wouldn’t have liked to think you were sneaking around.”
I managed a laugh. “Billy loved to sneak out after dark. What are you talking about? He used to run off to your house whenever he was mad at our father, if I remember correctly.”
“He wouldn’t want his sister prowling around by herself though.” Lucas reached into the breast pocket of his coat. “Will you do something for me, Ivy?”
I stiffened. “What?”
He pulled out a folded-up American flag and shook it out until the bottommost stripes hung down to his knees. “Will you kiss this flag for me? Show me how much you love this country?”
“Lucas . . .” I shook my head, confused. “I used to bandage up your knobby little knees whenever you’d fall down in our yard.”
“Are you one hundred percent American, Ivy Rowan?”
“Of course I am.”
“Then why do you smell like a German?”
My mouth fell open. I gaped at Lucas’s still-round cheeks and magnified baby-brown eyes.
He stretched the flag out farther across his chest. The Stars and Stripes reflected off his lenses, and, again, he started to ask, “Why do you smell—?”
I grabbed hold of the fabric with both hands and kissed it loud enough to make an obnoxious smacking sound. I then raised my head and, not even caring that I spat as I spoke, I said in his face, “Billy would hate you for this.”
“He’d hate you, too,” he said, and he added, with a sting in his voice, “whore.”
I should have slapped him across his cheek. I really should have smacked that boy good and yelled at him for insulting the sister of his dear fallen friend. Fear of the APL paralyzed my hand, however.
Instead, I let go of the flag and fled.
I THREW MY WEIGHT against May’s front door from the inside and turned a key to click the dead bolt into place. May’s sewing machine whirred behind me, but the noise soon stopped, and May asked, “What’s wrong?”
I shifted in her direction and found her staring at me through little silver glasses that reminded me of Granny Letty’s spectacles. I would have found the look delightfully entertaining if Lucas hadn’t just ripped my pride out of my chest.
“Someone caught me visiting the German,” I said.
May removed her right fingers from the Singer’s round hand crank. “Who?”
“A twenty-two-year-old busybody who used to be friends with my brother. He’s part of the APL now.” I hurtled myself over to her sofa and plopped down on the cushions before my head could go too dizzy, and, I swear, I could smell Daniel’s workroom in the upholstery and the rich maple frame.
“Ivy.” May swiveled toward me with a creak of her wooden chair. “If anyone ever corners you or threatens you again, there’s only one thing you need to say.”
“What?”
“You tell them, ‘I’m the daughter and sister of men who dispose of Huns.’”
A chill shivered down my spine. The guilty spot in my stomach palpitated with squeezing shots of pain that made my mouth taste of metal. “I can’t say that.”
“If the APL is dragging you away and labeling you a traitor, you have every right to state the truth. You’ll be untouchable.”
I leaned forward on my elbows and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Maybe I should take my piano lesson earnings and buy a big, fat Liberty Bond tomorrow. Prove I’m one hundred percent American.”
“Don’t waste your money to please idiots terrified of looking like cowards. And by the way”—she set her glasses on the sewing table—“is this particular German worth so much fuss? I know he’s in mourning and a tragic figure, which I’m sure melts your poetry-loving heart. But is he at least handsome and charming?”
My cheeks burned with another one of my splotchy blushes. “Oh, May. The truth of the matter is that Lucas was right to be suspicious of me. He called me a whore, and that’s . . .” I covered my eyes with the heels of my palms. “That’s actually the truth. The Herrick poem and all this death surrounding me inspired me to do something rather impulsive and stupid.”
May’s chair creaked again. “Ivy?” she asked. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I nodded, my eyes still covered. “I gathered my rosebuds.”
“Holy Moses!” She clapped her hands together and laughed in an impressed sort of way. “When you burst out of your cocoon, you come out in a full blaze of color and fireworks.”
“Do you happen to know if there’s anything I can do that would help prevent . . . ?” I lowered my hands. “I know Margaret Sanger published that pamphlet about birth control . . .”
“I don’t have any douches or quinine, which she claims will help. But I do own a bottle of Nujol.”
I winced. “I was hoping to sneak back out in the dark and drive that ambulance soon. I don’t want a laxative in my system.”
“A hot bath, then? That might help. Add a little Lysol to the water.”
“Oh, God, no. That sounds horrid.” I pushed myself to my feet. “In any case, I’m late for helping the girls with the ambulance.”
“Why are you going straight back out there if APL busybodies are creeping around in the dark?”
“I don’t want to just sit here and fret about everything. Ever since my father and brother came home the other night, I’ve only felt better when I’m doing something.”
“What about the hot bath?”
“I’ll just head off to my driving and pretend that everything will be all right.”
May exhaled a curt laugh. “You can’t just pretend away a pregnancy.”
“I can try.” I hustled toward her kitchen. “Pretending that unmentionable things never occurred is a Rowan family tradition. It’s what we excel at.”
“Are you sneaking out the back door?”
“Yes,” I called to her from the kitchen, rounding her bulky black range. “If you don’t mind, I’ll steal across your yard and cut across the rest of the neighborhood so I don’t have to run across any more APL snitches.”
She might have minded—she might have warned me to be careful or to reconsider taking the Nujol, but I tore out of the door and into the damp-smelling air before she could talk me out of leaving.
THE AMBULANCE WHEEZED and choked in the distance again, drowning out the faraway bass line and the melody of the jazz. I sprinted down the sidewalk, terrified Nela had stalled the thing on the tracks a second night in a row.
When I rounded a corner, however, I spotted the ambulance parked in front of the brick and stone headquarters of the Buchanan Red Cross. My feet slowed. My arms swung back and forth across my waist as I brought myself to a stop in front of the vehicle. Nela crouched down in front of the grille again, puffing and reddening and turning the crank with both hands.
“Here.” I bent down next to her. “Let me teach you how to turn the starter so you won’t hurt yourself.”
“Bah!” She stood up straight and kicked the grille with the toe of her boot. “I hate this goddamned truck!”
Addie’s masked face peeked out from the passenger side, her eyebrows raised.
“It’s all right.” I waved at Addie, and I guided Nela aside by her elbow. “I’ll show you what to do. Is the emergency brake set?”
Nela gave a brusque nod. “Yes.”
“Good.” I shoved the crank into place below the grille. “First of all—and this is highly important so you don’t break your hand or lose an arm—you only use your left hand to turn the crank, and keep your thumb tucked next to your index finger. And only pull upward.”
Nela set her hands on her hips and blew a lock of b
lond hair out of her eyes. “Yeah, OK. Left hand.”
“Thumb tucked next to your hand,” I said again, demonstrating the position with my fist.
“Left hand. Thumb tucked. Pull up.”
I gave the handle a swift crank, and the motor sparked to life, popping and humming with the contented symphony of a working Ford Model T.
“Let’s go.” I patted the hood and scampered toward the driver’s seat. “The APL is on the hunt again, and I don’t want anyone stopping us from heading down to Southside.”
ADDIE AND NELA NEVER TIRED THAT NIGHT, never stopped wanting to fetch one more patient. We carried the sick out of their houses on the sturdy canvas stretcher and delivered them to the comfort of Nela’s home, where the fireplace burned and patients seemed to heal. Liliana had regained her strength enough to help tend to those whom we parked in the rooms upstairs. Mrs. O’Conner from next door brewed steaming cups of tea and bubbling pots of soup in the kitchen. Benjie played records on a Victrola in the front room. I didn’t recognize the music that he chose, and instinctively I wondered if Daniel knew the names of the songs and the musicians. I almost even said aloud, I bet you anything Daniel Schendel knows that tune and could cite the title and artist in less than two seconds.
Eventually, morning broke out in patches of pale pink light. We passed a row of tired-looking houses with roofs that sagged as much as my shoulders, and the entire world struck me as a sickly thing in need of a strong shot of whiskey. Everything ailed. Even the cornfields in the distance looked unseasonably withered and brown for the first weeks of October.
“My eyes are getting bleary,” I told Nela and Addie when the road ahead of me rippled into a snaking black ribbon. “I desperately need to stop and go home.”
“Just one more patient.” Nela squeezed her warm hand over my right knuckles on the steering wheel. “Please, Ivy. We’ve got to save at least one more before our shift ends. Please.”