I started to feel excited about the recital as Peter and I followed a curved hallway to a small room at the building’s rear. He limped and sounded one-footed in the hall — the padded sole of his special boot silent while my heels clapped in double rhythm against the shiny floor. A poster on the wall showed a picture of Justine Janson, her hair pulled back. She looked much older than twenty-one.
As soon as we entered the recital room, Mrs. Janson came over to us and introduced herself. I shook her small hand. She was a short woman with frizzy hair and wide, hula-hoop hips.
“You’re dears to come in this weather. Where’s your mother?”
“Parking,” Peter said.
Mrs. Janson made a face, one that sympathized with the plight of finding a parking spot in Boston. She smiled and thanked us for coming. We took our seats in a row near the back. Peter draped his army jacket over Mother’s empty chair to reserve it for her.
Soon, the lights dimmed. A man in a tuxedo crossed the stage and took his place at the piano. The door to the recital room closed. I looked back instinctively for Mother, still circling the building, I imagined, looking for an elusive parking space. A spotlight brightened and Mrs. Janson’s daughter Justine glided to center stage swathed in purple chiffon. The pianist began a roulade of scales. Justine parted her lips and began to sing in Italian.
The program notes translated each aria into English so I read the words while she sang about loneliness and longing, the beauty of the woods and the path she walked on. She shaped her lips around high notes. She trilled about her aching breast and lost love.
“What good is the exquisite flower lighting her path with no one to share it with?” the notes translated. “What good is the sweet air if only I can breathe it?”
While Justine’s voice hovered in uncertainty, trilled and twirled and rose again, I counted fourteen rows of wooden seats.
“Where is she?” I whispered to Peter.
He left his seat and slipped out the door. I went with him.
The long, marble hallway was empty except for two women taking tickets at the front entrance of the main Jordan Hall. The Vienna Choir Boys were singing in there.
“Did you see a woman in a mohair coat?” Peter asked a girl with thin hair and freckles.
“She’s our mother,” I said.
The girl shrugged. “A lot of people pass through here. Where is she supposed to meet you?”
“She’s parking the car,” I said.
Peter pointed in the direction of the small recital hall to the left. “If you see her, please tell her to go to there.”
The woman nodded.
“She’s very pretty. She has blond hair,” I added. We walked down the foyer steps and looked outside. Snowfall covered the roads in a crusty membrane, the falling sky lowering itself upon us.
“Is she lost?” My breath fogged up the glass door.
“Possibly.”
We waited together, staring at the snowy street lined with parked cars turning into white ovules.
Peter looked at his watch. “It’s icy out there,” he said, his voice quiet as the snow.
We went back up the stairs and stood near the ticket takers unsure about what to do next.
“Isaac Stern is playing at Symphony Hall. There’s a lot going on today,” the girl offered as a way to explain the parking situation.
“Let’s go back,” I said. Maybe Mother had come through a side door.
Back inside the recital room, the audience clapped. Justine left the stage. Lights brightened for intermission. I wanted to tell Mrs. Janson. Perhaps she would know something. As soon as Mrs. Janson turned around I started toward her.
“Not here yet?” she asked, looking a bit worried herself. “They did say parking was impossible today.”
“It’s snowing,” I said. I looked for Peter at the door. He motioned to me.
“Let’s go back to the front,” he said.
We walked down the marble hallway again, past doors I now recognized. Some had gold leaf numbers and others did not. This time when we reached the front lobby we ran into the intermission crowd for the Vienna Choir Boys. People smoked furiously. The doors to the main concert hall opened revealing cathedralsized organ pipes above the stage and gold-rimmed railings. It was a beautiful room steeped in carved wood and plush green chairs. It looked happy inside there, the opposite of how I was feeling, a squall brewing in my stomach.
“I’m calling Dad,” Peter said testily.
Peter spotted a telephone booth off the lobby. I stood against the folding glass doors while he dialed home.
“No answer,” he said, thumping the receiver into its metal holder. “Let’s go outside.”
We went out without coats down one block toward Boylston Street. City lights twinkled red, white and green, indifferent to my cold-stiffened fingertips. Peter surprised me by lighting a cigarette.
“I’m thinking of calling the police.” He took short puffs, impatient intakes.
“Where do you think Dad is?”
“I don’t know,” he said, stamping out the cigarette.
“Where could she possibly be?” I was freezing, scared, my head covered in a doily of ice. I looked over at Symphony Hall lit up with a border of lights the size of onions. The building looked secure, unperturbed by the disorderly streets cutting around it.
Back inside the lobby, overhead lights flickered. The crowd drained into Jordan Hall for more Vienna Choir Boys, leaving the marble stairway empty again.
“This is insane,” Peter said.
An hour had passed since Mother left us at the curb. Behind the thick doors of Jordan Hall sounds of the choir crescendoed and receded like underwater currents. Peter went back to the phone booth and called Father again. No answer.
“Something’s wrong,” he said, unfolding the glass doors, still clenching the phone. His face was wet, his hair stuck in moist bands across his forehead.
“I’m calling the police.”
He folded the doors shut. I listened to the dime click and ring through the slots. Someone answered. Peter nodded and waved his hand. He looked at me as he talked but his clairvoyant blue eyes saw beyond my face. His voice lacked intonation. He nodded again and hung up.
“What did they say?”
“They thought an hour was long. They’re looking into it.”
He walked out of the booth and back over to the front door, which is when we both saw him: my father’s face distorted as a runover grocery bag.
“Dad!”
He veered abruptly, his shoulders pushing an invisible burden up the stairs.
“Your mother’s in the hospital. Get your coats.”
The ice crystals left a glistening halo on his large forehead. I scrambled down to the recital room, careless this time when I opened the doors. The light caused Mrs. Janson to turn. She must have seen a look on my face because she raised her hand to her chin but that is all I remember of my mother’s high school friend that day. We ran back outside.
In the backseat of the car, Elliot and Robert scrunched together on one side. I got in and sat next to them. Peter got in front.
“What happened?” Peter said.
“A furniture truck hit her. Goddamn it! They don’t know.” Father pounded the dashboard. When the light turned red, he looked both ways and ran through it.
“Jesus Dad!” Peter said. “Don’t kill us!”
“Your mother can’t wait.” Father swiveled the steering wheel, his eyes twisting all over the road.
I froze, but not from the cold. Father sped past Symphony Hall. A stray dog hunting for food in an overturned garbage can wore a sheen of snow on its back. Elliot kept wiggling his pudgy fingers like bugs caught under stones. Robert held tightly to a book and read, his body hard, unmoving.
I prayed as we raced toward the hospital. Father honked at every car in his way. I prayed for everything to be as it was before this moment, until the sound of my father’s murderous expletives dulled, and the stinging lights of the city became sh
adows. I imagined Justine in the deep woods singing alone as if only God were listening. I wanted God to hear me now. Please, please let her be all right.
Father swerved into Boston City Hospital and parked in front of the emergency entrance.
“Stay here,” he said.
He pushed open the car door and ran inside. The motor idled, warming the car with a moist, leathery smell. Every five seconds the windshield wipers cleared the glass, making Japanese fans.
“I’m going in,” Peter said, opening the door.
We all piled out.
Inside, we caught up to Father arguing with a woman behind the nurses’ desk. The woman had a hairclip, which she scooped into her hair as she stepped around the counter. She was thin and small.
“I’m calling the police if you don’t tell me where my wife is.”
“The doctor is coming to talk to you now — please hold on. I will get him.”
“Hold on to what?” he said, shadowing her. “Where’s my wife? Goddamn this fucking hell hole!” he screamed.
A doctor hurried down the main hallway, his white coat flickering. He wore gray slacks and black tie-up shoes.
“Mr. Kunitz? I’m Dr. Greer. Why don’t we go into the waiting room? No one’s in there right now.”
The doctor pointed to a small room off the hall.
“How is she?” Father said, grabbing the doctor’s elbow.
The doctor paused and made some kind of calculation. He turned his head slowly. His face was long and flat as a clipboard.
“I’m sorry — ”
“What?”
He looked at Father and the rest of us in the waiting room. I heard words about concussion. Shattered spinal cord. Pills. The man’s beeper pulsed and he turned it off. Another nurse walked in.
“She’s in recovery,” she said.
“Recovery? You said she was — For Christ sakes! Which is it?” Father jammed his face up to the doctor’s.
“It’s a holding room for you and your family, if you choose,” the doctor said, glancing at my brothers and me. But there wasn’t any choosing. Father dashed out and we hurried with him to the door where the man had pointed. We moved as one conglomerate, sidling into a room at the other end of the hall. I smelled rubbing alcohol.
The woman’s face was swollen inside a helmet of bandages twice as big as her head. She would have been horrified by how ugly she looked. It wasn’t her. She didn’t move. She lay still as a branch ripped from a tree. I floated to the top of the room, dizzy with the height.
Father collapsed on top of her, wailing and barking in shredded yelps. Elliot, who was more flesh than bones, sank into a corner. I heard him moan. Robert stiffened. Peter stood at the end of the bed shaking. The room convulsed, a spasm of contractions, as if Mother were giving birth again, over and over, pushing us back out.
“Shut up. Shut up. She’ll hear you,” I heard myself say. “Shut up, everyone.”
This is when my Aunt Annette came in. Nearly six feet tall in her navy pumps, she looked military in her blue suit, white pearl earrings and hair swept tightly into a sailor’s knot at the back of her head. “Good Lord, Leonard. The children.” My aunt tried to gather us up like a bushel of apples that had spilled across the floor. But that was impossible. The bitter bucket of life had spoiled everything or would if I let it. Mother said there were no shortcuts. It was up to me to know. Whatever life I would lead, whatever greatness I hoped to achieve, would take hours of practice, she said. Years. I turned. My aunt took my arm and led me away.
Chapter Ten
Stay
They buried Mother five days after the car crash. The adults called her death a tragic accident — that word again — as if she had not been trying to leave us. But she finally succeeded, and the whole town knew. Aunt Annette couldn’t get over the fact that a photo of the accident had appeared in a paper with a circulation of half a million. Front page of The Boston Globe metro section, a twenty-five-year-old driver from California was moving his wife and toddler to the city. He had never seen snow before and certainly didn’t know how to drive in it. His U-Haul truck broadsided her.
“The Cadillac stopped in the middle of the street,” an eyewitness was quoted saying in the article. “But the light was green.” The truck barreled across the intersection, unable to brake in time, and skidded into her. Unconscious, internal bruising, head concussion, broken ribs, the driver lay in the same hospital where Mother died. Uncle Max was worried about getting sued. I hated him even more than the day he wanted me to be his nude.
“Let him sue,” Father said, despondently. “He’ll get nothing from me.”
The morning of the funeral, a day streaked with elephant-colored clouds, I stood in a small reception room of Reuben’s Funeral Home, a dim-lit holding room, and loitered inside a cold, foggy hole, which is what life is reduced to when your mother dies. Aunt Annette thought Elliot and Robert were too young to attend. Father disagreed and for once I felt grateful toward him. It was our mother, not hers.
“I think it’ll be too much for them,” she said.
“She’s not yours,” I snapped.
The organ music in the other room grew louder, a whining but distant siren with one long note ramming the air as if the organ player’s finger had been scotch-taped to the key. It sounded ugly and rough. An usher in a black suit came up to me to let me know that the service would soon begin.
“Sarah. It’s time. You’ll sit in front, next to your father. Follow Peter.”
The cool draft from the larger room sucked me toward the doorway. Father left the room, tears soaking his face. He had gone into his own world of suffering alongside Hamlet and Lear, coveting his grief as if God had a limited supply to pass around. But Father was wrong. He couldn’t see that God had an endless source of it and it flowed through me and Peter, through my younger brothers.
The organ pitched higher, more insistent and unkind. As I entered the room, I heard the hush of strangers and looked down at my feet. There is nothing worse than the pity of others. It was as if this consensus by adults to feel sorry for me was a way of levitating themselves, nailing me to a display board. It demoralized any effort to appear normal. I pulled the veil of my hat over my face, turned toward the altar, and saw Mother’s casket covered in white roses. I looked away. My stomach twisted and I strangled an impulse to vomit.
In the wooden pew, an usher placed a paper program in my hand. Father let out another wail and I heard the crowd shiver in response. People take on the opinion that children can’t handle moments like these but it is precisely children — not adults — who are in sync in the presence of death. As the nausea subsided, I sat calm as a tulip bulb buried in the earth. In my dark pit, I simply asked Mother to stay with me, I prayed. Stay close. Closer.
I listened hard for her faint, intelligent voice. I just didn’t hear her then. She might still be catching her breath. Anyone killed by a truck would need time to recover. Knocked out, she swam in a different universe, breast-stroking to the surface. It would be the very opposite of her life on earth where she didn’t swim at the country club, but waded up to her thighs to keep her hairdo dry. She might start playing the violin again. Her fingers would straighten; her back would no longer hurt.
~~~~~
Up on stage, Rabbi Meyers took his place at the podium and began the prayers. The organ sounded again, quietly nudging the crowd to join in. I didn’t turn the pages in my prayer book. The rabbi asked everyone to stand. Again the sounds of muted sobs came from behind. I grew dreamy and drifted down my school hallway. I walked alone to the art classroom in the basement. Lights were dimmer here, floors made of a harder material, concrete. Side stairways spiraled up narrow passages. I had gone to the girls’ room to put on more lipstick, nearly late again so that the hall was deserted when he appeared at the opposite end; his blond hair combed back and wet looking. He must have just come from gym. Anthony walked up to me. I couldn’t turn away.
“What are you doing here?” he aske
d. He smelled of fresh cigarette smoke and English Leather cologne. I inhaled his scent, wanting more of it.
I pointed to my art class at the end of the hall.
“Who’s your boyfriend?”
“Who’s your girlfriend?”
“Maybe you.”
He touched my lip and walked away. I turned to watch him. He hunched his shoulders, but sauntered down the hall with a football star’s innate confidence.
“He likes you,” Margaret told me during morning attendance. “I want you both to come over after school.”
~~~~~
Father let out another piercing groan. Aunt Annette reached over and touched his arm. Her hand crossed my lap. Her fingers were long and pudgy, tapered to nails that glistened with a pale, pink glow. Though she was taller than most women, and overweight, she had a gentle refinement. I wondered what it would have been like if she had been my mother.
Then I remembered Uncle Max. He sat up front, behind the podium, twisting the program in his hands. Aunt Annette kept folding a small, white napkin. Everyone rose again. Uncle Max came to the podium and talked about Mother as a girl.
“Sarah, Peter,” he said, leaning forward on the podium. “Your mother had a musical gift, which she passed on to you. Cherish it.” He went on to talk about her love of gardening, her artistic sensitivity. Then he turned to the casket. “Irene, you’ll always be my little sister — ” His voice sputtered and snapped. He walked back to the chair and put his head into his hands.
The organ started again, another meager effort. Aluminum, grimy notes offensive to what Mother, my musical mother, should expect. I hated this crowded room. People nodded and mumbled the words. People obeyed.
Then, everyone stood and six men, including Uncle Max, but not Father, walked up to the stage and spaced themselves evenly around Mother’s casket. The rabbi nodded. The men picked up the box and descended down three steps to the middle aisle. As they passed through the room to the back exit, a ripple of sobs and murmurs followed. An usher leaned over to me and said I could return to the small room reserved for the family of the deceased. He wore a ruby on his middle finger and his brown hair was capped by a black yarmulke. My aunt came over and led me outside.
Night Swim Page 9