“Where was I?”
Carl thought about this. “I don’t know, Anna. You weren’t there. Perhaps the housekeeper had taken you to her house?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
“I’m trying to remember my mother,” I said.
“Poor Anna,” he said again, then smiled. “You will stay to lunch, won’t you? I’ve got black bean soup simmering, and the makings for quesadillas.”
“I’d like that,” I said. I was twelve years old again, grateful to Carl for the direction he was willing to give.
June 1950
Now that Alice is expecting, I have found a little house of my own, or rather, Herbie found it, a two-bedroom stucco on Amherst just a little ways off Central, close enough that I can walk to the University for classes and rehearsals.
Although I have purchased a car, a rather nice green Plymouth which seems to float along the highways. This is what I do, most weekends: float along the highways in my Plymouth. I have floated to a number of Indian pueblos: Acoma, Jemez, Santo Domingo, Santa Clara, and I have begun to learn about their pottery; and I have floated to Santa Fe, and on to Taos, and explored their little back streets.
I have floated along rutted dirt roads through the mountains: the Sandias, the Manzanos, the Sangre de Cristos (the Watermelons, the Apple Trees, the Blood of Christs). I have driven through the Jemez Mountains to the Anasazi cliff dwellings at Bandelier, and continued on to Los Alamos, the birthplace of the Atomic Bomb.
The radio in my Plymouth plays American showtunes: “Oklahoma,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” I practice my English by singing along with them; alone in the car I can sing quite loudly, and have found that the upholstery offers a pleasing resonance. I like, as well, the mournful sound of American blues, and in particular the voice of Billie Holiday, whose voice bares emotions as if they were merely hidden sounds. I envy Miss Billie Holiday her ability to, as the Americans say, “wear her heart on her sleeve,” though I prefer my own heart tucked away where I will not come upon it.
“You should go out!” Alice cries. Alice “fixes me up” with young men she has met at the Synagogue; Herbie fixes me up with the sons of business associates. They all wish to know what Terezín was like. They wonder why I do not have a number tattooed on my arm. What do I think of the Nuremberg Trials? Do I think Hitler is still alive, and living in South America?
But how could I explain Terezín to an American, to these young men who have never seen their own familiar country turned into a nightmare place one hopes she is only dreaming? If I tell them why at Terezín we were not tattooed, they think it was somehow “not so bad.”
They do not ask about my children. Perhaps Alice and Herbie coach them beforehand.
When they ask me about the trials, or that question about Hitler, I tell them I am an American now. I tell them that Americans do not look back but only forward, that Americans prefer the concrete to the imagined: I’m from Missouri, I say. Show me.
This makes them laugh, which is precisely my intention. Then I can move the conversation on to other things: Have you ever been to Missouri? I will ask them. What is it like? Have you read the books of Mark Twain? It is hard to believe that just eighty-five years ago the Colored were still slaves.
The young men drive me home after dinner, or after the movie. They pull into my driveway and then walk me to my door, wait while I unlock it. Then I turn to them as I open it. “Good night,” I say. “Thank you.” And I go in and close the door behind me before their startled mouths can think of anything to say.
I have discovered a fondness for good aged Scotch whiskey. I am not, needless to say, a “lush,” but late at night just before I go to bed I like to pour a little Dewars onto some ice from my Frigidaire and sip it slowly, feeling its heat move downward from mouth to throat to stomach.
The Scotch frees something in me that I am very careful to keep reined, except for these late nights. I will move to the black Kawai grand that I have purchased “on time,” and set the glass down and begin to play.
I may start with Liszt, or with Chopin, with their studies for piano so full of melancholy and remembering. But soon enough my hands move on of their own accord, playing the themes that I have come to realize have names: Anton, Pavel, Heidi. Dori Stoll. Gideon Klein.
Anton’s theme is very stolid, very predictable, or at least that is how it begins. A sudden dissonant chord shifts the melody to E-minor, though the original theme is still discernible.
Pavel’s and Heidi’s themes are several octaves above Anton’s, and, while they share a seed of Anton’s theme they soon move off in directions of their own, until they quite suddenly end, mid-bar.
For Dori Stoll I have used a variation of an old Hebrew song. This theme is also the thread that ties the whole piece together, so I suppose it represents myself as well. I have been experimenting with an unusual cadence for this theme, but am not altogether satisfied with it as yet.
Still, I have gone so far as to commit each theme to paper. I am seeing ultimately, I think, a symphony within which all of them will be interwoven, until the last theme, my own, is all that is left. I hear this being played by a lone clarinet.
It is very late when I stop playing. My piano sits by a pair of French doors that leads to a little patio, and I often carry what is left of the glass of Scotch out and sit on the little step. The sky here reveals innumerable stars and planets, the occasional meteor falling to earth. There is no one else about, this time of the night, and the city possesses a silence of which one would not think a city capable. Sitting there, beneath that sky, enveloped by that silence, I feel at once small and inconsequential and aware of the fabric of things, how it is all interconnected, woven with a thread so fragile and yet so amazingly strong.
Anton is with me there; they are all with me there, and I with them. Though I would not be so foolish as to tell anyone else this. Especially Alice, my completely American friend.
The distinction between score and performance entered a new phase with the advent of recorded music, and a side benefit of recording technology has been the ability of artists who may be reluctant to appear on stage to nonetheless perform, and to have those performances preserved for posterity. Thus we can listen to Glenn Gould, Wanda Landowska, and other performers whose unique talents would otherwise have been buried with them.
The more music we hear, the more there is available to our consciousness. In a mere hundred years, the recording of music has evolved from its early tinny renditions to the precision sound of the laser disc. Technology now allows us to listen to the sound of an entire symphony in our home or car, the recorded final chord as resonant as the original, the sound precise and clean and true.
At the same time, psychologists have begun to examine the role of music as an avenue to and from the unconscious. Melodies rise, seemingly unbidden, to our consciousness, melodies which may simply show how we are feeling, or may, on a much deeper level, indicate something hidden, of which we are not consciously aware.
There are melodies, too, which refuse to leave us, leitmotifs which, when examined, may well be revealed as our own particular themes. Considering that our emotional experience of a composition is quite different from that of its creator, this ability of music to express us to ourselves is indeed remarkable: Music may well be the missing link between our dreamed lives and our waking ones.
My mother was sometimes given to humming, a soft distracted sound of which she did not seem to be aware. On her good days, it might be Bach, snatches of a Brandenburg concerto, or a Mozart aria, from The Magic Flute perhaps. Other days she hummed melancholy tunes, but on her worst days she did not hum at all, and her silence became the melody, dark and without end.
My father, on the other hand, was a whistler. There is something in the very nature of whistling that says its source finds all right with his world. He whistles snatches of popular tunes, and the listener finds herself supplying the words: When you wish upon a star. Cuz he’s got high hopes.
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According to my father’s biographers, the primary factors in choosing the first atomic bomb targets were that they should convince the Japanese that they could no longer fight the war, and that they be military targets. What is not addressed is that the four targets finally selected were in areas of dense civilian population.
My father has been quoted as saying that the bombing of a metropolis “would serve to illustrate the bomb’s effects,” though his thoughts on the specific illustration Hiroshima provided are not recorded. Here, however, are the statistics: Sixty percent of the city was destroyed, including an area of total devastation around ground zero of 1.7 square miles. Casualties were estimated at 71,000 dead or missing and 68,000 injured. Did this “illustration” show my father what he wished to see? I wonder. Were these specifics the effects he had expected, for which he had hoped?
And how is it that the man responsible for these statistics could, throughout his life, continue to be a whistler? How is it that he could whistle “You Are My Sunshine” without apparent irony; “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” without a twinge of remorse?
And why should I in turn feel responsible for his decisions, decisions that he after all made years before I was born? Why, unlike my father, am I haunted by images of thousands of mouths forming surprised O’s in the millisecond before they are reduced to ash, by echoes of screams that never had the time to erupt? There is no music to accompany this horror, and yet my father was a whistler. To my father’s mind, these bombs ended a war, and “that’s all there is/to that.”
With the onset of soccer season, Karen Maisel quit her piano lessons. Joyce apparently had told her that it was her choice to make, but that she would have to be the one to call me. I had asked Karen several times for her reaction to the Schoenberg, but was always met with a non-committal, “It’s okay.” Now, on the phone, knowing I’d already lost her, I grew bold.
“You were intrigued by the Schoenberg, weren’t you?” I said.
“I guess,” said Karen.
I pushed on. “Which proves you have a talent you shouldn’t squander
“I’m just quitting, okay, Mrs. Kramer?” The beginning of a whine had crept into her voice. “If you wanna think I’m a quitter, fine. But I’m quitting.”
“Well, if you change your mind, I’ll be here,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “Bye.” Karen hung up before I could press on further, opening up much more than my 3:30 Monday slot.
I looked at the phone still in my hand, then before I could change my mind called the number of the chamber group I’d picked up the month before. A woman answered; I heard Schubert playing in the background.
I told her I’d seen her ad at the music store, and that I was a classical pianist.
“Who are you?”
I told her my name was Anna Holtz, and added an explanation that I’d been out of circulation for quite some time.
“You’re not any relation to Katherine Holtz!”
I realized then that I had given my maiden name, but decided not to correct myself. “She was my mother,” I said.
“God,” said the woman. “I heard a pirate recording of her playing with the Opera. Carl Mayer had coaxed her out of her retirement and she just played that one time. She was incredible. And what a beautiful woman!”
“Yes,” I agreed. “She was.”
“I never knew she had a daughter,” the woman went on. “Of course, why should I? But you’re a pianist, too. That’s so neat. We’ve got someone rehearsing with us, but to tell you the truth, he’s just not meshing. The karma’s off. Are you free for lunch?”
The woman was so…so open. For a moment I regretted calling. “I live in Los Alamos,” I said.
“Oh, that’s right. Your father was—now I remember.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Well, listen,” she went on. “We’re rehearsing every evening. You tell me what night you can come down and I’ll tell Mike—that’s the pianist we’ve got now—that rehearsal’s called off.”
“That’s rather duplicitous,” I said.
“C’est la vie,” she retorted. “I’m Emily Corbett, by the way. Cello. What night?”
Why not? I thought. “Thursday?” Today was a Monday.
“Great! Let me give you directions.”
Emily Corbett lived in one of the new pueblo-style townhouse complexes that had sprung up on the southeast side of town off the Old Pecos Trail. She was small, blonde, and in her mid-30s, and wore an embroidered black bolero vest over a white t-shirt and skinny little jeans.
“Oh good, you’re early!” she said when she opened the door. “We can get acquainted.” She led me into a modern Santa Fe style living room whose double doors looked across a courtyard to their mirror twin. As we settled into matching southwest-style chairs, a high voice called from the kitchen behind her. “Mom! We’re out of Spaghettios!”
“Then make Raviolios, Aaron,” she called back without turning her head. “Kids,” she said to me, as if I would understand.
“I don’t have children,” I said.
She glanced at my left hand and noted my wedding ring. “Clever you,” she said. “Katherine Holtz’s daughter. God, I can’t believe it!”
I could change the subject as quickly as she, I thought. “Tell me about your group,” I said.
“We call ourselves the Agua Fria Players,” Emily said, tucking her legs underneath her. “Paula Thoms and John Engle play the violins, and Louis Sanchez plays the viola. Have you ever heard Louis? He plays with the Symphony, too, We’re lucky to have him.”
“What are you working on now?” I asked her, trying to keep her from straying onto one of the tangents to which she seemed to constantly veer.
“The Beethoven Grosse Fugue? Schubert, no. 14 in D minor, you know, Death and the Maiden? And Brahms.”
“So why do you need a pianist?” I asked.
Emily laughed. “Good question. You know your music. See, what we’re thinking is to do some piano quintets. Some of the sonatas, you know? Schubert’s Trout, Opus 114. The Hindemuth—do you know it?
The doorbell rang and Emily leapt up before I could show off my knowledge, but the others had let themselves in. “Forgot to lock the door again, Em,” said a smiling man with thinning blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. “Boogie man’s gonna get you.”
The other man, a Hispanic with dark hair cut close to his head, crept behind Emily then jumped up and yelled, “Boo!” Everyone laughed.
“You’ll scare Anna away before she even hears us!” Emily protested. Then she made introductions. Nearest to me, Paula Thoms extended a firm handshake.
“The piano’s downstairs,” Emily told me, already leading. “We practice down there.”
On the stairs, Louis Sanchez turned back to me. “Wait till you hear her play. She’s not the flake you think she is.”
“What makes you think I think that?”
He smiled. “How could you not?” I liked him at once, something I seldom did.
When I told Carl Mayer about the group, he was delighted. “Tell me who they are!” he cried, and then said, “Yes…yes…oh, very good…yes,” when I recited their names. “Will you stay over here with me sometimes when you’re rehearsing?” he asked. “It would be like old times.”
“I don’t remember the ‘old times,’” I reminded him.
“Ah yes, the great mystery,” Carl said.
Now that I’d “found” him, Carl and I spoke on the phone often, and I tried to visit him a few times a month. He loved to tell me stories about those “old times,” and occasionally a small piece would click into place. But nothing more. Yes, he had told me, my mother and Hana Weissova were dear friends. Didn’t I remember?
Sometimes I could put them into a room in Hana’s house, the one I’d seen in Albuquerque. I could seat them on a comfortable sofa, have them face each other, both talking at once, ringless hands gesturing with words, laughter. But I wasn’t certain if this was memory or desir
e.
“Repressed memory’s like a lock without a key,” Carl said once. “You won’t let yourself in. It’s you against you.” He threw up his hands. “Hopeless.”
“But why would I repress it?” I asked.
“There’s lots of reasons. Because it’s too painful to remember, that’s the most common. But I don’t think that’s it. So maybe because when you did remember it, you were punished.”
“I was never punished,” I said. I felt my face redden.
Carl held out a palm. “Okay, okay. Sorry. Maybe you thought remembering those things would hurt your father, that if you forgot them, they’d cease to exist.”
“He was hardly a man who needed protecting,” I observed.
“But he loved your mother,” said Carl. “And, in her way, she loved him.”
“And we all lived happily ever after.”
“I wish you’d consider seeing my therapist,” Carl said, not for the first time. “She could help you so much more with these things.”
“There’s no sense living in the past,” I told him. But I knew that was exactly where I had been living.
March 1951
I have heard from Raja!
She is living on a kibbutz near Lake Tiberias in Israel, our young Jewish State. Until recently, she had been a member of an illegal organization and could not contact me, though she knew I was alive.
How she had wished to contact me, she wrote. And yet she did not, and for six long years I wondered and hoped and dreaded the words I would finally hear…
But now I have heard them, and I am no longer alone in the world. Poor Raja—Joseph died in her arms in a Bavarian wood and they buried him there and then hurried on. “It was a quick death,” she wrote. “A clean shot through the heart. No pain. I am grateful for that.” She did not ask me for details about the others’ deaths; perhaps she already knows them.
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