“Tell me,” I said. “What do you most want me to know?”
“I want to quit,” he whispered. “I can’t bear being Trigger anymore. I want to be rid of the whole business.”
I bent my neck so I could see the stove clock. I knew what to do, and if we hurried there was just enough time. “Then I want you to come with me.”
“I’m not in the mood for that right now.”
“I don’t mean it that way,” I said. “Let me get my purse and hat.”
On the bus we were quiet. He was tired, but my leg jiggled nonstop.
“What are you up to?” he asked eventually.
“I was wrong to tell you to be a man,” I said.
“That hardly matters now, Brenda.”
“That’s why I’m not going to push you today. You already are a man. I’m only going to give you an idea. Then it’s your own decision.”
Charlie took my hand and kissed the knuckles. “Whatever you say.”
I marched him from the bus stop to a place across the street from our destination. Then I turned Charlie so he could see for himself: the store sign, the trucks. “How about that?” I said. “Peale’s Organs.”
Charlie glared at me like I had three eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll spell it out. Two things.”
He turned his head. “Can we go home now?”
“Just two quick things,” I said. “Bear with me, please.”
In front of his face, he straightened two fingers.
“First thing.” I tapped one of them. “I love you, Charlie Fish.” The old surprised expression came back to his face, so familiar and kind, and I felt a flood of affection. “I admire you, I respect you, I love you.”
“Why, Brenda,” he said, “I just—”
“Second thing.” I tapped his other finger. “I don’t care what you do for a living, as long as you follow your conscience.”
That seemed to take the wind out of him. “What if I don’t know where to go?”
“I gave bad advice when I told you to be a man, then good advice when I made you propose to me, then bad advice when I said you should get a PhD. It’s time for good advice again.” I smiled. “Ready?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I genuinely don’t.”
Oh my sweet, brilliant, humble husband. So much doubt on his face, such a mountain of uncertainty. I was unsure, too, but I could taste the potential. Besides, I knew that this time I was not motivated by self-regard. I was guided by my heart.
“It’s time for you to leave Stanford,” I said.
“Before you begin your organ studies? I can’t do that.”
“Any life that doesn’t work for one of us isn’t working for both of us.”
He had no answer for that. I placed a hand on each of his shoulders, my palms probably right over his number tattoos. “Are you ready, my love?”
He looked up, eyes brimming. “All right, Brenda. What do I do now?”
I pointed. “Go on in there, right now. Walk into Peale’s Organs, and ask for a job.”
God bless that Charlie Fish: he did.
Epilogue
1986
Deep fog blanketed the Bay Area, but my flight still landed on time. When we left San Francisco, Charlie and I had just celebrated our anniversary. Now, forty-one years later, I returned alone.
The university said they would send a driver, but I had not expected a young woman. She stood with a sign at the arrival area: Mrs. Fish. Before I’d said hello, her face brightened with recognition. “Hi,” she piped. “I’m Gracie.”
She wheeled my bag to the waiting town car, hoisted it into the trunk, then opened the rear door for me.
“I’d rather ride in front with you.”
“We have another passenger back there.”
I climbed in, slow on my pins, but after all those years what did I expect? The curly-haired girl in back was adorable as a poodle puppy.
“Anna Carson,” she said, with a forthright handshake. “With the Stanford Daily.”
“Student run since 1892,” Gracie called from the front, starting the car.
Anna shook her head in apology, curls wiggling. “My publicist . . . and roommate. She’s a music major, so she wanted to meet you.”
“Well, I think you both are darling.”
Anna frowned. “Darling,” clearly, was not high on her list of desired compliments. “I was hoping to interview you.”
I folded my hands in my lap. “That would be fine.”
“Great.” She flipped open her notebook. “So when were you last on campus?”
“Well, I was never actually on campus. Charlie was.”
“Oh, right.” She nibbled on her pen. “Now you live on the East Coast?”
“Beverly, Massachusetts. We were near Charlie’s family, but the main reason is that he liked to hire boatbuilders, for their precision.”
“How many organs has the Fish Company built so far?”
“Today’s ceremony celebrates the debut of Opus 85.”
“Do you have a favorite?”
That question made me pause. Out the window, everything we drove past seemed to have doubled: cars, buildings, houses. The quiet town of Millbrae was unrecognizable.
“I always used to say the next one. Now I’m not sure. The company will continue to make excellent instruments. I’m still adjusting to that happening without Charlie.”
“I understand it will also be without you. Haven’t you basically run the place?”
I smiled at her. Young women now were all about who’s the boss. How could I explain the balance Charlie and I had found together? “Early on, I managed our travel. We were all over Europe, so he could study the great cathedral instruments, but we were also broke. It was a romantic education.”
Anna scribbled away. Up front, Gracie craned her neck to hear me better.
“When Charlie launched his own business, I did everything I could to help him succeed—hiring workers, writing contracts, keeping the books. Everything.”
“Is building organs difficult? Did you help with that part too?”
“Charlie could have built airplanes, printing presses, grandfather clocks. That’s what it means to be a mechanical genius. But he chose organs. They require many crafts and skills, none of which I possess. My value was practical—billing, payroll, supplies. When those tasks were done, my job was to help with voicing.”
“Voicing?” Anna asked. “What’s that?”
“Making the instrument sympathize with itself, and with the room where it will live. My part was to sit at the console, playing a note over and over, while Charlie worked deep inside the pipes, making refinements.”
“Can you explain that more?” Gracie asked.
Anna gave her a scowl, then tipped her pen at me. “Please.”
“Voicing takes two people: one to play the organ, one to adjust it. No one wants to sit for two solid days playing a middle C with the coronet stop open, while someone else listens and tinkers. Other technicians said it was deadly tedious. But I didn’t mind.”
The car was quiet, except for the blinker as Gracie turned off 101 and headed toward the university.
I surrendered to an impulse. “Stop taking notes and I’ll tell you the whole truth.”
Anna considered my offer, then put her pen down.
“Charlie was making sacred instruments—for weddings, funerals, moments of the soul. The work was about saving his conscience. And because we were a team, about restoring mine too. So in a voicing? Every time I pressed a key, it was an act of love.”
The girls were not so young, really. They looked to be about the age I was when I met Charlie. I hoped they would understand.
“How was all of this for you as a woman?” Anna asked. “Participating and contributing, but without undermining—and never pursuing your performing career.”
“Please understand,” I answered. “I did not abandon my aspirations for Charlie’s. It was more l
ike the time we sang the toccata together in the church: We merged our dreams. Each of us needed the other to make it happen. Each of us helped the other to find redemption.”
She gave me a puzzled look. “You sang in a church together?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Let me say it another way. Our lives together were like voicing an organ. Everything else goes away. There is no outside world. Only one person, playing a note over and over, and one person refining the sound. It’s a universe of two.”
In the silence that followed, I thought the interview was over. But Anna picked up her pen again. “In all your travels, was there a favorite moment?”
“Oh, a thousand. But I’ll share one. It concerns the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a piece I’ve always struggled with. Charlie and I were touring German organs, and we stopped in Thuringia. The man who was supposed to meet us was late. To pass the time while Charlie investigated the pipes, I decided to play. Well, I was making a perfect mess of the toccata when he popped up like an imp beside the console. I snapped at him not to startle me, but he laughed. Then he told me this was probably the instrument Bach wrote the piece on, and definitely one he had played it on. Bach himself.”
“Wow,” Anna said. “Cool.”
“We’re here,” Gracie called from the front.
Charlie was clever when it came to pleasing customers. He would complete an organ at his factory, for example, then invite whoever was paying for the instrument to come play it. They always did, even nonmusicians, pressing the keys with a mix of awe and delight at the giant sounds that resulted. Likewise, when he shipped an organ to the church or college or wherever it was going, he made a point of saying that his fee did not include unloading. The people receiving the instrument would have to remove it from the trucks themselves, and carry it inside. It belonged to them now. Sometimes the choir would perform outside during an unloading. Then Charlie’s team would assemble the instrument, he would perfect the voicing, and there would be a debut.
Stanford was no different. The chapel entry was crowded with students, faculty, well-heeled folks who’d written checks for the organ. The building’s exterior had a handsome mosaic, images of saints or apostles I suppose, but there was a hurry to introduce me around, and I didn’t have time for a proper look. I smiled, shook hands, thanked people, and in general felt my husband’s absence as though I’d come without my left arm.
Inside, the place was handsome: a floor of some unique wood, stained-glass windows, a lofty dome. Mosaics decorated the side walls, too, and I realized how accustomed I had become to the plain, forthright churches of New England.
The speeches were dull, until the university organist, a portly fellow with Ben Franklin glasses, took the podium. “This is the last instrument designed by Charles Fish,” he said. “It is an exemplary piece of work—so responsive, so powerful, you feel a direct connection between your finger and the pipe.”
He paused to adjust his glasses. “Please understand, I say this not to boast but to explain: We have here, in our chapel, an object as rare as an original of the Declaration of Independence. In the long arc of Fish’s life, he managed to become one of the finest organ builders in human history. This university is immensely fortunate to share in the final act of his exemplary career.”
The audience applauded. Career. I would have bet not two people in that place knew what Charlie did before he started making organs.
“We are grateful to Mrs. Fish for joining us today on his behalf,” the man continued. I raised a hand and the clapping was polite. “Now, for the performance . . .”
He introduced the musician, whom I’d never heard of. To judge by the crowd’s response, though, you would have thought he was the ghost of Harry Truman. Cheers, whistles, applause. I confess I felt a buzz of electricity.
My enthusiasm cooled, though, when the organist placed one hand on the console for balance, and bowed so low I wondered if he was joking. He straightened, making an odd flourish with one hand, and I thought, What a dandy. Then he slipped out of his shoes, showing everyone plainly that he was barefoot, a sign of respect for the pedals but so contrived I snorted behind my hand.
With a backward flip of his coattails, the man took his seat at the bench. It was all rather cloying, and I prayed he would not be playing Pachelbel’s Canon. He opened stops, straightened his posture, cleared his throat.
Begin already, I thought.
And he did: It was the Widor. The Fifth Symphony by Charles-Marie Widor, that is, a complete flambé of technique, and this musician was made for it. Minimum substance, maximum show. He had a way of swaying his head, of rising on his buttocks. If he had been my student in 1942, I would have smacked him with a ruler.
The man had chosen a piece to display himself, not the organ. He was impressive, yes, but mostly impressed with himself. When his right hand played primary melody, he would lay his left hand on the bench—calling attention to the music he made with only five fingers. I was annoyed, disappointed, then annoyed all over again.
But the piece is six minutes long. I used that time to examine the instrument. A lovely console, red poplar. Three manuals. Stops in four rows on either side of the keys. I couldn’t see how many pedals there were, but I certainly heard them. Charlie would have been proud of his crew.
We traveled the world together. We built a business from nothing. We met great musicians, witnessed spectacular performances. Increasingly, and then for years, Charlie was happy—the kind of hardworking happy he had been in those Santa Fe days, all dusty under the church organ. We were partners the whole way.
My father did come home, and reopened the store. People had room for music in their lives again. Fifteen years later he became one of the first people in Chicago to sell the new electrified guitars from Leo Fender. Likewise with the B-3, an organ Hammond built for gospel music, which instead became popular for blues and soul. Soon he owned music shops all over town.
Frank came home, too, opened a three-bay garage in Wicker Park, married a great chesty tough girl named Marie, and they had a troop of boys. As gas stations became convenience stores, he went into that business with my dad as an investor, and made a comfortable life for his family. Maybe even rich. I’m not saying the war didn’t touch Frank, sure it did. Years later, Marie had to put one of those accordion gates across the top of the stairs, because of his nightmare sleepwalking.
As for my mother, she was kinder to my father, as promised, and did one thing to spoil him every day. Coffee in bed, a love note hidden in the cash register. They added up. When I visited, I could see my parents were happier. She continued reading and doing crossword puzzles, but quit smoking. Too late, though. Lung cancer took her at age fifty-four. A decade later my father had a series of strokes, then died in his sleep.
At the reception after the funeral, a familiar-looking man came over to give his condolences. “Tom Beatty,” he said, shaking my hand. “Sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks for coming, Tom.” I hesitated. “Do I know you?”
He shook his head. “You knew my brother Chris.”
“Of course I did. Chris Beatty. How is he?”
Tom blinked at me. “Chris was shot down, in January of nineteen forty-five.”
“I am so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“Turns out you were his only girl,” Tom said. “I hope you were nice to him.”
“Nice as I could be,” I answered.
“He told me you broke his heart.” The man had a set to his jaw. Was this some sort of reckoning? I was at my father’s funeral, for Pete’s sake.
“Not quite.” I gave him a kinder face than I was feeling. “Anyway, I was a kid.”
“Yeah.” Tom nodded. “We were all kids.” He bowed and moved away.
For a minute I was alone, and allowed myself to consider what aspects of Chris had stayed with me over the years. Not my brief infatuation with a guy who probably didn’t really care about me, not my long guilt for emotional infidelity, but actua
lly what he said in that first feverish burst of words at the dance: that life is short, we never know when our time will be up, so we can’t waste a single opportunity.
“Here you go.” My husband appeared with a glass of water. “Who was that?”
How had he known I was thirsty, when I myself hadn’t noticed? I raised the glass to him. “Charlie, I love you.”
He kissed my cheek. “You, too, sweetie.”
After taking a big swallow, I answered: “Brother of a high school chum.”
That was 1962, the last time I went to Chicago.
We never returned to New Mexico either. But I have seen pictures. They tore down most of the old buildings. Which were sick with radiation. Today Los Alamos is a prosperous little city. A bridge, with security gates like a highway tollbooth, spans a ravine to the national laboratory that still operates there. It looks like an office park, only without corporate logos on the buildings.
Most of what remains from that time is irony. Oppenheimer was investigated as a possible Communist, and lost his security clearance. In a farewell speech, he said, “The time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”
Meanwhile kids were taught, in case of a nuclear attack, to duck under their school desks, though half a mile from a detonation the temperature reaches nearly six thousand degrees. Desks wouldn’t do much good. Not ironic enough? Holloman Air Force Base, where the Trinity test observation planes were based, has served repeatedly as a training ground for the Luftwaffe.
It’s enough to make an old woman wonder: Who is an ally? Who is an enemy? Do we have to kill millions of people every few decades to figure that out?
Nambe, New Mexico, is now a park, with dams, waterfalls, and a reservoir. The place Charlie and I conceived our one and only time is now underwater. And Stanford, the school that cured Charlie of physics forever, is home to the last instrument he designed.
The ultimate irony, of course, is that the terror invoked by atomic weapons has actually, inexplicably, created a new form of peace. A tense one, yes. Dangerous, fragile, untrusting. Each new nation that obtains this immense power seems less likely to exercise restraint with it. Nevertheless, since Nagasaki in August 1945, the atomic bomb has been a threat only, a bluff never called. So may it forever remain.
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