Sing for Me

by Karen Halvorsen Schreck

I look down, and there’s Rob, standing near the edge of the stage. He’s holding a drink. He tips it to his lips, winks at me. He nudges the man next to him. “What do you think? Enough of this Holy Roller stuff?”

  The man agrees, and the woman beside him agrees, too, and like that, the sentiment spreads and the crowd’s mood shifts. There are cries for something fun. People want to dance. They want to dance as fast as they can, dance till the cock crows.

  Theo says “Fun,” and we dig into that:

  Every morning, every evening

  Ain’t we got fun?

  “That’s the ticket!” Rob shouts. He drains his drink, sets his glass down on the stage, grabs the nearest woman around the waist, and throws himself into the crowd. The room seems to spin like the bodies before me. I keep singing. The Chess Men keep playing. We’ve got fun. They’ve got fun. And after that, “Yes! We Have No Bananas” and “My Blue Heaven” and “Toot Toot Tootsie.” We’ve got all this, too.

  In this way, we wind down the night. The crowd disperses, hot and sweaty and satisfied. Rob gives me a wild wave, and then he is gone as well.

  In the dim little back room, the Chess Men talk about the last set. There’s a fine balance, we agree, when it comes to managing a repertoire and arranging a program. It all depends on the night, the mood—how many risks you can take.

  I pick up a piece of sheet music—“Someone to Watch over Me”—and fan myself with it. The air stirs my hair, and I agree with them.

  “Tonight the risks were worth it,” I say.

  Then Theo drives me home, and the risks become real indeed.

  NINETEEN

  In the wee hours of the early morning, when the streets are empty and the rest of the world seems asleep, Theo has made a habit of opening the car door for me, extending his hand and helping me out, and walking me up to the apartment building.

  He is doing just this when it happens.

  As fast as lightning, it happens. As fast as the clash of a wooden stick against a brass cymbal.

  A shadow lunges at us from the shadows. The shadow solidifies into a man—into a group of young men. They surround us now.

  “We warned you,” Mike says.

  They are going for Theo now—or some of them are. Others are coming for me. They grab my arms and drag me backward. They tear me from Theo. I stumble over the hem of my blue dress. Fall. Hit the sidewalk hard. A bolt of pain flashes from my tailbone to my neck. For a moment I can’t see. Then my head clears.

  Theo is on the ground before me. They are hurting him. They are doing it quietly so as not to wake the neighbors.

  “Teach you to lay a hand on our women,” one man says as his fist swings low and hard against Theo’s jaw.

  I’m not your woman, I think.

  His hands, I think.

  Theo rolls onto his stomach to protect his hands. Boots come down on his back.

  I try to scream for help. My mouth opens. But no sound comes out.

  I have had nightmares like this, where my voice is lodged like a stone in my throat. Now I am my own nightmare, and Theo is, and these men on the street where I live, in this dark night where dawn may never come.

  The men drive their boots against Theo’s ribs as if they can kick their way through bone and muscle to his hands. “Boy,” they say again and again and again, and other words I try not to hear, but I hear them. They flood my mind, my heart, like foul, filthy water.

  Theo doesn’t make a sound. I can’t make a sound. I’d run for help, but my limbs won’t move. I am a silent, stone Mermaid lying on the stone-cold ground. Theo is a knot of pain.

  In the distance there’s a flicker—a pale sliver of light, high above and to the right. It’s the kind of light that flares when a curtain is swiftly lifted and lowered. An interior light in the night. Someone is looking out from a window in our building. Someone may see—though this brutal huddle might be anything in the darkness. A pack of dogs, it might be. And I am next to nothing in the shadows on the ground. And Theo is lost to sight.

  The sliver flickers again. This time I’m able to turn toward the light. It’s Dad, parting the velvet curtains at the front-room window.

  “Dad!”

  I call for him, my father, in a way I haven’t since Sophy’s birth. Again and again I call for him. Dad, Dad, Dad.

  The curtain falls, the sliver of light vanishes. The men turn from Theo. They turn on me. Theo uncurls himself as they drag me to my feet. It takes the four of them to do it, for now that my voice is working, my limbs are working, too. I kick, claw, spit, scream. I don’t stop screaming until one of the men slams his hand over my mouth. I bite down hard on his thumb and taste blood. The man grunts, slams up on my jaw with his arm. The other men hold me in other places. One man constricts his arms so tightly around my chest that I can’t breathe. Little lights like white sparks dance before my eyes. Through them, I see Theo, staggering to his feet. He is bleeding, hunched. I cry out to him. “Don’t!” I cry, even as Theo flings himself at the men. They bat him away. He falls, his body thudding against the pavement. Stands again. His beautiful hands are bleeding. His beautiful mouth, too. He comes at the men who hoist me into the air, though I writhe and flail. The alley. That’s where they’re carrying me. Theo’s on them again, on the ground again. Only this time a man releases my leg and whirls around. He stoops, grabs something as round as a Roman shield, and lifts it high. A scream rises in my throat, only to be muffled by the hands on my mouth. The man is holding the tin lid of a garbage can. He hefts the lid higher. He intends to bring it down on Theo’s head and crush Theo once and for all.

  “Stop.”

  Dad’s voice is loud and eerily calm, given the fact that he’s standing over Theo, holding his bayonet at the ready. The bayonet’s blade is pointed at the gut of the man holding the garbage can lid.

  “I know how to use this. I had plenty of practice in the trenches,” Dad says.

  The man—Mike—drops the lid. It hits the ground with a clang as Andreas runs up behind Dad. Andreas is holding a baseball bat. At the sight of Andreas and Dad and their weapons, the men holding me hesitate. One of them loosens his grip on my mouth and I bite down hard again. There’s a muffled grunt as the man jerks his hand away.

  “Let her go.” Theo’s voice is thick with blood.

  “Gently,” Dad says.

  The men set me on my feet. I can barely stand for the shaking. The heel is missing from my left shoe. My blue dress is torn at the waist, and there are other tears as well, at the neckline and shoulders and down the whole long side of me. I am half naked except for my underthings. I am exposed.

  Holding my dress together, I wobble toward Theo, collapse on the ground beside him. I don’t care what anyone says or does. I wrap my arms around him. He leans into me, rests his head on my shoulder. His blood is warm and thick on my skin, but he is alive. I kiss his hair.

  “I’m calling the police.” Dad is brandishing the bayonet near Mike’s chest, and now Mike and his gang are running away.

  “See if they care!” Mike casts this over his shoulder with a leer.

  “I’ll make them care.” Dad shouts this as the men round the corner and vanish.

  Andreas kneels beside Theo and me. “We must get him inside,” Andreas says. He looks at me and winces. “You, too, Rose.”

  Something drips onto Theo’s hair, and I realize that it’s my blood, coming from somewhere I don’t know.

  Dad’s hands are suddenly shaking. So hard are they shaking that the bayonet falls to the ground. Dad looks at me, and I see that he is terrified.

  “I could have killed them,” he says.

  Dad’s not terrified of Mike and his companions. Dad’s terrified of himself.

  Andreas is looking at Dad with an admiration I’ve never seen before. Maybe this is the father Andreas remembers from when he was a young boy, the father I can’t remember from before the war. A brave, good man. A humble man who can suffer remorse.

  “We’ve got wounds to tend,” Andr
eas says, before either Dad or I can say anything else.

  I carry the bayonet and the bat. Dad and Andreas carry Theo through the courtyard and up to our apartment. They do this with relative ease; they’ve had a lot of practice carrying Sophy. But the journey is painfully hard for Theo, I can tell, from the moans he can’t suppress, though he grits his teeth until they grind, trying. By the time Dad and Andreas lay Theo down on Andreas’s bed, Theo is out cold. Dad goes for Mother. They return quickly, Mother drawing on her robe. She leans over Theo and regards his wounds. Quietly, urgently, she asks for hot water, clean towels, rubbing alcohol. I run for these. By the time I return with them, Andreas has gone for Dolores. “I don’t know what to do for him. We need an experienced nurse,” Mother explains. “Dolores will know better than I whether we need a doctor, too.”

  Mother cleans and bandages my cuts, and then I kneel down beside Theo. His eyelids flutter, but he doesn’t open them. I watch his pulse beating in his throat. I watch his chest rise and fall with each shallow breath. His blood has stained the sheets. His tuxedo pants are stained, too—with urine, I realize. Theo would be so ashamed if he knew.

  While Dad paces, Mother loosens Theo’s bow tie, undoes the studs on his tuxedo shirt, and gasps at the sight of the gashes and welts rising on his ribs.

  “I wish you had hurt those men, Jacob,” Mother says. And then she closes her eyes. “Forgive me, God.”

  Sophy calls from the bedroom. She calls until I go to her, and then she insists on knowing what is happening. I tell her, and she insists on seeing Theo. There’s no use in denying her. She’ll raise a ruckus. She cares for him, after all. He is her friend.

  By the time Andreas returns with Dolores, Theo is stirring. He looks up at Mother and Dad, Dolores and Andreas, and his eyes turn wild. “Where am I?” he says with a gasp.

  I go to him.

  “Rose.” His face relaxes for a moment, then the next spasm of pain takes him, and he sees the bandages on my face. “Are you all right?”

  I tell him I’m fine. He will be fine, too. I promise him this.

  Dolores doesn’t wait long before deciding to call a doctor. When the doctor arrives, he takes one look at Theo and gravely asks us all to leave the room. Only Dolores is allowed to stay and help care for him. When I linger in the doorway, she gives me a look of compassion, and then she shuts the door in my face.

  I don’t sleep. None of us do. Andreas, Sophy, Mother, Dad, and I sit around the kitchen table while the doctor sets Theo’s bones and stitches him up.

  They don’t need to ask me where I was tonight, and why Theo drove me home. Of my own volition, I tell them about the Chess Men and Calliope’s. I tell them about my singing. I don’t speak of my feelings for Theo, or Theo’s feelings for me. I love him. He loves me. After all the time he and I have shared in the shadows, I won’t admit this in the bright light of this kitchen. Not without Theo standing beside me, agreeing that this is the right thing to do. My family may have helped us tonight, but there was a time when any one of them, except Sophy, of course, would have done their own kind of damage to our love. I want to protect us now more than ever.

  Still, explaining as I am, I can’t help but say Theo’s name. Maybe I linger over his name. Maybe I say it more often than I should. For whatever reason, by the time I’m finished talking Andreas is looking at me cockeyed. Dad’s face is ashen. Mother hides her expression behind her hands. Sophy watches us all.

  I can feel the tension building. Any minute, someone is going to say something I don’t want to hear. I’ve got to escape, if only for a moment.

  I go to the bedroom and take the money I’ve earned from beneath the mattress where I’ve hidden it. I return to the kitchen and press the money into Mother’s hands.

  “It’s all yours. Over a hundred dollars—yours and Dad’s.”

  Mother, Dad, and Andreas look at me, astonished. Only Sophy is not surprised.

  “We told you not to do this.” For once Dad sounds more desperate than angry, talking to me. He lost control of himself tonight. Or he gained control of himself. He still doesn’t know which, I think. “We knew something bad would happen,” he says. “And it did.”

  “But so much good has happened, too.” I’m steeling myself to say that I’m a grown woman; I can make my own decisions. I’ve been called to do this. But then the doctor comes into the kitchen, drying his hands on a towel. His coppery hair has turned rust-colored with sweat. He looks tired and concerned.

  “I’ve done as much as I can,” the doctor says. “He’s sleeping. Doped up. X-rays are in order. But for now, let him rest. He may sleep for many hours, and if he does, well and good. He should stay in one place for as long as possible. He should be moved only when he is ready.”

  “You’re asking us to keep him here?” Dad shifts uncomfortably in his chair.

  Mother says quietly, “He can stay with us for as long as he needs.”

  The doctor is almost out the door when I think to ask about Theo’s hands, which are swathed in bandages. The doctor hesitates, and then pats my shoulder, where the fabric of my blue dress has gone stiff with Theo’s blood. “His hands aren’t broken, but there may be nerve damage. Time will tell.”

  I return to the kitchen. “I’m going to be with him tonight,” I tell my family.

  “Oh, Rose.” Dad shakes his head slowly.

  “You love him.” Mother says it for me. She says it in a moan.

  Andreas says something about weakness. He says something about my path, and its dangerous twists and turns. I feel myself bowing under the weight of my brother’s words, cringing at the grim expressions on my parents’ faces. But then Sophy hisses at Andreas, and he goes quiet. Sophy looks at me and her eyes say I love you no matter. With a single look, Sophy helps me remember my strength, my desire, myself. I turn away from the table where I’ve eaten almost every meal of my life. I take one step after another until I find myself standing where I want to be, need to be, am determined to be, come what may.

  Theo’s hands lie still on the covers. I touch where the bandages aren’t. He feels cold. Carefully I cover him with an extra blanket. I sit down on the floor beside him. I will stay here until he wakes, and even then I will not leave his side.

  When I wake, I’m lying on the floor of Andreas’s room in a pool of afternoon light. I sit up, dazed, and see Theo, still tucked under the extra blanket, sound asleep. He hasn’t moved. He’s breathing still. He’s alive, and I am here.

  I don’t kiss him for fear of waking him, but I look at him with all the love in my heart. I can do that.

  Time passes. The apartment is silent all around. I am thirsty; perhaps I can get a glass of water and bring it back here without being seen.

  Filling my glass at the kitchen sink, I remember that it’s Saturday. Dex, Ira, and Jim have no idea that Theo won’t be playing tonight. They’ll be expecting him, and me, too. And then there’s Mrs. Chastain and Mary. They have no idea about Theo, either.

  I can’t go back to him yet. I have things to take care of first.

  I go quietly to the hallway phone. The numbers blur, and I realize how tired I still am. I blink and the numbers come into focus. I dial Theo’s number, and Mrs. Chastain answers. I can hear the panic in her hello. When she realizes it’s me, she says, “What’s happened to my boy?” I start to tell her, and she interrupts me. “Is he dead?” Only when I’ve reassured her does she allow me to continue. I explain everything that has happened. “He’s sleeping in my brother’s room. He’ll need to have X-rays,” I finally say.

  Mrs. Chastain is weeping. Mary wrests the receiver from her and begs me to explain all over again. When I do, Mary cries, too.

  In the end, they agree to come to see Theo. I tell them our address. Neither of them can drive, so they’ll have to take the El. They’ll get here as soon as they can. And no, they don’t know how to contact Jim, Dex, and Ira. Theo always called the other Chess Men. There was never a need for Mrs. Chastain or Mary to do so before.


  I hang up the receiver and turn to find Mother standing there. I try to say that I have more phone calls to make, but she won’t listen. She leads me into the kitchen and sits me down before a plate of food. She tells me that Dad will be working all day and into the night, and that Andreas is off somewhere with Dolores, and Sophy is taking a nap. When she starts to talk about Theo and me again—How can you think this will ever work?—I push away the plate. Mother holds up her hands in a truce. I agree to eat if she stays quiet. She stays quiet. I don’t taste a bite, but at least I can see straight, with food in my belly again. I go back into Andreas’s room and, wondering how to contact Dex, Ira, and Jim, I watch Theo sleep. He is sleeping so deeply. Too deeply. Coma? I think, and push that thought right out of my mind. Theo is asleep. That’s all.

  It’s nearly six o’clock when there’s a knock at the apartment door. I let Mrs. Chastain and Mary inside, thankful that Dad and Andreas are still nowhere to be found. It’s easier this way. I lead Mrs. Chastain and Mary down the hallway to Theo. Mrs. Chastain eases herself down on the mattress beside him; Mary eases herself down, too. When they start to pray for Theo’s healing, I leave them in privacy. In the bathroom, washing up, I realize what I need to do.

  I find Mother in the front room, ironing Sophy’s baptism dress, and Sophy watching from her child-sized wheelchair.

  “I have to go to Calliope’s,” I say.

  Mother keeps ironing. She won’t look at me.

  “I have to tell the other fellows what’s happened,” I say. “If Theo doesn’t show up and I don’t show up, they won’t be able to perform. We’ll lose this job.” We. The word sounds so right to me. I am part of the Chess Men. “We can’t afford to lose this job,” I say. “I have to go there, Mother, and I have to sing. I have to sing for Theo, Dex, Ira, and Jim. I have to sing for me.”

  Mother sets the iron down on the board. She looks at Sophy for a long moment. Something in Sophy’s expression makes Mother nod, and then Mother turns to me.

  “Go quickly before your father and Andreas return.”