“I don’t know if you do.” Nils presses his lips into a thin line, and I see that his lips are trembling.
Before I can stop myself, I’ve apologized again. Immediately, I regret it. His face has gone grim. “Please stop saying that.” And now his words are distinctly, firmly articulated; he wants to be as clear as he can be. “I want to love you, Rose. I want you to let me love you.”
Right here in middle of the church basement, balancing his cup of coffee on its saucer, he says this. Right here—his cup, his life, our lives in the balance—he leans close to me, closer, closer yet. He will kiss me on Easter morning with all these people watching, or not watching, but still they will hear about this kiss, the news will swiftly spread, and Nils and I will be a couple, and Theo will be waiting, and I need to go home to him—wherever Theo is, is my home—but Nils’s lips are near my cheek now, only a fraction of an inch away, and I can feel the familiar pull of his presence, and I raise my face to him; it’s instinctual, like a flower turning its face to the sun.
Nils draws back.
“I knew you were confused,” he says, and there is triumph in his eyes. “You have to decide what you want, Rose. Think hard. Remember where you came from. Remember who you are.”
He turns, carefully balancing his cup of coffee on its saucer, and walks away.
At last we are home, Mother, Dad, Sophy, and I. Others will soon follow and join us for Easter dinner. Andreas will bring Dolores and any leftover coffee and pastries from church. Julia and her parents are coming with Paul; their family’s renowned asparagus dish will make a brief appearance before it’s devoured. Rob will bring his mother, who is contributing dessert (in case the pastries prove insufficient), a cake the family calls Aunt Hulga’s Strawberry Delight. And in the kitchen already there’s a ham to be glazed, sweet potatoes to be boiled and mashed, rolls to be baked. On this day, even more than on Christmas or Thanksgiving, we always work hard to create a bountiful feast.
“I’ll be right there,” I tell Mother, and then I rush to Andreas’s bedroom.
The bed is neatly made. Theo is nowhere to be seen.
I search the apartment. Only a moment it takes and I understand.
Theo is gone.
I go back to Andreas’s bedroom and look down at the place where Theo was. Not three hours ago he was here. But there’s not a wrinkle in the sheet, not an impression in the pillows. If it weren’t for my note, still pinned to the covers, I might doubt that he’d ever taken shelter with us at all. I unpin the note, read again what I wrote. Could he have misread my Dear or morning. My home or right after? Could he have misread together or love or Rose?
The paper trembles in my hands. I fold it in half and then again. And then I see Theo’s writing on the other side. His writing is altered for the worse by his injuries, but I can still make out the cramped words. I unfold the paper and read what he has written:
Dearest Rose,
When I woke up, I called your name, but you didn’t answer. You couldn’t answer. But I didn’t know that then. I just knew that the quiet frightened me. I felt trapped by the quiet, and everything all around. I felt trapped by myself. And I knew that you were trapped by me, too.
We are trapped.
Then I saw your note, and I read it, and I knew what I must do.
I’m leaving. I can’t shed myself, but if I go quickly before we get in deeper, I can set you free. I’m going back to New Orleans. I want to see Papa. I want to ask him who I was when I was a boy. And if I can’t find him—Papa might be dead, that’s the way life goes—then I can hear the music of my childhood. Every note I’ve ever played has sprung from the Delta, and I want to go back there and drink deeply again. Maybe I can find my way back to myself before I knew things were so bad. Maybe I can find some hope again.
So I called Dex from your phone. Dex understands. I don’t mean to say you don’t understand. But it’s different with Dex. You and me, we’re different. I’m sure you understand.
You understand, don’t you, Rose?
Dex said I need X-rays, so I guess I’ll try and get those before I hop a train or hitch a ride. Though who’s going to give a black man with no money X-rays on an Easter morning, I don’t know. But Dex and I will see if we can find that saint.
Rose, you said you’d help me any way you could. “Anything you need,” you said. I need you. But I can’t have you. You can’t have me. Not in this world. I need to get away so we can get over the pain of that. The pain of that might kill me, which is one thing, but if it hurts you nearly as bad, well, then I won’t be able to answer for my sins. Not before God or anyone.
Rose, they would have killed you and me both if they’d had the chance. I believe that.
I know your address by heart. When I know mine, I’ll send it to you. Maybe by then we’ll be able to tell each other that we’re free.
If you write me, write me a song. Rose, keep singing. Keep singing with the Chess Men. They need you more than they need me, and once they get over me going away, they’ll realize that. Someday, when enough time passes, well, maybe I’ll be able to play a gig with you all again. Just one gig. A guest of the Chess Men. A visiting musician. I’d like that.
Theo
I turn to see Mother standing at the bedroom door, watching me. She takes one look at my face and says, “Oh, darling. What have you done?”
I don’t taste a bite of Easter dinner. I don’t say a word. I get through it for Sophy’s sake.
TWENTY-ONE
“He jumped the blinds,” Dex says on Tuesday night, clasping his hands tightly on the cluttered table in the back room at Calliope’s.
Like Ira and Jim, I look at Dex, waiting for more.
“Hopped a boxcar in the dead of night,” Dex clarifies for my sake. “It’s faster than going by hand, that’s for sure.”
Jim says, “Dangerous, though.”
“At least hitching you get a look at a fellow before you climb in his car,” Ira adds.
Dex doesn’t respond to this. The expression on his thin dark face is suddenly distant. There’s something he isn’t telling us. I lean forward and grip his arm. “Did he get the X-rays?”
Dex soberly shakes his head. “He wouldn’t have it. We couldn’t find someone who’d do them on credit, not even in Bronzeville. His mother was on the way to her bedroom to empty out the shoebox that holds her savings, and Theo told me he had to get out before she got back. He didn’t want to take her money. So we hightailed it. We found some fellows down in Hooverville, and they told us which track to take south.”
George flashes five fingers through the open door, and then he’s gone.
“We’ve barely practiced,” Ira says. “Are you sure you’re up for this again, Dex?”
Dex shrugs. “I’ll do my best.”
“If he wasn’t so beat up already, I’d give him what for,” Jim says. “Jumped the blinds, stupid fool.” But then his broad face crumples and tears stand in his eyes.
Dex sighs. “Do you really blame him?”
Jim presses his fingers to his eyes and shakes his head.
Ira says, “We want him back. That’s all.”
“Yeah.” Dex picks up the piano music. “But there’s even less of a chance he’ll come back if we lose this gig.”
“He’ll come back.” I have to say this. I have to make it true.
The fellows muster smiles that make me feel worse than if they’d ignored me. Then Dex heads for the stage, and the rest of us follow. I’m wearing my green dress again tonight. Mother promised she’d start working to repair my blue one just before I left for the El. As I walked down the sidewalk, I glanced back to see her and Dad standing between parted curtains at the front-room window. They knew where I was going, and what I was going to do when I got there. But they didn’t say no. “Don’t go to Calliope’s. Don’t sing. Don’t lower yourself, ruin yourself, endanger our reputation.” They could have said any of these things, but they didn’t. “Be the young woman we’ve raised you to be.�
� They didn’t say that, either. Mother only said she’d try to repair my blue dress. They stood at the window and watched me walk away, and the last light of sunset glanced off the metal of the bayonet mounted on the wall behind them. The way they looked at me, and the memory stirred by the sight of that glinting metal—Dad defended me—briefly lifted my spirits. I turned back to the El. I walked toward it, toward tonight, all the faster.
Tonight our first number is “My Funny Valentine.” It’s a song from a musical that’s just opened on Broadway. Dex learned it just a few days ago on the clarinet. He picked it up by ear—he’s good at that—so he was to able to figure it out on the piano, too. We ran through it for the first time tonight. Our relationship with “Valentine” is fragile at best. Maybe that’s why it seems so very near and dear to us, so tender, almost raw. Nobody in the crowd dances when we perform it. They stay very still as the song washes over them, listening hard:
Don’t change your hair for me
Not if you care for me . . .
I remember my hands in Theo’s hair. I sing like my heart is breaking. It’s not that hard to do. And when the song asks a sweet, funny, comic, tragic valentine to stay, I sing this to Theo. Come back, I sing to him. Come back to stay.
At the end of the night, George peers over his horn-rimmed glasses and asks me when Theo will return. Dex, Ira, and Jim—they’re already backstage. If only I hadn’t spotted Rob and Zane during the last set. If only I hadn’t let them keep me here after the encore. They asked questions about Theo I couldn’t answer, and now George is doing the same. If only I’d gathered my music and fled while the fleeing was good, like Dex and Ira and Jim.
“I don’t know. As soon as he can. He’s having some health problems,” I say.
George sticks an unlit cigar in his mouth. “Like Lilah?” His mouth moves around the blunt brown stub, but somehow it stays put.
“No!” I draw back, startled by the suggestion. “He’s not like Lilah at all.”
Though wasn’t he in such danger when he was younger, in New Orleans? He told me as much.
Now, in New Orleans . . . is he in danger again?
I wrap my arms around myself and hold myself tight.
George shrugs. “Didn’t think that was Theo’s problem. Had to check, though. The boss has been burned once too often.”
Suddenly I’m angry. “Who is this boss, anyway?”
George laughs. “Believe me, sweets, you don’t want to know.” He lights the cigar now, takes a long draw. “Listen, tell the others that the boss says you’re okay here for a while, as long as no one complains. But the sooner Mr. Chastain gets back, the better, you hear? And in case it takes him a while to solve his so-called health problems, your little quartet had better practice hard and hold your own, or you’ll be hitting the streets.”
“I’ll tell them,” I say, and I hold myself tighter.
Nights we’re not performing, we practice.
Mrs. Chastain and Mary invite us to come to their house. When we do, they fix us delicious meals. After we’ve eaten, they sit and listen to our rehearsal, smiling, sometimes, or crying, sometimes, or sometimes with their heads bowed or their hands busy doing small chores or tasks. When we leave, Mrs. Chastain and Mary follow us to the door. They reach out, saying good-bye, and their hands linger in ours. Touching us, you’d think they were touching Theo, holding on to him, somehow, because they’re holding on to his friends. Three weeks have passed—we’re a few days into May—and still none of us have heard from him. Ira and Jim are matter-of-fact about this: “Don’t worry, Mrs. Chastain. It takes a while to cover so many miles.” Dex is reassuring: “Now, Mary, don’t cry. You know he’s made of tough stuff.” But I look at these other women in Theo’s life, his mother and his sister, my friends who feel almost like family, and I don’t say a word. Their eyes, like mine, are filled with contradictory emotions. Hope and dread. Fear and courage. Doubt and resolution. Nothing is black-and-white anymore. Everything is mixed to gray.
On the nights we don’t practice at the Chastains’ apartment, we practice at Jim’s house. Jim lives near Rob, in Austin, and when Rob knows we’re there he’ll stop by. Sometimes he’ll bring Zane. The two of them drink more than they should, and when they get too distracting, we ask them to leave. “Save it for Calliope’s,” one of the other fellows will say, and I’ll add, “Better yet, stop it altogether.”
On Monday nights, when Calliope’s is closed, we practice there. And it is here that Nils finds me, the second Monday night in May.
We’re leaving for the evening when I spot him. He’s pulled his car close to the curb, and though it’s a warm evening, with the wind blowing balmy off the lake, he’s sitting behind the steering wheel, windows up, intently watching the door. He doesn’t feel comfortable in this neighborhood, it’s clear. When he sees me, his eyes widen with surprise, and then narrow with confirmation. He nods, opens his door, and steps out. Dex, Ira, and Jim are gathered around me, saying good-bye, see you tomorrow night, when Jim says sharply, “Who’s that, Blue Dress? You know him?” Nils is fast approaching, his face tight with concern. Ira steps in front of me, and Dex, too, and Jim stands stalwartly by my side. Only when I tell them that Nils is an old friend do they give him some room.
“Rob wouldn’t tell me where you were tonight, but Zane thought you’d be here,” Nils says in lieu of hello. Then he thrusts his hand into the space between Ira and Jim. Awkwardly I take it. But shaking my hand isn’t what Nils wants to do. Instead, he draws me to him and starts to walk me toward his car.
“You all right with this, Blue Dress?” Jim calls to me. “I was planning on driving you home just like always.”
I look up at Nils. “Are we all right?”
He says, “I’d like to talk with you again, Rose. I’ve been waiting for you to call me. Then I started waiting for the right time to call you. Tonight I just couldn’t wait anymore, so I decided the time was now.”
His big hand covers mine, hiding everything but the tips of my fingers. His long legs span the distance to his car in great strides, so that I have to jog to keep up. Trailing behind him, I feel like a little child. After the challenges of these last weeks without Theo, this feels comforting. I look over my shoulder at Jim, Ira, and Dex, and I tell them everything’s fine. Breathlessly I call, “See you tomorrow night,” to remind myself that I may indeed look forward to this. Then Nils opens the car door for me and I sit down in the front seat beside him.
This is the way the world is. If Nils were Theo, I’d sit in the backseat. I’d sit there happy in my discontent. Now I sit in the front, relieved to be with my childhood friend again.
We drive north toward our part of town, with the sun sinking below the horizon to our left. For a while we don’t say anything. I keep my eyes out for a glimpse of the gorgeous, tumultuous sunset that flashes in intermittent bursts down the alleys between factories, and stores, and homes. We’re in the vicinity of Hull House now, near the apartment where Theo first heard me sing, where he asked me to do the work I wanted to do, then took a rose-patterned rag in his hand and helped me do the work I needed to do. So I’m thinking of Theo, the way he cleaned those radiators until they gleamed, when Nils turns to me and says, “Where would you like to go? Name it. I’ll take you there.”
I blink the thought of Theo away, or try to. For old times’ sake, I say, “Your house? I’ve been wondering whether you’ve gotten any new butterflies.”
“Come on.” Nils smiles wryly. “Really?”
“Really.” And, really, I have wondered this. I’ve wondered what train tracks Theo took south, and in wondering this, I’ve wondered if he jumped on a freight car, and in wondering this, I’ve wondered what kind of freight the car carried—livestock? produce? coal? steel?—and in wondering this, I’ve wondered about Nils, whether he’s made any recent trips to the yards and, if so, what kind of insects did he find there in the freight cars? Tarantulas? Butterflies? A creature I can’t imagine, that I don’t even know exists?
“I’d love to see something beautiful,” I say.
Nils says, “My parents are at home. So not tonight. I want to talk without interruption.”
I blink. “Oh.”
“So. Where?”
“Let me think a minute.” I open the car window and look toward the lake. I smell water on the wind and, fleeting as a bird’s call, I hear the bell-like clanging of sailboats anchored in the closest harbor. Yearning fills me. Maybe I’ve inherited Dad’s love of the sea. If I’d been a boy living in Copenhagen, maybe I’d have been a sailor, too. I wouldn’t have been a little mermaid, that’s for sure.
I want to see the water.
And now I’m remembering the sweet, comfortable night with Nils at Old Prague, and the way I imagined things would go when he said he had something he wanted me to see. Almost that night seems a lifetime ago. Almost I was a different girl, not even a young woman yet. Almost I miss her, that girl, myself.
I look at Nils. His fine profile, that shock of hair, are distinctly familiar against the purpling sky.
“Let’s go to Adler Planetarium and sit by the lake and look at the stars,” I say.
Nils parks, then we walk through growing dark toward the immense round building that is Adler Planetarium. I can hear waves slapping against the stones that line the lakefront, and a bright crescent moon hangs just above the planetarium’s dome. Starlight pricks the sky. Nils doesn’t catch hold of my hand; he keeps a respectful distance. For that I’m grateful. When we pass through the puddles of light cast by streetlamps, I can see the expression on his face. I may feel comfortable with him, but he looks anything but that with me. He chews worriedly at his lip, and his gaze is focused intently on something I can’t make out. It could be the planetarium’s granite facade, but I think it’s more likely the future.
“Sophy desperately wants to visit the planetarium,” I say for something to say. “As soon as I can save up a little extra money, I’m going to bring her.”
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