“Enough!”
The voice startled us so thoroughly that we cut off where we were, Rick letting two or three last notes trickle out before he took his hands away from the keyboard and folded them in his lap. It wasn’t Martin who had spoken, but Philippe, and now that he had our attention he turned back away from the stage.
“Do you see?” he said, addressing himself to Martin but talking loudly enough that we could all hear him. “This is what I was talking about.”
Martin frowned. “She’s too young?” There was a question in his voice. His hand strayed up to his throat, as if it could discern with subtle fingertips the nodes young singers develop on their vocal cords by pushing too hard, straining too soon. I wanted to scream at them. Not me. I’m different.
But Philippe spoke for me.
“She’s wasted on Debussy. This girl is a born Reine de la Nuit.”
A gong went off inside my head, and in its aftermath I couldn’t hear Martin’s reply, could only track the movement of his hands as if they were showing me the way somewhere. Mozart’s Queen of the Night, in The Magic Flute, is his best witch, and I prefer to sing the songs of witches. The Queen is impossible for most voices, and quite wicked. She’s ready to eat her own young.
“Darling.” Philippe leaned forward in his chair, chin seated on his laced fingers like a soft-boiled egg. He was known to devastate debut singers. Make them cry. He purred at me. “Do you think it would be too much?”
Rick barked out a single laugh, then stared straight ahead as if it had been someone else. It was then that I truly began to adore him. I allowed my hand to stretch and flatten against the cold bulk of the piano’s hood, for balance. Raised my eyebrow.
“If anything, I may be too much for her.”
Martin sighed.
“You’re going to owe me,” he said to Philippe. And then, looking me up and down, “And spoil her rotten.”
Philippe just smiled.
“You know,” he said, “I quite intend to.”
That night I could barely hold my keys as I jammed them against the door, only tumbling into the apartment when Ada stood up from whatever she was doing and put me out of my misery by unlocking it from the inside. She was already an old woman then, my babenka, but you’d never have known it. Her hair was dark brown and piled on her head in an impressive bun, and she was wearing a wool pencil skirt that gave her the shape of a girl. Ada always said I kept her young, and it certainly seemed true that night. I bounced from one foot to the other and infected her with the aura boiling around me until she started to do a little shimmy of her own.
“What?” she asked. We were both laughing, though she didn’t yet know why, and I spun around, allowing her to pull my coat off my shoulders.
“Three guesses,” I said. And she considered, poking her tongue out thoughtfully to touch her upper lip and wrangling my coat onto a hanger. We had pathetic little wire hangers, from thrift stores and the odd dry cleaning mostly, bent into oblongs and suffering greatly under the weight of their burdens. First thing to go, I thought. Wooden hangers forevermore.
“You found a pile of gold,” she said. I clapped my hands as I bounced.
“Not exactly. Two more guesses.”
“It turns out that your shoes are magical dancing shoes, which will skirt you away to the land of the eternal ball, where you will dance faster and faster, until at last you light on fire.”
Ada made eyes at me, but I tucked my chin down, unwooed. Lowering myself calmly onto flat feet, I shook my head.
“Well, all right then,” said Ada. “It can only be one thing.”
“Oh yes?”
“Oh yes,” she said. She brushed an imaginary beard against her pale skin. “You figured out that Mélisande is not so bad after all and remembered that you’re about to sing on a real stage. I will admit, doing away with the silly goosey versions will be a difficulty, but I think, all in all, I can manage.”
Baba Ada looked happy with herself. Always upon making some sort of breakthrough in my singing, I’m consumed with a ball of energy. She assumed that the rehearsal onstage, with live accompaniment and professional critiques, had plucked me from my slump and reminded me to thank heaven for the favors I’d been granted.
“Oh no,” I said. “Oh no no no.”
“Well then, what?” she asked. “I do have to get dinner on, you know. You aren’t over the moon about a movie coming out or some other nonsense like that, are you? Because I told you last time, I can only care so much about—”
“I’m going to be the Queen of the Night,” I said. “I’m going to sing The Magic Flute.”
Ada stopped in the middle of hitching up one of her nylon stockings as she turned back to the kitchen. I watched the air leak slowly out of her, only to return, transfused, as if made into champagne. She bubbled upward back towards me and put both hands on my shoulders. They were surprisingly strong, and in other circumstances I might have winced.
“Are you being serious, Luscia?” Her voice was deadly focused, and her eyes shone like gunshots right into my own. I nodded.
Ada rested her forehead on mine, leaning down just slightly. She had three inches on me. “I knew it,” she said. So softly I almost couldn’t hear. “I knew it.”
Her fingers were still digging into my shoulders.
“Can you imagine,” she continued, as if to herself, “what your daughter will be like someday?”
I craned my neck back, away from her.
“What?” I asked. But Ada only shook her head.
“Never you mind, child,” she said. “We should celebrate.”
And so we did.
7
Kara and I walk through the streets of North Chicago and I point things out to her that she probably cannot see. She’s almost completely invisible in her winter clothes—out of reach of wind and dirt and water and snow—and yet everything touches her. When a bird skims the air above her, suddenly flight is possible. When she smells bus exhaust, the world loses its semblance of perfect cleanliness. Every time I stroke her cheek, she remembers tenderness.
My stitches feel better than I had expected—much better, considering that I have an extra six pounds attached to my chest. But the day is undeniably frigid, sleet sticking against my coat and wetting my hair, and when I turn the corner and see we’re at the end of our journey’s first leg, I want to laugh with happiness. Across the street is a florist’s shop where I sometimes order bouquets for dinner parties. They do nice window displays—right now, big puffs of hothouse hydrangeas to simulate snowballs and frozen hillsides, as if to taunt the real winter landscape, which is spitting mad. The shop is always warm inside, and they have a counter where you can sit and order coffee or tea while your flowers are being assembled. They’ll do something nice for Ada, I know. It’s stupid to leave flowers in the cemetery to wilt and freeze, but going without them seems callous to me. Presentation and all that. I look in both directions down the street and begin to pick my way across.
I’m almost at the sidewalk when a stylish woman emerges from the florist’s door cradling a tall bouquet of peonies and lilies. Various shades of pink and white and yellow, which she’s adjusting with her thumb when she loses traction on a patch of ice.
The woman is wearing inadvisable heels—she was probably planning to walk all of two paces before hailing a taxi—and one toe slips forward while the other slips back. I suck in a breath and hold out my hand, but I’m too far away to help. And do I really want to? Would I really have offered myself to grab if I’d been closer? I pull my hand back and shrink into myself, hugging Kara close.
“Oh,” the woman gasps.
She skids her feet around and then falls hard on both knees, the flowers spilling out of their wrappings in front of her.
And she screams.
Wherever she thought she was going—a party, an office building—she didn’t expect to make a noise like that on her way. The woman’s voice is so shrill that every pedestrian within a block turns t
o see what the commotion is. But what I hear mostly—what I cannot stop hearing—is the crack of her kneecaps. A sickening crush, palpable as footsteps on glass. I turn back and walk with purpose to the other side of the street and keep going. Tell myself I imagined it; she couldn’t have been hurt that badly. People slip on the ice all the time. But a few blocks later, hurrying in the opposite direction with my eyes down, I hear the wail of a siren approaching from somewhere to take the woman away.
Just a little farther, I think. Almost there. I rush past coffee shops, antique stores with furniture peeking through the windows. But I can’t go fast enough to calm down my frantic breathing.
Wounds have their own gravity—isn’t that what I was telling myself before? That injury draws further injury, and a person, once damaged, is never safe. I had believed, though, that the gravity was localized. Attached to its object. Kara murmels against my chest, sucking intermittently on the strap of her carrier, and I hold her closer, imagining an underground rumbling coming from the direction of the accident. A great wrenching moan as the street rips open. Buildings falling away into nothingness. People struck by bricks and swallowed by the void. Even though I know it’s not real, a large handful of my heart believes that if I look back, I’ll see destruction barreling down the road. That it’s only by averting my eyes that I can keep us both from being consumed.
St. Boniface Cemetery is surrounded by high walls, situated on the liminal edge between two neighborhoods—the wealthy one I’ve just passed through and the penniless one on the other side. In death they move closer and finally meet, the rich and poor alike. I stop when I reach the fence and rest my hand lightly against it, as if this were home base in some cosmic game of tag. I think of all the things Baba Ada saved me from, how close she hewed to me when I came to her crying after school or after a bad audition, any little injury. The cemetery is full of statues of saints, robed figures who peer out at me from their veils of stone and snow. I walk a few more paces to the gate, trying to ignore the nest of anxieties beneath my lungs.
I have no flowers after all, just a child half sleeping, but it’s Ada I’m here to see. She won’t be angry about something so petty. She’ll take me in her arms, put her hand to my cheek. That’s what she always used to do. Listen to my troubles. Tell me a story.
In the distance I hear some scratching, shuffling steps, but there’s no one in sight. Maybe it’s a stray dog, or a teenager avoiding school. The statues are perfectly silent, as statues tend to be. The snow has picked up, still wet, hitting hard against my skin, and I curl my fingers around one of the bars on the gate, the iron freezing even through my gloves. Somehow, I can’t bring myself to step inside. Ridiculous. What am I afraid of?
The saints, concrete and marble alike, stand still and wait for me, eyes hidden under hoods. I shiver and turn away.
All day I’ve been trying to save Kara, save myself from danger. A curse. The pressure of my secrets and fears building up inside me to a boiling point. Yet this is where I brought my child: not somewhere safe, but to a graveyard, a mausoleum. Maybe I hoped the silence would make me feel at home. This isn’t where my baba is, though, not really. Ada hated dead things. Or at least that was my impression. She would never talk about them as they really were. She had a taste for the living, or perhaps the living dead.
I remember. It was, after all, a taste I came to share.
A da earned our keep doing alterations at the Marshall Field’s annex store on East Washington. When she arrived in Chicago in 1938 it was a good job, better than doing tit and tat as a home seamstress, and certainly a vast improvement over anything connected to the city’s infamous slaughterhouses, where her cousin Freddie worked until they closed down or until he died—I’ve never been sure which.
To me the work at Marshall Field’s always seemed beneath my babenka, who herself wore clothes tailored to make her look like a lady, with precision pleats and hidden darts. None of the other women Ada worked with seemed to know who Greta was, and they took liberties with my baba that I didn’t think anyone had the right to: they laughed with her, they scolded her, sometimes they told her what to do.
Basia was my grandmother’s particular friend, the only one who ever came to our home. They drank tea out of our two good cups and generally chased me away to discuss “things a child wouldn’t understand.” So Basia put it.
Not long after the day Ada rescued me from my exile of painted nails, Basia sat in our kitchen listening to me go on about Greta’s powers. She turned to Ada and frowned.
“What nonsense are you filling this girl’s head with?”
I actually gasped, a terrible piece of theatricality.
“Oh, lalka.” Ada waved her hand at me. “Go to your room. Give us some time.”
“Baba—”
“Go on.” She set down her teacup. “I mean this.”
As I stalked out the door to what felt like another banishment, I heard her say to Basia: “. . . can’t know what she’ll make of it.”
Basia just laughed and said, “Well, it’s no better to hide.”
To which my baba said nothing at all.
What I didn’t understand was that Ada’s two sides—her dignified sense of style and her position as a day laborer; her self-assured domination over our home and her bonhomie at work—were quite inextricably linked. She was able to bring home clothes deemed beyond repair and work them over into sleek statement pieces for herself or else cut them down for my mother or me. And the women at Marshall Field’s—most of them immigrants too—provided a community that neither family nor church could give Ada when she first left Poznań.
Despite my certainty that my baba deserved better, the store still drew me with the childish appeal of a factory floor. I marveled at the fact that a bolt of cloth could become a pair of pressed slacks, that a tear could be mended into invisibility. And when they were all collected together, the seamstresses were a captive audience. Why they viewed me as a performer and my grandmother as nothing more than one of the girls, I couldn’t quite grasp. But it seemed to be what Ada wanted.
I was generally not allowed in the big back room where the women sat with lamps bent towards their handiwork, fingers running nimbly over bobbins, belts, and treadles. It was thought I would be in the way, and I was. On the few occasions Ada capitulated to my whining and snuck me along with her, I raced up and down the aisles between sewing machines and stood in the hallway singing “Amarilli, Mia Bella” until all foot pedals stopped and all hands applauded. Probably Ada and Basia prepared the rest of them for me, those women with their hair tied back, with their sensible dark eyes and occasional arthritic protrusions in their fingers. But as far as I knew they lived their lives there, bent over careful hemming and hypnotized by the constant grinding mumble of the machines. When I ran through the door—shoes making their slap-slap-slap against the floor—I pictured myself as a refreshing, avenging wind blowing misery and monotony out the window with my laughter.
After a song or, if I was lucky, two, Ada would give me a handful of Frango mints and tell me to go play quietly by myself. This was the hard part; I was not naturally still. But Ada told me it would be good practice for being a singer when I grew up: sometimes I would have a single aria nestled amid two full acts of opera. I would need to be able to wait in the wings for my moment of glory. That my taste for glory came from Ada too would not occur to me for some time.
The alteration room was on a floor that wasn’t open to the public. So when my fists were full of chocolates and I’d been dismissed from the sewing quarters, I was generally able to wander around the hall and find a place to sit all by myself. Any clothing waiting for the clever attention of Ada’s ladies was piled in a mountain of fabric in one room; women would come by as they completed projects and peel a new one from the stack, with instructions for hemming, mending, or taking in pinned to the front.
The finished clothing was treated with more reverence. Several of the rooms on the alteration floor were no more than giant w
alk-in closets with low lighting, as though they housed art that required preservation from the elements. Racks of suit jackets hung beside rows of starched blouses; wool skirts organized by length were suspended beside coats, which were trimmed with mink or rabbit depending on the price. One room was always reserved for wedding dresses sheathed in thin sheeting—the plastic muted the dresses’ blinding whiteness and made them glow as they might have in the light of the moon. Often the dresses swayed when I entered their lair; they looked very much like a cadre of sleeping ghosts all hung by the shoulders, effluvial tails dragging gently on the ground.
I dared myself to stay among them. It was a challenge: eat a pile of chocolates in a room of white clothing without leaving any fingerprints. Sit in a quavering pool of spirits without awakening one and raising its ire. I chose a point in the middle of the room and shuffled a few hangers aside to duck between so the plastic closed back around me when I leaned against the wall. I was afraid of the ghosts, but if I closed my eyes I could convince myself that the shushing sounds of the swaying dresses were really coming from leaves rustling together in the wind.
The only risk to this tactic was that sometimes I would fall asleep, and then my dreams might take me anywhere.
I remember the last time I ever visited the ghost room, how I pinched my eyes shut and concentrated on the sound of my own breathing because it blocked out all other distractions—a creak in the corner or a suspicious lowing of conversation from the floor below. As with any dream, I can’t recall the moment that it began, just that there was a woman roaming in a forest with her skirt brushing against her knees. Daylight leaked through the nearly bare tree limbs, but it was a bleached light, bone-white and arctic. When the woman—for I was the woman, though then again I wasn’t—looked up at the sky, she could see a cold bulb dangling there as if from a wire.
The Daughters Page 9