American Music

by Jane Mendelsohn

  The narrow hall was a dim haze. The dust motes blanketing the bookshelves that lined the passage swirled frantically when Honor passed, like thousands of tiny fish disturbed by a great ship. The little girl, not yet five, knelt down to scan the lowest shelves and found a gigantic book, The History of Italian Art, lying on its side. It was a huge linen-covered tome missing its glossy wrapping and when Honor opened to the middle the smooth pages buckled and swelled in a wave and out rolled a faded piece of paper the size and shape of a ticket stub. It wafted to the ground and was blown, who knows by what wind, through the space under a door that Honor had never before noticed. It was a thin door, inconspicuously located at a break between the shelves, painted a graying white just like the shelves and walls, and it had a fancy cut-glass doorknob. Honor instinctively lifted herself up onto her tiptoes and turned the knob. Here was a closet, stuffed with shopping bags that in turn overflowed with more stuff. The door had obviously been squeezed shut against the tide of unwanted things that could not be parted with, and so with its opening a few bags were dislodged and one spilled its entire contents onto the floor.

  It was a bag of photographs. Contact sheets, individual prints, little plastic boxes of slides, vellum packets of shiny negatives, they all tumbled out at Honor’s feet. She looked down at them as if jewels from a treasure chest had spilled in front of her. She sat down. She made herself comfortable among the heap of things obviously so unnecessary that they had been hidden away and not missed. She felt at liberty to play with them. There was no one and nothing to stop her. She noticed a pen idling on the floor of the closet, toward the back. She crawled over the photographs and stretched her arm into the closet and grabbed the pen. It was a blue ballpoint. The top had been chewed. She pulled it off, picked up a large contact sheet covered with black and white images of children, and began to write her name, or her approximation of it, over the images. Then she drew heart shapes and flowers and designs that looked like stars. She drew suns with rays of different lengths angling out in every direction. She made circles and spirals and what she thought looked like staircases. She made a garden. She drew a mother and child.

  She went through her entire repertoire of favorite subjects and worked her way over the contact sheets, the individual prints, then onto the tiny slides, their stiff white edges bordering miniature worlds of transparent colors, and then, finally, to the negatives, on which the blue ballpoint pen hardly showed up at all, other than to obscure the darkened faces and whitened backgrounds which already seemed dementedly drawn by some wild child. She took exquisite pleasure in her project. She worked with concentration and deep thought and she was fortunate that her grandmother, who eventually realized that she had not heard from her normally talkative granddaughter in over an hour, found the sight of Honor scribbling across the contraband photographs which she had absconded with so many years ago shocking but not enraging, disturbing but not worthy of raising her voice. She had changed. She was not the person who had stolen the photographs, not anymore. She would always be angry and difficult and filled with a sense that she had been robbed of the right parent, but she didn’t pay quite so much attention to those feelings after so many years. And she could forgive anything Honor did. That was love. If this was what it took to enable her to experience some love, then it was worth it. Everything, in this moment, seemed worth it.

  That evening after Anna had picked up Honor and taken her home, Iris cleaned up the mess in the hallway. She took a garbage bag from the kitchen, the old Bergdorf’s bag was torn and had ripped nearly in half when it fell, and began picking up the pictures and putting them in the plastic bag. For the first time, she tried to really look at them, but now they were covered with the shiny lines and scrawls and indentations of the ballpoint pen. Here and there she could make out a face or a hand, sometimes the sense of a whole composition, and she had the distance now to see the photographs for what they were: works of art. She still felt personally enough about them to find it amusing and strangely satisfying that they had been defaced by her granddaughter, but she also recognized the loss that this represented. She had followed Vivian’s career and knew that the images would be worth a fortune, although she had long ago given up the thought of having a fortune of her own and had never really contemplated trying to sell them. No, however unethically, she still considered them her birthright, and now, at the age of fifty-one, she had mellowed to the point of feeling like this was the perfect use and manifestation of her inheritance.

  She picked up the last picture. Underneath it, lying on the floor, was a yellowed piece of paper, the size and shape of a ticket stub. It was a ticket stub. The writing on it was faded but she could just make out that it was for a performance of Count Basie’s Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom on Christmas Eve 1936. She threw it in the bag. The last thing she picked up was the book on Italian art. It had been among her father’s possessions. She didn’t notice as she closed it that it was inscribed to Joe and Pearl, from V. “One day I hope you get to see these pictures,” it read.

  Anna

  After her daughter moved to New York City and made it clear that she wanted the space and freedom to make her own life, far from the confusing influence of a somewhat unbalanced mother, Anna had found work at a small college in the Midwest and had made some effort to stay in touch with Honor but had not pushed it. After all, she had hardly been in close touch with her own mother in later years, and now that Iris was gone she guiltily enjoyed the feeling of unfettered—some would say unmoored—freedom from having no attachments to any generation but her own. Her daughter, she often thought, was probably better off without her. Anna drifted from job to job, relationship to relationship. It didn’t feel like drifting to her. Each entanglement felt heavy with meaning and purpose, every new employer held forth the promise of complete security and comfort. Eventually, however, the constant inconstancy caught up with her, and she accepted an administrative position at a junior college on Long Island, where she could have a nice apartment in a small house a short distance from a beach. She supplemented her income by giving music lessons. Her one indulgence was an upright piano. She still loved music. Sometimes she took down the old saxophone from the back of a closet and played a little, although she had never been any good.

  When the days grew longer she would walk along the beach after dinner. She scanned the shore as if she were expecting a bottle to wash up, addressed to her. She still wrote to Honor, on holidays and her birthday. She mailed the letters to whatever address she had. Occasionally her daughter sent a postcard, but she had not received one in a long time.

  The sky was white and the sea was almost black. Hundreds of triangles of light floated on the surface of the water, silver and shifting, making the ocean look as if it had been sketched in pencil. A boat or two sailed away. Anna looked around and wondered how she had ended up here. She had been raised in privilege, attended an elite high school, been derailed by a teenage pregnancy, but still, out here in what felt like nowhere, how did that happen? She felt the nowhereness of her place on the planet and smiled. She asked herself why she hadn’t asked herself the more important questions: How was it that she had ended up here and could still feel so happy? How was it that the light on the water could soften the piercing sense that her life had sailed away? Was this a gift she possessed, this ability to inhabit the present so completely and contentedly, or was it a curse? The tendency that had turned at various times in her life to distractedness or impulsiveness or, to put it mildly, low frustration tolerance and poor planning. Who knew? She had always felt as though she was waiting for something and she had cultivated a kind of perverse patience, a patience that rarely seemed like wisdom but which—from a great, great distance, the kind she had now, here, looking at the vast expanse of liquid spilling off the side of the earth—now seemed to her the essence of her being. She had had the patience to have her daughter young and wait for her own youth to happen later. She had had the patience to let her daughter go and know that time would
bring what it would bring. Maybe these were rationalizations. It didn’t matter. This is the way things looked to her now.

  The sky was still white. The sea was still black. The other wanderers on the beach were still wandering. A figure came walking toward her across the sand. It was a man. He was slightly younger than Anna, weathered for his age, sandy-haired. He was barefoot. He knew her. He smiled when he approached and he wrapped his arms around her. Perhaps he was why she felt happy now.

  They walked together along the water. They talked of their short-term plans: dinner, a boat ride this weekend, maybe they would get a dog. Then they fell silent and continued to walk. Anna thought about the loneliness she felt in spite of her contentment, a loneliness that echoed through the generations, and how it was so much a part of her by this age that she didn’t notice it sometimes. So maybe she should have called it a contentment in spite of her loneliness. But what was the initial sound that was still echoing? Where did this come from? She would never know, but she hoped that someday perhaps her daughter would. Her daughter. She kept coming up today, or maybe it was every day and Anna was only just noticing it. The light had shifted and the water was shimmering dully like an enormous stretch of tinfoil, and the sky had gone from white to the kind of pale blue that emerges just before sunset begins, a last gasp of day. Her daughter. She would be twenty-one.

  Anna stopped walking. She bent over. Her companion asked her if she was okay. He bent down too. They stayed that way for some time and just as he began to get really worried and ask if he should call a doctor she shook her head and said I’m fine and stood up.

  Actually, she said, I’m not fine. But that’s okay.

  Her daughter. To say she missed her did not capture the stormy magnitude of her wanting. She could feel the full force of it now. What had happened? Just a shift of light on the water? Maybe that was all it took to realize that this life of contentment in the present was only possible by forgetting the past. And something, some shade of blue or gray or brush of wind or smell of salt, had brought back a hint of the past or perhaps a whiff of the future and suddenly the disconnectedness required to live in only the present, a present that one could convince oneself was luminous with the Now but which in fact was cut off like a sound dampened in mid-beat, this disconnectedness no longer satisfied. No, it was not possible to really be in the present without feeling the hard-won losses of the past, the clear terror that was the future. To ignore where all of these feelings came from, where it all began, that would be like thinking a song came from nowhere, a romance from nothing, a country sprung fully formed from itself. Trouble started this way. How to end it? Anna had no idea. All she had was a sense that by allowing the longing in, the excruciating desire, she might see more fully and maybe have access to some ragged shred of wisdom. Maybe. And maybe they would get a dog.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The forsythia bloomed and there were low fireworks of bright yellow all around the park. Then the dogwood bloomed and the magnolia trees bloomed and then the cherry blossoms and pear blossoms came next and the flowering trees canopied the entire park and underneath the trees the shade was cool and the light filtered down between the leaves in shapes that resembled a second blanketing of shadowy flowers tossed all over the green grass. People brought picnic baskets and arranged themselves in groups on the lawns as if they were posing for a grand picture and in the pond there were turtles and the children ran up to the pond and stopped and threw pieces of bread to the turtles and an egret swooped down from on high every once in a while and gave the onlookers a start and something to gaze at in amazement. By the pond one little girl stood with her back to the water watching the people as they watched the egret. She was wearing a princess-style wool coat in red with gold buttons and she was hot but her mother had made her wear it. It was a spring coat, her mother had insisted, and it was chilly out, but the child knew she was wearing it more for show than for comfort. They had cousins in the children’s clothing business who had given her the coat and who would be meeting them later that day. The girl ignored her coat. She watched the adults. She watched them so intently with her serious little eyes that it was almost as if she were looking for something, or someone. Her vision landed on pocketbooks and high-heeled shoes and children in sailor suits that were old-fashioned even for the time. Those children were worse off than she was! Then finally out of boredom she looked at the pond.

  A woman came walking up the path toward the pond. She noticed the girl in the red wool coat. She glanced around to see where the girl’s mother or father might be and she didn’t see anyone right nearby who fit the description. Then she saw a little ways off a couple that she had to look away from as soon as she saw them. They were sitting under a nearby tree eating sandwiches from a picnic basket and they were not concerned about their daughter, as they had no need to be. They were in Central Park. It was 1943. She was perfectly safe.

  The woman stood next to the little girl. The little girl looked down just past her feet at the edge of the water where the turtles swam and hovered and waited for food.

  I don’t have anything for you, the girl said to the turtles.

  I might have something, the woman said. Would you like me to check?

  The little girl twisted her head to the side and tilted it up and looked at the woman for the first time and said yes without smiling or saying please or thank you. The woman didn’t mind.

  She opened her pocketbook and found some crackers wrapped in a napkin.

  Here, why don’t you take these.

  All right.

  The girl broke off some bits of the crackers and tossed them down to the water where the turtles glided toward them and snapped them up.

  They were hungry, the woman said.

  They’re always hungry, the little girl said.

  Do you come here often? the woman asked.

  On weekends, the girl said. She looked up again at the woman. Her hair was soft and dark and brown. She was wearing pretty earrings with little rubies in them.

  Once when I came here a man told me you’re not supposed to feed the turtles because it’s bad for them and could make them die. I wouldn’t want to hurt them but they do look hungry so I almost always end up feeding them.

  Then she told the woman about her school, how she liked to paint, about her parents, how they always made the same kind of sandwiches every weekend. But they were good.

  She asked if the woman had any more crackers. The woman glanced off to the side and saw that the girl’s parents were occupied and said let me see and knelt down and said let’s check in my pocketbook.

  When the woman opened her pocketbook again the little girl saw something inside that interested her. What’s that? she said, pointing to it. A camera, the woman said. Oh, the little girl said. Do you have any more crackers?

  The woman didn’t and the girl looked disappointed. But then she recovered and said, Sometimes an egret comes. He was here before, but then he flew away.

  He’ll come back, said the woman.

  I know, said the little girl.

  The two of them stood together looking out at the water.

  You’re a very smart and interesting little girl, said the woman.

  The girl’s face brightened. People usually only told her that she was pretty or good.

  Thank you, she said. Then she smiled at the woman.

  The woman was about to say something else when the little girl said, Oh that’s my mother waving to me. I have to go now.

  Good-bye, said the girl.

  Good-bye, said the woman. The woman waited awhile for the egret to come back. She waited a long time, and it never did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  When Honor showed up on Anna’s doorstep she was carrying her infant son in a sling. Anna opened the door and on her face was a look of suffering and longing and welcome.

  I see you’ve brought someone with you, she said.

  History repeats itself, said Honor.

  If you don’
t watch out, said Anna.

  They ate dinner in silence, except for the noises made by the baby, the sudden gulps of air and exhalations of pleasure that accompany the beginning of life. In the quiet Honor felt stirrings of the beginning of her own life and Anna did too. A feeling that in stillness they could find more than momentary relief, more than a sudden abatement of despair. Here was a chance for something other than happiness. Something like harmony.

  •

  She had said good-bye to Milo thinking that she would see him the next day, that they would continue planning their new life. She realized in retrospect that this had been her fantasy. He had not really given her much reason to believe. But she had believed anyway. She had come to the hospital the next day—the nurses had not been able to reach her—and that was when she had seen his room, which was already empty of him. She opened the door and a pure whiteness filled the space completely and she looked for him in the shadows but there were no shadows. Someone came up behind her and quickly closed the door.

  On the way home and for a long time she would see him and hear him and speak to him. They had so many unfinished conversations. She saw his face, heard his voice, felt his skin, and sometimes she relived their times together.

  He is lying face down on the table with a sheet over him, in a posture of near death, but his body so alive. His arms are beside him, his fists are clenched, his eyes firmly closed. One of the muscles in his back twitches as she touches him. His fist tightens. She is frightened and thinks: How can he have so much pain? What is he feeling? And then he begins to speak.