The Music of Us (Still Life with Memories Book 3) Page 4

  Silence of the Muse

  Chapter 4

  I could not recall how I had made my way back to the hospital, nor did I have chance to say goodbye to Aaron, but the day after his departure for Honolulu I got a note, a mischievously cryptic note from him, telling me he had played a little prank on someone and used my name, but hoped I would forgive him for it, because what’s a little joke between friends, and I shouldn’t ask him any questions for now, because he wasn’t prepared to answer, not yet, but I would soon find out, and not to be angry with him, because he had done it on a whim, and because he knew what I really wanted even if I didn’t know it myself, and even if I did, I was too slow to admit it even to myself and too shy to act on it.

  A week after my onstage stunt I was discharged from the hospital. My shoulder was still hurting, which made me unable to resume military training. Instead I was assigned to mess duty. It offered no glory, only heat, which turned my life into a sweaty existence. There I was, a lowly servant of his majesty, the cook, a man with chubby, greasy hands, whose pots kept spilling over, which provided an ever-present opportunity to order me about.

  “Get up early in the morning, before the rest of the company,” he instructed me. “Bring in the wood, start the fire, place food on the sideboard, replenish as needed, and when everyone is done, mop the floors, scrub the tables and then—”

  “Then, can I eat?”

  “Prepare the next meal.”

  The mess call had long died out by the time he allowed me to fill my mess-can and tin cup. Still, there were enough leftovers to showcase his dubious culinary skills:

  Soupy, soupy, soupy, without a single bean

  Coffee, coffee, coffee, without a speck of cream

  Porky, porky, porky, without a streak of lean

  By now most of my pals were gone. Some had gone onto guard duty or shipped to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where they would be put into infantry training. Others had been sent onto battleships. I imagined them in hostile terrains or in stormy seas, deployed to prove their courage in battle. They left families back home, and I envied them for bonds made, for love tested.

  Meanwhile here I was, sweating to do nothing meaningful. There was no one with whom I could talk, except for the cook who expected me to listen.

  Aaron was gone, too. I was curious as to the nature of his little prank, but how bad could that be? There was no choice but to wait and see.

  I thought about him often, because before his departure he had given me a parting gift: his battery-powered Philco radio. I set it next to my bed and passed my hand over it with great awe. A Single piece of wood formed the top and sides, creating an arched shape that was not only practical for manufacturing but also delightfully beautiful. It looked like a cathedral. At night, when I returned to the nearly empty barracks, it helped my loneliness recede into the dark corners.

  ❋

  It was a sleepy, tranquil afternoon in Camp Upton on Sunday, December 7, 1941. There were only a few guys in the barracks. Each one of us was looking for a way to escape into his own dreams, in isolation from the others. Only the cook was heard, as he passed leisurely through the corridor with another guy.

  "I’m not ready for our country to enter a war,” he said.

  To which the other said, “Even if we stay on the sidelines, we should prepare ourselves, don’t you think?”

  Bloated with pride, the cook answered, “I suppose you could call me a pacifist. I can’t stand violence.”

  “What are you doing here, then?”

  “I stick to what I do best: cooking.”

  “Your food,” said the other, “is nothing to write home about.”

  “Well,” said the cook, “it’s an acquired taste.”

  “You think we’re heading for war?”

  “I hope not! I went through college during the thirties, when the emphasis was on the futility of war, and especially on the failure of the Great War, which is now called WWI, to settle any of the essential problems.”

  “You’re right. They said it would save the world for democracy. It never did.”

  They parted ways. Soon after, sounds of a local broadcast of the Giants and Dodgers game on station WOR could be heard from one side of the building and at the same time, the regular CBS broadcast of The World Today could be heard from the other. Faint as they were, these sounds came from opposite sides to mix into each other, creating inscrutable echoes in the empty corridor.

  The only way I could block away the noise was by listening to my favorite radio program, The Chesterfield Hour, which was sponsored by the Chesterfield tobacco company. For the most part, it featured big bands. But that afternoon, the announcer opened with, “Today, for a change, we have something quite unusual: a classical piece, one that has the reputation of being one of the most technically challenging piano concertos in the classical repertoire: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.”

  At the sound of his words I leapt off my bed and turned the volume up, which made the cook grumble, “Turn the damn thing off, right now!”

  He followed that with a few choice words, which had little effect on me. Outside the kitchen, outside his domain, I didn’t care to play the slave, so I pretended not to hear a word of what he had to say.

  Ever since that night when the redhead kid had entered my life—I mean, ever since she had decided, on a whim, to replace what she had intended to play with something else, something more suitable for GIs here, at Cape Upton—I had been growing curious to hear what I—what all of us—had missed.

  The announcer went on to say, “Many experienced pianists dare not play this concerto. Some of them lament that they didn’t learn it in their younger days, when they were still too fresh to know fear. Well, fear will not stop this performer.”

  By instinct I uttered her name even before he did. “Natasha Horowitz.”

  For many days I had been agonizing over the memory of how I met her, what a lousy impression I must have left in her mind by leaping off the stage. I kept asking myself, “How did you dare do it, what devil made you think you can share the spotlight with this girl, even for a single minute? Oh what a spectacle, what a sorry spectacle you made of yourself! What came over you?”

  If, by some lucky, unforeseen twist of events, I were to find myself in her presence ever again, which I doubted, I would probably freeze, not knowing what to say. I was a nobody, and she—a star. Unreachable. Glamorous. There could be no connection between us, except through her music. It would illuminate my life and at the same time, deepen its shadows, giving full meaning to what I felt, in joy and in pain. Such is the power of a muse.

  I leaned over the radio, eager to hear, ready to find delight in what she was bringing my way. I was hoping to grasp every note before the battery would run out of power and go dead.

  It was then that my ear caught the first interruption. From a distant radio at one side of the building, a CBS anchorman broke in. At the beginning of the sentence his voice was still subtle, but by the end it became amplified into a blare.

  “We interrupt this special news bulletin...”

  Before I could cry, “Hey! You deaf? Lower the volume, down there,” a second interruption occurred at the other side and a third one right here, out of Aaron’s radio. In place of the music, which came to a strange halt after just a couple of notes, a deep, resonant voice said, “We interrupt,” which was echoed once over, “We interrupt...”

  Struggling not to become downright emotional, it trembled now on the airwaves from three different distances, to deliver the same grave message.

  “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air. Details are not available. They will be, in a few minutes.”

  I caught my breath. The cook came running through the corridor, and several other guys gathered around him, all in shock.

  "What did they say?”

  “What do they mean?”

  “Where is Pearl Harbor?”

  “Should we do something?"

  "W
ell, we're in it now,” said the cook, and to my surprise he added, “We cannot let Japan get away with this."

  “Let's whoop them,” said one.

  “Yes,” said another. “Let's whoop them."

  Meanwhile I was flipping stations on the radio, trying desperately to learn some details about what happened. The reports were vague, all except one. A reporter for KGU radio climbed to the roof of the Advertiser Building in downtown Honolulu, microphone in hand, and called the NBC Blue Network on the phone, with the first eyewitness account of the attack.

  “This battle has been going on for nearly three hours... It's no joke, it's a real war,” he said.

  Then his voice was cut off.

  My heart was racing—no, it was running the gauntlet of emotions, stricken by disbelief, confusion, fear, guilt, and most of all, profound sadness. I had never thought that anyone would dare attack the United States. Now I was wondering what was to come and how it would affect us, how this would affect America as we knew it.

  I thought about the dead, and asked myself how many lives would be lost before this was all over.

  Feeling lucky for staying behind, on safe ground, and at the same time blaming myself for it, I slapped my hands over my face and there, there was my friend, Aaron. He was, at this moment, on the other side of the world, but I felt his presence awakening in me, in the darkness of the palms of my hands. First he winked at me, as if to ask what’s a little joke between friends, and I shouldn’t ask him any questions for now, because he wasn’t prepared to answer, not yet.

  Then he turned away from me, and in a snap, a strange thing began to happen: as if I came to be in his skin I shivered in fright, and saw it all through his eyes.

  What I saw was a vision of the battleship where he was stationed, which was one of our eight battleships under attack. The USS Arizona, which used to be the symbol of our national might, of our naval dominance, was now engulfed in flames.

  Falling into it through the black clouds of smoke was a bomb. It was coming with a shriek, and when it hit, for a split second there was no air.

  Then sparks came raining down, all the way down through the hollowed floors. They hit the ammunition, then the gasoline, and soon the whole place caught on fire. The blaze roared with such maddening intensity in my head that I paid no attention to the silence, the sudden silence on Aaron’s radio. Its battery must have run out of power. It was dead.

  I stared at the surface of its wood, which arched into the shape of a cathedral, and prayed that I could still find a touch, a fingerprint, a remnant of Aaron’s presence on it.

  Sensing the smell of burning flesh I heard men crying out, I imagined them leaping overboard as the battleship exploded, as it was beginning to sink.

  I caught the sound of demons screaming in my head and knew that this—this and no other—was the reason for the silence of my muse.

  The Letter

  Chapter 5

  At long last, a change happened: I got my transfer orders to Camp Lejeune, a military training base in Jacksonville, North Carolina. So I packed my stuff and left Rita Hayward behind for the cook, who was delighted to pin her up between one failed recipe and another on the kitchen wall.

  On the way to my new destination I learned what I could about it. Well over a year ago, a Major and his pilot had embarked on an aerial survey of both the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Norfolk, Virginia to Corpus Christi, Texas. Then, circling over the Onslow County coast, they had seen below them fourteen miles of undeveloped beach, interrupted only by a single inlet. This would become an ideal area, they had thought, for maneuvering large formations, artillery firing, and the construction of a major base. One thing they had never taken under account was the local climate.

  The thick pine forests surrounding the base, along with the dense underbrush and swamps, made it difficult for our troops to train and utterly unpleasant to inhabit, both of which ended up serving a purpose: they prepared us for later encounters. They toughened us. But on the first day I was slow to grasp it and quick to complain.

  “This camp,” the officer told us, “is meant for amphibious assault training.”

  “Is it?” I wondered out loud.

  “You have any doubts in what I tell you?” he asked, with a sudden twitch of his mustache.

  “I do,” said I.

  And before I could hold back from digging myself further down into a hole I muttered, “I’m convinced that this place will shape a soldier out of me who’ll be fit for nothing else but jungle warfare.”

  I was told to drop down at once and do a hundred pushups, which would not be all that hard if not for three things: I had to do them in mud, on my knuckles, and with his foot at my back.

  That night, as tired as I was, I stayed awake for hours, not so much because of my aching muscles but because of feeling like a stranger in this place. I knew no one here. I did not belong. My heart was down at despair.

  All I could do to keep myself from listening to the incessant crawling of snakes and buzzing of insects was turn on Aaron’s radio. I thought I could find the music of my illusive star, the redhead pianist whom I had seen only once, and whose name—Natasha Horowitz—quickened the pulse of my heart.

  Instead came the song, the popular hit song written just recently by Frank Loesser. It tried, somehow, to shape the ever-present feeling of foreboding about war into a snappy, happy beat.

  “Praise The Lord1,” sang the voice, “and pass the ammunition.” And after three repetitions, to make sure everyone is marching in tune, at last came the promise, “And we'll all stay free.”

  I was not the only one to have trouble falling asleep. Down the hall, two other marines were wide-awake. They had come back from the movie theatre, the first one to be constructed in the camp, and were talking excitedly about nothing I cared about.

  “Where d’you come from?” asked one.

  “LA,” said the other.

  “Oh yeah? Did you ever meet a celebrity out there?”

  “Not yet, but I figure it shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “How?”

  “Simple! You get a manicure in Beverly Hills during the middle of the day.”

  “You sure? Is that when the stars come out?”

  “They do, ‘cause that’s when real people are at work.”

  “Enough! No chatting, down there!” someone cried, and in the silence that followed you could sense tossing and turning, and later, murmurs and cries of men in their dreams.

  ❋

  A week after my arrival at Camp Lejeune, the heat and humidity were such that I longed for the good old days, I mean, the days of perspiration and exhaustion back in Cape Upton’s mess hall.

  It was then that I got a letter, which had been mailed there and redirected to reach me here. At first glance I thought it must have been a mistake, which irked me to the point of discarding it, almost. No one but my father had ever written to me—but the penmanship could not have been his. My name was drawn in an unfamiliar, flowing calligraphic style. The envelope looked quite different from the ones he would send, and so did the stamps.

  Dad would pay extra money to get the word INSURED printed prominently on the envelope in bold, capital letters. Invariably he would use stamps that featured famous Americans, each of whom was centered, rather formally, in a fancy, decorative portrait frame. I came to expect the usual lineup: a 2 cents stamp of Whistler, the artist, followed by a 2 cents stamp of Hopkins, an educator, a 2 cents stamp of Long, a scientist, a 2 cents stamp of Whittier, a poet, a 2 cent stamp of Cooper, an author, and a 2 cents stamp of Morse, an inventor. Forming a row at the top of the envelope, each one of these high and mighty characters seemed to have my father’s eyes, which gave me a sense of trepidation, of fear to find myself a failure.

  In a blink they might look down their noses at me and shake their heads ever so slightly, as if to say, “See? He’s chosen us as for a reason, setting us as a model before you.
Think, Lenny! Think what you’re going to become! Plan your future! Do it now!”

  But on this envelope, the postage was different. I used to collect stamps, and was surprised to see two identical, large, square ones that I had long wanted to get. Valued at 5 cents, they were posted one under the other, featuring the same image: a romantic drawing of a woman named Virginia Dare, whose life, according to popular folklore, was a mystery.

  Having read about her I knew that her grandfather had returned to England in 1587 to seek fresh supplies and upon his return three years later, she had vanished without a trace. She was drawn holding a small bundle, which on second inspection looked like a baby. In the background was the pitched roof of a home. The image was lovely, but had no personal meaning, I thought, none at all. If not for the rarity of these stamps, I would have assumed that they must have been chosen completely at random. Even so, my curiosity awakened.

  I flipped the envelope to its other side and thought I caught a whiff of perfume. I could not believe who the letter was from not only at first glance but also at the second and third, and had to rub my eyes to make sure I was not dreaming, not misreading the sender’s name. Written in meticulous handwriting, there it was, her name and no other: Natasha Horowitz.

  This, I thought, must have been someone’s idea of a practical joke, but on the unlikely chance that it wasn’t I decided to open the envelope with the utmost care. Hoping to insert some tool and rock it gently up and down till the glue gave way, I looked at the corner of the flap, searching for an opening, no matter how small. But no, there was none. The envelope was completely sealed.

  I dampened a cotton swab and pressed it against one segment after another around the gummed flap, to soften the glue. Then, taking a deep breath, I lifted the edge. The paper came off intact, it did not tear, but it became soaked with water, especially where her address was written. Some of the ink began to bleed.