TWENTY-SEVEN
It sounded as if the war that was unfolding in Europe was being waged inside our house. Freddy and I had been quiet babies, but Frank and Teddy rampaged through the house with the devastating force of an invading army. Nothing was too trivial to merit full-scale engagement. The sustained intensity of their fighting was such that none of the grown-ups ever had much time for Freddy or me.
The twins really were identical. The only way to distinguish one from the other was a small mole that Teddy had just above his right ankle; Joseph and Jette were always rolling down their little socks to see who was who. As the years passed, each remained a perfect replica of the other.
In December 1941 the Japanese attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt solemnly told the nation that America was at war, once again. By then the twins were two years old, and their talent for mayhem was reaching its first apex. I, at the grand old age of four, was mired in sibling-inspired ennui, dreaming of the day when there would be nobody left but me.
It was difficult for me, this sudden demotion in the family ranks. Freddy had the consolation of being the eldest; nothing could ever rob him of that. Also he didn’t seem to
mind
being ignored. During that first year, before I came along, his every twitch and fart had been cataloged and marveled at, and that was probably enough attention to last anyone a lifetime. I, though, was unable to relinquish the limelight so easily. Sandwiched between serenely untouchable Freddy and the twins’ dazzling commotion, I became sullen, resentful, and overly sensitive to every perceived injustice.
I wasn’t the only casualty of all that domestic chaos. My poor grandfather was suffering mightily, too. Martin Leftkemeyer was still mourning the loss of his darling daughter, and his nerves were being flayed daily by the brutal cacophony that had descended on his house. In the summer of 1942 he moved to a small apartment above the bank where he could grieve in peace.
We were now a household of five men, none of us especially well house-trained. Jette and Rosa’s best efforts could not halt the calamitous mess that our undomesticated existences created. No sooner was one discarded toy picked up than another would be carelessly deposited elsewhere. The house was booby-trapped with sharp items lurking underfoot, just out of the lines of adult vision.
After a long day at the grill, Joseph was too tired to tolerate sibling squabbles when he got home. Evenings became death by a thousand cuts, every high-pitched shriek another livid wound. He winced his way through supper, balefully eyeing the clock as it crept toward our bedtime.
Finally he thought of a way to combat our endless bickering. One night he arrived home with a large box in his arms. We watched as he carried it into the living room and placed it on the table.
He turned to us. “Boys,” he said, “I finally worked out what this house was missing.”
“What?” asked Freddy.
“
Music
,”
said Joseph. “Look.”
Inside the box was a beautiful radio, constructed out of polished walnut with a vast, single speaker squatting in the middle of its elegant façade. Five narrow chrome bars spanned the mesh from top to bottom. They reminded me of a lion baring its teeth.
“What does it do?” I asked.
By way of response, Joseph squatted down in front of the machine and switched it on. A soft hiss of static emerged from the beast’s ferocious maw. He turned a fat knob and the needle on the central display shifted a little to the right. “I don’t know quite—Ah, here’s something.” A creamy chorus of trombones and saxophones oozed into the room, as smooth and polished as the radio itself. Joseph grinned at us. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him smile. “That’s Glenn Miller,” he said. “‘Tuxedo Junction.’” When the tune ended, Joseph fiddled with the dial again. There was more static, then a thunderous blast of timpani and strings. He shook his head and moved on. For thirty minutes we surfed the airwaves, randomly alighting on snatches of melody and then taking off again.
Each night after that, we sat in front of the radio and bathed in whatever oases of sound my father’s fingers discovered on that dial. The ritual silenced our petty bickering, at least for a while. We were discovering music for the first time, but for Joseph every tune crackled with old memories. Caruso sang the same arias that Frederick had performed in the Nick-Nack. And in the rousing stomps of Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Artie Shaw, he heard the distant, blues-tinged echo of Lomax’s cornet. Sometimes we would catch a crisp blast of four-part barbershop. It was still the sound my father loved the most. As he listened to those swooping tags and perfect chords, he looked at us, his own fractious quartet, and wondered if our squalling discord could ever be transformed into such harmony.
I
n the years that followed, Joseph’s grief over Cora’s death did not abate, although its volume changed, from center-stage howl to a soft chorus of melancholy, whispered from the wings. Everything good was tempered by the knowledge that it would have been even better with Cora by his side. His mourning became a one-way stream of private telegrams, each one laced with tender regret:
You would have loved this. How you would have laughed at that.
After her death, Joseph was smothered by a fresh blanket of silence. He never sang another note, his beautiful voice locked within him once more.
My mother’s presence lingered on in the house after she was gone. There were photographs of her everywhere. I sometimes caught Joseph reaching out to touch one of those pictures in wistful communion. I wished that I missed her as much as he did. I watched him disappear into his memories, and wanted to join him there. But I could not remember her. There was nothing for me to hang my remorse upon. Cora’s clothes still hung in her wardrobe in mothballed memorial, and from time to time I crept into Joseph’s bedroom to examine the cloistered rainbow of brightly patterned dresses. I buried my nose in the soft folds of fabric and inhaled deeply, hoping to unearth long-buried memories, but my mother remained out of reach, a distant ghost.
In April of 1945, as the war was heading toward an Allied victory, President Roosevelt died. We all sat around the radio and listened to the live broadcast as the vice president was sworn in as the thirty-third president of the United States. It was a proud day for all Missourians. Harry Truman was the first man from our state to make it to the White House.
Jette still had Frederick’s last letter to her, the one he had written in that little whitewashed church in northern France. She did not know it, but the man taking the oath of office was the same piano-playing major who had accompanied Frederick in his last recital, and had sent him singing into the woods on his last morning on this earth.
My grandfather’s passion for his adopted country had been boundless. I can only imagine how proud he would have been if he had lived to see that moment. To have sung with the president of the United States!
O
ne evening in late 1946 Joseph walked to the farmhouse where Riva Bloomberg still lived. Nearly three decades had passed since he had last made that journey. Frau Bloomberg, now a tiny, white-haired lady in advanced old age, welcomed Joseph with a joyful hug and shuffled painfully down the corridor to the room where they had spent so many hours together at the piano. When he explained his proposal, Riva Bloomberg began to weep. Her fingers, once strong enough to strangle chickens and keep up with Frederick’s impetuous tempi, had been frozen by arthritis, and the piano had not been played for years.
Joseph wanted to buy it so that he could teach us to sing.
He offered a generous price, but Riva Bloomberg waved the figure away. She would not accept any payment. Another generation of Meisenheimers learning to sing at her piano was reward enough for her, she told him. Joseph kissed her softly on the cheek and promised her that she would be guest of honor at their first public performance.
Jette greeted the piano’s arrival in the house with certain misgivings. It was, after all, a machine designed to produce noise, and as such it appeared somewhat redundant. But she saw the look in Joseph’s eyes, and knew better than to protest too much.
Every evening Joseph sat at the piano and constructed simple arrangements of songs he had heard on the radio. He hummed to himself as his fingers poked at the keys, piling up chords. We flew around him as he worked, whooping and hollering, ignoring all that thoughtful prodding.
When he had completed a handful of arrangements, Joseph beckoned Freddy toward him. My brother stood obediently next to the piano and sang the patterns of notes that Joseph picked out. By then I was obsessively monitoring every family transaction for further evidence of my own irrelevance, and so I hovered suspiciously by the door, watching and listening as Freddy’s faltering treble floated through the room. My surveillance lasted two nights before I asked if I could join in.
It was immediately apparent to Joseph that our voices would never possess the luminous quality that his own once had, but we did okay. When he first heard us pipe out “Stars Fell on Alabama” in simple two-part harmony, his smile warmed us like sunshine. Basking in the glow of his approval, we began to learn new songs, and our repertoire slowly grew.
One evening Joseph invited Jette to listen to us sing. Our grand finale was “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along.” Freddy and I performed this with a little dance routine of our own devising that was supposed to represent the aforementioned robin, duly bob-bob-bobbin’. We sang and bobbed with such serious looks on our faces—this was our big moment, our first proper audience, and we were both concentrating madly—that at the end Jette had to sweep us into her arms and cover us with kisses to hide her laughter. Just at that moment, Teddy ran around the corner. He saw his grandmother bend down to hug us, her face lit up with pleasure, and came to an abrupt stop. Seconds later, Frank hurtled into the room, crashed into his brother, and sent them both sprawling forward in a heap. The twins gazed up at the three of us locked in our delicious embrace, and I knew right away that that was the end of that.
Sure enough, the following night Frank and Teddy joined the huddle around the piano, demanding to be included. Freddy and I complained in a halfhearted way, but we knew that there was nothing we could do to stop them.
What I hadn’t anticipated was how completely the twins would eclipse us.
I will never forget the night I first heard Frank and Teddy sing. Joseph asked us to repeat our recital of the night before, and we awkwardly stumbled through the songs while the twins sat on the floor, listening. By unspoken agreement, there was no bobbin’ of robins this time. If we were going to go down, we would go down with some measure of dignity preserved.
When we had finished, Joseph beckoned the twins toward the piano and began to play some simple melodies for them to sing. From the moment they opened their mouths, it was clear where our grandfather’s musical legacy had come to rest. The twins’ voices were as pure and as sweet as morning birdsong. As each perfect note emerged from their untutored throats, Freddy and I shrank further into the wall.
My father’s face was illuminated with something leagues beyond joy.
The twins had no idea of the effect they were having on the rest of us. When Joseph finally closed the piano they hovered for a second or two and then ran howling out of the room, throwing punches at each other as they went. Freddy and I were left in silence with our father. He looked at us.
“Well!” he said.
That night I cried myself to sleep.
J
oseph had originally supposed that Freddy would sing the lead melody in our little quartet, and I would sing the second part. Frank and Teddy would be consigned to the nether regions of harmony, the unglamorous tonics and humdrum fifths, while Freddy and I stole the show. After that first night, though, we all knew that those plans would have to change. Joseph did his best to cheer us up when he explained this to us. He told us that the lower parts were musically more challenging. That was certainly true, but if anything it made matters worse, given the imbalance in our abilities. Frank and Teddy only had to listen to an arrangement once for the music to be hardwired into their musical circuitry. After that they could reproduce each of the four separate parts, effortlessly unpacking the tune’s complex harmonic structure.
Freddy and I, by contrast, had to work devilishly hard. Singing the melody was one thing; delving deep into each chord to forage for underlying harmonies was quite another. Each note felt as if we were stepping into a void. To our young ears these new parts seemed untethered from the tune. We had to listen, listen, and then listen again as Joseph patiently played our parts on the piano. We stood and practiced until those alien notes finally stuck in our heads.
Joseph taught us all the barbershop favorites. The lyrics might as well have been in Latin for all the sense they made to us. Some sight we must have made, four young boys declaring their love for a procession of faceless girls with names like Dolly, Nelly, Suzy, and, of course, Adeline. We offered up hymns to this gal and that gal, your gal and my gal, a legion of babies, sweethearts, and dolls. We sang a lot about walking down streets, in the rain, on the sunny side—actually, in just about every meteorological condition imaginable. And we sang an awful lot about Dixie, without ever being sure who or what Dixie was. There was unsurpassed silliness and cheap sentimentality in abundance. Still, on we sang, learning how to blend our voices into one.
Freddy and I labored away at the underbelly of the tunes while the twins soared effortlessly above us, and occasionally our harmonies coalesced into something rather beautiful. But as our singing improved, the nightly sessions around the piano became more fractious: it did not take long for the music to become just one more thing for Frank and Teddy to fight about. They began to bicker and squabble about who should sing the lead. Soon our rehearsals became the forum where the twins’ loathing of each other was refined to its purest, most poisonous form. I couldn’t tell their voices apart if I closed my eyes, and perhaps that was the problem: the burden of being indistinguishable from each other, even on such a sublime level, must have been unbearable. If they were not singing in perfect harmony, they were pinching and kicking each other. While the twins fought, Freddy and I toiled. Very often nobody was having an especially good time.