The Jazz Palace (3 page)

Hannah didn't hear Benny's footsteps coming up the stairs. She didn't hear him outside, hurling stones against the fence in the empty lot. If she had, she'd have known right away that something was wrong. Hannah had learned to read the signs in her boys. If they didn't look her in the eye, if they shoved food around on their plate. If they hesitated coming home. Boys should eat hearty meals. They shouldn't drag their feet. But Hannah was in her bedroom, dusting her glass figurines.

Hannah cleaned the ferocious bear she had carried in her rucksack from the old country, the doe with fragile legs that stood, ears perked, in a grove of trees, the rosebud with its hundred carved petals her husband had given her for their marriage. The rosebud reminded her that once she and Leo had danced at their wedding. They had reveled when Benny, their first son, was born. Hannah returned to the task of folding her husband's clothes. She had just pressed and ironed his undershirts, and she held the warm cotton against her cheek. His drawer was messy as she reached into the back to straighten up the wayward socks. Leo could hardly complain about his clothes not being neat, but still he did. As far as Hannah was concerned, he had nothing to complain about. But, since Harold died, he complained all the time. He complained that the soup was
too cold or the coffee too hot, the meat overcooked or underdone. Nothing would ever be right.

She looked about the dreary room. It was dark, and the walls were stained. There was a smell of shoes and cigars she couldn't get rid of. Hannah had tried to let light in, but their bedroom overlooked an alley, and what little light seeped in was a dirty gray. She kept the room clean. She had made colorful bedspreads and airy curtains, but, no matter what she did, the apartment never felt cheery. She had not managed to make it into a home.

Hannah was sitting motionless on the bed when she heard someone staggering up the stairs. No one should be coming home at this hour. Quickly she rose and straightened the spread. Then she rushed to open the door. As Benny walked in, Hannah took one look at him and placed a hand to his brow. “Benny, what is it?” She saw the sooty skin, the greasy hair. “Are you all right?”

Though Benny had perfected the art of keeping things from his father, he was less successful with his mother. Perhaps because he didn't want to. As her warm hand touched his cheek, words poured from him like a sieve. He blurted out that there had been a terrible accident. Hundreds, he told her, had drowned. At first Hannah did not believe him. She could not see how such a thing could happen. But as Benny told her what he had seen, tears streamed down her face. Hannah listened, a quivering hand cupped over her mouth. Her mind ricocheted from the poor people who had drowned to this latest disaster that had befallen her oldest son. “How is this possible?” She shook her head. She made him a hot bath of baking soda and salts.

She got on her knees and, despite his protests, scrubbed the river from him. She scrubbed until his skin turned red and raw. When she was done, she dressed him in flannel, though it was a hot July day, and made him drink a bowl of scalding chicken soup. She'd sweat the river out of him. While Benny sipped the soup, perspiration dripping from his forehead, his mother sank into an armchair and wept. She cried because it seemed as if wherever her son went, disaster followed. Benny could think of nothing to say to comfort her. He
couldn't tell her about the child who'd slipped out of his grasp. About the dead girl he'd danced with on the hull. He hadn't been able to save his own brother either. So on these matters he was silent.

When he was finished with his soup, Hannah took the bowl, rinsed it in the sink, then her hand went to her head. Benny saw the look as if an ax had struck her skull. She went to her room and closed her door. She had come down with one of her headaches—the kind that sent her to bed for days at a time. Hannah could not bear light or almost any noise. She had to lie with a towel across her face in the darkened silence of her sewing room. She had gone to bed for weeks with the curtains drawn when Harold died. The only sound she could bear was music. Chopin preludes, Beethoven sonatas, soft, lilting pieces that she asked Benny to play.

Benny sat down at the oak piano with its rich, clear tones. He ran his hands across the golden wood surface. Its brightness shone against the dullness of the apartment. The sheet music from his lesson was open on the stand. Since they'd purchased it secondhand five years ago, his mother's goal was to make Benny into a great pianist. She herself had studied music at a conservatory as a girl, and, if she hadn't married, she often told the boys, she would have continued with her musical studies. Hannah had aspirations for all her sons, but none so great as those she harbored for Benny. She had found Dimitri Marcopolis, a Greek Jew, through a former teacher of hers who told her that Mr. Marcopolis had once had a concert career until circumstances forced him to leave Europe. He was a teacher she could afford.

Hannah would see to it that Benny had that career. He would elevate himself above the world of caps and crowded apartments. She envisioned him in tails, a soloist onstage with the Chicago Symphony. He was better, she thought, different from her other boys with his brooding gray eyes, those long, strong arms. It wasn't because he was her first but because he was the one who felt the most. Even as a baby, when he cried, he curled into himself. He wept as if whatever upset him came from somewhere deep inside. But when he sat down to play, something happened to him. He opened up, unfolded. His mother watched him bloom.

Now, with his hair still wet and the terrible day etched in his mind, he wanted to try out the rhythms he listened to in the alleyways on the South Side. He could lose himself there. But his mother wouldn't approve, and it wouldn't draw her out of her darkness. In his lessons Benny was working on a Beethoven sonata, and he was having trouble with the second movement. Mr. Marcopolis insisted that he stick to the piece, but Benny didn't want to. He couldn't hear the music in his head, and he could barely make out the notes. Benny had never really learned to read music. He hadn't needed to because he was good at faking it. If his teacher played a piece for him two or three times, Benny could pick it up. But he had to hear it in his head and he wasn't hearing it now.

He played best by ear. Anything he heard he could repeat. Anything he was told, he could remember. That was how he'd gotten through his bar mitzvah. He'd memorized his Torah portion, never bothering to learn to read the Hebrew. It was the same with music. First he heard it in his head, then in his heart. And finally in his fingers. He had been able to do this since he was young enough to talk, and he thought of this as a strange, useless talent, like someone who can memorize all the numbers in the phone directory or say words backward.

He could name notes the way a painter could name colors. In fact he saw them in colors. C major came in yellow and A major in orange. G was green and F a shade of blue. The minor notes were the muted shades of sunsets—mauve, rose, tangerine. Benny knew in what key the wind howled or crystal when it chimed.

Now he struggled with the first few bars of the Beethoven sonata, but quickly switched to Bach. He played fast and too hard. He didn't have that light, elegant touch. Then he stopped and listened. When he was sure his mother was resting, he switched tunes. He roughed out the rhythms he'd been humming just before the
Eastland
sank. He switched it to a minor key. The music was filled with forgetting. The colors swirled. Splashes, a kaleidoscope, raced through his head.

I
t was earlier than usual when Leo Lehrman got home. He'd heard about the sinking of the
Eastland
, as had the rest of Chicago. He walked home from the “el” thinking of what he'd say to his son. It was only after he'd yelled at him and the boy had run off that Leo understood what Benny had seen. Leo stood in the doorway to his son's bedroom, where Benny was stretched out on the bed.

Leaning into the doorjamb, Leo stared at his short, compact body. He was startled by the black fringe on his boy's upper lip. His son's fingers were flitting across the page of his book. Leo wondered why Benny couldn't sit still. For an instant he felt the urge to ease his way down on the bed and stroke his son's hair. But Leo couldn't look at his son and not think about the blizzard two years before. He couldn't look at Benny and not remember that Hannah had begged him to let the boys stay home. “I never stayed home,” Leo had shouted. “I never missed a day of school.” This wasn't actually true. Leo had missed many days of school. He had frittered away his afternoons in pool halls or shadowboxing on street corners. It was one of the dozens of lies he'd made up about his life, lies even he had come to believe.

But on that day when Hannah saw her husband was insisting, she'd tied the boys together with a rope. “Be careful,” she'd told Benny as she pulled the rope taut through their belt loops. She'd gazed out at the sheer whiteness beyond her window. “You're in charge of your brothers.” Hannah watched her four sons, vanishing into the snow, their footprints trailing off until they disappeared.

Even now, as Benny lay stretched on his bed, Leo could see him, racing up the stairs, breathless, crying. As he stood in the doorway, he wished he could gather him into his arms. Instead what he saw was his oldest son telling him that six-year-old Harold, the boy with the dimpled grin, had not been on the other end of the rope when the brothers reached the school—a school they'd found closed due to snow. And they would not find Harold—who had curled against a fence to fend off the wind—until the spring. It was difficult for Leo to look at his son and not think of that day and the days that followed. “Benny,” his father said, louder than he intended.

Benny leaped up. Though a book lay open on his bed, he hadn't
been reading. He had been somewhere else altogether—a place where he'd left behind the events of that morning. He had been trying to figure out a tune he'd heard in an alleyway on the South Side the week before. It was a lilting melody with too many notes, and whoever was playing seemed to take up the whole keyboard. His head was full of musical notes, and he wished he could write them down. Though he'd never cared before, it bothered him now. He'd been tapping out a tune on his sheets when his father opened the door. Benny clasped his hand to his heart. “I didn't hear you.” Already he'd lost the refrain.

“I'm sorry I yelled at you today,” his father said. “I didn't know what happened.” Leo took a step closer into the room. Benny looked up at his father with the same glazed look he'd worn that morning that made Leo pause.

His body stiffened at the sound of his father's voice.

Leo clung to the doorjamb. “It's a terrible thing, and I am sorry you had to see it.”

Benny nodded. “I'm all right.”

“Well, good. That's good then.” His father struck the wall as he turned to go. “Dinner's ready.”

His brothers were already at the table. They too had heard about the
Eastland
and wanted to know what Benny had seen. “Tell us,” Ira, who was closest to Benny in age, said. He had a reddish complexion, and his skin looked especially red that evening. “Tell us what you saw.”

Benny's mind was a blank. He remembered that festive moment. A ragtime tune was playing, and he smelled chicken and fresh-baked breads. He'd chatted with a woman and her two little girls. Then the woman's mouth opened into a scream. “I saw a feathered hat,” Benny said.

Ira bent closer to his brother. “I don't understand.”

“Leave him alone.” Hannah slapped Ira with a serving spoon. “Pass this.”

Hannah rubbed her head with her hands. “Be quiet,” Leo told the boys. “Your mother has a headache.” Ira, whose face was now very red, passed the casserole dish to his father. Leo Lehrman sat
hunched over his food. When Arthur, who was younger than Benny by five years, reached across for a piece of bread, Leo said, “And break your bread before you butter it.”