Sing for Me (38 page)

Suddenly I’m angry. “Who is this boss, anyway?”

George laughs. “Believe me, sweets, you don’t want to know.” He lights the cigar now, takes a long draw. “Listen, tell the others that the boss says you’re okay here for a while, as long as no one complains. But the sooner Mr. Chastain gets back, the better, you hear? And in case it takes him a while to solve his so-called health problems, your little quartet had better practice hard and hold your own, or you’ll be hitting the streets.”

“I’ll tell them,” I say, and I hold myself tighter.

Nights we’re not performing, we practice.

Mrs. Chastain and Mary invite us to come to their house. When we do, they fix us delicious meals. After we’ve eaten, they sit and listen to our rehearsal, smiling, sometimes, or crying, sometimes, or sometimes with their heads bowed or their hands busy doing small chores or tasks. When we leave, Mrs. Chastain and Mary follow us to the door. They reach out, saying good-bye, and their hands linger in ours. Touching us, you’d think
they were touching Theo, holding on to him, somehow, because they’re holding on to his friends. Three weeks have passed—we’re a few days into May—and still none of us have heard from him. Ira and Jim are matter-of-fact about this: “Don’t worry, Mrs. Chastain. It takes a while to cover so many miles.” Dex is reassuring: “Now, Mary, don’t cry. You know he’s made of tough stuff.” But I look at these other women in Theo’s life, his mother and his sister, my friends who feel almost like family, and I don’t say a word. Their eyes, like mine, are filled with contradictory emotions. Hope and dread. Fear and courage. Doubt and resolution. Nothing is black-and-white anymore. Everything is mixed to gray.

On the nights we don’t practice at the Chastains’ apartment, we practice at Jim’s house. Jim lives near Rob, in Austin, and when Rob knows we’re there he’ll stop by. Sometimes he’ll bring Zane. The two of them drink more than they should, and when they get too distracting, we ask them to leave. “Save it for Calliope’s,” one of the other fellows will say, and I’ll add, “Better yet, stop it altogether.”

On Monday nights, when Calliope’s is closed, we practice there. And it is here that Nils finds me, the second Monday night in May.

We’re leaving for the evening when I spot him. He’s pulled his car close to the curb, and though it’s a warm evening, with the wind blowing balmy off the lake, he’s sitting behind the steering wheel, windows up, intently watching the door. He doesn’t feel comfortable in this neighborhood, it’s clear. When he sees me, his eyes widen with surprise, and then narrow with confirmation. He nods, opens his door, and steps out. Dex, Ira, and Jim are gathered around me, saying good-bye, see you
tomorrow night, when Jim says sharply, “Who’s that, Blue Dress? You know him?” Nils is fast approaching, his face tight with concern. Ira steps in front of me, and Dex, too, and Jim stands stalwartly by my side. Only when I tell them that Nils is an old friend do they give him some room.

“Rob wouldn’t tell me where you were tonight, but Zane thought you’d be here,” Nils says in lieu of hello. Then he thrusts his hand into the space between Ira and Jim. Awkwardly I take it. But shaking my hand isn’t what Nils wants to do. Instead, he draws me to him and starts to walk me toward his car.

“You all right with this, Blue Dress?” Jim calls to me. “I was planning on driving you home just like always.”

I look up at Nils. “Are we all right?”

He says, “I’d like to talk with you again, Rose. I’ve been waiting for you to call me. Then I started waiting for the right time to call you. Tonight I just couldn’t wait anymore, so I decided the time was now.”

His big hand covers mine, hiding everything but the tips of my fingers. His long legs span the distance to his car in great strides, so that I have to jog to keep up. Trailing behind him, I feel like a little child. After the challenges of these last weeks without Theo, this feels comforting. I look over my shoulder at Jim, Ira, and Dex, and I tell them everything’s fine. Breathlessly I call, “See you tomorrow night,” to remind myself that I may indeed look forward to this. Then Nils opens the car door for me and I sit down in the front seat beside him.

This is the way the world is. If Nils were Theo, I’d sit in the backseat. I’d sit there happy in my discontent. Now I sit in the front, relieved to be with my childhood friend again.

We drive north toward our part of town, with the sun sinking below the horizon to our left. For a while we don’t say anything. I keep my eyes out for a glimpse of the gorgeous, tumultuous sunset that flashes in intermittent bursts down the alleys between factories, and stores, and homes. We’re in the vicinity of Hull House now, near the apartment where Theo first heard me sing, where he asked me to do the work I wanted to do, then took a rose-patterned rag in his hand and helped me do the work I needed to do. So I’m thinking of Theo, the way he cleaned those radiators until they gleamed, when Nils turns to me and says, “Where would you like to go? Name it. I’ll take you there.”

I blink the thought of Theo away, or try to. For old times’ sake, I say, “Your house? I’ve been wondering whether you’ve gotten any new butterflies.”

“Come on.” Nils smiles wryly. “Really?”

“Really.” And, really, I have wondered this. I’ve wondered what train tracks Theo took south, and in wondering this, I’ve wondered if he jumped on a freight car, and in wondering this, I’ve wondered what kind of freight the car carried—livestock? produce? coal? steel?—and in wondering this, I’ve wondered about Nils, whether he’s made any recent trips to the yards and, if so, what kind of insects did he find there in the freight cars? Tarantulas? Butterflies? A creature I can’t imagine, that I don’t even know exists?

“I’d love to see something beautiful,” I say.

Nils says, “My parents are at home. So not tonight. I want to talk without interruption.”

I blink. “Oh.”

“So. Where?”

“Let me think a minute.” I open the car window and look
toward the lake. I smell water on the wind and, fleeting as a bird’s call, I hear the bell-like clanging of sailboats anchored in the closest harbor. Yearning fills me. Maybe I’ve inherited Dad’s love of the sea. If I’d been a boy living in Copenhagen, maybe I’d have been a sailor, too. I wouldn’t have been a little mermaid, that’s for sure.

I want to see the water.

And now I’m remembering the sweet, comfortable night with Nils at Old Prague, and the way I imagined things would go when he said he had something he wanted me to see. Almost that night seems a lifetime ago. Almost I was a different girl, not even a young woman yet. Almost I miss her, that girl, myself.

I look at Nils. His fine profile, that shock of hair, are distinctly familiar against the purpling sky.

“Let’s go to Adler Planetarium and sit by the lake and look at the stars,” I say.

Nils parks, then we walk through growing dark toward the immense round building that is Adler Planetarium. I can hear waves slapping against the stones that line the lakefront, and a bright crescent moon hangs just above the planetarium’s dome. Starlight pricks the sky. Nils doesn’t catch hold of my hand; he keeps a respectful distance. For that I’m grateful. When we pass through the puddles of light cast by streetlamps, I can see the expression on his face. I may feel comfortable with him, but he looks anything but that with me. He chews worriedly at his lip, and his gaze is focused intently on something I can’t make out. It could be the planetarium’s granite facade, but I think it’s more likely the future.

“Sophy desperately wants to visit the planetarium,” I say for something to say. “As soon as I can save up a little extra money, I’m going to bring her.”

“Good.” Nils sounds distracted because he
is
distracted, still staring off at something I can’t see. He is walking quickly now, even for him. No jogging about it; I have to run. In the next puddle of streetlamp light, I look up at him and see the back of his head. He’s leaving me behind. Did Theo leave me behind? Is that what’s happened?

I’m about to call
Slow down, please!
when Nils whirls around, lopes back to me, swoops me up in his arms, and runs, runs, runs toward the lake. I feel small in his arms, which feels all right for a moment—
this is how it’s supposed to be, this is what I was raised to expect, this is what dreams are made of, being cradled like this, being carried over the threshold
—but then he stumbles and my head whacks against his shoulder, and I come to my senses. “Put me down,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me. Or he won’t. He runs on, cradling me in his arms.

I am frightened. I fling my arms around his neck, lest he drop me. He must take this as a sign that I am where I want to be. He runs on. We pass the planetarium and in its massive shadow the air turns cool. Then we are by the water. Nils leaps down to the first tier of stones, jarring me; he leaps to the second tier, and I feel the bones of his arms, his shoulders, and his ribs, jarred by the impact of his landing. He staggers, and then leaps to the third and final tier. We are just above the water now. He walks to the stones’ edge. For one horrible moment, I wonder if he’s going to throw me in just so he can save me, little woman that I am in his arms. He’s struggling to catch his breath, struggling, I realize, as the moonlight illuminates his face, not to cry.

But he doesn’t drop me into the choppy water; not yet. He bows his head. “Save us,” he says to someone I imagine must be God. Then he sets me down.

When my feet touch stone, I gasp with relief. I look at Nils and he looks at me.

“Marry me, Rose,” he says.

I close my eyes. In the darkness, I gather my thoughts. I open my eyes. I tell him yet again that I’m sorry. He is a good man, a great man—the best of the Old World in the New, and even more than that. But I’m not the girl he used to know, not entirely. And I’m not the young woman he wants me to be. I’m someone different from that.

“I’m called to be someone different,” I say.

“And with someone different.”

“Yes.”

I push back the shock of hair from his eyes, and hold him as he collects himself. How can it be that a man this tall can weep like a small child in my arms? The single shadow we make breaks and mends again on the waves.

TWENTY-TWO