Quintet
This story takes place around 1950.
He said he would call, so I’ve left the door of our apartment open, listening for a ring on the payphone downstairs.
We’re on the third floor in what may have been servants’ quarters or maybe just an attic. It’s impossible to stand anywhere in the living room but dead center because of the slope of the roof. The furniture says attic, too. A recamier sofa in faded mauve is too stiff to sit on. One shabby overstuffed chair and an unsteady floor lamp crowd the space.
Two bedrooms and a kitchen open off a long narrow hall, which leads to the bathroom, and because the bathroom door tends to hang open unless hooked from within, it’s an even bet the first thing anyone entering the apartment sees is the toilet. It’s the old-fashioned kind with a box up high and a long chain with a wooden pull. Except for one wall in each bedroom painted a deep blue that my roommate Véro has pronounced “poisonous,” the walls are all of a dingy yellow cast.
The kitchen has a small rusty-looking gas stove. Not all of the burners work, but the landlady promises to have them fixed. There’s a refrigerator, a small sink, and next to it, a shelf just large enough to accommodate a dish drainer. An old bookcase painted that same blue — it must have been headed for one of the bedrooms and lost its way — serves as dish cabinet and room divider.
A dinette set aligned with the window wall is, to my untrained eye, a plus. Because the house next door is not as deep, the sun has full access to this room through two large windows, and the combination of sunlight and the maple finish of the table and chairs makes for the closest thing to warmth or cheeriness the apartment has to offer. Véro finds the set “common.”
Before I met Véro, I was living in a furnished room in Cambridge just off Mass Avenue, working at a little ad agency in Boston, and, in my idle hours, haunting the bookstores around Harvard Square. I intended to spend more time writing poetry, but I was just out of college, on my own for the first time, and easily distracted.
That spring someone must have issued a new recording of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet. As the weather warmed, its strains seemed to spill from every third window. When I wasn’t actually hearing it, it was running through my head, filling me with nostalgia for a world I’d never known — a world where hearts are light, not from innocence, but from having seen it all and survived. It was what I imagined Europe to be.
When my landlady, Mrs. Brainerd, announced that a French girl, Véronique Letendal, was to take the room next to mine, I was thrilled at the prospect of rubbing shoulders with someone from that world. From the first, Véro found the shabby genteel surroundings dismal, the house rules — no men above the first floor — stupid, and Mrs. Brainerd impossible. When she located this apartment, I was flattered that she asked me to share it with her.
True, I was a little disheartened when I glimpsed a dust-covered apple core under the bed in the room that was to be mine, but the advantages of living with Véro outweighed any concern. At the least, I thought, my French will improve. I plan to visit France as soon as I’ve saved some money.
In the end, Véro convinced me the apartment was ideal. She can walk to her classes, and, instead of walking two blocks to the Mass Avenue trolley, I can roll out of bed in the morning and onto the bus. It stops right in front of the house. The bus spills me out underground at the subway stop, and the subway carries me to Park Square. From there it’s a half block walk to my job.
Of course, as it turns out, we speak French very little. I’m too hesitant, and Véro’s too impatient. Her English is very good. She keeps just enough of her accent to enchant anyone who sets foot in the apartment.
We made plans right away to fix the place up, but we haven’t done much beyond buying some bamboo blinds, a couple of woven wastebaskets, and a straw mat for the kitchen, the only room that’s at all inviting. A Chinese woman, a classmate of Véro’s, stopped by one day, and when she caught sight of the mat, she shuddered.
“How can you stand that?” she cried. “It’s what they put dead bodies in!”
We thought that was funny at first, but later we rolled the mat up and took it downstairs and out to the trash barrel standing on the curb. We’d paid only a couple of dollars for it, after all.
That was the first time I saw the Polish woman. She was standing by the barrel, a grease-stained paper bag in her hand, as if not quite certain how to proceed.
“Please,” she said, gesturing for us to go ahead.
Véro wouldn’t hear of it. I knew she was thinking how unpleasant it must be to hang on to a mess like that even for an instant. The woman dropped the bag in the barrel and turned aside, but she didn’t leave right away. Véro deposited the mat, I dumped the contents of the wastebasket we’d brought along, and we went back in, leaving the woman still standing by the curb.
“Who was that?” I asked, as we climbed the stairs.
“Shh,” Véro cautioned, and then, as we reached the second-floor landing, she pointed to a room at the back and whispered, “Her name is Nadia Zomzing-or-other. Very mysterious. Brunhilde won’t say anything but that she’s Polish — and she works in a factory!”
Brunhilde is Véro’s name for our new landlady, a tall fleshy woman who seems always to be wearing the same flowered print dress. Although she must be forty-something, her hair is still thick and yellow. She wears it pulled back from her face and hanging in a braid over one shoulder. A passage, which seems never to be lit, leads from the first-floor entryway to her quarters in the rear, and she sometimes startles us by materializing out of the dark while we’re talking on the payphone.
Véro is sure Brunhilde has something going with the construction worker who occupies a room in the front just off the vestibule. I picture her winding the braid around her head and fastening it with a jeweled comb when they go out.
“Nadia” didn’t sound like a factory worker’s name to me, and the woman at the curb looked more like a head waitress or a department store saleslady in her close-fitting black dress. We were inside the apartment and I’d started back to the kitchen when Véro grabbed my arm and pulled me into the living room. She got down on her knees to look out of the little front window and I followed suit. Below, on the curb, Nadia was studying the trash barrel. With a sudden motion she grabbed the mat and pulled it out.
Véro turned toward me, her hand over her mouth in a mock attempt to smother her laughter. When I looked again, Nadia was hurrying toward the house, but her progress seemed painful. She dragged her left leg, and I could see that her left shoe had a very thick sole. Except for the way she was dressed, she could have been our age.
When the phone finally rings, I bolt down the two flights to the vestibule. Then I wait a moment before picking up the receiver so I won’t sound breathless. The landlady, standing in the shadowy corridor, looks at me with something like amusement. She retreats almost as soon as I catch sight of her.
“Hello, hello?” It’s a woman’s voice, heavily accented. “Listen, please. You will help, yes?”
I should have let Brunhilde answer.
“Please,” the woman says, “I worry for my friend. She doesn’t work today. Nadia.”
“Would you like to speak with her?”
I use my receptionist voice, all the time thinking how long it will take Nadia to make her way to the phone. What if Stefan finds the line busy? Will he try again?
“No, no. Not to disturb.” The caller pauses.
“If you’ll give me your name . . .” I prompt.
“Please,” she says. “Nadia has heart. Go. See. Tell her Lena calls. Please. I wait.”
Nadia doesn’t open her door. She calls out that she’s all right. Her voice sounds thin, unsure. I almost ask if I can get her something, but I remember that her friend is still on the line. What if Stefan can’t get through when he calls?
The phone rings again the minute I hang up.
“Sally,” Stefan says.
“Have you been trying to get me?” I reply.
“No,” he says. “Why?”
I wish I hadn’t asked. Then he asks me if I’d like to go to a party one of his instructors is giving the following evening. I wonder if I should say I’m busy. It’s not much notice. I pretend to mull it over.
“You might find his place interesting,” he says, giving me an excuse to accept. “It’s his own design.”
When Stefan picks me up the next day, he apologizes for the car, a secondhand Chevy with green plaid seat covers. It’s the best he can afford just now, he says. At first, the car bucks when he changes gears, and each time he mutters under his breath. In German, I think. I begin to have qualms when we’ve gone well beyond the Square and he’s said nothing to me for some time. Sitting there in silence, I think of how little I really know about him. He’s just someone who knows someone who knows someone I know.
“You are so quiet,” Stefan says. “What are you thinking about?”
“The house,” I lie. “I wonder what it will be like.”
Four or five men are standing outdoors holding drinks when we arrive. The host, a tall, homely man with thinning hair and pale blue eyes behind rimless glasses, comes to the car to greet us. Stefan introduces him as Professor Vincent.
“Ben,” the professor corrects. He throws an arm around each of us and sweeps us toward the house.
“Here’s the young man I’ve been telling you about,” he calls to the others, “and his lady friend.”
I try to think of something intelligent to say about the house — from what I can see, it’s just a barn with windows — but I needn’t have bothered. The professor all but shoves me up the steps, saying, “You’ll find Tess inside,” and leads Stefan and the others off to see “the west elevation.”
“You must be Stefan’s friend,” Tess says. “Are you Radcliffe or Wellesley?”
“Neither,” I say. “I work in Boston.”
I start to tell her where I went to college, but I can see she isn’t really interested.
“This is Sally,” she announces to the knot of women hovering just inside the door.
Some of them don’t look any older than I am, but it turns out they’re all wives and Tess is very pregnant. I might be from another planet. It’s a relief when she asks if we’d like to look around.
There aren’t any rooms on the first floor, just space. Tess leads us through it, pointing out areas. Upstairs, a sliding partition separates the nursery from the master bedroom. An old-fashioned cradle in the nursery — Ben’s, Tess says — turns them all to treacle. I keep hoping Stefan will rescue me, but when at last the men come in, they follow Professor Vincent to the far end of the downstairs where there’s a hi-fi system built into a wall. Stefan doesn’t even glance in my direction.
Although we’re in the same space, there are two different gatherings taking place. I can hear the men talking about woofers and tweeters. The women are going on about their husbands — even the kind of undershorts they wear — just as if they weren’t in the room.
If Véro were here, it might be fun. She’d be making faces behind their backs, and later she’d mimic them perfectly. Alone, I concentrate on eating cashews so I won’t drink the wine too fast. After a while I notice that I’ve eaten nearly all the nuts that Tess put out. She must have noticed, too, because she suddenly announces, loudly enough to catch her husband’s attention, that she’s going to get something from the kitchen. The professor’s a little high now, and more than a little pleased with himself.
“Sit right there, little mother,” he says, pushing Tess back into her chair. “I’ll take care of it. Sally’s going to help me.”
He grabs me by the wrist and pulls me after him. I can hear Tess and the other women laughing. Would they laugh if they could see the way he looks at me when we’re out of sight? Those pale, bulging eyes! I’m glad now that there are no walls. After a long moment, he plants a bowl of onion dip in my hands and steers me back by the elbow, leaving red marks on my arm.
The evening drones on and my face aches from smiling. I wonder what I’m doing here among all these strangers. At last the professor stands up and asks, “Can I get anyone another drink?” It’s a signal for the guests to begin moving toward the door. As they go, they throw compliments back over their shoulders as if they’ll need them to find their way again.
“Great evening!”
“Fabulous house!”
It was light on the drive out. Now it’s dark, almost midnight. There aren’t many cars on the road and I haven’t any idea where we are. What if we have a flat tire? What if the car breaks down?
Why has Stefan brought me out here, anyway? He’s barely said a word to me all evening. And why have I come? In the occasional streetlight we pass, his profile is hard, cruel even. I think of all the stories I’ve heard.
Something like a sob, compounded of my fears and all the wine I’ve drunk, betrays me. Stefan pulls the car to the side of the road and stops the engine.
“What is it?” he says, turning to me. “You are not happy.”
“Those awful people,” I blubber.
He’s holding me now and I am happy. I can’t tell him that a moment earlier I thought him capable of killing me and leaving my body by the roadside.
“But the Vincents have been so kind to me,” he says.
“I didn’t mean them,” I reply.
Of course I did mean the Vincents, Benjamin Vincent especially. But not just them, all their friends as well.
“Poor little Sally,” Stefan says. “Someone has upset you.”
He takes my face in his hands.
“You must tell me who it was,” he says. “I’ll go back at once and challenge him to a duel.”
Then he’s kissing me and I forget everything else. Neither of us notices the policeman who’s pulled up behind us until we hear a car door slam. An instant later he’s shining an enormous flashlight on us and shouting, “Break it up and move along!”
What happens once we’re back in the apartment I put down to my poet’s need to know whereof I write.
I begin to think of us as a couple now, almost like Véro and Frédéric. Frédéric, who comes from Lyons, is Véro’s fiancé. He’s at the business school. He’s very serious about his studies, Véro says, so they see each other only on Wednesday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Since our move, Frédéric has been coming to the apartment for Wednesday dinners. I ask Stefan to join us, and soon we’re a regular foursome. We take turns fixing the meal, even stuffy Frédéric who makes us crepes. All the little inconveniences that have plagued us since we moved in are now just subjects of fun.
“Imagine!” Véro says, about the gasman’s method of tracing a leak from the stove. “We could be blown to pieces, and this man is making soap bubbles!”
In spite of his horror of rodents, Frédéric undertakes to rid the apartment of mice. He has purchased some pellets guaranteed to kill and, he announces proudly, to leave no corpses behind. “The mice will make their way à la campagne to die. It says so on the box,” he says. I picture them going by trolley and bus.
Véro’s other friends, who can make me so uncomfortable, appear to have fled for the summer. I’ve never been so happy. If only our “laughing Wednesdays,” as Véro calls them, would go on forever.
Seeing Stefan in company with Frédéric, whose good looks are almost classic, I try to analyze what’s attractive about Stefan. His eyes are heavy-lidded and his lips rather full. His hair, which he wears brushed straight back, is coarse and almost black. They’re not the features I imagined in my dream man.
When, in a tender moment, I tell him he looks like a Plains Indian, he laughs and says, “It’s possible. My forbears were careless couplers.”
Maybe it’s just the dimples.
“He’s very charming, your Stevie,” Véro says, “but is he all that he seems to be? Or is he perhaps more than he seems to be?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
“Oh, nothing,” she says. “It’s odd, don’t you think, that he never speaks of his home?”
“Why should he?” I snap.
“No reason, I’m sure,” Véro says. “Don’t upset yourself, ma chère.”
Not long after, Stefan and I are walking in the Square, eating ice cream cones, when a ragged looking dog begins to follow us. We ignore it at first, but it becomes bolder, insinuating itself between us.
“He’s after the ice cream,” I say.
“No,” Stefan says. “I think he wants only to be friends. Isn’t that right, Waldi?” he says to the dog.
The dog begins a frenzied tail-wagging. Stefan laughs and gives him the rest of his ice cream.
“He won’t let you alone now,” I say.
“But I like dogs,” Stefan says. “Don’t you?”
“Some,” I say.
“Which ones?” Stefan persists.
“Setters — and Dalmatians,” I say, because they’re breeds I recognize. I’ve never cared much for dogs.
“Ah,” Stefan says. “I see that you like only purebreds. Come along, Waldi. We are not good enough.”
He speeds up his step and the dog prances after him. I stand for a minute, hating that dog. Stefan doesn’t look back, and I think he’s going to leave me there, but when he gets to the corner he waits. The dog is zigzagging its way across the Avenue, snarling traffic.
“You see,” Stefan says, pointing, “I am like Waldi. Don’t expect manners from us.”
Then he tells me the story his second-grade teacher used to tell of how Rex, the noble Shepherd, saves the village from poverty and despair by driving out the mongrel who has been killing the sheep. I can see Stefan listening, the one little boy in the classroom with dark hair and “mixed” ancestry. Although his Mediterranean features are more like those of his mother, who comes from a very proper family with a Von in front of their name, he understands that it’s his father who’s the problem. For a long time, Stefan refused to talk to him.
I don’t know what to say. “Did your father…” I begin, hoping Stefan will go on, but he closes the door. Still, I think I know Stefan better now, and I’m ready to forgive his long silences. We’ll be closer, I think, but it doesn’t turn out that way. After a while, I wonder if I imagined that conversation.
One evening, just as we are leaving to see a French film, Véro comes in alone, complaining that Frédéric is being “impossible, just because of a little cold.”
“Where are you two off to?” she asks.
“To the devil!” Stefan laughs. “Diable Au Corps. The Michelle Morgan film.”
“With Gerard Philippe!” Véro sighs.
“You are so lucky,” she says to me. “Frédéric will never take me to see Gerard Philippe. He says films bore him. He’s just jealous!”
Stefan turns to me.
“What do you say?” he asks. “Shall we take her along? As translator?”
“Of course,” I say, hesitating for only an instant. “You can never trust the subtitles.”
Stefan sits between us in the theater. He doesn’t reach for my hand.
On Sunday, Ted, whom I’ve been seeing off and on since high school, calls to ask me to go to the beach with him. Ted is trying to work his way through MIT. He’s often out of funds or behind in his studies, so I haven’t heard from him in a while. I put Ted off, telling him I’m working on a poem.
Poetry, I like to think, is my true vocation. What I do at work is mostly answer the phone, clip copies of clients’ ads from newspapers to staple to their bills, and while away the time talking with our art department: Manny, an old timer who once put a client’s cigar in Harry Truman’s mouth and got away with it, and Helene who puts the perky housewives in our linen ads.
Once in a while the boss’s son, who writes the radio copy, lets me help him. We’re big on alliteration. Towels come in tantalizing tones. Sheets are silky soft. The hardest part is the typing. Five copies on pink onion skin. I’m always getting creases in the carbons.
Véro has gone off somewhere, leaving the apartment quiet. She wasn’t going to sit around waiting, she said, while Frédéric nursed “his silly cold.” I make myself sit down at the kitchen table with my notebook and start a poem I’ve been thinking of for a long while. It’s about a displaced person my father befriended when I was little — an inventor named Kretchmar who lived in a neighbor’s garage and subsisted on handouts. He was working on a scheme for a universal calculator that was going to solve all of humanity’s problems. Most of the town thought he was crazy, but Pop was convinced he was a genius. The man died ambiguously on Good Friday.
I’m not making much progress on the poem, and I keep hoping Stefan will call. If I’d made up the part about Mr. Kretchmar’s death, I think, it might ring true, but because it is true, it sounds contrived. I put the poem aside.
Tuesday evening Stefan phones to say he can’t make it for dinner the following evening. Something to do with Professor Vincent, which I don’t quite follow. Perhaps he’ll stop by later in the week.
That Wednesday’s dinner is not a big success, although I’ve gone all out and fixed the lasagna I planned before Stefan’s call. Frédéric, still nursing his cold, is grumpy, and Véro isn’t hiding her impatience with his complaints. I haven’t thought to buy wine, which might have made the scene less dismal. I stick it out as long as I can, then rather than banish myself to the living room again, I wind up going to bed early with a book.
I plan to go shopping with Helene after work the next day, so I tell Véro I’ll get something to eat in town. Helene has contacts in all the big stores. She knows where the bargains are, and she’s dying to educate me. We’re about to sneak out just before five when her sister calls. Their mother’s gallbladder is acting up. Helene seems more annoyed than worried, but she tells her sister she’ll be right along.
I poke around the stores for a while, but I’ve lost my enthusiasm. I find myself thinking of the leftover lasagna.
The door to the apartment is open when I get there. Climbing the stairs, I can hear the Mozart. The hallway is dark, and the music sounds both melancholy and erotic to me as I make my way back to the kitchen.
From the doorway, I see Véro standing by the table lighting candles. She doesn’t look up right away. The candle flames dance in the wine glasses she’s set out. With the background music coming from her little radio, it’s like watching a film. For a moment, I consider tiptoeing away. It isn’t until a voice calls out, “Which towel am I to use?” that it comes to me. It’s not like Frédéric to take two evenings in a row away from his studies.
“The little yellow one,” Véro answers, lifting her head.
“Sallee!” she exclaims, catching sight of me. The bathroom door opens and Stefan comes out, still drying his hands.
“We didn’t expect you so early!” Véro says. “Here, I’ll make another place.”
She’s talking very fast, even for her, and acting just as quickly. She grabs another plate and glass and puts them on the table.
“Open the wine, Stevie, do,” she directs, handing him a corkscrew with one hand and grabbing a knife and fork from a drawer with the other. We’re barely seated when she launches into her account of the day’s adventures.
The laundromat lady refused to make change for her. “Imagine!” She had to walk four blocks to the bank. “Imagine! Then the soap machine was empty!”
The lasagna is barely enough for three, even with the salad Véro has made. Stefan suggests we go out for ice cream. He helps me clear the table while Véro goes to get a sweater.
“You’re very quiet this evening,” he says, handing me a glass to rinse.
“I’m just surprised,” I say.
“At what?” he asks.
“At finding you here . . .” I almost add with Véro, but I catch myself.
Stefan smiles.
“I told you I’d try to stop in,” he says.
We have one more laughing Wednesday. Stefan brings sausages and potato salad from a German delicatessen. Not the real thing, he says, but not too bad. Frédéric, completely recovered, is in good spirits. Véro, in top form, wrinkles her nose and makes half-joking comments. The salad is vinegary, but what can one expect? It isn’t French after all.
Do I like the salad? Stefan wants to know. He couldn’t be more solicitous. Would I like another glass of wine? It’s a German wine, a white one. It goes down easily, and all my doubts go down with it.
“You have to take advantage of preseason prices,” Helene tells me as we’re leaving work the next day. She leads me through Slattery’s and Stearns just around the corner and then down to Washington Street. Before I know it, she’s talked me into buying a fall suit I can’t afford, even with the discount she’s wangled for me. It will be ready in a week. We celebrate my purchase in an Italian restaurant that has tables on the rooftop. Very European, Helene tells me, and assures me she’s picking up the tab.
It’s just getting dark when my bus pulls onto Kirkland Street. From the window I can see people standing near my stop, too many to be waiting for the bus at this hour. When I step off, I see an ambulance in the driveway, and just up the street, a police cruiser is parked, heading the wrong way. An attendant is shutting the back door of the ambulance. I get that sick feeling I always have around accidents. I think someone must have been hit in the street. I hurry past the crowd into the house. The front door has been left open. I’m careful to close it after me. Inside I see a policeman standing at the foot of the stairs.
“Live here?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, my voice shaking. “Third floor.”
“It’s all right. Let her through.”
It’s the landlady’s voice coming from above me. There are four rooms that open off the second-floor corridor — a small one at the front, two along the length, corresponding to the bedrooms in our apartment, and one in the back. I recognize the Swedish professor, peering from his room. The door at the back, Nadia’s door, is open. The landlady is standing a few feet in front of it talking to two men. One of them carries a small satchel. A doctor, I guess.
“Monday,” I hear the landlady say. “The last time.” Her face looks blotchy. I start up the next flight. “Nadia’s gone,” she calls, coming toward me. “Dead.”
It sounds like an accusation. I step back down to face her. She lifts her shoulders in a gesture of helplessness, then turns and goes back to where the men are still standing, talking quietly. I go on upstairs. Véro is waiting for me with the door open. I follow her into the kitchen.
“Imagine!” she says with a little shudder. “Since Tuesday! Right there.” She points at the floor.” All that time. Last night during dinner . . . Oh, Frédéric will be horrified!”
Véro hasn’t eaten and she can’t possibly eat in the kitchen — not now. She’s been waiting hours for someone to come to her rescue. She couldn’t even get to the telephone. “Maybe now that the body,” she shudders again at the word, “is gone….” We go back to the door and listen. We can hear the lodgers talking with one another.
“I never once saw her,” a woman is saying. “I didn’t know there was anyone living in that room.”
There are footsteps going up and down, doors opening and closing. When it’s been quiet for a few minutes we start down. We meet the landlady, flushed and perspiring, coming up from the first floor. Véro slips by her just as she reaches the landing, but I, following, can’t pass without awkwardness. The landlady keeps touching her hair, which is pulling loose from its braid, all the while looking at me in a way that’s almost pleading. She makes that same gesture of helplessness with her shoulders and starts walking back toward Nadia’s room.
I walk along behind her, I’m not sure why. I’m afraid of what I may see. But the bed has already been stripped down to the metal springs. A large suitcase lies open on top of it. The windows are open and the curtains have been tied back to let in the breeze. I look around the room. There’s almost nothing in it. A couple of books on the nightstand have titles I can’t make out. They seem to be all consonants. The dresser drawers stand open, already empty. A small crucifix hangs on the wall over the bed.
I look up at the ceiling. What must it have been like to lie in this room alone, hearing up above the clatter of dishes, voices, careless laughter? The landlady guesses what I’m thinking.
“Nadia didn’t mind,” she says, inclining her head toward the ceiling. “It’s like being at a party, she told me once.”
These are more words than I’ve heard the landlady speak in all the months we’ve lived here. I don’t really want to hear more, but she goes on.
“Poor thing! You know what she liked?”
She motions me to the open closet where a few dresses hang. I begin handing them to her and she answers her own question, all the while folding dresses and putting them in the bag.
“She liked the music from your phonograph. It reminded her of home.”
I try to think what music that might be. I have only a handful of records, all classical. No polkas. Not even any Chopin. Perhaps it was something on the radio.
The landlady puts Nadia’s books on top of the dresses. She takes down the crucifix, crosses herself, puts the crucifix in the bag, and closes it.
“Her friend comes tomorrow,” she says, patting the bag. She points to the straw mat on the floor by the bed.
“You want it?” she asks. “It won’t fit in the suitcase.”
“No,” I say, quickly. “We threw it out.”
She kneels down and begins to roll it up. I get down on my knees to help.
“You are going out?” she asks when we stand up. I nod. “Please, leave it by the street,” she says. She closes the door behind us.
Before the week is out, Véro announces that Frédéric is returning to France without taking a degree. His father is over seventy and not well. Frédéric must take over.
“You know how that is,” she says.
Véro’s flattering me, a bad sign. My father has a little title-searching business, not a factory with two hundred employees. She, of course, wishes to stay on in Cambridge but — a sigh and a shrug — what can she do? Her family is anxious for her to marry.
“You will come to the wedding, won’t you? Promise!” she says to me.
“But of course!” I say, in my mock French accent, knowing there’s not a chance I can afford the trip.
Then Stefan phones with “exciting news.” Ben — that’s what he calls Professor Vincent these days — has a big commission, an apartment complex in West Berlin, and he wants Stefan to be his representative on the site. It makes a kind of sense, of course. I can see that. Stefan knows the city and the language. And he talks about Vincent’s design philosophy with a reverence that in the past I’ve shamelessly pretended to share.
I see him one more time. We walk to the Square to eat in the Chinese place he favors. As usual, it’s crowded. Sunshine, a daughter of the proprietor, greets us.
“For you,” she says, “I find a place.”
She leads us to a table and sets down a pot of tea and two of those little cups with no handles. Stefan orders, asking her approval of each dish. I try to show some interest, but I feel like an employee about to be handed severance pay. He seems not to notice. Sunshine brings soup.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity,” Stefan says. He leaves in a day or two, he’s not quite sure when. Vincent is making all the arrangements. He’s meeting with him as soon as we’re finished eating.
I want to ask, “How can you go back there?” Instead, I smile.
Sunshine sets down bowls of rice and some covered dishes. I wonder, do they call her Sunshine because she’s so cheerful? Or is Sunshine some approximation of her Chinese name?
The Berlin phase of the work will take the better part of a year, maybe two.
I want to say something wild, like, “I’ve been commissioned to write a verse drama on the life of Margaret Fuller,” but I can’t think who would commission it.
Stefan will return sometime in the future to finish his coursework, although, with this experience behind him, it’s likely some requirements will be waived.
What if I said I was pregnant? I’d have to be quick because he pauses only long enough to swallow his food.
“Ben’s going to be big, I’m certain of it!” he says. “There’s already talk of an embassy.”
I’m not pregnant, and I probably wouldn’t mention it if I were.
Sunshine comes back with the check and the fortune cookies.
“You don’t finish your rice, you have bad luck!” she says, wagging her finger at me and laughing as she takes the dishes away. I don’t touch those cookies. I know all of the fortunes by heart.
Outside Stefan says, “I’ll get you a taxi.” It’s his last chance to talk with Ben before he flies out in the morning.
“I’d rather walk,” I say.
“You’re sure?” he asks, taking both my hands and pulling me to him. “You must write and tell me what you are doing,” he says.
My old furnished room on Linnaean Street is vacant again. Ted helps me move back in. It’s the first of October, and I haven’t seen him since July.
“How’d your summer go?” I ask, as we’re taking boxes of books from the trunk of his roommate’s Pontiac.
“Okay,” he says. “I made up the math I was missing. Worked in the cafeteria. Saw a couple of flicks. That’s about it. You?”
“Nothing special,” I say. “Work. You know, the usual.”
“Yeah,” he says. And then, after a minute, “Did you finish that poem?”
I don’t remember at first what he’s talking about.
“You know, about the drifter,” he says, and I’m embarrassed because I haven’t looked at it since the afternoon he asked me to go swimming in Nahant. I mutter something stupid and then start talking about which box goes where.
Mrs. Brainerd stands in the foyer, making sure Ted descends promptly from every trip up to my room. After the last climb I go out to the car with him.
“Thanks a mil!” I say. “I really appreciate your help.”
“It’s nothing,” he says.
I turn to go, and he says, “Wait a minute. I’ve got something for you.”
He reaches under the front seat, pulls out a bag I recognize right away and hands it to me. Inside is a recording of the Mozart Quintet. I must look perplexed.
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” Ted says.
“It was. It is,” I say. “I just didn’t expect…”
“I would have given it to you long ago,” Ted says, “but you were always so busy.”
When I get back to my room, I plug in my phonograph, take out the record, and run my nail along the cellophane at the edge of the jacket. I slide the record out, but I don’t play it right away. I just stand there staring at the spinning turntable, thinking of something I heard once about people in the Far East — how they bring gifts to the cemetery for the spirits of the dead to enjoy. I slip the record back into its jacket, tape up the cellophane, and put the record back in the bag.
The cemetery is in a part of the city I don’t know at all. The wind has come up, and when I get off the bus, soot and scraps of newspaper are swirling along the sidewalk. A heavyset man in a dirty raincoat lurches toward me. “Oh, God!” I think, but he lumbers on by and climbs on the bus, which has already started to move.
Gloom hovers over me as I go through the cemetery gate. Ahead are rows and rows of indistinguishable headstones. I find the office and get directions from a gray-haired, gray-faced woman.
Nadia’s grave has a temporary marker with just her name on it. Someone — Lena, or maybe Brunhilde — has left a bunch of marigolds in a glass vase. I move them forward a little. Then I take the record from the bag, place it upright against the marker, and press down on the cardboard cover until it’s anchored in the still soft ground.
It’s funny how you’ll hear a piece of music like that almost constantly for a time. Then you won’t hear it again for years, and you don’t place it right away when you do, although you can hum along and you know what note is coming next.
Stefan sends me a postcard of the Kurfürstendamm as it looked before the war, but it’s weeks before it arrives. He’s neglected to mark it airmail. Then a card comes from Véro announcing the birth of Philippe André, and I realize a year has slipped by. Although I write back, I hear nothing further from either of them. Of course, I’ve moved on, too, and Mrs. Brainerd, now quite old, may not always remember to forward the mail.
