American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [11]
She told him about a man, a distant relation on her father’s side, whose family had made cymbals in Turkey. They were an Armenian family and now they made cymbals for the jazz drummers in New York. They had a secret formula for making cymbals that had come from their ancestor, an alchemist in Istanbul in the seventeenth century. Joe laughed and said that he didn’t believe her. She said it was true. She would take him to meet them.
Do you know the secret formula? he asked her.
Yes, she said, but I’ll never tell.
When it was time to go he walked close to her and the backs of their hands brushed. At the subway he offered to ride back to Brooklyn with her, he still had hours before he was going to play, but she said that it wasn’t necessary.
When it was time to say good-bye she looked away.
You never showed me the bookstore, he said.
No, she said. I guess I didn’t.
CHAPTER THREE
Milo came wheeling in wearing bloodstained boots. She wouldn’t have known it was blood but he told her.
Whose boots are they? Honor asked.
A dead man’s, he said. Actually, two dead men. Me, and the guy who saved my life.
Pearl
They were smiling in the picture in the picture frame. It sat on a little table by the sofa. Pearl looked at the smiles and saw herself years younger, her happiness captured like a butterfly pinned and resurrected under glass. Joe was smiling too and his warm eyes stared out at the simple room, the doorway to the kitchen, and her. She felt the warmth of his presence even when he was not home. Just knowing he was around and not sailing across the ocean gave her peace of mind.
She was cleaning the living room although it was not dirty. She had already shopped for groceries and washed his clothes and taken the lamp that had broken in to be fixed and gone to the butcher who was her friend, it was important to make friends with the butcher. She had carried the heavy bags up their street, Featherbed Lane. It was called Featherbed Lane because during the Revolutionary War it had been lined with featherbeds to muffle the sound of marching soldiers. She didn’t know anything about the battle, who had been fighting whom, or what they had been fighting for, but the anecdote gave a sense of history and romance to the otherwise dreary six-story building. It validated her feeling that important things would happen, were happening, for them in this apartment. Her cleaning was a kind of constant readying for this coming event. Her cleaning possessed a nearly spiritual anticipation. She had straightened up the desk in the living room where he studied for his law classes. She had stacked his books. She had put everything in its place.
The picture kept smiling. It had been taken on their wedding day, almost thirteen years ago, in the backyard of her parents’ stucco house in Los Angeles. She had met Joe in the desert. She had met him as the result of an accident. It turned out to have been, for them, a happy accident. And now that she thought about it, her whole life since seemed like a happy accident, a random occurrence. How could she have met her husband, her soul mate, in such an unexpected way if it had not been Fate? It was only a matter of time before the meaning of that fateful event would be revealed to her. She had not always felt certain about things, but she had developed over the years, perhaps out of necessity, a fierce unwavering faith in her marriage and its rightness in the world. The picture kept smiling.
1923
At night, in her tent, Pearl switched on a small electric lamp and opened a letter that she had found in her pocket earlier that evening. She lay on an army cot,