Lulu — her real name, I learned later, was Rosalind DeLaney — sashayed onto the balcony and, spotting me, threw her arms open wide. They were bare now that the sleeves had been torn off them, but five or six new cloth hearts had been pinned haphazardly all over her remaining strips of dress. I ran over and tucked myself into the crook of her neck and shoulder, smelling the tacky sweet makeup caked on her face, cut with the salt of her sweat.
“My understudy!” She picked me up and twirled me around in the air and I laughed, making the sound purposefully melodic so she would hug me tighter. Then she set me down. “You have some pipe organs in those lungs, I hear?”
I nodded and beamed.
“Well, you take care of them.” She put a hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. “And someday you’ll be here too, singing secret shows for no money.”
“Do you think so?”
I had no reason to trust her encouragement and, having never heard me sing, she had no reason to give it. But still the moment glowed between us: she, shimmering with the light of her success, and me, burning brightly from the heart out.
“Lulu.”
We both looked up at the sharp sound, but it was clear that my mother was talking only to me. She had another cigarette between her fingers — this time, thankfully, unlit.
“Let’s go,” she said. “I have to get out of here.”
I gave Rosalind one more squeeze around the neck and then ran after my mother, who’d disappeared into the hallway. If Rosalind was confused about Sara’s behavior — ignoring her, absconding before the party I now know must have followed — she didn’t show it. There were other guests to greet and preen to.
We pushed out the back door into the alley and Sara immediately began flicking her lighter at the cigarette. She was talking to herself quietly—should’ve known, pretentious assholes—and couldn’t get a flame, so she threw the lighter against the side of the building opposite.
“Whoa, sunshine.” The gatekeeper pushed himself up from the wall against which he’d been leaning, puffing smoke into the sky. “Let me get that for you.”
I frowned at him, though I also had the urge to reach out and touch him as he casually ignited my mother’s cigarette and gave an ironic bow. The front of his tuxedo bore a bright red flower that had been used to simulate Dr. Schön’s gunshot wound.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” I scolded, thinking of his voice.
My mother rolled her eyes and tugged my arm again, waving vaguely at the man.
“What do you care?” She moved quickly towards the subway platform. The sun had disappeared behind a new head of clouds while we were hidden in the theater, and the cold felt less pure now, more invasive and wet. “He’s nobody.”
“He’s the gatekeeper,” I said, no longer sure.
Back at Washington and Wells, we waited for the train on the creaking cold boards of the platform. A sheet of newspaper blew around, never quite kicking off onto the tracks or down onto the street but tumbling up and back, shushing against the advertisements and occasionally tickling someone’s legs. Waiting for the train, I knew we wouldn’t be calling it a chariot or a royal carriage. But I couldn’t help feeling a shiver of hope, of electricity, as we retraced our footsteps.
The train slowed down, stopped, and lurched slightly forward again before the doors opened. My heart hiccupped into my throat and I hopped on board, accidentally pushing into a teenage boy, who told me to watch it. There was an old man sitting in the handicapped seats by the door clutching a cane with both hands. The madrigal, I thought; he would recognize us. The madrigal would wake my mother back up into the woman she had been that morning, putting a smudge of lipstick on my mouth before we left the apartment and entrusting me with the tickets, tucking them into the secret inner pocket of my coat.
I sat down in the pair of seats closest to the man, and Sara set herself beside me with a sigh.
“Shouldn’t we sing him a song?” I nudged her and indicated towards the man with the cane.
“What?” My mother followed my gaze and then looked up at the ceiling for a long moment. She said something that I couldn’t quite hear, using mostly the back of her throat.
“What?” I parroted. She closed her eyes.
“I said, can you give it a goddamn rest.”
My mother slept until we had to change trains, and I watched the blind man, studying him. He couldn’t possibly be the royal madrigal, I decided. His hat was different. He was no longer humming along with the train but just letting it throw him gently back and forth as it turned around the Loop. Anyway, I assured myself, it was too much of a coincidence.
When we reached our stop, I shook Sara gently by the shoulder and she blinked at me, then stood up and walked off without saying a word. I hesitated in front of the blind man.
“Good-bye,” I said.
He tilted his chin in my direction, and a mask of something approaching recognition came over his face. He sensed our greatness through the sound of our voices, my mother had said. The madrigal knew the orphans to be more than they appeared.
A metallic ding sounded and I ran through the doors of the train before they closed and locked me in. But when I looked through the window, I thought I saw the madrigal wink at me — wink, that is, at the ground on which I’d been standing before I ran after my mother into the world.
12
History is like any other story — it depends on us, it feeds on us, on our desire to get it right. But what if there is no way to know exactly how something was, what it meant? What if an event is too complicated to make sense of, to ever put your finger on?
Most people vaguely remember Fryderyk Chopin to be French. His father hailed from Lorraine and his compositions were Romantic, so it seems aesthetically appropriate to tie him to the City of Love and Light. Indeed he died in Paris; his body was interred there in Père-Lachaise Cemetery after he drowned in the fluid of his own lungs. So he is called Frédéric François Chopin, and listeners feel haute and beau monde when they put their children to sleep with his nocturnes.
But in fact he was born on a small country estate in Żelazowa Wola. He was christened in the same church in central Poland where his parents had been married, and he grew up under the watchful red turrets of the Warsaw Barbican. His family lived on the grounds of the Saski Palace, and as a boy Chopin played a small piano with heart-shaped legs under a window that looked down on trimmed trees and lawns as slick as seal’s fur.
Is it just the glamour of Paris that makes audiences wish it was the musician’s home? What about the romance of something star-crossed? Chopin left for France just before Poland rose up and was crushed down by the hand of the Russian Empire, making it unsafe for him to return. In all his time in Paris, Chopin never sought fluency in French and always kept a silver chalice filled with soil from his homeland.
Still, when he died the Parisians didn’t want to give him up. They collected their most buxom women and had them throw armfuls of roses over his grave to bury him deep below the French streets; their nattiest gentlemen poured out decanters of wine to confuse Chopin’s spirit and keep it happy in the company of Théodore Géricault, Dominique Vivant, and Vincenzo Bellini.