The Daughters: A Novel (21 page)

Greta gave a nod and slid away before he could change his mind.

The air buzzed with conversation as men walked past, the top buttons of their shirts undone, rolls of paper tucked under their arms. Some of them seemed to recognize her, their eyes lingering on her face with momentary curiosity. But she was lucky. Whether because they were too busy to stop or whether they thought she was there on some errand for Saul, no one did more than nod hello. Greta took deep breaths to keep her heartbeat even as she had in preparation for giving birth, when the first sharp pains shot up her spine. But she found that she wasn’t nervous. Her body moved smoothly and her mouth remained kinked into a small, smug smile. She was looking for something, without knowing quite what.

(
She wanted something
, Sara said,
that she couldn’t admit to herself that she wanted.
)

To her left, a pair of legs extended from the bottom of a discordant, groaning instrument, one bent at the knee and tapping its toe. Farther off was a tunnel. Could that be right? Greta approached and saw a man reaching up and making pencil markings on an arch of white wood, and realized the tunnel was in fact
a caterpillar queue of grand piano frames, lined up with their bottoms in the air.

Everywhere around her were sounds. Not just factory sounds, but echo chambers, hollow demi-music. A fist connected with a keyboard on the left side of the room, and the dissonant chord stormed across the warehouse like a wave. When it passed, Greta could hear wire coiling, stretching, snapping, and below this the great rumbling of boxes being moved on wheeled trays with a rhythm all its own. She felt she was being tugged in all directions at once, and the effect was familiar somehow, that yearning, gnawing urge. A high trill here, a rough scratching there, as pianos were pulled and warped into life.

Greta tried not to stay in one place for too long, silently imploring the men (
everywhere, men)
to ignore her, to pass over her with a glance and move on to more important things. She reached a hand up to rearrange the curls of her hair. Back home the oven temperature would soon puff them out into a shapeless, floating floss, or else sweat them down in rivulets along her neck. But she was here, a part of the factory machinations, and she knew that for once she looked the way people expected a lady to look.

As she walked towards the showroom in the factory’s rear, the tinkering fell away. First the pallets of raw materials were shed, then the sand-shaved, pretreated wood that still retained its faint scent of needles and leaves. Greta felt she could see all the detritus—the tools, the wood chips—being swept backward away from her, though in fact it was she who moved away from it. Her eyes were keyed on the sleek floor before her, peopled by a black herd of perfect glassine surfaces. At last even the sound of conversation died away, so that stepping onto the polished showroom floor was like walking into a world where everyone held their breath.

Greta felt a pinch in her abdomen, and wondered if she would find another small trickle of blood on her leg when she went home and stripped off her town stockings. The thought made her nauseous, and she sat down before an imposing baby grand piano—her back was turned to the piecemeal beasts in the workshop, but her mind strained towards them.
Not so different
, Greta thought, as her stomach clenched.
How many unfinished things have I abandoned?
Her left hand found its way to the keyboard, and she suddenly felt very angry and foolish. A cough resounded behind her.

“Excuse me?”

Turning sharply, Greta found herself staring into the face of the gentleman she’d seen outside the factory, the one who’d laughed so freely when his graying companion said
failure
and
mad
. He had white blond hair and a strange smile on his face, his hands tucked carefully behind his back.

“My name is Gustaw,” he said. “Gustaw Lindemann. I’m a senior designer here at Łozina.” He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, as if uncertain how to proceed. Greta noticed that he rocked gently back and forth on his heels. “I heard that there was a lady looking for me on the showroom floor. Would that lady by any chance be you?”

Lindemann smiled at her, gently now. His suit was made of tidy pin-striped wool, and Greta supposed his was the sort of polite society that noticed when a woman was wearing mourning blacks, that made a point of knowing the difference between fashion and funereal garb.

“Oh,” she said, blushing. “You design these?”

“Yes.” He gave a slight bow. Or perhaps he was still just rocking back and forth. “Well, that is to say, not all of them. Not alone. But I do have a degree of oversight over the direction of our movements. Glandt and I share a certain, shall we say, particularity
about the way our instruments sound. But I’m also interested in their longevity, so—” He stopped. “You don’t really know what I’m talking about, do you?”

Greta frowned.

“How can you design a piano? Doesn’t it already more or less have its own design? Built in?” She stroked the keys of the instrument in front of her like they were little finger bones.

His hand going lightly to the nape of his neck, Lindemann laughed again. His fingers were clean, scrubbed pink.

“Well, I can’t say it’s the first time I’ve heard that question. Let me put it this way: I believe there is an ideal piano out there”—he gestured vaguely, into the distance, not the factory—“somewhere. A fixed form, if you will, which if you found it would allow you to make a perfect piano every time, without fail. But at the moment, you see, no one knows what it is. So when I say I’m designing pianos, what I mean is I’m trying to shave away all the mistakes that the other piano makers—and, well, also that I—have made.” Lindemann grinned. “Trying to get closer to that piano in the sky.”

Greta looked out over the gathered instruments. Was each one different? Each one an infinitesimal improvement? Were they lined up, then, in the order of their creation so that discerning buyers could easily select the finest or choose, with greater consideration to price, the third from best? Fifth from best? Perhaps it gave Lindemann a pang of regret to depose each glorious princeling with the new generation. After all, each of them began with him. “You must be very well known for your work. You speak about it beautifully.”

She was worried that he was growing tired of her, as he had his back to her, strolling through the instruments and striking a note or two on each one. But then he turned and shrugged.

“Ah, well, there’s the rub. If I’m doing even a passable job, most people don’t have the faintest idea who I am. They all think
like you, don’t they?” He nodded at Greta. “A good piano has no maker. It just is.”

“But Łozina? Surely people look for the name?”

It was a point of pride for Greta, when she thought of Saul cutting and warping the boards. When she dreamed of sussing out the faults and illnesses of each instrument in a peerless white coat. Somewhere out there a woman in finery was asking specifically for a piano from their town, believing nothing else would do.

“Oh, certainly, the manufacturers’ names have a certain caché—Łozina, Steinway, Petrof.” Lindemann waved a hand. “But most people still don’t know what those names mean, who’s behind them. I suppose they imagine Łozina as some great mother instrument, trailing baby grands behind her.”

Greta and Lindemann looked at one another for a moment, sharing in this strangest of images. Then Greta shook her head, trying to dissipate it. Her hair was pinned back, but a few strands fell over her ears and she felt slightly indecent, like Cinderella shedding her finery at the stroke of midnight.

“I should be going,” she said. “I’ll be needed at home.”

Lindemann looked once more at Greta’s black dress, its creases carefully ironed, her shoes with a high polish. His face was soft, and he crossed the room to her, taking her warm baker’s hand in his own.

“
To była moja przyjemność
, my good lady. My pleasure entirely. I hope that I see you again.”

Greta stood still, feeling the pace of the man’s heartbeat through his palm. Small moves change you, she thought. A small twinge in a piano wire to make a note come out clean. A smile at one man or another at a dance when you’re young, yielding daughters or sons. She looked into Lindemann’s eyes, each with a crease trickling out from the corner, his head tilted to one side. When
he ran his finger over the keyboard of a piano, he noted every small catch, every minute imperfection with a tenderness that astounded her. To be master of your craft, like Saul, was one thing. A beautiful one. But it was another thing to be overwhelmed by your work. Consumed by your love for it.

A recognition flashed between them.

“I should go home.” Greta flushed up the back of her neck.

“Yes.” Lindemann didn’t let go of her hand. “You said.”

I
stared at my mother, something hot and sickly mixing around in my stomach. My spine felt rigid and my heart too high; I slid onto the floor from the bed and scooted backward towards my mother’s bedroom door.

“So you see,” Sara said. “Greta cursed us all because her heart was untrue. She didn’t love who she was supposed to love.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. She folded her hands primly over her knee, sitting up now with her back against the wall.

“Whatever do you mean?”

Her eyes searched mine, and though she held her mouth in a perfectly neutral pose, there was a smile hidden behind the cool mask of her face. Escaping through the seams.

“You know.” I squirmed, feeling my tailbone scrape against the floor. “Greta wouldn’t. Do that.”

Sara picked the dirt out from under her fingernails, making a sound like a cat testing its claws.
Flick, flick, flick
.

“I know one thing,” she said. “You’re just like her. From everything Mama says about Greta, you’re her little double, aren’t you? You take everything there is to have and don’t give a damn about the people who give it to you. You always want more. You can feel the wanting under your skin right now, can’t you?”

I shivered. To this day I can’t be sure whether it was, like my mother said, the fingers of desire I felt. Or whether it was just the flicker of recognition that the stories my mother told weren’t meant to instruct or entertain me. They were meant to destroy something. Meant to infect.

13

E
very day now, John comes home and sits across the room from me. He doesn’t look at me. And I think,
Good
.

We used to come home together and race to the door so we could begin taking off our clothing, running as fast as we could up the stairs so no one would see us unzipping, unbuttoning, shrugging out of shirts and shoes. Or if I got back from rehearsal before him, he would pick me up off the couch and give me a kiss. Hold me in his arms like he was carrying me over the threshold, and then set me back down. Put a blanket over my knees. Kiss my toes.

He wraps Kara into a papoose and walks around the kitchen, cooking for one. The scent of sautéing onions drifts through the door while I’m taking a bath and I dip my head under the water just to escape it for a moment. I get out and drip all over the floor to dig around for a handful of bath salts, which smell like heather. It’s a quiet enough scent that it won’t make me immediately drunk, the way rose would, or patchouli. But when the salts are
absorbed into the water with a patter and a hiss, I still get momentarily lightheaded. Slide gratefully back into the bath so I don’t have to stand on my own two feet.

I hear him eating alone at the dining room table, silverware scraping, ice shifting and cracking in a water glass. He babbles to Kara in a light voice but won’t say a word to me beyond the necessary—
excuse me, pardon me, are you going to be in there for much longer?
And again I tell myself,
This is
good
, when I think about how he used to talk to me almost without ceasing, memories crowding one another to get out of his mouth. Always reaching for the next story, the one that would really explain who he was.

J
ohn once described to me a camping trip he took as a child. He grew up in Virginia, in a town surrounded by farmland, with devoted parents who drove him to Blacksburg and later to Richmond and D.C. for voice lessons. It was a safe place, he told me, and so at the age of ten he was allowed to wander and sleep out of doors with only the supervision of a redtick coonhound, Rabbit. She was named for her ears, he said. Long ones, and soft like velvet. In the morning John woke early to the sun leaking milky through the canvas of his tent. He let Rabbit out and stood in an empty field to pee, staring into the morning light with his face upturned. Bold and certain of his place in the world.

After sharing a Pop-Tart with the dog, he proceeded to explore. His parents wouldn’t expect him home for hours. And even then they wouldn’t worry too much, knowing how close he was to the house, how easily they could drive out and find him. Rabbit loped beside him, sometimes pausing to flop into the dirt and wagger around on her back, scratching head and spine. Her tongue lolled out into the pebbles and dried leaves, picking up
both indiscriminately and not bothering to shed them when she sprang back up to trot again beside her boy.