The Jazz Palace Read Online Free PDF Page A

draw her out of her darkness. In his lessons Benny was working on a Beethoven sonata, and he was having trouble with the second movement. Mr. Marcopolis insisted that he stick to the piece, but Benny didn’t want to. He couldn’t hear the music in his head, and he could barely make out the notes. Benny had never really learned to read music. He hadn’t needed to because he was good at faking it. If his teacher played a piece for him two or three times, Benny could pick it up. But he had to hear it in his head and he wasn’t hearing it now.
    He played best by ear. Anything he heard he could repeat. Anything he was told, he could remember. That was how he’d gotten through his bar mitzvah. He’d memorized his Torah portion, never bothering to learn to read the Hebrew. It was the same with music. First he heard it in his head, then in his heart. And finally in his fingers. He had been able to do this since he was young enough to talk, and he thought of this as a strange, useless talent, like someone who can memorize all the numbers in the phone directory or say words backward.
    He could name notes the way a painter could name colors. In fact he saw them in colors. C major came in yellow and A major in orange. G was green and F a shade of blue. The minor notes were the muted shades of sunsets—mauve, rose, tangerine. Benny knew in what key the wind howled or crystal when it chimed.
    Now he struggled with the first few bars of the Beethoven sonata, but quickly switched to Bach. He played fast and too hard. He didn’t have that light, elegant touch. Then he stopped and listened. When he was sure his mother was resting, he switched tunes. He roughed out the rhythms he’d been humming just before the
Eastland
sank. He switched it to a minor key. The music was filled with forgetting. The colors swirled. Splashes, a kaleidoscope, raced through his head.
    —
    I t was earlier than usual when Leo Lehrman got home. He’d heard about the sinking of the
Eastland
, as had the rest of Chicago. He walked home from the “el” thinking of what he’d say to his son. It was only after he’d yelled at him and the boy had run off that Leo understood what Benny had seen. Leo stood in the doorway to his son’s bedroom, where Benny was stretched out on the bed.
    Leaning into the doorjamb, Leo stared at his short, compact body. He was startled by the black fringe on his boy’s upper lip. His son’s fingers were flitting across the page of his book. Leo wondered why Benny couldn’t sit still. For an instant he felt the urge to ease his way down on the bed and stroke his son’s hair. But Leo couldn’t look at his son and not think about the blizzard two years before. He couldn’t look at Benny and not remember that Hannah had begged him to let the boys stay home. “I never stayed home,” Leo had shouted. “I never missed a day of school.” This wasn’t actually true. Leo had missed many days of school. He had frittered away his afternoons in pool halls or shadowboxing on street corners. It was one of the dozens of lies he’d made up about his life, lies even he had come to believe.
    But on that day when Hannah saw her husband was insisting, she’d tied the boys together with a rope. “Be careful,” she’d told Benny as she pulled the rope taut through their belt loops. She’d gazed out at the sheer whiteness beyond her window. “You’re in charge of your brothers.” Hannah watched her four sons, vanishing into the snow, their footprints trailing off until they disappeared.
    Even now, as Benny lay stretched on his bed, Leo could see him, racing up the stairs, breathless, crying. As he stood in the doorway, he wished he could gather him into his arms. Instead what he saw was his oldest son telling him that six-year-old Harold, the boy with the dimpled grin, had not been on the other end of the rope when the brothers reached the school—a school they’d found closed due to snow. And they would not find Harold—who had