And After the Fire

by Lauren Belfer

  “None taken,” Susanna said. “I try my best not to give rich do-gooders a bad name. I try to give rich do-gooders a good name.”

  This earned a smile from Mrs. Randolph, pleasing Susanna immensely.

  Later that day, Susanna studied the Matisse above the fireplace at Rob and Cornelia’s apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies. The painting portrayed a young woman sitting at a table reading amid a profusion of multicolored flowers.

  Susanna happened to know—because it had been appraised recently with an eye toward either donating it to the Metropolitan Museum or selling it for the benefit of the foundation—that the painting was worth $23 million. What even 1 percent of that money could do to help Raffie and his students . . . Susanna stopped her imagination from going any farther in that direction. Large amounts of money dropped onto even the most worthy causes tended to be wasted, frittered away in confusion. Incremental steps were the only way to make lasting progress.

  Even so, she felt the gap between the kids who’d performed for her this morning and the crowd gathering in Rob’s apartment for a dinner to celebrate his mother’s ninety-fifth birthday. The guest of honor received well-wishers from her wheelchair near the windows. She wore a red Chanel suit that looked not simply vintage but original, purchased sixty or seventy years earlier. Mrs. Barstow had a public reputation as a liberal firebrand and civil rights activist going back to the 1950s and ’60s.

  Cornelia Barstow greeted guests on the opposite side of the room, as if mother-in-law and daughter-in-law held separate spheres of influence. Cornelia wore an Asian-style, high-buttoned embroidered silk jacket over trousers. Rob stood in the middle, the mediator between the two. The vast apartment, on two floors, combined coffered ceilings and mahogany wainscoting with starkly modern furniture and modern paintings.

  Susanna had been invited to many such events at the Barstow home. Cornelia and Rob were proud of what they accomplished through the foundation. A cynic might say that Susanna was a trophy being shown off to their friends, but in the realm of rich people’s trophies—yachts, Maseratis, basketball teams—foundation director wasn’t so bad.

  Soon Susanna would be traveling to Buffalo for the closing on the two-family home on Lynfield Street where she’d grown up. From Lynfield Street to Fifth Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street . . . the distance still astonished her. When Susanna first began visiting Rob and Cornelia’s home, she’d felt ill at ease. She’d worried about her clothes, her shoes, her jewelry; about what to say and how to say it. To learn the subtleties of good manners, she’d surreptitiously studied Cornelia. Step by step she’d trained herself to fit in, to look elegant and polished, to create a façade that made her appear as if she belonged.

  “Susanna, I was hoping you’d be here,” said Ina Freeman, joining her. Ina was Susanna’s mentor and had given Susanna her first job after business school, at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. When Rob was looking for a foundation director, Ina had recommended Susanna. With her slate-gray hair brushed back and her tailored suit, Ina was impeccably turned out, as usual. In the realm of refined self-presentation, Ina was an inspiration. Ina’s father had worked on the factory floor of a GM facility outside Detroit. Susanna had noticed over the years that many foundation directors and staffers came from far different backgrounds than their board members. “How are you?” Ina said.

  “Good. Work is going well.”

  From the look of concern on Ina’s face, Susanna suspected that Ina was on the verge of asking about nonwork matters. Susanna didn’t give her the opportunity.

  “Today the students at a high school in Brooklyn treated me to a hip-hop performance. They’re hoping to build a green roof. Tremendous curriculum potential.”

  “I’ve heard that constructing green roofs on public schools is a bureaucratic morass.”

  “I warned them, but the teachers and administration, not to mention the students, are fully committed.”

  “Keep me posted. It might be something we could become involved in, down the road.”

  Well, this was good news: she certainly would keep Ina informed.

  Ina was drawn into another conversation, and Susanna went to the windows facing Fifth Avenue and Central Park. The towers of the San Remo and the Majestic, on Central Park West, glimmered in the distance. Hoover, Rob and Cornelia’s overweight cat, reclined on the radiator cover. With effort, he maneuvered himself onto his back, as if inviting Susanna to caress his tummy, which she did. Because of the radiator heat, his fur felt especially dense and silken.

  “Hello.”

  She turned.

  Scott Schiffman was standing before her. Meeting him here, she saw him anew: he was dark-eyed and attractive. He didn’t fit with Susanna’s idea of a man who spent his days studying handwriting on old documents.

  “You may not remember me. We met at the MacLean Library.”

  “Of course I remember you. It was only last week.”

  “I’d like you to forgive me for my impatience that day.”

  “Were you impatient?”

  “You know I was. In fact, I was rude. The angry way I spoke to you was completely out of line.”

  He had a winning grin.

  “Put it down to the shock and trauma of discovery,” he continued. “It’s not every day that a young woman . . . I won’t say more in this relatively public place, but I trust you understand what I mean.”

  “I do understand.” The content of the cantata ought to be enough to make any sensible person angry. She felt certain, however, that his anger had actually been prompted by her refusal to leave the manuscript with him. “What brings you here?”

  “First tell me you forgive me.” He seemed utterly at ease, to the manor born.

  “I forgive you.”

  “Thank you. I’m here because my mother is an old friend of Mrs. Barstow’s. They used to go on civil rights marches together, back in the ’60s. My mother was in her twenties, and Mrs. Barstow was . . . older. My mom carried Mrs. Barstow’s suitcase. Shared a room with her. Got arrested with her.”

  “That’s fascinating.”

  “Anyway, I’m a last-minute addition for the dinner: my mother’s usual escort, an entertaining confirmed bachelor who accompanies her everywhere, came down with the flu.”

  Susanna noticed that he didn’t ask her what she was doing here. She sensed, uneasily, that he already knew a good deal about her. He couldn’t know about the rape, however: the court records were sealed, and her name appeared nowhere. She’d done an Internet search on herself (several searches) and found nothing relating to it.

  “I haven’t been to this apartment in years,” Scott said. “I’d forgotten the Matisse. You come here often?”

  “I do.”

  “It’s a long way from Buffalo.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been to Buffalo,” he added, as if not wanting to offend her, “and I can assure you it’s not as bad as it’s generally made out to be.”

  “I agree with you. What took you to Buffalo?”

  “The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It has a terrific collection.”

  She was beginning to like him. “I agree with you on that, too.”

  The group was moving into the dining room.

  “I should find my mother. Help her to her seat. And I already checked, your table isn’t my table. But I’m glad we saw each other and had a chance to talk.”

  “Me, too.”

  And Susanna was pleased to see him. But if he had some scheme to entice her into giving up control of the cantata, she thought as she took her place in the dining room, she wasn’t falling for it.

  Chapter 17

  Dan and his colleague Katarina sat in the playground bundled in coats and scarves while the girls romped from the jungle gym to the swings.

  “What are you doing over Christmas break?” Katarina said.

  “Visiting family. One week with my family, one week with Julie’s. Becky will have fun playing with her cousins. I’ll try to get some slee
p.”

  He regretted saying that. It felt too personal for the playground. As usual, he’d woken up at 4:00 a.m. He’d tried to fall back to sleep, but he was haunted by Julie’s vacant stare after Martin died, and by Martin in his little coffin. This morning, too, he’d felt his spiritual emptiness more acutely than usual.

  He didn’t want to reveal this to Katarina, or to anyone, so he masked it with chitchat.

  “What about you? What are your plans?”

  “We’ll be with my mom and grandmom in Pittsburgh.”

  “What’s your routine there?” He wasn’t genuinely interested, but he wanted to keep her talking.

  “Cooking, cleaning, home repair. Changing the lightbulbs they can’t reach. This year will be special, though: I finally convinced my grandmother to do an oral history. I’ll ask her questions and record her answers. We’re going to do the interview in Czech, so she’ll feel more relaxed.”

  Katarina and her mother had been born in America, but her grandmother came from Bohemia and had spent the war years there. She’d been a kitchen worker for the SS administrators at Theresienstadt. Katarina had shared the basic facts with him long ago.

  Dan said, “Forgive me for prying, but how does your family deal with your grandmother’s . . .”

  “Job. That’s what we call it. Her job. She was a young woman alone. She needed a job. That was the job available. She could have turned it down and starved. How many people can be heroes?”

  She was silent. Then, “Even though she agreed to do the oral history, Grandmom keeps saying she can’t remember anything. Sometimes I wonder if her story is plausible. Wouldn’t the SS have used prisoners to do kitchen work? Maybe Grandmom created the story to cover up something else that happened to her. Something she thought was worse. Maybe she was in fact a prisoner. I just don’t know. I’ll have to consult with experts to see if the details of her story pan out.”

  She shook her head, as if to cast off her doubts. “In case her story does pan out, I’m planning ahead for a book. I’m thinking big: I Was a Chef at Theresienstadt, how’s that for a memoir title? Or Concentration Camp Cook. That has alliteration. Although a recipe for, say, Bohemian potato-peel soup garnished with dandelions may not qualify her as a chef, or even a cook, exactly. And she might only have washed dishes. But the situation does bring the idea of fresh local foods, the whole locavore movement, into a new perspective.”

  Dan was accustomed to Katarina’s black humor.

  “If her story is true, does she bear responsibility for what happened at Theresienstadt? Being a cook, or even a dishwasher, wasn’t the same as being a guard. Or was it? Maybe she smuggled the SS officers’ food to the prisoners. Or maybe she didn’t. I’m hoping that if I ask her under the guise of doing an interview, everything will be less personal and emotional, and we’ll be able to discuss things that we wouldn’t say otherwise.”

  In Dan’s own family, forgetfulness was the rule regarding relatives who’d been in Germany during the war years. His relatives, of course, were on the other side. The side of the aggressors.

  “My mother and grandmother made certain that I grew up speaking German and Czech both. Czech in case the Americans ever sent us back, German in case they came looking for me. The threat of an amorphous they was big in my childhood. It’s stupid, I know, but I applied for a passport for Lizzie right after she was born.”

  Becky didn’t have a passport.

  “When I look at Lizzie, I wonder what languages I should be teaching her.” The girls were going up and down on the seesaw, Becky leaning back and forth in heedless delight. “What language will they be speaking next time? Chinese? Arabic? Hindi? Never too early to start defensive planning.”

  The wind picked up. Katarina pulled her hat down over her forehead. “I’ve had just about enough of sitting in the cold watching children play. But before we go home, forgive me for bringing up a sensitive topic: Are you ready yet to start dating?”

  The shift took him by surprise.

  “I only ask because I have a line of women-in-waiting.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t think so.”

  “It’s been a year and a half. That might be enough time for you. Or it might not. Frankly, that’s not my concern. Don’t start dating for them. Or even for yourself. Start dating for me. These women don’t give me a minute’s peace. You’ve got to help me make them stop bothering me. I’ve got a daughter, a husband, a mother, and a grandmother. I’ve got terrific and demanding students. I’ve got research to do and books to write. I can’t afford to spend my precious time contending with women who’d like to get to know you better. What should I tell them?”

  “You could say—” He wanted to make a joke of it, but he wasn’t able to muster any humor. “I don’t know, Katarina.” He struggled to remain impassive in front of his colleague.

  She stared at him. “All right. I’ll accept no for now, with the stipulation that I’ll ask you again when I’ve determined the time is right.”

  She stood and walked toward the girls, who were running to the slide. “One turn down the slide for each of you, and then we leave.”

  With Becky safe in her room hosting a tea party for her dolls, Dan sat at the desk in his study and stared out the window instead of reading term papers. Julie’s desire to make everything in the house cozy had led to a Persian carpet in shades of red and velvety curtains to frame his staring bouts. Floor-to-ceiling CDs lined one wall. Books lined another. As he whiled away his time not grading term papers, Bach’s viola da gamba sonatas were playing on his stereo system. The sonatas filled the room with a joie de vivre that Dan didn’t feel.

  He’d made a good number of scholarly breakthroughs, such as they were, staring out this window. He glanced at the stack of term papers. His guilt about them led him to reflect once again on how fortunate he was. This was his work, and excellent it was, compared with the labors of most people in the world, including himself in previous years. One summer in college he’d cleaned gutters. Another summer, he’d done roofing. Every November and December weekend during his teenage years, from midnight until 6:00 a.m., he and his brother worked at a turkey farm, grabbing unruly birds by the legs, turning them upside down, and loading them into a truck. Dan had never looked at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner the same way after that.

  The term papers began to take on an accusatory edge.

  He remembered his promise to Susanna Kessler, that he’d help her do better than the set of Bach’s greatest hits she’d downloaded. He’d devoted his life to Bach’s music, and he wanted to prove to her that there was a lot more to the repertory than the cantata she’d found.

  He decided to let himself be impulsive. He’d order for her a collection of five CDs of Bach’s instrumental music. He sensed she was younger than he was, so maybe she no longer listened to music on CDs. He still thought in terms of CDs and saw their merits, however, so they’d have to do. He logged on to the Internet music site Arkiv. Five CDs suitable for a desert island.

  As he went through the website, debating the repertoire and performances, the project became absorbing and moving. Most likely Susanna wouldn’t realize how much it meant to him. But she’d surely be excited to receive the package. She’d open it, she’d maybe play the CDs several times over the following week . . . he liked imagining her doing this.

  While he reviewed the options, he kept his eye on the time. He needed to start dinner at 5:30. That meant he soon needed to turn on the oven and put in a casserole dish of—he didn’t know what. Every Friday afternoon, in return for expenses and a modest fee, a retired woman from church arrived at the house with several bags of groceries and cooked meals for the coming week, putting each day’s dish into the freezer, labeled by date. Each morning he transferred the designated container from the freezer to the refrigerator, in preparation for baking in the evening. He felt awkward about essentially hiring a personal cook, but at least this way Becky always had a hot and healthy dinner, with daily variety. Left to his own de
vices, he and Becky would have eaten pizza with onions, pineapple, and pepperoni (drawing from three basic food groups) every night, and they’d have enjoyed it, too. But Julie wouldn’t have been happy about it.

  He had only twenty minutes remaining to review the Arkiv site. He didn’t want to leave this for later, when he might not be feeling as impetuous as he felt now. Okay, decisions: the oboe concertos with Marcel Ponseele, that was a must. So many good performances of the cello suites . . . let’s go with Jean-Guihen Queyras. The violin concertos—Amandine Beyer. The first of Pierre Hantai’s two excellent recordings of the Goldberg Variations. The lute music for sure, but with Jakob Lindberg or Hopkinson Smith? A tough call. The Lindberg was perhaps a bit more introspective; Susanna might appreciate that.

  He had his five. But so much was missing, even without the sacred music. How about the Brandenburg Concertos? He loved them, but they’d become overused. The last time he arrived at New York’s Penn Station, they were blaring over the loudspeaker system. The local mall in Granville played them at the holidays. He’d read studies indicating that classical music in shopping malls and transportation terminals discouraged teenagers from congregating. The justly renowned Brandenburg Concertos had become a weapon in the battle against loitering teenagers.

  Nonetheless he’d add one more disk to make it six. The viola da gamba sonatas, the same recording he was listening to now. Vittorio Ghielmi on gamba and Lorenzo Ghielmi on the fortepiano. He loved this recording for its clarity, and for its combination of melancholy and high spirits.

  At 5:17, he pressed the ORDER tab. He was asked for the shipping address. With a quick bit of online sleuthing, he was able to find her home address. The site asked if he wanted to write a gift card. This he hadn’t planned for. He might not need a gift card. The CDs were self-explanatory.