The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  “But . . .”

  “It’s a party!” she said with a small bite to her voice, and she wandered away while half-turned toward me. Her heels clicked across the smooth floorboards, and her hips wiggled beneath that blue fringed dress. She set her champagne flute on a table, went straight over to the lost-looking Wyatt, and grabbed his arm and his hand for a dance.

  I ignored her pressure to drink and entertain married men and instead pushed through the crowd of partygoers, which seemed to have swollen into a louder and larger mass of undulating bodies, fueled by jazz and juice and desire. People bumped against me and pummeled my toes with their sharp heels, but I somehow forged my way to the band.

  The drummer, the clarinetist, and the trombonist perched on the ends of their wooden chairs, their bodies rocking and swaying, their posteriors barely planted on the seats, as if the music possessed the power to launch them off the earth at any moment. The cornet player stood with his legs apart, his knees bent, his back arched, and he wailed on his horn until his puffed-up cheeks turned redder than turnips. The piano player with the slicked oil-paint hair sat nearest to me, and he stormed those keys with the fury of a madman, his eyes squeezed shut, his head rattling back and forth, his lips wobbling.

  I walked over to the group and leaned my right elbow against the smooth top of the upright piano. The vibrations of the notes thrummed through the wood and traveled up my arm and down to the farthest reaches of my toes with a pleasurable sensation that made my eyelids flutter. I breathed a small sigh and struggled to keep my wits about me.

  The piano player lifted his hands from the keys. After only one short beat, he seemed about to thrust his hands straight back down to the ivories for another number.

  I knocked on the top of the piano and quickly said, “Excuse me.”

  His hands stopped in midair, and he looked my way. “Yes?”

  “Am I able to make a song request?”

  The drummer behind him—a blue-eyed gentleman with skin that blended the boundaries between black and white—tapped the opening beat of a song, but the pianist held up his right hand and said, “Wait a minute. The lady wants to make a request.”

  “I’m really sorry to interrupt your performance like this,” I said, shifting my weight between my legs, “but first of all, I was wondering if you’d ever be interested in having a guitarist join your ensemble.”

  The five members of the band eyed each other with their faces molded into the little frowns people make when considering an idea they’ve never contemplated before.

  “I know a guitarist, you see,” I continued. “He’s extraordinarily talented and learns music by ear. He knows jazz as well as he knows himself.”

  “It’s hard to hear a guitar over the rest of our ruckus,” said the trombone player, a black fellow with a rich voice that rumbled in my knees. “He’d have to play loud and fierce.”

  “He does. He’s remarkable. I’ve never heard anything quite like him.”

  “Well”—the piano player swiveled toward me on his stool—“bring him over here then. Let us hear this fella.”

  “Well, there’s one problem. He’s nervous about coming here, because he’s . . .” I picked at the corner of the piano below my elbow. “He’s German.”

  The piano player and the drummer both broke into snickers.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “Ernest Ford”—using his thumb, the piano player gestured toward the drummer over his shoulder—“this handsome blue-eyed fella sitting behind me, his daddy’s one hundred percent Negro and his mama’s one hundred percent German, but somehow he adds up to be one hundred percent all-American jazz. As long as this guitarist joe doesn’t wander in here with a German bayonet pointed at all of us . . .”

  I stiffened. “No, no, no.”

  “We’d be happy to meet him,” said Ernest at the drums.

  “Hey!” called one of the uniformed boys out on the dance floor. “Where’s the music?”

  “Hold your horses.” The piano player swiveled back to the keys. “Did you say you had a music request, too, miss?”

  “Yes.” I rubbed my lips together. “I was wondering if you might play a little Beethoven.”

  The heads of all five band members whipped toward me.

  “My guitarist friend will need proof to feel welcome over here,” I explained. “He lives across the street, and I know if he heard the music of a German composer blaring out of these windows . . .” I stopped, for they all wrinkled their foreheads as if I’d just asked them to don German helmets and speak in the tongue of the Kaiser. “I know that Beethoven has been banned, but—”

  “That’s not the problem, darlin’,” said the trombonist, leaning forward with his elbow on his right leg. “Beethoven isn’t jazz.”

  I tapped my fingers against the top of the piano. “The fourth movement of Symphony No. 9 could be.”

  They furrowed their brows again, and the balding clarinetist chuckled and scratched his thumb against his cheek. I slid myself around the piano, bent over the keys next to the pianist, and tapped out a bass line with my left hand. Two bars later, my right hand launched into the melody of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—played in the hot, modern style of the Original Dixieland Jass Band.

  The rest of the room fell still with a silence that startled me at first, but my fingers continued to pound those ivories as if the safety of the world depended on an improvised jazz rendition of a nearly one-hundred-year-old symphony movement. Behind me the trombone burst awake with a fanciful slide. The clarinetist joined in with embellishments and echoes. The blue-eyed, half-German drummer tapped out the timing. The cornet player accompanied me on the melody, and the rouged and pomaded piano player lunged into the lower keys beside me with complicated flourishes and harmony that made old Beethoven sing. Germany, America, classical music, and jazz collided and mated and set the entire room dancing in a jubilant one-step that could have ended the war right then and there.

  I lifted my fingers from the keys and let the piano player take full rein of the ivories. No doubt existed in my mind that “Ode to Joy” rang throughout the nighttime streets and permeated Daniel’s closed-up store and apartment. I strode over to the same open window where I’d stood before and watched the lights burst to life behind Daniel’s drapes. He slid open the curtains, raised the sash, and stuck his head into the glorious Beethoven air with his mouth hanging open. A breeze stirred through both his hair and mine, and every element on earth seemed to move and sing and cry out for us to celebrate. Daniel’s eyes met mine from across the street dividing us, but we didn’t say one word to each other.

  We simply listened.

  I bit down on my lip, determined not to miss a single note by allowing myself to cry, and I mentally willed Daniel to stay at his window and experience the song for however long the band decided to make it last. The music rose to astounding heights. Daniel’s lips moved as if he mouthed the words in German. The lights in his bedroom seemed to brighten around him, illuminating his hair and his clothing.

  The song lasted for another full minute, and then it ended amid a thundering round of applause from the dancers behind me. I already missed the thrill of the symphony inside me.

  “That was for you,” I called across to Daniel, poking my head out as far as it would go without losing my balance and falling out the window. “The band members want you to know you’d be more than welcome over here. They could use a guitarist.”

  Daniel rested his elbows against his sill. “It’s not the band members’ opinions that I care about.”

  “I want you to know you’re welcome over here, and I don’t give a rap who hears the music of a German composer blasting through the streets. Playing Beethoven was my idea. I’m sorry about what I said, and I hate myself for saying it.”

  The trombone player blew a startling slide, and a conventional jazz number exploded across the lodge, drowning any chance of my properly hearing a response from Daniel.

  I pointed down
to his front door and shouted over the horns, “Please—meet me downstairs. I want to talk to you.”

  He stood up straight and closed his window, an action I took to mean that he was either complying with my request or shutting me out of his life. Hoping for the former, I left my own window and clasped my hands together in a gesture of thanks in the direction of the band.

  My feet galloped down the Masonic Lodge stairs, and I almost slipped twice in my haste.

  Once again, I set off to right a Rowan wrong against Mr. Wilhelm Daniel Schendel.

  Chapter 23

  His front door remained shut. I slowed to a stop in front of the boarded-up glass and rapped my knuckles against one of the rough planks with a sound that came out dull and hollow.

  “Daniel?” I tried the brass knob but found it locked. “Please open up. I want to apologize for what I said.” I turned my ear toward the door and held my breath, but my pulse beat in my head like a clattering locomotive and muffled even the sounds of the band.

  “Please, Daniel. Talk to me. You know I said those terrible words in a moment of panic. Let’s not end things like this.” I inched closer to the door. My voice shook. “The very idea of you walking away from all that horror over there—risking your life to do so—makes you a far braver and better person than I could ever be. I’m sorry I reacted so poorly. I know the war forces people to do atrocious things they wouldn’t normally do.”

  The door clicked open, and Daniel stood in front of me with one hand on the doorknob and the other massaging his throat below his shirt collar.

  “That word ‘Kraut,’” he said with a wince and a sharp swallow, as if the German slur burned at his mouth and stung his throat, “it never sounded so ugly as it did coming out of your mouth.”

  “I know.” I pressed a hand against my stomach. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Those were horrific things to say.”

  “I don’t even know what we should do, the two of us.” He leaned his left shoulder against the doorjamb and breathed a weighty sigh. “The more truth you pull out of me, the worse things will get between us, and this whole beautiful world we created will keep shattering to pieces.”

  “What do you mean by ‘the more truth’?” I stepped closer. “Are there other secrets you’re hiding from me?”

  He averted his eyes to the Masonic Lodge windows up above.

  “Daniel? What else are you keeping from me?”

  “Those people up there in the lodge . . .” He nodded up to the music. “What do they say about you and me?”

  “I told you, they don’t care that you’re German. Their drummer is half black, half German, and they’re kind as can be to him.”

  “That’s not what I mean. What do people say about the world?” He tipped his head to the right and narrowed his eyes at me. “Those friends of yours in the ambulance, that man Wyatt you spoke with the other night. What do they think is happening?”

  I shook my head, perplexed. “I don’t understand what you mean. Everyone feels the world is crumbling to pieces, but mainly people are looking to either help each other or escape. Or both.” I rested my left hand against the door and felt the pressure of his hand holding the nearby knob. “You know I’m terrified you’ll get this flu, but it would be awfully nice to go somewhere with you tonight and leave behind everything that’s haunting us inside this store. It doesn’t even have to be up in the dance hall. We could go somewhere private.”

  He rubbed at his throat again, and he refused to meet my eyes. “I’m not going anywhere, Ivy.”

  “No one will hurt you out here, Daniel. I swear. Please”—I took his right hand and sandwiched it between my shaking palms—“come with me. Let’s take a walk or—”

  “I’m not going with you.”

  “I know you’re still upset with me, but—”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then come with me.”

  He pulled his hand out of mine with a force that made me lose my balance. “I can’t go with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t.”

  “But—”

  “I can’t leave the store, damn it! Don’t you hear me?” Without warning, he kicked the door inward with a startling bang that made me jump. “I can’t ever leave this goddamned building.”

  I stepped backward, toward the street, and a cold rush of blood shot through my veins. The hairs on the backs of my arms and neck stood on end.

  “But . . . no . . .” I shook my head. Every part of me trembled and ached with a terrible chill that hurt more than the knife blade scraping at my stomach. “I d-d-don’t understand.”

  He gritted his teeth and turned his face away from me again, and I heard Goethe whisper in my ear, Truth is a torch . . . we all try to reach it with closed eyes, lest we should be scorched.

  I pushed past Daniel and forced my way into the unlit shop, taking care not to trip over the silhouettes of chairs and tables propped on the floor at unsettling angles.

  “Where are you going?” he asked from behind me.

  I rounded the mahogany counter at the back of the store.

  “Ivy?”

  I reached for the top drawer below the register.

  “No!” Daniel locked both his arms around my chest and hoisted me away before I could grab the knob and pull.

  “Let me see the article.”

  “No!” He carried me away, toward the front door.

  “Daniel!” I kicked my legs and wriggled to break free. “Let me see it!”

  “You’ll spoil everything.”

  “It’s already spoiled. Show it to me. Let me see the name of the man they murdered. I want to see it.”

  He threw me out to the sidewalk, where I fell to the ground and banged my knees against hard cement. The door slammed shut behind me. The lock clicked into place.

  I stared at the boards vibrating against the glass and quaked as violently as they quaked.

  Some spirits get stuck in the places where they died, May had said as she sat at her table with all those letters spread before her on the Ouija board. Some spirits get stuck in the places where they died.

  I pushed myself to my feet, meeting with the pain of a twisted ankle, and I limped eastward on Willow-not-Werner Street, toward my family’s home.

  You don’t understand, do you? Daniel had asked me the first night I met him. You are—how do you say it over here—naïve? Is that a word in English?

  My secrets won’t change anything, he had also said, two nights later, after I’d somehow been with him—twice by then. They can’t hurt you. What’s done is done.

  My Uninvited Guests always signaled loss. Their presence suggested that the wall dividing the living and the dead had opened a crack. I kept seeing and seeing and seeing him, and people all around me in Buchanan died at an astounding rate that turned grocery wagons into hearses, social halls into morgues. He had stood over the blood on the night of the murder, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his tan trousers, his face directed toward the dark stain marring the floorboards, and if I really stretched myself back into time and truly thought about that night, my mind would show me his face again, and I’d see the truth blazing in his eyes. His brother had slept at his sweetheart Nora’s house that night, while Daniel remained at home—alone—until two strong men with revenge in their eyes burst into his store to kill.

  Chapter 24

  Mama!” I called up the staircase, not caring who I woke. “Come downstairs. Please! Hurry!”

  I paced the floorboards and clasped my temples to keep my skull from breaking in half. When my mother didn’t hustle down fast enough, I grabbed an old studio photograph of my brothers and me as children—one that teased of happier times from above the piano—and hurled it at the opposite wall with a wild shattering of glass. “Mother!”

  “Ivy?” Mama tiptoed into view at the bottom of the stairs and pulled her white cambric robe around her nightgown. “Why are you here so late—and so upset?”

  I squared my
shoulders at her and lifted my chin. “What is the name of the man they murdered?”

  Her face drained to the color of that robe.

  “You must have seen the article,” I said. “What was his name? Which Schendel brother did they kill?”

  “What’s going on down there?” asked Father from their bedroom upstairs.

  “It’s nothing, Frank. Go back to sleep.” She turned back to me and gripped the square newel post at the bottom of the stairs. “Oh, Ivy . . .”

  “Tell me!” I said. “Why won’t anyone tell me anything? Stop treating me like I’m a delicate piece of china that mustn’t be broken.”

  “Wait here.” She held out her hand, as if instructing one of the dogs to stay put, and pattered off to the kitchen on the bare soles of her feet.

  I heard the pop of a tin lid coming off of a can, a sound that always betrayed Mama’s secret sips from a flask of booze she kept hidden in a biscuit container—her emergency dose of comfort, consumed whenever Father pushed her to the edge of sanity and composure. A newspaper rustled out there in the kitchen, and then Mama crept back around the corner and walked toward me with her hands tucked behind her back.

  “Do you truly want to see it, darling?” she asked. “Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?”

  I thrust my right hand at her. “Show me.”

  She pushed a newspaper my way, and I saw the face of the victim—his face—along with his name: WILHELM DANIEL SCHENDEL. Key details about his condition at the time of death shot at me like stinging bullets:

  Multiple bruises and lacerations . . . broken nose . . . fractured ribs . . . ruptured spleen . . . a rope wrapped around his neck . . . strangled . . .

  And that opening sentence—oh, God.

  Friday night a band of vagrants broke into Liberty Brothers Furniture Store and attacked and killed Wilhelm Daniel Schendel, aged 24, a German enemy of the U.S. who resided in downtown Buchanan.

  I dropped to the floorboards with a jolt of my neck that hurt down to my knees.

  “Oh . . . darling . . .” Mama stepped toward me with an offer of a trembling hand.