So despite being dwarfed by her new surroundings, Otylie settled into the sparsely furnished apartment Jane and Jim had secured for her, and embraced this new frontier with a quiet vigor that surprised her wartime friend. She took on a dozen music students, teaching both piano and voice. Her pupils were mostly sweet, studious, and hopeless. One boy insisted on pronouncing Beethoven “Peethoven.” An older girl said “Chopin” in the same way she might have referred to what one did to a tree with an ax.
The shortcomings and, to her, fascinating idiosyncrasies of her students only made Otylie more devoted to them. She sat through hours of scales that went flying off the tracks like derailed freight trains. She succumbed to four-handed “Chopsticks” when there seemed no better way to get a student to overcome his gremlin fear of the keyboard. She found that by first teaching her vocal pupils to sing a tune by Stephen Foster or a cowboy classic like “Streets of Laredo,” she could better entice them to try Vivaldi’s short and simple “Vieni, vieni, o mio diletto.” A spinet that was included with the furnishings became the centerpiece of her world. She liked to place a fresh bouquet of wildflowers, picked during her morning walks, in a chipped yellow Fiestaware pitcher on top of the piano. Pupils who did an especially good job got a flower for their lapel or hair.
Otylie had never anticipated, back in Prague or London or New York, one day needing to know how to drive. But once she’d arrived in Texas she recognized quickly that, unless she were to ride a horse, a driver’s license was nearly as necessary for survival as fresh drinking water and a wide-brimmed hat. The day she passed her driver’s test was nowhere near as momentous as when she had become an American citizen in Manhattan, though she did feel a giddy pleasure knowing she could, if she so chose, climb into her rusted Chevrolet and drive to Mexico or Canada or California, and nobody could stop her.
Instead, she drove to her second job—or jobs—cleaning houses to make ends meet. This work she liked less than the hours spent with her children, as Otylie came to think of them. But she never complained, and she took silent pride in her ability to polish a copper pan or wax a linoleum floor. She liked discovering how these wealthy ranchers and bankers lived. Everything was a revelation. She had never before seen such fancy televisions in mahogany consoles, such efficient washing machines or gleaming electric stoves. Though some of her clients were “filthy rich”—Jane’s phrase—she bore them and their wealth no malice, nor was she jealous. Her sole mission became to save enough money to one day buy her own small bungalow so that nobody could ever send her away from home again. Slowly, day by day, a deep peace came over her. She slept better at night to the chorus of crickets outside her window than she had even during the halcyon days on Wenceslas Square before the jackbooted thugs took over. The gratitude she felt toward her benefactors here was inexpressible in English, in Czech, in any language.
Jim worked long hours for a construction company while Jane had a part-time job at a local hospital. They spent as much time with Otylie as they could spare, and Jane met with her some evenings to continue their old moviegoing habit. Cary Grant was still Jane’s idol, while Otylie developed a passion for Humphrey Bogart. Casablanca was her favorite movie because of the idealistic, fearless, handsome Paul Henreid, who played Victor, leader of the Czech underground. To be sure, his escape from a German death camp was as unlikely as his impeccably tailored, spotless white suit and his leisure to travel in Europe and North Africa, promoting the resistance while drinking champagne cocktails with his gorgeous wife at his side. If only Czechoslovak realities had been so elegant. Still, it made Otylie proud that a Czech stood at the center of what Bogey and Ingrid Bergman believed in beyond love itself.
Whenever Otylie had the Burkes over for dinner, Jim delighted in calling her curious cuisine of Bohemian dumplings and cabbage with Angus steak and pinto beans “Tex-Czech.” Now and again, Jane invited an unattached gentleman friend to join the three of them for a backyard barbecue at the Burkes’ two-bedroom suburban house. Otylie was still a handsome, youthful-looking woman. She had put on some needed weight while in New York, so the scarecrow slimness Jane had grown used to seeing in London was gone. She always had a modest flair for style, and wore bright silk scarves tied at her throat and dresses cinched at the waist with wide leather belts. Looking every bit the modern woman, Otylie Bartošová cut a striking, shy figure, rather more exotic than many of the neighborhood women at Jane and Jim’s parties.
Otylie appreciated Jane’s good intentions as a matchmaker, but none of her proposed gentlemen callers got anywhere with her. She was likable in the extreme, but closed to any intimacies beyond a Sunday drive in the country or attending a picture in downtown Austin. Try as some did now and then to encourage her to talk about her past, her family, what life was like for her during the war, she always politely changed the subject. She spoke longingly at times about Prague’s magical palaces and the beautiful river that ran through the city. Czech culture—its Němcová, queen of fairy tales; its Dvořák of New World Symphony fame; even its beer-hall polkas—offered subjects about which she could be drawn out. But her personal biography was off-limits. If it came up and she was seated, she would stand and walk away. If she was standing, she would find a place to sit down.
One man, however, did manage to break through Otylie’s reserve and become a close friend. Daniel Hajek, who had grown up in a small settlement an hour’s drive southeast of Austin, was a second-generation Czech American whose family had emigrated from České Budějovice. He worked with Jane at the hospital. Tall, lanky but strong, with close-cropped black hair silvered at the temples, Daniel—or Danek, as friends called him—was a plainspoken man, who, according to Jane, had lost his wife to melanoma fairly early in their marriage. He continued to live alone through the rest of his thirties, and was now well into his forties. For Otylie, aside from his steel-blue kindly eyes and the fact that he pronounced her name properly, easily, with its accent on the first syllable, what made him stand out from other men was his speaking voice. His melodic baritone gave even the simplest phrase a quality that approached poetry. Something as unheroic and everyday as “Want to go down to the Lyric to see the new Gary Cooper?” was tinged with a kind of mild electricity and gravitas. But Danek showed no great initial interest in pressing her into any kind of romance. Delivering her to her doorstep after an evening out, he would warmly shake her hand and give her a friendly hug, but nothing more. He was a committed bachelor-widower.
“The kind of man every parent wants to have as a godfather,” Jane confided, “since he’s so generous and sweet to kids but never had one of his own.”
“I like him very much,” Otylie said.
“That’s wonderful,” exclaimed her friend. “Maybe you’ll be the one to bring him out of his shell.”
“Not like that.”
“Not like what?”
“You know. That.”
“Honey, hear me out,” Jane continued one evening while the two were taking a stroll, the golden apple of sun flattening out into a bronze pear as it sank into the horizon. “You don’t want to grow old alone, without love in your bed. Your Jakub wouldn’t want you to, I’m sure of it. Not if he really loved you.”
Jane, the only person with whom Otylie ever discussed Jakub, felt her friend withdraw into herself. She immediately felt sorry for having overstepped.
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be pushy.”
“That’s all right.”
“It’s not. Please forgive me.”
Jane hated to see Otylie’s eyes well with tears which, from sheer willpower, did not spill.
“You know I love you.”
“I love you too, Jane,” Otylie said, taking her hands, voice cracking for the first time since Jane had known her. “I had a friend like a sister once. Irena, as you know. You’re the only sister I have left. My only family. Can we talk about something else?”
Fifty miles southeast of Austin as the crow flies, down past hamlets with names
like Rosanky and String Prairie, in the flats where Farm Road 1295 intersected with South Knezek, was an even tinier hamlet named Praha. Settled by a Bohemian immigrant, Mathias Novak, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Praha briefly boomed, its mostly Czech population swelling toward a thousand until the Southern Pacific Railroad laid tracks through the rival town, Flatonia, Daniel’s birthplace and childhood home just north, drawing people away. In the new century, Praha became more and more a ghost town, as its schools, its businesses, and finally its post office closed. The population soon shrank to a couple of dozen stubborn, deep-rooted souls.
What kept little Praha on the map was a parish church with a single steeple rising over the local plain. Completed in 1892, Saint Mary’s had been, on every August 15 since 1855, the site of Pražská Pout, a popular festival celebrating the feast of the Assumption. On this day, upwards of five thousand people, many of Czech descent, converged on Praha to celebrate Mass, dance to live accordion music performed by Texas Czech musicians, and eat Moravian and Bohemian fare. Otylie asked Danek about the feast one evening while they had mint liqueurs after dinner on his porch overlooking a tangle of mulberry bushes sparkling in the moonlight.
“Praha’s famous for more than just that annual festival.”
“How so?” she asked.
“Sad story, but Praha lost more men per capita in the Second World War than any other town in America.”
The idea that the little town gave so much blood to the cause of defeating the Reich galvanized her. “So, will you take me to the Mass there next month?”
“Sure, love to,” he answered. “But I thought you weren’t religious.”
“I’m not,” she assured him, wondering if that was still true, given how often she found herself saying a brief prayer of thanks when she woke in the morning or silently dialoguing with Jakub before she floated off to sleep at night.
During the drive to Praha, Otylie felt an unusual sense of excitement. The air rushing in through the open windows of the car was rich and soft. An all-night rain had greened the fields and raised the creeks that snaked through them. When they arrived at the festival, Danek parked among rows of cars and trucks lining the road, and they joined a steady stream of people making their way toward the village center.
Saint Mary’s vaulted sky-blue ceiling, blue as the day outdoors, was painted with golden angels, as well as wondrous pelicans feeding their young, and the eerie floating eye of the Holy Ghost. It was different from any church Otylie had ever seen. In some inexplicable way, she found it more inspiring with its homespun modesty and clapboard quirkiness than the grand soaring cathedrals she’d seen in Prague and London. Danek, who sat close beside her in the pew, told her about the muralist, Godfrey Flury, a Swiss immigrant who made his living painting houses, signs, and county-road billboards, and who transformed this sanctuary into a folk art heaven.
“But, then, that’s America for you.” He craned his neck as he admiringly scanned the indoor firmament above them. “Settlers from everywhere just hankering to leave their fingerprints on the new homeland.”
“Beautiful fingerprints,” Otylie added, her spirit lighter than it had been for how many years? Many, too many years. At the same time, the throng of Czechs who spilled out across lawns surrounding Saint Mary’s and beyond made her homesick. The pilsner was not as nutty or rich as what she drank back home. The famous kolaches, she laughed as she told her companion, were filled with such sticky-sweet, bee-drawing jelly that it made her teeth feel on fire while frozen in ice.
Yet what did it matter? She delighted in hearing the Czech-accented English at every vendor booth beneath the overarching shade trees that edged the parish cemetery, loved seeing Czech descendants playing country games—Danek excelled at the ring toss. Never a fan of polkas, she let herself be swept along with the dancing couples, some in traditional regalia. Doing the short steps and twirls with her enthusiastic partner, she sang “Roll Out the Barrel” with others in the broiling afternoon.
As Danek drove her home that night, she mused that, much as she liked Austin, it would be lovely to live where fellow immigrants from the homeland congregated. Those sugary kolaches must have gone to her head, she thought, and laughed. When Danek asked what was so funny, she told him what she’d been thinking. The Texas Praha they’d just visited was all but a nekropole, a necropolis that rose to life like Lazarus but once a year. But she had to wonder whether, in a country as vast as this, there wasn’t another Praha. One that hadn’t died yet.
He nodded. “Minnesota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska—we’re here and there all over the place.”
It needn’t be, she told him, anything like her—their—shining jewel on the Vltava. Obviously it wouldn’t be. No medieval castles and statuary in Oklahoma. No known alchemists in Arkansas. But why not look into it?
“I’d miss you terribly, Otylie,” Danek said, surprising her as much because of the sentiment itself as because he had confessed it to her.
“You know you’ll always be welcome in my house no matter where I end up,” now surprising herself with how foolish and sentimental that sounded. More shocking was the realization of how much she would miss him too.
Maybe Daniel Hajek, who that evening kissed her good night on her doorstep for the first time, would come along with her, she mused. A long-shot fantasy. Besides, his job at the community hospital was steady, and most of his life had been spent in these parts. But who knew? They were birds of a similar feather. Maybe he would be willing someday to fly elsewhere with her, if there was a better place to nest. She adored Jane and really liked Jim. Her students were charming. She had some years to put in here in order to make her bank account grow, so unless something unforeseen happened, the idea that hatched on the Day of the Assumption would have to wait. That night, though, when Otylie put her head on her pillow, exhausted but wide awake, and watched the constellations trek across the pane of glass in her bedroom, she knew that this was not where her journey would end.
Some strategic long-distance telephone calls and discreet behind-the-scenes inquiries preceded Danek’s showing up unannounced at Otylie’s door on an early September morning following their Praha jaunt. She knew right away that something out of the ordinary lay behind his unexpected visit, given that Danek was even more formal than Otylie when it came to making appointments. “Starched shirt, starched blouse, you two’re a perfect match,” Jane once teased her friend. Unable to disagree, Otylie just shook her head with a wry grin.
“Danny,” she said, using her personal nickname for him, as she pushed open the screen door, “what brings you here?”
“My day off, and I hoped to find you home.” Hat removed, he asked as he stepped inside, “Anybody got a cup of black coffee around this place?”
“You bet,” she said, amused by how many of these Americanisms had crept into her once formal British locution.
“Good, thanks. I brought cinnamon buns from Brody’s, hot out of the oven, as they say in the commercials.” He presented her with a brown paper bag from the bakery, a couple of silver-dollar-size grease spots on its sides attesting to his claim.
Another scent besides cinnamon wafted in the air. Did he smell of extra aftershave this morning—sandalwood? And while Danek was always nicely groomed, this morning he seemed particularly natty in a deep blue dress shirt tucked into dress jeans, wearing black cowboy boots that had been polished earlier that day.
After trading small talk in the kitchen while Otylie poured their coffees and arranged the buns on a plate, they sat together, as they liked to do, out on her back porch shaded by cottonwood trees that were older than the two of them combined. Though it wasn’t quite eleven, the late summer heat had quieted the song-birds. Cicadas droned away. A magpie squawked out at the edge of the gravelly yard, hopped twice, nonchalantly took wing.
“So, then,” she said. “This pastry’s delicious, but really, what brings you by this morning?”
“Well, I just had a very interesting conversation and
thought you’d want to hear about it. You remember mentioning that you’d enjoy visiting other places where there were more folks who had settled from the old country?”
“I do.”
“Well, wouldn’t you know, I’ve been asked to interview for a job at a big hospital up in Lincoln, Nebraska.”
“I’d need a map to know where that is,” Otylie admitted.
“It’s pretty much due north of here, up past Oklahoma and Kansas in the southeast part of the state. Now, I haven’t said yes to anything and neither have they. But a friend of mine from school days married a girl originally from Lincoln, and they moved up there and really like it. It’s the state capital, you know. Good university, considerable culture from what I understand, a music school. But here’s another thing. Less than an hour farther north and west out in the farmland, there’s a town called Prague.”
“What? Really?”
“They pronounce it long so it rhymes with hay but it’s still spelled P-r-a-g-u-e.”
The Prague Sonata Page 36
