Nocturnes Read online

  He followed the voice down through the foliage along the banks. There on a slab of rock jutting out into the stream, singing one of her own lullabies to a doll, was the 14-year-old poet, Lessa Frankle. He stood above her behind a tree, like a dumbstruck animal, as something in her voice punctured him like tender thorns.

  “My sweet child

  You are lucky, indeed.

  Papa will take care

  Of all your needs. My husband

  Keeps us both from harm,

  And holds back the night

  With two strong arms…”

  When she had finished her song, Isaac walked down to her and tried to introduce himself. But her voice had rendered his mute. So she talked to him until he finally found his voice. By that time he never wanted to hear any words but hers, ever again.

  They became the thickest of thieves and the finest of friends. In their innocence, they shared everything. School work, holidays, walks in the rain, and bathing in the creek on sultry summer days. By the time their families realized that they had grown older and ever closer, it was far too late to think of chaperones and traditional courtship. In any case, events were shaping that captured everyone’s attention in much more alarming ways.

  The beds in this hotel had always been some of Isaac’s favorites when he traveled. But on this night they might as well have been made of car radiators and rusty springs. He crossed and uncrossed his feet, willing himself to relax. He didn’t want to pursue these memories any further. There was a deadline, and work to focus on. Memories of Lessa, indulged and embraced, would only be an unhealthy distraction.

  He tossed on the sheets for another hour but sleep had no mercy for him. He staved off memories of Lessa in one context only to find her waiting for him in another. The image of the refugees returned to him and, sighing deeply, he surrendered once more to the sweeping current of his thoughts.

  It was late summer, 1945, and Isaac had been blown across the European continent like a ragged flag, seeking some word, some small sign of Lessa’s existence. He had traveled with great hardship to all the major refugee camps, and had witnessed the crowded squalor of the Jerusalem-dreamers. Hundreds and thousands waiting to become the flesh and bones of the new promised land.

  Eventually he made his way to London. The British were the administrators for the majority of the camps, and he had come to examine their records. It was there, as his hope broke in waves of despair over the vague and fruitless files, that he met the young priest, Evan Connor. And thus began his slow, halfhearted revival with the human race.

  Father Connor heard the outline of Isaac’s story and took him into his home, where the tormented young Jew stayed for the next five months. The priest was patient and compassionate. Only Lessa could have salvaged Isaac’s wounded spirit. In her absence, Isaac turned gradually to what he saw as a possible redemption in the Catholic tradition. He would now attempt to reconnect with a faith that had fled from him during the horror that was Auschwitz.

  To Isaac, the God of Abraham had proven His cruel indifference by shrugging His shoulders as the swastikas danced around the pyre of Isaac’s race. Father Connor spoke of the same God, but with a powerful difference that appealed to the dreams of the young survivor. Resurrection. Eternal life. If this were true, then Lessa might well be waiting for him out there beyond the veil.

  Resurrection became his ideal. If this Jesus really was the personification of eternal love, then there was at least a possibility that he would see his wife again. And a possibility was all that Isaac needed to subscribe.

  It wasn’t as huge a leap as he might have imagined. When he approached Father Connor with the idea of Conversion, the priest seemed more concerned with the implications than Isaac did. He invited Isaac into the book-lined rectory and poured tea for them both. The silence balanced on a wire between them.

  “How long have you been considering this, Isaac?” The priest broke the silence after several tense moments.

  “For about two months now, Evan.”

  “And what, exactly, do you believe that Catholicism is going to mean in your life? Especially in light of all that you have been through these last few years?”

  Isaac broke the priest’s hard gaze and looked down at the floor. That was a very focused and somewhat unsettling question. How could he explain about Lessa? What could he possibly say that would make sense to a man who had never lain with a woman? Who had never experienced that peculiar fusion of body and soul? Even under these circumstances he knew that he couldn’t begin to unravel his truest feelings for the sake of the priest’s questions. The gravity of love’s loss was still too heavy upon his tongue. But a substantial part of it would have to be said. This wasn’t a new suit of clothes he was trying on. His love depended on it. And his hope commanded it.

  He raised his eyes again and met those of the priest with a steady gaze.

  “Let me ask you some questions, Evan. What is God? Is He supreme love, as the words of Christ suggest? Or is He brutally indifferent, as my people’s most recent history implies? Does He hold conjugal love in as high a regard as He holds the love of compassion…the love that you and your brothers and sisters in faith have taken vows of celibacy for?”

  The priest looked a little perplexed by Isaac’s line of questioning. He had covered a lot of ground during conversion discussions, but this was a novel path. Isaac pushed more questions into the uncertain silence, his passionate motives flowing out of him.

  “I want to know if God recognizes, and gives some sort of priority to, the love between a man and a woman who wanted nothing less than forever. Because if He doesn’t, I am never going to see my wife again. And I could never want to know, or try to love, a God who would give us the capacity for such longing only to viciously rip the heart out of the dream. If there is no reunion to hope for, He can send me straight to Hell right now and skip the formalities.”

  Isaac’s eyes blazed with accusation, with ten lifetimes’ worth of anguish. Until now he had kept the depth of that suffering to himself. The world of men was no longer a place of meaning for Isaac Bloom. His attention was now focused on the afterlife, and the love that might yet await him there. Evan Connor was caught in that powerful undertow.

  This truly was a soul in need. Here was a man who might never hope again. It was thin ice for a young priest to skate out upon. But there was great possibility here as well. And the priest had to believe that God was trying to reveal something to both of the young men who sat pondering the eternal in a London rectory, only months removed from the greatest carnage in “civilized” history.

  “Isaac, I can’t even begin to comprehend your pain. And I certainly can’t offer any simple answers to your questions. I will say this: When love and faith come together, it is the most powerful combination imaginable. I have seen lives changed and great miracles performed under such circumstances. It is as though God takes our abilities and multiplies them. But the best product of this rare confluence is an unshakeable inner peace. A peace that is everlasting. That is, it lasts as long as one’s faith does. Your own faith has been sorely tested. But your love, at least in the most perfect conjugal sense, has stood firm. We need to set about the recovery of your faith.”

  Isaac leaned back into his chair and sighed deeply. “That alone could constitute a miracle,” he thought bitterly.

  During the course of the next several months, the two men were nearly inseparable. They took long afternoon walks through Hyde Park and along the Thames. Through autumn leaves and over wintered bridges. One step at a time.

  Father Connor spoke of the risks of faith, and of justified hope. He took the great historical lessons of suffering and put them into a personal context…always bringing the conversation back around to love.

  He was an enthusiastic teacher, learning as much from his own ideas as he hoped Isaac was. He tried to convey to Isaac that the great mining-out of the hear
t that suffering performs could eventually be filled with the deepest kind of love—the kind that Isaac was on a quest to find—and that he would need faith if he were to realize the dream of eternity with his wife.

  “Suffering often produces hatred and anger. But perhaps its greatest miracle is the softening of the heart…and that softening is love, Isaac.”

  Finally, two weeks before Easter of 1946, Evan Connor told his friend that he would administer the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and First Communion on Holy Saturday. Isaac spent the next twelve days in prayer, imploring St. Jude, the patron saint of Lost Causes, for intercession. He pleaded with all who would listen to preserve his marriage forever.

  It was an evening ceremony. The church shadows danced in the flickering candlelight as Isaac made his way to the altar to receive his First Communion. Father Connor smiled at him and leaned forward to whisper in his ear.

  “Rejoice, Isaac! I have been praying very earnestly for something to bring you comfort. I have never heard of this being done, but I can find no misgivings in my heart for what I am about to do. I have come to believe that Lessa’s spirit does dwell within you as part of your own soul.”

  With that, the priest took two hosts, dipped them into the crimson wine, and held them forth like an answered prayer to Isaac’s trembling lips.

  “The body and blood of Christ.”

  From that time forward, whenever he received communion from Father Connor, he received it for himself and for Lessa. It may have been nothing more than a well-intentioned placebo for the ailing soul, but to Isaac it was the recovery of some measure of hope. Life would always be a sentence to be carried out as long as he was separated from his love, but now a possible pardon seemed to exist, out there somewhere.

  In 1953, Father Connor was transferred to a parish in Boston. Isaac had stayed on in London after his conversion, and had found work with a major newspaper. When his one true friend departed, he could find no reason not to join him in America. By following Evan to Boston, he could continue his faith, with the unique incentive of the two hosts.

  Now, as memories finally gave way to fatigue, Isaac shifted onto his side, wrapped his arms around a pillow, and called out the day’s final yearning.

  “Lessa, come to my dreams. Please, come to me…”

  Chapter Two

  Isaac rose early the following morning, determined to focus on the task at hand and to put the previous night quickly behind him. Eleven cities needed to be covered in the next twenty-four days. There was no time for nocturnal involvement with dreams and ghosts…or strangers in the shadows.

  He worked with intensity and by lunchtime he was famished. Last night’s encounter was a thing of fading anxiety. He placed an order for a bottle of Pouilly-Fume and grilled chicken salad to be delivered to his room. He sat at the balcony table enjoying the brilliance of the cobalt sky and opened the paper, automatically, to the obituaries. No familiar names. He was just about to turn to the redundancy of the headlines when something caught in the smoky webs of reluctant memory and demanded his attention.

  He glanced back over the obits and there it was, the vague little paragraph that marked the end of a life…and the end of a lullaby.

  Jane Doe. Unidentified elderly vagrant female.

  Found dead in Piedmont Park. Cause of death

  Unknown. Pending autopsy.

  Police do not suspect foul play.

  Isaac rose and walked to the balcony’s edge. He looked out over the rooftops and the busy streets toward Piedmont Park. He could see the density of trees that marked the park’s interior. Dark questions of coincidence whispered like a rustle of leaves.

  “Hush little baby, don’t you cry…”

  He knew it was her. That pitiful wraith, singing herself to sleep on a park bench, would dream no more.

  Did the stranger in the shadows have anything to do with it?

  “Careful, Isaac. There’s a whole neighborhood of well-wishers back home just waiting for you to start chasing demons when you’re out in the yard with that broom,” he thought aloud.

  In fact, his own fear deterred him as well. He knew that he had an over-active imagination. He was a writer, for Chrissakes. There were times, especially during recollections of the camp, that he doubted if he would return to the world intact. Best not to ponder what is unseeable, and unknowable.

  But the question refused to die that easily. He had shared a bond with that old woman. He crossed himself and offered a prayer.

  “Give her a good home, lord. And a soft pillow, free of tears.”

  *

  The next day he caught a flight to Charlotte. By charging into his assignment, he was able to keep that old sorrowful ghost at bay. But that night, as he lay his head on the scented pillows, he was forced to succumb and invite her into the crowded haunts of his memory.

  Over the course of the next several nights a pattern developed, in which his memories oscillated between the homeless woman and his wife. Lessa seemed especially close now, almost reproving in her love. His conscience was curiously co-mingled with thoughts of how Lessa would deal with recent events.

  “There is nothing I can do for her, Mrs. Bloom,” he would say to an empty chair. “She is at peace now,” he would remark to the clothes in the closet. “This is ridiculous,” to the bidet.

  But still he could not free himself of the troubling idea that the old woman and the dark stranger were connected. And the notion that he should somehow get involved began to wear on his nerves.

  Nine days later he was in St. Louis and lack of sleep was taking its toll. He didn’t carry fatigue well, and when he checked in to the hotel the manager, who had known Isaac for a decade, politely inquired of his health. Isaac went straight to bed and into a dreamless sleep. When his call came at eight the next morning, he was already up and alert, feeling much renewed.

  He ordered eggs Benedict, sourdough toast, and French press coffee, then stood for fifteen minutes under a scalding shower. When breakfast and the morning paper arrived he was feeling as frisky as a fifty year old. He avoided the obituaries for the moment, unwilling to dampen his mood with the news of death. The deceased were interred there in their little columns. They weren’t going anywhere.

  He read through the news and shook his head. “What have we become?” He gazed up at the ceiling and wondered aloud at the cruel and violent obsessions of mankind, and suddenly felt fatigue wash over him again. He sat there, half a century removed from the butchery of the Holocaust, and had to admit that the species hadn’t learned a thing. He had avoided the obituaries, but why? Every newspaper in the world had become one redundant obituary for the planet, and for the most overrated species ever residing upon it.

  With disgust, he turned at last to those neat little rows of the dead to look for any familiar names. All that remained of a life, of loves and disappointments. A name, whispered among friends, wept over by family…and called out in anguish in the long night of mourning.

  Consciously he tried to avoid it, but his eyes kept returning to a troubling little paragraph that whispered of Atlanta.

  Itinerant male found dead

  near Braintree Station.

  Identity unknown. Cause

  of death uncertain.

  Pending coroner’s report.

  There was absolutely nothing to connect the two deaths. Nothing except a fevered imagination fueled by too many sleepless nights. He knew that he needed more rest than he had been getting. He also knew that he had taken the old woman’s death too personally. He knew that the whole thing was crazy. He picked up the phone and got the number to the County Coroner’s office.

  *

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, sir. Please follow me.”

  Isaac was led down several winding corridors of tile and chrome and flickering fluorescent lighting. The attendant introduced Isaac to the assistant coroner as Arthur Stratton, the name th
at he had given over the phone when he had called as a concerned relative looking for his missing brother.

  Isaac was still swimming in disbelief over his own actions. He could not rationally explain to himself what he was trying to accomplish by viewing the dead body of a transient in a town that wasn’t even his home. But when he tried to disengage himself from the gruesome task, he could feel the annoying tug of his conscience urging him on. He had to follow his gut on this if he was going to have any peace.

  “Hello, Mr. Stratton. I’m sorry to meet under such solemn circumstances. Hopefully, this part of your search will prove futile.”

  The assistant turned and led the numbed Isaac to a gurney occupied by a linen-swathed figure. With no preamble, he pulled the pale garment from an even more colorless body.

  The abrupt face-to-face with death caused Isaac to sway and clutch at the gurney for support, find the cadaver’s arm instead, and pull it off the edge. It dangled there, outstretched with rigor mortis and pointing at the shaken old man like an accusation.

  The attendant grabbed him and Isaac composed himself enough to notice the bruised and punctured skin near the joint of the dead man’s elbow. The young coroner rearranged the arm, covered the face, and looked questioningly into Isaac’s face.

  Isaac finally managed to tear his gaze from the figure. He looked into the coroner’s eyes and shook his head. “Just out of curiosity,” casually, cautiously, “how did he die?”

  “Nothing terribly exciting. A combination of poor physical health and morphine. I hesitate to call it an overdose because, in a healthy man, it wouldn’t have been. But his body had deteriorated enough from the disease that would have eventually killed him that the drug in his veins was just enough to help things along.”

  “The disease that would have killed him?’ Isaac asked, confused.