And After the Fire Read online

  When the cantata ended, no one applauded. The musicians and singers dispersed. The strangers around her in the pews behaved as if nothing special had occurred. The gray-haired woman diagonally in front of Susanna checked her program. The red-cheeked man on her left drifted into sleep. Susanna felt energy cascading through her, as if she were seeing everything around her with a newfound clarity. What could she do with this awareness?

  Nothing, apparently. The service plodded on. The minister recited more prayers, a hymn was sung, the parishioners stood up and sat down, and Susanna followed along. The organ began to play what the program called a postlude, by Buxtehude. When this was over, the parishioners filed out.

  The program notes concluded, You are invited to join us in the community center downstairs for coffee and cake after the service!! The two exclamation points evoked a determined optimism that Susanna couldn’t share, but a reception was convenient from her perspective. She’d introduce herself to Daniel Erhardt and inquire about a private consultation.

  She followed the others downstairs. The community room was dingy, with a scuffed linoleum floor, musty odor, and peeling paint. Several tubes of the fluorescent lights flickered. In the corner, a roasting pan collected rainwater that dripped from the ceiling. Daniel Erhardt was surrounded by parishioners eager to talk to him.

  “Is this your first visit to our church?” A white-haired woman with an open, cordial expression, and wearing a powder-blue suit with flat shoes, stood before Susanna. The woman didn’t pause for Susanna to respond, no doubt believing the answer self-evident. “I’m Jessie Mueller. The pastor’s wife. Welcome.” They shook hands. “Would you like some cake?”

  Susanna had already had dessert at her colleague’s party, but she allowed herself to be led to the cake table. From another kind, white-haired woman, she accepted a slice of yellow cake with chocolate frosting. The cake was sugary but otherwise tasteless. Susanna surreptitiously covered it with a napkin and put it into the garbage bin on the far side of the room.

  The minister, dressed now in a black suit with a white clerical collar, strode over to her. His responsibilities no longer seemed to weigh on him. Instead he looked exuberant and robust, a man who’d enjoyed decades of hearty food and drink and looked forward to many more.

  “A newcomer! Jessie alerted me. Bach always brings the newcomers. Frank Mueller.” He thrust out his hand.

  “Susanna Kessler.” They shook hands, he with a fervency that left her taken aback.

  “And what is your faith, if may I be so bold?”

  “Atheist-Jewish, I’m afraid.”

  “No need to apologize. Our Bach program attracts many atheist-Jews, and a lot of other kinds of Jews, too. Our Lord was a Jew, did you know? Silly question, I’m sure you know that. Nevertheless a fundamental point in our religion and always worth repeating.” His expression brightened with an oddly hypereager enthusiasm. “I’m pleased to tell you that in 1994, our denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, repudiated Martin Luther’s writings against the Jews.”

  Susanna wasn’t familiar with Martin Luther’s writings against the Jews, but she could well imagine. The fact that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America hadn’t repudiated these teachings until 1994 . . . their awakening seemed a little late in coming. Judging from his rather overexcited nervousness, the Reverend Mueller might have thought so, too.

  “You’re always welcome here.”

  “Thank you.”

  Jessie joined them, along with several other women. “Frank, we need your advice on a question of . . .”

  As they became involved in a conversation about an upcoming children’s festival, Susanna stepped away. She searched for Daniel Erhardt. He was free now, on his way to the table that held coffee and cookies. He poured himself a cup of coffee. She made her way through the crowd and approached him.

  “Professor Erhardt, excuse me.”

  He turned to her.

  “My name is Susanna Kessler. I’m a visitor here.” That seemed like the best opening gambit, and it did bring a smile to his face.

  “Me, too. Hired to give the preconcert lecture, all expenses paid.”

  “Sounds like a good gig.”

  “It is. Especially because I love the music. Did you enjoy the cantata?”

  She paused to formulate an answer. “Enjoy isn’t exactly the right word. My background is Jewish, so I’m sure I didn’t understand it properly, but—well, I thought it was staggering.”

  “Bach’s music is staggering.”

  “I hadn’t realized. Years of piano lessons when I was young, and a subscription to the local orchestra, and I never knew until now.”

  “I hear such things all the time.”

  “To me it seemed more spiritual than specifically religious.”

  “When the cantata begins, the music puts us into an alternate world. I believe that for Bach, God is part of the intended audience. That’s what we’re hearing: his call to God.”

  “I think I understand what you mean.”

  “However, Bach didn’t call to a generic God. Despite how the music affects us today, Bach himself was very much of his time and place. He—okay, enough lecturing.”

  Professor Erhardt’s light humor set her at ease. “I’m hoping you can help me,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Your bio in the program says you do consulting. I need to hire a consultant.”

  “To consult about what?”

  She hesitated. “I found something . . .” She didn’t want to sound deranged. “Unusual. A music manuscript.”

  He frowned. “What sort of music manuscript?”

  “My uncle brought it back from Germany after the war. Kept it hidden all these years, and now it’s come to me.”

  “And it’s signed, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  “By Bach or Mozart or Beethoven?”

  How quickly he dismissed her.

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t get involved in estate matters. I hear stories like this a lot. You should contact a dealer, or Sotheby’s, and secure an expert appraisal. I have to warn you, though: roughly one hundred percent of these cases turn out to be false alarms. Printed sheet music used to be expensive, so music lovers often copied out pieces by hand. That’s what confuses people nowadays.”

  “If it turns out to be an old copy, that’s fine. The point is, I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to show it to a dealer, or to anyone whose first thought would be to sell it. My uncle kept it hidden for a good reason, I feel certain. For now, I want only a scholar to look at it. The signature says J. S. Bach. You’re a scholar of Bach.” She put on her best professional manner, forthright and to the point. “Your bio says you do consulting. I’d like to hire you. I’m happy to add twenty percent to your accustomed fee, due to the unusual circumstances.”

  “When I do consulting, it’s usually to give advice to libraries about acquiring scholarly books. Or musical advice to orchestra groups. When they’re looking for a Bach piece that includes, say, one French horn, a flute, and three oboes, because those are the instrumentalists available.”

  He seemed to think this was funny.

  “The fact is,” he continued, “I don’t charge them fees because they couldn’t afford a fee.”

  “I can afford a fee.”

  “Dan, look who’s here today!”

  The Reverend Mueller pushed a wheelchair that held a frail, elderly woman dressed in a lavender suit. She wore sunglasses that curved around her temples.

  “It’s our own Mrs. Hoffman!” said the Reverend Mueller.

  “She braved the rain to join us,” Mrs. Mueller said, patting Mrs. Hoffman’s shoulder.

  From the Muellers’ deference, Susanna inferred that Mrs. Hoffman must be a major donor to the church.

  Leaning over to grasp Mrs. Hoffman’s hands, Professor Erhardt asked, “Did you enjoy the cantata?”

  College websites generally gave the e-mail
addresses for faculty, so Susanna knew she’d have no trouble following up with him. She slipped away.

  Chapter 6

  Daniel Erhardt pulled his car behind the others waiting on line to drop off children at the pre-K through third grade school on the campus of Granville College, outside Philadelphia. His daughter, Becky, a first grader, was buckled into her car seat in the back.

  “You have your lunch and your project?” Dan said.

  “Yes, Daddy. You already asked me.”

  As usual, Becky was impatient with his anxieties. To Dan, she seemed far older than six, although he didn’t have much experience to judge by. This morning she’d dressed herself in red leggings with a white top and a short jean jacket. Julie, Dan’s wife, Becky’s mom, used to say that Becky had been born with a fashion sense. Two barrettes embossed with the image of a white kitten prevented Becky’s silky blond hair from falling into her face.

  “Sally will pick you up after school.”

  “You already told me.” Sally was a senior at the college. “Sally picks me up every day. You don’t have to keep telling me.”

  “Bear with me, sweetheart.”

  Becky shrugged. Where is Becky, who is taking care of Becky? This was the constant refrain of his days.

  They reached the front of the line. Miss Emma, age roughly twenty-three, greeted them. “Good morning, Becky. Good morning, Mr. Erhardt.” Miss Emma was forever on the verge of laughter, as if all of life were like first grade.

  Becky undid her seat belt and grabbed her backpack and lunch box. “Bye, Daddy,” she called as she bounded out of the car. Instinctively he reached out to her. He wasn’t fast enough and didn’t manage to touch her.

  He felt an ache in his chest, even though rationally he knew that her ability to run off each morning showed how well she was doing. She joined her friends on the swing set. Becky’s day started with recess.

  As Dan drove away, Katie Reilly, the principal, waved to him. For an elementary school principal, Katie was surprisingly voluptuous, he couldn’t help but notice despite his loyalty to Julie’s memory. She wore a snug V-neck sweater that showed off her figure. Katie was divorced, three or four years now. Recently she’d been waving to him with an encouraging expression that he didn’t want to recognize. He knew what it meant, but he still thought of himself as married. Maybe he always would. With his thumb, he turned the gold band on his ring finger. He’d been getting a lot of encouraging looks lately from unattached women. The beckoning that said, I’m here if you want to talk, or for anything else you might want to do. But he didn’t want to talk. He’d done enough talking. And he wasn’t prepared for more than talking.

  He drove on the narrow roadways across the campus. With its sweeping lawns and hundred-year-old shade trees, the campus was looking exceptionally beautiful today. As he contemplated his morning class, he felt like two people, a public self, giving lectures and interacting smoothly with the world, and a private self, locked in mourning. He wished he could make Becky’s life more fun by bringing his public self home, but he couldn’t.

  He found a parking space near the music building. After yesterday’s rain, the air was fresh and cool. From the outside, the music building was a hideous pile of drab concrete blocks. Inside, it opened to reveal glass walls facing a forest. He walked upstairs to his office. His class was at 9:10, an awful time slot when three-quarters of the students were half asleep, but he didn’t control the scheduling.

  He turned on his college-issued desktop computer with its mammoth screen. He saw an e-mail from Susanna Kessler, requesting an appointment. Yesterday, when she’d told him that she’d found a Bach manuscript, he’d thought, oh no, not that: a manuscript—autograph was the more exacting term, if it was really in Bach’s handwriting, which it wasn’t—found in a closet or an attic, and an excited heir assumes it must be a lost work by the great master.

  This morning, however, as he thought back on their meeting, he felt more sympathetic toward her. God alone knew how she’d come to be there, with her high heels and short skirt, amid a sea of conservative Lutheran women.

  When it came to church basements, Julie had fit in perfectly. He’d often teased her, that she should have been a minister’s wife. She’d lean close to him and whisper that he was her personal minister, of music, and he could bring out his instrument for her later, and she would help. She had a secret sensual side, hidden from everyone but him.

  During Julie’s final months, their church in Granville had united to help the Erhardts. Their fellow parishioners assured that a babysitter was always on call, so Dan never had to worry about finding someone to stay with Becky when he needed to be at the hospital with Julie. When Dan was teaching, church people made certain that someone was with Julie, reading aloud to her. In the church basement, sign-up sheets filled the bulletin board, outlining weekly care for the Erhardt family: who would cook and drop off food, do the laundry, run errands, car pool.

  Pray for our beloved Julie, Pastor Mansholt intoned each week, and pray for her family. Although Dan couldn’t say for certain if the prayers made a difference, he did appreciate them. The parishioners were good people, and he couldn’t have managed without them. He reserved his anger for God. How could an all-powerful, all-loving God let Julie die? He hoped that someday he would come to understand God’s mysterious ways. At his worst moments, Dan found himself wondering whether God did or could in fact know and watch over every person on earth.

  Despite his questioning and his doubts, he had to carry on. Susanna Kessler seemed to believe that he could help her. Grief had led her into a church, a place she didn’t usually visit. She’d found him and asked for his assistance. Plenty of people had been helping him lately. Maybe he ought to help her.

  He replied to her e-mail message and suggested several possible meeting times.

  Then he closed his eyes. In his mind he reviewed this morning’s class topic: social implications in Mozart’s instrumental music. Dan never wrote out lectures for his classes. Instead he reviewed the material beforehand, chose music examples, and in class let the music guide him. With luck, the immediacy made his classes more exciting, for himself and the students both. He didn’t want to end up teaching the way his own professors had taught, unfolding yellowed lecture notes prepared thirty years before and delivered by rote ever since. Nowadays he faced an added challenge: to compete with Google, YouTube, texting, and whatever else was on the phone in the palm of every student’s hand, teaching had to be a performance, an entertainment.

  This semester’s Mozart class had attracted six members of the varsity baseball team. He might be gaining a reputation for easy classes, although that was hard to believe because musical structure was like a new language for most Granville students. At any rate, he was happy to have the baseball team. They participated in discussions as if class were a game worth playing.

  Picking up the stack of CDs he’d organized on Friday, he left his office, locking the door behind him. His colleague Katarina Kundera, dark-haired and motherly, was coming out of her office down the hall, holding her own stack of CDs. As usual, she was dressed in black except for a scarf tied around her neck in a complex manner she described as French. Today’s scarf was purple. Having a colleague like Katarina was a blessing for him. She was a terrific scholar as well as brilliant and funny. An expert on the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana, she taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. She was married to a physics professor at the college, and her daughter and Becky often played together.

  “Good morning,” he said. “What’s on your schedule for today?”

  “Madama Butterfly.”

  Dan cringed in spite of himself. He disliked nineteenth-century Italian opera. To his taste, the music was saccharine and the stories melodramatic.

  “Many people find Italian opera cathartic,” Katarina said cheerfully, well aware of his bias.

  “I’m happy for them.”

  “What are you doing today?”

  “The Serenata no
tturna.”

  “You’re lucky. I do love that piece.”

  “Yes, I am lucky.” He was drawing a good salary essentially for ruminating upon his CD collection: a person couldn’t be luckier than that.

  She went into her classroom, and Dan went into his.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” he said with a dash of irony to lighten the mood, so they’d be more receptive to the challenging material ahead.

  “Good morning, Professor,” they said in sing-song unison, responding to his tone. A few baseball mitts were stashed under chairs.

  “I’m certain you’ve all done your listening homework”—strained laughter ensued—“so you’re prepared to discuss the Serenata notturna. Let’s begin at the end, with the third movement, which Mozart deliberately gives the French title, Rondeau.”

  “Excuse me, Professor,” said Derrick Lyons, the third baseman. His gangly legs fit awkwardly under the chair’s table extension. “What I want to know is, what’s with the weird bit of gypsy-sounding music in the third movement? Does it make sense in there?”

  Talk about cutting to the chase. This was Dan’s first topic. “Interesting question, Derrick. Thank you. Let’s start by considering what’s happening at that spot.”

  Chapter 7

  Susanna sat down on a child-sized chair in the far corner of the refurbished library at P.S. 629. The air smelled of fresh paint and new carpeting. Across the room, a class of second graders sat cross-legged on the floor while Sheila Davis, the librarian, began her presentation on a book about life on the International Space Station.

  “Today’s chapter is called, ‘Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. Plus Snacks.’”