I am pleased to confirm your interview at the Bentley School of Music at four o’clock on Tuesday, September 25. Please bring your cello and your scholarship application with you. My office is located in Trumbull Hall.
Yours very truly,
Elihu Pierson, Dean of Students
Jack closed his eyes and tried to picture the elite boarding school—the classrooms, the auditorium, the dormitory, the musicians. He could hardly wait to go to the place where everyone loved music. A place where there were things to do. A place that wasn’t this pit town of Massena, New York.
He felt a hand on his back. “Happy birthday, shport,” said his father, his Yiddish accent shaping the last word into a cross between ship and port. Sam Pool was a short man with thick spectacles that hardly improved the poor eyesight he was born with. Blotting his graying mustache with a handkerchief, he added, “And a hundred more.”
“Thanks, Pa…So, do I get the day off?”
Mrs. Pool jumped at this opportunity to make the point she made every Saturday morning. “Jack should always get Shabbos off. It’s bad enough you break the Sabbath yourself, Sam. Do you have to encourage your son to do the same?”
“Friday is payday at the plant,” he said. “Saturday is shopping day. I have no choice in it.” He pointed toward his wife’s apron pocket. “Some things can’t wait, can they, my dear?” Turning toward Jack, he added, “I tell you what, shport. Tomorrow you can have off.”
“We’re closed Sundays, Pa,” Jack said.
Mrs. Pool just rolled her eyes, then checked her hands for tell-tale pencil smudges.
The synagogue, a ten-minute walk from the Pools’ house, was a small red brick building with tinted windows and heavy double doors. Jack, Harry and Mr. Pool climbed the front steps and entered the sanctuary, a simple room with twelve benches—six on the left for men and boys and six on the right for women and girls. On the bima stood a lectern and, against the far wall, a wooden cabinet that housed the two Torah scrolls. The windows spilled chartreuse light into the room.
“Where’s Rabbi Abrams?” asked Harry, impatient for the services to begin and end. He fell into his usual spot, nearest the window in the second row.
“What difference does it make?” Jack asked, nodding to his friend Abe Goldberg. “We’re only five yet.” Ten men were required to hold a worship service, and they were only halfway there.
“Rats,” Harry said. But by the time they put on their prayer shawls and yarmulkes, Rabbi Abrams was entering the sanctuary, flanked by a handful of other men. “Finally,” Harry whispered.
Rabbi Louis Abrams was a compact man with a trim nut-brown beard and a scar on one cheek that turned into an S whenever he smiled, which was often. He nodded to the men and boys as he approached the bima, then took his place behind the lectern and began chanting the Hebrew prayers.
Jack grew restless within minutes. He’d felt restless a lot lately, stuck in this remote little whistle-stop that didn’t even have a movie theater or a music store. Scarcely five miles from Ontario, Canada, Massena was locked between the St. Lawrence River on one side and the Adirondack Mountains on the other, a flat, bland expanse of nothingness. Most Massena men toiled as dairy farmers or laborers at the aluminum works, jobs they held all their lives and then passed on to their sons. People stayed on here—and so did their children—until no one seemed to notice the drudgery anymore.
No one except Jack. Every day he felt this place trying to squeeze the music right out of him. No concert hall, no local quartet, no classical music on the radio. Jack didn’t know what he’d do without Mr. Morse, who taught the skimpy school orchestra, gave lunch-period lessons, and, most importantly, spent untold hours with him after school, talking about fingering, bowing, rhythm, and the inner workings of the music. But Mr. Morse would be retiring at the end of the year. What then? What would he do then if he didn’t get into the Bentley School?
Harry nudged Jack out of his reverie. “I saw Sarah gawking at you yesterday,” he whispered.
“Huh? Sarah who?”
“Sarah Gelman, who else? Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed her looking.”
“Well, I haven’t,” he said, and it was the truth. How could Jack think about other girls when there was Emaline, the girl he’d almost kissed? The only girl he wanted to kiss.
“Don’t you think she’s pretty?”
Jack didn’t hear him.
“Don’t you?” Harry asked again.
“Don’t I what?”
“Think she’s pretty, genius.”
“Yeah, she’s okay.”
“Want me to tell her brother next week?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Jack had nothing to say, so he said nothing.
“You think she’s a bug-eyed Betty, don’t you?” Harry said.
“I told you she’s okay. I’m just not interested.”
“How come?”
Rabbi Abrams saved Jack from Harry’s inquisition by singing Adon Olam, the closing song. Harry had his shawl folded and put away before the hymn was over.
“Come, the store,” Mr. Pool said to Jack. “Harry, your mother needs your help at home.”
Pool’s Dry Goods was one long room divided into departments by handwritten signs: SHOES. LADIES’. MEN’S SUITS & JACKETS. CHILDREN’S. HOME WARES. Roscoe, Mr. Pool’s head clerk, was standing by the window, dressing the mannequins in work pants and boots. Other clerks were milling about the departments, chatting with browsers, folding clothes, and ringing up purchases.
“Who you rooting for today?” Jack asked Roscoe.
Roscoe took a straight pin from between his lips. “Yankees, ’course. You?”
“Any team with Lou Gehrig and the Babe is my team. It’s the one good thing about having to work today—I can listen to the game on the radio here.”
“You ain’t got a radio at home?”
“Not on Saturdays. Got the delivery?”
“Shoulda been here half an hour ago. I’m just killing time. Why don’t you…let’s see…” He clicked his tongue, something he fell into when he was thinking. “How about you straighten up the men’s pants?”
Jack frowned. “Got anything a little more interesting?”
“More interesting?” Roscoe blew a raspberry. “What you got in mind—cleaning the bathroom?”
Jack turned in resignation to the denims, figuring he’d use the mental downtime to walk through his piece for the Bentley audition, but he stopped short when he heard a sweet and airy laugh nearby. He peeked around the pants rack to find Emaline and her older cousin Lydie sorting through the ladies’ hat display.
In the sunlight, Emaline’s eyes shone gold, and her ash-blonde hair reflected hints of red. Jack wondered what her hair smelled like today and decided on nutmeg or aniseed—something fresh and lively and a little exotic. She looked so beautiful to him that even her little flaws—the crowding of her teeth, the asymmetry of her eyebrows—made him feel crazy.
And her hands—what else had they touched today: her pillow, her skirt,