Saint Hiroshima

by Leigh Kennedy

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

As a boy Phil Benson tried to summon up an enthusiasm for baseball. He could see that his real passion, classical music, was considered somehow subversive - not really American. That is why Mr Tackett's became such a haven for him. Away from the uninspiring pitch and the disapproving ear of his father at home, Phil found at his piano teacher's a sanctuary for his musical conspiracy with the universe to flourish. Katie Doheney was the victim of another sort of conspiracy - or so she was convinced from the first brush of her childhood logic with the real-life spectacle of death in a road accident and the image of the Hiroshima mushroom on television. The threat of nuclear holocaust stalked Katie's every moment. Meanwhile Katie stalked Phil Benson. By the time Phil was ready to go East and make everyone proud of him, no ordinary bond had grown up between Katie and himself. They understood each other's obsessions. Phil's keyboard was Katie's bomb shelter and from Cuban missile crisis to the raid on Tripoli the curious duet played on. Leigh Kennedy's disarming and irresistible novel follows Katie into unlikely matrimony and Phil into the arms of a gun-toting St Louis actress. But that's the least you would expect from two people who alone, as far as we know, have already been through World War Three.

Release date: August 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

She sat in the middle of the front room door bundled in a scratchy blue blanket. The electrician installed the television in the corner where they used to have the big chair. Now the big chair sat closer to the piano, where it looked a little confused and out of place. Katie had only seen one of these things before, at Aunt Margaret’s house, but she had thought it was a radio with a shiny speaker.

“Have a mirror, Mrs Doheney?” the electrician asked.

Katie’s mother brought out the gilt-framed hand mirror from her brush set and handed it to the man. “I heard the Youngs are getting a television, too,” she said to him.

“Yeah, I installed it yesterday. They have a lot of snow on it though. They’ll have to get some rabbit ears.”

Katie wondered where the Youngs go snow at this time of the year. Then she realized that it probably ca me from Rabbit Ears Pass in the mountains. Her father said there w is snow in the shady spots under rocks all year round. Katie was a quick child; she knew how to figure things out.

The man propped the mirror against Katie’s knee. “Here, sweetheart, would you mind helping me out?”

Katie shook her head. The man went behind the television and looked over the top of it at the mirror. The glass popped alive with grey light. He instructed her to hold the mirror up a little. Katie held it up and he said, “Whoa,” and fiddled with things in the back, glancing back and forth between his hands and the mirror.

She could see light blurs in the screen. A man’s voice, like a voice from the radio, said, “That July it was tested in New Mexico.” There was a pause and a long hiss.

“Doggone,” the electrician said.

Her mother had told her that it would be like having the moving pictures at home. Katie couldn’t see anything but vague shapes without face or form. The electrician scowled at the mirror. Katie’s arms were beginning to tremble from holding the mirror up for so long. Something changed on the television window and dark bars rolled down the screen, making Katie dizzy.

She squinted, trying to make sense of the fuzz. There was a booming explosion sound in the television which reminded Katie of the sound that the truck had made yesterday when it hit the white car. With the squealing, crackling and rumbling sounds coming out of the television enhancing her memory, she recalled the scrape and crunch of the accident she had seen while walking home from kindergarten. Then she understood what she saw on the television.

That dark blob was the truck bearing down on the white blob which was the car with the woman in it. The white blob swerved and tried to escape. A woman screamed but it was a weird electronic howl this time. Then she could make out (it happened a lot faster yesterday, she thought) the black blob crushing the white one under its front wheel in a deadly smash.

Katie barely noticed the radio voice talking on again as half a woman was flung towards her, her pretty white and blue flowered dress fluttering like a dancer’s as it sailed through the air towards the curb where Katie stood.

Then the truck exploded. Katie didn’t remember that from yesterday; she had been staring at the bloody head at her feet in the gutter. On the television, they showed the truck blowing up through the clouds so quickly that the middle shot beyond the edges which fluted out into a puffy, mushroom shape.

“Hiroshima was destroyed,” the television said.

Katie could no longer hold the mirror. She dropped it and stared down at the braided rug that lay on the polished floorboards of her own house. She knew that it wasn’t really happening again, that the woman was not lying at her feet right at this moment. Even though the television played it all over again it had only happened once. Just as her father had explained to her that when they saw the newsreels of the war, they were just moving pictures. The war was all over.

But now that Katie knew the name of the woman it made her shudder and feel sick all over again. Before, the woman had been anonymous, thrown into her mortal pieces by chance at Katie Doheney’s feet. Now she had a name, a pretty name, and Katie could imagine her friends calling to her as she got into her car that day, wearing the full-skirted swirling dress.

“See you later, Hiroshima!” her friends said. She waved to them and drove away.

The eyes that Katie knew only as glazed, shocked and spattered with bits of gravel had once been alive. Then Hiroshima was destroyed. Katie’s father was trying to be quiet but they spoke just on the other side of her bedroom door. “How is she now?”

“She’s asleep, I think,” her mother said.

“I thought she would be crazy about the television.”

“She will be. She’s still upset by the accident.”

“Well, I thought it would help.”

They went into their own bedroom where their voices were quiet murmurs. Katie wanted to go to her parents but she was afraid to get out of bed.

She had a ghost in her room.

“So you’re Master Benson, eh?”

From the garden below the window in the music room came the smell of roses and sunlight. Phil was too small to see out of the window without climbing on to the chair but he was old enough to know he shouldn’t. He stood and stared down at the carpet which was well-worn around the piano.

Mr Tackett (old, because he had grey hairs) sat on the mahogany piano bench with his back to the piano and smiled at Phil the way uncles or family friends smile at boys.

“Your mother told me all about you.”

Phil rolled into a tube the envelope his mother had sent with him. It contained money. Phil wanted to give it to Mr Tackett, have him open it and be surprised at how much there was in it. At the same time, he wanted to keep it. So he stood and rolled it even more tightly, glancing at Mr Tackett when he thought the old man wasn’t looking.

“Your mother tells me that you play your granny’s piano very well.”

Phil nodded.

Mr Tackett lit an unfiltered cigarette and blew smoke towards the window where a warm breeze carried it through the screen. “What do you play?” he asked.

“I make it up. Thunder and Lightning, mostly.”

“Thunder and Lightning.” Mr Tackett grinned. “Seems to me that I used to play that, too.”

“You did?” Phil was amazed. His father always said, “Shut up that noise!” but here was a piano teacher who knew Thunder and Lightning. Phil was exhilarated by the possibility of being understood by someone with the knowledge but also disappointed. He thought he had invented the song himself.

“Come over here and sit down, Phil.” Mr Tackett patted the bench beside him. As Phil slid between the piano and the bench the man hoisted him up with huge hands which were strong around his ribs. It was the kind of lifting that would have made him say “Whee!” when he was younger – last year.

“OK, for a little while we’re going to do something simpler than Thunder and Lightning but it will still be just as much fun. I’m going to show you how to read notes of music that tell you what keys to play. You know how to read, don’t you?”

“I know my ABCs,” Phil said confidently.

“OK.” Mr Tackett seemed to notice the envelope for the first time. “Is this mine?” When Phil reluctantly nodded Mr Tackett took it and tossed it lightly into the overstuffed chair across the room as if all the money meant nothing. “Put your hands on these keys all in a row. No, not your thumbs.”

Phil looked over his shoulder at the envelope balanced on a corner against the cushion. He thought about how his mother had given it to him so nervously, reminding him never to tell his father about it or the piano lessons. “My pin money,” she said. “He would wring our necks, P.J.”

“Yes, that’s right,” the piano teacher said. “Now the keys all have letter names and this one is C. Middle C.”

Mr Tackett lifted his hairy, bony-knuckled hands away from Phil’s like a magician releasing twenty white doves. All that remained were a boy’s grubby fingers on the cracked keys of an old and well-used piano. Phil pressed all the slippery keys down at once.

Thunder.

Phil learned to play baseball out of self-defense. He had learned somehow that other boys didn’t dream about the things of which he dreamed – of Chopin dying of consumption and writing about raindrops while his lover, a writer who used a man’s name, was away. Of Darius Milhaud sitting in smoky jazz clubs in America and taking back the sounds to France long before jazz was fashionable in the United States. Of Robert and Clara Schumann and their devoted friend, Brahms. He never quite understood the nature of this devotion. It always seemed odd and gave a glimpse into a world that he would learn about “someday” when he, too, was a famous pianist and composer.

Other boys talked about Joe DiMaggio and going to see the stock car races in Englewood and building model airplanes. Phil learned their language and dabbled in it because he liked some of the boys and wanted to be friends. But he had another side that he couldn’t really explain to them.

He also learned to play baseball to please his father. He, like his father, saw that there was something subversive in classical music. It was not American. Even the American composers, like Copland, had ethnic backgrounds and weren’t what his father called “one hundred per cent American” or they were like Gershwin and wrote music about black people or Cubans. Dipping into subversion frightened him. He had overheard some men talking about Senator McCarthy and one said, “Next children will be turning in their parents as Communists.” Phil knew that he would never turn in his father but he doubted that his father would hold back from punishing him. So he left this feeling of not being one hundred per cent as a secret.

Neither was he natural with Mr Tackett. He became a temperamental, romantic musician who never had been a boy on a hike with the Scouts on Pike’s Peak or had a bicycle or knew how to heft a Louisville Slugger and bat over the shortstop’s head. The inquisitive and conciliatory kid that the teachers praised to his parents became dark and brooding and had a certainty that at some time during his life he would go deaf or blind or die of consumption after many unhappy love affairs. He could imagine the blindness much more easily than the lovers but he was aware that these things took time.

His most immediate struggle was with Mr Tackett’s constant criticism. As soon as he thought he had mastered something, Mr Tackett would throw another wrench into the works, tell him to play it differently or give him something too hard to learn. He wanted to hear Mr Tackett say that what he had accomplished was near perfection, or perfection itself. His teacher was is an impossible taskmaster with a ready, gentle smile.

Phil loved him but he knew better than to show it.

Mr Tackett put up with the temper to a degree but the day Phil threw his score over his shoulder on to one of his teacher’s ever-burning Camels, it was enough.

“Philip,” he said in a level voice, “boys your age do not say ‘damn’ nor do they throw tantrums when they can’t master something the first time through.” He brushed the ashes and cinders from his brown overstuffed chair. “In fact, we’re not supposed to do that sort of thing at my age.”

Phil ground his teeth.

“Pick it up.”

He sat, staring at the black and white keyboard.

“All right. Apparently I can’t teach you any more. Maybe you would rather spend your Wednesday afternoons playing ball or riding your bicycle. It would certainly make my life easier.”

Phil fought to hold on to all the dignity that an eleven-year-old boy could muster. Stiffly he stood and picked up the music. The creamy vellum paper had a few singed marks on the coda. Phil was sorry and embarrassed. He shuffled it together and opened it solemnly on the piano.

“Try again.”

Phil sat with his back to Mr Tackett and picked at a wart on the back of his knuckle.

“Hey,” Mr Tackett said gently. “Listen to me. This is going to be hard for you because your hands aren’t fully grown yet. Look at the difference between your hands and mine eh?” He held up his long, driftwoody fingers as if Phil had never seen them before. In fact, Phil had been watching them intently for five years and now gave them a grudging sideways look.

“But I know you can do it with practice.”

Phil was suddenly horribly conscious of his own boyish hands.

Mr Tackett rose, brushing still more tobacco crumbs from his trousers. He closed the door as he left the room.

Phil stared out of the window at the sparrow on the cold metal post of the cyclone fence. Beyond the Tacketts’ garden the mesa that was a prelude to the Rockies was shrouded in a low autumnal cloud. Between the cloud and where Phil sat at the edge of the Great Prairie the air was clear but cool and turbulent. The coming change in the weather affected Phil to the marrow; he felt expectant and impatient. As he stretched his fingers over the keys he measured how far they would reach. To grow a little more, to get that extra note without banging his thumb against the corner of a wrong note …

He turned the score to the beginning.

As he practiced he ticked out the time with his tongue against the roof of his mouth just as he used to when he was a beginner. Several times he stumbled and started over. It was considerably better than the first time through.

He finished and stared down at his hands, aware that his hour was probably over. He didn’t want to leave. He wished that he could live with the Tacketts and always have access to this room for it was where he played his best. The little brown piano with keys like old teeth was all he could think of some days. In school, his fingertips played desk tops in silent striving for mastery. Always there were stretches of music in him waiting for release into sound.

Mr Tackett returned.

Phil’s heart pounded against his ribs. “Well, you know I won’t be able to practice it anyway,” he said, his throat tight.

“Sure you can. That was better, wasn’t it?”

“No, I mean my father’s on strike and I can’t practice at home and I won’t have an allowance and he’ll take my odd-job money anyway. So I guess I’ll see you around.” Phil dashed for the front door.

“Wait a minute, young man.”

Phil would have taken his jacket and charged through the front door but he was startled by the girl sitting on the sofa. He recognized her as one of the kids in the grade behind him. She looked at him with an equally startled expression, her eyes too big in a thin face and her slender neck burdened by thick braids.

“Phil, come back here.” Mr Tackett guided him to the music room and closed the door.

Phil stood, head hanging, and prepared for a lecture full of impossible adult reasoning.

“I’ve told you before that when your father won’t let you practice you can come here. Don’t worry about paying me. You can help out around here – take out the garbage, shovel the walks when the snow comes, whatever. I’ll ask Mrs T if she has any jobs for you.”

Phil nodded uncertainly, thinking of the lies he would have to tell at home. He hated it when his father was off work. He and his mother both had to bear the result of his father’s easily found boredom but they found themselves in counterpoint rather than in harmony and it was better to avoid his mother, too.

“Phil, look at me.”

Phil raised his head. He observed for the first time how much younger Mr Tackett’s eyes were than the rest of his face. They were spry, happy eyes as they looked down upon him.

“I’m as proud of you as three fathers but I get pretty discouraged when you give up so easily. It’s a lot of work, music, and you have to stay at it. Never, never let other people get in your way.”

Phil nodded obediently.

“OK. Go. See you in a few days, eh?”

Mr Tackett followed him to the front door. As Phil put his jacket on, Mr Tackett said, “Do you know Katie Doheney?”

“Hi.” He didn’t want to make conversation with some fifth grader. Contemptuously he glanced at her hands and derived satisfaction from the fact that they were even smaller than his own.

Snow scrunched under her red rubber boots as she walked along Kit Carson Boulevard. There was a strange lull in town – she wasn’t often downtown at half past four in winter when the light was beginning to fade. Most of the kids went straight home from school or to play at other houses. The cars with men coming home from work wouldn’t start sloshing up and down until five. It was late November, early for the eager Christmas shoppers to be compelled to come out in the snow like this.

Katie liked the snow but feared it. She loved to look at the flakes and count their six sides before they melted into droplets on her coat sleeve. With her sisters, she used to make snow cream with snow, vanilla, powdered sugar and condensed milk. But now they said it was dangerous to eat the snow; it had fallout from the bomb tests. The fallout came right over the Rockies in the clouds. Covered with boots, mittens, muffler and knitted cap, Katie was protected from the snowflakes except on her face and hair. Each one stung her where it touched her bare skin.

She hurried along to get out of it and to fetch the medicine for her mother who was ill with influenza. When she reached the glass front of the music shop, she slowed down. Inside the shop was Phil Benson, walking around the three pianos in the shop with his hands behind his back, leaning over and peering but not touching th. . .