Page 59 of Barre Fight
This summer had been hotter than usual in Sydney, which meant it had been infernal at home, where there was no ocean air to take the edge off. Inland, the country baked for months on end every year, longing for the southern fronts that brought pounding rain to the coast once a week or so. Bushfire danger had been a fact of life growing up in Hillstone; the summer before he started kindergarten, hundreds of acres of bush in the Blue Mountains had burned, the oil in the eucalyptus trees turning entire forests explosive as the fires swept through. Justin still remembered the sight of ash falling from the sky, tiny dark grey flakes drifting down and coating the grass in the backyard of Aunt Steen’s house until the lawn looked dusty.
Now, anyone who lived out there knew how to take precautions, keeping trees from growing too close to their houses and storing rainwater from the winter so they’d have something to soak their lawns with if a fire ever came close. In Hillstone, residents with money to spare had bushfire shutters installed over their windows, and Shane cleared the gutters religiously all spring and summer long. It had been decades since a bushfire had threatened the town, though.
Still, Hillstone wasn’t that far from the base of the mountains. And he’d never known his mum to pack an evacuation bag before.Just in case, he thought. They were just taking precautions, like Shane did when he trimmed the branches on the trees at the side of the house. Better to be safe than sorry, after all.
“Looks like it’s going to be another bad season,” Ivy said from across the bed, and Justin glanced up from his phone. For a moment, he’d almost forgotten she was there.
He gave Missy’s message a thumbs up, then texted her back,telling her he was sure everything would be fine and telling her to get some sleep. He half expected her to reply with a sarcasticYes, sirand a salute emoji, but no reply came. Again, unease crawled at the back of his neck, but he put the phone on the bed, screen down.
Ivy drained her coffee and set the empty cup on the nightstand, then stretched and yawned. Again, that idiotic thought of her doing that not in her coat and street clothes, but in her pajamas or her underwear. He cleared his throat, banishing the thought, and finished his own coffee. “What have you got planned for today?”
Ivy took a deep breath. “It’s not that fun. For you, anyway.”
“Oh, a musical.”
“No, it’s Monday. The theaters are all dark,” she reminded him.
“My favorite day of the week,” he said, and she rolled her eyes. It was as endearing this morning as it had been last night. “What is it then?”
“You don’t have to come,” she said quickly. “I don’t think Peter will notice or care if you’re on your own for a few hours, and it’s kind of personal, so…”
“What is it?” He shifted so he was facing her, intrigued and a little concerned now.
Ivy fiddled with the edge of the sheet for a moment. “I want to go to the Jewish Museum.”
“Oh.” That was far less concerning than he would have guessed. “Then let’s go.”
An hour later, they were wandering the permanent collection of the museum, which was housed in an enormous former townhome on the Upper East Side, not far from the edge of Central Park. There was more contemporary art here, as well as jewelry, furnished rooms, and more traditional oil paintings collected from all over the world. It was still early in the morning,and they had the place mostly to themselves, especially in the smaller rooms. As they had at MoMA, they drifted in and out of rooms separately, but inevitably found themselves standing together before one piece of art or another.
Justin found Ivy standing in the viewing area of a furnished room of a lavishly decorated furnished room, all gold-trimmed furniture and lush pale pink carpet. An enormous oil painting of a pastoral scene hung over the marble fireplace, whose mantel was lined with gold ornaments and porcelain statuettes. In the corner, an immaculately polished piano stood open, several plush velvet chairs around it with equally glossy string instruments lying on them as though their players had just set them down and stepped out of the room for a brief moment.
Justin looked over Ivy’s shoulder at the little sign describing each of the items in the room.Langer family music room, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, 1932, the title at the top. The sign explained that the contents of the room had only been spared the Nazi plundering that began in 1938 because the Langer family had left Vienna several years before and had reconstructed their living room in New York just as it had been in their home country. They had bequeathed all the items in it to the museum on the condition that they be displayed precisely like this.
Justin put his hands on the wooden railing at the edge of the viewing area and peered over at the piano, where sheet music was open halfway through a piece of music, and at the plump gold-legged velvet sofa, where a book lay open, a thin burgundy ribbon marking an unseen reader’s page. The room looked lived in, even though it had been empty and frozen in time for decades.
“It feels haunted, doesn’t it?” Ivy said quietly.
Justin nodded. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but haunted was the right word for this room. She breathed in deeply through hernose, looking around at the lustrous fabric wallpaper, the chandelier, the swooping rose pink drapes at the internal windows the museum had built and lit with imitation natural light. Justin had never been to Vienna, but it almost felt as though, if they climbed over the railing and peered out the windows, the Danube would be right there.
“Why did you want to come here?”
She looked up at him appraisingly, the faux natural light behind her picking out her freckles and making a few errant strands of her hair burn gold. “My grandfather fled Austria in 1939.”
“You’re Jewish?”
She looked up at him, a slight frown creasing her forehead. “No. Kind of. But technically, no.”
“You’re going to have to explain that one.”
“He was my dad’s father, and it passes down matrilineally, and my grandmother wasn’t Jewish, so my dad’s not, and I’m not, technically.”
“Huh. I didn’t know it couldn’t come from either parent.” There weren’t any Jews in Hillstone, that he knew of. There had been one Jewish student at the ANB school, and she’d had to miss classes on Saturday mornings and make them up on Sundays. “But you said ‘kind of?’ So… how does that work? Were you raised Jewish anyway?”
“No, I wasn’t raised anything. I grew up knowing I had Jewish ancestry, though, which is more than I can say for my dad. Opa was 16 when he fled, and he arrived in Australia a few years after the war ended. And he did what a lot of refugees did back then: stopped practicing except in private, stopped associating with other Jews. He didn’t even tell my dad he’d grown up a practicing Jew until he was in his teens. Quite the shock for my dad, apparently.”
“Why did he stop practicing?”
Ivy turned her back on the Langer family’s music room and leaned against the railing. “What do you know about Australia after World War Two?”
