“When I went to his house for the appointment that his brother had set up for me, he’d forgotten all about it. He was home alone, eating boiled rice and frankfurters with hot sauce off of a card table. In that huge expensive house, he had no furniture except for a gigantic piano and a sofa. He said he didn’t need any life insurance. ‘Who would lose if I dropped off?’ Anyway, he gave me a beer and a CD of Tristan and Isolde.” Peter shrugged. “He’s a nice enough man. I don’t even think he remembered us ever meeting when I sang today.”
Peter and about a dozen of the men left to eat kalbi. Several others were looking for a house to play ha-toh—invariably, someone would have brought a deck of red cards to church in the hopes of getting in a game.
Leah had been paying attention to every word Peter Kim said. Dr. Hong seemed tragically sad to her from his description—to be so alone in the world. Yet she wondered what it would be like to study music all your life. That must have been like heaven.
“You want to go with the geh girls to eat jajangmyun?” Kyung-ah asked, breaking up Leah’s thoughts of him.
“Oh no, sister, I have to go home and make dinner,” she said.
“Oh, you’re such a good wife. You put us all to shame,” said Kyung-ah, who had no intention of going home so early. Her son and daughter were in college, and her husband was perfectly content to fix himself ramen on Sunday nights. She let him go to his men’s Bible study twice a week, and she did what she wanted.
The members scattered and would return again to the same room in three days.
On Wednesday, Leah blew through her work rapidly. She finished most of the mending that needed to be done for the week and was able to help the girls sort clothes in the back room. She hummed the whole day. For dinner, she’d bought some broccoli and a piece of fish from the market near the store to prepare for Joseph’s meal. He ate so little these days. She’d have a bowl of rice with bori-cha because her stomach had been feeling nervous all day. Their drive home was quiet, with hardly a word between them. Leah’s mind was full of music and thoughts of the old choir director and the new one. As soon as they got home, she rushed to the kitchen to cook, and when it was done, she called out to Joseph, who was watching his favorite terebi program.
“Yobo,” she called out to him from the kitchen, but there was no answer. “Yobo,” she said again.
In the living room, Joseph had fallen asleep in front of the television set. He’d suffered from nightmares since the war and all through their marriage, but inexplicably, they seemed to occur more frequently since the building fire. Joseph tried to go to bed earlier, but he never felt rested.
“Yobo,” she said quietly, trying to wake him. She didn’t want him to go to bed without having his dinner. Joseph didn’t stir, having fallen into a deep sleep. Leah dragged the ottoman from the other side of the chair to prop up his feet. She covered her husband with a quilt she’d made from her sewing scraps. She set the kitchen table with his dinner in case he got up, and moments later, she drove to choir rehearsal.
Leah was hardly the first to arrive. Kyung-ah was already sitting in her chair, wearing a red belted dress and high heels. She crossed and uncrossed her pretty legs to adjust herself in her chair. Between giggles, she teased the nearby baritones, who stared at her as if she were a wedding feast.
Most of the choir members wore street clothes to practice, nothing close to their Sunday best, since many of them had come from their jobs—groceries in Spanish Harlem, midtown Manhattan nail salons, hair product wholesale shops in the Bronx, and dry-cleaning shops, like Leah. A few came from office jobs, but most of them owned or worked in stores. The Kim brothers, forty-year-old twins, both bachelor tenors, owned a brake repair shop in Flushing, but prior to Wednesday night choir rehearsals, they scrubbed themselves with Irish Spring soap and wore Aramis aftershave. They wore white shirts pressed and starched by their mother, whom they lived with and supported, and pleated trousers from Italy. Like the Kim twins, Mrs. Koh, a widow who worked twelve hours a day as a cashier at a fish market in Queens Village, made a deliberate attempt to erase her vocation through water and heavily perfumed soap. She was renowned at church for having sent all three of her sons to Harvard—the oldest awarded second place in the Westinghouse competition when he was a junior at the Bronx High School of Science.
Once everyone had taken a seat, Charles tapped his white baton against the black metal music stand. Today, he wore a black V-neck sweater with a white T-shirt underneath and blue jeans. His expression was again serious, no curve or softening of his lips. With his baton, he pointed to Mrs. Noh, the secretary for the choir, a tall, elderly woman wearing beige foundation from the base of her neck to the tip of her brow hairline. He gestured for her to come forward. For over two decades, she’d been in charge of attendance, choir robe cleanings, folder clearing, and photocopying of all choir business. He handed over a pile of scores for the song “O Divine Redeemer” for her to distribute.