April in Paris

by John J. Healey

  ***

  Frederick A. Buddemeyer: “I am a policeman. I went to the house of the defendant’s father and brought him to the station where I left him sitting in a chair. Then he was taken into Captain Morrison’s room. By the time I left the station house around 1:30 a.m. the prisoner had already been locked in the cell. I did not visit him there. I did not at any time strike him or threaten him or see anybody else do it. I treated him like a gentleman.”

  Eugene Whalley: “I am a policeman. On June eighth I was on the night shift at the station house. I was in charge of the cells and prisoners. I received the defendant from Officer Buddemeyer and locked him up around 2:00 a.m. I did not from that time admit anyone else into the cell corridor. I did not refuse the defendant a drink of water. I never did that to a human being in my life. I did not keep him up all night by asking him questions. I don’t recall speaking with him at all that night.”

  William Wilkesmann: “I am a policeman. I relieved Officer Whalley at 8:00 a.m. that Sunday morning. During that morning I did not admit anybody to the cells to see MacBride. I served him his dinner that day. After he finished his meal, I took him out and presented him to Captain Morrison upstairs.”

  John F. O’Mara: “I am a policeman and first saw the defendant at the station house. I at no time told him that he should tell the story suggested by Captain Morrison. I never heard that Captain Morrison had suggested a story for him to tell.”

  Theron R. Jameson: “When I received the message that the defendant was ready to make a statement, I went to it right away. Captain Morrison was with me. I did not notice anything peculiar about the defendant’s condition. He was dirty, his collar was dirty, and his hair not brushed. That is all I noticed. He did not make any statement to me about ill-treatment of any kind. After the examination was over, I went and got my lunch. I did not see the defendant again after I left that room.”

  – 21 –

  Paris felt different. I sensed Carmen’s presence everywhere, in the apartment and during the walks I took that either followed or intercepted the routes we’d taken together. Up until then I had not felt lonely there. Clearly, I was indeed besotted. Associating her with Dirk and Consuelo, I gave them a call and reached Dirk on his cell phone in Ireland, where he was scouting locations for his film. He told me Consuelo and Lucia were still in Paris and I got them over for tea and some pastries I picked up at the Boulangerie Martin.

  It was a warm spring day and they arrived in sneakers and summer dresses, Consuelo very pretty in a sculptural way, somewhat resembling Françoise Gilot during her Picasso period. Lucia looked more like her father. Corru was a hit with both of them, but once we settled in the living room and poured tea Consuelo got down to business, which was just what I wanted.

  “Are you in love with her yet?” she asked, half in jest.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am.”

  It caught her by surprise. She raised a hand to her chest.

  “Really?”

  “I’ve got all the symptoms.”

  “Does she know?”

  “I’m afraid she might,” I said. “I’ve been none too subtle about it.”

  “This is such good news,” she said.

  “It’ll be good news if it’s reciprocated. I think there may be another guy involved, or that there was not that long ago—or something. I met her in Madrid, and we ran into him, embarrassing everyone, but I finally got her out to dinner with me.”

  “Oh my god!”

  “Don’t tell me she hasn’t told you all this.”

  “She hasn’t. We’re not that close, you know. Who was the guy? That must have been just amazingly awkward.”

  “It was. But she handled it very well. I’ve no idea who he is. But she says he’s not someone to be concerned about.”

  “See? She’s into you too.”

  “She’s amused at least—I hope. She plays her cards close to her chest.”

  “Claro. Good for her.”

  Consuelo had an accent that was hard to place, part French and part Spanish, and some of it possibly invented, a Euro-aristo intonation contoured for effect.

  “Tell me more about her,” I said. “And don’t tell her I’m head over heels. I’ve already come on way too strong, which is not sexy.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “You think?”

  “Have you told her how you feel?”

  “No. I’m not that insane. It’s too soon.”

  “Well, so you’re playing your cards close to your chest too.”

  “Anyway,” I said, not wanting to go there. “She’s delightful and I’m so grateful to you for thinking of me. It was the last thing I expected.”

  “I just had a feeling about you two.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I’m jealous,” she said, standing and looking at herself in the large mirror over the fireplace. “I haven’t felt like you’re feeling for a long time. Enjoy it.”

  “I can’t eat or sleep, but I am enjoying it.”

  Lucia was playing with Corru. No matter how many times her mother and I told her not to, she kept trying to give him one of the pastries. I finally had to take the platter away.

  “I want a dog too, maman.”

  “Talk to your father about it,” Consuelo said. “It’s a lot of work.”

  “Is it?” I asked her.

  “For most people it is.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “How long has it been since you’ve felt this way?”

  “Do you have anything stronger to drink?”

  “Champagne?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  It was too early for me. Gold light was still streaming across the river onto the living room carpets. When I returned from the kitchen both Lucia and Corru were asleep on the couch.

  “Look at that,” I said in a whisper.

  “They’re very cute together,” she said.

  “I’d happily get her a dog.”

  “Dirk would kill me.”

  I poured her some of the champagne, a 1998 Pol Roger, very cold.

  “God, that’s good,” she said taking a sip.

  “Churchill’s favorite. He drank it like water.”

  She took a swig of it.

  “So, you were saying,” I said.

  “The last time I really felt that way was during my first year with Dirk. We were both with other people when we met, and all the secret meetings in hotels, the hurried trysts in borrowed apartments, was thrilling.”

  “How long did that last?”

  “It lasted until we became a couple, you know, officially, out in the open, when I realized that the passion high had much to do with our having had to lie and sneak around.”

  “But you got married.”

  “Ours was a good story, and we looked the part for each other, you know. And, well, here we are still. We get along and respect each other and we’re devoted to Lucia.”

  “This is clear to see.”

  She emptied her glass. I poured her another.

  “Marriage is tricky, Shaun.”

  “I know,” I said. “Everyone knows.”

  “You have to be very giving, and most people aren’t. Or you have to be very lucky.”

  I had loved my wife too. But as Carmen had sussed out, I hadn’t been in love with her.

  “There was another time too,” she said. “I’ve never spoken about it.”

  “You don’t have to now.” I’d never seen her like this.

  “It was with a woman.”

  “Really?”

  “A young woman.”

  “I can relate to that.”

  “But I’m not a lesbian,” she said. “I mean, I’ve always been into guys, except for her. I could be bisexual, but I’m still processing the whole relationship.”

  “How young was she?”

  “In her twenties. I don’t know what came over me. Une amitié amoureuse. It was so intense.”

  “Did Dirk know?”

  “No.
God no.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Nothing. I just had to live with it. She moved away two years ago and that was that. But not a day goes by that I don’t think about her, like the story Bernstein tells in Citizen Kane.”

  “To what do you ascribe it?”

  “I’ve no idea. I only know that if I’d been able, if the world would’ve permitted it, I would have done anything to stay near to her.”

  “Who are you talking about, maman?” Lucia said, eyes still closed.

  “No one, dear. An old friend.”

  The child kept her eyes closed and turned over, facing away from us. Consuelo and I looked at each other.

  “Perhaps we should get back to Carmen,” I said.

  “Yes,” she agreed, finishing her second glass and putting it down decisively. “She had a number of beaus when we were living in New York together, but I never got the feeling she ever really fell for any of them. She had a good time. She has a talent for that. It speaks well of her. But she never, from what I saw and from what she told me then, never went mad for anyone in the way you and I have been speaking about.”

  “And they fell for her.”

  “I should say so. Yes.”

  “How many are we talking about?”

  “Keep your shirt on,” she said. “Nothing crazy. A normal load.”

  “What about the husband?”

  “Never met him.”

  I saw them out a little later. I almost invited them to dinner, but Consuelo looked tired and seemed to still be caught up in the melancholy of her recollections. I gave her a hug.

  “Life and its tricks,” I said speaking gently into her ear.

  She kissed me on both cheeks. The second one, imbued perhaps with the relief that follows confession, was harder than the first.

  I dined alone at the Rotisserie d’Argent and brought my laptop with me. MacBride’s lawyers brought forth some character witnesses.

  ***

  William C. Martin: “I reside at 2771 Marion Avenue, Bronx. I have known the defendant intimately for twenty years. I am a civil engineer and graduate of Fordham University. We were young men at Fordham together. His reputation for being a peaceable man is very good. There is nobody that knows him could believe Gene MacBride possibly did such a crime. It is absolutely repugnant to his character.”

  Thomas Porter: “I reside at 955 Ogden Avenue, Bronx. I am a fireman from the station directly across the street from 1077 Ogden Avenue. I’ve known MacBride for three years and know other people that know him. I have never heard anything bad about the man’s character. His reputation is good. I have seen him work. He was not all the time hanging around that neighborhood, sitting on the wall and going to Valiunas’s. Once in a while he might. He was working pretty steadily. I never seen him do any plumbing, except to go around with Mr. Conlan, carrying his tools, which implied that the man was working.”

  Dennis D. Buckley: “I reside at 1049 Ogden Avenue and am a fireman at the station located at 1080 Ogden Avenue. Everybody in the neighborhood knows MacBride. He has worked in my house and he has worked for my wife. He did odd jobs for almost everybody around that neighborhood. His reputation for being a peaceful man is very good.”

  Michael Healy: “I reside at 1015 Nelson Avenue, Bronx. I am a fireman stationed at 1080 Ogden Avenue. I know MacBride. His reputation in the community is good.”

  Philip M. Hamilton: “I reside at 1034 Ogden Avenue, Bronx. I am an alderman for the City of New York. I know other people that know MacBride from around the neighborhood. To the best of my knowledge and belief, his reputation is that of a quiet, law-abiding citizen.”

  ***

  While processing all this I devoured half a roast chicken and drank a young, slightly chilled pinot noir. No potatoes and no dessert. Walking back to the apartment, I stared at the residences lined up along the south side of the Ile, including mine and Dirk’s, admiring their modest height and elegant construction. I looked down at the river that I never tired of contemplating. The Harlem River was the river of my childhood, then came the East and Hudson Rivers, all three of them wider, wilder, and deeper than the Seine. But the Seine as it went through Paris was the most romantic, and sinister, especially at night. It was the farthest from the sea. The temperate air carried the scent of blossoms and old moistened cobblestones. A half-full dinner boat slid under the Pont de la Tournelle. It aimed a line of flood lamps against the house fronts, magnifying the shadows of the trees that lined the Quai d’Orléans and the Quai de Bethune. Close to my front door I passed a couple leaning against the parapet, nuzzling each other in what was surely a prelude to sex. I envied them.

  That night I discovered the original notes I’d made in order to remember the dream. They were in the pocket of my robe. I looked them over and realized I’d all but forgotten about the man standing next to the girl at the beginning, the one who watched her as she leaned down and cut the wire wrapped about her ankles. I’d written “Ed Wynn” and underlined it. Ed Wynn, an actor I’d no associations with except for the role he played in The Diary of Anne Frank, a role I could barely recall. I thought to try to watch the film again, to stream it or order it for quick delivery, but the idea made me anxious, which was interesting all by itself, a film I’d only seen once in my life when I was fifteen.

  Then the penny dropped.

  One of the most interesting characteristics of dreams is how often they condense various meanings and people into one. Ed Wynn as the bickering, pessimistic Mr. Dussell in the film certainly meant something in the dream. He represented anxiety, judgment, doom and gloom, and he provided a direct link to my memory of the story of a young girl condemned to death, all of this the result of hearing the police siren before I fell asleep that night. But I realized then, staring at my notes, that the actor’s name, in and of itself, provided me with another clue. Ed Wynn. Edwin.

  I returned to the transcript and found the reference. Two of the children who testified referred to Ingrid’s little brother as Edwin. I remembered how that confused me when I first read it because in their testimony the parents called him Adranaxa—a name no child would put up with and one that, I assumed, had been shortened and transformed into Edwin. And then I remembered the only Edwin I’d ever known, if you could even call it that, a man I had not thought about since my early teens.

  – 22 –

  When my father married Caro Cuddihy-Woodward, she was much younger than he was, as young as Carmen was in relation to me, which gave me thought. Right after their honeymoon we moved from our Bronx apartment on Undercliff Avenue into her duplex on Fifth Avenue. My father ceased renting houses each summer with the Judge and we began to summer at Caro’s “cottage” at the beach in the Cuddihy-Woodward compound in Southampton/Water Mill. When they first started dating, she had a smaller house on the property, but by the time they married her mother had died, and her older sisters, content with their own homes, had allowed her to buy them out of their shares of the main house.

  Initially designed by Stanford White, it faced the dunes and had a swimming pool. There were ten bedrooms on the second floor, each with their own bath, some with balconies overlooking the ocean. The third floor was a warren of smaller bedrooms reserved for servants. The main floor had a huge kitchen, dining room, living room, and study. About sixty yards away, backed up against a line of tall hedges, was a large garage that matched the house. It had its own repair shop, space for five automobiles, and an apartment upstairs where Edwin lived.

  Caro was still alive at ninety-four. A decade after my father died, she sold the New York apartment and moved out to the house by the dunes permanently. In addition to her normal staff, two nurses took turns taking care of her. I spent most Thanksgivings and Christmases there and visited whenever I could. I called her that night before going to sleep.

  “Da-ling,” she said. She actually spoke like that, a family-specific version of debutante lockjaw a la irlandés, tweaked with a dash of Katharine Hepburn. She was angular and t
rim and slightly masculine the way the actress had been as well—a sportswoman, mostly tennis and swimming and a decent game of golf that she had worked at to please her father. Her mother, Mrs. Cuddihy, whom the Judge had courted in a nineteenth-century manner during their mutual widowhood, had been religious, retiring, and very smart. Rose Kennedy came to her often for advice. Caro was the youngest of the five daughters and the rebel among her sisters.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Paris.”

  “Still?”

  “Still, but not for long.”

  “Are you driving all the jeune filles mad?”

  “Every single one,” I said, smiling at the ceiling.

  “Then pick a favorite, but not the prettiest, and marry her, for god’s sake. Bachelorhood doesn’t become you.”

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  This was a theme she visited regularly, starting not more than a month after Scarlett died.

  “Why not the prettiest?” I couldn’t resist.

  “She’ll make you unhappy. It’ll be all about her.” It sounded like the voice of experience.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m well, marvelous. I’ve got a beau.”

  “Who is the lucky man?”

  “The new gardener. He’s Venezuelan. He brings me flowers.”

  “A Latin lover.”

  “Sí!”

  I remembered the one and only time she came to our apartment in the Bronx. She inspected my father’s closets and found half of them still filled with clothing that had belonged to my mother, stuff he’d been unable to throw out. She told him she would handle it and donate everything to a Catholic charity. He didn’t resist. He seemed relieved. She’d seen us there, surveyed the shipwreck, and come to the rescue.

  “I need a favor,” I said.

  “Whatever you wish.”

  “Do you remember Edwin the mechanic? From when I was a boy?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. Why? What about him?”