April in Paris

by John J. Healey

“Can you remember how it was he came to work for us?”

  “I suppose I should, but I don’t. Why?”

  “I had a dream. And I was just wondering.”

  “About him? Are you going gay on me, Shaun?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “I wouldn’t mind, you know.”

  “I’ve met a woman, one I truly fancy.”

  “Then introduce me to her before I run off with Javier.” She pronounced it incorrectly, as Ja-Vi-Ay.

  “I will. Her name is Carmen. She’s Spanish.”

  “I always said you and I were the bohemians of the family.”

  Her voice sounded weaker than usual.

  “How are you doing dear—really.”

  “Fit as a fiddle,” she said, “more or less. A bit of heart trouble now and then.”

  I sent Carmen an email after I turned the light off and told her about this exchange. She answered straight away and said I hadn’t mentioned that Caro was still alive. I apologized and told her I’d be in Boston in a few days. All she said was “How nice.” I’ve always hated that word. But she did sound enthusiastic about having dinner with me when I got there.

  The phone rang at three in the morning, waking me and making my heart race. I hoped it was Carmen, tipsy perhaps and more forthcoming. But it was Caro, who apparently paid no attention to the difference in time between Wickapogue Road and the Quai de Bethune.

  “I remember now,” she said.

  I pictured her in her armchair, or perhaps in bed in the room she had shared with my father, at the far western end of the second floor. The two beds pushed together with separate Pratesi sheets and pillowcases. The three large Persian rugs handed down from the original Cuddihy residences in Albany and Brooklyn. The bureaus and the mirrored vanity table. Stacks of yellowing issues of Vogue and Time and National Geographic. The too-modern sliding door to the balcony she had installed. The scents of medicines and mildew, naphthalene and Chanel No. 5. I decided I should go and see her as soon as I could.

  “Your father helped him,” she said. “I remember him saying Edwin was someone he knew as a boy, that he’d been through a hard time. He spoke to the Judge who spoke to my mother and she hired him. She said the fellow’s mother had worked for us straight off the boat from Sweden before I was born. Your father promised he would be reliable. And he was. Our cars never ran better.”

  It was Adranaxa. Ingrid’s little brother. It had to be.

  “Whatever became of him?” I asked, my eyes now wide open in the dark. “I don’t remember when he left.”

  “He left all of a sudden. His mother took ill and he brought her back where she came from. I liked him, very much. We gave him a good severance check. He was a lonely fellow.”

  “How so?”

  “Never had anyone with him, openly or on the sly as far as I could tell.”

  – 23 –

  The summer after my mother was buried, I would walk about the property we rented at Fair Lea in Southampton, imagining adventures. I would stroll up and down the long driveway, run about the vast lawn, and play inside the forestlike thicket of untended hedges behind the house that separated us from the McKnight and McGowan estates. Throughout the day I would fixate on certain objects. I would look at twigs, stones, or stray bits of paper on the ground and grace them with sentiment. I could not bear the thought of their remaining abandoned and uncared for with the fall of night. And so I would pick them up and put them in my pockets.

  At the end of the day I’d put all that I had rescued in the top drawer of a bureau in the room I shared with my father, which faced the ocean. At one point my Aunt Jane noticed the drawer filled with sand, pennies, pieces of wood, and paper. When she asked me, I told her the how and why of it. A devoted Catholic, unmarried, an attractive forty-year-old virgin who only pretended to have a beau now and then, a woman who lived with her father and who had a number of potentially crippling neuroses of her own, a woman with no patience for anything resembling modern psychology, she nevertheless understood what I told her, because she did not tell me to stop it. She simply listened and nodded as if my compulsion were the most logical thing in the world.

  I grew out of it. More accurately, over time, it transmogrified and expressed itself in other ways that are still part of me. I’m all right saying goodbye to people, I can shake their hands, kiss them, look them in the eye and depart. But I’m not good at leaving places. When I was leaving the Ritz in Madrid, I took a final look out the window at the Prado. In the bathroom I took note of the still damp shower and tub, the sink with its small bottles of half-used products, the towels and floor mats. I looked at the bed, touched it, and quite consciously took in the sitting room for a final time before letting myself out. At the parador in Oropesa I repeated the exercise. There I included the newspapers in my ritual, still spread out on the floor in the baroque bedroom. I imagined the people who’d written the articles in them, the presses that ran them, the small trucks and drivers that delivered them to the villages in the area. Even when I dropped off the car at the airport in Madrid, I bid adieu to it with some emotion.

  So, when it was time to leave my apartment in Paris, the procedure was more complicated. I’d been there for five months. Though I had entertained friends and a few ladies, most of the time I’d been alone and content, pleased with my routines and caprices, never bored or itching for change. I’d gotten good work done. I’d derived pleasure at almost every hour of the day looking out the tall open Baudelairean window-doors down at the Seine, across to the Tour d’Argent, gazing west at what was left of Notre Dame and at the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

  Before I left, I said goodbye to every inch of it, including the washer and dryer, the two guest rooms that had never been used, the kitchen, my zinc and copper tub, the armoires, even the utility closet. Mad as it sounds, I left the building with tears in my eyes. Sitting in the back of the car with Corru, chatting with Thierry on the way to the airport, I remembered the exterior of the building where Carmen’s mother lived back in Madrid, and I pictured it still there at that moment. I pictured the ocean I was about to fly across, the reality of it, the terrain underneath it, the hotel room in Boston where I would spend the night. I pictured the house at Fair Lea— bought and tarted up, some years after our departure, by Gloria Vanderbilt—I pictured it as it used to be. I pictured Caro, at that moment hopefully asleep in her bed with the night beach in front of her. I revisited the Undercliff, Ogden, and Woodycrest Avenues from my past, and tried to picture them as they might be then at four in the morning, most of the storefront signage in Latino Spanish. I pictured my wife’s and my father’s graves in Southampton, my mother’s in the Judge’s family plot at Gate of Heaven cemetery in Valhalla, New York. And I pictured Ingrid Anderson’s grave in Queens, her coffin under the earth, her remains, her bones and skull, the thick stitches from the autopsies long decayed, her burial gown dark and tattered, just as real and existent as my still living hands holding my little living dog.

  – 24 –

  I had booked a room I liked at the modest and discreet Eliot Hotel in Boston. Though too close to Newbury Street’s boutiques with its crowds of shoppers, it conserved authentic Back Bay elegance and it was just across the river from MIT. I hadn’t told Carmen exactly when I’d be arriving. When I got there I checked in and took Corru for a walk in the narrow bit of park that runs along the Charles River.

  The Parisian streets, with their trim, beautifully dressed men and women perched on traditional English bicycles, were replaced by earnest, mostly thick-set joggers with a Kmart fashion sense and cyclers arrayed in bright spandex, pedaling fender-free bikes designed to punish calves and thighs. But the river shimmered in late spring light and little sailboats dappled the water and there was the MIT campus on the other side, where the woman I was pursuing lived and plied her trade. Many people who saw Corru stopped and asked about him with a disarming American friendliness that put my faux Euro snobbery to shame. I found a bench near the water a
nd sent Carmen a text. The thought of calling her made me too nervous.

  Man & dog gaze longingly at MIT.

  She answered a few minutes later.

  Just finished class. WHERE are you?

  Back Bay near the Harvard Bridge.

  Are we still on for dinner?

  Harvest. 7 P.M.

  Great.

  The “great” was much appreciated. Back in my room I fell into a deep sleep thanks to which I arrived fifteen minutes late at the restaurant. She was halfway through a vodka martini chatting with the barman.

  “There you are,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. She smelled like real roses mixed with lemon rind. We had oysters and salad and lamb chops with a white wine that she preferred, and we laughed a lot. We mostly talked about movies, celebrities, literature, and other Boston restaurants we liked. We barely touched on biology, art history, or MacBride.

  “Come back with me and meet the puppy,” I said, as casually as I could.

  “I’d love to,” she answered, seemingly sincere, “but I have a class at nine in the morning.”

  “When do they set you free for summer?” I asked, quickly moving on.

  “Eleven days from now,” she said. “I can’t wait.”

  “Have your plans firmed up at all?”

  “Nothing written in stone,” she said. “I’m supposed to give two talks in London in July, but I may cancel, I love canceling, and I should see my mother a bit more. Other than that, I’m not sure yet. You?”

  We were lingering over the end of the meal, me with a glass of red wine I ordered instead of dessert, she with a cup of mint tea.

  “Normally I visit Caro in Southampton for a couple of weeks and then I go back to Europe. The west of Ireland, London, back to Paris, I keep saying I’m going to rent a little place on the Cote d’Azur, the sort of place I doubt even exists anymore, but I’ve yet to do it.”

  “No plans to visit Highbridge, I see.”

  “No. I couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “The idea terrifies me, and I cannot tell you why. Some deep-seated, visceral rejection. I just keep it well-preserved in my own way in my head. The idea of actually seeing those houses and apartment buildings, those streets and parks again, seeing they’re still there, or not, fills me with dread. I thought about this last week while I waited in the car in front of your mother’s building, admiring how you were able to return to a place you’d grown up in, while I am unable to.”

  “But you do return to Southampton.”

  “That’s different. I’ve had continuity with that part of the world since I was born and most of my associations with it are good ones.”

  “What about your house in Williamstown?”

  “My house.”

  “You mentioned a house there, even though you live in Lenox.”

  “I have a house there, yes.”

  “A nice house?”

  “Very nice. It used to belong to Cole Porter.”

  “Well, so why Lenox then?”

  “The place is too big for me, for one thing. It’s a nice house with lovely grounds and a pool and the whole deal, but I like having a bit of distance from where I work. I live in a hotel, just outside of Lenox.”

  “A hotel.”

  “A really nice one, quite deluxe, out of the way, a massive old mansion with acres of lawns and great food, European service. Great wine cellar.”

  She finished what was left of her tea.

  “You’re quite eccentric. Do you know that?”

  “I think I’m just lazy. I like being comfortable and not having to deal with domestic things, help and all of that, and if I fancy taking someone to dinner, I prefer not to have a colleague seated at the next table. You don’t have that problem here because you live in a city.”

  “A small city. This wouldn’t have something to do with your wife, would it?”

  “How so?”

  “Well, you’ve the apartment in New York you maintain but don’t use, where you also stay in a hotel instead. And now it turns out you do the same thing where you actually live and work most of the year.”

  “The apartment belonged to her husband’s family and I still think of it as pertaining to them. She and I bought the place in Williamstown together.”

  “They’re still two places you lived with her.”

  “I see your point. And perhaps to confirm your theory, we didn’t buy the Cole Porter house until she first got sick. We’d gotten to like the area over the years because Scarlett loved classical music and we’d often get to Tanglewood. Rather than sit out her chemo sessions in the city, we decided to move north. The job at the Clark opened up and soon after, the teaching position at Williams that’s associated with the Clark, and so we bought the place there.”

  Added to the wine and the jetlag was the worry she might think I was carrying more baggage than she had counted on.

  “Maybe you should sell them,” she said. “The apartment in New York, and the place in Williamstown. Start fresh.”

  “I have thought of it. That’s where the lazy part kicks in.”

  “Have you come here ahead of schedule because of me?”

  The question came out of nowhere and though I felt off balance enough as it was, I just went for it. “Yes.”

  “So you’re not lazy about that.”

  “No. Look. Could you come and visit this weekend? I’ll fly you there. I can get a car to take you from MIT to Hanscom Field, a little airport not far from here, and a plane to get you to Pittsfield, forty-five minutes door to door. You can see everything and see what you think, and we can spend some time together. I’ll get you a room at my hotel, it’s called the Wheatleigh, look it up. You’ll get a kick out of it.”

  She thought about it and to my great relief she then agreed. I walked her back to her place, a floor-through in Cambridge that was midway between Harvard and MIT. We kissed at the bottom of stairs that went up to a front porch. Really kissed this time. I flagged a cab and went back to the Eliot and took Corru out, up the middle of Commonwealth Avenue for a few blocks, then came back and went to sleep.

  – 25 –

  Mr. Northshire was the district attorney, the job my father later filled, and Tannenbaum was one of MacBride’s lawyers.

  ***

  Mr. Northshire: “The People rest.”

  Mr. Tannenbaum: “The Defendant rests. I move for the dismissal of the indictment on the ground that the People have failed to show facts sufficient to constitute a crime.”

  The Court: “Motion denied.”

  Mr. Tannenbaum: “I also move to strike out all evidence with relation to the clothing worn by the deceased and removed and subsequently marked in evidence, on the ground that no connection is shown between the clothing and this defendant.”

  The Court: “Motion denied.”

  Mr. Tannenbaum: “I also move to strike out all testimony with reference to the alleged confession, on the ground that the same was not obtained according to law.”

  The Court: “Motion denied. The defendant is indicted for one of the highest crimes known to the law, murder in the first degree. It is charged that the defendant, Eugene J. MacBride, on the sixth day of June 1916, in the Borough of the Bronx, County of New York, from a deliberate and premeditated design to effect the death of Ingrid Anderson, did with malice aforethought, choke, suffocate, and strangle the said Ingrid Anderson, of which choking, suffocating and strangulation the child did then and there die. The People further claim that the defendant engaged in committing the crime of murder either before or pursuant to committing the crime of rape in the first degree upon Ingrid Anderson.”

  – 26 –

  I got to the Wheatleigh around lunchtime. My suite was held on a yearly basis, so all my things were as I’d left them; some paintings I favored, shelves of books I treasured, two closets and a big bureau filled with mostly winter clothing. The grounds and gardens were in full bloom. The pool was filled and open. The staff was pleased to have me back. C
orru presented the only wrinkle but I managed to iron it out with a donation.

  My 1974 Citroën SM was in their garage. It fired up just fine and I drove it into town for a late lunch at the local café. The usual crowd was there, rich yoga ladies, graying trust-fund guys with iPads trying to look busy, some younger folk, including two gamins in tight jodhpurs who looked as if they might actually have been riding earlier in the day.

  Back at the hotel I parked in the lot that bordered on a small forest, stepped back, and admired my car. When did automobiles start to get so ugly? I realized I was glad to be back, glad to be able to stop traveling for a time. After the extended calm of my Parisian stay, the past two weeks had been frenetic. Other wealthy people I knew were on the move constantly. It was like their job. Too anxious to stay in any one place for more than a week, they seemed to be slaves to invented calendars. I never wanted that to happen and I reassured myself with the thought that all my recent locomotion had been due to an exceptional circumstance. Carmen was a worthy cause.

  It was a warm afternoon and I took Corru with me down to the pool, where I fell asleep under an umbrella. As was often the case there, no one else was around. When I woke up, I swam laps for a while. Corru ran about the edge until I got out and cuddled him. Back in my room I worked on the Géricault article and then breezed around the Internet looking into what had become of some of the people who had figured prominently in the MacBride trial.

  Theron Jameson, the assistant DA who took MacBride’s official statement at the police station, went on to be elected to Congress. Albert Vitale, one of MacBride’s lawyers, became a judge and a key Tammany Hall Democrat leader in the Bronx, whose reputation was later ruined due to ties with underworld gangsters. Captain Samuel E. Morrison, the man I was most interested in learning about, went missing a few years after the appeal trial concluded. In a brief obituary that appeared once he was declared officially dead, one I found in the archive of the New York Times, two things caught my attention. Morrison had been trained, mentored, and brought along on the coattails of New York City Police Inspector Thomas F. Byrnes, a Dublin-born, firefighting, mustachioed figure straight from Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. Byrnes was famous for his brutal physical and psychological interrogations of suspects. Though the MacBride case did not merit mention in Morrison’s obit, another case he “solved” was cited, the rape and murder of another blonde twelve-year-old girl, found in the basement of a building less than a mile from Ogden Avenue.