April in Paris

by John J. Healey

  Back on the property we lay in the sun and swam in the pool that I kept maintained each year. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done that there. And I’d never done it feeling so in love. After a bite of lunch in town we came back to the house and retired to the master bedroom. I felt like a damn fool for having spent so much time at the Wheatleigh. In the afternoon we went for another swim.

  “What happened at the Institute of Fine Arts?” she asked, draping an arm into the water. “You mentioned something about having enemies.”

  “It’s an extraordinary place, really special, but there were some personality clashes. My fault surely. Some folks there considered me a kind of dinosaur. As I told you in Paris, I’ve always done my best to avoid jargon and theory when talking about art, and I was ostracized a bit for it. When Scarlett got sick and the position at the Clark opened up, I went for it. Things are much more laid back up here and Williams seemed more like college, as I remember it.”

  “And is it?”

  “Enough. It’s a great institution.”

  We dined at Mezze in Williamstown and ran into a colleague and her female partner. It was good to see them and they could not have been nicer. Back at the house I lit a fire and opened an old bottle of port neither of us liked. We chatted and snuggled on the sofa in front of the hearth and then went upstairs to bed. After we finished making love, I heard Carmen crying in the bathroom. I went to the door and called in.

  “Are you all right?” I said, an absurd question in those circumstances.

  She didn’t reply.

  “Can I come in?” I said, as gently as possible.

  “No,” she said, in a neutral tone.

  I got back into bed and waited for her. I prepared myself for just about anything. She came out and got in next to me. I took one of her hands and kissed it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You’ve nothing to be sorry for.”

  “I’m not used to this,” she said, seemingly on the verge of tears again.

  “Me neither.”

  “I suppose I’m scared,” she said.

  I was about to say “me too” but thought better of it, not wanting to sound like I was trying to make everything about me, like I was competing with her.

  “What are you scared of?” I asked instead.

  “Of you. Of me. A lot of feelings, you know, have been unlocked all of a sudden.”

  Our intimacy, intense, was proving cathartic. And though I’d felt from the very start that I knew her, knew her in some deep, fundamental way, a way that transcended her immediate concerns and any possible other entanglements still unclear to me, I also had to accept that some of those ideas on my part might be a self-serving fantasy.

  “Whatever those feelings are,” I said, “this feels very good to me.”

  “I guess that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  I took her in my arms. “Don’t be. Let’s just enjoy it and see where it goes. Don’t worry. We’re not perfect, but I’m pretty sure we mean well. I certainly do. And I’m mad for you.”

  I sensed she wanted to tell me something. But she didn’t. We lay there like that in silence until she fell asleep. Cool mountain air was coming through the screen, and rather than close the window or go look for a blanket, I carefully got out of bed and lit a fire in the bedroom fireplace. Corru fell asleep by the hearth. Then I took a hot shower and came back to her, kissing her some more. Before falling asleep myself, I found myself thinking of the garbage bags with Scarlett’s clothing in them, all mushed together in a rusty green metal container by a convenience store near North Adams. Thousands of dollars of clothes and shoes she had once bought and worn with such delight. I thought I’d been okay with it, but there in bed I felt guilty. And it reminded me of “the bundle,” of the clothing that Ingrid Anderson’s mother had made for her and stuffed into a bag as well.

  Watching Carmen’s plane take off from Pittsfield the following day I felt at peace, but also forlorn. I returned to the Wheatleigh and smelled the pillows she’d rested her head upon. At my table for one that night, I texted back and forth with her like all the other idiots I despised for doing the very same thing during dinner.

  I finished the Géricault article in two days and sent it off to Paris. I hired movers who went through the house with me, tagging everything I wanted to give away or put into storage. By the following day the place was virtually empty. I arranged for a contractor to paint the interiors white. I wanted it to be cleaned out, to be transformed into a fresh canvas that either I could put up for sale or that we could do up together some day as we pleased.

  I flew to Boston, this time staying at the Charles, a pretty awful hotel. Carmen spent the night with me and during the following day, as she taught her classes and worked in her lab, I crossed the river and went to the Museum of Fine Arts and then to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, where I hadn’t been for years. The recent Renzo Piano wing underwhelmed me, and the house itself, though charming for the chaotic distribution of its artwork, was darker and drearier than I remembered. The majority of the people visiting both institutions were frumpy and depressing to be around. The contrast with my memories of what it had been like to visit the MOMA and the Metropolitan and the Frick in my teens and early twenties was stark.

  Carmen accepted my invitation to visit Caro in Southampton with me as soon as her term finished, and I returned to Lenox and Williamstown to wrap up some things of my own. On my last night there I walked the grounds at the house with Corru. Night fell as we strolled. I paused before a tall and thick Norwegian pine. My first reaction was to enjoy a sense of property. Though Cole and Linda Porter had once inhabited these grounds, I felt the tree and the earth it grew from were mine. It was a lord of the manor moment, infused with sentimentality about time and its passage, how I’d first come there with Scarlett as opposed to where I was then in my life. But the tree and the grounds had known many owners, for almost three centuries, and before that it had simply been part of the woods and meadows the indigenous inhabitants had hunted through. It would surely know many more owners as time progressed, after I sold it or after I was gone.

  I closed the house and drove back to Lenox for a late dinner at a wine bar in town where I got half tanked on a very good Bandol rosé from the Domaine Tempier. When I got up in the middle of the night to pee and brush my teeth for a second time, I found Corru in the bathroom where, unable to contain himself, he’d retired to do his business. It’s what I deserved for giving him some of the shrimp I had with the wine. He looked up at me as if to ask for forgiveness and it brought me to tears. I don’t know why. I cleaned everything and picked him up and brought him back to bed with me. He was okay with me doing that by then. He wasn’t afraid anymore. I watched him fall asleep and thought back to the damp little house in Extremadura where I had first seen him.

  – 30 –

  Beauregard L. Harrison: “I have been a photographer for the past twelve years. At the request of the District Attorney’s office I went to St. Michael’s Cemetery on Long Island and took this photograph. I also developed the negative.”

  Prosecuting Attorney: “Gentlemen of the jury, in admitting this photograph in evidence, the District Attorney offers it solely for the purpose of showing the nature of the character and place where the alleged wounds were inflicted upon the deceased; it is only offered for that purpose; and in viewing the photograph you must not permit anything that appears in the photograph to tend to inflame your judgment against the person on trial, it is not admitted for any such purpose, that is, whether the child was a beautiful child or not, that is immaterial.”

  The Court: “The defendant is presumed to be innocent until he is proved to be guilty. The presumption rests with him throughout the case until the moment when the jury is convinced from the proof submitted to them that the defendant is guilty of the crimes charged. Then the presumption of innocence is destroyed.”

  Mr. Tannenbaum: “I respectfully ask Your Honor to charge that the pr
osecution has failed to prove any specific motive for the defendant to have killed the deceased.”

  The Court: “I so charge.”

  Mr. Tannenbaum: “I will ask Your Honor to also charge that there is no proof in this case that the motive for the alleged killing of the deceased was the concealment of the crime of rape.”

  The Court: “That is for the jury to determine.”

  Mr. Tannenbaum: “I ask Your Honor to charge that if the jury finds that the confession was forced from the mind of the defendant by the flattery of hope, or by torture or because of fear produced by threats, they must reject it.”

  The Court: “I so charge.”

  The Court: “Gentlemen of the jury, you may retire.”

  – 31 –

  I flew Carmen to Pittsfield again and picked her up in the G-Wagon. After six months sitting around shrouded in a Lenox garage, it needed a workout. We were about to drive down to New York and I was reluctant to risk putting the forty-year-old Citroën through its paces on such a journey. I wended my way to the Taconic Parkway and cruised south. Up there it was a beautiful highway, but it got increasingly narrow and filled with cars as we neared the city. I clung, as I often do just about everywhere now, to outdated fantasies of the terrain, imagining it as I pretended it had been during my youth. While Carmen described more facets of her childhood in Madrid, and what Spain had been like in the late 1980s, summering as a little girl in Galicia, I listened happily while retrofitting the Berkshires and Dutchess County.

  I erased all the strip malls and most of the people who lived there now. I banished all the wealthy, puritanical exercise freaks. I reintroduced farmers who cut their own wood and read the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell-like figures who pumped gas, doctors who made house calls, dairies that delivered milk in thick bottles, women in tweed coats out walking their dogs, girls in summer dresses mad about horses, Korean War and Vietnam veterans skilled with Zippo lighters. I gave everyone a foxy sex life and a favorite book. I brought back movies with Audrey Hepburn or Katharine Hepburn, Gary Cooper and William Holden. It was ridiculous and therapeutic.

  Carmen spoke a bit more about her father. She had tenuous memories of him teaching her how to swim off the beaches of the Cíes Islands. Hearing him swear in Italian when he got angry. Putting her to bed and singing Russian lullabies. She mentioned a portrait he did of her when she was five that she kept at her place in Cambridge and that she promised to show me. As we sped by exits for FDR’s Hyde Park estate I heard about her early crushes and Madrid’s teenage disco world.

  Then, as we started passing exits for Yonkers, her attention came back to me and she convinced me to man up and drive through Highbridge. I did it to please her, to demonstrate I was not as neurotic as in fact I am. What impressed me most, after getting off the highway and grappling with streets that were common in my most unsettling dreams, but difficult to find in real life, was how different everything looked while managing to remain creepily familiar, the persistence of the avenue names and most of the buildings lining them. The persistence of bricks. In the 1970s and ’80s Highbridge went downhill and only took an upturn in the ’90s when crime rates began to go down and the sturdy apartment buildings and two-family homes proved attractive to a growing African American and Hispanic middle class.

  I refused to stop and get out in front of what had been our apartment building on Undercliff Avenue. I’m glad to say she found this amusing. The front of the building was no longer grand, but otherwise it looked to be in fair shape. Being there again was difficult to process and I distracted myself by talking a blue streak.

  In between what had been our building and another similar to it half a block farther south, just before a dark granite arch of the Washington Bridge, there had been two tenements left over from an even earlier era. When I’d driven by some years before they were still there, just as grim looking as I remembered. In our building and in the other one like it, mostly progressive Jewish families had lived along with some Irish folk like mine. But the two tenements had housed humbler tenants. I most remember the Rossetti family. I befriended one of their sons, Ricardo, who got into fights and always had a runny nose. Sometimes his mother had me over for a meal. The stairwells and hallways smelled of garbage and canned tomato sauce. Mrs. Rossetti, clearly pretty once upon a time, had a ravaged look by then. There was an older daughter famous for being “fast” and an older son who often got arrested. The only reason these memories, images, and smells remained active in my brain was because it was Ricardo who first told me my mother had died. On that day with Carmen the tenements were gone. They’d been replaced with a new residential apartment building that was not especially pleasing to look at but was probably considered desirable in the neighborhood for being modern.

  I drove us to the beginning of Ogden Avenue where there used to be a pharmacy and, a bit farther along, the movie theater where I sat through numerous triple features as a child, Abbott and Costello films and Westerns. After five minutes of driving by bodegas and check-cashing businesses, beauty salons, and some prison-like public schools, we arrived at the scene of the crime, the stretch of Ogden Avenue where I’d played and stayed with my paternal grandparents, where the Colossi barber shop had been, where MacBride had sat on that wall, and where Ingrid Anderson was raped and strangled to death.

  I parked the G-Wagon and we got out—at Carmen’s insistence. The people strolling on the sidewalk smiled at us or ignored us, going about their business. A great shock hit me immediately. Of all the buildings on both sides of the street, only two had disappeared: 1075 and 1077, the buildings where my grandparents had lived, where my father and his brothers were born and grew up, where Ingrid’s family, MacBride, and the Conlans had lived.

  Where once those houses with their matching granite stoops had stood, there was now a vacant lot filled with weeds, shredded plastic bags, and shards of broken stone. What had happened? Was it karma, sheer coincidence, or had their disappearance been connected in any way to the crime? The latter option was the most implausible because the crime took place in 1916 and I had known those buildings long after. But it was still uncanny. Carmen was nevertheless convinced there had to be a connection. She asked the owner of a nearby store when the buildings had been destroyed, speaking to him in Spanish, but the man had no idea.

  What was still there was the fire station across the way. It was now designated EMS Station 17, and though it had undergone various alterations, its basic structure remained intact and a modern fire truck was parked within it at the ready. I crossed the street and asked one of the firemen about the fate of 1075/77 and he thought they’d been razed sometime in the 1980s. I thanked him and crossed back to where Carmen was standing by the chain link fence. I remembered what the janitor, Albert Boulder, had said at the trial: I am the janitor of the premises 1075 and 1077 Ogden Avenue. They are double tenement houses, five stories each, with ten families in each house. Under these houses there are basements. I wondered if the basements were still there. I wondered if they’d been filled in with earth and debris, or had they just been covered over when the buildings came down? Whatever the case, there it was, not fifteen feet in front of us—the exact spot on this planet where Ingrid had been murdered. The stoops where she and Edwin and my father and his brothers and Gino Colossi played, and where I had played half a century later, were gone. The room where I’d eaten butter and raisins with my grandmother, she who’d been born in County Clare, was gone. But the basements, in one fashion or the other, were probably still there.

  The Valiunas saloon and the Colossi barbershop were long gone as well, and driving around the corner onto Woodycrest Avenue we stopped in front of what had been the Judge’s house, where the dream I had in Paris had taken place, where my mother had lived until she married my father, and where I had spent many nights sleeping in what had been her room. It was painted a different color and had been repaired. In fact, all of Woodycrest Avenue shone with renewal. Many of the fine wooden homes had been renovated. New
cars were parked in front of them. Down the hill, even the scary orphanage edifice had been steam-cleaned and repurposed.

  Rather than pushing on and heading out to Southampton as planned, I called Caro and told her we’d arrive the following day. I was reeling from the Bronx tour and suggested to Carmen that we spend the night in the city living it up a little.

  – 32 –

  At 4:50 p.m., the jury returned to the courtroom.

  The Clerk: “Have you agreed upon a verdict?”

  The Foreman: “We have.”

  The Clerk: “How say you, do you find the defendant at the bar guilty or not guilty?”

  The Foreman: “We find him guilty as charged in the indictment of murder in the first degree and guilty as charged in the indictment of rape in the first degree.”

  Mr. Tannenbaum: “May it please Your Honor, I respectfully move to set aside the verdict of the jury and ask for a new trial upon the grounds, first, that the verdict is contrary to law; second, that the verdict is clearly against the evidence and the weight of the evidence; and thirdly, that the Court at the trial admitted illegal and improper evidence against the defendant’s objections.”

  The Court: “Motion denied. When will you be ready for sentence?”

  Mr. Tannenbaum: “I think Your Honor ought to give me about a week; say a week from today.”

  – 33 –

  I’d felt like a stranger in my own city for some time. In the early 1990s, Scarlett and I moved out of Bunky’s Fifth Avenue “palazzo” after buying a loft on Spring Street. There was a weekend phenomenon back then everyone referred to as the invasion of the Bridge & Tunnel people, revelers that drove into lower Manhattan weekend nights gumming up the streets, restaurants, and clubs to such an extent that many from the crowd we hung out with stayed in or fled to their country homes. It had actually been another incentive for taking the job at the Clark Museum.