Margot's War

by Ty Knoy

  “She must have been out of her mind.”

  Nick shrugged. “I was let down. A bit angry, really, but she was right. It would have been reckless. She had seen it happen with her sister: too much planning time leads to too big a wedding. By the next day, I had cooled off, and anyway I’d been a little jittery myself. We hadn’t even discussed her career and my own need to finish school.

  “That night at dinner, I did make an announcement, but one of a different sort. I stood, tapped my glass with a knife, and as everyone held their breath, I said that Vietnam had been stressful, that I needed a break, and that I would wait until September before going back into school. I also said I would stay in Colorado and ski for the rest of the season.”

  “Did you give Gayle advance notice?”

  “I did about not going back to school until fall, but not about staying in Colorado until summer. The next day Gayle and my father started calling it my ski-bum year. Ski-bum four months was more like it.”

  “Sounds like you got kind of worked up about it.”

  The man who had rolled his wife into the lobby came running back to his car. He got a bag out of the front, apologized again to Camille, and ran back in.

  “I was hacked off about the chiding, I suppose, but not so much that I put her on a plane to New York the next morning.”

  “Camille laughed. “True love, then.”

  “On my part, at least. Also, and I didn’t tell this to anyone right then, I thought I might stay on in Colorado through the summer, right up to the wedding day—if there really was going to be a wedding—and treat myself to a lot of classical music, meet Victor, and spend some time with him. I wasn’t going to be needed in the ski school after the holidays, so I arranged for a job at the Big Lodge as a bartender. I didn’t know a dry martini from a Guinness Stout, but relatives—Victor’s aunt and uncle—owned the lodge, so no problem.”

  “Nepotism,” Camille said, pointing her finger. “Did you ever feel guilty about your privileges?”

  Gee. Another needler, Nick thought. “Veteran’s preference. Like they have for those post office jobs. ‘We deserve it’ is the prevailing attitude of veterans. You yourself had a few privileges that were unearned: beautiful, daughter of a doctor, to name two.”

  “I also was born lucky,” Camille said, “but I haven’t felt guilty lately. My soon-to-be ex-husband is the do-gooder. He even sometimes gives away medicine.”

  “If he didn’t do that, he’d have to go volunteer in a soup kitchen or something. Would you rather have him in a soup kitchen or home in bed with you?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  Nick began thinking for the first time that maybe this wasn’t theater, that the divorce announcement was real.

  “So what happened? Camille asked. “Did my mother find you alone that winter, give you sympathy after you told her how your fiancée and your family were abusing you? And then, ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ and ooh la la?”

  “Your mother never would have done that.”

  Camille rolled her eyes.

  Nick drew a deep breath and said more firmly, “She never would have done that.”

  The man with the wheelchair-bound wife got something else out of their car and headed back in. “What the hell is he doing?” Nick said.

  The declaration three hours earlier by Priscilla, the receptionist, that Katherine Anne’s move to University Towers had been voluntary and amicably arranged hadn’t sounded convincing to Nick. And that the information had been gratuitous made him suspicious. He heaved an exaggerated sigh. “I did in fact see your mother later that winter with your father from behind the bar a few weeks on. That may have been the first time I saw her.”

  Camille looked blankly at Nick.

  “It was the night of Leap Year day. The bar was crowded, and everyone was having extra rounds. Your father recognized me from when he had brought you to the ski school at Christmas, and he made a remark that I had changed professions. He introduced me to your mother, and I asked about you and Cindy. She said you girls hadn’t come this time.”

  “We were in school. Our Iowa grandmother was staying with us.”

  “They were staying in the Big Lodge. I remember putting their drinks on the room charge. Did your mother ever say she had been to Mackinac Island?”

  Camille frowned. “I don’t think so. I don’t know.” She reached and turned down Pink Floyd. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Nick said. “Absolutely nothing. She was with your father. It was the briefest of encounters. Your mother was attractive. Most women at ski lodges are attractive, but your mother stood out to me because she was not in ski clothes that night. She had dressed up a bit, more like she was at an office party.”

  “She always dressed down expensively. Always high-end brands and fabrics, but at the same time subdued. And never low necklines. She dressed Cindy and me that way—”

  “But without high heels?”

  “Right. Cindy was always okay with it, but I was annoyed. More than annoyed, actually. It was never easy disagreeing with my mother. She spent a lot of time at the piano, and she didn’t want to waste time dealing with nonsense—nonsense being anything that wasn’t her idea. She was trying to catch up with—her career, I guess. She was good, but she was in her late thirties. The window had closed. You should have seen our house. Everything Victorian: carved walnut, velvet—”

  “I can imagine. That wasn’t uncommon back then.”

  “I’m the opposite.”

  “A chrome and glass girl, then?”

  Camille smiled. “Something like that.”

  “Should it turn out that your mother is not the pianist who almost knocked me off the rails to the altar, then the only time I ever saw her was when she was at the bar with your father. On the night of Leap Year day.”

  Camille patted the steering wheel with her palm and nodded. “Some of this fits,” she said. “It’s crazy, but some of this fits with what happened to Cindy and me that summer.”

  “But here’s something else strange. The other reason I remember that night so well is that Gayle was there. At the bar and with your mother. They talked to each other.”

  “Your wife was there. I mean, your future wife was there?”

  The man came out and moved his car. A driver just behind on the circle tapped his horn. “That man wants to let you out,” Nick said. When Camille didn’t respond, he put his hand on her shoulder and shook her. “He’s letting us out,” Nick said. “Are you okay?” He waved to the driver and reached through the wheel to pull the left turn signal on again.

  Camille shook her head, as if shaking water out of her hair. “I’m okay,” she said. She waved to the driver, put her car in drive, and let it creep out into the line. “He always loved her,” Camille said. “No matter what she did, he always, always loved her.”

  “I’m sure,” Nick said.

  The car crept into the long line of vehicles waiting either to cross or to turn onto the road to the stadium.

  “Gayle was there at the bar that night,” Nick repeated.

  Camille shrugged. “Right. So what? Two total strangers arrive at adjacent bar stools and talk. Happens a million times a night all over the world. No significance.

  “But in light of what was going to happen a few weeks later, why did those two particular females at that particular point in time come face-to-face on those two particular bar stools? What an incredible coincidence! Months or years later, the bits and pieces started coming together in my head. The lady who was there Leap Year night was definitely your mother. Indisputably. And she was with your father. Was she also the woman who almost torpedoed our wedding? And if so, how did she happen to have the bride in her periscope from a thousand miles away? How did Gayle get herself into the crosshairs? Were they seeing into the future? Sizing each other up?

  Nick put his hand on the t
op of his head and pulled at his hair, shook his head, then dropped his hands onto the dashboard with a smack. “These questions started driving me crazy decades ago.” He paused. “You know, I want to apologize to you, Camille, for coming here and putting all this on you. My car is right over there.” He pointed. “I think I should just get in it and leave. I didn’t know about the guardianship. I thought I’d only see your mother—Margot, she is to me. I’m sorry for the intrusion.” He reached to the door handle, hoping all the while that Camille would stop him.

  Camille took hold of his free arm. “Please stay,” she said. “There are questions that are driving me crazy too. Please stay.”

  Nick took his hand off the handle and drew a breath. “Years later, I asked Gayle about that night at the bar, and she did have things to say that she hadn’t told me that morning after. The night stood out for her also. She said she had mentioned to your mother that she might be getting a diamond, maybe the next day, and that the two of them had then talked about love, marriage, what life is all about—those sorts of things. She said the woman told her to be sure—really sure—because bad things can happen.

  “I myself still remember feeling uneasy, even from way down the bar, down by the taps. I sensed they were talking about me. No, I was sure. Gayle said the woman had asked her if I was her first love and if she was my first love. Gayle said she had answered yes. Your mother then patted her on the hand, told her that, in that case, everything would be all right. She also said first loves are the real loves.”

  “My mother said that?”

  “That’s what Gayle said. And if she is the same woman who was playing her grand piano across the fence later, it definitely was your mother at the bar.”

  Camille inhaled deeply.

  “Gayle said there were tears in your mother’s eyes.”

  “All of this right there in front of my father?”

  “I wondered about that too. She said he was talking to a man on his left and so wasn’t hearing it or seeing it. It was a private conversation. She said your mother then picked up the bar napkin and dabbed her eyes, and said, ‘Whatever happens, you will have better luck than I had,’ and then walked away.

  “Your father abruptly got up and followed her.”

  “All this stuff, from forty-five years ago,” Camille said, “and it’s still tearing at us, you and me both—isn’t it, still today.” The car ahead crept forward. Camille let her car creep and then braked it to a stop. “She never gave me any such advice.”

  Nick smiled. “Would you have listened if she had?”

  “That she would go into all that with a young woman she didn’t even know! Cindy and I were always on our own.”

  “So you girls raised yourselves? Is that how you felt—feel even now? Most girls complain about the opposite.”

  “I know. We had nothing to complain about, and we had everything to complain about.” Nick and Camille sat a moment or so. “We Don’t Need No Education” played softly.

  “Gayle had come unexpectedly,” Nick said. “When she and I had almost become engaged—we were engaged at the top of the mountain for a few minutes, but unengaged by the time we had skied down—we had agreed not to see each other again until she came down the aisle in Petoskey.”

  “Strange.”

  “That’s what I thought. It was her idea, not mine. Gayle said it was a test of our purity. She wanted us to pay for our wedding ourselves, with my army pay, together with whatever she earned in New York. But then she ups and spends money on an air ticket.

  “I was working in the bar nights and skiing in the day, talking to her on the phone on Sundays, as usual, all as if the wedding was on—but with the feeling that it was off.

  “Then down in the employee dormitory at five in the morning, on the twenty-eighth of February—after I had worked until three—I was awakened by someone shaking me to get me out to the telephone. I had finally gotten my feet warm. I scurried barefoot along the concrete floor, wondering if someone had died or something, but it was Gayle saying she was at LaGuardia and that she’d got a good deal on a flight and would be arriving in the afternoon. We were only about eight weeks into our pledge not to see each other.”

  The driver behind gently tapped his horn. Camille let her car creep forward as she said, “She must have been having an anxiety attack.”

  Nick continued, “I told her I had to be at work at four and that it was such a busy weekend I couldn’t possibly get off to come down to meet her. She was curt, and I was sure she was coming to break it off. I didn’t go back to sleep, and I didn’t ski that day. Finally, it occurred to me that she probably had been on a pay phone and was running out of coins.”

  “She could have just mailed the ring or hocked it and kept the money.”

  “There was no ring. I still had the diamond in the Big Lodge safe. But even if she’d had it, she would never have just mailed it. Is that what you would have done?”

  “I’d have mailed it. In fact, that’s what I did do when I decided to marry the boss instead of a guy who was stationed in West Germany.”

  A gust of wind brought some yellow leaves into the car. Gayle and Nick both picked them off their laps. “Rain tonight. There’s the first warning,” Camille said.

  Nick continued. “But anyway, that afternoon, I was behind the bar, and in Gayle came, suitcase in hand. As I was hugging her, I said, ‘If we get married tomorrow, we’d only have an anniversary every fourth year. And think of all the money that would save.’ She said no, but she didn’t call off the wedding either. I put her suitcase behind the bar, and she sat.”

  Nick, who had been gazing up at the sky, looked back down to Camille. He shrugged. She shrugged.

  He said, “She may have changed her mind two or three times, back and forth, right up there in the air, and then two or three times more on the shuttle. She’d had some success in New York: she had landed a singing part in a television commercial, a one-shot, and they had paid her well. But I didn’t bring up the ring, and neither did she. I wasn’t going to get myself thrown under the bus a second time. I wasn’t exactly sore about it, but it was her move; that was sort of my attitude. I wondered if, when she went back to New York, she would have to explain to some guy there that she had changed her mind about him.”

  Camille smiled, shaking her head. “Did you ever really think that there were other fish in the sea?”

  “No. Maureen and Eduardo had gone to Palm Springs, so I couldn’t put her up with them. The lodge rooms were full, and my parents’ condo was rented out, so she ended up sleeping in the girls’ section of the employee dorm. She hadn’t brought her skis. We just sat and talked about—well, not if we were still going to get married, but about the wedding plans, as if a wedding was still going to happen. We talked about her commercial shoot, her auditions, how her family was doing.

  “Her return ticket was for Sunday. Saturday night was when she and your mother were talking. After I put her on the shuttle on Sunday, I imagined—this is how crazy I was—that she had asked your mother to tell me that the wedding was off.”

  Camille laughed out loud. “My mother would never have done that. ‘Do it yourself, toots’ is what she would have said. Surely, surely that tall blonde I saw you with so long ago would never have asked such a thing.”

  “Anyway,” Nick continued, “I didn’t see your parents again that weekend. Gayle called me at the bar that night when she was safely back in Manhattan. Most coincidences are after the fact, but your mother and Gayle meeting was a coincidence before the fact. Or maybe there is no such thing as time. I’ll never get to the bottom of it. Do you believe in mental telepathy, ESP, those sorts of things?”

  The horn of the car behind beeped gently, and Camille eased her foot off the pedal, letting the car creep forward again. “You mean, you think your bride-to-be and my mother somehow read each other without ever having laid eyes on each other
?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That would mean that jealousies are timeless, that they exist eternally. I’d guess there’s a simpler explanation,” Camille said. “Your bride-to-be, Gayle, feared some trim lady in ski pants would turn your head. But I’m glad to have you here, Mr. Rohloffsen. It could have been on a better day for me—like when our store wasn’t being wrecked, and a few other things. But how could you have known?”

  “I spoke with Mrs. Bergeron yesterday.”

  “Oh?”

  “Helen Bergeron. She even spelled it for me, telling me that the N is silent and that it’s pronounced Berjourrow, not Bergeron.”

  “I know who you mean,” Camille said. “How do you know her?”

  “I went into South Bend and drove to your old house, presuming that I’d find your mother there. But I could tell immediately it was no longer hers—tricycle on the front lawn, swing set in the side yard—so I drove out to the country club. Lunch was being served, but she wasn’t in the dining room. Through a big window, I saw some ladies on the putting green and a foursome heading down the fairway, so I went down to the pro shop, but no Katherine was on the register.

  “Back up in the lobby area was a portrait wall of club presidents. For 1994 was John Kendall, MD, gray hair, the man who had brought his girls to ski school and who had been at the bar with his wife on Leap Year night. A woman came by, and I said to her that I knew Dr. Kendall from years ago in Colorado.”

  “He died on June 7, 2008,” Camille added.

  Nick nodded. “From there, I learned that your mother was down here. The woman—Mrs. Bergeron—then led me to a gallery of photographs with a picture of herself, your mother, and two other lovelies, all in evening wear and holding cocktail glasses, standing around an ice sculpture.”

  “I know that picture,” Camille said. “A New Year’s Eve party. I was down here in college at the time.”

  “Mrs. Bergeron then started telling me that you girls and her children were in school together, that this daughter was now in London and another was in Washington. Fortunately, someone called her in because the bridge game was starting, and I came on down here.”