by Ty Knoy
“What about this aunt of hers that was lost in the war? Do you mean she had been killed?”
“That’s what Gayle and her cousin were trying to find out. She was Gayle’s mother’s younger sister. She was a singer, and during the Occupation, a bandleader in troop entertainment recruited her. One thing led to another, and when the band was ordered to Paris, she went also. She and he married there. The girl’s father—Gayle’s grandfather—disowned her. Never again spoke her name, I’m told. Her mother, though, kept in touch with a secret mailing address—secret from her husband, I mean. The letters stopped abruptly near the end of the war, and nothing further was ever heard. If she survived, she could never have come home, so they suppose she might still be alive.”
“What a sad story,” Camille said.
“Gayle’s mother always said she was just a young kid with hopes of a career who had no idea when, if ever, the occupation would end. Where was your mother during the war, Camille?”
“She was right here,” Camille replied, pointing down, as if to the ground. “I know she graduated. She gets alum mail.”
“And then she went to Paris?”
“She is fluent in French, you know. Minored in French here and then became fluent over there.”
“I once heard her talking to someone in French—that is, if she is who I think she is. It was at a party at Victor Rohloffsen’s house. Do you think she was in Paris with Victor? Or did she go on her own?”
Camille looked Nick in the eye. “She never said anything about how she got there, but she did have a reason other than Victor—if he was a reason at all, that is—for going to France. I’ll show you some pictures that go with that.”
“A piano tutor there?”
“Maybe, but there’s still another reason.”
Camille turned a corner at a pharmacy and sundries store, then turned again into the alley behind the store. There were four parking spots: two with signs that read “Store Personnel Only,” one marked with the name “I. Lawrence Margolis, RPh” and the other with “Camille Margolis, RPh.” All four were filled. Camille stopped the car in the alley.
“Would you mind holding the car, Nick? I’m picking up some things. They’re already bagged, so it will just be a minute.”
“Sure.”
“Just go around the block if someone needs to get through.” She released her seat belt, got out, kept the door open, and glanced back up the alley. “You’re not the first man to come here looking for my mother,” she said, looking down at Nick.
Nick was surprised, but he said, “I’m not surprised. She’s extraordinary.” He wondered if he was about to be told that Katherine Anne was with this man or maybe some other man—maybe at that very moment. Until just then, it hadn’t occurred to Nick that Katherine Anne could have taken up with someone other than himself or married someone else. Nick was amazed at himself that the possibility hadn’t occurred to him. Then the further thought came to him that maybe Camille was getting ready to present him to Katherine Anne as an alternative to a man Camille didn’t want her mother to marry.
“Aaron showed up last spring,” Camille said.
“Aaron?”
“I had never heard of him until he called. He did call first.”
Nick was fearful of what Camille might say next, but then he thought, Why would she be playing me along like this if Katherine Anne does have someone else?
“Aaron was from New York, and he lived there virtually all his life. Like you, he was widowed about three months before he showed up here.”
“Another guy who didn’t wait a year,” Nick thought out loud as he noted that she was speaking of Aaron in the past tense.
“The army drafted him late in the war, out of college, in New York, and then put him back in college here.” Some students were walking through the alley. Camille closed her car door and walked around the front of the car to Nick’s door.
“From a wealthy, politically-connected family?” Nick mused aloud. “With the wherewithal to keep their son away from danger.”
“Could be. After he was discharged, he went back to New York. Had a career. Married there. They had a son, but he was killed in Vietnam. Aaron and his wife apparently weren’t able to keep their son away from the bullets.”
“Maybe the son wanted to go.”
“Like my own son,” Camille said. “Mr. Tough Guy. He’s in the Rangers, in Afghanistan.”
“I’m sorry,” Nick said. “But he is where he wants to be, isn’t he?”
“He had been a music student, but the army had him studying Russian here. He drifted over to the music school in his spare time and met Mother there. They became friendly, played for each other and played together, but when the school term ended, she broke it off with him—though I don’t know how much there was to break off—and just disappeared, he said.”
Camille looked to her left, and Nick looked in the mirror. A car had turned into the alley. She shrugged. “He did say he had gotten a Dear John letter. I’m going in, so just drive around the block and come back here. I’ll probably be out before you get back.” She went into the store.
Nick opened the door, went around to the driver’s seat, and started the engine, but the car that had started into the alley was being backed out. He turned off the engine, leaned his head against the rest, and looked at the sky, wondering if, twenty-eight hours before, he had gone seriously crazy. Playing golf with Alan Maarten and two other friends, he was headed for the best round of his life, even though he was feeling an uneasiness, a fear. He had awakened early that morning with his heart pounding, seeing the face of Margot Renard the way he had seen her in flood lamps over her Steinway. She was still with him as he put on his shoes in the clubhouse and still with him on the first tee and every tee, down every fairway, on every green. He hadn’t been in a trap, so he didn’t know if treading in sand would have broken the spell.
He made a long birdie putt on nine—either in spite of or because of his anxiety—to go down to one over. He took deep breaths as his companions putted out.
Then Nick told his surprised friends he was going in, not finishing the round. There was something that he had to do, and he had no time to spare. After assuring everyone he was perfectly sane—while worried he was not—he took his bag and headed for the clubhouse.
Alan had followed him a few steps. “Her again?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Nick had said.
“Are you going there?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to need to be careful driving. Call me if—”
“I’ll be okay,” he said. He patted Alan on the arm.
Nick had gone in, changed shoes, and driven home. He showered, packed a hanging bag, and drove to his mother’s apartment, fully intending to ask her if she remembered the young woman from whose lap she had lifted him sixty years before and if she remembered the young lady’s name. But then he didn’t ask. The need to keep his intentions secret, so soon after Gayle’s death, had recurred. He did reassure his mother—not that she needed to be assured—that Elaine and Gregg would be back the next day and would look in on her and that he himself was going to Boston to see an old army buddy he hadn’t seen since Saigon.
Had he headed directly for Boston, he would have driven down to Interstate 94, taken it to Detroit, crossed the Ambassador Bridge, and taken Queen’s Highway 401 to Niagara Falls, where he would have spent the night. He and Gayle had liked the gardens on the Canadian side of the falls, but neither had been there since their honeymoon. But he hadn’t headed for Boston. He hadn’t taken I-94, but merely crossed it and headed south to South Bend, intending to go to Boston from there later in the day.
On the way to South Bend, he called his housekeeper and asked her to go in, water Gayle’s plants, and see to it that the yard was raked and that the pool was let down and covered for the winter. He told her also that
he was driving to Boston and probably wouldn’t be back for a few days.
In South Bend, he came to the Kendall house—or, as he then saw, what had once been the Kendall house—and he thought again of just going on to Boston. But then he had gone to the country club, where he had met Mrs. Bergeron, and from there he had driven most of the length of the state, into the homecoming hoopla and the marching bands, to the piano bar where he’d had his first drink of gin since Gayle’s death, and then out and around the senior center buildings where Margot lived. Nick’s room that night was twenty miles back out of town—another consequence of his failure to anticipate homecoming weekend—on an intersection with an all-night truck stop. The noise of the trucks coming and going was part of the reason he hadn’t slept. He had walked over to the station at two and bought a quart of milk and some oatmeal cookies, but he still hadn’t slept.
At six he had gone over again for bacon and eggs.
Maybe Mrs. Bergeron called. What difference would it make if she had? Nick asked himself. Mrs. Bergeron might have called, and Camille had lied about it. He assumed she and Camille were well acquainted, as Camille was of the same age as the Bergeron children, and the families knew each other.
Nick went back over everything Camille had said, trying to think of anything that would mean she had received a call. But had Camille been called, she would have gotten an earlier start on having her mother readied for the “man visit,” so probably no such call had been received.
Mrs. Bergeron had been sitting down to play bridge and maybe by the end of the session, the thing had slipped her mind. Had Mrs. Bergeron read his intentions? He felt she had. Perhaps, it occurred to him, Camille didn’t want him to visit her mother, and perhaps, having been forewarned, Camille was stalling him and keeping her out of sight. Neither Priscilla, the receptionist, nor Lille would have known about such a call, since there was no switchboard for the call to come through. So the only way for either to know would be from Camille or Katherine Anne herself, and there was still the matter of this other man who might still—
CHAPTER 13
A HAND WAS placed on Nick’s shoulder. “Are you okay, sir?” a male voice asked.
It was the hand and voice of a policeman—not Big Bill, not little Bill, but a policeman in a leather coat and a helmet, and in the mirrors were a motorcycle’s lights and windshield. Nick hadn’t seen or heard the motorcycle come up. He was in the driver’s seat, but the lights weren’t flashing, so the intervention was friendly, casual.
“Sorry,” Nick said. “She said she would be right out. I’m to move it if someone needs to get through.”
“You’re okay. I know whose car this is, and anyway, I can get around.”
“That’s a quiet bike.”
“We used to have Harleys. I couldn’t have snuck up on you like that with a Harley,” the patrolman said, undoing his chinstrap. He smiled. “You were sort of waving your hands and talking to the steering wheel. Are you a preacher, practicing your sermon for tomorrow?”
“Maybe in my next life,” Nick said. This town’s women may be crazy, but its policemen are uncommonly good-natured, he thought. “Just trying to explain something to myself—a complicated thing. I got my hands into it, I guess. And my mouth also.”
“It’s okay. If we arrested everyone who talked to themselves, especially in this town, we’d have to have a lot more jails. Even when they start answering themselves, we’re not obliged to look into it.”
“I don’t have any answers yet,” Nick said. “If I get some, I’ll try to keep it quiet.”
“Good enough.”
Camille came out. “Hi, George,” she said as she tossed a package into the back seat. She handed Nick a plastic cup with orange juice, sealed over the top with foil. She had another cup in hand, the foil already punctured with a straw. “I needed this,” she said to the policeman and to Nick. “I’m hypoglycemic. Free coffee inside, as always, or I can get you one of these.” She held the cup up, as if proposing a toast.
“If you don’t give it free to everyone, I can’t take it,” George said.
“I know. But I’m very good at keeping secrets,” she purred.
“I heard about the fight. Everything okay now? Mess all cleaned up?”
“Yes. Not much loss. All the cosmetic bottles are plastic nowadays, so nothing broke. Are the girls in jail?”
“I don’t think so. I heard that they were just given appearance tickets. Fighting over a man, I suppose?”
“What else? Anyway, I wasn’t here at the time,” Camille said.
“So everything is all right?” George asked, turning his eyes down and giving a slight nod toward Nick.
“It just couldn’t be better. Except that my car’s blocking the alley, isn’t it? But I’m leaving, I’m leaving. Don’t get the handcuffs out.”
“I’m leaving too. Cherri-oh,” the policeman said. He nodded at Nick. “Nice meeting you, sir.” He got the bike around the convertible and rode on down the alley.
Nick got out and let Camille back in. “Did your mother ever talk to you about a long motorcycle ride she went on—high into the mountains with a young man she had just met?” Nick closed the door as she looked up at him, orange juice in hand.
“I can’t imagine,” Camille said. “Did that happen”—she paused—“with you?”
“If your mother is the pianist I’m looking for, yes, it did.” He went around the front of car, got in, and fastened the seat belt.
“What is this about you and your wife being married twice?” Camille asked, as she started the engine. “A reaffirmation or something? After a falling out? With my mother in between?”
Nick was surprised Sgt. Big Bill had let that out. He laughed. “No, that’s not quite it.”
“Did my mother have something to do with it?”
“No,” Nick said. He shook his head but then said, “In a way. In fact, she, or Margot, whoever she was, had a great deal to do with it. There was some reason Gayle showed up out there.”
“On Leap Year night?”
“Another time, too,” Nick said.
A moment passed. Then Camille said, “My mother never had anything good to say about motorcycles.”
Nick smiled. “Attitudes are flexible,” he said.
“Cindy allowed a young man to bring her home from school on a motorcycle once, and Mother had an absolute fit. She would have chased him out of the driveway with a broom if she could have found one in time.”
Nick nodded, thinking a moment. “High school? You girls were in high school at that time,” he said, calculating that that would have been after the mountain ride in Colorado.
“Yes.”
Nick took that as a good sign, thinking that Margot was angry not because her daughter was on a motorcycle, but because she had never gotten to go on another motorcycle ride with him. Stupid thought, he thought to himself. “Your father never had a motorcycle, I take it?”
“Not as far as I know,” Camille said.
“And Aaron didn’t come on a motorcycle?”
“Hardly,” she said.
CHAPTER 14
CAMILLE LET THE car creep along the alley, past students cutting through. One, a female, tapped on the fender. “Hi, Mrs. Margolis,” she said, her eyes on Nick as she spoke. She gave a thumbs-up.
“Hi, Rachel. He’s my stepfather, from Michigan.” When the girl was a distance off, Camille added, “She works for us part time.”
Nick laughed and then held a crooked smile. “This is odd. Maybe you’ve noticed it. She looks like that girl President Clinton had in the Oval Office.”
“Funny you should say that. My husband is having an affair with her.”
Nick, stunned not only by the remark but also by the casual way it was delivered, shook his head. After a moment, he said—stupidly, he thought, even as it was coming out of his mouth—“M
aybe he’ll take her to Boca.” He expected Camille to say something to the effect that she hoped he would.
She didn’t.
At a traffic signal, Camille sat quietly, intermittently nodding, holding her head still, then nodding again. At a four-way stop where there were no other cars behind, she waited and waited.
Nick thought of breaking the silence by asking, What about this Aaron guy? Is he still around? But he hesitated, fearing what he might get for an answer.
Then Camille, all the while watching in the mirrors, broke the silence. “Mom and Dad went to Colorado once more that spring, about a month after the Leap Day weekend you were talking about. I remember them quarreling about it. My father didn’t want to go, but he gave in, even though it was his weekend to cover at the hospital and he had to rearrange. Our South Bend grandmother stayed with Cindy and me.”
“You were in school.”
Camille nodded. “Daddy came back alone on Sunday night, saying he had a patient he could no longer neglect, but Mother didn’t return until the middle of the week. I was only ten, so I didn’t have the imagination to make anything of that, but a few years later, after my imagination had widened, I remembered that Austrian ski instructor. I had overheard him and Mother talking to each other in French and laughing together.”
“Rudolf Schneider,” Nick said, “the ski school director. Charming accent, shock of blond hair that caused women to fall all over him. But your mother? Never. I worked for Rudolf at Christmas, and later on, when I was down behind the bar, I would see him and one woman or another head up the stairs. He was from the Geneva area, and in spite of his German name, French was his native tongue. Maybe German and French were both native tongues.
Camille said, “Anyway, some five or ten years later, when I had become capable of putting it all together, I became sure she had stayed on because of him.”
“No, no, no,” Nick said. “You think that about your mother? How can you think such a thing?”