Margot's War

by Ty Knoy

  “Now I’m getting the idea that it wasn’t him at all, but it was you.”

  “Not me. Not anyone,” Nick said, raising his hand with three fingers up. “Scout’s honor. I learned later what she was doing. She would never have jumped into bed with some transient ski bum. You shouldn’t harbor that notion.”

  “Then why did she stay behind?”

  “Making plans. The same reason she went out there the first two times. Just hang on. You’ll see. I’m surprised your husband isn’t putting up a fight for you.”

  “Me too, but—”

  “I know. You don’t want to go to Boca. I don’t know anything about this trip you’re talking about now. I wasn’t behind the bar anymore by then. In the middle of March, I was moved up out of the lounge and into accounting, which was on the mezzanine. That was partly thanks to nepotism, as you call it, but also because I’d had some accounting classes and was a reliable guy. I didn’t see much of the goings-on down at the bar anymore. I’m sure I didn’t see your mother, or your father either, but I did remember the name and did notice their account, but I never saw either of them.”

  “And did you notice that she had stayed on?”

  “I did not. Nothing on the account would have shown that the occupancy of the room had gone from two to one. And I’m sure your mother wasn’t—isn’t—promiscuous. Get that idea out of your head! Talented, purposeful, but not promiscuous. You never asked her about that trip—when you got older, I mean?”

  “Certainly not. She never pried into my adventures, and I never pried into hers. I knew they were there, but I never pried.”

  “She wasn’t adventurous in that sense,” Nick said.

  A car came up behind, and Camille took the car across, then stopped again. “God damn her, God damn her,” she shouted, pounding her fists on the wheel, accidentally hitting the horn button on the final pound. “And goddamn you. You men are such fools! You don’t know bimbos and whores from good women! She abandoned us! She was just trying to abandon us.”

  “Christ,” Nick said quietly, looking up and down the sidewalks to see if anyone was in earshot. A woman was working in her yard half a block ahead, but her head hadn’t turned. Maybe it had turned but quickly turned back, Nick thought as he tried to shush Camille.

  “I don’t give a damn who hears me!” she yelled.

  “I’m sure,” Nick said, not as quietly as before. He was calm, but he felt a fury rising inside himself as he remembered the last time he had seen Katherine Anne, at Victor’s party, and what she had done there. He found himself thinking harder and harder of grabbing Camille and strangling her, but then she no longer looked like her mother, and the moment passed. His heart pounded, but his breathing slowed. He heard his own voice again, speaking quietly in muted, measured fury. “She was not a whore. You don’t understand. Don’t you dare think that. How dare you! Should I drive? Where is she? Get out of that seat. I’ll drive.”

  With his left hand, he slammed the shift lever to park. He also reached to the keys and turned off the engine. He pulled the key half out, but then put it back in, then deftly unbuckled his seatbelt, opened his door, and got out. If she wants to drive away, here is her chance, he thought.

  Camille, who had turned white, got out, and they met by the left rear wheel. She was sobbing as Nick extended his arms, and she came into them. “She abandoned us. She was going to leave us. Cindy and I both knew it. She was leaving us. Just tell me why. Just tell me! If the ski teacher wasn’t the reason, if you weren’t the reason, then for God’s sake, just tell me why! I didn’t know her. I’ve never known her.”

  Nick looked over his shoulder. The woman in her yard was erect, frozen, watching them. Her husband is probably inside watching football, Nick thought. With his arm around Camille’s waist, he guided her around the back of the car, placed her in the seat where he had just been, and buckled her in as she quietly sobbed.

  Nick wondered as he came back around if they were close to Camille’s house and if the woman in the yard was someone who knew her, or knew who she was. He had never had a moment like the one that had just passed from him. The fury was outside him now, and he examined it empirically, wondered about it, and then put it away—back into its compartment, he hoped—from which it had come. He thought of walking back to his car, which he judged to be only three or four miles away. Maybe he would see a cab. Maybe he could hitch a ride. He checked to make sure his own keys were still in his pocket. They were.

  But then he thought again: All of this is manageable. He was going to see it through. He got in the car.

  Camille got a handkerchief from her bag, and her sobs quieted to sniffles. Color came back to her face. He restarted the engine. After a moment or so, she said quietly without looking up, “Straight ahead.”

  Nick took slow, deep breaths. He knew Camille had no idea how close she had come to being murdered, and he was shaking because of how close he had come to murdering her. All because of a goofy misunderstanding, but then most murders—nongangster murders, at least—are goofy, he thought.

  He himself had come close to death, he was sure. Had he strangled Camille, he also would have killed himself, though he wasn’t sure how. He had no pistol. And what would Katherine Anne have thought? Her daughter, her long-ago lover, the love of her life, both suddenly dead, side-by-side in a murder-suicide. It would have been unspeakably horrible for her. He was so, so glad that no such thing had happened to Katherine Anne.

  He shifted the transmission into drive.

  “Our house is on the second street to the right,” Camille said, still without having looked up. “But let’s drive around a little bit before we go in. I need to gather myself.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “You’d never hurt me. Break my mother’s heart? Keep going straight.”

  She was right. He hadn’t hurt her, and he never would have, he assured himself, hoping it was true. He had never before felt that monster inside himself. He was so glad it hadn’t taken control of him. For the first time in his life, he understood what the expression “losing it” meant.

  They drove farther outside the city for four or five miles as Camille directed Nick to the edge of what looked like a tranquil lake. In fact, it was an abandoned limestone quarry filled with water, with steep white walls all around and islands here and there that had been left standing. Red and gold maples were all around the sides and also on the islands. The walls and the islands and the trees reflected in the water.

  Nick shut off the engine, and all was quiet. He broke the silence without taking his eyes off the quarry. “A placid, isolated place. Thank you for bringing me here. I needed this.”

  “So did I,” Camille said. She breathed deeply, her head back against the rest. After a minute or so silence, she said, “Back in the old days, when the university kept the boys and girls out each other’s rooms as best it could, couples would come out here in the evenings, on weekends, and swim to an island. If they were hungry, they would float a picnic basket and an Indian blanket on an inflatable cushion. More often than not, it was just the blanket.”

  “Hungry for something else. What did they do all winter?”

  “Made other arrangements.”

  “No one here today,” Nick said.

  “The day isn’t over.”

  “Maybe they all went to the football game.”

  Camille smiled for the first time since they were at the pharmacy, talking to the motorcycle cop. “Football isn’t that great,” she said. After another long pause, she asked, “Where would I be today if you had married my mother?”

  Nick shrugged. “Christmases in Colorado. Europe now and then. So, is there another guy, someone other than Aaron, in your mother’s life?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “It was nice that Aaron came last spring. Mother was sort of bubbly for a day or two. I felt like I got to see her the way she
was when she was young. I had never seen her that way before. Let me tell you about it later. Right now, I want to hear more about Colorado. “She took a comb out of her purse, pulled down the visor, looked at herself in the mirror, and began fussing with the hair around her temples. “I’m okay now,” she said. She took up her glasses and put them back on. “Are you okay?”

  “Not Victor?” Nick asked.

  Camille looked at him. “As far as I know, he hasn’t been here since Mother has been here.”

  “Not in South Bend either? Since your father died, I mean?”

  “If so, she never told me. It can’t matter now anyway, can it?”

  “No. You’re right. They knew each other in school here. And probably in France.” Nick pulled down his visor and looked at himself in the mirror, nodding. “So, who is this other guy you’re referring to?”

  Camille drew a breath, leaned back, and looked up to the sky. “Also last spring a man named Miller called from Iowa, asking about Mother. He said he and she were in high school together and that he had just talked to my uncle, Clarence, and would like to come here for a visit. I got the call because Clarence didn’t yet know that Mother had left our house. He sounded legitimate, so I gave him Mother’s number.

  “I keep a room at our house for Mother, and among the things she hadn’t taken with her was her high school yearbook. There were two Millers in the Class of 1942, John and David, perhaps cousins or brothers. I called Clarence, who said it was John Miller, owner of the big grain mill and storage towers along the railroad, who had called.

  Nick knit his fingers and put his hands atop of his head as he leaned away from Camille with his back against the door. “Another man recently widowed?” he asked, believing, hoping, that Margot hadn’t succumbed to an offer to go home again, to live in a mansion in the Iowa cornfields. He mentally laughed at the thought, but not very hard.

  “It sure sounded that way,” Camille said. “Two nights later, Mother called and said that two old Iowa friends were coming for breakfast the next morning and asked if I would join them. Mother had their breakfasts brought up to her apartment. When I came, Mr. Miller—and his wife—were already there. The wife also had been a schoolmate, though a year behind, in the class of nineteen forty-three. Mother introduced her as an old friend. She was a thin, pale woman, and she was wiping tears from her eyes as she stood to shake my hand. I wasn’t let in on what they had been talking about.”

  Camille said the couple was well dressed in a country sort of way that made her think of Jimmy and Roselyn Carter in their peanut farm styles.

  Nick straightened up in his seat and put his hand to his mouth.

  Camille went on. “During the small-talk about old times, Mrs. Miller had little to say, but Mr. Miller kept trying to coax remembrances, turning his head from my mother to his wife and back. The wife seemed mousy. Maybe she didn’t mind her husband paying such attention to Mother, or maybe she resented it. Anyway, she was firmly silent. She seemed frail, and I got the feeling she might be dying. It all seemed awkward. I was uneasy, and I began wondering if Mother remembered things perfectly well but was holding back because of the wife’s presence.”

  “Odd,” Nick said, “that Mrs. Grain Miller put up with it.”

  “Actually,” Camille said, “their last name is Miller. His first name is John and hers is Adele.”

  “How convenient—that the man who owns the mill is named Miller, I mean.”

  “I had a notion,” Camille said, “to ask the wife if she would go downstairs with me for coffee—my idea to create some privacy for Mr. Miller and Mother, but then I said to myself that I wasn’t going to involve myself in whatever was going on. So I excused myself and left. But then I changed my mind and went back. I wanted to talk to her. I asked her to come down to the dining room with me for coffee. She stood right up and followed me right out.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Nick said. “Mr. Miller was married to this woman, but in love with another one who had remained out there in the mist all those years. It had been a practical love and an ideal love inside his head all those years?”

  Camille laughed out loud. “Does it sound like anyone you know?” she asked.

  Nick squirmed then laughed also.

  “I had totally misconstrued the situation,” Camille said. “As I soon found out, Mrs. Miller, despite her frailty, was very sure of herself. On the elevator on the way down, she said she had met me before, when I was eleven or twelve, with my grandmother at the county fair, while we were looking at the pigs and cows. I did remember her then. She hadn’t been so thin at that time.”

  Camille told about having coffee, sitting at a table, and having a bit of small talk, mostly about her uncle Clarence and aunt Ellen, but also about Camille’s sister. “Mrs. Miller and my mother had once been very close friends, not only in high school, but sorority sisters in Iowa City. I thought perhaps they’d had a long-ago rivalry over John Miller and that it wasn’t yet resolved.”

  “I see,” Nick said.

  “No, you don’t. That wasn’t it. Like I said, I had totally misconstrued.”

  “Okay. So, I don’t see,” Nick said.

  A car drove up and parked on Nick’s side of the convertible. A young man and woman, college age, got out, took a blanket out of the back seat, and after smiling and saying hello, went to the water.

  “I never knew much of anything about Mother’s high school days until the Millers came. She hadn’t achieved what she had envisioned herself as achieving, and so she never went back to school reunions, never called on any school friends, and never talked about any of it. About all I know is what Mrs. Miller told me.” Camille looked at her watch. “I need to get home. Can you start driving, please?” She looked at her watch again.

  “Sure,” Nick said. He started the engine.

  “We’ll go to the house. Now go on about Mother and this Colorado thing.”

  CHAPTER 15

  AS NICK BACKED the car away from the quarry edge, he asked. “So, what was the real deal with the Millers?”

  “I have some pictures that go with it. I’ll tell you when we get home. Now tell me what she was up to in Colorado.”

  “Okay,” Nick said. “Here’s how it all came about.” He started driving back along the hilly road with woods on both sides. “At the end of the 1964 ski season, my relatives, Eduardo and Maureen, asked me to stay on, to continue working in accounting, and to house-sit for them while they went to Italy for the summer. All I had to do was water the plants, feed the cat, and change the litter box.

  “My father was expecting me to come back to Michigan and work in the plants until the wedding and then go back to school in the fall, but he was okay with me staying in Colorado for the summer. In May, I moved from under the lodge to the house—a little more than a mile out of town—just as my benefactors were leaving. A Bentley and a Jeep with a snowblade were in the garage, and Eduardo asked me not to drive the Bentley unless there was a dire emergency, but welcomed me to drive the Jeep. He said I could take it to the garage downtown to have the snowblade taken off and stored for the summer.

  “Eduardo also went over the pool controls with me and remarked that the house next door was rented out to music camp people in summers and that the summer before a couple of brass players—young men on camp faculty—had rented it and often played out on the deck at night. They liked to listen to their echoes, play a bit, listen a bit, down some more gin, and then do it all again. Eduardo said he had spoken to the landlord about the noise, and the landlord hadn’t rented to the brass players again, but had rented to a pianist instead for the summer. He said faculty didn’t start coming until June, so the house next door would be empty for a month.”

  “A pianist?” Camille said as they were almost in to town. “Turn left at the next light. My mother?”

  “Eduardo said the landlord told him the pianist had a French a
ccent.”

  “And you fell in love with this pianist just before you were to get married to Gayle? And you think she was my mother?”

  “That’s about it. Maybe it wasn’t your mother,” Nick said, though he had become certain it was. He made the turn and drove along a wooded street where the houses, all one story, had big lawns. “The day after I moved in, I drove the Jeep to work and left it to have the blade removed. A day or so after, Rudolf, the guy you overheard talking French to your mother, got a call for a job in Chile. He needed money for airfare and wanted to sell his motorcycle. The bike was an elderly Harley-Davidson that had spent the winter under a tarp and a snowdrift, but it started after only a few kicks. I talked him down a bit, but then I had to loan him what I had talked him out of so he could get his ticket. Away went some more money out of the wedding fund, but then Gayle had blown some of her money on her Leap Year trip. And I was sure I could sell the bike in July or August and at least break even, even if Rudolf didn’t pay back the loan.”

  “Did he pay it?”

  “Yes, he did. And he added an extra ten dollars as a prospective wedding gift.”

  “A philanderer with a good credit rating.”

  Nick laughed. “So, if Gayle was throwing me over—”

  “Fat chance.”

  He continued, “I’d have had to send him back the ten dollars.”

  “Then you saved ten dollars by not marrying my mother.”

  “No. If I had married your mother, I would have kept the ten dollars. It was still a wedding gift. It just would have been a different bride.”

  They came onto a street that wound through hills and high trees.

  “On the day Eduardo and Maureen left,” Nick said, “Maureen gave me an envelope from Victor, an invitation to his annual welcome party for camp faculty, up at his house on a Sunday in mid-June. It was for Gayle and me. Maureen had arranged it. I called Gayle that night and told her.”

  “The house on the left,” Camille said, pointing. The house was a limestone ranch with a picture window on a large lot with tall trees. Nick slowed the car as Camille pushed a button on the windshield frame. A Lincoln, very much like Nick’s own car, was parked on the street in front. Nick turned in as a garage door was rolling up. Both bays were empty. “I park on the left,” Camille said, and as the car was stopping, she began opening her door. “The house is a mess. I need to go in first and pick up a few things. I’ll come back for you in a few minutes.” She went into the house without looking back.