Margot's War

by Ty Knoy

  “About five minutes later, Margot sat again, and she played Prelude to Afternoon of a Faun.”

  “No chance to escape then?”

  “Right. Why couldn’t it have been a Beethoven or a Liszt? I had to hold very still, itching all the while. A few minutes after the piece ended, the manager—that’s what she’d called herself when she had come to my door two or three days before—came onto the deck, and the two of them let the lid down and pushed the piano in. I was surprised at how effortless it was for them. There was no bump, so it seemed Margot had had the threshold removed and a smooth runway built out onto the deck, precisely at the level of the floor inside the house.”

  “I see,” Camille said, nodding slowly.

  “Along with having done the French doors.”

  “She never left anything to chance,” Camille said. “Never.” She had tears in the corners of her eyes as she stood. “Excuse me for a moment, Mr. Rohloffsen. If you need a bathroom, there’s one on the way to the garage.” She went down the other hallway, stepping over clothes as she went.

  CHAPTER 18

  “SO, HOW DID you get yourself out of the bushes?” Camille asked when she came back, smiling again and with dry eyes.

  Nick told her only that it was easy; he just had waited until the piano was pushed back, the lights were turned off, and the doors were closed. The next day, as he arrived home from work, he had seen the piano tuner’s car again and again heard the man at work.

  That night at dusk, when the floodlights went on, Nick had walked around and up onto the road, folding chair in hand, and sat on the edge. The piano was already out on the deck, but on that night, the lid was removed, and the nose of the piano was pointed into the canyon. The frame and lower-register strings gleamed gold in the lights.

  A woman from work, whom Nick had told about the first night’s concert, showed up. He gave his chair to her and ran back down to bring up another. A few minutes later, the pianist’s manager came walking up the road with a folding stool. She said hello—apparently not recognizing Nick—and went on by.

  Just after she disappeared around the bend in the next switchback up, a couple on the way down appeared. They set up their chairs alongside those of Nick and his colleague. The man said their house was up a level and that they had sat out and listened the night before. They’d heard the Mozart well, but the Ravel had been faint. He added that having the lid off probably would be better. Then he and his wife and Nick had the conversation about how Nick was related to Victor, their famous neighbor up at the top.

  “Margot came out, once again just at eight o’clock, and after adjusting the stool’s position, she launched into Schubert’s Sonata in B Flat Major. Once again, the performance was superb, but a car came up the road right at the end of the second movement. Margot didn’t stop; she didn’t even look up. The driver, who was looking down as he went slowly by, parked his car up at the turn, turned off the engine, and walked back to where we were sitting. I had brought an extra chair and I offered it.

  “After a short intermission, it was Schumann’s Fantasia in C, Opus 17. No other car came through. At the end, the manager came walking through, on the down, while my companions and I were saying our good nights and wondering to each other how long it would go on.”

  “Why would you let yourself be taken in by this?” Camille asked.

  “Young and gullible? Eduardo had said that the owner of Margot’s house said she had a French accent.” He shrugged and continued with his story. “The third night, the Wednesday, I came home with a long telephone extension cord, took a phone out to the juniper, and twisted a coat hanger into a hook that would hold the earpiece to the knothole. The audience on the road had increased, and there was clapping. I couldn’t see, but I assumed Margot had come out and had taken a bow. I dialed Gayle’s number, but she didn’t pick up, so I left a message, took the phone back in, and went up on the hill again. That night it was Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 and then Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata.”

  “I know them. She worked hard on those.”

  “They’re tough.”

  Nick put down his empty coffee cup. “The next night, I took the phone out to the juniper again and dialed New York again. Gayle picked up—though it was already ten in New York—and I told her the luck I’d had with a great pianist moving in next door who was playing outside every night, and I reminded her again about Victor’s party, which was the next Sunday. She said crossly that she was singing in church on Sunday and added, ‘That’s an odd way to treat a piano. What if dew got on the strings?’ Then I told her I was putting the earpiece to the knothole, and I was going inside to pick up there so we could listen together.

  “By the time I got inside, she had hung up.”

  “Maybe she didn’t like Liszt,” Camille said.

  “Liszt was the night before. This night was Chopin. Do you remember where you were those nights, while these concerts were going on? Third week of June, summer after fourth grade for you, was it?”

  “I certainly do. Not because of anything that happened right then, but because of what followed. I was in Iowa with Grandma and Grandpa Stratton. I spent the whole summer there. Unexpectedly spent the whole summer there, I should say. Hold on a moment. I’ll show you a picture.” Camille stood. She went toward the hallway, stepping over the clothes again, but then stopped and looked back at Nick. “I just had an epiphany, a connect-the-dots sort of thing, that this picture may be familiar to you.”

  She disappeared into the hall.

  While he waited, Nick heard the ringtone of a cell phone somewhere in the house.

  A few minutes later, Camille returned with a sizable framed picture. “This is on the wall in Mother’s room.” She put it on the coffee table, and Nick moved to the sofa squarely in front it. The image was a color photograph of a Midwest farmstead, not a straight-down shot as would be used for maps, but a view taken from an airplane a few hundred feet up and out in front.

  Dominating the center of the farm scape were three cylindrical grain silos made of bright corrugated metal with auger pipes up and over conical roofs. The nose of a green tractor protruded from a large shed, also of bright metal, in front of the granaries. The background, all the way to the horizon, was green, green, green corn, Nick supposed. Above the green was blue sky. A distance off, nearly to the blue horizon, the spire and roof of a church peeked up out of the green.

  The farmhouse in the foreground was dwarfed by the granaries and a shed behind. It was a turn-of-the-century home, a story and a half with a roofline out over the porch and with a walkout balcony cut into the porch roof. Nick thought the house likely had been ordered from a Sears Roebuck catalog about the time when William McKinley or Theodore Roosevelt was president. That meant it had arrived in boxes and bundles of boards—complete to the last shingle and the last nail—at the nearest rail station and then was brought to the farm on drays.

  On the driveway next to the house was a pink and gray Cadillac four-door with high fins—a 1958 model—and on the other side of the house, attached by an enclosed breezeway, was what was obviously an addition—an architecturally disingenuous addition—with floor-to-ceiling windows and a high, flat roof.

  “This is my grandparents’ farm, where my mother grew up,” Camille said.

  “I see.”

  “And this,” Camille said, putting her finger on the addition, “was Mother’s music room.”

  “Umm. Built just for her, Steinway included?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her father loved her,” Nick said.

  “He certainly did. This”—Camille gestured to the photograph again—“is where I was when you and my mother were having your—whatever it was.” After a pause, she went on. “Just after school was out for the summer that year, Mother drove me out there, stayed two nights, then left early in the morning of the third day. Nothing was unusual about that. Cin
dy and I, from the time we were five or six, stayed a week or two with Grandma and Grandpa Stratton every summer—but never at the same time.”

  “Trouble when you were together, were you?”

  “Not at all. Grandma said she just wanted to enjoy us one at a time.”

  Nick nodded. “And when your mother left that morning, you and your grandparents assumed she was going back to South Bend?”

  “She didn’t say she wasn’t. But Daddy called that night, wondering where she was. He talked to Grandma, so I overheard only her side of the conversation. He thought that she was still with us, that she had decided to stay another night.”

  Nick nodded. None of this surprised him.

  “She had an old school friend who lived on the North Shore, and they thought she might have gone there, so Daddy and Grandma hung up. But a few minutes later, the phone rang again, and Daddy told Grandma that he had called and that she wasn’t in Chicago. Grandma and Grandpa were alarmed, of course. And I was frightened. I could only imagine robbers or kidnappers or something like that.”

  “Did he think she was leaving him?” Nick asked.

  Camille shifted, leaning away from the farm picture and into the corner cushion of the sofa. “I was too young to think that. When you were with her in Colorado, did you think that was what she was doing?”

  Nick shook his head. “A single lady from France is what I was thinking.”

  “But just a moment,” Camille said, sitting straight again and pointing a finger toward Nick. “There is something else.”

  Nick cocked his head.

  “I spent the rest of that summer at the farm,” Camille said, “getting back to South Bend in the fall, when school started. Cindy had spent the summer with our South Bend grandmother, and she also came home just in time for school. Mother wasn’t there, but we had a live-in housekeeper.

  “One day, Cindy offhandedly said something to the effect that the piano was back, so Mother surely would be coming soon.”

  Nick nodded.

  “What happened was,” Camille went on, “at the beginning of that summer, just as school let out, Mother took Cindy and me over to Grandma Kendall’s, where the two of us were to stay two nights, and then Mother was to pick me up and drive me to Iowa. She did pick me up two mornings later, and we set out. We stopped for lunch in a fast-food restaurant built over the freeway—a fast-food restaurant with cars zooming underneath.”

  “I know it,” Nick said.

  “It was a beautiful day. We drove the rest of the way with the top down.

  “But here’s what had happened back home when the summer was over. Four or five days after Mother and I left, Cindy and Grandma Kendall had gone back over to our house to pick up some more clothes or something, and she had seen that the piano was gone!”

  “An elephant not in the room,” Nick said.

  “I never saw the elephant not in the room, as you put it. When I got back, it was there, just like always, and it hadn’t occurred to Cindy that I hadn’t known it had been gone.”

  Nick laughed, quickly apologized for laughing, and said, “So she put you girls over with your South Bend grandmother for a night. The movers came the next morning, just after your father left for work, and took the piano. Then she picked you up and drove straight off to Iowa?”

  “You have it exactly right. I asked her a few years later, and that’s what she said she had done.”

  Nick shook his head, smiled, and said, “So she was leaving him. What a girl.” And he knew for sure for the first time that he could have had Margot.

  “This is going to make me sound like an idiot,” Camille said, “since I didn’t catch on for so long, but years later—in fact, I was living down here then—I woke up in the middle of the night, sat straight up in bed, and realized that when Daddy made those calls to Iowa, he hadn’t mentioned that the piano was gone, and that meant he hadn’t been calling from home. It also meant, he hadn’t been at home the whole time we were gone!”

  “And your mother knew he would be gone. Why didn’t she just file for divorce?” Nick asked, although he already knew: she wanted her career. “She wasn’t abandoning you. She would have been back for you. Is she here? Now?” Nick asked, thinking about the clink of tableware he had heard on the way in from the garage.

  Camille stood, went over to the window, and looked out at the yard. Even though her back was turned, Nick could tell she was crying. He went to the kitchen and got a tissue. Then he touched her on the back as he held it between her and the glass.

  “Sorry,” she said, turning her head. She took the tissue, dabbed her eyes, and looked out the window again. “I’m just thinking about all the might-have-beens. Not for me. I’m okay. I mean her might-have-beens. It’s all so sad.”

  “It was a super plan.” Nick said. “She had to have had it in the works for months. Just a super plan,” he stupidly said, thinking about how it had turned out so badly before he finally thought of something sensible to say. “When you were out there in my ski class, she was off arranging to rent the house, arranging for the lights, the deck, the new doors. She would have been back for you as soon as she had gotten herself established. She just didn’t want to end up giving piano lessons to fourth graders between alimony checks, but she would have been back for you.”

  “You know,” Camille said, still looking at the lawn and toward the Lincoln outside, “I hated her for leaving us like that, but I’m glad to know she didn’t just take it lying down. She didn’t just put up with it. I’m so glad, glad, glad she did whatever it was you are about to tell me, but I’ve just had another epiphany: Cindy and I liked skiing, but Mom and Dad didn’t seem to. Dad especially didn’t care for it. A lot of our friends and some of their parents were skiing up in Michigan on weekends. Our mom and dad took their turns at driving, and they sometimes rented skis for themselves, but most times they just sat by lodge fireplaces and read.

  “But then as Christmas approached that year, she suggested to him, in front of Cindy and me at dinner one night, that we all fly to Colorado and ski as a family in the Rockies over Christmas.”

  Nick smiled. “My presence next door was just a coincidence, of course. I don’t know how she found out who I was, but once she did, she played me like a violin.” He hoped as he said it that Camille would contradict him, tell him that Margot, as he knew her, genuinely loved him.

  He wasn’t disappointed. “I don’t think she played you at all,” Camille said, turning to him, her eyes by then again dry but still red. “I think she truly fell for you. I’ll tell you why, but I want to hear the rest about Colorado first.”

  “She’s not married to someone else now or ready to marry someone else, is she?”

  “No, there’s nothing like that.”

  “What about Aaron?”

  “No. I’m sure he asked, but she didn’t do it. He stayed around a few days. He talked Lillian into letting him put on a recital at University Heights. I went and sat with her. He was very good. He played a Brahms, but mostly he played pieces from the forties, things that had been popular during the war, when they knew each other. But nothing happened. Go on and tell me what happened in Colorado.” Camille looked at her watch. “But wait. It’s getting late. I must freshen up and change, and then we have to go back into town. Make yourself at home. There’s a bathroom down by the laundry. Can I get you anything?”

  She looked at her watch again. “No, wait a minute. Stay there.” She looked through the kitchen toward the hall to the garage. “Let’s do this now.” She put her hand on Nick’s arm and led him back to the sofa. “This will get your ego back to where it usually rests. I think you’ve seen this before.” She pointed at the farm photo on the coffee table as they sat down.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “I don’t mean that you’ve seen the picture before. I mean you’ve seen the farm—the farm itself—before.”
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br />   Nick said nothing.

  Camille waited, then went on. “Seven years after your Colorado, uh, soiree—after yours and mother’s Colorado soiree, I should say—Mother stopped driving for a while. Cindy had gone away to college, and I was a senior in high school.”

  “Cindy went to Northwestern, you said?”

  “Right. I had begun driving by then, so I became the driver for the house. At Christmastime that year, we went to Iowa. We always went to Iowa at Christmas, but Daddy wasn’t going that year. It was decided that I shouldn’t drive all that way because of the likelihood of bad weather, so Mother and I took the train to Chicago, met Cindy at Union Station, and took a train on to Iowa. Grandpa met us at the Ottumwa station in Iowa.

  “Over dinner on one of those nights in Iowa, there was a discussion—needling is a better word, actually—with my Mother’s brother, Clarence, about a man in a Lincoln with Michigan plates who had stopped and talked to Grandpa out on the road on a Saturday morning a few weeks earlier.”

  Nick shrugged.

  “The man who said he had just happened by said the addition to the house had caught his eye and that it looked like a music room for a prodigious pianist, and he wondered if such a pianist had grown up there. Grandpa said the man had said, ‘After all, Glenn Miller grew up in similar environs not so many miles away.’ Or rather, Uncle Clarence said that Grandpa had said that.

  “Grandpa had been quick to talk to the man, it seems. And though it was seven or eight in the morning, right in the middle of harvest season, Grandpa invited the man in to see the room and to tell him all the places his daughter had been and how extraordinary she was and how he had bought her a Steinway grand and so on.