by Peter Heller
If Baboo was sometimes distracted and seemed to move in a mist of sadness, she was also more tender with her daughters than she had ever been. She read to them from books more often when she put them to bed (one of the latest had been Kim from which Celine got the betel-nut thing); she often eschewed the formal dining room, with apologies to Gaga, and ate with the girls at the long table beneath the windows in the kitchen. She took them on walks to look for bird nests, and they all practiced together how to whistle like a bobwhite and a whip-poor-will, and hoot like a barn owl. Bobby could make the ugly alarmed croak of a heron, which got the biggest laughs.
Of course the girls could feel their mother’s grief but they had nothing to attach it to and so responded with a tenderness of their own. They reached for her hand when they were walking over the uneven stones at Chocomount, and they curled up in her lap to shelter from the wind and sun in the fragrant shade that smelled of coconut Coppertone and the particular salty sweetness of their mother’s freckled skin, and they breathed in her sadness with her love.
In mid-June Harry Watkins also fled Paris. Baboo knew how the girls pined for their father, and she loved them too much to ever let her own troubles get between him and his daughters; she told them that their father had left the house on rue de Lille and was coming across on a grand boat and was bringing their cat, Chat. They would see him in New York at the end of the summer. The girls were beside themselves. It would have been hard to say what caused more delight—the prospect of seeing Harry again or of squeezing Chat, who, remarkably, loved to be squeezed and seemed even to enjoy being picked up unskillfully by Mimi, under the forelegs, and run around the house, eyes huge and striped gray body dangling.
Bobby, who was hard to excite, and who had not been listening closely, asked excitedly, “Et quand va-t-il arriver ici? He promised he would jump with me off Grayson’s dock!”
And Baboo stiffened and said that Papa had urgent business in New York and would not be coming to the island but would wait for them there.
The three girls looked at one another. In many ways, despite the span of their ages, they were as close as triplets. They had sensitive social barometers—even Mimi at five—and they were sensing the import of this statement without having a clue as to its meaning, and the pressure in the room dropped as before a nor’easter.
Celine, who was even more attached to Harry than the others, said, “C’est entendu. Il peut venir pour le weekend! Il nous emmenera pêcher!”
Baboo squeezed her hand and said that they would see him in just two months in the city.
And that marked the end of the Period of Tenderness and the Weeks of Wild Roses.
Not from Baboo’s standpoint. She recognized the beginning of a transition that would be very painful for the girls and she was determined not to scar them, or, at the least, to minimize the damage. She was as attentive as ever. She insisted on forays up island to the village for ice-cream cones at Diana’s and comic books at the drugstore; she organized picnics with just the four of them to Simmons Point and to her friend Ty Whitney’s where there was a swimming pool with a diving board and slide, which were objects of endless fascination for the girls. But the sisters were keenly aware of a dark cloud of catastrophe hanging over their displaced family, and they had nothing tangible on which to pin their dread, and they began to act out.
The Lander Grill did serve ribs. So there. Celine was starving. She had a full rack and Pa had a chopped salad that, curiously, was blanketed in well-done burger. The only flora on Celine’s enamel plate was coleslaw out of a can, which is the way she preferred it, but Pete dutifully picked a leaf of iceberg lettuce out of his bowl and garnished her pork, laying it down delicately like a proffered rose. “Geen,” he said.
“I don’t like geen.”
“Well I know.” It was their ritual. She would eat the single leaf last because she loved him.
It was a Sunday night and the grill was hopping. Most of the tables were full, and the mounted speakers played a mix of Mavis Staples and the Dixie Chicks, which was lively if not a little disconcerting. The crowd was burly oil-and-gas men—she could tell because their caps said stuff like McIntyre Drilling or Hansen Well Services—a few young cowboys, anachronistic in their Wranglers and hats; a large contingent of very athletic and outdoorsy-looking young people, men and women; two Native American couples in Goth black; and a single pleasant-looking young man in the far corner, head down, concentrating hard on his double cheeseburger. Celine noticed that his Black Watch flannel shirt was very green in the greens and black in the blacks and creased down the breast—brand new. And that he sported a week’s worth of whiskers but was otherwise clean-cut. She noticed these sorts of things.
She also noticed that the folks laughing the hardest and seeming to have the best time were the drillers. Maybe because they were drinking at twice the rate of anyone else. She noticed, too, that the sporty outdoorsy folks in their very expensive and colorful soft shells and fleece mostly ordered pitchers of beer—the cheapest option—and drank them at a judicious pace. Revealing perhaps a subconscious tallying of ounces-slash-dollars per minute per level of intoxication divided by the steadily decreasing time left in the evening. A couple of the kids were clearly wild and showed some promise, but mostly these young people were very smart and very controlled. There was one woman who was older than the rest, and more beautiful, very lean, her hands dark and weathered, and Celine studied her, the facial structure, the movements. Early fifties would be the age, just right. She felt the old swelling in her heart, but she shook herself—not a chance; just a habit, an old habit, that’s all—and continued scanning the room.
The oil-and-gas men drank longnecks, some accompanied by amber shots—that would be Jack Daniel’s, wouldn’t it?—and they were supremely comfortable in their own skins. They drank what they wanted and didn’t care what it cost. The Native Americans were in one of the far corners, at the dimmest table, and seemed insular and wary. They leaned toward each other when they laughed, as if trying to cover their humor. The single man in the new shirt in the other far corner was hard to read. He was eating with a purpose but not quite relish, and he seemed at the same time to be listening, the way a hunter would listen in a windy forest.
All of this was good information, probably. For context in a new territory if nothing else. One never knew. When Celine was on a case she observed many things closely, it was reflex—gathering everything up in the baleen of her intelligence. It both kept her in practice and sometimes gleaned useful and even crucial information. As for her and Pete, nobody seemed to notice them much, though they were clearly “from away” as Pete would say, and this was also good. One of the things that happens to people as they get older, and especially to women on the other side of middle age, is that people forget to notice. If Celine wanted to be virtually invisible she could be. She was also gorgeous and striking and if she wanted to make an impression she could do that, too. Also useful.
They finished their meals and Celine ordered a scoop of ice cream smothered in chocolate sauce for a nightcap. The warmth of the pub, the rich meal, the hiatus from the long day on the road—they suffused Celine with what these days was a rare fatigue that felt a little like contentment. She came around the table and slid a chair next to her husband. She’d been very patient with him all day.
“Okay, Pete,” she said. “You’ve been ‘arranging’ all day, I can tell. Now tell me the rest.”
Pete let his brown eyes fall gently on his wife. The wonderful thing about having a close and long marriage is that certain responses are as dependable as sunrise. He pursed his lips, which only meant he was covering another inscrutable expression, like maybe the beginnings of a laugh. He’d known this reckoning was coming.
“Well,” he said.
“You need coffee.”
Pete nodded. She managed to grab a waiter who brought two cups, one black, one with milk.
Celine nodded. “I can hear you, Pete. Even in the din. Any time.”
Pete sipped and set the mug on the scarred wood table. “Gabriela’s exile.” He huffed out a breath. “Paul Lamont let his new wife banish his daughter. Just downstairs, but still.”
Pete glanced at her. She tipped her head forward: Go on. Sometimes Pete was a bit slow to rev up.
“The calculus may have been something like this: I need this woman. Without this woman I will drown. She is keeping food in the cupboard, in Gabriela’s kitchen, she makes sure she gets off to school and back, she knows that is the bottom line, the bare minimum. That is the bargain. Without her my daughter may not eat and I may succumb. To oblivion. It was oblivion he was battling. A mortal battle. For him and his beloved daughter. Beloved, yes. May not seem like it at first glance, but if you look closely. Gabriela was his cherished daughter and also the living repository of his wife’s heart. And her doppelgänger in some sense. She looked just like her, you should see the photographs.”
“Well, I would have, if—”
“I know, I know. I’m catching you up now. There’s nothing else.”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m getting to that. He must have known right from the beginning that his bargain with the devil was a mistake. But he had no Plan B. Whenever he could—when Danette was working an afternoon or night shift—he would go downstairs and try to help Gabriela with her homework. He tried. But he was often too drunk. And it wasn’t often enough. When I called her the other day—you were having a fit trying to compress two suitcases into one—she told me that when he came to visit she pushed aside her homework and tried to engage him in a game of canasta. A fairly advanced game for an eight-year-old, my cousins and I played it for hours on rainy summer nights, on Aunt Debbie’s porch on North Haven—”
“Why rainy nights?”
“Because on clear summer nights we were out frogging, or fishing with lights, or playing these big games of kick the can in the Beveridge cemetery.”
“Was Norman Rockwell on-site? Or were those reenactments?”
“You’re making me lose my train of thought.”
Celine considered her husband’s upbringing and felt again the pang that those with imperfect childhoods feel when confronted with one that seems idyllic. Or even normal. She marveled once more that his youth seemed to her so exotic, when she was the one raised in Paris who fled the Nazis on an ocean liner. Salvador Dalí was on her passage. She remembered him, he had a pair of ocelots on jewel-studded leashes, imagine.
“I’m sorry. You were talking about card games.”
“Gabriela ignored the homework and tried to get her father to play canasta because even three sheets to the wind he was a competitive sonofabitch and canasta can be a very long game. She wanted him to stay with her as long as possible.”
Celine lit up. “We used to play it on Fishers! Same strategy: The longer the game, the more time Mummy would spend with us, and the later we could stay up.”
Pete nodded. “She told me that she also visited her father upstairs. She would listen for the heavy clomp of Danette’s clogs on the steps going down—Gabriela said she was sexy but not at all graceful—and she’d go up. She said she took little Jackson with her once, but only once because Danette came home and found cat hairs on the couch and freaked out. Gabriela said she was afraid her stepmother would get rid of the cat while she was at school. Ended up that Jackson took care of that all by himself.”
“Whew.” Celine could hardly bear it, the story. The predicament. Her finely tuned sense of empathy vibrated and hummed. It was the harmonic that ruled her life. The small child was visited by her father like someone in a prison, or a hospital. Or worse, a mental ward. What is wrong with me? Gabriela must have asked herself again and again. She knew that Danette was jealous of her, her and her dead mother, Amana, but the kind of isolation she experienced gets internalized. Especially by children.
“Another thing,” Pete said. “When they visited and he was warmed up, which was pretty much all the time, he would tell her this fairy tale that he’d made up: He said that way far north, up on the Canadian border, there was an Ice Mountain, and a lake the color of his true love’s eyes, and there was a castle there for princesses and their families and he would take her there. He said the lake sounded like birds and the mountain was the king of mountains.”
“I want to hate him,” she said, “but somehow I can’t.”
“That’s just it. And what I’m getting to. He must have known right away. He was not insensible, as I said. He was too sensitive. What I’m learning about the man. He was too heartbroken. He could not face life on life’s terms after his wife’s death. He tried every way: alcohol, immersion in work, travel, a plunge into an obsessive sexual affair that he allowed, unfortunately, to become a marriage. I imagine that Danette got him warmed up one afternoon and screwed his lights out and dragged him down to city hall. So there he was. Trapped first by overwhelming grief and then by marriage. And he was—really trapped.”
“How do you mean? Was there a prenup?”
Pa let out one of his soft hums, part amusement, part pathos. He loved that his wife could often be a step ahead of even him.
“Yes there was. She wrote it, not him. Gabriela sued to see it after he disappeared. Lamont had not inconsiderable income from the royalties of a handful of his iconic pictures, which are everywhere. But, as you seem to anticipate, the prenup undid and reversed the usual protections. I mean that we think of a prenup as usually entered into in order to protect the rights of the party with a disproportionate share of assets. Well. It also protects the other, the one who has much less, in that it often stipulates a schedule of payments in the case of a divorce—so much after so many years of marriage, so much more after more time. But get this. This prenup said…let me see if I can remember the wording…‘In light of the fact that the grantee’—that’s Danette—‘has eschewed numerous lucrative marital options in favor of marriage to the grantor’—that’s Paul Lamont—‘this agreement, legally binding under the laws and statues of the State of California, lays out the following terms…’ ”
Celine was wide awake. Unconsciously she was stirring her coffee, which didn’t need stirring.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” she cried.
“No. Not kidding.”
“In plain English,” Celine averred, “it was saying that because she screwed so many surgeons in the broom closet and had them dead to rights in one way or another, and could have had her choice of a gaggle of rich doctor husbands—if Lamont ever divorced her she would pick his bones. Clean him out! Unbelievable.”
“Yep.”
“That’s legal? I mean some lawyer actually typed out those words. My God.”
Sometimes in the middle of the night when Pa couldn’t sleep, which wasn’t often, he liked to think about all the jobs there were in the world. He liked to take a tour of the workbenches in China or India where nimble-fingered women who would never see a free-running brook, much less a trout stream, tied fishing flies. He imagined someone cementing the gargoyles to the ledges of reconstructed churches. Someone adjusting the compasses that now come with cars. He could imagine many both wonderful and cruel jobs but he could barely imagine the conversation in some cluttered legal office—probably just like those in the warrens of the hack lawyers up on Court Street—that led to the crafting of those lines. Man.
“The terms set forth, needless to say, were draconian. Gabriela said she probably got him drunk and worked him up right to the threshold, so to speak, of sex, and then made him sign it. Most of his net worth was tied up in the upstairs apartment, the one the two lived in. If he were ever to initiate divorce she would get the place, plus half the value of the cash and stocks he had on the date of union. Lamont had bought the apartment outright after selling a coffee-table book on the wild horses of Monument Valley. You’ve seen the pictures, some of the most iconic wildlife pictures ever taken. And there is the famous one you see everywhere of the fishing boat cresting the giant wave. Gabriela is still partly
living on the royalties and subsidiary rights. As I said, they are not inconsiderable.”
“Danette would have gotten those, too.”
“That’s right. But not if he died.”
They sat in silence. The Dixie Chicks were wailing out “Travelin’ Soldier.” “I need fresh air, Pete,” Celine said. “There was a bench by the door. It’s not so cold.”
They paid the check and buttoned up their coats. It was cold. They shoved open the heavy door and went back out into the chill night. Because it was night now and moonless and ranks of heavy clouds had marched over the country in just the last hour, and the stillness smelled heavy with rain. Not a single star. Still, the fresh air was clean and good.
Pete held her hand and they sat. “You were saying about what happened if Lamont died,” she said.
Pa nodded. “Danette thought she had that covered too. Gabriela said she was practically licking her lips at the unsealing of the will in the lawyer’s office on Howard Street.”
“Ha.”
“Yep. She gave Gabriela a look like, ‘You poor thing. I’ve seen the will. You’ve always lost out in the battle for his affections, and you are going to lose out now big-time.’ Gabriela told me she would not have been surprised if Danette had whispered, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll send you a card from Acapulco, sucker.’ ”
“And?”
“And her expression changed gradually as the lawyer unsealed and read the document and she digested the words sole heir and then Gabriela Ashton Lamont. Danette stormed out. Later she locked herself in the apartment and Gabriela heard dishes breaking. It took about a month for the co-op board to transfer ownership to Gabriela, at which point Gabriela evicted her on the spot. She was only twenty, but she knew what needed to be done. The co-op board, none of whom had much stomach for Danette Lamont, had to call in the city marshal to drag her out.” Pete lifted up his tweed cap and rubbed his forehead. The image was sad and amusing at once. It always amazed him that greedy people could throw themselves so headlong into acting against their own long-term self-interest.