The Grandmother Plot

by Caroline B. Cooney

She needed to eat something or she’d get a headache, but the thought of food set off waves of stomach upset. She understood the bleak reality of the half-life Maude and Kenneth had led. She so admired the buoyant Freddy, who faltered after every visit but bounced back, affectionate and caring toward the grandmother who now only sometimes knew him.

  Would Freddy’s mother be surprised that Freddy had not only done the right thing by his grandmother but was trudging on, doing the right thing into the indefinite—and certainly awful—future? Alice Bell had chosen Freddy, not one of her daughters. How painful it must have been to survey four children, deciding which one should be entrusted with the dwindling life of a very old woman.

  But maybe the decision had been based entirely on geography, and the three daughters were as wonderful as Freddy but out of the picture only because of distance. Poor Freddy. If he had just known enough to relocate to Australia too, he would have been spared and it would all have been on Kara.

  Her heart failed her, thinking of all these trustworthy people when she was not one.

  She swallowed half a bowl of cereal and went to chorus rehearsal.

  The concert choir practiced in the Congregational Church of Westbrook. Rebuilt after a Christmas Eve fire in 1892, the church had been a charming brown shingle, like the beach cottages of its day. In the 1970s, the brown shingles were pasted over with white vinyl siding. Blessedly, no remodeling committee had attacked the sanctuary, with its high, round ceiling painted a startling indigo blue. Acoustics were outstanding.

  The chorus was to perform Haydn’s Mass in the Time of War with a guest conductor, who turned out to be a wordy doctoral candidate more interested in displaying his scholarly triumphs than rehearsing the subtle dynamics of the Paukenmesse. Like all Yalies, Gordon Clary availed himself of every opportunity to wedge the name of his school into any conversation. Laura was approaching comatose when the man added dramatically, “Let us never forget that Charles Ives—about whom I have written two papers for Yale, of course—summered here in Westbrook as a boy. It’s entirely possible that this great American composer played the organ in this very sanctuary.”

  Charles Ives had summered here?

  In all her decades in Westbrook, Laura had never heard a mention of Charles Ives. He’d been a Danbury man. Was he also a Westbrook man?

  Gordon Clary raised his baton and set a very fast tempo for the Haydn.

  What are Charles Ives’s dates anyway? she wondered, singing from memory because it was at least her fourth performance of the Paukenmesse. I think our doctoral candidate is wrong. I think by the time this building goes up, Charles Ives is at Yale, not hacking around on our organ.

  Laura was given to pointless research and this was a fruitful topic: Charles Ives in Westbrook. Impossible to imagine.

  But everything about Charlie Ives was impossible to imagine. A composer so chaotic, so wonderfully out of step, not hearing the same tiresome different drummer but church bells, marching bands, yelling children, patriotic songs, anvils, and sweet old hymns, all at the same time, assaulting one another. A composer Laura loved in the abstract, but if she had to sit down and actually listen, she’d rather stick a fork in her eye.

  Laura hid her smartphone behind her music folder, went to the online Westbrook library catalog, and here they had a biography of Charles sitting on the shelf. She took the precaution of reserving it, just in case somebody else in the chorus had been paying attention and planned to check it out.

  Gordon Clary whipped through the Mass.

  Et resurrexit, she sang, and her eyes blurred. She prayed that Maude had been resurrected, that earthly things were gone for her, and that the method of her death no longer had meaning.

  And the method of my life, thought Laura. How do I put meaning back into it?

  FRIDAY

  Chapter Twelve

  Freddy opened his eyes to find that sleep had worked its glass miracle, filling his mind with color, pattern, and technique. He ran downstairs.

  He loved his shop. He loved the posters of spray art taped to the walls. Freddy was not into art crime himself, but he knew a lot of people who were masters of it. He loved the splintery length of four-by-four into which he had drilled a bunch of holes, like a huge pencil holder, in which leftover glass rods in many colors tilted. He loved the crack-off bucket, an orange plastic mixing bowl with some water in it. Catastrophic temperature change caused glass to break off. Unwanted glass usually just fell into the bucket but could turn into projectiles and get you in the eye. Therefore Freddy really loved his big, dark safety glasses.

  The kiln was clicking on and off, keeping the temperature at a hundred fifty degrees.

  He opened the door and there were his beads waiting for him, warm like fresh baked bread. They cooled quickly in his hands. Last week, he’d overdone some color and the beads had been gaudy instead of glamorous, but this was good stuff.

  It was so trippy to be at the level where he totally recognized good from crappy.

  Sadly, the nicest bead was cracked. It was important to figure out why it had failed. Could be thermal, going from hot to cold too fast. Freddy added the cracked bead to the Box of Pain, a shallow wooden crate he had discovered in his grandmother’s marvelous garage and bolted to the wall next to his bench. Grandma and Grandpa had never discarded anything. Whenever life was too difficult to consider, Freddy would take another dive into the garage.

  Then, surveying his little basement kingdom, Freddy prepared to light up. It was not a ceremony, exactly. More a procedure. He smoked pot out of a scrap of glass tubing because he sold anything good. Sometimes he rolled herb, but he wasn’t very adept and half of it ended up on the floor, and Freddy couldn’t afford to waste it.

  The morning was brisk but sunny. Freddy slouched outside on Grandma’s redwood chair with its thick, weather-stained pad, nothing but a recipient for inhaling. He floated, watching an indigo dawn become gaudy fire. Then he had his first cigarette of the day and went upstairs to make coffee.

  Coffee was his culinary skill. He loved Grandma’s funny old percolator. He loved using her tiny silver tongs to lift sugar cubes and drop them into her old Biltmore Hotel souvenir mug. He loved cream, so thick and perfect, the coffee sliding down like hot snow.

  Other than that, Freddy used takeout, unless the minister’s wife, Lily Burnworth, brought him a casserole. Her standards were scalloped potatoes with ham and baked spaghetti. How come she brought it so often? Was it funeral overflow? She’d forgotten how to measure and always had extra? Or had she adopted Freddy? Women often did. He was a little worried that Mapes might.

  He drank his first cup standing at the counter, planning the day’s work, and then carried his second cup downstairs.

  He had to make enough beads to have a decent booth at the next bead show and enough pipes to earn a living. He had told the Leper he wasn’t doing shows anymore. But in fact, beads hypnotized Freddy. What was more beautiful than a glass sphere?

  His sisters liked to say, “Freddy, you can’t spend your life making little round things with a hole in them.”

  Yes, he could. Beads were the most basic adornment of the human body. From the beginning of time, hunter-gatherers had poked holes in shells and bones, strung them together, traded and cherished them.

  Freddy tried to think clearly about the presence of Doc and the skinny guy, but it took him weeks or years to see anything clearly. He did know that if he let the Leper run his life, it would last till Freddy was Grandma’s age and he and Gary were both in an asylum for old stoners.

  At twenty-six, Gary Leperov had already achieved a serious slot in the drug industry, which meant he had epic guts. Doc was no idiot either. He had made it into medical school.

  Could it really be that Doc—who had once wanted to heal people—had sneaked into an institution that held the saddest and the weakest and purposely suffocated one of them?

  Th
e pipe world referred constantly to peace, love, kindness—all the nouns that went with Christmas cards, although potheads had no sense of grammar and included adjectives, so their list would be peace, love, kindness, pretty… But anyway, let somebody fail to pay for his weed or his pipe, and it was “I’m going to kill him.”

  Freddy didn’t see Doc as a big supporter of peace, love, kindness, or pretty. But he totally didn’t see Doc as a smotherer of old ladies asleep in their beds. He decided not to worry about that. The real worry was—could he tolerate another retail bead show?

  Nothing compared to the smile of a bead lady who had just purchased a handful of glass jewels and would love him forever. It was the best thing about shows: the dreams in the air. Then of course there was: “Why is this so expensive? What do you mean, you don’t take credit cards? You don’t trust me?”

  Of course he didn’t trust a customer. What Freddy trusted was cash. “There’s an ATM in the hall,” he’d say, smiling right back.

  Cash. The reason the Leper had befriended Freddy. How crazy that he’d gotten into hot water in the bead world, which was all middle class and quiet, and not in the pipe world, which ran around with crime all the time.

  He’d made a pipe the other day, clean and classic, in Monet colors. He remembered now that he’d put it up for auction on Instagram. Before he actually checked, he daydreamed about possible bids. Some rich dude who spent thousands on his pipes would see it. The bids would escalate, along with Freddy’s fame.

  I want a Freddy, somebody would post.

  Did you see that Freddy? would be the next post.

  What? You don’t own a Freddy yet?

  And finally, he would be a verb. Do you freddy, bro?

  His cell phone rang: Jason, the supplier whose booth was next to his at the Milwaukee convention each year. Jason sold kilns and torches, huge tweezers and paddles, safety glasses and gas equipment. He had two physical shops, a large online presence, and was himself a very large guy. Jason always shared the Tupperware container of cookies his wife packed for his shows.

  “Hey, Jase. Whaddup?”

  “I got a phone call from the Leper asking about you. He wants to know exactly where you live.”

  Freddy sat.

  “Luckily I don’t know where you live,” said Jason, “so I couldn’t answer. Freddy, are you involved with him? Because Gary Leperov is not some friendly hippie.”

  Freddy totally trusted Jason, who kept the cashbox for him when Freddy trotted off to take a leak. But even Jason could not be told about the faked sales receipts. “Kind of,” said Freddy.

  “There’s no such thing as ‘kind of’ with Gary Leperov. Once you’re in, you’re in. And there’s no out.”

  Freddy resisted this. There was always an out.

  “Gary Leperov is not into art, Freddy. He’s into money.”

  “The Lep is an artist, Jason. Those toe pipes? The pendants where it’s a finger or an ear that’s got leprosy and it’s necrotizing in glass? He sells a lot of those.”

  “He hires those out. He’s too busy to make glass. Freddy, listen up. Every year in the United States, about a thousand dead bodies are found and never identified.”

  Freddy was skeptical. “Divide a thousand by fifty states, and you have twenty per state, Jason. You really think each state has twenty unidentified bodies every year?”

  Connecticut had a number of tough towns: Bridgeport, Waterbury, Hartford, New Haven, Norwich. Could each one have unidentified corpses? Frozen homeless guys? Faceless murdered guys? Unknown ODs?

  Since Jason lived in Brooklyn, he generally referenced New York City. “You know how floaters show up in the rivers around Manhattan? They usually find a dozen bodies in the river each year. And they claim it’s suicides jumping off bridges. Well, at least a few of them, they’re not suicides. The Leper’s guys throw them off.”

  “The Lep is out of Vegas,” protested Freddy. Plus, how many guys could you toss off a bridge when you weren’t even thirty yet?

  “He has a studio in a Vegas warehouse, where his employees make the toe pipes, but a guy like that, who knows where he’s actually based? He’s an octopus. Anyway, he’s Russian. Second generation in drugs. He wouldn’t be connected to Mexican cartels that control Nevada. Russian kingpins are in Brighton Beach and Bergen County.”

  So Gary wasn’t a newbie. He had a father to advise him. And he wasn’t a Vegas guy looking for a cheap flight for Doc. He was sending his mutts straight up I-95.

  “Gary Leperov wants to know where you live?” said Jason. “This is not a good thing, Freddy. Watch yourself.”

  He thought of Maude, who could not watch herself. Grandma, who couldn’t either. Polly and Philip and Irene and all the others—completely relying on the kindness of strangers. And now there was a stranger, or else Kenneth, who would strangle them.

  It was impossible to believe.

  Freddy walked into the Way Back: the deep yard he had loved so much as a kid. A belt of grass, an almost impenetrable stretch of forsythia, because each long thin wand arced over and rerooted, the tiny brook, the swamp of skunk cabbage, and finally the strip of sassafras, witch hazel, tulip tree, maple and oak that ran all the way to the railroad tracks. He and his sisters had gotten off the school bus every day at this house, ate afternoon snacks Grandma baked, played in this yard because Grandma and Grandpa believed in fresh air after school, not television, and at five thirty flew across the front yard to leap into their mother’s car when she got back from work.

  His mother had died in a vehicle. Her tour bus had flipped over, killing two people. Freddy could picture Alice Bell catching the falling bus in her arms and throwing it back up on the road, but he could not picture her trapped, crushed by the impact.

  In the photograph his sisters obtained, the bus hadn’t fallen into a deep ravine or off a mountainside. It had just fallen. Alice Bell, of all people, died in an accident where practically everybody else just got out, dusted themselves off, and went on.

  Oh, Mom, he thought suddenly, and grief shot through him.

  He had to pull himself together. He decided to check his Instagram pipe auction. Usually bids were hot for an hour or two and then tapered off and vanished.

  250. Sweet color.

  300. Killer work.

  Good one, man. Wish I had money.

  350. Mine.

  Three hundred fifty dollars was way exciting. Freddy had never sold a pipe for that much money. He was laughing with delight when in came another bid.

  No, posted the Leper. Mine. 1000. Doc will pick it up at your place, Freddy.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Laura walked to the library.

  The Ives biography had been written by an expert not from Yale, which was a pleasing bonus. She checked it out, walked home, yelled hello to Howard and Marco, who had arrived in her absence, and sat on her front porch to read.

  Charlie, it turned out, had been born in 1874. He had a wonderful childhood with his delightful crazy father and did indeed spend his summers in Westbrook at the home of his uncle, Lyman Brewster.

  Great name, thought Laura. Sounds like a Pilgrim or a transcendentalist.

  In the 1880s, there had been excellent summer train service between Danbury and the shoreline, and even when he was very young, Charlie caught a train back to Danbury every weekend because he was a church organist there. His brother had had the unenviable job of pumping the organ for him.

  In an extant letter from August 1889, Charlie begged his father to sub for him in Danbury, because Charlie wanted to stay in Westbrook—fishing, swimming, rowing, and playing tennis and baseball. (Even in his century, being a musician, let alone an organist, was lame. “What do you play?” a well-meaning adult would ask Charlie, referring to Mr. Ives’s marching band. “Shortstop,” Charlie would tell them.)

  By the time he was a teenager, though, Charlie
was organist at St. Thomas’s Episcopal in New Haven and attending Hopkins, prepping for Yale. So it seemed unlikely that Charlie had spent much time visiting Westbrook Congregational, or even any time, given that he was busy elsewhere on Sundays, and if he had ever been in the church, it would have been the building that burned in 1892.

  Many Ives relatives summered next door to each other: Lyman Brewster, the Whites, the Parmelees, and the Seeleys, in whose house Charlie practiced the piano. They called their neighborhood “Cousins’ Beach.”

  Each small beach in Westbrook, separated by little brooks or curves of land, had a name: Chalker Beach and West Beach, New York Beach and Stannard Beach, Middle Beach and Chapman Beach. Laura had never heard of Cousins’ Beach, but that might have been family usage, not the official name.

  At the town hall, Laura researched the precise location of Lyman Brewster’s summer home.

  Westbrook had been a popular summer destination since the 1870s. But in that century, houses were not numbered. Laura could not figure out which house had been owned or rented by which Ives cousin. Their houses might have been destroyed in hurricanes, moved away from the beach to save them from future hurricanes, or torn down and replaced.

  The Seeley property was easier to work out because it turned over so few times. The Seeleys kept the house where Charles Ives had once practiced the piano from 1882 until 1910. A family named Fairweather bought it in 1910 and kept it as a summer home until 1955. By then, it had a street name: Magna Lane. In 1955, the Valeski family purchased the house. They still owned it.

  Freddy was in need of an ally. He drove Grandpa’s pickup down to the shoreline, hoping Shawn would be home.

  Shawn scored excellent weed, always shared, and never asked about Grandma, making him the only adult in Freddy’s life who did not want to dive into a dementia conversation.

  The Aminetti property still had its barn, which had been remade into two apartments. Shawn lived in one and used the other for his glass studio. As far as Freddy knew, Shawn paid no rent, although there were utility dials on the exterior wall of the barn, so he might pay heat and light. His parents and grandparents lived in the farmhouse, which meant that Shawn had great meals whenever he wanted them and probably also when he didn’t.