by Nancy Young
At the end of this forested walk a magnificent château looms — or is it a convent? In a white dress and bare feet she enters the stone gateway onto a huge expanse of lawn. She carries not a child now, but a guitar in her arms. The stippling sound of water has become a soaking rain, besieging the stone with its pillaging wetness. She runs for cover in her quickly ruined dress and tries unsuccessfully to shield the instrument from the elements. Which direction? Ahead of her in the farthest reaches of the expansive courtyard, a small chapel offers refuge. A heavy door yields to her pressure and she peers into the darkness …
Lorraine was awakened by a melodious disturbance. It was the doorbell for the second time, followed by a polite knock on the door. Startled, she alit off the bed, realizing she had been lying for several hours unclothed, with the guitar as an inadequate blanket. She was chilled to the bone and caught in the dizzying interlude between half sleep and wakefulness. She found a thick cotton robe hanging from a rack beside the armoire and stumbled blearily to the door.
“Who is it?” she called out wearily.
“Excusez-moi, Mademoiselle. Hotel management. I have your evening’s itinerary here for you. Shall I slip it under the door?”
“Yes please. Merci.” A small white envelope was extended under the door. It was addressed on the cover with her name in a flowing hand.
“I will also leave this package, Mademoiselle, outside your door. Merci, bon soir.” With this information delivered, the attendant quietly left her to discover the large white box at her door. She retrieved it quickly, and then unceremoniously opened the invitation. Her presence was requested for dinner at seven pm at a concert in the Imperial Suite of the Hôtel Ritz. The white box contained a creamy peach ball gown festooned with a swath of white roses designed to span demurely across an otherwise revealing décolletage. On the back of the dress, a long train with matching roses trailed to the ground. Also in the box was a pair of matching evening sandals and a rose and orchid wrist corsage. Wearily she laid the evening ensemble on her bed beside the guitar and prepared herself for a bath. She had less than two hours to make herself the belle of the ball. Could she do it?
Never had the young woman felt so weary. The rigors of trans-Atlantic flying and maintaining decorum with a crowd of well-meaning strangers left her with little resources to revitalize her flagging energies. I will have to get better at this, she reprimanded herself for the second time this day. It was beginning to seem like her time was not her own; the rigors of belonging to a not-so-distant royal family were nearly too much for the shop-keeper’s daughter and it was only her first day. Her previous visits to the family had been formal and quite brief. She imagined her fiancé fighting with the family to accept his choice of wife. She was a commoner, albeit an extraordinarily beautiful one. But from the colonies no less! If there was a whiff of rebellion in his swift engagement to Lorraine after only three months at the end of his one-year LLM studies in Québec, it had escaped her until now. Was there any hope of a reprieve in the proceedings? Would she be given the opportunity to shed the time delay that plagued her?
The steep learning curve was the price she would have to pay for purchasing a fairy tale destined for someone born prepossessed of the silver spoon, or with more ambition and avarice. The five-course dinner was interminable, and Lorraine found herself nodding sleepily in her seat next to Joël and his family, as the large string ensemble expertly wended its way through the four seasons of Vivaldi and then closed with a defining G-major quartet by Mozart. Only at the closing announcement of the concert did she realize that the performance was dedicated to her. Her embarrassment was complete as she realized that as she lightly dozed in her elegant chair, all eyes would have been on her before Joël’s hand on hers awoke her during the last strains of the quartet. When she returned to her bedroom late that evening, she cried with exhaustion into the sound hole of her only familiar friend.
•
Col and Ellen Tenderfield stepped out into the hustle-bustle of a steamy afternoon on the outskirts of Bangkok and were greeted with the sounds of a people and a culture in constant movement — it seemed a hundred clackity tuk-tuks, the single bicycle-drawn carriages that carried elegantly dressed ladies and busy gentlemen through the throngs of traffic, jostled for attention. A pair of identically cleanly shaven, burgundy and yellow–robed monks in deep conversation crossed the street in front of them oblivious to the dozens of bicycles and cars swerving around them with deferential flair. The couple was headed northward, strolling solemnly in the direction of a large white-walled wat, a retreat of Buddhist calm just a few blocks from the Tenderfields’ temporary accommodation at the Bangkok YWCA, whose building squatted not far from one of the floating markets — on the Chao Praya River with its colorfully chaotic tangle of produce-laden rowboats. At the Y, the travelers found a veritable community of long- and short-term expatriate American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, British, and other European nationals.
The expulsion of the Church in China, and the eventual termination of missionary delegations there a decade earlier, had not been the case here in Thailand. It was a revelation — hundreds of years of Buddhism and a royal family passionately loved by its own people — the honey-coated haven of a country seemed positioned on a higher moral and communal plane than its neighbors, even while the political and social fate of Southeast Asia and the monolith that was China was poised to rend itself into shreds. Nascent threats of insurgency and turmoil, however, had sprung up of late in the hill-country area around Chiang Rai where their missionary placement was centered. This sent chills quietly up the spines of both Tenderfields, although neither one spoke of their inner panic.
The first week was the hardest. A shock to the system even for some seasoned travelers — the heat, the unrelentingly crowded streets and the low sea-level altitudes — all cause for the kind of oppression experienced by first-time divers. The pressure was claustrophobic and the panic debilitating, causing an emotional revolt edging on hysteria. If Ellen felt it, she kept it well hidden beneath the starched layers of her well-bred Bostonian reserve and erudite decorum, but Col almost succumbed to the tropical malaise of quiet terror. The three-week delay for the church administration to organize their posting in the countryside left them at loose ends and without their worldly goods.
International postal services on both sides failed God’s laborers and ruined their maiden sojourn with uncharted inefficiency and disorder. While their purpose was to proffer services in the name of God, the job ahead seemed daunting when stripped away from the familiar and when life’s irreconcilable mysteries were thrust in one’s face. Separated from their belongings, the Tenderfields felt painfully unsettled. The only items they had carried with them on the plane were Ellen’s handbag, Col’s camera, and Bernard’s guitar, safely secured in a curvaceous black leather case acquired for the trip.
The Church-organized accommodation was at capacity with budget-conscious antipodal travelers from Australia and New Zealand, and a small group of free-spirited Americans from San Francisco, en route to an ashram on the Ganges. Between them all, the Tenderfields were suited up and supplied with personal toiletries sufficient to tide them over for a few days. In their borrowed cotton tunics, and traveling with only the guitar case in hand, the Tenderfields were mistaken for touring musicians and treated like entertainers and show-people. They learned to smile wanly and wave like minor celebrities until they finally paid a visit to the Canadian Embassy, where the staff happily opened up a special supply room in the back of the agency which could have posed as a flagship of Taylor’s department store.
At the mention of Chiang Rai, however, a look of astonishment came over their fellow travelers. Known as one of the tri-corners of the notorious Golden Triangle, Chiang Rai was not for the faint-hearted, and unseasoned travelers were warned to avoid that particular den of iniquity. The Tenderfields’ hero-status soared at this point when they shared the
ir mission and itinerary.
“If God’s will be done, you will both be sainted before the year’s end! And please put in a good word to His Lordship on my behalf, would you?” exclaimed a jocular Australian.
Ellen was entirely disbelieving of the spurious claims of her fellow travelers. According to her own research, Chiang Rai was home to numerous indigenous hill-tribe populations with quite remarkable but harmless cultural practices, such as the elongating of necks to increase a girl’s marriageability, accompanied by pictures of smiling children and elegantly toothless grannies.
They would never find out the truth of those claims for within a few days of arrival, the Church organizers received word that their belongings had mistakenly been transported to Kathmandu instead of Chiang Rai, and there were no personnel in the Nepali mission capable of transferring them on to the Thai village. Ellen had not researched such a drastic change in their itinerary, and the fear of an unknown country began to give away signs of her panic. This occurred, fortunately, just as Col was beginning to overcome his own malaise. He found himself laundering their limp and sweat-soiled clothes in the Y’s small bathroom sink, while Ellen sat plumbing the precipitous depths of her resolve for the imminent travel.
The pair flew from Bangkok to Kathmandu, the second highest-altitude capital city in the world from one of the lowest — on a rather shabby plane which looked to be a retired vehicle from a previous decade. Perhaps it was purchased from the Chinese military, for most of the signage was in undecipherable characters, forcing Ellen to spend the majority of the time in mid-air trying in vain to make sense of them in case of a mid-air emergency. Meanwhile her husband slept soundly in the plane’s cool environment, the first they had enjoyed in a week. Looking out the small fogged window of the plane, she was astounded to find them ascending into a mountainous country not unlike her own in terrain, if not temperature. Far below her the stretch of peaks and valleys lay like the humps of a moose’s back and the thought brought tears to her sleepless eyes.
The tumultuous landing of the plane was like a stampede over a cattle grid before a river-crossing, but then it came to a halt. Ellen silently thanked the Lord for their safe arrival, while Col shook himself violently in its wake. Taking the guitar case securely in hand, Ellen marshaled her husband to the front of the plane to quickly disembark. But when they entered the terminal building, they were surprised to find themselves face to face with an imposing row of a half dozen armed military guards, their Indian Civil Service–issue shotguns and rifles pointing menacingly at them.
Col recognized these legendary Gorkha soldiers, fierce and dedicated Nepali soldiers who fought bravely with the Indian Army in their fight for independence from the British not long before. Their trademark crinkle-bladed kukri swords were sheathed menacingly at their sides, a badge of extraordinary courage and duty. Col instinctively raised his arms in surrender and hastened his wife to follow suit. But Ellen had the guitar case in her hands and did not know what to do. One jungle-camouflaged soldier wrenched the case from her hands and pointed his gun at her head, causing the weary woman to completely collapse in an unconscious heap at his feet. Pandemonium broke out and Col did not know whether he would be shot if he tried to attend to his wife, but his worries were allayed when the guard’s superior, a stern, older-looking soldier, relayed a curt apology to Col before he ordered two younger men to carry the woman.
Col was ushered again at gunpoint into a special detainment area where Ellen was laid out gingerly on a rather soiled rug by the two soldiers. Col was then asked to open the case, which he did gladly at this point. All eyes were on the case as the lid was pulled open and the gleaming guitar revealed. An audible, almost shameful, “Aaaawwhhhh” spread across the room as each soldier, Col amongst them, smiled in relief and embarrassment at the harmless and beautiful, almost heavenly glow of the glossy instrument. The captain of the troop reached across and inspected the guitar as he would a regulation issue rifle. Suddenly, launching a surprise guerrilla attack, the leader of the Gorkha band ran the back of his nails across the strings of the soundboard and the room burst into the warm astonishing sounds of the open strings, quickly tranquilizing the agitated men and engulfing the metallic sterility of the terminal with its calming sounds. He then removed the guitar to inspect its interior and to peer beneath it. Satisfied that it was not an implement of military insurgency, the captain handed the guitar to Col and indicated for him to entertain the crowd.
Behind the gathered men, Ellen had gained consciousness and witnessed the effect of the guitar on the group. She gathered herself up off the floor, brushed herself off, and tapped Col on the shoulder. With a surge of absolute relief, he handed the guitar to his wife. All eyes were on her as she drew up a chair and proceeded to play for the first time in nearly forty years.
Her fingers were hesitant with the fret board at first, but it seemed that, with her earlier descent into temporary unconsciousness, something unrecognizable rose to the surface of her brain and now directed the ascendance of the first rousing round of sounds she made on the guitar — an entire winged sailing fleet of tremolos and arpeggios accompanied by a concordance of hypnotic chords, which unexpectedly turned on their heels and danced a flamenco waltz of lento then allegro vibrato scales until they descended into the penultimate arpeggios of the unrelenting harmonic finale. Carulli’s “Andantino” was a miracle of classical artistry and the men nearly cried with newly stirred passions, but she followed the emotive serenade with a fiery “Tarantela” that sent the men into a frenzy of whooping and applauding that did not cease, in Ellen’s feverish mind, for an eternity.
•
In another place, on the far side of the rotating earth, a lonely heart soared momentarily as the serenade roused a tandem ghost in her bedchamber and granted her a much-needed reprieve from the frenzy of wedding preparations and the cold clutch of a medieval castle deep in a fertile valley not far from Carulli’s own City of Light. Even against the crush and commotion of wedding preparations next door, Lorraine distinctively heard the melodious tune play itself quietly in the tranquility of her chamber, an intimate concert for her personal pleasure.
Sleeping pills and tranquilizers had done their work almost as soon as her head touched the pillows of her canopied bed the night before. With morning firmly ensconced in the château window reflected in her mirror, however, the fog returned to its defiant post inside her head, draped though it was in a luxuriant bridal veil. The team of hired professionals who had washed her hair, swept it up in a perfect chignon, moisturized her entire body, manicured and dressed her, then completed her cosmetic transformation, were finished and now performing their rituals on the bridesmaids next door.
Lorraine sat in mild amazement at the detailed finery of her toilette upon her dressing table, and pondered the blur of her vision and the overly adamant coloring of the rouge on her pale cheeks. Then, a solemn string of legato notes came to her like the lament of a funeral march. Glancing at the guitar perched at her bedside like a guardsman flanking a prison door, she sensed a motion in its strings; its sonorous tune mixed flawlessly with the trills and twittering of four bridesmaids rushing about the dressing room adjacent to her bridal chamber, which was cavernous by her own estimation. On the far side of the room, just beyond her ornate door, the frantic bustle of the servants and caterers flummoxed by the arrival of the wedding guests did not disturb her equanimity.
The bride looked somberly at the guitar, contented that it had accompanied her here and everywhere without complaint. It had provided companionship to the otherwise friendless young woman from the Haut-Saint-François. It was now her rabbit’s foot, the charm without which she could not step outside the hotel-apartment, to the great consternation of her fiancé, who kept his distance under the guise of preserving their intimacy for the wedding day. He seemed more like a stranger to her each day, and as she prepared herself reluctantly for the upcoming nuptials, her nerves were
as brittle as a denuded willow branch blighted by the bitter cold of winter, and her mind just as tortured, if not more so. She was sorely tempted to lift the guitar onto the lap of the heirloom wedding dress and strum a riotous gypsy rondo, but instead she stayed her hand and sat resolutely before the large mirror of her grand Louis XIV dressing table and made a comical face at her own reflection. Satisfied with the ridiculousness of her image, she next put on her steeliest, most regal, and most devastatingly beautiful countenance and stood to face the ceremony like the warrior-saint, Jeanne d’Arc, off to the wheaten battlefields.
A mysterious fog surrounded the medieval château as the haunting sound of the French horns signaled the start of the wedding ceremony. A solemn procession of nearly two hundred attendees led by the royal members of the wedding party made its way regally across the vast courtyard and then hesitated ceremoniously before the chapel, awaiting the completion of the first traditional hunting song by the cornets. When the last notes were drawn, the procession entered the chapel, dividing neatly between left and right, and filling the pre-arranged seats systematically with relatives and close friends of the bridegroom’s family.
As the last blasted notes of the somber hunting tune faded into the past, Lorraine, as solemnly as a widow, methodically and regally paced down the aisle in her royal gown with all the decorum that the weighty dress required of her. Accompanying the bride was her father, the frail and closed-mouth tool-shop owner from St.-Gérard who had flown in on the overnight flight with his wife, to Aubigny-Sur-Nère via Montréal and Paris the night before. All heads and eyes turned to the main attraction beside the man, a vision in white luminescence like the first blanketing of snow on a virgin landscape, whose demurely downcast eyes led all eyes below to the voluptuous, precipitously draped bustline where a thin line of moss green velvet ribbon delineated the fashionably cinched Empire waist while majestically lifting two ripe winter melon–like breasts, forcing them skyward.