by Hy Conrad
The clergyman had been trying in vain to find a mushroom tartlet, anything to help fortify him for a eulogy for yet another unknown corpse. Half the funerals he presided over seemed to be for people who’d never entered a church while alive. He poured one more half glass of the Pouilly-Fuissé—in low supply, like the tartlets—and started off in the general direction of his late hostess.
“Having fun?” Peter asked. He had been keeping Amy on his radar as she hid behind this easel or pretended to be absorbed in that one. He didn’t mind that she hadn’t been working the room. It would come.
“Fun?” Amy asked. “I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.”
“Half and half. Do you think you’ll be transporting the ashes as carry-on or as luggage?”
“Luggage, definitely. Again, I can’t tell . . .”
“Serious this time.”
She covered her gasp with a little laugh. “Are you sure? Because it would make a funny joke.”
“Serious.” Peter looked serious. “With most countries and airlines, transporting ashes is more or less legal. But I’m not sure about Turkey, and I really don’t want to ask. It’s not one of those questions you can take back.”
“Do you think many dead people are smuggled into Turkey?”
“Another thing you don’t want to ask the authorities.”
“And why am I the one doing this?”
“Because you’re an innocent-looking woman. And you have no past history of problems with Turkish immigration.”
“Again, I can’t tell . . .”
“Serious. An unfortunate misunderstanding.” Amy’s face must have formed some equally unfortunate expression, because Peter reacted with a coy grin and a complete change of subject. “I saw you with Nicole Marconi. She seems nice.”
“She’s terrific.” Amy wasn’t in the mood to let him off lightly. “You should get her talking about MacGregor and her parents. She’s got some great stories.”
Peter’s face brightened. “What kind of stories? Do you think she’d tell them at one of the wakes? That might be fun.”
“Loads of fun.” Amy tried to match his coy, reassuring grin. “And Herb and David. You should get to know them, too. I’ll bet if you flirt a little with Herb, you can get them thinking about some over-the-top trip. Maybe an anniversary extravaganza?”
“You’re serious?” Peter asked. “I can’t tell . . .”
“Serious. You should flirt with both of them.”
“Hmm. You think they’d respond to a little harmless flirting? I don’t want to seem rude.”
“Oh, they’ll respond,” Amy promised. “Absolutely.”
CHAPTER 5
It was almost exactly two days later to the minute, if you took into account the six hour time difference between New York and Paris. Two days from the end of the East Side memorial to the start of the first of the wakes.
“We kept getting these horrible, ugly presents from Laila’s mother, year after year. I mean, lamps covered in seashells. Atrocious paintings on velvet that she’d picked up in Mexico. Horrific stuff.”
The thin middle-aged man continued to weave his anecdote as the silver yacht glided through the shadows of the Pont d’Austerlitz. “So we did the only thing we could under the circumstances. We gave them to the maid.” As his voice echoed off the stone arch a few feet above their heads, Paisley MacGregor’s wake floated west with the current, toward the lighted towers of Notre-Dame and the gathering sunset. “Each time we did it, we told Paisley we had picked out this crap just for her. And she’d thank us profusely in that way she always did and tell us how wonderful we were for buying such expensive things.”
A good-natured groan welled up from the listeners, and everyone took another sip of champagne. The next bridge would be the Pont de Sully, which framed the eastern bank of the Île Saint-Louis, part of the ancient heart of Paris.
The air was surprisingly still, and the man barely had to raise his voice to be heard. “Come on,” he said with a twisted grin. “We all give our horrible junk to the maid.”
“It was Maury’s idea,” Laila Steinberg protested from somewhere near the front of the group. “Although I have to say, Paisley loved them. She did. She’d get the handyman from her building to come over, and they’d cart it all away.”
The Steinbergs looked like a perfect match. They were both shortish, and fit, and they had allowed their hair to go gracefully gray. Their skin was flawless, Maury’s as well as Laila’s, and their teeth were straight and white, but not overly. Such perfection might have occurred naturally, but not in a couple of fifty-five, which was what Amy estimated their average age to be.
Their most striking attributes, to Amy’s mind, were their eyeglass frames, thin and elegant, with layers of subtle color running through them, hers in red hues, his in dark brown. Amy didn’t envy the rich, not much, just their frames.
“Right.” Maury Steinberg’s mouth tightened at his wife’s interruption. He was standing at the stern, champagne flute in hand, next to a photo of MacGregor’s smiling, precancerous face. “So that became our routine about twice a year. We got crappy stuff from her mother. We gave it to Paisley. Everyone’s happy.”
“Until my mother decided to pay us a visit.”
“Uh-oh,” said Herb Sands.
David laughed, as if Herb had said something clever. They were getting along fine now, Amy noted, although . . . Herb’s roving eye did seem to be roving toward Peter, who responded by smiling back and giving him all the extra attention Amy had suggested.
“A visit. Exactly.” Maury pressed on. “Laila’s mother was coming to New York, something she never, ever did. So you can imagine, we’re in this predicament. What do we say when she sees that none of her presents are anywhere in the apartment? For a while we thought of telling her there’d been a fire—”
“Maury even thought about setting a fire. Just for a second—”
“Right,” Maury interrupted back. “So . . . finally the day comes. We pick her up at LaGuardia, and all the way home we say nothing and we’re thinking and there’s no ideas coming, none, and we don’t know what she’ll say. And we walk into the house—”
“And it’s all there,” Laila said, stealing the punch line again.
The listeners did not erupt into laughter. This time the laughs were small and knowing and affectionate. Except for Maury, who didn’t laugh at all.
“It was all there,” he said, trying to regain momentum. “Every tasteless lamp and Peruvian wall hanging. All of it was crowded in there with our stuff. Everything rearranged. I don’t know how the hell the woman did it.”
“Or how she even knew,” Laila added. “Because we never told Paisley where the furnishings had come from. And we certainly never told her about our predicament, although she did know my mother was visiting.” She shrugged her shoulders. “But that was dear Paisley. She knew everything.”
“It actually didn’t look horrible. Paisley had a good eye.”
“And the upshot of it all was that my mother had a great week with us, and the second she went home, Paisley moved all the stuff out. Without ever saying a word.”
The laughter grew and remained warm.
“It’s true.” Laila Steinberg had, perhaps unconsciously, joined her husband at the center of attention. “Paisley never, ever mentioned it. And we never mentioned it. We were way too embarrassed and grateful, and I don’t know what.”
“To Paisley MacGregor,” Maury Steinberg said and led the final toast of the evening.
When Peter stepped forward with the urn, he didn’t need to speak. The moment felt instinctual. The small silver scoops had been lined up on a white linen tabletop, and one by one the mourners came forward and silently, meditatively took scoops of their maid and cast them into the breeze above the Seine. From here the ashes would scatter and join the dust of the city and perhaps fly through some tall, laced-curtained window of some riverside apartment, to be dutifully dusted away by someone else’s maid.
Amy giggled at the notion, a maid’s dust being dusted by a maid, and drained her flute. It had been a great trip so far, exactly what she’d needed. Even Peter’s one attempt to get romantic had been sweetly lame.
Amy had known he would try something, that her skill as a travel agent hadn’t been the only reason for his generous offer. And now that they were in Paris, thousands of miles from Amy’s boyfriend—and, more crucially, her mother—it hadn’t taken him long.
Their rooms were at the Hôtel de Crillon, a palatial pile on the place de la Concorde, mere steps from where French peasants had once set up a guillotine to deal with just the sort of people who could now afford to stay at the Hôtel de Crillon. On their arrival, Peter had taken the manager aside and spoken with him in French, arguing politely, probably about some misunderstood detail in the reservation. When Peter had turned and walked the fifty feet back to Amy, his expression had turned apologetic.
“They made a mistake and put us in the same room.”
“Us? You and me?” Amy had done her best to look surprised. “How could that happen? I made the reservations myself.”
“The good news is I managed to talk them into a suite. It’s got two bedrooms and a balcony and this incredible view of the Eiffel Tower.”
“Don’t they have two singles?” Amy had asked. “A hotel this size?”
“Completely booked,” Peter asserted. “Springtime in Paris. But the suite has two bedrooms.” He raised his eyebrows and looked helpless.
“Excuse me,” said Amy. Then she walked back fifty feet to the sleek, Armani-clad manager. If she had spoken to him in English, the man might have been able to maintain the ruse. But Amy’s French was better than Peter’s, and more importantly, she had mastered the sardonic little twist of the head, so important in any Gallic conversation. The man twisted his own head in response and quickly gave up.
“Nice try,” she shouted back over her shoulder to Peter as she followed the manager back to the front desk for the new room keys. “You didn’t think I’d figure it out?”
Peter trotted to keep up. “I didn’t think you’d want to.” Which was the perfect answer. She didn’t even pretend to be mad at him.
Their guests began arriving later that afternoon. The only glitch was the Steinbergs’ room. Apparently, Laila mentioned to her husband the possibility of noise drifting up from the patio bar two stories below their balcony. Maury proceeded to take this on as his mission, rejecting the manager’s assurances that it wouldn’t be a problem and demanding another room. “My wife is very sensitive to noise,” he kept repeating like an accusation. Amy felt sorry for Laila, who just stood in the background and looked mortified.
“Don’t ever interrupt one of my stories again.”
The hushed, angry words brought Amy sharply back to the present. After the ceremony, while most of the guests had stayed glued to the yacht’s bar area, still getting acquainted, she had wrapped herself in a pashmina shawl and had wandered up to the top deck to enjoy a private view of the City of Light’s lights. She knew she was neglecting her duties, but just for a minute. No one would mind.
The argument, Amy saw, was happening directly below her, half whispered and barely audible above the thrum of the engine. Maury and Laila, of course. Their long shadows moved eerily on the lower level.
“I got carried away,” Laila’s shadow tried to explain.
“Is this the way it’s going to be the whole trip, you sabotaging everything I say? God, I am so sick of you.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“You’d think I’d be used to you by now. But it just gets worse.”
“Do you want a divorce, Maury, is that it?”
“Divorce?” His laugh was soft and mean. “It should be so easy.”
This was the second time today that Amy had seen Maury Steinberg go ballistic. The first outburst had been over something just as trivial, berating the hotel manager over the mere possibility of noise rising from the patio to their balcony. Poor manager. Poor Laila. Amy now realized that this incident had also been a case of Maury lashing out at his wife, but with the Hôtel de Crillon standing in as her proxy.
CHAPTER 6
“Should I say I’m twenty-five or thirty?”
Marcus was forced to look up from his game of Angry Birds and across the living room. The woman sitting at her computer was easily in her sixties—real person sixties, not movie star sixties—and her frilly brown blouse and defiantly auburn pageboy weren’t helping. She peered over the top of her reading glasses, silently demanding an answer. “Do you think you could pass for twenty-five?” he asked back.
“Of course I could pass,” she said. “I’m youthful enough.”
“I’m not sure a youthful person uses the word youthful these days.”
“My question is, which is better? To be a thirty-year-old with some life experience or some know-it-all twenty-five-year-old?”
“Why does TrippyGirl have to be any age?”
“Because my followers keep asking. And I have to keep TrippyGirl real. That’s the whole point of a blog, isn’t it?”
“Let me think.” Marcus put aside his phone and saw that his glass was empty and Fanny’s only half full. It was a good excuse to grab the bottle of white from the coffee table. He liked Fanny’s half of the Abel brownstone. The bottom two floors were homey and eclectic, with old rugs and dark furniture that had been built to last. Amy’s half, the upper two floors, felt a little more IKEA, although Amy would insist that none of it was. But it felt that way.
“Why don’t you make yourself Amy’s age?” he asked as he crossed to Fanny’s side and topped off her glass.
“That old?” Fanny made a face.
“She’s only what? Thirty-three?”
“She is? You’d think I’d know that, being her mother. She seems older.”
“And you’re younger? Do your readers really believe that you’re at this moment”—Marcus stopped for a second to look at her screen and skim her most recent entry—“in your bra and panties, playing backgammon with a sexy albino waiter on the Trans-Siberian Express?”
“Well, the nights are long in Siberia. We have to do something.”
“Actually the nights are getting shorter.”
Fanny waved him away like a fly. “Oh, that’s just the kind of mistake TrippyGirl would make. It adds realism.”
Marcus wasn’t sure how to respond, which was just as well, since the house phone had decided to interrupt them. Fanny checked the display. She was about to pick up but changed her mind and let it ring.
“It’s Amy,” she said in a half whisper.
“Why are you avoiding Amy?”
“I’m not avoiding her. I’m just not here. I stepped out.” Even Fanny knew this deserved more of an explanation. “I picked up a copy of Paisley MacGregor’s will at the lawyer’s. Amy wanted me to scan it to her, but I forgot.”
Marcus understood. “We’ll do it right now.”
Since the brownstone was divided into two separate apartments—Amy’s lone stipulation before agreeing to move back into her childhood home—they had to go out to the landing, climb up two flights, and unlock Amy’s front door. An interior set of stairs led them up to her bedroom and the sunroom/office at the top-rear of the house. Marcus switched on the computer and the copier, which was on a small side table.
Fanny was less familiar with machines than Marcus, so she fed him the pages—a copy of the will itself, a few codicils, a handwritten letter from Paisley MacGregor, all notarized. There was a homey feeling to these documents, Fanny thought, a reassuring indication that there had been a real person behind all the planning and the demands. Within a minute they had a system going: from the file folder to the scanner to a neat pile on the seat of a chair. Fanny had handed off about a dozen pages—legal size, letter size, single sided, double sided—when there was a stop in the supply chain.
Marcus reached out behind him. “Is that all?” Then he turned to see. Fanny was at the
desk, looking curiously at a handwritten letter. “What’s up?”
“Letter from Paisley,” said Fanny, looking a little somber. “She wants it read aloud in Hawaii before they dump the last of her.”
“It’s nothing bad, is it?”
“Basically just thanking them for making the trip, for all the years that they let her be a part of their families. A little odd,” Fanny added as she scanned the page a second time. “Not that I want to criticize the dead.”
“Let me see.” Marcus took it. It was one page long, written in tight block letters on fine, heavy stationery. He felt slightly guilty, even though it was a document meant to be read. He, too, had to read it a second time. “She’s implying a lot in this little ‘thank-you.’ Some of it not very nice.”
“Good. I thought it was just me being sensitive.”
“No, it’s definitely her.” Marcus set it aside, as if it might be radioactive. “I don’t know these people, but even I can figure out . . . she must have known all their secrets.”
“From what Amy says, they were very dependent on her.”
Marcus pushed out his lips and frowned. “That must have been an odd kind of life, don’t you think? Living through other people. Do you think Ms. Paisley was happy?”
“Maybe. In her own way.” Fanny gave it a few seconds of serious thought. “As happy as you can be when your job includes cleaning toilets. She was a part of their lives—big houses, smart, successful people confiding in her—with very little downside. No actual family to deal with. She could always leave and move on to the next.”
“But she still loved them.”
“It’s easy to love someone when you can leave.” Fanny glanced down at the radioactive page. “I do envy her writing skill.”
“You think? It feels stilted to me.”
“I meant handwriting. It’s very precise and tight.”