by M. M. Mayle
She folds the papers together and Bemus offers to dispose of them in a dustbin on the other side of the car park.
“You can give him the day off if you wish,” she says whilst Bemus is out of earshot. “I’m certain you won’t be accosted here and I have no problem with returning you to the city at the end of the session . . . Oh, he won’t think I’m displeased with the way he handled things yesterday, will he?”
“Never enter his mind,” Colin says.
Given word of his early dismissal, Bemus is quite within reason to ask for assurances about alternate means of transportation, access to phone service, the general availability of park rangers, and the potential for ravening hordes to show up on a nippy early spring morning at the tail end of the workweek. He then disappoints by asking, “What’s Nate gonna say about this?”
“Nothing. Not unless you tell him, and we know that won’t happen, will it?” Colin flickers a warning scowl. “Off you go, then.”
TWENTY-THREE
Midmorning, April 3, 1987
The instant Bemus leaves the car park, Laurel takes charge, leading the way to the visitor center, where she insists on paying the admission fee and reviewing with him on a wall map the ground they’ll be covering today.
“I’ve been here numerous times and I still like to refresh my mind. The route I’m most familiar with combines portions of three trails and comes out to a little over five miles. How does that sound?”
“Brilliant,” Colin overstates.
“I estimate it’ll take three hours to go that distance at a moderate pace, bringing us back here a little after one o’clock. That work for you?”
“Anathing you say works for me.” He says too much without her seeming to notice.
“Ready?” Laurel indicates the direction they’ll be taking from the visitor center. “Oh, I should warn you, we’ll encounter standing water and a few muddy areas after yesterday’s rain.” She inspects his footwear no less critically than David did and nods her approval. She similarly scrutinizes and approves his leather bomber jacket. “You’ll be glad you’re dressed warmly, it’ll be cooler on the trail.”
She snaps closed the puffy insulated vest she’s wearing over a bulky Columbia University sweatshirt. Nothing to see there, but when she leads the way to the starting point, it’s apparent her jeans fit in all the right places. Her rubberized moccasins are sensible—downright ugly they are, and a far cry from the delicate high-heeled shoes he’s envisioning.
“I think we have an extraordinary day ahead of us,” she says over her shoulder, compelling his gaze to follow the finger she’s pointing at a sky filled with clear-blue promise. And more. More now that the entire universe has shifted with Bemus’s departure.
The trail widens, they go shoulder to shoulder. He saturates himself with her presence as she identifies the trees they pass; he drinks in the fine details of her left ear, the origins of the tendrils that have escaped her hair fastener, the way she licks her lips now and then whilst rhapsodizing about the trees.
The sheer pleasure she takes in her surroundings keeps him from drowning in her altogether, and alerts him to the importance of what she’s saying as well as the way she’s saying it. A bit more self-discipline allows him to register that the stands of old-growth trees do remind of the Kentish countryside, as David foretold, and that the understory is dense with dogwood not yet in bloom, as Nate sourly predicted.
“If I recall correctly, there are close to a hundred species of birds, perhaps as many as twenty species of mammals, and more than three hundred species of trees to be found here,” Laurel enthuses. “At risk of repeating myself, I love the forest trees most of all—black locust, tulip poplar, oaks, and hickory—and any kind of beech tree is a special favorite.”
At an overlook to several acres of cleared land, she hesitates. “I know my priority’s skewed and yet I always lament the hundreds and hundreds of acres of trees Washington’s soldiers had to chop down in order to build shelters during the encampment of 1780. I know it’s the winter soldiers—in every sense of the term—I should feel sorriest for, not the trees.
Pensive she is, then a bit tentative when she commences murmuring:
“These are the times that try men’s souls . . . The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country . . . But he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered . . . Yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
She stops to clear her throat, giving him the chance to take over. He carries on in hushed tones matching hers:
“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly . . . It is dearness only that gives every thing its value . . .Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods . . . and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”
When she gets round to looking at him, her expression’s gone beyond surprise; she looks worried, actually.
“I wasn’t expecting . . . that.”
“You weren’t expecting me to know the Byron either.”
“No, I wasn’t, even though Lord Byron was one of your countrymen. And I certainly wasn’t expecting you to know Thomas Paine, a turncoat from your standpoint.”
“I hope you don’t think we Brits ignore the writings of Thomas Paine just because he went to the other side. Give us a break, Laurel. We may have lost the colonies, but we gave up being pissed about it a bloody long time ago,” he says with enough mock seriousness to get a little smile out of her before they move on.
“In all fairness,” he continues, “I should admit I never read Paine myself. Whilst I was . . . unplugged, that passage was read to me over and over by my great friend, Rayce Vaughn. The sole emphasis was on the lesson about esteeming too lightly what we’ve obtained too cheaply, and that fit right in with his and everybody’s effort to get me back on my feet and keep me there.”
“I see,” she acknowledges and steps over a puddle. “My father read to me a lot,” she goes on after a bit. “He was a literature professor, so I heard a lot more Emerson and Longfellow than I did the Grimm brothers or Hans Christian Anderson. During the first few months after my mother died he wasn’t always up to doing the same for my younger brothers, so I filled in.”
“How old were you when your mother passed away?”
“I was twelve. She died giving birth to my sister, Emily. My brothers were five and three, the ages when children most need to be read to and encouraged to read on their own.”
“Did you read them poetry or did you let faerie stories creep into the mix?”
“I tried reading from Hiawatha one time and they liked the sounds of the Indian names—Gitche Gumee, Opechee, Mudjekeewis—much as you describe your little one’s response to catchy words, but that’s as far as the poetry reading went. After that I had to depend on the small library of children’s books we had on hand or on my father, once he felt up to inventing stories for them.” She sidesteps another puddle and brushes a stray wisp of hair off her forehead. “I should interject here that after our mother’s death, we had financial constraints and books considered frivolous were not in the budget. We weren’t allowed to take them from the library either.”
“Your father imposed this rule?”
“Heavens no, he’d never have done a thing like that. It was my grandmother’s rule, my maternal grandmother, the only grandparent I ever had. But I’m getting ahead of myself. To explain—my father was much older than my mother. He was forty-seven and she was twenty-two when I was born. Both his parents were dead by then and so was my mother’s father. My parents met and fell in love at Fairfield-Douglas University where he was her professor. When they married, it was against my grandmother’s wishes . . . My mother was expected to follow in her mother’s footsteps, complete her postgraduate work at Columbia, join the family law firm, and practice happily ever after. Instead, my m
other married young, had four kids, and died young. Grandma never got over it.”
“You mean your mother’s death . . . There can’t be anything much worse than losing an adult child.”
“I absolutely agree. There can’t be, not for most people. But my grandmother was not like most people and it was my mother’s rebellious ways she never got over. Until the day she died, my grandmother never stopped blaming us—me, my two little brothers, my little sister, and my father—for the greatest disappointment of her life—my mother’s refusal to become a lawyer. She had always taken it out on us in insidious ways, but when my father went into decline and could no longer teach full time, she was more open about making us miserable.”
“Are you telling me she didn’t try to nurture and comfort her own grandchildren in the absence of their mum?”
“I am. She went through the motions, of course. She’d make twice-weekly visits and sometimes stay for a weekend to keep the neighbors from talking. She never held the baby, though, or showed any physical affection for the little boys.”
“What about you? How did she treat you?”
“She kept me at arm’s length other than for showing some interest in my progress at school. Then that changed when she found me in bed with my youngest brother during one of her weekend stays and denounced me as an incestuous child molester—her exact words—for trying to help him through a bad night.”
“Denounced you to whom? The authorities? A child protection agency?”
“No, just to my father, fortunately.”
“And he told her to fuck off, I hope.”
“He really couldn’t afford to. He only told her she must be mistaken because by then his health was worsening and we were on the brink of becoming wholly dependant on her. I will say this, however, he was far more harsh with her when she discovered a package of tampons in my schoolbag and called me a miserable little masturbator—again, her exact words. I really thought he was going to slap her and send her away for good.”
“He should have.” Colin keeps his eyes on the ground and widens the distance between them. What’s going on here? The naming of trees and birds and even a few insects was one thing,—that could have been payback for what he put her through at the museum—but this spillover is quite another. Starting with her just happening to spout the only words of Thomas Paine he ever heard, and progressing to talk of her upbringing, could she be employing the standard Nate tactic—tossing out a few intimate disclosures here and there in order to encourage similar from him? If that is the case she’s not giving him any openings. Not yet, anyway.
“Sorry.” He breaks off speculating and asks her to repeat whatever it was she just said.
“I was saying . . . that sort of thing went on for nearly a year. When my grandmother wasn’t maligning my character, she was undermining my father’s and he continued to take it because he’d lost tenure and was running out of money.”
“Your grandmother had money and refused to help?”
“Yes, she had money, a lot of money, and she considered it her righteous duty to refuse us all but the most meager financial assistance. I’ve since come to understand that her reasoning was not entirely punitive. She truly believed unearned wealth would corrupt.”
“How did she come by this money?”
“Oh, she earned it, no question there. For a woman of her generation, admission to Columbia Law was an accomplishment in itself, and graduating at the top of her class put her in something of a category by herself. Then she went on to establish with David Sebastian’s father the highly successful law firm that now represents you and that was achieved in only one generation. Another triumph, especially for being in New York. I will never deny that my grandmother earned the money. She did, however, become deranged in the process—no question there either ”
“I was thinking the same—barking mad, she had to have been.”
“Such a fine line between madness and genius . . . Do you believe that?”
“Yeh, I think it’s similar to the one that can exist between goodness and evil-doing . . . can be ill-defined . . . nebulous. I’ve got a question, though. You just said you think your grandmother became deranged in the process of attaining her goals. Does that mean you believe she started out as a decent human being?”
“That’s what I wanted to believe, just as I wanted to believe—even while her abuse was ongoing—that she was redeemable. I wanted to believe that for the simple reason of her being my grandmother. I wanted to believe she’d somehow come around, revert, become grandmotherly in the traditional sense, become caring and loving. Comforting. This character out of Dickens I’ve described for you just now is the product of my adult thinking, of confronting cold hard facts from a distance and being better equipped to accept certain realities.”
“Let me understand . . . You’re saying you didn’t hate her whilst she was actively making your life miserable?”
“Not consciously. Like my poor father, I was probably in some form of denial related to the practicalities of the situation and, like my father, I couldn’t afford to expend any more emotion. We were still grieving, we didn’t have extra energy for hating.”
“How were you able to reach the point where you are now? You strike as amazingly dispassionate, and you don’t seem to have much prejudice about what must be a very sore subject.”
She flashes a half smile. “You mean how many years did I spend on a therapist’s couch? None. I was lucky. Writing my grandmother’s biography was my best therapy. Not a complete cure, though, because I can still have flare-ups now and then—just ask David.” The smile flickers again and goes out.
“Hold on. You can’t be telling me one of the books you wrote is about this grandmother from hell, can you?”
“Well, yes.” She stops walking and turns to face him. “I thought you knew I had written a biography when I was tapped to write yours.”
“I . . . uh . . . I only glanced at your CV, I saw you were qualified as a writer . . . but I didn’t know. . . .”
“Your manager probably had some idea. He was very quick to agree with David that I would be capable of more than the interview that was your original request.”
“I don’t know what to say, actually.”
“You don’t need to say anything. Don’t worry about it. Why on earth would you want to know more than the title of an exceedingly dry dissection of a pioneering female litigator? Why would anyone? I wrote it with the same lack of passion and prejudice you credit me with now, so it’s quite a slog to read just as it was quite a slog to write.”
“You wrote it for the therapeutic effect, then.”
“No, I had no idea the writing would provide a much-needed catharsis. That was an unexpected benefit. I wrote it because it was one of the requirements of my grandmother’s last will and testament.”
They resume walking and at the next intersecting trail encounter the only other person they’ve seen since sending Bemus on his way. The ruddy-faced older woman poling herself along with a heavy walking stick gives a perfunctory nod that may have broken the spell because the subject suddenly changes without warning.
“Yesterday you were speaking of modern-day musical influences when we had to leave the museum.” Laurel brings out the little notebook from a pocket in her vest and begins reading aloud from a registry of greats. “You had just started listing what you referred to as the contemporary brotherhood when we had to stop,” she ends the prompt.
“Wait a minute. Are you just gonna leave me hanging? I’d very much like to hear the rest of the story. Your story.”
She stops again and tips her head to one side. “Colin, I don’t think you realize I’ve been talking for way more than an hour.” She points at her watch and frowns. “I let the trees get to me, and then it was Thomas Paine and the unavoidable link to my father. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I can’t very well inspire you to talk when my mouth’s running, can I?”
“You have nothing to be sorry for. Noth
ing at all.” He has to look elsewhere or he’ll be compelled to touch her cheek or smooth her hair or make some other intimate gesture he’s dead certain would be judged wildly inappropriate. “Please tell me the rest of the story, Laurel,” he says in the general direction of what he’s recently learned is a black locust tree.
Given this opening the size of the Lincoln Tunnel, his pledge to reciprocate with some of his own difficult history should then follow, but the words will not come. They won’t even form. It’s doubtful he will ever be provided with a better, more natural opportunity to speak of parallel experiences with presumably good people gone irredeemably bad and of denial as a way of life—and he lets it go.
He decides it’s safe to look at her feet. “I don’t think I mentioned that I like your shoes,” he says with a degree of honesty because they are starting to look good to him.
She laughs. “You don’t have to resort to that. Pretending to like these clunky things will get you absolutely nowhere.” She laughs again. “Perhaps I will tell you the rest of the story sometime, but it won’t happen until you’ve opened up. That is what we’re here for, don’t forget, and I’ve already taken far too much of your morning.”