The Last Chance Matinee

by Mariah Stewart

  “Who’s Gil?” Des and Cara asked at the same time.

  “Pete’s older brother. He was in my class.”

  Her voice held a touch of softness, and her three nieces exchanged curious glances. Cara said, “You and Pete’s brother were friends?”

  Barney smiled. “Of course. Everyone grew up knowing everyone else. The Wheelers lived across the street in that big brick house.” A shadow fell across Barney’s face, but as if she refused to let it linger, she brightened. “When you’re a kid and the town is very small, the pool of potential playmates is limited. You tend to make friends everywhere.”

  “Is Gil a lawyer, too?” Des asked.

  “He would have been,” Barney said simply.

  “He would have been . . . ?” Des repeated.

  “If he’d lived,” Barney replied.

  “What happened to him?” Cara, who’d been leaning over Des’s shoulder, took the seat next to her.

  “He was in an accident a week after he graduated law school. He never did get to practice.” Barney swallowed hard. “It was a long time ago, girls.” She reached over and took another book from the stack. “Let’s see what your father was up to in his junior year.”

  And with that, she changed the subject.

  “You said Dad was in the drama group. All four years or any particular one?” Allie asked.

  “The book in front of you, sophomore year. Fritz tried out for a role in the school play on a dare, and ended up playing the lead in Our Town. I don’t think anyone was more surprised than him that he liked it so much. After that, he tried out for every play, and he got very much involved with the Sugarhouse. He did summer stage there every year for years.”

  “That’s where he met our mother,” Des said.

  Barney nodded. “She was very good on the stage. The acting bug bit her real hard. Once she got a taste of the stage . . . Some say it was the applause she liked, but I don’t judge. After that, nothing would do but for her to go to Hollywood. She was convinced she was born to be a star, got Fritz to take off with her, abandon everything here. She did well, too, for a time, as you both know. No need to rehash ancient history.”

  “What else did Dad abandon besides the theater?” Cara had watched Barney’s face closely, and knew there was something her aunt wasn’t saying.

  “Responsibilities he had here,” Barney replied.

  “What other responsibilities?” Cara couldn’t resist pressing.

  Barney sighed. “The Hudsons have been in this town since its earliest days. My ancestors—your ancestors—have played an important role in the town’s development. In its prosperity.”

  “Uncle Pete told us about all that.” Allie waved a hand as if they knew it all. “About the hospital and the land for the school and money for a college and everything that our great-grandfather—I think that’s the right guy—everything he did for his miners, and for their families. The mines must’ve been pretty much done by the time Dad was in his twenties. But what was Dad supposed to be responsible for?”

  “The bank,” Barney said simply, as if that said it all.

  “The bank you ran?” Des asked.

  “Yes. Your father was supposed to take over from our dad. Fritz majored in finance in college, and he worked summers in the bank from the time he was fifteen. We both did.”

  “I thought he did summer stage,” Des said.

  “That was after work, on weekends, and whatever vacation days he could talk Dad out of. The theater was supposed to be his recreation. The bank was supposed to be his future.” Barney leaned back against the counter. “Then he met Nora, and we all know where that led.”

  “So you pitched in when he stepped out,” Cara noted.

  Barney nodded. “I’d always sort of resented the fact that it had been taken for granted that Fritz would take over the bank, instead of me. After all, I was the older Hudson child. But back then, men ruled. I worked for years in that bank and I knew everything about running it by the time my dad passed away. There were some who thought a woman wasn’t up to the job. And it was a lot of responsibility, taking care of the money and the investments of so many people. You have their lives, their futures in your hands. It weighs heavily when you stop to think about it.” Barney forced a smile. “And when you’re in that position, you think about it most of the time, especially when the world was changing as it had, the financial world so uncertain. It’s quite daunting, having that many people looking to you to always make the right decisions. Especially when you personally know everyone who has accounts with your bank.”

  “Sounds like you didn’t like it very much,” Allie observed.

  “Actually, I loved it. I’d give anything to . . .” Barney shook her head as if to shake off the unfinished thought, then straightened her back. “Now, do we want to look for photo albums before dinner?”

  “I’d rather look for the record player and that box of old records you told us about, Barney. You think they’re in the attic?” Des went to the sink and rinsed her fingers of the stickiness from the honey in the granola.

  “That’s as good a place to start as any.” Barney nodded. “Anytime I can’t find something, I look there first.”

  The four women trudged up to the third floor, stopping at the landing at the very top. There were two doors on the right and one on the left.

  “Where to, Barney?” Cara asked.

  “The two rooms on the right were the maids’ rooms, back when the house was first built. They’re small, and these days there’s nothing except furniture and some things in the closets. The door on the left leads into the attic, and the records and the player would be somewhere in there.” Barney headed for the left and opened the door. “Take care walking around in here. I wasn’t kidding when I said neither Mother nor my grandmother ever tossed out a thing.”

  The girls followed Barney.

  “There’s a light switch here somewhere. . . . Ah, here it is.” Barney turned on the light.

  “Wow,” Cara exclaimed.

  “I never saw so much . . . stuff.” Des looked around as if in awe.

  “Who knew I came from a long line of hoarders?” Allie murmured. She touched the lid of a nearby trunk. “What’s in here?”

  Barney turned to look. “Could be anything. There must be twenty trunks like that up here, maybe more. Some hold clothes, some old letters and personal items. There’s one that’s packed with old dishes that belonged to my great-grandmother. My grandmother hated them and never used them, but because they belonged to her mother-in-law, she couldn’t part with them. I’ll let the three of you fight over them someday. God knows I have no use for them.” Barney made her way through a maze of boxes. “All the newer stuff is over here. The records might be in one of these boxes, so let’s start here.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, boxes were open, the contents briefly scrutinized, then closed up again while the search for the records went on, punctuated by the occasional sneeze as dusty containers were handled.

  “You know, it’d be a good idea to start marking these boxes as we go through them. There are things we’re not looking for right now that we might be interested in later.” Des stood and brushed her dusty hands on her pants. “I’ll run downstairs and grab a pen.”

  Ten minutes later, they were still looking.

  “Any chance Dad took the records with him?” Allie asked.

  “No. They were still here when I . . . Oh, here. Here’s the record player.” Barney lifted a light-blue and white case from one of the eaves. She set it on a trunk and unlatched the lid. “Ever see one of these?” She held up a small plastic disklike thing.

  Cara and Allie both shook their heads.

  “This is an insert that you’d put inside one of the forty-five singles so they’d play.”

  Both women stared at her blankly.

  “The center piece here on the record player is tall and thin so you could stack more than one record on at a time. The albums had a small hole in the center and they�
�d fit right over this center piece. But the single recordings had a larger hole, so you’d slip one of these into the hole so it’d fit over the center thing there and you could play the record.” Barney looked from Allie to Cara, then to Des, who had joined them, pen in hand. “I guess I’ll have to show you once we find the box with the records. Remember, they’re in a red leather case, not a cardboard box.”

  “I just saw a flash of something red.” Allie looked around. “There, Des, right behind you. Under that coat box.”

  Des moved the box and found the red leather case. She opened it and looked inside. “This is it. The mother lode.” She grinned. “Let’s go downstairs and play some of them.”

  Barney snapped off the light and closed the door behind them as they all made their way downstairs.

  “I can’t wait to see what’s in here,” Des was saying as she went down the steps.

  “I can’t wait to see what else is in the attic,” Cara said. “Did you notice the old lamps? And all those picture frames leaning against the back wall? I really want to get a look at those.”

  “Photographs or paintings?” Des asked.

  “I couldn’t tell,” Cara replied. “I’ll check them out later.”

  “I wanted to look in the old armoires. I’ll bet there are some funky old clothes up there.” Allie reached the first floor ahead of the others. “Nikki would have a ball up there. She always loved playing dress-up.”

  “Well, I don’t know how many of the clothes qualify as funky, but there are definitely a lot of them. You’re welcome to go up and look around whenever you like, and when Nikki is here, she’s welcome to dress up in anything that strikes her fancy. Like I said, this is your family home as much as it is mine,” Barney told them. “In the meantime, let’s go into the kitchen and we’ll see how these old records sound while we fix dinner.”

  They opened the red case on the table and each took a handful of the black vinyl disks.

  “Barney, you were right. Dad really was an Elvis fan.” Cara held up a half dozen records.

  “Well, actually, the Elvis records were mine,” Barney admitted. “I was a huge fan.” She chuckled. “Mother was appalled, so we told her the records were Fritz’s. Somehow it didn’t offend her quite as much if her son bought them. Totally unacceptable for her daughter.”

  “Why? What was the big deal?” Des asked.

  “Oh, you know, in the early days, rock and roll was considered the devil’s music.” When the girls laughed, Barney told them, “Seriously. There were admonitions from church pulpits all across the country warning parents not to let their kids listen to it. My mother took that all to heart—the pastor of our church here was certain the apocalypse was near—but my father thought it was all rubbish.” Barney ran her finger under the arm of the record player. “Good. The needle is still there. Let’s hope it still works.” She reached for one of the records. “I can still hear my dad. ‘For God’s sake, Evelyn, it’s just music.’ She never agreed with him, but she let Fritz buy whatever he, or whatever I, wanted.” She glanced at the record she’d picked without reading the label. “Not Elvis, but still, an oldie and a goodie.”

  She put the record on the machine and they all watched as the handle automatically lowered. A few seconds later, the room was filled with the sound of guitars strumming. Barney reached over and lowered the volume and looked up at her nieces.

  “The Everly Brothers. ‘Bye Bye Love.’ ” She moved slightly to the music. “Oh my, but those boys could sing.”

  The girls sat at the table going through the records and making stacks of the ones they wanted to hear. Barney started dinner, singing along with every one of the songs.

  Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Chuck Berry, the Platters, Ray Charles, and lots and lots of Elvis. Some of the records were badly scratched from having been played so many times, but Fritz Hudson’s daughters sat and listened to the songs their father and their aunt had loved once upon a time.

  “Dad always loved music,” Cara recalled. “We had a little of everything in our house—show tunes, opera, classical, rock, but I don’t remember any of these. Which were his favorites?”

  “He liked the ballads best,” Barney told them. “The more romantic, the better. Your father was a big hit with the girls back then. Girls were always calling the house, and my mother, of course, disapproved of any girl forward enough to call a boy on the phone. So she made it a point to answer the phone in the evening, and anytime a girl called Fritz, Mother wrote down the girl’s name.”

  “Why?” Allie asked.

  “So that she could tell my brother that he wasn’t to go out with that girl.” Barney laughed and shook her head. “Oh, how times have changed.”

  “So did he ever go out with any of the girls who were blacklisted?” Cara began to set the table.

  “Of course he did. I imagine that by the time he graduated high school, he’d been out with all of them at least once. Like I said, Hidden Falls is a small town: There were only so many girls to go around.” Barney took fresh vegetables and a head of lettuce from the refrigerator and placed them on the counter.

  “I’ll do the salad,” Des said.

  “You know, the yearbook photos don’t do him justice, but your father was quite the stud in those days.” When Allie snickered, Barney turned to her with twinkling eyes. “Yes, I said ‘stud.’ He and Pete always had pretty girls on their arms.”

  “What about Pete’s older brother?” Des asked. “Gil.”

  “What about him?” Barney opened the oven and slid in the marinated chicken she’d prepared earlier in the day.

  “Did he always have a pretty girl on his arm, too?”

  A slow smile on her lips, Barney replied softly, “Every day.”

  By the time dinner had ended and the cleanup was completed, they’d played all the records, some familiar, as they’d heard them on classic rock radio stations, other songs and artists completely new to the girls. One at a time, Barney taught them each how to jitterbug, and before long, they were paired off, Barney and Des, Allie and Cara, dancing to fifties rock and laughing so hard their faces hurt. By the time they called it a night, they knew all the words to “Blue Suede Shoes” and sang the chorus as they danced up the stairs to bed.

  Alone in her room, Cara tried to put together what she’d actually learned about her father. There were the little things: that as a young man, he’d liked girls and girls had liked him, too. He loved the popular music of the day, romantic ballads at the top of that list. He was good at sports—baseball, track—and had developed his love of the stage apparently by accident as a high school sophomore.

  Cara dressed for bed, and over the next few minutes heard the rest of the house settle as well. She opened her bedroom door and peered down the hall. There were no lights coming from under the doors of either of her sisters’ rooms. Barney had stayed downstairs to read in the library, and the house was very still. Cara tiptoed down the hall and around the corner, then paused at the door to her father’s old bedroom. As quietly as she could, she turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped inside, her fingers searching the wall until she found the light switch. There was the heavy mahogany bed covered with a blue chenille spread, a tall chest, a dresser, two side tables, an old pine desk with a scratch-covered top, and an overstuffed blue and white plaid chair. There was nothing in the closet other than a few wooden hangers and a long-forgotten blue tie that had fallen to the floor. The built-in bookshelves held nothing but dust.

  She moved the chair a little closer to the window and stared out at the dark night. The promise of financial reward aside, Cara had made this trip hoping to regain that feeling of closeness she and her father had shared, that feeling that had been shattered when she learned the truth about his life. She’d hoped to find him there, in that house, through things he’d been surrounded by, things he’d loved, and in finding him, she hoped to understand some of the choices he’d made, and so far, she wasn’t sure she’d done that.r />
  Not that the past week hadn’t been without its jaw-dropping surprises: mainly that Fritz had an older sister that he’d never thought to mention, and that his story about having had a terrible childhood that kept him from talking about his family was, as Barney had stated, bull. Barney’s version—that she wouldn’t welcome him back until he did the right thing as far as his two wives were concerned—was clearly more believable. If his life in Hidden Falls had been so horrible, why would he have insisted that his three beloved daughters go there, stay there for an indefinite period of time? Learning that he’d walked away from his position at the bank had raised more questions than answers.

  Walking the floors of this house, climbing the steps he’d climbed so many times, running down the path through the woods that he’d surely taken to get to the falls, sitting here in the quiet of a cold night, in his chair, looking out his window at the view he saw every day—those things brought her closer to the man she was still discovering. But there were still so many questions to be answered before she’d understand how and why he’d become the man who’d tell so many lies to people he so clearly loved.

  Cara returned to her room and crawled into bed. Earlier she’d borrowed an old worn copy of Gulliver’s Travels from the downstairs library, a story her father had read to her many times. Bunching up the pillows against the headboard, she began to read, but she lost interest after the first ten pages. What she’d loved about it as a child wasn’t so much the story, but the time she had shared with her father as he read to her, the sense of adventure he infused in every page. She turned off the light and settled into the warmth of the quilt, wondering where else she might look to find the real Fritz Hudson.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Cara had barely gotten out of the shower when she heard the doorbell ring. It was eight twenty-five on a Saturday morning and she’d finished an early run, stretched before and after, and she still hadn’t been able to get downstairs before Joe Domanski arrived for breakfast. She’d hoped he’d find her cool, calm, and relaxed when he got there, but no. Now she’d have to rush to dry her hair, and unless she wanted to make it to the kitchen before he finished and left, she’d have to forego makeup.