Margot's War

by Ty Knoy

  The sergeant, who hadn’t seemed to take in what Nick had said, began shouting. “That was the trouble with Vietnam! We were getting our asses shot off, and we weren’t saving them from anything. We never had a chance to save anybody from anything. There was nothing for them to be grateful for!”

  Nick looked around. Behind the kitchen doors, the sounds of dishes being put away had stopped. Out through the archway, Priscilla had raised her head and was looking in their direction.

  “I know what you’re saying, Bill,” Nick said, hushing his voice, gesturing with his palms to suggest to the sergeant that he do the same. He reached, patted the man’s shoulder, and looked around the room and back. “I appreciate you. I volunteered for Vietnam, but I know I never saw anything like what you saw. No one ever shot at me, as far as I know, and I never shot at anyone. I was both thankful and disappointed. I got the Overseas Service Ribbon, the only thing I have that my father didn’t have, so there was at least that much. I was kind of hoping for a Purple Heart—just for something minor, of course.”

  “My mother,” the sergeant said, starting to raise his voice again, “never took off her wedding rings. Never. Not once. Once she got a bumble bee sting that made her hand swell, and they had to cut the rings off in the hospital, but a week or so later, she had them soldered and had them right back on. Now, a lot of these women—and most of them are married, too—don’t even wear their rings. They don’t, as a rule, go to church either.”

  “I know what you mean,” Nick said. He patted Bill on the shoulder again, shushing him while trying to remember if his own mother ever had her rings off. He didn’t remember one way or the other.

  The sergeant quieted. “These women sort of hang together and play games. They’re like a pack of cats. They’ll get hold of a man, either one of their own husbands or someone else’s husband—they don’t care—and put him through the wringer.”

  While Nick wondered what that wringer was, he glanced toward the reception desk, hoping Mrs. Gordon would show up. But only Priscilla was there. Mrs. Gordon’s last name being the same as Bill’s surely is just a coincidence, he thought.

  “Say,” Nick said, hoping to engineer a change in subject, “you’re the expert. I want to ask you something about football and a thing that made a permanent dent in me: I screwed up on the last play in the last game in high school. Last game of my life. The gaffe probably caused it to be the last game of my life.”

  The sergeant abruptly returned to normal posture and started breathing more slowly.

  “We were on their thirty, out of timeouts with eleven seconds left and down by one. Our kicker hadn’t made a field goal from that distance all year. There was time for one more play to get closer, if we could also get out of bounds to stop the clock and get the kicker on the field. The play that was called had my number. I was to come out of the backfield on a route straight down and then cut to the sideline, catching the pass over my right shoulder and then run out.

  “I didn’t like catching from my right side, and I was afraid I would drop the pass. I did not want to be remembered as the goat that dropped the pass, so I cut two strides off so I could catch the ball on my left side. I did catch the ball, but I came back on my feet facing the wrong way, and my momentum was in the wrong direction. I was tackled in bounds, and the game ended.”

  “Umm.”

  “But I didn’t drop the ball.”

  “The age-old conflict in team sports: the needs of the team and the needs of the individual,” Big Bill said. “I can’t help you much on that. Offensive linemen are never in the spotlight, as your father probably told you.”

  “That five- or six-second moment was fifty-odd years ago this month,” Nick said. “And there’s seldom been a day since that I haven’t thought about it. We didn’t get into the playoffs; guys who might have gotten college rides were never called. So they may be digging ditches today instead of having become—who knows—teachers, lawyers, doctors.”

  “You know,” the sergeant said, “a lot of men—and women too—have an incident early in their life that forms them, determines who they become. My line of work has put me face-to-face with more than a few. Sometimes it’s very sad. It’s called ‘a cross to bear,’ and sometimes those crosses are heavy.”

  “Or it can go the other way and—” Nick interjected.

  “Yes,” the sergeant said, “but those are the ones I never see. You don’t seem to have been warped.” He took up his cup and stood. “I’m getting a warm-up,” he said. “Would you like a cup now, Nick?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Bill filled his cup and sat again.

  Nick said, “I do have one good friend, a lifelong friend out of—or in spite of—my football debacle. He threw the pass. Today he has the funeral home in our town. A friend from grade school right on through high school I can call anytime, day or night, for anything.” Nick spelled the last name, and the sergeant pulled out a notepad and wrote it down. “If I really go crazy here, you could call him. Alan Maarten, president of Maarten Funeral Homes.” Nick gave him the phone number.

  “Okay.”

  “Just don’t call my mother.”

  “I don’t think there will be a need, but if so, I’ll call him. Let him take it from there. You’ll be okay, though.”

  “Alan and I have talked about the way I caught the pass. He said that it could have worked out, even if it was against the coach’s orders.”

  The sergeant threw his head over to the side and frowned. “So you haven’t had to keep it inside you, all to yourself all these years. Odd that it bugs you so much.”

  “Well, now I’ve confessed—to a policeman. Maybe that will help.”

  “I’m Catholic. Priests take our confessions.”

  “Calvinist. No such option for me. I guess you’ll just have to do, Bill. Want to give me a penance or an indulgence—or whatever they call it?

  “Sure. Put ten dollars in the Policemen’s Ball jar, and disobey the coach’s orders no more.” The sergeant gave the sign of the cross. “And that cheerleader you had your eye on? She wouldn’t have understood the play anyway, so you couldn’t have had any trouble with her. Was that Gayle?”

  “No, I never went on a date in high school.”

  The sergeant snickered. “Were your parents worried about you?”

  “I broke down in my third year in college, however. I stumbled onto Gayle, who, like me, had resolved that she was in college to make herself a career, not to get drunk and—you know. She wanted to be an opera singer, and she was quite good. Anyway, this was all before birth control pills, or just at the beginning of birth control pills, and our churches were against them so that helped keep a lid on things. In the moment we first met, we sort of started almost by spitting at each other. Just over two years later—after my government-sponsored tour of Southeast Asia—we married.”

  “Twice, you said?”

  “Yes, twice. We were halfway engaged while I was in the army. That was way before free long-distance phone calls. About fifty pounds of letters, both mine and hers, are still in a drawer in our house. I’ve been reading through them these last few weeks. I was faithful to her—Waynesville, Missouri; Killeen, Texas; Saigon—I went through all those places and did nothing.”

  “Just like in those old black-and-white movies where everyone is a virgin.”

  “She was in New York most of the time I was in the army. And by the time I was out, birth control pills were everywhere, and we talked about it. But then we said, well, we’ve come this far, so we might as well go the whole distance. So we didn’t avail ourselves—never went to bed together until we were married.”

  “Wow,” Bill said.

  “Well, almost. Actually, we missed it by a couple of days.” That was another thing Nick had never told anyone before.

  “And Mrs. Margolis’s mother, the Kendall woman? How does she figure
into all of this?”

  Nick was startled. He thought he had the sergeant eating out of his hand. “That’s a long story.”

  “I suppose. Maybe she will turn back the clock for you, but it won’t turn this country back into what it used to be. You’re what? Fifteen or twenty years younger than Mrs. Kendall?”

  “Sixteen years. We’re both prewar.”

  The sergeant laughed out loud. “You just made it, didn’t you? If you had been born a day later, you wouldn’t have been in her generation.”

  Nick suppressed a flash of anger but then had to laugh also.

  “I’m sorry,” the sergeant said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s okay. I kind of know it’s a long shot.”

  “Listen to me though, Nick,” the sergeant said firmly as he straightened up in his chair. He put his elbows on the table and held his hands out in front, as if he were in a pulpit. “I know I’m ten years younger than you, and I was never a CEO, but I have some wisdom here, thanks to my mother. Mrs. Kendall, if she’s sixteen years older, was a teenage girl during the war. My mother is of that age, and she has told me—not directly, but told my sister, who then told me—that she cried and prayed night after night before the radio during the Battle of the Bulge, and it turned her into a different person. You may remember the Battle of the Bulge as the first thing you ever remembered, but I’ll guarantee you that doesn’t put you into the gut-wrenching, head-warping category my mother was in. I don’t know Mrs. Margolis’s mother, but—”

  “Everyone has a foible,” Nick interjected. “Hers is ambition. Natural-born talent and natural-born ambition.”

  “You can be sure there’s some suffering mixed in there.”

  They sat for a moment in silence.

  “Well,” the sergeant said, “you’d better keep your fingers crossed is all I’m saying. Bumped into her on the ski slope after having her daughters in ski class?”

  “No. The snow had melted by the time I met her. And the girls weren’t with her then. After the snow melted, she and I happened to move into houses next door to each other. She was angling to rev her career back up so she could leave her husband, I think. I had no idea she was married. All just a coincidence. She played piano a lot at night. I think she had some bad luck on the way up when she was younger and maybe a raw deal.”

  “Are you angry for her?” the sergeant asked.

  “Perhaps. I’ve never thought of it that way, but that could be.”

  “Just so you’re not angry with her.”

  “No, no, nothing like that. A man who loves piano music is easily won over by a woman with a Steinway grand. Believe me, those are instruments of seduction. If a piano girl is good, and she wants you in her bed, she’ll have you there before long. Just like those sirens in Homer’s Odyssey.”

  “Sirens?”

  “Not your kind of sirens. Those were female singers out on the islands in the sea.”

  “I remember that!” the sergeant said triumphantly. “I told you I graduated. Anyway, I never had the pleasure—with a pianist, I mean.”

  “Ah, but if you watched her fingers while you listened to her play the Eighteenth Variation, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43, by Rachmaninoff, you’d be toast.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “You probably do, just not by name. When she switches into that Chopin, A-flat Etude, in the last four or five bars, it’s as if her blouse is falling down off her shoulders—”

  “Now you’re making my heart jump.”

  “She was fiery when she didn’t get her way, though—less than homicidal, but maybe not much less.”

  “That sounds like quite a story, but if it’s less than homicidal, it doesn’t come under the heading of police business, and I have to get out of here.” The sergeant stood and took his hat from the table. Nick stood also.

  “You be careful, now,” the sergeant said. “You may be in for some trouble.” He turned his eyes to the direction of Priscilla, and Nick did also. “I’d say they especially like rich guys.”

  “I’m one of the poor Rohloffsens.”

  “Well, to them, you can be sure Rohloffsens is Rohloffsens.”

  Another woman was standing behind the glass with Priscilla, who was still seated.

  The sergeant reached into his shirt pocket and handed Nick a card. “Call if I can be of help. I’ll be off in the middle of the afternoon, if you are not otherwise occupied—and maybe disappointed—and need to have a beer or something. And thanks for remembering me on the football field. You’re the first one in a few years. No one remembers linemen.”

  “You’re quite an interrogator. You were a detective for a while?”

  “Yes. Captain.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s a long story. Watch out for the sirens, Nick. Even you rich guys can bite off more than you can chew.”

  CHAPTER 3

  NICK WATCHED BIG Bill stride to the reception area, hat under arm. The new woman, a blonde, and the sergeant came to attention before each other and exchanged salutes. Priscilla stood, and the three of them talked quietly, with Big Bill doing most of the talking.

  Nick sat. After a few minutes, the sergeant left, Priscilla sat, and the newly arrived woman clicked toward Nick. He stood.

  “Mr. Rohloffsen, I’m Lillian Gordon,” she said.

  “In the military, were you, Lillian?” Nick asked.

  She smiled. “Yes, but I didn’t make a career of it. I was in Vietnam also. Please just call me Lille.”

  “Okay. I didn’t see you there, Lille.”

  She laughed. “If you had, you’d have that Purple Heart Bill that your red-blooded heart desires.”

  Nick, immediately sure Mrs. Gordon was quick-witted, got an impression that she also was mischievous, that she would enjoy making him uncomfortable. An odd foible for a nurse, he mused. But then she isn’t a practicing nurse anymore. “I don’t need the Purple Heart now,” Nick replied. “My father died eight years ago.” He pulled out the chair where Big Bill had been. “Can I get you coffee or anything?”

  “No thanks. Oh, look! Bill took his coffee cup. He usually leaves it for one of us to pick up.”

  She sat and looked up at Nick. “But you still have your mother, don’t you?”

  “Yes, as long as I wasn’t hurt in the war. That was her thing.”

  “Maybe a Purple Heart wasn’t important to your father either. Maybe only to you.” She leaned forward and put her arms on the table. “I have talked to Camille, Mrs. Kendall’s daughter. She can’t be here before noon. She asked me to keep you occupied and entertained. She wants to have you for lunch. Sergeant Gordon said you gave him a phone number of a friend up in Michigan that we can call, and he gave the number to Priscilla and me.” She paused. “Do you have children, Mr. Rohloffsen?

  “Yes. Two daughters. One in Grosse Pointe and one in New York. My Grosse Pointe daughter is eight months pregnant with our first grandchild. I thought my wife would hold on until the grandchild was born, but she didn’t.”

  “That would have been nice for both of you.

  “I was sort of counting on it, but it didn’t work out.”

  “Is it a boy or a girl, or don’t you know?

  “They don’t know. They want to be surprised.”

  “I see.”

  “Uh, and Mrs. Kendall? May I see her soon ?”

  “Well, Mr. Rohloffsen, you have arrived unannounced. It would have been awkward if you had found her in robe and curlers. And there’s still the matter of the guardianship. That isn’t going to be any problem, but we still have to wait for Mrs. Margolis.”

  “I see.”

  “Mrs. Kendall wasn’t down here this morning anyway.”

  “I shouldn’t have tried that,” Nick said. “I apologize. I’ve been doing some silly things lately.”


  Mrs. Gordon smiled—consolingly, it seemed to Nick. “You’ve had a tough two or three months.” She paused. “So you’re a distant cousin of Victor Rohloffsen, and he and Mrs. Kendall were”—Mrs. Gordon raised her eyebrows—“acquaintances?”

  “They were piano majors here in the last days of the war. I have no idea whether their acquaintanceship was casual or”—Nick smiled—“noncasual.”

  “I haven’t heard her play. I didn’t know she did until just now.”

  “She once had a Steinway grand, much like the one out there,” Nick said, pointing to the vestibule.

  “I’ve seen her down here, listening to recitals,” Mrs. Gordon said. “But I’ve never seen her play. Faculty members or grad students come out, and we push the piano out here into the dining room and arrange chairs around. In fact, I believe there’s a recital today: ‘Pictures at an Exhibition.’”

  Nick’s heart skipped a beat, but he caught himself. “Really,” he said. “I once heard Mrs. Kendall play it, if she’s who I think she is. That’s one of my favorite pieces. What a coincidence!”

  “Camille usually comes to the recitals also.”

  “Mussorgsky wrote it for piano. It was later transcribed by Ravel for orchestra.”

  She looked at him blankly for a moment then said, “It’s a faculty member playing today. Helen Brown.”

  Nick nodded and asked with trepidation, “What level of care is Mrs. Kendall?”

  Lille paused for a moment as if for a thought, causing Nick alarm, but said, “She came in as independent and that was never changed. She came over here in a cab, all on her own, in February, sat right down and filled out the paperwork. I believe Camille knew nothing about it.”

  Nick smiled. “That sounds like her.” He recalled the strange way she had come to live next door to him many years before.