by Ty Knoy
“You’re not really poor, are you, Mr. Rohloffsen?”
Nick smiled. This blonde has a nurse’s knack for getting right to the point of things. “That’s kind of a family joke, really, but with some truth in it. I’ll tell you how it came about, if you really want to know, but could we go outside? Sit on the patio? It’s a beautiful day.”
“Let’s go out to the trees. There are benches. The patio will get noisy as lunch begins. Let me get my purse. Would you like something to drink?”
“I’ll get water for us, if that’s what you would like,” Nick said. “And in case you don’t already know, I’ll also tell you how it happened that Victor Rohloffsen came to dwell among us earthlings.”
“Rohloffsen Brass was founded in the 1890s by two brothers,” Nick began as he and Mrs. Gordon stepped off the patio. “The older was my great-great-grandfather. The younger became wealthier and the patriarch of the rich Rohloffsens. He was Victor’s grandfather. The Rohloffsen brothers were in the same generation of Americans as Henry Ford, the Dodge brothers, the Wright brothers.”
“A distinguished group,” Mrs. Gordon said. She took Nick’s arm as they came to landscaping timbers and terraces planted with evergreen shrubs. Nick went on that as youngsters both brothers played brass horns and that they worked together on duets with original improvisation. Nick and Lille came to grass and level ground. She kept his arm, and Nick asked, “You aren’t by any chance married to Big Bill, are you?”
Lille laughed. “No, the name is just a coincidence.”
“Good. Then he won’t beat me up. Do you know why he was demoted?’
“He became too impatient with a pedophile suspect he was questioning. He’s retiring at the end of the year. Still gets a captain’s pension, according to the paper.”
She let Nick’s arm go, and he set the cups on the arm of a bench under a maple and slid out of his blazer. She took it out of his hands, folded it, and draped it over the back of an adjacent bench as Nick, with a paper napkin, swept red leaves and dried bird mess off the seat. The patio, the building, and the porte cochère were up a green hillside. On the road behind—a road that led to the stadium—traffic had increased.
Nick went on that the Rohloffsen brothers began their working years not as musicians but as apprentices in an uncle’s marine repair yard on Lake Michigan while playing nights and weekends in the city band and in dance halls. “The boys were tinkerers. And in their spare time, with machines and casting equipment in the steam engine shop, they took to modifying their horns, making handier valves, more resonant tubing, that sort of thing.
“Both married singers, girls they met on the bandstand or on stages, and those wives helped with the horns’ tone qualities and variations. The younger Rohloffsen did the inventing and took out patents. The brothers soon began making parts and installing them on instruments brought to them, and then they began producing components for horn manufacturers. They turned their uncle’s shop into a parts factory.”
“What did the uncle think of that?” Mrs. Gordon asked.
“They bought him out and kept him on as a board member. It all chugged along as a nice little business for a few years, but then along came the automobile era. Early car builders wanted brass windshield frames, headlights, and radiators, and orders started pouring in from Detroit. With my great-grandfather arranging stock-and-bond offerings in New York, the brothers built new factories and bought others. The fortunes multiplied, the wives got big lakeshore houses, minks, diamonds, cars, and chauffeurs. Then World War I began, and the fortunes doubled or triple again as the firm was called upon to turn out millions upon millions of ammunition casings.”
Nick paused and shrugged. “That’s how it all began.”
Lille nodded then asked, “So how did you end up as a poor Rohloffsen?”
“Wrong great-grandfather.” Nick smiled. “My great-grandfather was the scrambler for capital, but as a means of preserving dollars, as opposed to raising them, he talked his brother into taking stock options, rather than cash, as payment for his patents. Over the years, as the stock grew in price, split, grew in price again, split again, and so on and on, both brothers’ stock became worth zillions, but little brother’s options became worth extra gazillions.”
Lille, who was frowning, slowly nodded. “I kind of get it.”
“I’m not in the gazillion side of the family.”
“You poor thing! Maybe in your next life you’ll be on the rich side.”
“There were some resentments,” Nick said, “but there’s also something huge for the poor Rohloffsens to be thankful for.”
“Oh good.”
“Three of the six rich-side descendants died during World War I.”
“Really?” She gasped and put her hand to her mouth. “All in combat?”
“Just one in combat. The first and oldest was a warplane pilot who was shot down and killed in France in 1917. The second was an army nurse. She was murdered in Paris and so was only indirectly a war casualty. But had it not been for the war, she wouldn’t have been there to be murdered. The third to die was a teenage girl, back home. She was a victim of the great flu epidemic.”
“She could be considered a war casualty,” Lille quickly said. “The flu wouldn’t have spread so far and fast if soldiers hadn’t been hauled all over.”
“The family doesn’t talk much about this, but the original rich-side Mrs. Rohloffsen, who had been one of the singers, had a mental breakdown. As her children died, she became sure that God was punishing her and her husband for their financial success. She wanted to give away all the money.”
“It must have been awful.”
“She was briefly institutionalized.” Nick paused. “She died before I was born, so I don’t know much.” After a moment, he went on. “Arthur Rohloffsen, who became Victor’s father, was the only other son in that family. He also was a warplane pilot, but he was younger and got in later. He came through unscathed.”
“Did any poor Rohloffsens die?”
“No. My own grandfather also was a pilot. In fact, he and Arthur went in together. My grandfather’s plane was shot up over the Somme in the summer of 1918. He managed a crash landing, fortunately on the Allied side of the trenches, and was sent home in the fall with his leg still in a cast. He married his school sweetheart at about Christmastime. My father was born the next fall.”
Lille looked around for her water, but she had knocked it off the bench’s arm without noticing. “You can have mine,” Nick said. “I haven’t drunk from it.” He handed it over.
She took a drink and resumed her pose, then shifted on her seat again and glanced down to her purse on the grass. “I have my cell phone. I can call for a pitcher.”
“I’m okay,” Nick said.
She brought her legs and feet up under her skirt, knees pointing toward Nick, and rested her elbow on the bench back. A breeze came up and fluttered her hair and the front of her blouse.
“I’ve had a lot of luck,” Nick said. “It was lucky for me that Grandpa’s plane didn’t crash on the German side and also lucky for me that it was his leg, rather than his neck, that broke.
Lil smiled.
“But now get this piece of luck. When the war ended, Arthur got himself discharged in France, and rather than come home to be with his parents and what was left of his family, he stayed on in Europe. My grandparents were appalled, as were Arthur’s own parents, but good old Arthur was whooping it up in Gay Paree.
“Arthur’s crassness, however, was eventually a direct cause of my very existence. In Paris, Arthur made the acquaintance of a young pianist who had come over from Geneva during the war—Gotha bombers and Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz be damned—to study with a famous teacher. She and Arthur met, and in the winter after the war ended, she took him home skiing in the Alps. They married. Her real name was Monique, but Arthur called her Molly. He brought her hom
e with him in 1919 and settled into a job at Rohloffsen.”
Nick went on to say that Arthur and Molly had three children, the youngest being Victor, who was born in 1925. “The same year as Katherine Anne Kendall.
“Some ten years later, Victor became president of the Rohloffsen firm, just in time for the stock market crash of 1929. Rohloffsen stock took a big hit, and two years later, it hadn’t recovered. So Arthur resigned.”
“Forced out?”
“I never asked. Molly had become restless. For a long while, she had thought that Michigan skiing wasn’t up to her Alpine standards. Arthur needed a new place to go, so he bought a depressed mining town in Colorado and began building a lodge, clearing slopes, and putting in chairlifts, converting the Victoriana village into a ski resort.”
“And this, I take it, is where you taught Camille and her sister to ski.”
“Right you are,” Nick said, “thirty years later, of course. I, and they also, had to get born first. And I didn’t teach them to ski. They already knew how. I was hired to introduce them to the long, high lifts. But long before all of that, Arthur’s resort served the purpose of bringing my parents into each other’s arms.”
“Once again, lucky you.”
“My parents didn’t meet as skiers, however. The ski part of Arthur’s new enterprise was an immediate success. He knew a lot of rich people, and rich people like to have places to be rich together, so there was never a shortage of skiers, investors, and purchasers of lots and condos. But summers were a problem—no snow, therefore, no skiers, therefore, empty lodge rooms, empty condos, empty restaurants. So Arthur and Molly—mostly Molly—got the idea to found a summer music camp to fill up those empty rooms in the warm months. The camp’s first year was in the summer of 1936—the year Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland.
“Victor, who was eleven by this time, famously won a youth piano contest in the East and got to play a concerto with an orchestra. There were rave reviews, and Victor was anointed a wunderkind in the eastern papers. Molly, through her ad agency, shamelessly put his likeness and a small biography of him on brochures for the camp. Full scholarships were offered for the first year, and top music teachers from colleges were recruited for the summer.
“One of the brochures, which were sprinkled liberally among the conservatories and colleges in the East, landed on the desk of a professor of philosophy at West Chester College, near Philadelphia. The professor and his wife had a daughter, sixteen at the time, who was a very promising pianist.”
“Your mother!” Lille exclaimed. “Was Mrs. Kendall—the future Mrs. Kendall, I mean—there also?”
“No, no. The camp was only for high school juniors and seniors. I may have sat on her lap when I was only five. Not there, but on Mackinac Island.
“My father also applied for that first-year camp, albeit under duress. He was a lukewarm brass player who was in his school band but more interested in football. He went to the camp only because of the promise of a Ford of his very own if he went and did well.”
Nick went on to say that, many years later, his grandmother told him his father had come back from the camp playing coronet much, much better, but that he hadn’t told her or his father about the other thing that happened to him. “No sooner was he back, my grandmother said, than they started seeing letters postmarked West Chester, Pennsylvania. And on the first phone bill after camp were charges for toll calls to West Chester.
“Early on the day after Christmas, my father and a high school buddy took off in the Ford. There was no Pennsylvania Turnpike then, or maybe there were just pieces of it, so it was a long trip. It all turned out all right—they didn’t wreck or anything—except that the door on the car was bent.
“The Ford was a Bonnie and Clyde–type car. Did you see the movie?”
“No, but I get the idea,” Lille said.
“My dad’s car was a model year earlier, a 1933, on which the front doors opened backward.”
Lille frowned.
“Also known as suicide doors,” Nick said. “Somehow my father or his buddy or one of the girls inadvertently opened the right door latch while the car was underway, and wind caught the door and bent it back. It would no longer close. They couldn’t get it repaired fast enough to get back for the start of school, so they drove home with the door strapped shut, at least as far shut as it would go, with rags stuffed into the crack.
“There’s a photograph of my father and mother doing a Bonnie-and-Clyde pose. Dad never said they did that intentionally, but that’s what it looks like to me. He’s at the front of the car with his foot on the bumper and his arm around her. No guns, no cigars, though. There’s snow on the ground, but they aren’t wearing coats.”
“How romantic.”
“My father always kept that picture in a frame on his desk—even after he became CEO.”
“With the bent door?”
“No. Either the picture was taken before the accident or it was taken from the left side. She caused the accident, you know. He married her anyway, so it was true love. They married the following summer, about as soon as they were out of high school. They went up to Niagara Falls for a few days, back down to West Chester to gather a few things, then back to Michigan to music school for her and freshman football for him.”
A cell phone’s ringtone started up. Lille reached into her purse, and Nick rose and walked several paces into the trees, toward the noisy road.
Soon she came walking after him. “That was Mrs. Margolis,” she said. “She’s still tied up. They have a drugstore down near the campus, and things are rather hectic there on football weekends. She says if you’ll just be patient, she’ll get with you in time for lunch.”
Nick nodded. “I’m okay.”
“I need to go in for a few minutes. I’ll leave my purse here with you.”
“Okay. If you’re seeing Mrs. Kendall, ask her if she’s been to Mackinac Island, and let me know what she says.”
“All right.”
“If she’s the right person, she’ll know. It’s a resort island in northern Michigan where there are no cars—all horses and carriages, and no McDonald’s or anything like that either. It’s an eighteen nineties atmosphere.”
“Sounds like a fun place.”
CHAPTER 4
NICK LIFTED MRS. Gordon’s purse to the bench, placed his elbow on it, and hooked his thumb onto the strap. Clever of her, Nick mused, to put it in my care. Now he could leave.
Nick’s parents had taken him and his sister to a Rohloffsen family reunion, the first such gathering after the Second World War and the first time in several years that everyone in the family had been back home.
The fête had been at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.
Victor had been there with a young woman whose dark hair was drawn back into a bun and—Nick remembered this well—whose fingernails were short and either unpainted or painted with clear polish, like his mother’s nails. He thought he remembered the young lady’s eyes as blue, but he was unsure of that. Whoever she was, she had “saved” him from his sister and his female cousins, all of whom were older than he and were teasing and chasing him up and down the hotel’s long porch and in and out through the shrubbery on the other side of the lane where the carriages went through. At one point he had scurried away on his hands and knees beneath a team of horses standing in their traces at the carriage stop. The coachman had yelled at him and at the girls, who had run past the horses’ heads to cut him off on the other side.
Victor’s young lady had happened onto the porch at that moment. She ran down the steps and apologized to the coachman. He bawled her out, saying, “Keep an eye on your kid. He could have been kicked or trampled.”
The young woman picked Nick up, carried him up onto the porch, and sat with him in one of the long line of white wicker chairs with brightly colored cushions. She held him in her lap, shielding h
im from the girls, and pressed his head against her bosom. Nick had never forgotten the moment.
He wasn’t sure if he had gone to sleep, but he remembered his mother came looking for him and his sister, and she thanked the young woman. Elaine, Nick’s sister, retorted that she had kept an eye on him and hadn’t told him to run under the horses. “Under the horses?” his mother nearly screamed. She left Nick in the young woman’s lap and led Elaine off into the hotel by the wrist. The cousins all disappeared.
Some eighteen years later, Nick had begun to wonder if the young women who had held him in the wicker chair could have been the pianist he’d come to know as Margot Renard.
While Nick was in the arms and on her lap in the white wicker chair, Gayle Maarling—who some fifteen years later was to become Nick’s wife—was a few miles away, over on the Lake Michigan shore. Or at least her family’s house was that many miles away. That same summer, Gayle’s parents, her sister, and she attended post-war reunions—post-occupation reunions, in their case—in the Netherlands, the first Maarling and van der Meulen reunion in eight years. Eventually, she and Nick met in college.
During the spring term of 1961, Nick’s sophomore year at university, the prospect of military conscription was threatening to make a mess of his life, as it was the lives of young men all over the nation. It seemed the Cold War was about to become hot. Men at the university hovered around radios or in front of televisions in lounges, listening for word that the Red Army had crossed the Elbe. The supposition among students and faculty alike was that the NATO countries were inadequately garrisoned and that once the Russians and East Germans set off, they would be at the English Channel in three weeks.
Some of Nick’s classmates began talking to recruiters and their draft boards, and two men in Nick’s dormitory dropped their classes and enlisted. “Getting in on the ground floor,” one had said, explaining that his uncle had gone in early in 1942 and had risen to the rank of sergeant by the war’s end.
As a full-time student, Nick was deferred from conscription, at least for the moment. But he was feeling patriotic. Korean War veterans at the university on the GI Bill were wondering if they would be called back up, since enrollment in college did not protect them.
