Margot's War

by Ty Knoy

  In the car ahead, a woman with a bun of gray hair had gotten to the number-one position at the boulevard. “I know her,” Camille said, pointing. “Her husband is in there.” She pointed backward with her thumb. “We filled prescriptions for them for years, and now she comes out here, usually for lunch with him, and sometimes she brings lunch in a basket that she has fixed, and they sit out.”

  “She can’t keep him at home, then?”

  “He’s pretty big, and she isn’t. It’s all just so maddening.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE GRAY-HAIRED DRIVER, who seemed to want to go across, gave up and turned right. Camille followed, and her tires squealed as she drove onto asphalt, out onto the passing lane.

  Nick was pressed back in the seat as they roared past the gray-haired woman’s car. The signal ahead—green—rushed at them as Camille’s braid began fluttering on the front of her blouse. She held the braid down on her shoulder with her chin, watching the road from the corners of her eye. Then she took her glasses off and put them on the console. “Can you reach my sunglasses in the glove box, please?” she called.

  Nick, who was holding tightly to the armrest, reluctantly put his hand in the glove box and handed her the glasses.

  The signal changed to yellow, and after thinking about it for a moment—a forever moment it seemed to Nick—Camille raised her foot to the brake pedal, and a stressful deceleration began.

  “Let’s drop this until we get to my house,” Camille said as the car rocked to a stop. “Let’s talk about you and your wife.”

  “I guess you’ve heard most of it,” Nick said.

  “It sounds like my mother nearly came between you.”

  “Nearly is correct,” Nick said.

  The gray-haired woman with the bun slowly brought her car alongside, stopped, looked over at Nick and Camille, and smiled. Nick nodded to her, smiled, and gave a salute sort of wave. Camille waved.

  “I believe Gayle had a secret life kept entirely inside her head,” Nick said. “A life in addition to the life that was around her on the outside. I believe everyone is that way.”

  “So you think everyone is schizophrenic?”

  Nick laughed. “No, they’re only schizo when—and if—the inside life leaks to the outside and mixes in, causing disingenuous talk, disingenuous actions. People with no such leaks—”

  “Such as yourself?”

  “I didn’t say that—or with minimal leaks are the ones called sane, and those whose leaks reach flood stage are called insane. Gayle was definitely in the sane column—super-practical, charming. But songs, mostly opera songs, popped out of her often, and I always supposed that on the inside she was on stage at the Met or La Scala. And she did sing in our town, on our side of the state, and a few times in Chicago, so she could fluff off her leaks as just practice. She never took pills.”

  “I see,” Camille said, nodding and smirking.

  “People are like cars. Water circulates through engines to carry away excess heat. People have blood circulating through their brains. When water leaks out of a car’s radiator, steam starts spewing. You can buy this stuff—or at least you could buy it when I was a kid—that’s powdered metal, and pour it in at the radiator. It flows around inside, gathers at the leaks, and clogs them. That pharmacy of yours does pretty much the same thing for people. You sell pills that people put in their mouths. Leaking and steaming stops, and soon they’re walking up straight and tall again—until they forget to take their pills, that is.”

  “That’s a joke, right?”

  Nick laughed. “An analogy. An analogy to psychobabble pills.”

  “Got it,” Camille said.

  “On older cars, like Model T Fords, which had no water pumps, you didn’t have to buy the powdered metal. You could just pour in some oatmeal. The oatmeal cooked, and the gooey flakes gathered on the inside of the leak, clogging the hole. Maybe oatmeal works on people too.”

  Camille shook her head.

  “I never knew about analogies until I got to college—Freshman Lit,” Nick said.

  The gray-haired woman’s car began moving, and a horn behind beeped. Camille accelerated again and passed the gray-haired woman once more, but soon she began braking and flipped the left turn signal. At the next corner, she bullied her way through the lines of cars filled with football fans flying red-and-white pennants. And suddenly, it seemed to Nick, the universe changed. They were on a winding, two-lane street, with houses and trees and no cars ahead or behind.

  Camille again turned down Pink Floyd and drove slowly. “And what about you? How do you feel about yourself?” she asked.

  “I’ve never taken pills. Minimal leaks for me. I easily have kept myself in practical mode, pretty much at will. I was a CEO for a few years, and our firm made a lot of money during my tenure, which doesn’t mean I did anything brilliant. It only means I didn’t muck things up. It takes talent just to not muck things up, so I must be okay.”

  Camille looked quickly at Nick, just to deliver a smile.

  “I do have recurring dreams, though,” Nick said. “On some days, I’m catching a long pass for a touchdown. But I never leap up from the sidewalk with my arms out.” Nick raised his arms high out in front of his forehead, up into the air flowing over the top of the windshield frame. “I never make a feint and then do a fast cut into someone’s yard or out into the street.”

  “Sounds sane to me.”

  “Sometimes I think of myself as an army sniper picking off Viet Cong, but I never take aim, like this.” Nick put his cupped left hand out to the windshield and brought his closed right hand to his cheek, index finger in a trigger curl. “Nor do I ever say bang, at least not out loud.

  “I think virtually no one tells anyone about their inside lives. The only exceptions are those who gush it out at four hundred dollars an hour on a couch. Their psychobabbler persuades them to keep it all to themselves. When they show up without the four hundred dollars, he either pronounces them cured or sends them to you for pills.”

  Camille laughed. “And what about my mother? What did you think of her?”

  “If she is that lady who played the piano across the fence, in the first moments, I thought she was beautiful, charming, captivating. And she was all those things then and still is. Some days later, I could see that she also had dreams of glory—like she was trying to catch up with glory. Maybe her playing across the fence was a leak.”

  Camille interjected, “When I was young, she practiced very long and hard, but she never said or did anything strange. Except she did abandon us that summer after the winter we’ve been talking about.”

  Nick nodded. “How long was she gone?”

  “All summer. I’ll tell you about it. It fits in with what you’re telling me. Was she with you?”

  “No,” Nick said. It was a lie, but almost truth, since it was just for one night.

  As they were approaching a four-way stop, Camille coasted the car over to the curb into the shade of a maple and shut off the engine. “I need a few minutes,” she said. She put her head back and closed her eyes. “I hardly slept last night, and then this morning, two coeds—if you can believe this—got into a hair-pulling fight in our store and knocked over some displays and actually knocked over shelves. In thirty years, nothing like that has ever happened—in our store, I mean. I had to get dressed and go in and help straighten up, and now I’m having arrhythmia. Just give me a few minutes.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  “Not A-fib, is it?” Nick asked. “I’m not carrying my cell phone. Could you put yours out on the console here, please? Just in case help is needed.”

  “I’m okay, but here it is. It’s turned off,” she said. “If you call, you’ll need to turn it on first, but don’t turn it on unless you have to.”

  “Okay.”


  Camille put her seat back.

  “I hope your husband doesn’t drive by,” Nick said.

  “It wouldn’t matter if he did. Anyway, this isn’t our neighborhood.” She closed her eyes but opened them again as a horn tooted and the gray-haired woman drove by, waved, stopped at the sign just ahead, and then drove on across and down a hill toward the river in the distance.

  “When do you want me to awaken you if you go to sleep?” Nick asked.

  “I won’t go to sleep, but if I do, ten minutes. I know you must be hungry. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m okay,” Nick said. “Go ahead and sleep.” Even though his own heart was in an odd beat, Nick wasn’t sure he could keep himself awake for ten minutes.

  Camille promptly fell into a sound sleep.

  Nick feared that if he fell asleep, they both might sleep until dusk. Just watching Camille, who began breathing easily, caused Nick to start nodding. He took up her phone and called Michigan. “Maarten Funeral Homes,” a female answered. A moment later, Alan Maarten, Nick’s old quarterback and lifetime friend, picked up.

  “Al, I need help. Can you see the number I’m calling from?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just call me back in fifteen minutes? I’ll explain later.”

  “Okay. Where are you?” Alan asked.

  “Down in Indiana. I started for Boston, but I got sidetracked.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “Maybe. I may have found her daughter. Can you check on my mother in the morning? Elaine and Gregg will be back in the afternoon.”

  “Okay. Good luck.”

  Nick closed the phone, leaned back, and promptly went to sleep. He was awakened by the distant sound of a phone ringing, the sensation of vibration between his thighs, and the sight of Camille’s well-manicured hand picking the phone up out of his lap. She answered, but then folded it. “No one there. I’m on the Do Not Call list, but they call anyway.” She looked at the screen as it occurred to Nick that Alan could infer from the area code number where he was. “A number somewhere far away,” Camille said.

  “Probably Manila,” Nick said.

  It apparently hadn’t occurred to Camille to ask why the phone had been switched on. “I made a call on your phone,” Nick said.

  “To your mother?”

  “Indirectly.”

  Two children on small bicycles, a boy and a girl—probably siblings, Nick thought—were on the sidewalk by the car, looking at Camille and Nick. Perhaps they had been watching them while they slept. “Hi there,” Nick said. “We were having our afternoon naps.”

  “Are you going to shoot someone, mister?” the boy asked.

  Nick was startled by the question, but replied in tempo. “I’m out of bullets. Do you have any to spare?”

  “No.”

  Without saying anything further, the children rode away.

  “Cute kids,” Camille said. “You must have sprung a leak, talked in your sleep.”

  “Did you hear a bang?”

  “I was way gone.”

  Camille started the engine, and Pink Floyd started up. “Okay if I turn this off?” she asked.

  “Sure. Back to the present. Back to the past. The future is still ahead, though, isn’t it?”

  “We’ll see. I thought of something as I woke up that I forgot at the store. I need to stop by. It’ll just take a minute.”

  They went to the stop sign. Up the side street, Nick once again saw the two children. They probably don’t have permission to cross the street, he thought. “My sister and brother-in-law are coming home this afternoon. My mother will be okay.”

  “How old is she?” Camille asked.

  “Eighty-seven. In an assisted living place, but she hasn’t yet needed any assistance.”

  “Neither does mine,” Camille said. “Does your mother still play?”

  “Every day. But your mother doesn’t, I was told. Not even that Ravel piece that’s played only with the left hand?”

  “I guess not. I don’t know what you mean.”

  CHAPTER 12

  CAMILLE DROVE INTO downtown, past the funeral home near Nick’s parking place from the night before, and on to the courthouse square and the stores around it.

  A shopper called and waved from a sidewalk, and Camille waved and called back. On a corner was a flower shop with mums of every color out in front on tiers. “Quite a splash,” Nick said, gesturing.

  The car crept along in traffic. Several cars and a red signal were ahead. “Gayle and I had an apartment in Amsterdam, and a flower barge moored on a canal just down the block.”

  “That must have been fun.”

  “We were only a couple of blocks from the Rijksmuseum.

  “You were near the Anne Frank house, then?”

  “It’s in the neighborhood, but a canal or so down. Gayle almost died there in June.”

  “In the Anne Frank house?”

  “No, no, our apartment. I was gone that day—the last day I ever left her alone for more than an hour. A man from Rohloffsen headquarters back home had called the day before and asked if I would go to Duisburg and smooth some ruffled German feathers. Rohloffsen has a long-standing relationship with the firm—going back to before the war—and I’d worked amicably with the people. The night before, Gayle said she would go—a drive out through the tulip fields, past the soccer stadium that looks like a spaceship, a night on the other side of the river, then maybe on up the river, and over into Cologne or Koblenz for another night.”

  Camille nodded. “Was it tulip time?”

  “Yes, but by morning Gayle had changed her mind. I was sort of stuck with the commitment. She said she felt okay but just wanted a day to herself. Maybe she had German burnout. After our girls were in college, she traveled with me any time I went to Europe to visit relatives, and she and a Dutch cousin went to Dresden three times to search for an aunt who was lost in the war. Anyway, I made a day trip of it to Duisburg.”

  “Sounds like you were nervous about leaving her alone.” The signal changed, but the square was crowded, so Camille didn’t get through.

  “I should have been more nervous,” Nick said. “But we’d just found out that our first grandchild was on the way, and she seemed happy and upbeat. When I got back that evening, she was on a sofa, sitting with her legs on an ottoman, ankles crossed. Fresh flowers were in the apartment, all cut and arranged, so she had been to the barge and had had her hair and nails done. I smiled when I saw her, but then I heard her babbling. A book was on the floor, standing on its end with pages fanned out. In the time it took me to walk across the room, she had gone unconscious.”

  “Weren’t there relatives close by? Her grandparents? Cousins, didn’t you say?”

  “The closest were in Haarlem. Not very far, but not all that close either. She hadn’t called them. Later she said she couldn’t remember what had happened.

  “She was in the hospital a couple of days, and then all seemed right again, or as right as it could be. The doctors couldn’t explain or maybe didn’t wish to explain, or maybe she had asked them not to explain.”

  “Maybe she had overdosed on pain meds. Accidentally?”

  “I wasn’t told.”

  A woman on the sidewalk in heels with a package called and waved and said, “He looks like a keeper, Cammy. Ménage à trois tonight?”

  Camille answered, “Don’t know yet, Mo. I’ll call.”

  She got through the light and crept along in the direction of the campus among cars of students. “So, Gayle was okay then? I mean, as okay as she could be?”

  “Seemingly, but I could tell that things were changing for her. We came home a week after that, and she was better then. She and our daughter got to talk about the pregnancy, and everything was so upbeat I relaxed, sure that Gayle was fine. But then I awoke early in morning of Augus
t eighth to find her unconscious beside me. She died that afternoon.”

  “Is Mo from New York?” Nick asked.

  “No, Gary? East Chicago? One of those places.”

  “Is she getting a divorce too?”

  “She already has—twice.”

  Nick shook his head. “It may have been something that had nothing to do with her, uh, larger illness,” he said. “I feared a stroke, but it could have been an allergic reaction of some sort—maybe to one of her medications.

  “She had had her hair done—and her nails. She was in a pink evening dress that I hadn’t seen in about thirty years. The only time she had worn it was with a shawl when she and Johnston Lord danced and sang Bach’s The Peasant Cantata with a chamber quartet in Grand Rapids. Fabric high heels, dyed to the color of the dress, were in front of the ottoman. “I guess she had planned to surprise me, like turning back the clock or something.”

  When they had returned to the States, Nick had looked up the Cantata concert in Gayle’s scrapbook. It had been twenty-nine years before. He also asked their housekeeper about the dress and shoes. She told him Gayle had called from Amsterdam and asked her to send the clothes over.

  “I can still see and hear her and Johnston singing that night, in sort of a dance, with the whirl of that shawl between them.”

  “But she lived two or three more months?” Camille asked.

  “Yes. We came back soon after that hospitalization. She died back home on August ninth.”

  “Has the baby arrived?”

  “It’s about six weeks yet.”

  The signal changed, and Camille drove through. “Is this your Michigan daughter or your New York daughter?”

  “Our Michigan daughter. Gayle really perked up when we got the news, and I assumed she would live until the birth.

  “She was in good spirits early in May. She and I were walking to the Rijksmuseum in May when the Canadians came marching along with their duck-boat things. The Canadians liberated the Netherlands in 1945, and they came over on anniversaries and had parades. Dutch people lined the street and cheered. Gayle cheered pretty good that day also.”