by Ty Knoy
Nick wondered if she had gone in to get a gun out of a drawer or if she was calling the police or if she was running out a door on the other side of the house to a neighbor’s house. He didn’t care. He knew he was now harmless and that no crime had been committed. A contorted face—if his face had been contorted—is not a crime. He looked at himself in the visor mirror, and he thought he looked normal.
About five minutes later, the door to the house opened, and Camille stepped out. “Please come in,” she said.
CHAPTER 16
A HALL STRETCHED past a washer and dryer and a closed door to what could be a study or a spare bedroom. Nick thought he heard a clink, like a piece of silverware being placed on a piece of dinnerware.
The window over the kitchen sink was to the backyard, where there was both a swimming pool, covered with a green canvas, and a tennis court. Both the canvas and the court were covered with red, yellow, and bronze leaves.
“I’m having the yard raked Monday,” Camille said. She spun around in front of the stove and leaned back against it, stretching the front of her blouse, a pose emphasizing how slender and flat-chested she was. She was one of those women who flaunted flat-chestedness and understood that, used well, it had its advantages. She gestured for Nick to pass. “Do you mind sitting at the breakfast bar? I have some nice tomatoes, and I can make bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches.”
“A BLT would be very nice,” Nick said, taking a stool with a view to the back.
“Water? Or iced tea, lemonade?” Camille asked, holding out a tumbler. “Or I can make coffee.”
“Just water, thanks. No ice.” He stood and he took the tumbler from her hand, touching her hand as he did, and then drew water from the sink faucet.
Camille started the microwave and put a tomato on a cutting board. “Will you please go on about how you came to know my mother?”
“Yes,” Nick said, sitting back, wondering if Camille’s mother was behind the door they had just passed. “Where was I?”
“Your relative, Maureen, had just handed you an invitation to Victor Rohloffsen’s faculty party.”
“Yes,” Nick replied. “Well, that was in May, and the party was set for June twenty-first, a Sunday afternoon. Gayle told me she had just landed a job as a soloist at a sizable Upper East Side church, so she was unsure about coming to the party, and she also said that a flight to Colorado would deplete the wedding fund.
“The church was reserved. She and her mother had talked to a caterer and a florist, and had reserved rooms at a hotel. But I was left wondering if she might still pull the plug. I wondered what they were going to do about attendants’ dresses. My guys could rent tuxes at the last minute, but the girls? The time to start paying out deposits to the caterers and florists surely was closing in.”
“She had nerves of steel, didn’t she?” Camille said as she took bacon out of the microwave.
“I guess so, but not me. I was jittery. I didn’t know whether I would be going to Columbia in the fall or back to Michigan. The honeymoon was to be in Niagara Falls. That much was settled. We talked on Sunday nights, and I kept reminding her of Victor’s party invitation, but on weeknights, night after night, I’d come home, swim laps, and then lie on a chaise and gaze at the stars, wondering if she would leave me standing at the altar.”
Camille laughed. “Did you think about beating her to the punch?”
Nick smiled. “Not really. I felt committed, but I was both nervous and bored. Then, in June, things began happening as music camp approached.” Some rooms at the lodge were converted to offices, pianos were brought in, and a circus-size tent with a stage and several dozen folding chairs were set up near the lodge. Traffic in front of Victor’s house and on the switchbacks picked up just after Memorial Day, as tradesmen and deliverymen took the house out of mothballs and readied it for his arrival.
“I rode up there a couple of times in the evenings, but the gate was always locked. Even from the turnaround, there was a nice view down into the valley and the village. Peaks all around were capped with snow.
“Victor came after Memorial Day and took an office in the lodge. He and I had the ‘haven’t seen you in a few years, you got pretty tall, and how are your mother and father’ conversation. He was jovial. He made me feel he had known me all his life.”
Camille put a BLT sandwich before Nick. “Looks terrific,” he said. “Thanks. I suddenly got hungry.”
Camille sat beside him, and they started eating.
After a couple of bites, Nick went on. “A morning or so later, as I was just leaving for work, a carpenter’s truck pulled next door along with a lumberyard truck. A set of French doors and other materials were unloaded and carried onto the pool deck. The doors were leaned against the fence that separated my neighbor’s deck from my own.”
“I’m going to make coffee,” Camille said as she got up from the table. As she set up the coffeemaker, she said, “My mother was gone all of that summer, so I guess I’m about to find out where she was.”
Nick said, puzzled, “I can account for only a few days of it.”
Nick told how he had come home that night and seen that French doors had been installed, replacing sliding doors to the deck. Also, two poles had been fastened to the fence. And floodlights, aimed down onto the deck, were mounted atop the poles. “At dusk, I went up onto the road above to have a better look. The floodlights weren’t on, but there was a light on inside the house. Someone—a female in white—was moving around, making up a bed, putting clothes in drawers. I inferred that my new neighbor, the pianist, had arrived.”
“Cream or sugar?” Camille asked, pouring coffee.
“Neither,” Nick said.
Camille sat back onto her stool, touched her cup, and then withdrew her hand from it. “Go on.”
Nick also touched his cup and pulled back his hand. “I swam my laps and was inside again, ready for bed, when my bell rang. The woman I’d seen putting away clothes was at my door. I introduced myself and asked her if she would like to come in. She explained, without any trace of an accent, that she was the manager and that the lady of the house would be arriving the next day. She also said that a van with a piano would be coming in the morning and asked if she could park a car in my driveway so the movers could bring the piano in through their garage.”
Camille took a sip of her coffee.
“I told her it was okay and asked that she leave room for me to get the motorcycle by. I asked the name of her employer, and she said Margot Renard. I hadn’t heard of the pianist Margot Renard, so I presumed she was some up-and-coming European performer, perhaps from a rich family that would make it possible for her to afford to haul her piano across the Atlantic.”
Camille only shook her head.
“And you’ve never known any of this?” Nick asked. “You’ve never heard the name?”
“No and no.”
They moved to the living room. Camille left her coffee, picking up clothes from the floor as she went and throwing them into the beginning of a hallway. Nick brought the coffees out. The picture window gave a view of the front yard and the Lincoln at the curb.
Camille sat on a sofa. Nick got up, sat on a chair near the sofa, and continued his story. “A car was in the drive as I left the next morning. That evening it was gone, but a different car was in front of my neighbor’s house, and when I shut off the bike’s engine, I heard the sounds of a piano being tuned next door.”
“I know what that sounds like,” Camille said.
“I’ve heard it a few times myself. I swam my laps and fell asleep on the lounge. When I woke up, I looked up at the stars and the lights of Victor’s castle, several hundred feet above. Before I went to bed, I again went out the front door and walked around the end of the neighbor’s house and up onto the road above and behind. The French doors onto the deck were wide apart, and the nose of an ebony grand piano w
as pointing out from inside. I still remember thinking—odd as this may seem—of one of those atomic missiles ready to be launched from its silo.”
Camille laughed. “Pianos are weapons, aren’t they?”
“In the right hands, they certainly are. Especially grands,” Nick said. “Two women—one I had seen the night before—were at a table. I was alone up on the road, sitting on a rock in the dark, sure no one could see me. I had just stood to start back down when the new floodlights above my neighbor’s pool deck came on, lighting up the deck and most of the pool next to it. I panicked but then realized the lights weren’t on me and that the women could no more see me than performers on stages can see an audience. I sat down again.
“A minute or so later, the women appeared alongside the piano and then effortlessly pushed it out through the doors, into the floodlight. A single chord—probably middle C and the E above middle C—was struck without the lid being raised. The women listened as the sound died away, then the new woman raised the lid onto the high stick, struck the chord again, and listened again. She did the same with the lid on half stick.
“She seemed satisfied. It was ready for launch, I guess,” Nick said.
Camille smiled.
“She let the lid back down, and the two pushed the piano back inside, closed the French doors, and turned out the lights. May I get myself another cup of coffee, and may I warm yours up, Mrs. Margolis?” Nick stood.
“Yes, thank you,” Camille said. “Tell me quickly while you pour: did your wife ever find her aunt in Germany—or anywhere else?”
“No, never,” Nick said as he got the carafe. He turned back and said, “A strong possibility is that she died in the horrific firebombing of Dresden, on Valentine’s Day 1945. Her husband had gotten orders to report to Berlin, which was being heavily shelled by the Russians by then, so he had put her up in Dresden for her safety. We know all this because it was in the last letter her mother ever received from her.”
Camille shook her head.
Standing with the carafe, Nick said, “The letter was postmarked February tenth, but it didn’t arrive to the mother in Amsterdam until the sixteenth or seventeenth. The news of the horror was all over Europe by then, but the mother had no idea that her daughter was in Dresden until she saw the postmark and opened the envelope.”
Camille gasped, and tears came to her eyes. “Oh, that poor woman,” she muttered.
“Dutch people had been cheering—maybe even the mother among them—two nights before as the armada flew over their heads, saying and thinking, ‘Those Krauts are getting it tonight.’”
CHAPTER 17
NICK POURED THEIR coffee, put the carafe back, and turned off the burner. “Back to Colorado,” he said as he sat down. “The next night—the night after I saw my new neighbor push the piano out and back in—it was nearly dark when I finished my laps. I was toweling off and getting into my robe when the floodlights over the fence came on.”
Camille took a deep breath and rolled her eyes.
“I turned off my pool light and pool pump, and all was quiet. I was wondering if there was to be a recital across the fence, but there wasn’t any chatter or clinking of glasses. No scooting of chairs. Nothing like that. I settled back onto the chaise and waited.
“I was starting to nod off when precisely at eight o’clock the silence was broken by Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 23. It was not as if she was practicing. It was like a straight-off, professional performance, like one would hear in a big city auditorium.”
“I know it. Every note,” Camille said.
“I instantly knew that the pianist was a superstar, or a soon-to-be superstar, but I also wondered why such a talent would come from Europe to teach at a second-tier US music camp.”
Camille sat up straight and shifted, looking at Nick. “When exactly was this, if you remember?”
“I remember, all right. Boy, do I remember. It was a Monday night. The next-to-last Monday in June, nineteen sixty-four.”
Camille swooned and began to fall onto the coffee table.
Nick quickly stood and took hold of her and asked, “Are you all right?”
After a moment, she straightened and said, “I’m fine. Go on.”
Nick slowly let go while he kept his eyes on her and his hands ready.
“I’m okay now,” she said. “Please go on.”
After a moment, he continued, “I got into my clogs and stepped to the fence, in shadow, hoping no one was looking through and seeing me. Now, Mrs. Margolis, you are about to hear something that no one else in the world knows. I pawed my way into the juniper, hoping to find a knothole for a peek at this Margot, thinking there would be a circle of her acquaintances, friends, or something, all on folding chairs with martini glasses. Then, as I squeezed between the juniper branches—they were tight together and prickly—I wondered if the performance could be an audition in front of camp directors. I even wondered if Victor was there.
“I spotted a small shaft of light coming through, and I squirmed to it, very carefully not to break a branch with a snap. The juniper was scratching me, and pieces of bark were moving down past my collar and onto my back. It was itchy and uncomfortable. I made up my mind that I would get out, get dressed, and go up on the road. But I had to have a peek first.”
“Like a Peeping Tom.”
“It wasn’t like I was looking through her window.”
“But it was a privacy fence.”
“Okay. Peeping Tom it is. I was looking for a knothole, but I was afraid someone on the other side would see my eye in the fence. I found a knothole, but I stayed back at first then gradually moved my eye closer and closer.
“The piano wasn’t inside the French doors. Margot and the piano and the bench were the only things on the deck. There was no party—not a single listener. From my angle, the lid stick was diagonal across Margot’s face, as if she were one of those Modigliani portraits where faces are divided and the halves are shifted from each other. She was beautiful—or I knew she would be beautiful once I was able to see her in one piece. Then I wondered if it would turn out that she was more beautiful when I had to construct her face from the pieces or less beautiful when the unconstructed face came before me, when imagination had no part in it.”
Nick’s heart raced as he remembered the corner of Margot’s mouth, the tip of her nose; her bouncing black hair, joined, disjoined; a gold hoop flying from her ear in a Mozart-ly rhythm; her neck in a choker collar; her white blouse with pearl buttons and ruffles disappearing into a dark suit coat. Her shoulders, undivided by the stick, seemed not to move. Her whimsical smile seemed to say, ‘There’s nothing to this.’”
“I know that look,” Camille sighed.
Nick nodded and went on. “Just before the end of the first movement, I let myself down onto my hands and knees, and then down onto my side on the needles and bark debris, where a bit of light was coming through under the fence. I put the side of my face down and looked under.”
“Skirt or slacks?”
Nick laughed. “Skirt, but it was very long. And I couldn’t see her feet because of the frame. It was one of those Y-shaped things with rubber tires, like they have in music schools where pianos are moved around a lot. I’d never done anything like that before.”
“No?”
“No, never. Well, now that I think of it, I’ve been told that I crawled from that angle while my mother played and played. Your view of the world must have begun in the same way, didn’t it?”
“Probably, but I don’t remember. Your mother didn’t have a maid or a governess or someone to entertain you?”
“I did before long, I’m told,” Nick said. “I guess I would bawl and scream if she put me in my playpen. My mother and this Margot, by the way, both have terrific legs. As do you, also, Mrs. Margolis. Evidence of—”
“I’ve noticed that about myself. Thank you,
” Camille smiled.
“You have your mother’s legs. They are a clue”—Nick pointed at Camille’s knees—“a biological clue that this Margot and your mother are one and the same person.”
“Almost as good as DNA,” Camille said.
“I didn’t see Margot’s legs very well just then. Because of the rubber tire-rack thing.”
“My mother’s piano at home was on one of those. And I suppose it kept me from crawling under. One of my mother’s foibles was that she moved furniture a great deal and often bought new furniture, seeking the perfect arrangement, I suppose. Or perhaps she wanted to see out this window or out that window as she played. Or maybe she wanted to be seen in a window by anyone happening by outside. So, how did you extract yourself from the bushes?”
“I didn’t. I stayed put. The second movement, as with all second movements, is quiet, so I didn’t want to risk squirming out then. In the third movement—well, I was comfortable by then, and it all was so beautiful. It was shameful, though. Me about to be married—maybe—to a lovely girl. Shameful. I knew it. How awful of me. But with that frame in the way, I wasn’t seeing very much, so it was the music, not the legs, that had made me a prisoner in the bushes.”
Camille shook her head. “So you fell in love with her before you ever saw her face in one piece?”
“I wonder. I don’t think so. No. That came later. Therefore, it had to be the music.” He smiled and continued. “After the Mozart ended, the manager or housekeeper or whatever she was came onto the deck, assured Madame that the work was done, and asked if she could sit out and listen. Margot asked her to go up onto the road and listen to how the sound was carrying. The housekeeper glanced up to the road and back, shaking her head, saying she would be frightened to drive up at night, but she didn’t mind walking. She went back in and, I presume, walked up on the road. From my position, I couldn’t see up there, and even if I could have, the floods would have been in my eyes.
