Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  “Oh, yes,” she said, her eyes moist, and she held as tight as she could. Her mouth was wide and hungry, kissing me. I repeated the phrase and Peggy Lee sang not a word.

  MY SON

  MY FIRST CHILD WAS born in a snowstorm, the first of the year, in November 1990. There were other things going on in the world. The Berlin Wall had just come down. Czechoslovakia was declaring itself to be free. But things like that don’t seem so important when you’re dealing with the essentials of life, like birth and an early snow.

  It made everyone anticipate a good season. Which we needed after the last two winters. The Austrians said, “Zu-per.” The English called it “bril.” Which is short for brilliant, an adjective applied with such indiscriminate verve that one begins to hope that it means “I promise not to speak when we next meet.” The Aussies said, “Another pint of lager, mate.”

  The promise of November was to be broken. It snowed once again in December, when the baby was a month old, then it stopped. Giant storms came in from the Atlantic, battered England, scoured France with hurricane winds, drenched Belgium, headed for the mountains—where they were wanted and belonged—and then they split, north and south, leaving a big unwanted circle of warmth and sunshine across the Alps. Until the big storm of February. The one that brought the avalanches.

  In a commercial sense St. Anton was one of the luckier alpine resorts. It was high enough that the snow we got in December was a base that lasted for the next two months. What little subsequent precipitation we had was snow, not rain. Hundreds of smaller, lower ski areas had nothing. Even such high giants as Val o’Isère actually closed. There was talk of putting the French ski instructors on welfare. Poor Gerard. But what snow we had was limited, and once you left the few pistes with snow-making equipment you had to cross patches of rock, grass, and cow shit to get from snowfield to snowfield. The instructors and the ski bums got out their rock skis, the repair shops went into overdrive. I was the only person I knew virtually unperturbed by how bad conditions were. I was so elated with the baby that what I skied on barely mattered. The laundry business was far better when people fell in the mud than when bright, clean white snow was everywhere.

  The grandmothers-to-be wanted to come for the birth. Marie’s father was not so eager. He referred to our happy fetus as le bâtard. I asked Marie if she would like to get married. That is not to say that I proposed.

  “Would you be happier if we were married?” is what I said.

  “To who,” she said. “To Rick Cochrane?”

  The point appeared to be: how married would we be under an assumed name? Which I might have to change again? But what she really meant was “I might marry you when and if you want to marry me, enough to get down on your knee and beg me and make me believe it is something you want. Don’t do me any favors.” At that point I did not inquire into what she really meant and was pleased to take what she said she meant as the excuse that it was.

  “What shall we name our son?” she said. She was certain it would be a boy. She had that knowledge As a Woman. She knew it because it was Part of Her. Herr Doctor Ochsenboden agreed with her. He deduced it from the strength of the heartbeat. So did Fraulein Glütz, the midwife with the umlaut. She knew from the way he kicked.

  If it had been a girl, the name would have been easy. Anna Geneviève. One name for each grandmother.

  Naming a boy was more complicated. Marie’s father was named Gerard. No way. My father’s name was Michael. Which might have been all right, except we were excluding her father, who was pissed enough about le bâtard already. We got books. Baby name books are apparently among the great staples of the publishing industry, along with cookbooks and Bibles. Yet the number of names we couldn’t agree on was enough to fill six of them in four languages. I had a yearning for simplicity—like Mike, Jake, Tony—and for Americana, revealing to myself that I somehow, someday expected to be able to go back. She wanted something romantic, different, perhaps Celtic or Gaelic.

  I think, perhaps, if we had been married, we would have had the grandmothers come. God knows, they were ready enough to set up residence. Marie said she didn’t want to be the focal point of a baby watch. We all have our own ways with anxiety.

  It doesn’t matter how cool you are. It doesn’t matter how perfectly normal the doctor says the mother’s condition is. None of that matters. I don’t think there is such a thing as birth without fear. Not fear of the pain or the mess—that is something the woman goes through, God bless her—nor is it what she fears. The fear is of what is inside. Does it have two of everything it’s supposed to have two of? And one each of all those things that people are designed with one of? Two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, two kidneys, two lungs, two buttocks; one anus, one mouth, one nose; ten fingers, ten toes. Is its brain enclosed, does its heart have holes, can it process food, cleanse its blood; can it yell, excrete, feel? Can it think?

  All in all, then, I was relieved not to have my mother there. Because in addition to birth fear, I had another fear. Would they follow her? The way most flown felons are caught is by going home. I knew that from the days when I used to chase them. It didn’t matter how heinous they were. The baby-rapers, the cop-shooters, serial killers—they all go home to see Mom. Or their woman. Or the hood. This was the inverse. I did not in fact know how closely watched she was. If there was a permanent wiretap and mail search on her home in Brooklyn. If there was an army of agents, or even one fanatic, obsessed with nailing me, waiting to follow my mom overseas. It would be too literary and ironic to be taken and extradited as my first child was being born. And I felt too distracted by the coming birth to arrange for my mother to break whatever surveillance she brought with her. How do you ask a woman in her mid-sixties to fly halfway round the world, then jump out of a train heading south from Paris into a waiting cab to the Gare du Nord, then onto a train to Charles de Gaulle; change her clothes, her hair, her passport in an airport bathroom; and catch a plane to Zurich, where she will begin a new set of evasive maneuvers. Not that she wouldn’t do it to see her first grandchild.

  I wrote her and asked her to wait until after the birth, when we were certain that the mother was up to it and the father could cope. My letters take about two weeks. They go through Rome. Not via the Italian postal service, where the letters are lost as frequently as delivered and the delivery date is selected by lottery. They go through the Vatican post—the Church is an independent country in Rome—then by Vatican diplomatic pouch to New York, where they are passed by hand, or messenger, to her friend Father Guido. It’s a lot of favors and seems like an excess of precaution, yet it’s been a long time and I have had no trouble. So we continue.

  I was making Marie lunch. Marie was timing the minutes between contractions. She was calm, I was pretending to be cool. When the sun came out it hit fresh fallen snow like a trumpet’s blare of jubilation. It was so happy that I opened a window to feel the warming air and the freshness of it all.

  “I am glad you are not skiing today,” Marie said.

  “I’m not. Look at that powder.”

  “It’s dangerous, the first snow of the season.”

  “Nothing would happen to me,” I said. “You bring me luck. You and the baby.”

  “He is almost ready to come out,” she said. “And you will not ski until ’e does. You would do something like breaking of the leg and then someone else would have to help me and I would be very angry with you.”

  I went around behind her and put my arms around her. I felt her breasts and that big full belly. Our child kicked. Marie held my hand to the kick.

  “I am glad I’m here,” I said. “Not skiing. I’d rather be here with you.”

  She leaned her head back against me. If it hadn’t been true when I’d spoken it was true then.

  The intervals between contractions were decreasing. While it is overwhelming for the new parents, it is simply a signal to the doctor and midwife. Over and over again, in fractured English and less fragmented French, they had exp
lained to us that we were not to come over to the birthing center—which was one room attached to the Sports Injury Clinic—until the contractions were coming every five minutes.

  I helped her on with her shoes and her jacket and her hat. I helped her down the stairs. Then I made her wait while I ran back up for the duffel bag of stuff and her mittens. Inside each ski town, obscured by all the tourists and the business, is a tiny town of intensely ordinary people. Once you begin to participate in that town, particularly if you stay through an off season, you know a remarkable number of them. Of course, they know you are not really one of them. Where was your family in the eighth century when St. Boniface was defining the boundaries of the bishopric and when the Duchy of Bavaria was incorporated in Charlemagne’s Frankish kingdom? Where were they in 1552 when Maurice, elector of Saxony, invaded? Did they repulse the Swedes at Ehrenberger Klause in 1632 and the Bavarians in 1703? What do you and yours know of the Pragmatic Sanction, the infamous Treaty of Pressburg, the ceding of the South Tyrol and Trentino by the Treaty of St. Germain? What secrets do they harbor from the Anschluss and the days of national socialism?

  We had been told to walk the eight blocks to the birthing center. Both the motion and the position would help the baby. There was a foot of snow on the ground. The best that could be said was that it was packed down hard. Pregnant, wide, and prone to overbalance, Marie clung to my arm. Every yard of the journey, someone seemed to appear to say “Good luck” in one language or another.

  Franz of the Gendarmerie, the federal police, was running across the street with his large and ill-tempered German shepherd, Rudi. Rudi is one of the few dogs in town. Austrians don’t seem to like them very much. That may say as much about their national character as the French obsession with canines says about theirs. Or it may not, Franz stopped to pump my hand and give the mother-to-be a kiss on the cheek. He apologized for running off. But there had been an accident near the pass. Two cars over a cliff, he said, and Rudi was needed. Rudi’s job was searching for bodies.

  Halfway there, between contractions, tears of sentiment overwhelmed Marie. She held me close. “We can name him Michael,” she said, “for your father.”

  “What the hell,” I said, “we can even name him Michael Gerard after both of them. Then maybe your father will stop calling him le bâtard.”

  “You are sweet,” she said, “but I don’t think so.”

  Even into the delivery room we kept discussing the names. Jean-Claude because he was a ski baby. Sean because of my Irish passport. Phillipe for her grandfather, who she adored. Even Guido, for my mother’s friend. Or possibly even name him after me, after my real name, though I don’t like Juniors or people named the Second unless they are going to inherit something that comes with a throne or at least a coronet.

  My love gave birth in a squatting position after just four hours of labor. She yelled, but not excessively. She sweated and strained and impressed the hell out of me. We were lucky; the baby was in the right position and seemed to be moving easily. I saw Marie’s vagina stretch wide and there was the matted, wrinkled, wet, hairy head of my firstborn, centimeters away, up the vaginal canal. Stunningly real. Poised at the demarcation point. Waiting for the final push and the starter’s gun.

  “Push, push,” said Fraulein Glütz, the midwife with the umlaut, in German.

  “Yah,” nodded Herr Doctor Ochsenboden. “Looks goot.”

  Fraulein Glütz inserted her fingers into Marie’s vagina and smeared lubricating jelly all around the stretched labia and the emerging head. I kept saying, silently, to myself, “Holy shit, holy shit.”

  Marie pushed. What a pusher. Push, push, push. One, two, three. Out came the head of my baby. Ugly. So ugly. It is another of the subtle biological differences between the genders that men clearly see how ugly a newborn is and women find them beautiful. But I was counting and the count was good. Two ears (check), one head (check), two eyes (at least two eye formations—they were closed, check), one nose with two nostrils (check and check), one mouth (check). Then Fraulein Glütz blocked my view as she reached in to help slide the shoulder out.

  “Is goot, is goot,” she said. Doctor Ochsenboden looked over her shoulder so that he could accept his fee in good conscience. “Is goot, is goot,” he said, and nodded at me.

  Then they were pulling the baby out, with the mess and the cord. Two arms (check), a bunch of fingers including two thumbs (check), a chest, a belly (check, check), two legs (check).

  Then my eyes fell between its legs. “Oh-my-God!” I said to myself, as I saw my fears come true. My mind raced forward; the years of our future flashed before my eyes, like the endless hallway from a horror film—our flawed child, Marie’s heartbreak, the extra care, medical and psychiatric, and the constant explanations. “Oh-my-God! My son has no penis!”

  “Yah, ve vas mistaken makin,’” Doctor Ochsenboden said. “You hev girl baby.”

  “Is goot, is goot,” Fraulein Glütz said.

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s what it is.”

  LAUNDROMAT BLUES

  I MET ARLENE TAVETIAN at my Laundromat.

  I didn’t know who she was, but I instantly knew so much about her. She was an American. East Coast. North of Washington, south of Boston, not inner urban. I knew she was—on the whole— a nice person, who tried hard to do the right thing. Not a person I would have known in most phases of my life and in those times when I might have met her, I would have passed right over her. Not unattractive. Well maintained, certainly past thirty-nine, but significantly under fifty. She looked married, not single or divorced. It gave me a warm feeling to see her, as if something more solid than nostalgia had walked into the room, an artifact of normalcy, the kind of person I used to imagine existed when I tried to picture who it was that watched a measured portion of prime-time TV back in the U.S.A.

  She had a load of laundry that wasn’t hers—unless I had radically misjudged her. There was an entire collection of G-string underwear. Two sets, really. One in the dainty hues—rose, fawn, mist, jade, sandalwood—silk and satin, from Palmer’s most likely, and the other in hot neons, phosphorescent red, green, orange—colors for playing strip disco or neo-LA. The jeans had artistic rips and patches. The T-shirts were the type that teenagers wear to carelessly demonstrate to an envious world that there is a time in life when breasts are gravity defiant.

  She came in full of organization and competence. But it all collapsed when she tried to figure out how much change she needed to operate the machines. I figured she was in sad shape. A woman like that could walk into any Laundromat in the world, from Darien, Connecticut, to Casablanca, and come out with clean clothes. I offered to help.

  She apologized for being so befuddled. She was glad, very glad, that I spoke English. She insisted that she knew how to do wash—I believed her—but she was confused by the currency. “The machine seems to require seventy schillings.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But that’s over five dollars,” she said. “I’m not wrong, am I?”

  “Quite right,” I said. “About five dollars, five cents.”

  “That’s not right,” she said.

  “Twenty percent of it is tax,” I said. “Like VAT, or sales tax.”

  She started to cry. Her mascara cracked and her makeup ran. She tried to choke it back but she couldn’t. “My daughter’s dead,” she said to apologize for her display. “My daughter’s dead.”

  “The American girl. In the avalanche?”

  “Wendy,” she said. She looked at me. With her daughter’s name spoken she stopped fighting it and the tears fell with simple clarity. She stood there, for several minutes. Not sobbing. Just crying. I had a daughter. A perfect baby girl. Her name was Anna Geneviève. She was home with her mother, nursing, or napping, probably. She had come out as ugly as ET. I mentioned that once and never again. Marie Laure thought that the baby was born into beauty. To question that was to raise doubts about my baby love. Marie Laure had fallen in love with her daughter. Rig
ht there in the delivery room. A love that practically swept me out, but left me no room for jealousy, and gave me a new role to play.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I asked Wendy’s mother.

  “I thought,” she said, “that I should give her things away. To Goodwill or whatever they have here. That’s what I would do at home. But I couldn’t give away her clothes unless they were clean,” she said. Of course she couldn’t. And in Austria they probably wouldn’t accept them. Everything is perfect in Austria.

  “Why don’t you sit down,” I said. I led her to a chair. I took the clothes and tossed them in washer number six, which always seems to do a slightly better job. I didn’t separate the whites from the colored and used nonchlorine bleach. I held back some of the Palmer’s stuff. “This should be hand washed,” I explained. “I think you could use a drink or a cup of coffee or something.”

  “No. No, thank you very much,” she said. But she had to explain again, to me or to herself, “My daughter is dead.”

  “I know just the thing,” I said. “A cup of hot chocolate.”

  “I don’t want to be any bother,” she said.

  “Of course not,” I said. I went across the street to Johann’s Café. The temperature was dipping, the air had a snap to it, and the wind was picking up. Johann put a dash of schnapps in the chocolate and the obligatory cream on top, ÖS34. She thanked me and told me her name. I said it was no bother, that I was sorry for her pain, and that I was Rick Cochrane.

  “It’s good to speak to an American,” she said.

  “I’m not really American. I just spent a lot of time there.”

  “You sound American,” she said.

  “How’s the chocolate?”

  “It’s very good. Hits the spot.” She tried a smile.

  “I could take care of putting the clothes in the dryer and then bring them over to wherever you’re staying. Or drop them off at the church. They do that sort of thing, so you don’t have to see the stuff.”