by M. M. Mayle
He tries a few keys on the piano, expecting it to be out of tune. When it proves to be otherwise he starts to catch on that all is not abandoned; all is in readiness in case the former occupants happen to return. He tries a few more keys on the piano, then sits down to test a tune that’s only hours old. He’s well into the test before realizing Laurel has returned and is touching his shoulder.
“What is that you’re playing? That’s not something new, is it?” she says.
“It is, actually.”
“How strange . . . I’m sorry, I should say interesting, haunting even, because it doesn’t sound new, it sounds like something I’ve heard all my life.”
He somehow gets through the moment when he’s madly tempted to reveal lyrics that could come across as greeting card sentiments this early in the game and concludes the demo with a few random struck chords.
She has no idea how much of a compliment she’s just paid him and he has no idea how he will get through another day without declaring himself to her. He leaves the piano to see that she’s readied herself by tying her hair back with a scarf and donning a jacket to match her trousers.
“Do you play?” he asks as they leave the lounge.
“‘Fur Elise,’ ‘Turkish Rondo,’ ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’—the usual recital pieces and very badly,” she says as they reenter the kitchen. “Do you want to use the phone or the facilities before we go?”
“Just the phone.”
“Help yourself and don’t feel you have to rush. I still need to gather up some papers from the other room and wrap a piece of pancake for my father.”
The call home yields no new information from either end and he’s finished up the same time she is. Together they go out through a side door and along a walkway on the street side where nothing is stirring except for a woman walking a dog near a pair of cars that weren’t parked there when he arrived.
The cars wouldn’t warrant a second look or even a second thought if they both were not quite a bit older than would seem usual for an upper-middle-class neighborhood like this. The high-profile car he’s driving today is less conspicuous, actually.
For becoming preoccupied with useless observations, he almost forgets to hold open the car door for her.
She pauses at the open door. “I thought about buying one of these,” she says of the car. “Between this and the Range Rover.” She drops a satchel and a wrap of some kind onto the back seat and climbs into the front.
He has the time it takes to walk to the driver’s side of the car to decide if she’s throwing him a cue. Is this when he says he has both Jaguars and Range Rovers in his garages at home? Should he follow that with mention of the trees and flowering shrubs they have in common?
He says nothing about any of it and reverses out of her driveway reasonably sure that she’s the only person of his acquaintance who won’t question his ability to drive in the States.
On the way to the nursing home, he can almost believe they’re being tailed and that the chase car is one he saw parked on her quiet street just minutes ago. When Laurel directs him onto a busy motorway, the rather generic vehicle disappears in traffic, and with it his concern.
At the nursing home, no one is behind him as he’s directed to drive round to the rear of the facility and park in a sparsely filled area. She asks him to wait in the car. He refuses, arguing that the patients won’t know who he is and the staff likely won’t care. They enter through an unlocked fire door, where he indicates surprise that an alarm doesn’t sound.
“I know,” she says, “I’ve reported it more than once, but since it’s the only real criticism I have of the place, I tend to ignore the lapse—I take advantage of it, I should say.”
He sees why when she leads him to a room only steps from the fire door, and a glance down the corridor leading to the main entrance reveals the wheelchair-and walker-bound populace she’d otherwise have to pass through.
Her father is nowhere near the fright he envisioned. The man is seated in an armchair, obviously aged and frail, but well groomed and neatly dressed. Father shows no sign of recognizing daughter when Laurel approaches him. His overbright eyes dart from one thing to another without change of expression. Laurel proceeds as though the exact opposite were true, introducing her guest and enthusiastically explaining she’s brought something good to eat. At the point when Laurel attempts to feed the old man morsels of the now cold and deflated apple pancake, he has to look away. To watch something this intimate, this poignant, is to cast himself as voyeur.
Displayed on the windowsill are several framed photographs of the Chandler family as it once was. The progression begins when there were just three of them and ends when there were five. An especially beautiful baby is photographed alone, perhaps signifying the end of an era. He’s taking a closer look at this baby the other Chandlers could understandably have resented when someone knocks on the open door and a doctor announces himself.
“Sorry, is this a bad time?” the doctor says.
“No, not at all. Come in Dr. Bolivar. I was just giving Dad a little treat and telling him where I’m off to today. This is one of my clients, Colin Elliot, who’s been kind enough to—”
“Ah yes, you’ve brought along a witness. Very good, very good. Allow me to summon the charge nurse as your other witness and we can get on with it as requested in your phone message.”
The doctor leaves the room and Laurel produces from her satchel a sheaf of papers she places on the tray-table spanning the bed. The doctor returns presently with an officious-looking older woman and the three of them begin discussing the sad task of instating a “Do Not Resuscitate” order as though he’s not in the room—and as though the patient is not in the room, which is even more bothersome.
“Any chance he knows what you’re talking about?” Colin interrupts, rolling his eyes in the patient’s direction.
“Extremely doubtful,” the doctor says.
The charge nurse echoes the same.
Laurel appears not to know what to say, if only because she was holding a one-sided conversation with her father only minutes ago, a conversation that hoped the old man might be cognizant.
Without revealing that an entire fleet of doctors was once wrong about his ability to comprehend when he was the presumably witless patient and similar issues were discussed in front of him, Colin manages to steer Laurel and the medical personnel out of this patient’s room. They reconvene in an open area furnished with game tables and clustered chairs and couches. The few occupants of the room are fixed on a large-screen telly tuned to a religious program and impervious to the newcomers claiming one of the game tables.
The deed is done, signed, and witnessed in a matter of minutes. The speed with which the doctor and nurse hare off in opposite directions is a good indicator of how many of these little ceremonies they must be party to in any given month. It’s a first for him, and if he’d had any idea what he was getting into by insisting himself into Laurel’s visit with her father, he would have stayed in the car, sparing her possible embarrassment and himself a profound sense of helplessness.
They return to her father’s room, where she again speaks to the old man as though there could be a breakthrough at any moment.
“I saw Mrs. Floss yesterday morning and she still makes the best blintzes in the world. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that I’ve finally hired a service to take care of the yard and I’m looking for someone to help keep the house up to snuff. Who knows, I may wind up with the best-maintained museum in the neighborhood.”
She laughs and goes on in that vein for several more minutes, giving him time to imagine what he’d say to old Mr. Chandler if he thought the message would get through. Thank you, sir, he’d say; I intend to take extremely good care of her, he’d say after that. Next he’d pledge to supply everything he could towards making up for her sacrificed youth and on and on it would go.
Outside, Laurel stops him before they reach the car. “I am so sorry . . . I should not have a
llowed you to be dragged into that . . . I handled that incredibly badly . . . And you were entirely right to question how much he might be able to understand . . . Shit . . . how could I—”
“Laurel . . .” The words he imagined saying to her father try to get out now. He clamps down so hard he nearly bites his tongue. When he can talk, it’s in moronic mumblings as he risks giving her the sort of cuddle reserved for maiden aunts with bad breath—the sideways sort that spans shoulders without touching anything but upper arm. For a lovely moment she leans against him a bit, softening the stiff embrace till the moment is snatched away by their joint notice of an occupied car parked a short distance away. The driver’s attention is unquestionably fixed on them as he lowers the bill of his baseball cap and recedes a bit into the shadowed interior of a customized vehicle that’s neither standard coupe nor dedicated pickup truck.
Laurel could be veteran of dozens of run-ins with paparazzi for the way she conceals her face and keeps her head down, even after they’ve made it to the shelter of the Jaguar. He’s both admiring of her quickness to learn and saddened that she had to learn at all. And all for nothing in this instance, because the watchful bloke makes no attempt to follow when they start for the front of the building and the exit to the street.
“Appears to be another clean getaway.” He makes light of the false alarm with the expression she used yesterday after the park sojourn proved uneventful. But he may have spoken too soon. At the front of the nursing home, in the main car park there, he can’t be dead certain he’s not eyeballing the same car he thought was following them earlier.
“Bleedin’ Jesus,” he mutters.
“Sorry?” she says.
“Nothing,” he answers.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Late morning, April 5, 1987
Colin finds his way back to the main road and to the bridge over the Hudson River with very little guidance. Other than for alerting him to a turnoff or merge point now and then, Laurel is quiet, lost in thought as they distance themselves from the nursing home. They motor on this way till they approach the Connecticut border, where he confronts her silence head-on. “Was there a catalyst for the decision to establish a DNR order for your father? Something happen recently to bring that about?”
“No, no specific event. It’s something I’ve long known I’d have to do and wasn’t willing to deal with until now. A number of things have caught up with me lately. I’ve had to accept that my father will never recover from the several small strokes he’s had and I can no longer pretend his Alzheimer’s isn’t worsening. Along with that, I’ve had to acknowledge that my house needs more upkeep than I’m able to provide without help and . . . and despite having just bought a new car, I’d be seriously delusional not to admit that commuting makes less sense every day. Oh, and I should add that the reason I’m visiting my brothers and sister today is related to these wakeup calls, but you needn’t worry that you’ll again be sucked into something difficult or unpleasant because—”
“Laurel . . . listen to me. Stop thinking that you sucked me into something. I was there of my own volition. I only wish I’d been forewarned, I might have been more help, actually.”
“You . . . helped . . . just by being there,” she says in a half-whisper with her head bowed like she’s still apologizing.
He waits a few beats before reminding her she was about to tell him the reason for the visit to her remaining family. “They’re called Ben, Michael, and Emily, right?”
“Yes, and there’s nothing at all grim about my business with them today. In fact, a celebration will probably be in order when they learn I’ve established trust funds in each of their names. I’m not saying I’m cutting them loose altogether. I’ll still administer the funds and I’ve built in some very stringent limitations, but they won’t have to feel so tied to me.”
Questions pop up about the source of the funds—the extent to which she’s sharing her inheritance, the amount of the inheritance itself—and he pushes them out of mind as unsuitable and even more premature than the other questions that beg asking. “Laurel?” he begins.
“Yes?”
“I’m wondering. . . .”
“Go ahead.”
“Do they . . . do your brothers and sister fully appreciate what you’ve done for them, the sacrifices made, putting your life on hold so they—”
“I want to think they do because not one of them has ever caused me any real disappointment. I think the boys knew from early on that we all had to cooperate or we’d all go down together. And I think Emily must have sensed that from birth.” Laurel repositions herself in the seat, glances over at him. “You’ve never talked about your siblings. Do you have any?”
“A younger sister, Moira. In Australia, she is. Went there with my dad when he split with my mum. That was over twenty years ago, so I don’t know her, actually.”
“You’ve seen her since?”
“A time or two when I was touring down under, but ours can’t be called a relationship.”
“Do you have a relationship with your father?”
“No. He got in touch with me once—hit me up for money when I started making it big. Said I owed him, he did, and if there ever was any sort of connection between us, it ended there.”
“I see . . . Did your mother remarry?”
“No, she never got round to it. I know she’s entertained an offer or two, but something always got in the way—me, mainly. She gave up a teaching position and maybe even an eligible suitor to take charge following the accident. Was supposed to be temporary, but it’s been so long now I don’t see her ever going back to her place in Herts. She’s very much involved with my boys, as they are with her, and she’s very good at switching from strict surrogate mum to pushover gran as the situation calls for. Anything about that sound familiar?”
Laurel laughs. “Yes indeed. I can’t begin to count the times I was called upon to be both lenient sister and stern stand-in mom in the span of one afternoon. Speaking of your mother, did she agree that your responding to Anthony’s naughtiness by coming home would send the wrong message?”
“Yeh, she’d basically reached that conclusion when I gave her your recommendation, so it’s like the two of you are already in league. And why wouldn’t you be? You have quite a bit more than me in common.”
“Hold on there. Wait a minute. About your son, Anthony, I only raised a suggestion, posed a possibility. I definitely did not make a recommendation and I most definitely did not expect you to relay it as such to your mother.”
“Why not? She knows all about you, respects your opinion same as I do.”
“And what’s this about my having you in common with your mother? What do you mean by that?”
“Um . . . well . . . when we’re done here you’ll know as much about me as my mum, won’t you then?”
“Based on what I’ve learned so far I’d say that day’s a long way off.”
“That another way of saying I’d better get on with it?”
“It is, and if you ever do get on with it, I’d prefer not to be quoted to your mother as a personal advisor. Okay?”
“Sorry, I can’t promise that, but I can promise I’m gonna open up as much as I can on the return trip. We’re gettin’ too close to New Haven to start anathing now.”
“Very well.” She appears somewhat placated when she begins calling out the turns that lead to a neighborhood of student housing near the Yale campus. She shows him where to drop her off and he assures her he can find his way back after he pays a nostalgic visit to the site of his first American gig. He does not tell her he’ll be doing only a brief reconnoiter of Newt’s Place, and from the car park at that; there’s no reason for her to know he won’t chance going inside after all these years, even if the joint does happen to be open at this unlikely time of day.
His memory of greater New Haven is murky and he makes several wrong turns before arriving in Windsor Street with goal in sight. At approach it’s obvious the scene is one
best viewed after dark, as is true of most venues of this sort. Broad daylight projects an air of seediness that might not otherwise be so apparent—rather like encountering an aging stripper under naked fluorescents. He nevertheless parks off to one side of the building, releases himself to recall the few other times he was in these precincts and it suddenly occurs to him that this is where the story owed Laurel should begin—at the American beginning.
He can regale her with many a tale about life lived out of a rattletrap old Chevy van with a band of mates who smelled like goats eight days out of seven and hungered for success in ways that seem unimaginable at this distance. No sacrifice was too great and no opportunity too outrageous to be endured for however long it took to make the one connection that embedded them in the minds of the listening and buying public. There are more than enough stories about this period to fill the distance back to New Jersey and cover his inability to tell Laurel what she deserves to know, what she was engaged to know.
Untouched by the nostalgia he thought he’d feel, he’s rather glad Newt’s is shut at this hour of the day, relieved to leave the scene behind without having had to test himself further.
On the street where Laurel’s brothers live, he finds a parking space where she’ll be sure to spot him once she’s done with her business. She must have been looking out the window as he drove up because he’s no more than wedged the Jaguar in between a couple of battered student cars when she’s out on the pavement beckoning him to join her. He does, and she guides him into the vestibule of the apartment block, where he’s met by two young men Laurel smilingly introduces as her brothers.
