First Lady

by Michael Malone

  I was eating Stilton cheese and an apple when finally Mavis skipped down the wide stairs from the bedrooms and flung herself into an ancient Morris chair. She took a slice of the green apple from me. “So what was your winter home, a palace maybe?”

  I said my family hadn’t been rich but they’d been comfortable for a long time.

  She laughed. “You American sods never think you’re rich. Now do you know what I’m going to tell you? My mother cleaned a hotel in Glengarriff not so big as this and too much for her bad feet it was at that.” The singer poured herself a glass full of her whiskey and took it to the small white spinet where I’d left out sheet music of the Scott Joplin that I played too slowly. The piano had been my mother’s; she called it “The Summer Piano” and she and my father, an amateur violinist, played Mozart duets here in the long August evenings when he came home to us from Haver Medical School, which he ran. It was my mother who gave me piano lessons. A sudden rush of memory took me back to sitting with her on this white wooden bench, her hands patiently guiding mine to form the chords, our tanned bare legs side by side, in our summer shorts, my legs then shorter than hers that now seemed so small and frail to me.

  Mavis’s fingers raised nonchalantly over the keys and suddenly a strong sad rolling stride of bass melody shook the room. She sang from an old blues that I’d heard before, “When I…came in…to this ole world, I didn’t come here to stay. / I didn’t bring nothin’ into this ole world. / And nothin’ I’ll carry away.” The music stopped as suddenly as it had started. She waved her whiskey glass around the room. “Darlin’, you and Mavis got more than we can carry away, that’s for certain. I am terrible, terrible rich.”

  I said I would imagine so.

  “All of a sudden I had more money than time. And that’s surely a curious situation in which to find yourself at twenty years of age when you grew up with a poor mum longing day and night after a ratty plastic reclining chair collecting dust in a cheap store window.”

  I expected her to tell me some tragic way in which her sainted mother had died—starved or clubbed by British soldiers or eaten by venereal disease—but instead she said that as far as she knew, her bitch of a mother still lived in County Clare; at least somebody at the rest home was cashing the checks she sent. She said frankly she had never liked her mother, who was “righteous religious.” “Always lighting the candles to these bloody martyred saints of hers that got burned up and raped and chopped to bits, their tongues pulled out and their heads whacked off.” The mother had even told her son Willie that his fits were signs of sin and his own fault.

  The war with Mrs. Connolly had driven Mavis to run away when she was eleven. She stole the money to take the bus to Dublin to find an aunt of hers whose name was Mavis. Her mother asleep in the lumpy bed that morning as she robbed her purse was the last sight she’d had of her. “Always smackin’ me. ‘You’re the spit of Mavis and the twos of you will be burnin’ in hell together for all eternity.’ So I say, ‘That’s fine by me, Ma, for I’d rather be damned with Aunt Mavis and the devil in hell than sittin’ with you on the high cold throne of God.’”

  I laughed. “That’s a mouthful for an eleven-year-old.”

  “Not for the Irish, me boyo. We’ve done bollocks all but talkin’ at each other since the Middle Fuckin’ Ages.”

  When I asked what had been so damnable about her aunt, she said that the original Mavis was either a junkie hooker or she’d let a Protestant get her pregnant, or both. The young Agnes had never been able to locate her aunt in Dublin, but she had taken her name and made it famous all over the world. And as soon as she’d made the money to do so, she’d hired a detective to find her relative. The detective learned that her aunt had recently died of cancer. After he found the grave for her, Mavis had her aunt reburied in County Clare beside Willie under a marble tomb that cost ten thousand pounds. “My aunt used to say when we’d go by that church, ‘This cemetery’s shite. I want a stone so grand and gorgeous the Mother of God will be proud to come calling, and please Jaesuz, she’ll bring champagne and caviar.’ That was her dream of heaven, someday sitting down to champagne and caviar.”

  I helped myself to a glass of her whiskey and toasted her aunt with it. “To the two Mavises. May your fire never go out either.”

  “Ah,” she grinned as she watched me sipping at the whiskey, and when I finished the glass and poured another, she said strange words in a raspy voice. “Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile.”

  I asked her if it were Gaelic and she nodded that it was. “It’s an old proverb. ‘One beetle recognizes another beetle.’”

  I knew what she meant and didn’t bother pretending I didn’t. “Then you’ve never seen your mother since?”

  She drank from my glass. “Never once. But I can see her still, with her brown kerchief tight knotted under her chin and her black purse in her fists and her legs locked together, waiting at the bus stop.” She looked at me and smiled. “So this is Nachtmusik. Am I the Queen of the Night then?”

  “What do you think?”

  She turned back to the piano and started singing in a raw throaty voice:

  I don’t want you to be no slave.

  I don’t want you to work all day.

  I don’t want you to be true.

  I just want to make love to you.

  She circled slowly around and looked at me. I asked her if she would like breakfast, although I was sorry I couldn’t offer her champagne and caviar.

  “I wouldn’t be sorry for an egg,” she told me. “But I hate to leave just yet.” Her left hand played a slow blues beat. She looked at me again “Not when I’ve come to such a handsome place with such a handsome fellow.”

  I moved to the fireplace, lit the newspaper I kept ready beneath the logs. “We don’t have to leave. I’ll cook you something. There’s food here.” The month-old newspaper in the fire was the Hillston Star and I noticed the small headline, “POLICE ADMIT NO PROGRESS ON G.I. JANE HOMICIDE,” before the words flamed into ashes.

  Mavis smiled at me, not watching her hands as they moved slowly over the keys. “You cook then, do you, Mr. Savile? Ah, quite the catch you’d be. You sail…you ride…you send the bad fellows off to prison.…” After every phrase, she played the slow rhythmic beat. “You get the girl.” She turned again on the bench, leaned toward me. “Do you get the girl?”

  The fire leapt up behind me. I said, “Yes I do.”

  She stood and walked toward me. “At home on St. John’s Eve in the country, the fellow and his girl they’re supposed to take hands, you know, and jump over the fire, and that’ll tell them if they’re meant for one another or not.”

  “Here’s the fire,” I said and pulled her down toward me.

  • • •

  Afterwards we slept for an hour and it was two-thirty when I cooked the omelette while she listened to my old blues .78 recordings. She asked for pencil and paper and wrote things down as she played the Bessie Smith song again and again. In the hall, the old black dial phone suddenly rang.

  No one knew that I came here to Nachtmusik but Alice and Cuddy. I didn’t want to talk to either one. I let the phone ring. There was no answering machine in the house. Finally it stopped.

  • • •

  Back on the lake, the wind had died and I lowered the sails and used the outboard motor to speed us along. We were in a hurry now, late for our lives. Mavis was listening to voice mail on her small cell phone. I’d left my car near the bridle path and had decided we’d go straight there and avoid The Fifth Season. I’d take her back to the Sheraton where her entourage was waiting for her. For safety’s sake, just in case, I asked her to promise to keep her people around her at all times.

  “Ah,” she smiled ironically, “‘people around me at all times.’ Wouldn’t that be unusual now? Eight years ago, I woke up one noon and I was a celebrity and there were people all around me, who knows where th
ey came from, and there’ve been people all around me ever since. Combing my hair and patting my face and hauling me along halls onto stages and into cars and onto planes and under lights and stand here and move there and hold it please. I can’t go sit in the loo without people shoving their autograph books under the stall door at me. I haven’t bought my own pair of knickers in fuckall because I can’t go strolling in the shops. You know, I heard where in Memphis they’d open up stores for Elvis in the middle of the night like they do for the bleedin’ Queen. Maybe Dodi’s dad would do that for me at Harrod’s, what do you think?”

  “I think stars are famous because they want to be. They like it.”

  She laughed like a song. “Of course I like it! I feckin’ love it.”

  We were coming close to The Fifth Season. I could see the outdoor ring of the stables where I boarded Manassas; it bordered the resort on one side. I had assumed the Daysailor belonged to the resort, but when I asked her if the resort had a boathouse so I could return the sailboat later, she said she hadn’t taken the boat from the hotel. She had seen the O’Day tied to the small dock of some cottage that she’d swum past this morning. So she’d taken it for a sail. There’d been a duffel bag down in the hull with clean clothes in it—that had been where she’d gotten the white shirt and shorts. She wasn’t sure which cottage it had been. Painted blue, she thought, but maybe not.

  She sat in the bow, resting on her arms. She’d thrown open the white shirt to feel the afternoon sun on her breasts. Like everything about her, they were beautiful. Contrary to all the reports in magazines, neither nipple was pierced. I could see the red birthmark of a star on the side of her neck, the stigmata of her destiny, the mark that hadn’t been there when I’d looked at the body of Lucy Griggs.

  I said, “You just stole it? Somebody else’s boat?”

  She turned back to me and laughed. “Well, darlin’, I’m not planning to keep it forever, am I?”

  It was a warning. Or should have been.

  Part Two

  On the Devil’s Horn

  Thursday, June 21–Friday, June 29

  Chapter 15

  New Deal Tavern

  At dawn when Mavis kissed me, the media had only just begun to hear the first whispers that she was dead. Through the morning, grief raced across the world. People cried in the streets. In our global village of strangers, our strongest feelings may be for celebrities we’ve never met. But by noon, the Sun had apologized and CNN had explained to the world that the rumors were false and that nobody had been murdered but a waitress who was nobody. And then the world that had sighed and cried and rushed to heap altars of flowers and cuddle toys at the star’s death site, now sent up a cheer, reprieved by the happy news flashing on television screens across oceans. Mavis Mahar was alive. It had been thrilling that she had killed herself and it was thrilling again that she hadn’t. In fact, her quick resurrection was even more satisfying. For there is one discontent in what is otherwise a thoroughly enjoyable gobble at the trough of public grief: after the shock subsides, people are forced to notice that the celebrity they are mourning really is gone. Gone for good. There will be no new footage. Never again will those particular stars do the glamorous dangerous things that made us all so fascinated with them in the first place. Never will they be messily divorced or noisily adulterous or drunkenly arrested or caught in the nude by paparazzi in their Mediterranean love nests again.

  Of course, Mavis had taken a risk by being alive. Early death has its advantages for stars. It makes them endlessly young. Out of the imperishable rerun of their self-destruction comes their immortality. A Marilyn, an Elvis, a Diana—and maybe someday still, a Mavis Mahar. She was reckless enough. But for now the magic of Mavis was her escape from death. Here she was, so recently excitingly a suicide (or better yet, so gruesomely murdered), the newspapers still on the streets around the globe screaming:

  MAVIS E MORTA!

  SÄNGERIN MAVIS MAHAR BEENDET SICH.

  LA MAVIS SE SUICIDE!

  And then only hours later, here she was again not dead. Here she was waving at her fans live on the news, alive to sing for them and wreak havoc for them once more. Alive to make the question of who may have tried to kill her international news, and so a nightmare for Cuddy Mangum.

  As for the young woman who actually had been killed in Bungalow Eight at The Fifth Season Resort in a small city in the Piedmont of North Carolina, she was only an ordinary person and the world didn’t care about her. Ordinary people get themselves murdered every day. Lucy Griggs’ only claim on even a minute of the world’s time was her bad luck that the killer had mistaken her for Mavis Mahar.

  The governor’s press secretary Bubba Percy was feeling, as he boasted, “pumped.” We’d just watched Mavis on television making a live statement to as many of the media as could squeeze into the ballroom of Hillston’s largest downtown hotel. Quietly dressed, beautifully made-up (Dermott Quinn must have been waiting when I dropped her off at the Sheraton), the rock star was somber about the murder of Lucy Griggs, she was charming about being alive herself, she was apologetic about the missed concert at Haver Field—while leaving the effective if erroneous impression that it was the homicide itself that had somehow caused her failure to show up.

  And she was irresistible in her pledge to redo the concert whenever the university would let her. She’d do two concerts and she’d sing all night! But as she spoke, the person I kept seeing wasn’t this celebrity on the television screen, but the woman with whom I’d been making love only hours earlier. A troubling passionate private woman, who was now performing the part of Mavis Mahar the rock star.

  Meanwhile, as far as Bubba Percy was concerned, the best thing about the singer’s appearance was her complete silence on the subject of Governor Andrew Brookside. Equally miraculous to him was the fact that no one else mentioned Brookside’s name in the cacophonous burst of questions shouted at Mavis as soon as she finished her statement.

  “You Riverdancing bitch, I love you!’ Bubba told the television set hung above the bar at the New Deal Tavern. “Home free!”

  It was amazingly true. With the single exception of Shelly Bloom’s Sun exclusive ambiguously talking about “unconfirmed rumors” linking Mavis Mahar to “a second high-ranking Southern politician” (the first presumably the ruined Tennessee Congressman), not a single leak had tied Brookside to the Irish star in any way. (At least not publicly—half the crowd here in the New Deal were trading rumors about the affair right this minute, but they were all “in the business.”) And not even this in-crowd seemed to have a clue that the governor had been in Mavis’s bungalow on the actual night of the murder.

  According to Bubba, it was possible that the only people who knew the truth knew that it was in their best interests to keep their mouths shut. Admittedly, this group was not small: in addition to Mavis, the governor, Bubba, Cuddy, and myself, it included at the minimum the N.C. Attorney General and Brookside’s two crisp lawyers, the Haver County D.A. and the coroner, the sheriff, an SBI agent, the reporter Shelly Bloom, the hotel manager, the murderer, and (I suspected from her predawn visit to Cuddy’s office) the governor’s wife, Lee Haver Brookside. Of course, if someone in this group happened to be the murderer, that cut the number down by one.

  The potential danger in this free-floating knowledge did not seem to bother the press secretary at all. He chortled, “Jesus loves me and I love Him,” still fooling with the born-again vow to which Cuddy had earlier referred. Elatedly he slapped the bar in front of him and crowed, “Come on, Justin, I’m buying,” to the astonishment of the local politicians and press corps around us, all of whom knew him to be notoriously cheap.

  The state auditor hit his arm. “Bubba! And after I heard you were so tight, you shut off your mother’s defibrillator to save on the electric bill.”

  A columnist called to me, “Don’t turn your back on him, Savile. Last time Percy bought somebody ha
rd liquor in here, he tried to fuck her before she could drink it.”

  But their ribbing rolled like water off the oil of his slick self-regard. “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” he told them cheerfully as he led me past a loud table of state legislators over to a corner booth.

  The New Deal was only half-a-block from the State House, and since 1938 had been serving increasingly expensive Italian food to government officials and the reporters who got paid for talking about them. Low and wide, it had two dark noisy dining areas—the original one in which Democrats traditionally gathered and the “New Room” for Republicans (where, rumor was, prices went even higher). The walls of each were entirely filled with photographs of famous patrons shaking hands with three generations of New Deal owners. Giuseppe DiSilio with Harry Truman and a governor. Joe DiSilio Jr. with JFK and my uncle Senator Kip Dollard. Scott DiSilio with Bill Clinton and Andy Brookside. Bubba pointed at this last picture as we passed it. “Two lucky bastards,” he grinned.

  I reminded him that his boss was by no means free and clear. Brookside was still a material witness in the Lucy Griggs’ homicide, if not a suspect. The same, I noted, could be said for Bubba himself.

  Bubba told me blandly that he’d never met or heard of Lucy Griggs and neither had the governor. If the person who’d shot her had done so thinking she was Mavis Mahar, the killer was not Andy, but one of the “Slut Queen’s” ten thousand other lovers.