The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “We’ll steal the photographs. That’s easy. Say you want to borrow them.” He had stood up. He was walking around the room.

  “She gave us a set.”

  “I’m going to get them now. We’ll sell the house. We’ll move. I’ll sell the house tomorrow.”

  “That’s overreacting.”

  “No, it’s not. Call Mother. Tell her we’re coming over there for a few days. Then we’ll go get the photographs. You keep her busy and I’ll steal them.”

  Twenty minutes later Nora Jane and Freddy were in the kitchen of Clyda’s house. “We want to see those photographs you took,” Freddy said. “We need to borrow the negatives. We can’t find the ones you gave us. The girls must have put them somewhere.”

  “Oh, they are good, aren’t they? I can’t believe how well they turned out.” Clyda left the room to get the photographs. Zandia stuck his sword into the space between the refrigerator and the wall. The cat climbed up on a counter and sat beside a plate of fruit. The doorbell was ringing. Then the phone was ringing also. Nora Jane started to answer it, then couldn’t touch it. Zandia picked up the phone. It was Lydia, looking for her mother. “Put my mother on the phone, Zandia. Zandia, can you hear me? Is my mother there?”

  There were excited voices in the hall. Zandia dropped the phone and ran down the hall and then they were there. His mother and his grandmother and Sandy George Wade, moving into the kitchen all talking. Freddy had never met Sandy Wade but he had lived with Lydia for ten years and it was as though she had stepped into the room. The hair, the eyes, the body English, the expression on Sandy’s face, quizzical, waiting.

  “I have wondered where you were,” Nora Jane began. “I’m glad to see you well. This is my husband, Freddy. Sandy is an old friend from New Orleans,” she explained to Clyda. “We went to school together.”

  “We went to the same church,” Sandy added. “We knew each other a long time ago.”

  “We have to be going,” Nora Jane said. “We have people waiting on us.”

  “May I borrow the photographs to show them?” Freddy took them from Clyda’s hand and led Nora Jane toward the back door.

  “This is who saved Zandia’s life,” Clyda was saying. “This is Nora Jane.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Claudine put in. “I brought you a present. Sandy, go get my suitcase, will you?” She was very tall, very thin, nervous and excited. She had picked up Zandia but she was not paying much attention to him. She was trying to figure out what was wrong. “Mother,” she added, “get that goddamn cat off the counter, will you? I told you Zandia’s allergic to them. Has that cat been inside the whole time?”

  “We really have to leave. We’ll see you later.” Freddy put the photographs into his pocket and he and Nora Jane disappeared through the door.

  “I’ll call you later,” Nora Jane called over her shoulder. “We’ll get together later.”

  They made it through the gate and started up the hill to their house. “Get the girls,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They walked back across the yard, holding hands, tight against each other’s bodies. Freddy’s shoulders barely came an inch higher than Nora Jane’s. “Yet I feel the breadth of them,” she said, and he did not ask the meaning. They had grown to talk this way when they were alone together. In sentence fragments, long hints, musings. Perhaps she had learned it from him, or perhaps she had only learned to do it aloud, since she had always whispered parts of secrets to herself and to her cats. Lonely little only child that she had been, always up in trees with a cat, spinning worlds she could inhabit without fear. Now, into this world she had created with this man, a real world of goodness and light, peace and hope, came this moment and they must bear it and survive it.

  “He cannot mean to harm us” Freddy answered. “Still, she is his and he will know it. What do we do now? First we think.”

  “He thinks they both are his. We should never have kept this secret. Nothing should be a secret. Secrets are dynamite, weapons-grade uranium.”

  “Who would we have told? Tammili and Lydia? We can’t do that.”

  “Call your mother and tell her we’re coming over there. We’ll move if we have to. He knows where we live.”

  “Leave the house?”

  “There are millions of houses. Think of the stuff we could throw away.”

  “All right. Go get the girls. Let’s go. A house on the beach. That’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?”

  “This is what money is for, Freddy. This is the difference in being rich and being poor.” They had arrived at the cobbled path that led to the back door. It was sheltered by azalea bushes and they stopped beneath one and moved into each other’s arms. Frozen still, on guard, but moving. This was the thing Nieman envied them, this marriage, this shield they had created, the ability to plan and move as one.

  Nora Jane disappeared into the house and began to throw clothes for the girls into a suitcase. Freddy got the station wagon out of the garage and drove it to the side door. He went into the living room and turned on the CD player. Then he called his mother. The strains of the Sixth Symphony were in the background while he talked to her. “It’s dire, Mother. Someone who is a threat to us is staying next door. We’re coming there, for perhaps a week.”

  “What will you tell the girls?”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Say I need them. Say I was frightened.”

  “You’ve never been frightened in your life. They’d never believe that.”

  “Then tell them they can’t know.”

  “I’ll say the air-conditioner’s broken. Hell, I’ll say the power’s going off.”

  “Come on then. I’m waiting.”

  “We’re going to buy another house. Will you go with Nora Jane this afternoon and help her look?”

  “Whatever you need.”

  Ann Harwood hung up the phone and sat staring out the leaded glass doors into the morning light. Then she picked up the phone and called her lover and told him she couldn’t drive to the desert as they had planned. “The children need me,” she said. “This is why there’s no point in getting married.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll call you later.” She hung up the phone and walked down the hall and began to open doors to unused rooms.

  Sandy George Wade stood by himself in Clyda’s pink and white guest bedroom feeling the way he had felt most of his life. Frightened, deserted, in the way, waiting for the next blow to fall. I guess I’d like to see those kids she had, he decided. See how they turned out, but what the hell, nobody offered to show them to me, did they?

  Zandia came into the room and brandished his plastic sword. Sandy struck a pose and pretended to fence with him. They moved around the room thrusting and pointing at one another. Zandia began to laugh, he ran in little circles, faster and faster, then he jumped up on the bed and held the sword in both hands and began to jump on the mattress. Sandy picked him up and carried him upside down to his mother. “You’ve been had, Zorro,” he said to him. “You’ve met your match when you fence with Captain Sandy Hook, the master swordsman of the deep.” Zandia whacked him on the leg with the sword, then dissolved in upside-down giggles.

  Sandy set him upright and took his hand. “Back to Montessori for you, old buddy,” he said. “Tomorrow morning bright and early. And this time don’t bring home any colds while I’m filming.”

  Freddy and Lydia had promised to go to movies with Nieman, so only Tammili went with Nora Jane and Ann Harwood to hunt for houses. “I came to California to live by the ocean,” Nora Jane said. “I want to live where breakers beat upon the shore. I want to look out the window and see my girls playing in the sand.”

  “What’s she been smoking?” Tammili dissolved in laughter. They were in Ann’s Bentley, going to meet a real estate broker. “It’s because Zandia fell in the pool, I bet,” she added. “She probably wouldn’t let us in the ocean if we lived by it.”

 
At five-fifteen that afternoon they found it. A three-story frame house on a promontory where the Pacific Ocean beat against the shore. Nora Jane stood on a slope and watched the waves break against a tall, triangular rock. She walked to the water’s edge and watched her footprints come and go. She thought, I did mean to live by the water, where the land meets the sea. “I was on the ocean’s edge when I decided you were about to be born,” she said to Tammili. “I think you should be excited by the sound of the waves.”

  “I know. Then you got on the train and went to Willits and that’s why we were born there. How many times do I have to hear that story?”

  “But do you like the house?” Ann asked. “We’ll restore it and paint it and change the landscaping. But the basic plan, the house, how do you feel about it, Tammili?”

  “Who wouldn’t want that mansion? But I don’t want to move. How are we going to get to school? How will Daddy get to work?”

  “It isn’t that far. We’ll keep the other house too. In case we need it. We won’t throw it away.”

  “I don’t see how we’ll get to school. We’ll have to get up at six o’clock in the morning.”

  “Details,” her grandmother said. “Three months and we can have it done. Paint, new bathrooms, new kitchen. I know just the people. I’ve been wanting to get them some work. This young contractor who’s helpful with Planned Parenthood.”

  “Do you want to see the other two houses?” the real estate agent asked.

  “No, we’re mad about this house. We’ll go back to my house and talk about an offer. Oh, Freddy has to see it. I forgot about that.”

  “Can we show him tonight?” Nora Jane asked. “Are the lights on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are we getting this house?” Tammili asked. “You can tell me the truth. You can trust me.”

  “Would you wait a few days and let us tell you then?” her grandmother asked. “Could you trust us?”

  “Okay. I guess so. But I know why. I know anyway.” She walked off from them and stood looking at the house, smirking to herself. They think I’m so dumb. It’s because the people next door are anti-Semitic. Dad’s afraid they’ll be snotty to us or something. He’s so protective it’s pitiful. Now Grandmother will have to spend a million dollars or something to move us all out here so we won’t have any neighbors. It’s ridiculous. If they’re snotty to me I’ll dump the cat litter in their yard. She walked closer to the house. Actually, it was four houses joined together to make one. A colonial house like one in some faraway country in another time. She was drawn to it. She wanted to go back inside and pick out some rooms for herself and Lydia.

  “We aren’t ever going to tell them or admit it to them,” Nora Jane said. “We made up our mind. Can you live with that, Ann? With never letting them know there is any difference in them to you? You have to leave them the same amount of money in your will and things like that. If we keep this from them and they find it out, the older they are when they find out the madder they are going to be. But it’s a chance we have to take. I don’t want them to meet Sandy. I don’t want him trying that charm on them.”

  “I always knew this, Nora Jane. I didn’t know how exactly. I studied science as a girl, you know. I knew Lydia wasn’t kin to me, but it’s never mattered one way or the other. I adore her. I would rather be her grandmother than any little girl in the world. She’s ten times as lovable as Tammili. Tammili reminds me too much of my mother to be able to pull the strings of my heart. Look at her, she’s probably going up there to stake out territory. That’s what Big Ann would have done. She was a weaver when she got old, did you know that? She had a loom and made twenty or so rugs and we don’t know what she did with them. She never gave us one of them. I think she sold them.”

  “Are you sure you want to buy this house? It costs so much.”

  “A sound investment. They don’t make any more beaches. It would be a good investment if the lot were empty. I might fix it up for myself if you decide you don’t want it or Freddy doesn’t like it.”

  “Oh, he’ll like it. He’ll go crazy. I know his taste. He’ll start wanting to fill it with period pieces.”

  “Let’s go find him. We can send Tammili into the movies if they’re still at the Octoplex. Were they really going to three movies?”

  “Parts of three. That’s how Nieman does it, you know. If he comes to one he likes well enough to stay that one gets a review.”

  II

  Of course Nieman started seeing the Harwoods’ problems as a play. It had everything. Confused passions (the great overbearing winds of the first circle of the Inferno), uncertain parentage, innocence slaughtered, random ill. He was walking around his house listening to Kiri Te Kanawa sing Puccini and thinking of Nora Jane’s amazing singing voice, which she almost never let anyone hear. He was musing on the story of her childhood: a father slaughtered in a senseless war, a mother drinking herself into dementia, the portrait of her grandfather in the robes of a supreme court justice, the grandmother in the blue house with the piano and the phonograph records.

  “Unfair, unfair, always unfair.” Nieman strode around the living room and waved his arms in the air to the music. Vissi d’arte, the consolations of art. There was nothing else. Struggle and death, and in the meantime, beauty. Tammili and Lydia and Nora Jane and his best friend, Freddy, who was born to bear the suffering of anyone who came his way. He bore mine, Nieman remembered, when my own father died within a month of his, both taking their cigarette-scarred lungs to the Beth Israel Cemetery. We were fourteen years old but it was Freddy who became the father. It was Freddy who saw to it that our holidays were never sad, Freddy who sent off for the folders and found the wilderness camp where we could learn the things our fathers would have taught us. Freddy who went to Momma and made her let me go. “I won’t let him die, Miss Bela,” he told her. “I’ll see to it personally that Nieman isn’t involved in anything that’s dangerous. His safety will be more important to me than my own.”

  Four weeks later they were stuck all night in a canyon in the Sierra Nevada with half the rangers in the area looking for them.

  The phone was ringing. It was Freddy, catching Nieman up on the events of the afternoon. “They bought a mansion on the beach. Up by Mendelin Pass. You wouldn’t believe what they bought. It looks like Gatsby’s house. Mother’s in ecstasy, as you can imagine. She’s been trying to get me in a house she understands for twenty years. Well, on a higher note, I’m taking two days off for this education jaunt. You want to meet us somewhere or shall we come and pick you up?”

  “We all have to be in different buildings at different times. Let’s meet at Aranga’s at noon and have lunch. I’ve got to work all night to get caught up. Is that all? They bought a house? You haven’t been home?”

  “I’m going over later and see if he’s left.”

  “Can I do anything to help?”

  “Not yet.”

  “He has no legal rights. Your name is on the birth certificate, isn’t it?”

  “We don’t want him to know where they are, Nieman. Hide your treasures. You’re the one who taught me that. If he sees them he might want them.”

  “Perhaps you should confront him. Pay him off. Who is he anyway? You need more information. Call Jody and get him to put a tail on him and do a profile. I thought you read murder mysteries.”

  “That’s the best idea you’ve had. Tammili has decided we are moving to escape anti-Semitism. It’s a sore spot with her that she can’t experience prejudice.”

  “The angel. Well, I’ll meet you at noon tomorrow. Call Jody Wattes. Get more information. Don’t let your imagination run this. Athena’s the goddess you need. Balance, knowledge, cool head.”

  “See you tomorrow then.”

  Sandy walked around the perimeter of Nora Jane and Freddy’s house. It was eight o’clock at night and there were lights on in the living room and central hall but the garage was locked and no one seemed to be there. “They’ve run off because of me,” he sa
id out loud. “Well, I deserve that. I never sent her a penny. I guess they have a good life, her and her Jewish husband and my kids. I wonder what they look like. She always said they might not be mine. What if they were his kids and I’d been supporting them all these years? Well, things will change for me after this picture is released. I’ll come see them then.” He shook his head. I’ll just go up and look around. See what kind of stuff they keep around. You can tell a lot about someone by the things they keep around. Life never lets up on me, does it? If I get happy for fifteen minutes, something comes along to throw me to the mat. Well, I better get back or Claudine will get worried. She’s the best thing to come down the pike for me in years. I even like the little kid. Yeah, Zandia’s a kick. He’s got a criminal mind. And Clyda’s okay for an old lady even if she is a nervous wreck. Yeah, Claudine’s good for me.

  Sandy walked up on the front porch and listened for guard dogs, then tried the door. It opened. In their hurry, Nora Jane and Freddy had left it unlocked. He walked into the foyer and called out, “Anybody here? I brought a message from Clyda next door.” He walked into the living room and came face to face with a huge portrait of Tammili when she was nine years old. Her short black hair, her intense, worried black eyes stared out at him. They were in sharp contrast to the frilly white lace dress Nora Jane had made her wear. It was a powerful, no-nonsense face. A forbidding IQ, an analytical mind, a wide, flared nose, the painter had captured them all. It was a portrait of a Medici.

  Not very pretty, Sandy decided. She sure doesn’t look like me. The face followed him when he tried to turn away. That is not my kid, he decided. It hardly even looks like a kid.

  The painting, the empty house, the strangeness of a life he could not imagine, began to work on Sandy’s mind. If they were mine they might not like me, he decided. They wouldn’t know anything about me. Maybe when the movie comes out I’ll send N.J. a print and she can show it to them if she wants to. If they’re mine. That kid’s not mine. I’m out of here.