Blackbird Fly (3 page)

“
Did you put anything on your
eye?”

“
Bag of gel.”

“
Who was the culprit?” He squinted
with his good eye. “The guy who socked you.”

“
Just an asshole. One of millions at
Blackwood.”

“
Right. It was in the paper. They’re
calling it a public health crisis.”

He grunted and stuffed another piece in his mouth,
washing it down with soda.

“
So they tell me two weeks, is that
right?”

“
There’s a letter in my backpack.
They want me to see some quack. But I’m not doing it.” A
frightened, belligerent look crossed his face.

“
Did this asshole get
suspended?”

“
I guess.” He looked at her. “It was
Lancaster.”

“
Billy?” Tristan’s best friend. Or
had been. “Billy hit you?”

“
I hit him first.”

“
Ah. Good thinking. Catch ‘em
unawares.”

“
Ha ha. You aren’t Dad.”

Merle felt her stomach drop. That was Harry’s line.
Catch ‘em unawares
, along with other moronic pointers on
fighting that he bragged were from his years on the streets. A
family joke. None of them believed that Harry had been a
bare-knuckle street fighter. Not with being short, pudgy, and
better suited to
foie gras
and martinis.

“
Sorry,” Tristan said. “I mean, I
know you’re not.”

He must have seen her picking at her cuticles, the
delightful new habit that made her hands look like a battle zone. A
twist of his lips indicated a teenage smile. He laid a hand on the
top of her head. A big, warm, greasy hand.

“
It’s okay you’re not Dad. Really. I
wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The Widow
. She read about them in the
newspapers, heard about them at parties: wives of fallen soldiers,
firefighters, policemen, executed criminals. Men whose lives had
meaning, whose deaths were heroic or justified. But Harry was no
hero. Just a middle-aged man trying to fleece the world.

The concept of ‘widow’ was semi-romantic, at least in
novels. The curse of adolescent reading, dozens of gothic romances
she chewed through in her teens where the heroine mucks around in a
creepy old mansion, looking for treasure and true love. Annie or
Stasia read them then handed them down. They all saw themselves as
that brave girl, searching for love. How young they were.

And now she was the widow. Not the heroine. The widow
was usually a crazy old bat. Merle remembered one of the first
gothics she read, ‘A String of Pearls.’ The widow was scary for
having lived alone for years pining after her dead husband, but
generous to the naïve but plucky slip of a heroine. The wild-haired
crone gave the girl a string of pearls that helped her survive the
storm that battered the mansion and turn the smelly stable boy into
a perfumed prince, or some such drivel.

Merle lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, wishing
someone had magic pearls for her. Instead of being the slip of a
girl she was the scary old widow with crow’s feet and bunions. How
had it happened? Just yesterday she was sixteen, with dreams. And
now, no Harry — but was that so bad? That little voice returned:
Now you’re free.
She hadn’t loved him. Why was that so hard
to accept?

If she was honest with herself — and why bother with
the truth when it causes wrinkles, constipation, and other joys of
adulthood? — she’d stopped loving him a long time ago. Maybe the
week after he’d saved her from a concussion on the restroom floor.
Or maybe when he forgot their first anniversary and worked late.
This was no gothic romance. There was no magic moment when the
spark went out. Maybe it was just a shallow flame after all, not
the raging fire they imagined drew them to the altar.

What had she loved in him, all those years ago? She
scrunched up her eyes and tried to think back. He was generous,
he’d given her flowers unexpectedly, diamonds from time to time,
this house she hated. For a man driven by money he wasn’t stingy,
not at all. Except perhaps with his time. The only time they went
out together was for business. That had been his way for years. And
she had never complained.

She got up and stared at herself in the bedroom
mirror. Her dark hair was streaked with gray, and stringy. The
mascara she’d put on for the meeting with the lawyers had smudged.
Her lips were thin and cracked. She closed her eyes and tried to
take a deep breath. The rock was lodged there, but somehow a tiny
bit smaller. For an instant she saw a glimpse of herself when all
this was over: attractive, smiling, lovable. And younger:
how
was that going to happen? Wake up, Merle.

The doorbell rang. She rubbed her cheeks, and marched
to the door, eager to pounce on another cheesy casserole or gooey
dessert. Betsy stood on the porch in her clogs and barn jacket.
Faithful friend and cheerer-upper, Betsy had been stopping by each
evening, when she knew things grew too quiet. They had been friends
since their kids were in preschool, and still jogged together once
in awhile. As Merle made them both herbal tea, Betsy’s eyes turned
toward the thumping ceiling.

“
He got in a fight at school. I
probably sent him back too soon.” Merle set down her cup. “I heard
the will today.” She summarized the inheritance, such as it
was.

Betsy's eyes widened. “Wait — no trust fund for
Tris?”

“
I guess he never got around to
it.”

The word hung in the air:
Bastard.
“But what
about you? Will you stay at Legal Aid?”

“
For the time being. I’ve been
trying to think. Do you know anybody else whose husband died young
like Harry?”

“
Well. You remember Margo
Willoughby. She was about forty-five when Gus died.” Betsy bit off
her next sentence as they both remembered Margo had flipped out,
treated herself to a bad face-lift then married a guy who owned a
strip club in New Jersey.

Merle drained her tea cup and smiled. “Time to
perfect that cannoli recipe?”

She took the file Troy Lester gave her to bed. The
obituary for Harry’s parents was something he’d never shared.
Despite his material generosity he hadn’t really been the sharing
type, always buzzing off to his meetings and reading endless
financial newspapers. He’d rarely sat down in the kitchen to chat
like she’d just done with Betsy. Had he ever seen this
clipping?

New York Herald Tribune. March 2, 1954.

Weston Montgomery Strachie and his French bride,
Marie-Emilie, died tragically on a rainy night as they returned to
their home on Long Island from a romantic outing in Atlantic City.
Their auto skidded off the road on a curve and struck a large oak
tree that has claimed the lives of more than a few drivers over the
years. Husband and wife were pronounced dead at the scene. They
leave behind their four-year-old son, Harold.

Weston, 37, was a devoted husband and father. He met
his bride in France after his Army service during World War II. His
business as a wine and spirits importer brought him frequently to
the country. They married in 1947, and their son was born several
years later. They moved back to the United States in 1952, settling
in Levittown.

Marie-Emilie, 26, who preferred to be called Emilie,
will be remembered as a sunny, lively girl, a devoted wife and
mother. She will be sorely missed by all who knew her.

Weston is survived by his loving sister, Amanda
Wilson and her husband, Sylvester, who have opened their hearts and
home to little Harold, and by his mother, Louise Strachie, of
Buffalo. Marie-Emilie is survived by many relations in France.

There was another, smaller announcement in the
Times
. The only new information was Marie-Emilie’s maiden
name, Chevalier. She reread the
Herald Tribune
obit; it had
the touch of Aunt Amanda, last seen in a dinner plate hat at
Harry’s funeral. After Sylvester died she traveled the world with
friends from her days as a dress buyer at Macy’s.

“
Marie-Emilie Chevalier,” Merle
whispered aloud. Was she really sunny and lively, or was that just
Amanda’s drama? Merle closed her eyes. She’d missed having a
mother-in-law, all these years. Amanda had played the part but not
exactly, not being the maternal type. Merle tried to imagine Harry
as a little child, round and smiling, playing in the fields of
lavender — the way she imagined the French countryside, bucolic and
fragrant.

The bass and drums of music videos thumped through
the ceiling, bringing her back to the present. She put the obituary
aside. Like so much in the past, it didn’t matter. Not any
more.

Chapter 3

1949

“
Complaining will not keep you
alive.”

She backs through the gate with the chicken held by
its legs as it flaps and squawks. Pausing inside the garden she
looks up at the window. Cigarette smoke curls out, which means
Weston is working at his typewriter. No tapping sounds so he isn’t
actually typing. She wonders if that is good or bad. He believes,
like the chicken, that complaining will change his fate. He truly
thinks that sour thoughts, and words, about his writing not selling
will magically make it sell, when it made sense to accept
defeat.

Marie-Emilie sets down the vegetables and the bread
on a spot of shade behind the outhouse. She has been lucky at the
market, the first real piece of good luck they’d had in weeks.
There had been potatoes and leeks, and some asparagus for the first
time. The chicken is scrawny but will provide a week’s worth of
soup. The bread was cheap because it is last week’s, hard and dry
but she has a method to make it right again. Normally the farmers
are hard on her at market, raising their prices out of spite. They
are suspicious of strangers, from the war, she imagines, but why
they take it out on her, a real Frenchwoman, is beyond her. The
villagers’ coldness hurts her. She would move back to her own
village in a moment, but there is no house to live in there.

The chicken scratches her leg with its beak, causing
her to cry out. Weston comes to the window, frowns, and disappears.
Jaw clenched she grabs the neck of the bird and gives it a violent
twist. With the axe she dispatches its head. Basket between her
legs she plucks its feathers, then cleans it. Inside she lays a
fire, filling the kettle with water and hooking it onto the iron
arm. Weston hollers down from upstairs.

“
What the blazes are you doing now?
It’s so hot my fingernails are sweating and you build a fucking
fire.”

He appears on the stairs, cigarette hanging from his
mouth, in his undershirt. She dislikes seeing him this way,
half-dressed in suspenders and wrinkled trousers. Sometimes he goes
out on the streets, walking in the evening, like this. Is it any
wonder no one likes them?

“
Fresh chicken,” she says. “For
soup.”

“
It’s too fucking hot for soup,” he
growls. “Where’d you get the money?”

“
Barter,” she says, smiling. “No
money.”

“
What did you barter then,
cherie
?” His eyes are hateful and black. Money is his
biggest worry since things went bad in Nice. They had come with
such hopes, with money in their pockets. All gone now. Between the
wine business and the writing, they haven’t seen any money for a
month. But he finds wine to drink. His fingers are stained with
it.

“
Old clothes,” she says, smoothing
her cotton skirt. He would never know if she had sold clothes or
not. He hates all her clothes.

He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “What
clothes?”

“
Some old ones I do not wear.” In
Nice he bought her the satin dress, fancy shoes, the lovely soft
jacket. She sold them months ago.

He looks her over with his hard eyes, not lingering,
as she hoped he wouldn’t, on the faded blue scarf she wears on her
head. Planning this day she wore the scarf for a week, hiding her
long, black hair until this morning when she sold it for sixteen
francs to a woman from Bordeaux who makes wigs for whores.

He frowns at the kettle, now bubbling. “I’m going
out.” In the garden he washes himself in the American way, she
supposes, of splashing a few handfuls of water on one’s neck, and
slams the gate behind him.

Sitting on the stool in front of the hot fire, she
thinks she will write to her aunt. Ask her why she gave up this
house, if there is some curse on it. Maybe there is a way to find
happiness here that she is too blind to see. With the curse lifted,
Weston will be happy and they will have a baby.

She chops leeks and tears flow from her eyes. As she
throws the vegetables into the kettle she prays once more for a
child. Then they will both be so happy they will love each other
forever.

Chapter 4

It was late morning by the time they arrived in the
financial district. Fifteen days since Harry died, a Wednesday.
Merle was missing a staff meeting at ten-thirty, a lunch meeting in
Queens, and six afternoon appointments with clients, one of whom
was an old black man named Elmer she’d been helping for years.

She sighed and tried not to think about Elmer and his
problems. She was a walking appointment book, her mind fixated on
the calendar the way others memorized football scores and bird
lists. It was a curse to be so obsessed with days, hours,
appointments. Calendar Girl, Harry used to call her, teasing her as
he asked on what day of the week the Fourth of July fell three
years from now, as if she were a parlor game. And she knew, she
always knew.