The Chaperone (43 page)

The postmark read NYC, stamped just a few days before.

TWENTY-ONE

Earle wasn’t killed in the war.
The ship he was on engaged in battle three times, but he would only tell Cora and Alan this after the war was over and he was back in St. Louis, his life with his wife and children and his shifts at the hospital resumed. There was no way to know if he would have survived Europe just as well—Cora was only relieved he was home and safe. And then Greta had another baby, a girl she named after her mother, and she would bring both Donna and baby Andrea by almost every week. Cora was aware of her good fortunes, all the grief she’d been spared. Not every mother had been so lucky, and she was still trying to comprehend the new reports coming in about the suffering in the concentration camps, as well as in Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It scared her to think how much her life’s ease and happiness had been granted by chance. Earle could have been killed of course—but even more than that, she could have been born anywhere in the world, and to anyone, she and her loved ones suffering in ways she could barely fathom when she listened to the international news. This idea seemed a revelation, something that it had taken her years to really understand. But it was not so different from the way she’d felt as a child, grateful for the Kaufmanns, but anxious to know how easily the train might have left her with someone else. Everything would have been different.

They had their minor troubles. In the winter of 1946, Joseph slipped on a patch of ice and broke his right wrist. His cast turned his hand into a giant, immobile claw, so that he resembled the irritable crab he became during the twelve weeks he couldn’t work. And a rough spring storm knocked over one of the neighbor’s sycamores, which fell away from their neighbor’s house and right onto their own. But the third floor took most of the damage, and no one was hurt. Even as Cora had heavy rain and opportunistic squirrels ruining the upper floor of the house, she knew she should count her blessings.

And then, Alan got sick. At first he was just more tired than usual, only going to the office in the mornings. Then he started sleeping through dinner, and though Cora would save a plate for him, he only picked at it. She told him she was worried, but he assured her he was fine, just needing to rest. It was Raymond who made him go to the doctor. They had a terrific fight about it, which Cora heard from up in her room. The fact that Alan put up such resistance was itself cause for concern. Later, both Cora and Raymond understood that he must have guessed he was truly ill. Pancreatic cancer, already progressed. There was no time to be astounded, to disbelieve. The doctor said two months, and warned none of it would be pleasant.

Within just a few weeks, he couldn’t manage the stairs. Cora carried meals up to his room, soup she could spoon up to his lips. She brought up meals for Raymond, too. He’d retired from his practice the year before, so his days were free, and he posted himself in the green upholstered chair by Alan’s bed, reading aloud in his still-commanding voice whenever Alan felt up for listening. He administered the morphine, and he helped Alan to the bathroom at the end of the hall. Raymond was seventy, just one year younger than Alan, but he was still wide in the shoulders and strong enough to easily lift him into the bath.

The whole while Alan was sick, Greta was pregnant with her third child. But she came over every afternoon at two, when Donna was in kindergarten and Andrea could be counted on to stay quiet and asleep in her buggy. If Greta thought anything of Raymond’s constant presence, she said nothing. She may or may not have understood that he was there all day, every day. In any case, Raymond still left by ten every night. Even then, they had to think about the neighbors, what they could and couldn’t explain. But Joseph was home at night, and he could manage any lifting until Raymond returned in the morning.

Alan wasn’t always in his mind. The doctor said it was the morphine. More than once, he confused Cora with his grandmother, asking if he’d been a good boy and if he could still go sledding with Harriet; an hour later, he would be calling her Cora again. He told her he loved her more than he ever planned to. He told her how sorry he was. She didn’t know if he was apologizing for his illness or for leaving her, or if he was still feeling guilty for marrying her, for her unhappy years.

“It’s all right,” she would say. “Don’t worry. Please don’t worry yourself.”

“Don’t tell the boys,” he whispered once, looking at her with such burning focus that she knew he wasn’t delirious. Spittle clung to his pale lips until she dabbed it away.

“Promise me, Cora. Promise me. Don’t ever tell the boys.”

“I promise,” she said, taking his hand. “I understand.”

When he was clearly nearing the end, Howard and Earle came home. They dragged a mattress from Howard’s old room into their father’s room, and they took turns sleeping at the foot of his bed in case he woke in the night. One of them was always with him, sitting in Raymond’s chair. Raymond himself had disappeared the day Howard and Earle arrived. He might have gotten away with a few visits, as they knew him as their father’s oldest friend. But his bedside vigil, had it continued, would have seemed strange to them, and Cora understood that Alan had made his wishes known to Raymond, too. They’d likely said their goodbyes on the last day they could.

She worried about Raymond.
At the funeral, everyone was kind to her, solicitous, so many people embracing her and telling her how sorry they were. She appreciated their sympathy, and she listened with longing to the good things they had to say about Alan. But the whole time, even with the ache in her own chest, she was aware of Raymond standing off by himself. Joseph went over and tried to have a quiet word, but Raymond shook his head and turned away. Maybe he knew what he could manage. When he left, he left alone.

She kept inviting him to dinner. He said no the first few times, but after a while, he started saying yes. She didn’t know how hard it was for him to sit at the table with her and Joseph and the empty chair. But he kept coming, and he certainly didn’t come for her cooking. She assumed it meant something for him to spend time with the two people in the world who knew and recognized his grief. Fifty years he’d been with Alan, including the years when they had tried to cease. Now, he seemed grateful to be with Cora and Joseph, at the table where one of them could point at Alan’s empty chair and say “he” or “his,” and the other two would understand.

•   •   •

“I am not
so much younger than Alan was,” Joseph told her one night. It was just the two of them doing dishes. Raymond, especially quiet that night, had left just after dinner.

Cora offered him a plate to dry. “You’re twelve years younger,” she said. “And I’m the same age as you.”

Joseph moved a towel around the plate’s brim. Watching his face, she understood that he wasn’t just being morbid. He was thinking about something. She waited. He wore thicker spectacles now, and the gold streak in his right eye appeared wider and brighter.

“I do not know if we should tell Greta,” he said. “I could die. We could die. And she will not ever know.”

Cora frowned. They had not had this discussion for years. She’d made up her mind long ago, and she thought he had, too. She looked at her hands, her familiar hands, wrinkled with age in the soapy water. What was it Schopenhauer wrote?
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
But they might not be in their closing years, and their masks, as far as she could tell, weren’t doing anyone harm.

His cloth squeaked against the plate. “You know what she said to me the other day? She said with each pregnancy, she wondered if she would have twins. Since it runs in the family. Cora, she believes you are her aunt.”

None of this was news.

“It’s not a good time,” she said, handing him another plate. “She’s about to have a baby, and we just lost Alan. She doesn’t need the shock.” She could feel him watching her, waiting.

He turned off the faucet, not angry, just wanting her focus. “You do not think we should tell her,” he said. “Not now. Not ever.”

She dried her hands on her apron. She shouldn’t be afraid. Whatever she said, he wouldn’t judge her. He was who he had always been. He would take in the information she offered as if she were a pilot offering a suggestion for one of his engines or wings. He was a careful, listening person, a thoughtful chooser. She loved him still.

“I don’t,” she said. “If you think we should, I’ll listen to you. I’ll hear what you have to say. But no, on my own, I don’t think we should tell her. Ever. I don’t see what good it could do, and it could do so much harm. To her. To Raymond. What if she tells her husband? What if he tells someone?”

“But it is the truth.”

Cora shrugged. She’d once thought truth important. She’d gone all the way to New York in search of it, what she believed she needed to know. And what had it gotten her? Mary O’Dell. Even then, in her pain and confusion, Cora had known better than to go up to Haverhill and tear into that woman’s life. And now she had no desire to tear into Greta’s—not over something as trifling as a bloodline.

“I’ll think on this,” Joseph said, turning the water back on.

She nodded. She’d said what she needed.

Aunt Cora, who loved her niece.

In the winter of 1953,
Cora heard sad tidings about Louise. Someone at a fundraiser had a friend with a nephew living in New York City, and the nephew reported seeing Louise Brooks, the old silent-film star, at a bar on Third Avenue, alone and drunk and mumbling in the middle of the afternoon. Cora knew she’d heard the story at least twice removed, and she didn’t know how many details had been made up or embellished. Allegedly, the nephew, who remembered seeing the beautiful Louise Brooks in films as a little boy, almost didn’t recognize her, as she’d grown her hair down to her waist, and it was stringy and threaded with gray. She’d grown out the bangs, too. The nephew reported that Louise was practically falling off her bar stool, and when he approached her and very politely asked if she was who he thought she was, she’d turned hostile, screeching at him to leave her alone.

Cora didn’t know if any of this was true, but she understood that it could be. There was no reason to expect that just being in New York, the city she loved, could save Louise entirely, that it could rescue her from whatever had made her love gin. As far as the hairstyle, Cora presumed the neglect was purposeful. If Louise truly wanted to be left alone, what better way to divorce her fame than to let her hair go gray and let it grow long, especially the bangs? It didn’t seem accidental that she’d gone to the other extreme.

Still, Cora hoped the story was embellished, or even completely untrue. Louise would be in her mid-forties now, and if she was truly spending her afternoons falling off bar stools, that might be the end of her story. Cora wondered if there was anything else she might have said to her that day up in her darkened room on North Topeka Street, something that might have done more for Louise than just getting her out of that house. But she doubted there was. Even then, Louise had a momentum, just as she’d had that summer in New York. It didn’t matter if she was headed up or down. Really, it was amazing that Cora, even with so much effort and insistence, had altered her path at all.

But as it turned out,
Louise’s story wasn’t yet over—not at all. The next time Cora heard anything about her, it was from an unexpected source: Walter, Howard’s eldest son. Cora didn’t know Walter as well as she would have liked. He and his sisters had grown up in Houston, and though Howard brought them up to Wichita for holidays when he could, it got harder for him when they reached adolescence, and Cora never felt she got to know them the way she knew Greta’s children. When Walter was in his early twenties, he became Walt, and Cora knew he was scholarly and interested in film, and that he was doing something purposeful in Paris, albeit on his father’s dime. But she usually only heard from Walt when he wrote his perfunctory thank-you notes after cashing the checks she mailed every birthday and Christmas. So she was very surprised when, in late 1958, she received an actual letter from him, sent airmail from France.

Dear Grandmother,

Dad said that you knew Louise Brooks better than anyone in the family, and I thought you might be interested to know I just saw her
here in Paris. She’s still very admired here, and the Cinématheque Française organized a retrospective of her films. I actually talked with her at one of the parties, and I asked her if she remembered you, but honestly, she was too pickled to have a real conversation. I hear she was quite the guest of honor. Apparently, she would order room service, charge it to the CF, and then throw most of her meal out the hotel window. Some of her fans picked up what she threw, I guess so they could have a piece of Louise Brooks’s coq au vin, saved for posterity! So she’s a bit off, but I have to say, she’s a first-rate writer. She’s had articles in Objectif and Sight and Sound, and they were both very good. But she’s mostly famous for who she was. In any case, I thought you might like to know all this. When I come home, maybe I can get up to Wichita, and you could tell me some stories. As it is now, when I tell people my grandmother in Kansas was Louise Brooks’s chaperone, no one believes me. Hope you and Uncle Joseph are doing well.

Love, Walt

Cora was happy to feel reproached. While she’d imagined Louise falling off bar stools until she died a lonely death, the real Louise was actually the toast of Paris. Life could be long, indeed. Clearly, Louise was still drinking, and now she was throwing chickens out windows, but what was this about the articles in film journals? Either she was sober some of the time, or she could write very well when drunk.

Even after Cora
turned seventy-five, she felt neither old nor frail. She continued driving herself to fundraisers and meetings at Kindness House. Joseph’s continued health seemed unsurprising, as aside from that terrible slip on the ice, he rarely suffered so much as a cold. But Cora had never thought of herself as a particularly hearty person, and when she started to notice the number of people listed in the local obituaries with birth dates more recent than her own, she was aware of the possibility that she might be nearing her own end. But year after year, she didn’t get sick, and her appetite stayed strong, and though she was terrified of falling and breaking her hip, as that seemed to be what happened to every old woman she knew, it didn’t happen to her. Despite her worries and resignation, she kept getting out of bed every morning, feeling, more or less, herself.