The First Warm Evening of the Year

The First Warm Evening of the Year

Jamie M. Saul

Dedication

For my brother, Lawrence A. Saul

And in memory of William T. Braman

Contents

PART I

Marian

One

T
he first time I saw Marian Ballantine she looked like a burst of bittersweet among the winter branches in her bright red coat and orange scarf, her hair thick and dark, the way certain secrets are dark.

She extended her hand, which folded over mine, and said, “Not what you expected, was it?” Marian might have known that there were more than a few other things to which she could have been referring, besides the circumstances for my arrival. I might have even believed that she was nothing more than a pleasant distraction from the unpleasant purpose for my having to be there, except I was aware of more than just her presence. It was her face, mostly, illuminant from deep within her eyes, and more complete than a simply attractive face, more involved. It was a welcoming face, which made me think for a moment that she'd mistaken me for someone else, or she thought she might have known me from some other time. It revealed the certainty of recognition and familiarity. No one had ever looked at me quite like that before. That's when I fell in love with her.

A
few weeks before, in the middle of a slow morning in March, I was alone in my apartment. According to my datebook it was the last week of winter, but I was feeling the “damp, drizzly November in the soul” that Ishmael talks about and sends him sailing toward his rebirth of wonder. For the past month or so, the rumblings of discontent, an emotional stasis had settled in. All the things that used to give me pleasure were unsatisfying now. I had a lucrative career doing commercial voice-overs for television and radio, with the kind of freedom that most of my friends envied; a relationship that allowed me an autonomy that other men seemed to desire—my girlfriend, Rita, was the least possessive person I'd ever known—and that I once wanted, too.

I couldn't quite locate the reason why I now felt so unsettled, as though my collar were always half a size too tight—and it had been a long time, it seemed, since work or relationships provided me much satisfaction.

This morning I'd decided to rest all considerations of heart and mind, feeling that loafing away this delicious lazy day and its unblemished and undemanding time was just what I needed to pull myself out of the doldrums.

Outside my window the sun had broken free of all clouds. A smattering of people crossed the street against the light, hailed taxis, ran after buses, walked the paths of Central Park, beneath the sad, bare trees and dreary lawns. I stood and watched Manhattan's anonymous society and felt a sense of well-being. I was one of them, at peace with myself and the city. The gloom of the morning had passed when the doorbell rang and my doorman handed me a registered letter with a Shady Grove, New York, postmark and the return address of an attorney named Frank Remsen.

I recalled the name Shady Grove, but why, I didn't know. It couldn't have been from a book, since it was a real place, and I was sure I'd never been there, but a registered letter from a lawyer, even if I had remembered the town, was the sort of thing to fill me with apprehension, which was why the letter remained unopened while I finished my coffee and allowed myself the illusion that this day still belonged, complete and inviolate, to me.

Then, I sat down and slowly peeled open the envelope.

I read the letter once, and a second time, and even then I wasn't quite sure what to think. It seemed like such an unusual request: Mr. Remsen was writing on behalf of Laura Stevenson, who was requesting that I act as executor of her estate. There was nothing in the letter saying why Laura wanted me to do this, and nothing at all about Laura, except that she lived in Shady Grove, New York, hoped I remembered her, was aware that this was coming out of nowhere, so I could certainly decline, and would I please call Remsen with my answer at my soonest convenience.

I stared at Laura's name, not because I didn't remember her, and not because I needed time to make my decision. I knew Laura Stevenson, or had known her, twenty years before, when she was a student at Juilliard, and I at Columbia. Her name was Laura Welles back then. Why would she want me to act as her executor after all these years? And what was so urgent about it?

I walked into my bedroom, opened the daybook on my desk, and checked my appointments, but I'd already dialed Remsen's number.

I told him I'd just received his letter. “And it's all very vague.”

There was silence at the other end, as though I'd given the wrong response, but it didn't last long.

Remsen said, “I thank you for getting back to me, Mr. Tremont.”

“My father is Mr. Tremont,” I told him. “Call me Geoffrey.”

“Laura was aware that you'd have a few questions, Geoffrey—”

“She can get in touch with me herself. Even after all these years.”

“She wanted me to ask you, and she didn't want to see you— Well, actually, she didn't want you to see
her
.”

“You said didn't.”

“Laura died,” he said. “A week ago. There really isn't very much—” Remsen began.

I only then realized that I'd turned my back to the phone, and was staring at the floor. “Wait a minute.” I kept looking down. I had a feeling of disbelief, because in my mind, I could recall a girl named Laura Welles, and all I could think, as irrational as it was, was that girl should still be alive.

“Can you tell me how she died?”

“Cancer. Lung cancer.”

I took a moment before saying, “What about her husband? When I knew her she had a—”

“Her husband passed away some years ago, as have both parents. Laura had no children.”

“What about the brother?”

“You know Simon?”

“I've met him.”

“Laura hadn't stayed in touch with him.” Remsen cleared his throat. “There was some trouble years ago. She had her reasons.”

I knew about those reasons and remembered the spring in '86, but I said nothing about it to Remsen.

“But that was then,” he was saying, “so who knows? Anyway, I should tell you I notified him a couple of days after the funeral. He wanted to know how to find you. I said I'd have to check with you first. He didn't leave a number or anything.”

I was aware now of the room feeling hot and airless.

“When would I have to take care of this?”

“At your convenience. Of course, sooner would be better than later.” He had the kind of voice that made me think of those men who go bald before they're thirty. “For what it's worth,” he said, “it isn't much of an estate. Her house and furniture. Nothing terribly complicated. All you have to do is make sure the people and charities receive what she specified for them, that her house is sold for a fair market price, and the money's donated to the high school music program where she taught. Basically, that's it.”

“A music teacher? When I knew Laura she was a jazz musician and lived in Paris.”

“She moved back here after her husband died. This is her hometown. She taught at our high school for the last ten years or so.”

I'd already turned around, and had a pen in my hand.

“I'll need her address,” I said, “and directions. I can't leave town until Tuesday.”

Remsen said it could wait until then, and told me how to get to Shady Grove and find Laura's house.

I hung up the phone, sat on the edge of the bed, and tried to remember Laura Welles.

I wish I could say that my mind was ripe with memories, but I hadn't given Laura very much thought in all these years. Although we'd been good friends, close friends, when we were both in school, we hadn't stayed in touch once she'd moved to Paris. I suppose we might have kept up if we'd lived closer to each other or had the convenience of e-mail like we have now. And now there were things that I wanted to remember about her. Not the broad things—how she looked, what neighborhood she lived in, things we did with our friends. The smaller things. What we'd done on a specific afternoon, what we'd talk about late at night over a beer, what was important to her, and what she shook off. Anything that might have conjured Laura Welles for just a minute, given texture to the sadness I was feeling, and held more than this pitiful context.

I am not blessed with the deepest memory—when I was in the theater, I could always remember my lines and cues and marks, but the exact year of a show, or where we played, I couldn't say—and I didn't do much to keep up with people from my past or any of my old friends from school, including Laura, and all that was left were a smattering of recollections, parties we'd gone to together, nights at the West End, over on Broadway, where we used to eat inexpensive food and listen to jazz. I recalled one night when we seemed to be doing a lot of catching up and gossiping, so it might have been when we'd just come back from summer vacation, and we were laughing a lot; although it could have been almost any time, since the West End was one of our haunts, we always had things and people to talk about, and we always made each other laugh. It might have been just before the start of our senior year, when Laura sublet a studio apartment in the same building where I was living—I was staying in my brother Alex's apartment while he did his residency in Chicago—Laura and I certainly would have been happy about that.

I remembered that we used to go to some of the downtown clubs and stay out all night, sometimes all weekend, and we went to the theater and concerts once in a while. And one night, in someone's apartment near Lincoln Center, looking out the window at the people on their way to the opera, maybe, or the ballet, Laura said she liked watching them from up high like that. She said most things looked better from a distance.

Two

I
t's about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Manhattan to Shady Grove, all of it pleasant and scenic along the Parkway and state roads, where Shady Grove nestles into the New York–Massachusetts border just south of the Berkshire Mountains. This is the corner of New York State where Old Dutch meets New England and each neutralizes the other, leaving a little town that might be mistaken for a dozen other little towns in the region. A week after Remsen's call I was driving down a main street of pleasant if unexciting stores, the local bank, a spacious town square that even in late morning seemed to be in the midst of a habitual nap. And I had to wonder why Laura would come back here to teach high school music after New York and Paris. I couldn't reconcile that Laura with the one I had known in Manhattan.

Remsen met me at Laura's house, handed me the keys, and the inventory of what was going where and to whom, and left me there alone.

It was a small two-story place, set back from a neat lawn, three steps up to the front porch. There really wasn't much to do. Laura had packed most of her personal things, or maybe she'd had someone do it for her. The closets had been emptied of clothes, upstairs and down, and the walls were all bare—I could see the light stains of picture frames. Lined up in orderly rows in the living room were dozens of boxes labeled in a clear, feminine handwriting, clothes and books for a town thrift shop.

The furniture was still there, a sofa with two deep cushions, two soft chairs, coffee table, and end tables with a matched pair of lamps.

I walked to the back hall and into the dining room where there was a small drop-leaf table of no particular age, four matching chairs, and a glass bowl that might have been used for flowers. The kitchen still had plates and cutlery, a little table by the window. Outside the back door was a garden, which was in disrepair, maybe because of a harsh winter and not from neglect.

Upstairs were two bedrooms, with quilted bedspreads, and delicate lace curtains. The larger bedroom had flowered wallpaper, the smaller bedroom was painted pink and white.

I went downstairs and got to work, not that there was much for me to do.

In a corner of the room was a fairly large carton marked: “Scrapbook and photographs,” along with two violins Laura had left to someone named Marian Ballantine; and a stereo system and a box of old LPs that Laura had bequeathed to me, which, she'd explained in her will, we had listened to together and, if she remembered correctly, I liked. But what the songs were, where or when we'd listened to them, what they might have meant to her, or what she thought they'd mean to me, she hadn't said.

There was also a box with photographs, some in an envelope with my name, and the rest I was to give to Marian Ballantine.

The entire house looked like the kind of place where someone's grandmother lived, delicate and tidy, not fussy, but in strict order. Except for the cartons, and the slight accumulation of fine dust that had settled on the furniture and floors, and the absence of the more personal touches, it seemed as though at any moment Laura might walk in, with a fresh bouquet for the table.

It didn't take me long to make a full account of Laura's things, and a few minutes later I was sitting on her couch, holding a photograph of the two of us looking young and painfully optimistic, taken, so the inscription on the back read, at “Bradley's” the first time she sat in with the Mel Stevenson trio. I remembered that night, at least the part when Laura sat in, and I recalled that no one ever called Mel Stevenson anything but “Steve.” There was another photo of Laura, Steve, and me sitting at a table in a jazz club; two photos, both of Laura and Steve standing next to a piano, Laura wearing a tuxedo and a smile, Steve in suit and tie, hair combed back over his forehead, looking very cosmopolitan; and two framed photographs: Laura when she was a teenager, standing outside a large house with another teenage girl; and one of her sitting on the steps outside Juilliard. I held onto that photo, and stared at the expression on her face. It was an expression I'd seen often when we were friends, an amused expression, and private, but in a moment she would tell you
all
about it. I had no trouble remembering that and how much I enjoyed being around her.

I wanted to believe that Laura had known that I'd do this for her, that she'd wanted this to be between the two of us. That she'd wanted me to sit with the empty closets, the stripped walls, the tokens of her life; but what I found rather remarkable was, whether by accident or intent, she'd managed to lay bare everything and bare nothing at all.

Then, a moment later, I wasn't thinking about empty closets and bare walls, or anything else about Laura Stevenson, whom I had never known. I was thinking about my friend, Laura Welles, who had died at the age of forty-two. Anything else that I might want to consider at the moment was quite beside the point. Which was what I was still thinking about when I walked outside and saw a woman standing there, in a bright red jacket, an inviting expression on her face, shivering in the cold.

That's when Marian introduced herself, explained that she'd come by to get the few things Laura had left to her, extended her hand, and said, “Not what you expected, was it?”

I said that few things were, but I wasn't sure to what she was referring.

She smiled. “All this,” and made a circle in the air with her hand.

I said, “Considering that I've never been anyone's executor before, I really didn't know what to expect. It's a bit confusing.”

“I told Laura more than once that she could depend on me to take care of this, but she said she didn't want her friends to have to bury her twice, that you were the closest thing to a friend who wasn't still involved with her life. I must admit, I didn't like it. I told her it was very risky to ask someone she hadn't seen in all these years. She said you were the most trustworthy person she'd ever known, and the most reliable, and you were always there to help her out when you two were in college. She thought you might be willing to help her again.”

It was the first day of spring and a cold morning. Dormant gardens were visible under the few inches of weathered snow. Empty bushes sagged like skeletal arms beneath the muted sky. Marian was still shivering. She pulled up her coat collar and put her hands in her pockets.

“Not that Laura was sure you'd do it.”

“Why wouldn't I?”

“Why
would
you?”

“Because I loved her.”

She took a step back, as though she needed to put a little distance between us. She appeared to be surprised and unsettled by my answer.

“Not like that,” I said. “I genuinely loved her.”

Marian's face softened. “I know what you meant.” She took a step closer, said, “Laura understood that,” and walked me over to the house.

We sat on the front steps. The cement was cold, but the sky had cleared, and a moment later we were warmed by a circle of sunlight.

Marian was leaning forward, her arms resting on top of her legs, staring down at the ground and looking pensive and sad, and I wanted to say something to let her know that I understood her sadness, or was trying to. That I was thinking about the face I'd seen in those photographs, which was how I remembered Laura: as the twenty-two-year-old girl I had known, and it was that girl who had died, and I realized that it was her who I was here to mourn.

“I'm not here as a stranger,” I said.

I saw Marian watching me out of the corner of her eyes.

“When I met Laura I had a girlfriend at Colby College,” I said, “and I'd gotten the noble idea not to fool around while she was gone. Laura and I started going places together, our freshman year, and I liked her. She was very urbane, certainly compared to the other girls I knew. I always had the sense that she knew who she was.” I shook my head. “I'm not doing a good job with this.”

“I've known—knew her all my life. That's a pretty good description of her.”

“After a while, it wasn't about being noble. The girlfriend and I broke up and Laura and I remained friends. Girlfriends came and went. And Laura's boyfriends.”

“And the two of you remained friends.”

“I guess we did.”

Another minute or more passed, before I asked the more obvious questions about Laura's death, and the more indelicate ones.

“There was nothing sudden about it. If that's what you're asking. She had time,” Marian said, “to prepare for her death, and to prepare her friends.”

“That sounds like Laura.”

“It wasn't enough time.” Marian sat up straight. “It's never enough time, is it.”

We stayed outside, sitting in the warm sunshine, and continued to talk about our friend Laura, who studied classical violin at Juilliard, and whom I hadn't seen in twenty years, who taught music at a local high school, and who, Marian said, had found a sort of sanctuary in her hometown.

“I've always liked the idea of her, even after we'd lost touch,” I said.

Marian turned to me.

“I can't say I was ever aware of thinking that, or that I thought about Laura all that often, but I liked the idea of her. Of having a friend who was a jazz musician and lived in Paris. I liked the idea of knowing her.”

Marian was still watching me.

“A long time ago,” she said.

“But she and Steve did live in Paris and were jazz musicians, right?”

“After Steve died Laura moved back to Shady Grove. Nine years ago.”

“A
music
teacher?”

“She stopped performing.”

“And they gave her a job at the high school?”

“Laura and I always kept up with each other, so when she told me she wanted to move back and what she'd like to do, I told her about the job opening up at the high school.”

“Is that what you do? Teach?”

“Me
? No. I'm a gardener. Actually I own a nursery, and do
other
people's gardening. It's not the most exciting thing in the world.”

“What is?”

She shifted on the steps, secured one of her coat buttons, when she saw me looking at the yellow pickup truck parked at the curb, at the logo
BALLANTINE DESIGNS
.

“And you're also a landscaper?” I asked.

“My husband, Buddy, was. He did the landscaping and I did the flora.”

“Here in Shady Grove?”

“Around the region.”

“And this is where you're from? Shady Grove?”

“Are you really that interested?”

“Why shouldn't I be? You and Laura both grew up here?”

“We grew up and she grew out.”

“For a while.”

“And when she came back, we settled right back into our old friendship.”

I nodded my head in the direction of the truck. “And the landscaping? You and your husband—”

“I gave it up after my husband died.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.”

Marian said, “He died the year before Laura moved back. Laura used to call us ‘the young widows of Shady Grove.' ” The way Marian said this made me think I'd been making her feel uncomfortable, and I apologized.

“That's all right.” She put her hand on my arm. “Hey, let me tell you a story Laura told me about you.” She gave me a quick glance as she said this.

“Is it embarrassing?”

She shook her head, kept her hand on my arm a moment longer, and asked me, “Does the name Neil Billson sound familiar?”

I needed a moment. “Was he that weird guy who was always following her around?”

“He told her he was crazy about her. Laura told me he was just plain crazy. This was just around the time she met you.”

“Did he have long hair, and always needed a shave?”

“All I know is, you told Laura that he was a messed-up guy, and she agreed. She said he never became menacing or anything, but he did get on her nerves and made her feel creepy. Maybe he thought his persistence would wear her down. Finally she told him, first of all that she didn't like him, and second, to back off. But he kept calling her. You told her that you'd say something to him, but she didn't want you to get involved.”

“I remember Laura wasn't very worried about it. She was sure that it would run its course and he'd get discouraged. But I didn't like it.”

“You saw him at some party or something, and told him you were Laura's brother, and that Mom and Dad were coming to Manhattan to meet him and find out what his intentions were—”

“I actually used the word
intentions
?”

“So the story goes. And everyone in the family hoped he liked big weddings and big families because Laura did. And you were all anxious to set a date.” Marian let this settle in, then smiled at me. “You were always coming to her rescue, weren't you.” She leaned back on her elbows, turned her face to the sun, and said, “In a few more weeks you'll be able to smell spring. That's really delightful.” She said she always looked forward to the change of season, and
The Old Farmer's Almanac
predicted spring would come early that year. She said, “The fragrance of spring in the air delights me.” As though this was what I was also looking forward to, or should have been. And suddenly I wanted us to have that in common, watching for the approach of the new season. I wanted to be there with the scent of her hair, aware only of how it felt to sit this close to her, like dancing in drifting sunlight with a piano playing in a distant room.

I didn't know Marian before that day, yet I felt that I'd known her for a very long time. How familiar she seemed to me, yet it was the
unfamiliarity
that felt so compelling. I'd been stuck in the horse latitudes and it felt as though Marian were the change in the weather that I'd been trying to locate, the shift in the breeze.

And then there was her laugh.