Blackbird Fly (5 page)

Tristan bounded down the stairs, waving his English
book. He read her a poem by Dylan Thomas; he was trying to write a
short paper on it. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, one eye
swollen shut, and read it theatrically, arms waving, one toe
pointed just so. He was so adorable, hair uncombed and shirttail
out, she had trouble focusing on the words, let alone their
meanings. When he finished he reread certain passages.

“
'A weather in the flesh and bone/
Is damp and dry.’ What do you think that means? How can something
be both damp and dry?”

“
Well,” she began. She had struggled
in English, at least the interpretation of metaphor that was the
heart of poetry. She was too literal. “Um. Let’s see. Flesh and
bone. So the flesh is damp and the other is, like, bone
dry?”

“
Yeah, but.” He frowned at her. She
apparently wasn’t helpful. “What about this line: ‘the quick and
dead move like two ghosts before the eye.’”

She knew this! “Quick means alive, so dead and
alive.”

He squinted at her and slammed the
book. “Dylan Thomas liked to think about death.
Mr. James
thinks he was obsessed.”

Merle bit her lip. Was this Tristan’s way of telling
her she was thinking about death too much, that she was obsessed?
If anything she thought too little about Harry. She didn’t miss
him, not really. Was this Tris’s point? Did he know she didn’t love
Harry? She glanced up at her son. He was getting out the popcorn
popper and looking for oil. Life went on. It was just poetry.
Strange, pretty words that she couldn’t figure out, just like when
she was in school.

She put on a smile.
“Oh, those
poets.”

Tristan made a huge bowlful of white kernels. Before
he took it upstairs she enlisted him in breaking-and-entering on
Harry’s home computer, a job that had more appeal than Dylan
Thomas. Then the Widow, numbed with wine and poetry and parental
advice on culinary octopi, slept in her sweatpants, disturbed only
once, “in the darkest hours when the mansion lay still in the icy
moonlight and the silent hand of the future held all in its clammy
fist,” [
String of Pearls
] by a victorious squeal from the
young prince down the hall.

Chapter 5

The telephone rang on Harry’s desk, buried under
towering piles of files that Merle had pulled from cabinets. She’d
decided to go back to work on Monday, even though Tristan had
another week at home. The calendar in her head was on overload,
screaming in the night about the things she had left undone,
responsibilities untended, duties ignored. The calendar didn’t care
about dead husbands or traumatized youths. It demanded her
presence.

Anyway she had to get out of the gloom and back to
what she loved. So with only the weekend ahead, she’d plowed
through her dead husband’s computer files, printing out obscure
stuff, rifling his cabinets for investments he didn’t tell her
about (no luck there), and generally making a mess in the room that
was always off-limits while he was alive. Betsy had come by in the
afternoon to help sort through the debris of a lifetime, drink tea,
and once again cheer her up.

A dusty account book she couldn’t understand fell to
the floor as she answered the phone. There was a lag, and the
echoing sound of faraway. “Harold Strachie, if you please.” A
British accent.

“
He’s not — in. May I ask who’s
calling?”

“
The name is Rogers. Atlantic
Investments. Mr. Strachie is a client. I’ve been trying to reach
him at his office for several weeks.”

Merle remembered the name from the pink call slips.
One of many unreturned calls. “Well, there’s a reason for that.
Harold is — dead.” It was odd to say. It stabbed like a nail in the
heart.

“
Sorry?”

“
Passed away.” People liked that
better. “No longer with us. He had a heart attack three weeks ago.
”

“
I see. Oh dear. And you
are?”

“
His wife. Widow.”

“
Yes, well, my condolences." He
cleared his throat. "Mrs. Strachie, your husband had promised a
sizable investment in Bordeaux futures, some fifty-thousand pounds.
We were to receive a wire on the 15
^th
.”

“
Bordeaux futures?”

“
Yes, for this year's wine. We
simply cannot wait any longer.”

“
That’s impossible, Mr. Rogers.” Did
she owe him an explanation? “There is very little cash in the
estate.”

“
How odd. He was a wealthy man, was
he not?”

“
Well. I hope you can sell the
futures elsewhere.”

There was a pause, and Rogers’s voice smoothed out.
“I’m sorry for your loss. I’m shocked that Mr. Strachie, as a man
of financial brilliance, did so little to protect you — and your
children? You have children?”

“
We — I have one child. Thank you.
It was all pretty shocking.”

“
He left you a house, I hope, your
home there in — is it New York?”
“Close by. And another property. Which is nice, but it doesn’t pay
the bills.”

Rogers sighed. “Poor man, so young. He had a
brilliant nose and an instinct for investment. He bought futures
from me for several years. This year’s were special to both of us,
it being such a fine year for French wine. Do you know France, Mrs.
Strachie?”

“
Not really. No.”

“
Did he never take you
there?”

“
I have to go.”

Rogers set down the phone and called his assistant
in. “Strachie’s dead. Get Marseille on the line.”

Who to trust, and how much, was a constant juggle but
one he enjoyed. He didn’t think of it as a problem, just a sort of
masked ball. A bit of theater, actors playing their parts. He
almost liked it better before the curtain went up, and definitely a
lot more when it fell. It had taken so long to set up, to find the
right sort of sap who would play along. He had been worried that
Strachie had caught on and was stonewalling him. But he’d only
died, that’s all.

Rogers’s eyes went to his father’s photograph, framed
in a battered wood trim. The old man was young then, wearing a
poncy suit and full of himself. His niece, pretty and delicate, sat
on the grass at his feet. The black-and-white photo didn’t show his
father’s determination to live large in his world. But the brittle
slip of paper tucked in the corner of the frame did. His last
dinner at his club, on account and never paid so Hugh had kept it
as a reminder of how to live, as if death were around every corner.
Might as well have oysters and champagne because tomorrow you might
die.

Like Strachie. Dead at what — fifty? Not much more.
And now Hugh would never get his father’s full revenge. It was
disappointing. His father would have been proud of him sticking it
to the Strachie’s after all these years. Prouder than he’d ever
been while alive. But the game would still be played, and won. And
it would still be sweet.

Merle leaned back in the leather chair, feeling the
sway it had cradled Harry’s back. French wine, of all the asinine
ideas. He probably bought all sorts of crack-pot investments, if
the state of his file cabinets was any clue. Swamp in Florida,
Internet porn, penny stocks: nothing was too mundane or
ridiculous.

She pulled open the heavy drapes that covered the
window overlooking the pool. Harry never swam, never had time for
such a frivolous activity. He worked all summer, preferring air
conditioning to cool water. Soon Stasia’s kids would come over
every day to swim. Tristan loved his cousins. He was spending the
night over there.

The words of the man on the phone:
Did he never
take you there?
Of course not. They hadn’t had a vacation
together in years, not since the three of them went to Disney World
when Tristan was seven. She took Tristan on trips, once to the
Grand Canyon with Stasia and Rick, another time to Vermont. Why
hadn’t she insisted Harry come? She couldn’t even remember trying
to convince him. There was no point. He was a workaholic.

He never talked about going to France, or mentioned
this house where his parents had lived. She’d found nothing in his
files about it, nothing about France at all. It was the one place
he'd made no investments. It was clear: he didn’t care. Probably
why he foisted it on her in death.

Suddenly she had to see what that part of France
looked like. Logging onto the internet from his computer she did a
search for the little town,
la petite ville
, Malcouziac.

Chapter 6

The first time she sees the village she’s riding in a
dusty
autobus
, holding Weston’s hand. The dry wind blows
back Marie-Emilie's hair and settles a fine dust on their clothes.
She wears her last good pair of stockings, and the new shoes he
bought her, delicate Italian leather with small heels, so soft they
feel like slippers. He wears a linen suit and has taken the jacket
off and folded it over the seat. The weather is warm, much warmer
than Nice where the breeze off the Med cools the city, and in the
evening the pine-scented air drifts down from the hills.

There are pine trees here, and hills, yet the
Dordogne seems like a foreign land. Weston’s business dealings in
Nice had gone well for almost a year and they had been able to save
a little. He spent too much on clothes for her, she scolded him
even as she adored the things he gave her. He wanted to get away,
he said, to see another part of France, do some writing. But she
had also heard a man talking loudly to him, grabbing his lapels.
They left the next day.

The rolling hills, dotted with sheep and goats, are
brown already. Along the creek bottoms the trees are lush, a tangle
of green. Pretty country, but hard, very hard during the war. Her
uncle had been gone for years during the fighting, her aunt told
her, and she didn’t know if he was alive or dead. The women had
persevered alone, even as the Nazis came through, vanishing those
they considered traitors or conspirators or Resistance. Aunt
Josephine likes to say she helped in the Resistance, but
Marie-Emilie thinks it unlikely, an old woman, almost thirty then.
What could she have done? Besides the Nazis would have shot
her.

No, Aunt Josephine is just a sweet woman who moved
away after the war and left the house she inherited from her mother
vacant. She thought she might come back someday. She lives on some
rich man’s estate now, helping with the animals and working in a
produce market, selling fruit. Times are hard, she can’t afford the
taxes any more. So she gave Marie-Emilie the house with the
stipulation that she keep the garden alive, water the lime tree and
the wisteria, and keep the birds out of the attic.

The village is quiet in mid-afternoon as the
autobus
stops near the
place.
The walls of the city
are tall, sloping down to the green sward and bushes in the
ditches. She hadn’t realized it is an old bastide town, walled to
keep out the nasty English. At the top of a hill, surrounded by
thick stone, she feels safe, as the ancient French must have felt.
The plaza in the middle of town is ringed by arched market stalls
where Marie-Emilie will soon be browsing, basket over her arm,
smiling at the farmers as she, only nineteen but so, so happily
married, picks discriminatingly through their produce.

Marie-Emilie helps Weston open the shutters and let
out the stifling air inside the house. It is quite large, five
rooms, bigger than any apartment in Nice she’s ever seen. The back
garden takes her breath away: walled with a pretty arched gate,
bursting with flowers she has yet to learn the names of, anchored
by a sturdy stone
pissoir
and a large cistern to catch
water. Big enough for outdoor meals all year, for intimate
candle-lit parties, for tomatoes. She stands in the middle of it,
turning slowly round and round, mouth agape in wonder, until Wes
calls to her to help with the mattress.

Here, she thinks, beating a rug in the garden, here
we will be happy. Here we will make babies and fill the house with
love. Here, she thinks, looking at her handsome American husband,
we will be a family.

Chapter 7

Annie Bennett, antithesis of regimented time, arrived
too early and without an appointment. Merle was doing laundry and
avoiding her face in the mirror. Sunday morning, the most
depressing hours of the week. She opened the front door, stunned
for a moment by sunshine and lilacs. She had forgotten about their
power. The oldest Bennett sister — and the shortest — stood under
the oak tree, pulling a string of colored fabric squares along low
branches.

“
Are we having a yard
sale?”

“
Great idea. Get loose of excess.
Free the mind and body of clutter.”

In a pink leather motorcycle jacket Annie wore her
wiry hair in a tangle of gray and brown tamed by combs and clips.
She consulted for environmental groups and governments, about
landfills and recycling and generally keeping the land and water
and air as clean as humanly possible. Merle’s hero, the activist
lawyer fighting the corrupt corporations to save the planet. She
took Merle’s hand, dragging her to the curb to admire the
handiwork. “Tibetan prayer flags.”

“
Ah, so you’re a Recycling
Buddhist.”

“
Hey, good karma is where you find
it. They bring you happiness.” She explained the colors of earth,
water, sun, sky: white, blue, green, yellow, red. The neighbor
across the street peered suspiciously out of her tidy saltbox
colonial. Merle gave her a wave. She’d either be calling the
neighborhood association or dropping by for a great deal on a good
used car.