Brass Ring (9 page)

Vanessa leaned against the cold stone wall herself and breathed deeply for a minute before responding. “I would love to have a baby,” she said. “More than anything.”

Darcy studied her so intently that Vanessa realized she had never spoken to her friend this way, this confidentially. She knew all there was to know about Darcy. She knew about the first marriage that had ended in her husband’s suicide. She knew about the abortion that had left her with problems conceiving and about Dave’s long-ago drinking problem. Vanessa had shared little of her own past in return. She discussed those things with no one other than Brian. And Marianne, the therapist she’d had until a year ago. Even then, even with those two people whom she trusted above all others, the telling had been long and hard in coming.

“Van.” Darcy lightly touched her arm. “I didn’t know that. Why haven’t you ever said anything about this to me? I can’t believe you’ve kept that to yourself after listening to all my trials and tribulations. Have you seen a specialist? I can tell you who’s—”

“That’s not it.” Vanessa shook her head. “I can have a baby, as far as I know, even though I’m getting ridiculously old for it. And I assume Brian’s capable of doing his part.” She looked down the quiet, tree-lined sidewalk, away from Darcy’s gaze. “I’m so afraid we’d split up, and the baby would only have one parent and—”

“God, Vanessa!” Darcy threw her arms up in exasperation. “You and Brian have been living together for over two years, but you always talk as though you moved in with him last week. Like you’re still in the trial-run stage, or something.”

She was right. It was irrational. Vanessa had known that for a long time, yet that knowledge did nothing to change her fear. She put her arm around Darcy and started walking in the direction of the hospital.

“Well, I’m as happy for you as I can be,” she said, and she supposed there was something in her voice that told Darcy not to pursue the subject any further. They talked about sonograms and names and godparents, and Vanessa tried to concentrate on the conversation instead of the thoughts roiling in her head. She was as certain of Brian as she could ever be of any man, but trust was something that would never come easily to her. Trust in the future. Trust in other people. She expected to wake up one morning and find Brian gone. He had left his first wife, hadn’t he? He hadn’t walked out on her, exactly, but still, ending the marriage had been his idea. No matter how fervently he reassured Vanessa of his deep feelings for her, she knew something about herself that no words of love could change: She was the kind of person other people left behind.

VIENNA

ON TUESDAY, NEARLY A
week and a half after her harrowing encounter on the bridge, Claire called the Fishmonger Restaurant in Arlington and asked for Randy St. Pierre. The woman who answered the phone didn’t respond immediately.

“You must mean Randy Donovan,” she said.

“Is he the owner?”

“Yes.”

“Then, yes. I’d like to speak with him, please.”

The woman left for a moment, and Claire paged idly through her appointment book where it lay open on her bed.

She heard a shuffling noise on the other end of the phone before a man said, “This is Randy Donovan.”

The first thing that struck her about Margot’s brother was his voice. Deep and rich and resonant.

“Excuse me for disturbing you,” she began. “My name is Claire Harte-Mathias. I wanted to get in touch with you because I saw your sister just before she”—Claire wished there were some euphemistic way to say it—”before she took her life. I talked to her on the bridge.”

Silence filled the line. Perhaps she hadn’t explained herself clearly enough. She was about to try again when he spoke up.

“Yes,” he said. “They told me about you.”

Claire walked to the bedroom window and looked into the darkening woods. “Well, I’m finding that I’m having a hard time forgetting about her. I was wondering if we could meet and talk. I’d like to understand her better.”

Randy Donovan cleared his throat. “I’m afraid you’re asking the wrong person. I didn’t understand my sister at all.”

“Please? Also, I have something of hers for you.” Claire looked across the room at the bed, where the framed photograph lay next to her appointment book.

He hesitated for a moment. “I suppose I could meet with you for a few minutes.”

“Great.” She walked back to the bed and sat down again, turning to that week’s calendar in her appointment book. “You can say when and where,” she said.

“How about tomorrow night?” he suggested. “It would have to be late. I’m rehearsing a play at the Chain Bridge Theater in McLean. Could you meet me there afterwards? Say about nine?” That voice. She tried to picture the man who would accompany it but failed to come up with a clear image.

She agreed to the time and place, and he gave her directions to the theater.

“And Mr. Donovan?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m very sorry about Margot.”

THE DIMINUTIVE CHAIN BRIDGE
Theater had once been a small chapel. It was built of fieldstone and stood alone on a street corner, its slim white steeple piercing the night sky. Claire parked near a few other cars in the small gravel parking lot and walked around the building to the broad front doors. Pulling one open, she stepped inside.

She was in a foyer, cool and dark. From beyond the closed oak door leading into the heart of the theater itself, voices echoed. A sandwich-board poster, barely legible in the dim light, stood in one corner of the foyer:

The Chain Bridge Theater of McLean proudly presents The Magician of Dassant—January 22-30.

Claire shivered against the chill in the foyer and pushed open the heavy oak door. Inside, she stood still, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. The stage was brightly lit, a rectangle of white in the dark cave of the chapel. A man and two women stood near the center of the stage, arguing loudly.

Claire unbuttoned her coat as she moved slowly down the center aisle. The pews of the little chapel now served as seats for the theater, and all were empty except for the front row, where a man and a woman sat facing the stage. Claire chose a seat in the center of the theater, laying her coat on the cushioned pew as she focused her attention on the drama taking place in front of her.

The actor onstage was short and squat. She hadn’t pictured Randy Donovan fat; the boy in the photograph was slender. If he owned a restaurant, though, perhaps food was a ruling force in his life. He was in the midst of berating the two actresses, and his high, nasal voice was nothing like that of the man with whom she’d spoken on the phone.

A second man walked onto the stage. He was tall, solidly built, with medium brown hair and a beard and mustache so immaculately trimmed that from this distance it looked as though they had been painted on his face. The way he carried himself—his entire commanding demeanor—matched the voice on the phone. There was a self-assured dignity to him, and when he spoke, his voice swept across the theater and lingered in the dark corners. Claire sat up straighter. If there was indeed a magician in this play, Randy Donovan was it.

The squat man and two women listened raptly to his words, and Claire sensed that the scene was drawing to a close. After a moment, the other characters slipped back into the wings, and Randy Donovan stood alone, offering a soliloquy to his small audience, something about magic and community and loyalty. Claire was oblivious to the words themselves as she lost herself in his presence.

When Randy had finished speaking, the man and woman in the front row applauded. Randy walked down the steps at the side of the stage and spoke briefly to them before glancing in Claire’s direction. Picking up a coat and a canvas bag from the edge of the stage, he started walking toward her. He slipped into her pew, reaching out with his hand.

“You must be Claire?”

She stood to shake his hand. There was something familiar about him. Something in the clear blue eyes. The scent of pipe tobacco was agreeably strong in the air around him. She felt as though she’d met him before.

“Yes, I’m Claire,” she said. “You were excellent up there.”

“Thanks.” He motioned for her to take her seat again, then sat down himself. He rested his coat on the back of the pew in front of them, and she watched him brush an invisible piece of lint from the dark wool before he opened the canvas bag on his lap.

“I need some coffee,” he said, pulling a green thermos and two Styrofoam cups from the bag. “I have an extra cup. It’s decaf. Care to join me?”

“Yes,” she said.

He poured them each a cup of very creamy coffee. “Sorry,” he said, handing her one of the cups. “It’s about half milk. I prefer it that way and wasn’t thinking about anyone else’s taste when I made it.”

She took the cup and held its warmth between her palms. She sipped the pale coffee with a strong sense of comfort, unexpected and very welcome.

She should begin with small talk, she thought, not the probing questions she was longing to ask him.

“How long has this been a theater?” she asked.

“A decade.” He looked up at the pitched ceiling, white crossed with dark beams. “My home away from home. The building dates from the early nineteenth century.” He lowered his eyes from the ceiling and leaned back to study her. “Well,” he said after a moment, “you look perfectly normal.”

She laughed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that Margot was my own sister, and I don’t think I would have had the guts to hang off the edge of that bridge in a snowstorm to try to save her. I figured you would look either like some muscle-bound superwoman or someone with a few screws loose.”

“Well, I only wish I could have succeeded in stopping her.”

“You were doomed to failure,” he said with a sigh. “One thing I had to admit to myself a long time ago was that Margot couldn’t be saved. Unfortunately, she was smart enough to know what an empty existence she had. Life must have been unbearable for her. I don’t really blame her for wanting to put an end to it.”

There was a coolness to his words. A certain detachment that had probably rescued him from years of guilt over not being able to help his sister.

Three women walked up the aisle toward the exit. Randy waved good-night as they passed and told them he would lock up. Claire heard the heavy doors close behind the women, leaving her alone with Randy in the dim theater.

He looked at his watch, holding it into the stage light, and Claire quickly began speaking again.

“I think about her all the time,” she confessed. “I’ve tried to tune her out, but my memory of that night seems to have a life of its own. That’s why I wanted to see you. If I understood why she did it, maybe I could finally let go of her.”

“I don’t think it’s possible to understand Margot,” Randy said. “A dozen doctors sacrificed an inordinate number of their brain cells trying to figure out what made her tick, with very limited success.”

Claire opened her purse and pulled out the framed photograph. “I brought this for you from her room,” she said, handing it to him.

“Is that the picture I gave her?” He turned to hold it up to the light and laughed. “Does this look like a screwed-up family or what?”

“I thought it looked like a nice family,” she said, although she hadn’t formed an assessment one way or the other.

“Which object does not belong in this picture?” he asked, as if he held a puzzle in his hands.

She leaned closer to look at the picture and stayed in that position a moment longer than necessary, breathing in the scent of his tobacco. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, me. Two beautiful little blond kids, this lovely blond mother, this handsome blond man. And this spindly-legged, dark-haired, big-toothed kid.”

She studied the picture, knowing of course that he was right. She could see clearly that he didn’t fit in. He even stood a little apart from the rest of the family. A slice of the front door was visible between him and the other children, and she felt sorry for the dark-haired boy. His smile in the photograph looked strained.

“You were in the awkward age,” she suggested.

He set the picture upside down on the pew next to him and let out another sigh. “How can I help you, Claire Harte-Mathias?”

“Tell me about her. Tell me why this entire situation happened so I can make some sense of it and lay it to rest.”

He looked away from her, back to the dark wool coat, and she was not surprised to see him pick at another obscure fleck of dust.

“Would you rather go someplace else?” Talking about Margot, about this family he felt no part of, was clearly not easy for him. “We could go to a restaurant or somewhere—”

“Actually,” he interrupted, “if I’m going to talk about Margot, I’d prefer the darkness.”

Did he mean he might cry? Already she could see that the smile had faded from his face. His lips had taken a downward curve.

“All right,” she said.

“But I don’t want to know the details of what happened between the two of you on the bridge.” He raised his hands in front of him as if to thwart an assault. “Don’t tell me her last words or any of that stuff. Please.”

She licked her lips. “I’m sorry to put you through this,” she said. What gave her the right to ask him to divulge his personal life to her? She thought about withdrawing her request entirely when he began to speak.

“The woman in the picture was my mother,” he said, “but the man was not my father. My father had been a miserable shit—at least according to my mother. I don’t remember him at all. They were divorced when I was three. She told me he was a chronic gambler, a womanizer, a liar, and a drinker, and that I was the spitting image of him.”

“Oh,” Claire said. “And that’s where the name ‘Donovan’ came from?”

“Right. I was a constant reminder of someone who had messed up her life. So, then she met Guy St. Pierre, who was God in her eyes. He was a classical pianist who had toured with different orchestras before he developed arthritis and had to retire. They got married and had twins, Margot and Charles, who were, to be fair, incredibly gorgeous kids.” He tapped the picture at his side. “Everyone fawned over them. They were weird though. My parents never treated them like children. Right from the start, they were tutored in reading and music. They were little robots. Articles were written about them. Life magazine did a story on them. And there is no doubt that they were gifted when it came to music.”