“And thank you for being such a good teacher.”
Frank bobbed his head in Nova, Charlie and Jean’s direction. “Ladies.” Executing a precise turn on his heel, he was back on the dance floor in a minute, a new and smiling partner in his arms.
“Isn’t he the gentleman?” Jean said. Her life had been short on gentlemen. Claire’s father had met Jean in a movie line when Jean was just sixteen, and wasted no time in first seducing and then abandoning her. Over the years, Jean had practiced serial monogamy with a sequence of men met in bars. Most of them could be counted on to observe the niceties, like not spitting on the floor, but they didn’t approach life with Frank’s flourishes and flowery words.
Charlie and Nova both made polite-sounding murmurs, but Claire could tell their opinions of Frank weren’t nearly as high as Jean’s. Oblivious to their lack of enthusiasm, Jean watched with dreamy eyes as Frank escorted another of the chosen to the dance floor, then excused herself to go the bathroom.
A part of Claire felt sorry for Frank. It couldn’t have been easy growing up short, homely and red-haired.
“Did you ask Frank about the ring?” Nova leaned forward, her eyes bright. “What did he say?”
“He was surprised. He thought she had given it back to Allen. He seemed mostly concerned about who would own it now.”
Nova sat back, shaking her head in exaggerated disbelief. “Don’t tell me he thinks it belongs to him.”
“He is the oldest living relative of Elizabeth,” Charlie reminded her. “It is an interesting question. With those large diamonds, the ring must be very valuable. And its age might make it even more rare.”
“But Liz was the one,” Nova said, “who broke off the engagement. All the etiquette books say that if you’re the one who breaks off the engagement you have to give back the ring. So it belongs to Allen.”
“Ah.” Charlie sat back in her chair. “But what if she did not really break off with him?”
“But Allen said she did,” Nova said. “Why would he lie?”
“I have been thinking. We all know that he came home changed after the war. What if he broke off with her after she told him she was pregnant? That would explain why Elizabeth was desperate that she hung herself. With no husband, the whole community would whisper about her. And then after Elizabeth killed herself, Allen felt guilty. Ashamed. So he made up a story so people would not think badly of him for causing her to do what she did. If people had known that he was the one who had broken up with her, that he had been the one who abandoned her after she waited for so long, people might have felt differently. As it was, they were sorry for him. A war hero, and then his fiancée was such a child she could not deal with a few scars.”
“You might be right,” Nova said, downing the last of her third Singapore Sling. “Maybe after Liz killed herself, Allen decided to put – what’s that word they use? – his own spin on what had happened.”
“What do you think, Charlie?” Claire asked. There was a long stretch of silence. “Charlie?”
“Hm?” Charlie said finally.
Claire looked out at the dance floor, following Charlie’s gaze. Clasped to her partner’s chest, Jean whirled by. Her eyes were closed, her lips were parted, and she looked totally happy. And because her eyes were closed, Jean couldn’t see the three dozen elderly women glaring at her for monopolizing the best dancer in the place - short, solicitous, smooth-stepping Frank Ellsworth.
Chapter 12
Now and 1944
For a long time, it was as if Charlie was frozen like a blade of grass inside a thick coating of ice. Caught immobile, preserved, untouched.
Then slowly, she let herself melt, and it was the past that was covered in a skin of ice.
There was the self she was now, and the self she had been, and the two were not even related. Sometimes, though, the skin of her new life gave way. And Charlie fell into the past and became Charlotte again.
#
Women. Standing in rows of five, thousands of them. So thin they look like boys. No breasts, no hair. Ribs like hoops, necks nothing but knots and ropes. Frozen to the marrow, filthy, eye sockets filled with black shadows. Numbers tattooed on their arms, to identify them when they are naked and dead.
The night is bright with cold. The moon’s blue shadows light up the ice and the dirty snow, here and there spotted with puddles of diarrhea.
They call it the morning roll call, but it really begins at 3 a.m. and lasts for hours. Every roll call, Charlotte wants to let herself slide into the snow. Into death. Each morning it is the coldest it has ever been. Her bones are made of ice and the wind knifes through them.
It would be so easy to die.
All she has to do is let go of her heart.
Chapter 13
NOAZARK
Jean was quiet as Claire and Charlie drove her home from Riverwalk. Her arms wrapped tight around all her goodies, she sat smiling to herself in the passenger seat. Claire wished that her mother’s smile stemmed from her haul of logo-imprinted gee-gaws, but she knew it didn’t. Jean had danced with Frank for nearly an hour, finally stopping when the band took a break. Afterward, they had lingered, talking close together at the edge of the dance floor, neither of them seeming to notice that Jean was half a head taller than Frank, and easily fifty pounds heavier. When Frank had finally led Jean back to their table, Jean had surprised everyone but Claire by hugging him good-bye for at least two minutes, pressing him so close that his nose must have been in danger in getting caught in her freckled cleavage.
Claire broke the silence. “I didn’t know you knew how to dance like that, Mom.” When Jean didn’t answer, Claire repeated herself.
“What?” Jean started as if she had dozed off “Oh, I don’t. Not really. Frank is just a marvelous dancer. Didn’t you notice how he made you feel when you danced with him? It was like, I don’t know, like I was doing something I had always known how to do, only I had forgotten. Except I’ve never danced like that before.” Jean’s smile was sleepy, her eyes unfocused.
Claire, who had lived with her mother until she was nearly thirty, had seen that smile far too many times. It usually appeared when Jean was about to be suckered into something that would have been against anyone else’s better judgment. Until she had maxed out her credit card, Jean had smiled that same dreamy smile while she watched the QualProd TV shopping network, her hand hovering over the speed-dial button. Each time she got taken by a new scheme, like the times she had decided to make her fortune selling water filters or oxygenated vitamins, Jean had smiled that same slightly dazzled smile as she inwardly counted up all the money she was sure to make. Whenever Jean took up with a new man (at least twenty times, in Claire’s experience), the smile had reappeared. Now here she was, grinning like a fifteen-year-old. Except she was really fifty-five. Really, Claire thought, wasn’t her mom old enough to know better?
Claire did the math Jean seemed determined to avoid. “He’s got to be at least twenty years older than you, Mom.” In the backseat, Charlie wisely kept silent.
The smile was replaced by a pout, but at least Jean’s eyes were focused again. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, young lady. I’m didn’t say I was marrying him. I just liked dancing with him.”
Claire didn’t point out that Jean had never bothered to marry anyone, including the men who had fathered Claire and her sister Susie. Silence again filled the car, but this time it felt heavy, full of unspoken arguments. When they pulled into the apartment parking lot, Jean muttered good-bye before she flounced away. Charlie took her place in the passenger seat.
As she started the car, Claire said, “I’m sorry. I know that wasn’t very diplomatic.”
“Your mother is not a child, Claire.”
“I didn’t say she was a child.” Claire shook her head so hard that she felt her hair whip her cheek. “She’s more like a permanent teenager. Even when I was little, I had to be the grown-up.”
“If I have learned anything in this life, it is that
you cannot make anyone do what you think they should.”
“You’re probably right.” Claire thought of her frequent resolve – made and broken on a daily basis – to give up junk food. “I can’t even make me do what I should.” Instead of turning right, which was the way home, Claire turned left, taking the route she had when she had found the ring. She pulled over at the curb, next to the Lisac’s property. The house was barely visible between the tall arbor vitae that stood shoulder-to-shoulder on top of the high wall.
Claire walked or driven past this wall without paying any more attention to it than she would a telephone pole or a mailbox? How many thousands of people had done the same thing over the last 50 years?
Claire pointed out the chink in the wall where she had found the ring. It was so small and shadowed it was a wonder she had seen it at all.
“It was definitely put there around the time of Elizabeth’s death,” Charlie said. “You can tell how upset Tom was by those last two layers of stones.”
Claire saw that what Charlie said was true. The rest of the wall fit as tightly as pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle, but the top two rows held many more gaps and spaces that had had to be filled in with sandy mortar. It was one of these spaces that had held the ring.
“Since you found that ring,” Charlie said, “I keep thinking of Elizabeth. Now I wish I had known what was wrong. I could have helped her.”
“I guess I understand why Elizabeth killed herself. But what I still don’t understand is why the ring was in the wall. It just doesn’t make any sense.” Claire paused for a moment, thinking. “So there were – what? – eight of you who were friends when that happened?”
Charlie counted on her fingers. “Yes. If you count Elizabeth. And me.”
Claire shifted the car into drive. “And we’ve talked to Nova and Frank. Mary and Allen are still in Europe. And then there’s Howard. What about Tom? The guy who built the wall. Do you ever run into him?
Charlie busied herself rolling down the window on Claire’s old Mazda. “It’s been nearly fifty years since I have seen him.” She rested her forearm on the doorframe, keeping her head turned away. “We did not stay in touch. I do not know where he lives. I do not even know if he is alive.”
Looking at the fragile wings of Charlie’s shoulder blades, Claire wondered why they had broken apart so completely – and whose idea it had been.
“Maybe he knows how the ring ended up where it did. Maybe he even saw who put it there.” Claire parked the car, got out and walked up the steps to their house. Before she reached the door, she was almost bowled over by a big chocolate brown lab trailing a red leash. It busied itself gobbling up the kibble Charlie had set out that morning.
“Bailey! Come here!” A girl who looked about 11 shouted at the dog from the street, but it paid no attention. She ran up the driveway and grabbed the dog’s leash.
“Sorry! I guess Bailey’s hungry.” The girl’s dark brown hair was held back with a shiny scrunchy and there was a spattering of freckles across her nose. “What’s your name?” She continued talking without giving them time to answer. “My name’s McKenzie Malone. I’m just visiting my aunt and uncle. They live at the end of the block.” With her scuffed Nikes braced against the pavement, she began to reel in the dog. “That’s weird. My dog’s not excited. Usually he would be jumping up and down and barking when he smelled another dog. Do you keep yours inside?”
“We don’t keep it anywhere, honey,” Claire said. “There is no dog. The dish is more of a deterrent. We figure no burglar is going to want to mess with whatever is big enough to eat out of that dish.”
The girl opened her blue-green eyes wider. “You mean it’s like a fake? They see the dish and then imagine there’s a dog?”
“Yes.”
“Cool!” The dog was straining at the leash again, now wanting to go back into the street. “Well, it was nice meeting you!” McKenzie ran down the driveway, half-towed by the dog, her ponytail bouncing behind her. Claire watched her go, wondering if she would ever have children, then turned and went inside. She pulled the white pages from the telephone table’s bottom shelf. “What was Tom’s last name?”
“Bonfiglio. Thomas Bonfiglio.”
“What kind of name is Bonfiglio?”
“It is Italian. The ‘bon’ is for good, and the ‘figlio’ I believe has the same root as the English word filial.”
“Good child,” Claire said. Dante’s last name was Bonner. He was Italian-German, and his last name was from the German side, although he looked all Italian. Did ‘bon’ mean good in German? Charlie had taught her some German, but Claire didn’t think bon was one of the words. She flipped open the phone book to the B’s.
There it was. Bonfiglio, Thomas. An address in Hillsboro, a Portland suburb 30 minutes to the west. And no women’s name appended, which made Claire strangely happy. She looked up with a smile. “Why don’t you call Tom and see what he remembers?”
Without answering, the older woman took the phone from her. Claire watched Charlie’s face as she dialed Tom’s number. The last time her friend had called him, the phone had probably been made of Bakelite, black and square and heavy, despite its name. And with a real dial that made a ticking noise when it slid back into place, a sound now as anachronistic as the sound of a typewriter’s carriage return. Claire herself, with her fond memories of rotary phones and eight-track tapes, was in danger of being outdated as someone who lamented the lost sounds of steam engines or Linotype machines.
“May I speak to Tom, please?” Charlie’s face had flushed pink, and white tendrils had sprung up around her face, as if the room was suddenly warm. There was a half-smile on her lips.
“Tom, hello, I do not quite know how to put this. This is Charlotte Heidenbruch. Charlie? I do not know if you remember me?”
Whatever Tom answered was enough to make Charlie laugh, the sound surprisingly low and sexy for a petite 81-year-old.
Claire realized it was time for her to leave, and she did so quietly. But judging from the rapt look on her friend’s face, she could have had taps on her shoes and bells around her neck and still not have attracted Charlie’s attention.
Chapter 14
SLWNEZ
“I can’t wait for next week.”
Dante’s voice tickled Claire’s ear. When had phones gotten so insubstantial that they weighed only a few ounces, not just cell phones but home phones as well? Charlie had recently replaced their ten-year-old portable phone with a new one that weighed two-thirds less and was smaller than a deck of cards. Claire hated it. With nostalgia, she remembered the heavy phone in her grandmother’s house. That weighty phone had made any conversation held on it seem important. If she tried to hold this new phone between her shoulder and ear, it slipped away. In a recent issue of the New York Times she had read that disposable phones were soon going to be on the market. The article touted them as being cheap, easy-to-use and disposable. Was Claire the only one who felt that things were already disposable enough?
“I find myself sitting here and thinking about you and I don’t get any work done,” Dante continued.
“Are you thinking about me or this curatorship?” Claire reached up to put away a plate, almost loosing the phone in the process.
Dante was nothing if not honest. “Both, probably. But mostly you.” Dante was one of a team of curators at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, all specialists in Old Masters. It seemed like a dream job, and in many ways it was. But if he were named head curator of the planned Old Master wing for the Oregon Art Museum, he would be able to put his own stamp on things. The position would offer him the chance to design his own exhibits from the ground up. With his many connections in the art world, he could stage shows with famous loaned works that could earn him a national reputation and draw art lovers from all over the country.
“Well, I’m glad to hear that I rank near the top, anyway.” Claire bit her lip. She couldn’t put off telling him any longer. “Look, something’s come up
that I need to tell you about.”
“What?” Dante’s voice was wary. Claire had gotten cold feet about their relationship before, part of a well-honed defense mechanism. As a child, she had learned that it was better to reject than to be rejected.
“The art for the new wing is all being donated by one collector, right?”
“Allen Lisac. I understand he’s a big contractor there.” He must have read her silence. “Why – do you know him?”
“No. But I need to let you know something that I didn’t tell you before.” Claire stopped sorting silverware as she tried to find the right way to tell him. “You know that engagement ring I found in the wall? The thing is, see, the man this Elizabeth Ellsworth was engaged to, well … was Allen Lisac.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me that before?” There was a pause. “Not that I guess it really makes any difference. It’s just a coincidence.”
Claire fought the urge to move the phone down, closer to her mouth. She still found it hard to believe anyone could hear her. “Anyway, he and his wife are in Europe. Charlie and I are going to return the ring when they come back, which I think is in a couple of weeks.”
“Earlier than that,” Dante said. “I know for sure they’ll be back by a week from Wednesday.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Allen Lisac is one of the people I’ll be having an interview with next week.”
“Oh.” This certainly complicated matters. Courtesy of Dante, Claire had been on the periphery of the art world long enough to know that money drove more decisions than anyone wanted to admit – the same as in the rest of the world. So even though Allen Lisac was not an employee of the Oregon Art Museum, as the donor, his word would carry weight.
“So could you wait to return the ring until a decision is made? Technically, he’s not the ultimate decision-maker – the museum’s executive director is – but he could nix any chance I have of getting this. I really want this position, and I’d rather I came at it straight on. Who knows – maybe he would even wonder how you got your hands on the ring in the first place?