The Chaperone

  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 somethi
ng 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.

  Her physician, who looked like he might have been born around the time she’d turned fifty, asked if she had longevity in her bloodlines. “Did your mother or father live a long time? You’re still in very good health.”

  “I don’t know,” Cora said. “I was adopted.”

  “Hmm.” He was writing in her chart. “Well, whoever they were, they gave you good genes. You’re ticking like a watch.”

  She was seventy-nine when Senator Frank Hodge introduced a bill in the Kansas Senate that would require the Health Department to furnish information on contraception upon request to any Kansas resident. Hodge wasn’t a particular favorite of Cora’s, as he’d made it clear he was more interested in trimming the welfare rolls of dependent children than safeguarding the health and dignity of women, but whatever his motivation, she thought the bill was a good one, and she threw in her support, financial and otherwise. She offered to testify on the extent of grief she’d witnessed at Kindness House and the rampant and damaging use of Lysol as a prophylactic. However, her testimony was never sought. She thought at first that she perhaps wasn’t the best face for the campaign, as a white-haired widow of means. As it turned out, during the hearings, no women testified at all.

  She did what she could. She met with representatives who’d known Alan, and she wrote letters, and she asked old friends to do the same. Many flatly refused, including women who were younger than she was. It was 1965, and birth control was still a radical cause. A spokesman for the Catholic Bishop of Kansas told the papers that the bill was essentially “state-financed adultery, state-financed promiscuity, and state-financed venereal disease.” Raymond warned Cora that she might be wasting her efforts, as the bill was unlikely to pass. The Wichita Eagle threw in its support, but the Advance Register threatened to print the name of every senator who voted for it, and warned that careers would be ruined. In the end, the bill did pass, though without the governor’s signature, and only after the supporters agreed to change the wording of the bill to only include married citizens. The unmarried of Kansas would have to wait another year before a federal law mandated that health departments provide information on birth control to every adult, married or not.

  Raymond bought her a cake—Cora’s favorite, white with lemon icing—delivering it with both his congratulations and his apologies: he said he hadn’t meant to be discouraging—he really thought the bill wouldn’t pass. Greta and her husband came over to celebrate. Joseph got out some champagne, and Cora found herself the subject of a toast. She was embarrassed, and a little tired, but she did her best to soak up the goodwill. “How nice to have cake and a party without having to get any older,” she managed, thinking how good it was to see the faces of people she loved around her, smiling at her little joke.

  Later that night, when they were standing by the sink and brushing their teeth, just the two of them in the house, Joseph nudged her arm. “You can take a rest now,” he said. “You can retire.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re one to talk,” she mumbled, leaning over to spit. Joseph had retired from Boeing years ago, but he spent much of his time going around and fixing people’s cars. People were always coming by or leaving notes, saying they’d heard he could help. “I’m like you,” she said. “I like to stay busy.”

  He cocked his head, watching her in the mirror. “It’s more than that. You do not do needlepoint.”

  She was quiet. She thought of the cemetery in McPherson, how light the rain had been the last time she drove out to pull weeds and put out flowers for the Kaufmanns. The farm was gone now, the property divided up into small tracts of land for little houses with built-in garages. The Kaufmann children must have sold.

  “You’re right.” She put her toothbrush back in the holder. “I suppose I want to do some good in the world.”

  “You have.” He looked at her in the mirror, unblinking, until she understood.

  Maybe he knew. Maybe he didn’t. But he gave her that before he died. A month later, he was out in front of the house, looking at the engine of someone’s car, when a blood vessel burst in his brain. It was the middle of the day on their quiet street, and no one saw him fall. Cora was inside, taking a nap. The little neighbor boy, maybe seven years old, saw him on the pavement, already blue, and ran home crying to his young mother, who was crying herself by the time she knocked on the front door, waking Cora from her dreams.

  At this funeral, too, people were kind to her. It was a hard thing to lose a brother, they said, even a brother she didn’t grow up with, whom she’d only met as an adult. Family was family, and they were sorry for her loss. But how amazing they had found each other in the first place, people said, and Cora knew they were trying to say something good because she looked the way she felt—scared, aching. But yes, she said, it was amazing that they’d found each other. Such wonderful luck, even so late in life, and she was grateful for the years they’d had. Greta held her hand, and Howard and Earle each stood up to say good things about their uncle.

  But she held on to Raymond the longest, reaching over his walker, her face pressed into his hunched shoulder, his dark lapel smooth against her cheek. She closed her eyes like a child hiding in plain sight, just the two of them knowing and known.

  Later, when Cora became something of a marvel to people, the eighty-five- and then ninety-year-old woman with the sharp mind and the steady gait who still got up in the morn
ing and made her own coffee, who still read the paper every day, she would try to explain that there was a downside to all her genetic good fortune, her indefatigable health. The problem, she sometimes explained, was that she outlived so many people she loved. At ninety-three, she was healthy enough to fly with Greta down to Houston for Howard’s funeral, to reach out with steady hands and touch his grandchild’s—her great-grandchild’s—soft cheek. Howard died at seventy-six, an old man with a fortunate life. From the eulogy, it was clear the minister saw his death as sad, but hardly tragic. And yet it still seemed so wrong, so backward, for Cora to live to see her funny and lively son’s casket, to stand beside Earle, her remaining, gray-haired son—scared that she would outlive him, too.

  Oh, but there were great rewards for inhabiting the world for so long. She was aware of that, too. She could remember riding in the Kaufmanns’ wagon, a black horse trotting in front, yet she’d seen the topsides of clouds from the window of an airplane. No generation before hers had seen the earth from so far above. She’d lived for years without indoor plumbing, without feeling too deprived, and some ninety years later, she let Greta help her into a Jacuzzi tub at a hotel in Houston. She got to vote for Della’s grandson when he ran for the state senate. And though she would outlive Raymond, and reel from that loss as well, he was still alive in 1970, and the two of them were watching the news together when the first gay pride marches in New York and Los Angeles were reported; after the news cut to a commercial, the two of them stared at each other in disbelief, their TV dinners going cold.