Blackbird Fly (6 page)

Inside Annie settled herself at the kitchen table.
Their faces had similarities, the same nose with a bump on the end,
same widow’s peak, now too apt. Annie’s eyes were hazel, lighter
than Merle’s, and sparkled as she told her sister about the
convention in Manhattan for mayors of all stripes. “Where are you
staying?” Merle asked.

“
At the Rabid Capitalist Repressive
Inn. Unless I get a better offer.”

“
Ah, well, there are ground rules—no
jumping on the beds or playing ‘Eleanor Rigby.’” They had strict
ideas about Beatles songs, from a childhood full of
them.

“
What about ‘When I’m
Sixty-Four’?”

Merle snorted. “Absolutely not.”

“’
Dear Prudence?’”

“
Oh, all right.”

Annie disappeared in her environmentally-friendly car
to find the nearest organic market. Rick, Stasia’s husband, dropped
off Tristan. In the kitchen Merle made him a tuna sandwich. “I made
an appointment with this Dr. Murray. Betsy says he’s a very nice
guy.”

His eyes flew open — at least one did. “I’m not
going. You can’t make me.”

“
No, but the school can. You can’t
go back until you talk to Dr. Murray. It doesn’t have to be all
touchy-feely.”

“
Right. We're going to talk about
the Yankees.”

“
It doesn’t matter what you talk
about. He knows what’s going on. He’ll be nice. The sooner you go,
the less behind you’ll get.”

Tristan had inherited her compulsive time gene so he
agreed. Anything but getting behind in studies. She just hoped he
didn’t develop the full-fledged calendar in his head.

That night Annie cooked mushroom-filled crepes, two
colors of asparagus, and strawberry sundaes for dessert. She made
Tristan laugh and help with the dishes while Merle forgot about the
future, and the past, for an hour. Afterwards, curled up on the
sofa in the cold living room, Merle told her sister about the will
and the life insurance, about her chat with Harry’s lawyer.

Annie cocked her head. “Hold on. Troy Lester? Yalie
with fat sideburns?”

“
He’s bald now. You know
him?”

“
We spent one ill-fated year
together. Met at a mixer. Remember those?” She shuddered. “He wore
full Yale regalia, right down to his regimental socks.”

“
What a turn-on. He was your
boyfriend?”
Gad.

She laughed. “We wrote to each other. We pretended
faithfulness. Then he met some chick from Smith or Vassar and that
was that.”

“
You must have been
crushed.”

“
Devastated. Now. You and Tris. No
starvation in the immediate future?”

“
There are debts,
his
debts,
and I won’t pay them. I can’t pay them.” She sighed.

“
You’ll figure something out, Merle.
You always do.”

Merle looked at her sister across the room. She
wrapped a wool shawl around her shoulders. It was a struggle to
bring the words into the air, but she made herself do it. “What if
I told you he was — you know, dead to me. For a long time.” She was
whispering.

Annie crossed her arms. “Are you saying that?”

Merle frowned. “I should have told you. I just — I
hardly noticed.”

“
You didn’t
notice
?”

Merle cringed, shrinking into the shawl. It sounded,
it
was
, so lame. There were so many ways to fail in life,
but she hadn’t had that much experience with failure until now.
She’d always been buoyed by her family, her sisters, her choices.
She’d never let herself fail. But now — she stared into her wine
glass, horrified at the mess she’d made.

“
I haven’t told anyone. But I —" She
gulped a breath. “I didn’t love him. There’s some — something wrong
with me.”

Her sister moved to the sofa and put her arm around
her. Merle felt the tears rise in her throat. “Now listen, Merdle.
There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just the shock of all this.
You’ve got some of the most productive years of your life ahead of
you. You could get married again — god forbid. Or get an incredible
new job doing something you love.” Annie got her a tissue and Merle
wiped her eyes. “You have to open yourself to possibility.”

“
Possibility? Now that worries
me.”

“
Because you can’t schedule it into
your Day-Timer?” Annie smiled. “It’s the stuff that’s not on the
calendar that’s most interesting.”

It seemed too late to change her internal workings.
She was 49. Life inside the brain was fixed. Even if she wanted to
change, which she wasn't really sure she did, how did you do that?
How did you change who, and what, you were? She would just have to
live with her calendar.

“
I should have paid more attention.
To him, or at the very least, to myself, to my lack of feelings for
him. I’ve already forgotten what he smelled like. I can’t remember
the last meal we ate together.”

“
You had a good life together. You
have a wonderful son. No regrets now.”

“
Yes. I guess. I mean, I know. But —
was I sleepwalking all those years? Why didn’t I wake up one day
and say, this isn’t how I want to live my life? I mean, I’m fairly
smart, aren’t I? Why didn’t I notice?”

“
Let’s see. Skipped two grades,
graduated from law school at twenty-one — ”

Merle smiled. “In the top quarter, as Mother always
says."

Annie grinned. “ — In the top fucking quarter,
partner by thirty. Wife, mother, housing rights crusader. You are
an embarrassing overachiever.”

Their usual shtick. They buoyed each other. When one
was down, the other sister lifted her up. No small matter, and she
never forgot that, even if she didn't believe the shtick anymore.
Annie’s opinion mattered, it always would. She cared, that was the
important thing. Now more than ever.

“
But why did I let him handle all
the money?”

“
You were too busy saving the poor
from slum-lords? It’s not a crime. Millions of women do it.” Annie
cocked her head. “You know what you’ve got, don’t you?”

“
A financial nightmare? Acid reflux?
An AARP subscription?”

“
Come on, Merle. Repeat after me.
Case of courage —”

The Bennett girls’ code, first a joke from the summer
they took golf lessons, an experiment that didn’t stick, then a
solidarity hand-smack between sisters. When all else failed, they
had each other. Even when they didn’t get along, even when they
didn’t talk for months, if disaster struck there was a shoulder to
cry on. When they had a fight with a husband or got divorced or
somebody died or got expelled or lost a job, or any other crap that
life threw your way from time to time, the sisters had each other.
Sometimes Merle forgot, but it was only a matter of time before one
of her sisters reminded her.

“
Come on now. We’re together. Case
of courage,” Annie repeated. Merle held out her fist. Annie whacked
it, then they reversed.

“
Bucket of balls,” they
crowed.

When she tried to sleep that night, Merle had too
many thoughts. She reminisced about Dr. Farouk’s pills, swirling in
the toilet. She got up and went back to Harry’s office. Dumping all
the files into a corner, she cleared the desk. Behind the chair was
the McDonald’s bag full of stuff from the safe deposit box. She'd
been putting off looking at it, afraid there might be some grim
secret about Harry, something that would make her feel even worse
about her loveless marriage.

Documents, photographs, passports. The usual stuff.
She relaxed, pawing through it. Harry's passport had expired three
years before. He never traveled, why bother. A stack of folded
papers, the deed to the house, the marriage license. Also, a large,
yellow, brittle envelope. She looked at the documents and set them
aside.

Inside the manila envelope were old photographs and
more papers. She’d never seen these photos. Harry’s parents,
Marie-Emilie, small and fair, Weston, dark-haired, squinting into
the sun. Harry looked so much like his father: thick, wavy hair,
sturdy chin, barrel chest. Only names on the back: ‘Wes and
Emilie.’ The house in the background had brick walls, hollyhocks,
mullioned windows. Could this be Long Island? No, she'd seen that
house, it was clapboard. This must be the house in France. It
looked peaceful and sunny, a cottage from long ago when things were
simple.

In the photograph Weston wore a wide-collared shirt,
Emilie a flowered dress, her hair in a quaint sausage roll above
her forehead. Gone for so long: fifty years. It would have amazing
to have known them. Maybe she would have understood Harry more,
loved him more. Things couldn’t really have been simple then. Not
right after the war.

A photo of Harry at three or four, sitting on a
tricycle in front of a ranch house. Probably after they moved back
here. Maybe the last one his mother took of him. Dark curls, fat
cheeks, the vacant toddler stare. Then, a school portrait from the
late fifties, Harry in a school uniform, a serious expression, eyes
glassy, his hair slicked down. He looked, well, not very happy.

In crackling old envelopes she pulled out two death
certificates, for Weston and Marie-Emilie. So they were actually
gone, there wouldn’t be any surprise visits. What a silly
thought.

Merle opened a sheet of paper. The blank, engraved
letterhead with Weston Strachie’s address in Levittown had a large,
rusty skeleton key taped to it with stiff old cellophane tape. Now
this was mysterious. Maybe Weston had a sense of humor beyond the
grave. No writing, nothing to identify the lock the key would open.
A trunk in the attic? A grandfather clock? The house in France? The
thought kept coming to her, that house, what it might be like. She
would never see it. Why was she imagining what color the shutters
were, whether there were flowers like in a Monet painting? She’d
been to France once, a college trip in the summer, and never forgot
the sunshine.

The amazing light. As opposed to this dark,
depressing house. She put her chin in her palm and sighed. Oh well.
With the new revelations about Harry's financial genius she had to
be even more practical than usual. Her sister Francie had found
somebody who did international property law. Merle had an
appointment with him to start the process for selling it.

Also in the big envelope was a battered gray menu
from a restaurant with three curled, dry wine labels hooked to it
with a rusty paperclip. Souvenirs of their life in France, she
supposed. The menu was in English while the labels were from French
wineries.

Two packets of envelopes remained. The first were
yellowed, thin envelopes with faded, spidery script, surrounded by
brown string. The tiny stamps were peeling, and French. They were
addressed to Marie-Emilie at the house in Levittown. Pulling out
the letter from one torn envelope, she tried to read the script,
faint as it was. The blue ink was barely legible. The postmark was
December 1954. The other two envelopes were similar, postmarked
1955, all of them after Marie-Emilie and Weston were dead. She held
one up to the lamplight. French, it seemed. She could make out a
few words but her French was mediocre at best. She would get it
translated, one of these days.

The last small packet of papers was wrapped in a
rubber band which broke as she slipped it off. The deed to the
apartment on Twelfth Street: she stared at it for a minute before
she realized what it was. Harry said he’d sold the apartment five
years before, so this was just an old copy — or was it? He moved
on, to that crappy little studio near the Exchange for when he
stayed in the city. She remembered him being vague about the price
of the Twelfth Street apartment, and who he’d sold it to. Or maybe
her memory was just vague. She stared at the deed a long time.

He told her he sold it, she was sure of that. Five or
six years ago. But where had the money gone? Down his options
rabbit hole with all the rest, no doubt.

Chapter 8

Monday morning. The Legal Aid Society offices at
128
^th
& Madison. The list of appointments ran
through her mind. She felt a jump in her step. It was good to be
back.

Noisy, chaotic, piles of papers everywhere, the smell
of unwashed clothes and hope: a little bit of heaven. Merle was
immediately swallowed up in correspondence, filings, briefs,
arguments, disputes, and rulings. By the time she looked up
staffers were back from lunch. She kept working, making one pile to
take home, another to give the new fellow starting next month,
another for cases that needed attention this week.

Most of the critical cases had been taken over,
rather too ably, by Laura Crandall, the current law fellow. She’d
taken to tenant rights like she was born to it. Her hard work made
it possible for Merle to take two and a half weeks off without
feeling single mothers, disabled veterans, and the illiterate would
be living on the streets. Laura reminded Merle of herself,
twenty-five years ago, energetic, idealistic, full of crusading
fervor — not to mention attractive, articulate, smart, and her
whole life ahead of her.

“
I’ve set up a workshop with the
Tenants Council, on improving communication with your landlord,”
Laura said, checking things off on a pad. “The new fellow starts
Monday so she can help with that. Also I’ve started interborough
lunches with Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. Once
a month, brown bag thing, no big deal but we kick around ideas. The
first one is Friday.”

Filing away those details in her head, Merle scanned
email correspondence, trying to get rid of a backlog the size of
the Britney Spears Fan Club. “Who is the new fellow?” she
asked.