Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (24 page)

“Shall I start with your second birthday and the red ribbon Mama wanted to tie in your hair?” Anne asked sweetly. “Or skip directly to Christmas dinner when Aunt Lucille asked you for the eight-hundredth time if you minded not having a husband and children?”

“Blasting Aunt Lucille doesn’t count,” Sigrid protested. “Anyhow, you didn’t exactly set an example of patient fortitude when she started on all the men you could have married since I grew up and—” She lapsed into Aunt Lucille’s cultivated Southern drawl. “—‘left you all by your lonesome in an empty nest with not a soul to love.’”

As the waiter brought their lemon-roasted chicken and poured their wine, they smiled at each other and Sigrid felt a sudden rush of genuine affection.

The realization surprised her. She knew she’d always loved Anne, but as a child automatically loves the most important person in her life, especially if that person returns the love in whatever helter-skelter fashion. Tonight seemed different. It was as if she were for the first time seeing Anne from her own eye level instead of looking up from a child’s perspective toward a being of glamour and limitless power. It could have been because they were both pleasantly tired from sharing a day mixed with frivolity and physical self-analysis; or maybe, thought Sigrid, it was because somewhere in the past six months, since Nauman came into her life, she’d almost quit comparing herself unfavorably to Anne and had gradually learned to accept her not as a mother alone but as a friend. A rather dear friend, in fact.

And even though she’d never felt comfortable enough to initiate mother-daughter confidences, she found herself asking, “Why
didn’t
you remarry? Was it because what you had with Dad was so special that you couldn’t? What was he really like?”

“We’ve talked about this so many times, there’s nothing new to tell, honey,” Anne said, cutting into the crispy grilled skin of her succulent chicken.

The mouth watering smells of lemon, sweet yellow peppers and garlic drifted up from both plates, and Sigrid lifted her own knife and fork.

“He used to take you to the park and—”

“No,” Sigrid interrupted. “Not as my father. As a man. A police officer. Your husband.”

“As a man?” She chewed thoughtfully. “Okay. As a man, incredibly handsome. That was the first thing anyone noticed about him. Tall and blond and the bluest, bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. You know how blue your cousin Hilda’s eyes are? Go one shade brighter and that’s the color Leif’s were. I could never quite catch it in the camera. And when he turned those eyes and that smile on you, you felt as if you were the only person in the whole world he’d ever really listened to. It was as if he’d been waiting all his life to hear the things you were saying. I’m here to tell you there was nobody like him in Colleton County.”

A rueful smile curved her lips. “He certainly dazzled this little hick. Mama always swore he had an Irish tongue in his head the way he could charm birds off trees.”

Sigrid had heard all the family tales of how Grandmother Lattimore had rushed up from North Carolina to save her innocent eighteen-year-old daughter from an unsuitable alliance and had wound up so charmed that she’d blessed the wedding on condition that the ceremony be shifted from the Lutheran chapel in Greenwich Village to the Southern Baptist church Grandmother’s own grandparents had helped build near the family homeplace in central North Carolina.

“He never saw a stranger,” Anne said. “There was a time when we couldn’t walk through the Village without running into at least two people on every block who knew us and were glad to see us both. But if we did wander into a strange cafe or deli once in a while and if they weren’t real busy, your daddy’d have them talking like old friends in just minutes.”

That was the easy-going father image Sigrid had grown up with, and yet . . . “Mick Cluett, the last time I spoke to him, said Dad could freeze someone with a look if he wanted to.” Sigrid topped their glasses from the bottle of white Zinfandel.

“Mickey said that?” Anne lowered her fork. “Yes,” she mused. “Yes, he could do that, too, if the mood struck him . . . if he felt too hemmed in. It was like—”

She hesitated and her lovely face was earnest as she searched for the right words. “Once, when you were about eight or nine, the thermometer broke and you chased that little blob of mercury all across the table top. It kept breaking into smaller drops or slipping away from beneath your fingers and you were laughing but you were frustrated, too, because you couldn’t pick it up. Remember, honey?”

Sigrid nodded.

“That was Leif. Quicksilver. Just as enchanting, just as elusive if you tried to make him stand still in one place. It took me a long time to realize that it was nothing to do with me, it was just the way he was made. Like mercury.”

An undertone of regret shadowed her voice.

“Metaphors, Mother?”

Anne smiled warily and took a sip of wine. “You asked.”

Sigrid began to feel as if she’d opened a bright familiar door into a dark and unfamiliar room, yet she took that first step across the threshold. “Didn’t you love him?”

“Well, of course, I loved him!” Anne said, surprised. “In the beginning—”

“At the end, I meant.”

“At the end, too, even though it was a different love. Time and marriage do that, sugar. You just can’t sustain that catch-in-your-throat delirium; you’d burn up if you did. But certainly I loved him.”

“Would you still be married if he hadn’t died?”

Anne considered for a moment. “I don’t know,” she answered slowly, then she gave a little shrug. “Maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to stay with me.”

“Was he unfaithful?”

“Sigrid!”

“Sorry, Mother, but—”

“No, no, it’s . . . I mean I . . . ” She shook her head, looking annoyed with herself, and at the same time, faintly embarrassed. “I’m not as cold-bloodedly modern as I sometimes think I am. You’re our daughter, Siga. I just can’t talk about our sex life with you.”

Sigrid was horrified. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

“Then what did you mean? Oh, honey, are you going to go from believing he was a hero ten feet tall to wondering if he had clay feet? Do you really want that?” She reached across the table and clasped Sigrid’s hand. “You asked me what he was like as a person and all I can tell you is that he was just a man. A wonderful man most of the time—funny, smart, exciting, and yes, ma’am, sexy, too—but just a man. Isn’t that enough?”

“Mick Cluett—”

“Mickey Cluett wanted to be your daddy’s mentor,” Anne said impatiently. “Not that mentor was a word anybody’d ever heard of back then. He was like a turkey buzzard trying to take a falcon under its wing. Leif never needed his protection and I think Mickey resented that.”

“What about Tom Oersted?”

“Oersted?” Anne lifted the napkin over the bread basket and took out a soft roll. “I remember the name, but I can’t quite recall a face. One of Leif’s colleagues or yours?”

“Dad’s, I guess. Retired now, but he used to belong to the Viking Association.”

“The Viking Association!” Unexpectedly, Anne giggled. “Now
them
I can tell you about! What a wonderful, rowdy bunch they were. The year we were married, Leif took me to one of their weddings at the old Norwegian Hall in Brooklyn. I’ve got pictures somewhere. They carried the groom’s Volkswagen up two flights of stairs and deposited it on the dance floor. For all I know it was still there when they tore the building down. And oh, the beer and aquavit that used to flow on Swedish Nation Day or after the Norwegian Constitution Day Parade! You should join them.”

“Right,” Sigrid said dryly.

In the Village, forty blocks south, McKinnon leaned back on his couch, deep in memory. The coffee table, the floor, the cushions on either side of him-all were littered with piles of black-and-white photographs. Anne had taken dozens of rolls of film for her photography class and many of these were culls too good to throw away but not good enough to take to class.

He remembered sitting at the kitchen table with Leif, as Anne snapped picture after picture, experimenting with her cameras to learn their limits and what effects she could achieve by opening up or stopping down the lenses, by playing around with shutter speed and film types. Each click of the camera had been fully documented in her notebook.

Here they were in shirtsleeves, their uniform jackets draped over the backs of kitchen chairs. Close-ups of their faces, the badges on their hats, his gun, Leif’s ear, his own hand holding a glass of beer. He’d forgotten this one of Mickey Cluett. Had Mickey Cluett ever been that young, that lean? A whole series of baby pictures: an owl-eyed Sigrid splashing in the deep laundry sink or seated on one of their laps to gnaw on a teething biscuit. He could almost smell the baby powder and gummy Zwieback, see those impossibly tiny fingers closed around one of his.

And there were pictures of Anne. Occasionally she’d leave a camera unattended and one of them would turn the lens on her and snap her with her head tilted back in laughter or with the tip of her tongue caught between her small white teeth as she concentrated on one of those complicated Danish recipes Leif’s aunt had written out for her. God, how beautiful she’d been! And how young. Only nineteen.

More pictures spilled from another manila envelope: he and Leif clowning around the day they’d gotten their gold shields and hung up their uniforms. He could remember their celebration right down to the bottle of champagne Anne had bought. What he couldn’t remember was the name of that redheaded reporter from the old
Journal-American
with whom Leif had celebrated the next night.

“Well,” said Pam Peters, “I’m sorry Matt’s got another cold and of course, we can always use the overtime, but you know what it’s like, Frances, when you’ve got three little ones and he’s never home to help.”

Frances agreed that she did indeed know what it was like.

“I probably shouldn’t have tried to go back to work so soon. Even though it’s only three days a week, it just messes up my whole routine and—”

Frances uhmmed and oh?ed in all the appropriate places, but her mind was on her own sons. Dressed in their colorful warm-up suits, they loomed over her and huffed impatiently for her to come on.

“Sorry, Frances, but the baby’s crying and I have to go. Talk to you soon,” said Pam and hung up as if it were the older woman who’d prolonged the conversation.

“One minute, guys,” Frances said and hurried down the hall to the bedroom. She found Matt stretched out on their bed watching the news on their portable television. Except for his shoes, he was still fully dressed.

“Matt, you promised. Under the covers, lights out.”

“As soon as the news is over,” he said. “Honest.”

“And no snacking,” she ordered. “I know exactly how much ice cream’s in the refrigerator and how many cookies are in the box”

“Ma-aaa,” came her older son’s plaintive cry from the back door

“Go on,” said Matt. “You’re going to make the boys late.”

She glanced at the clock, realized he was right, and rushed to join their sons.

CHAPTER 21

Above ground, defying the promise of more snow, Times Square was a gaudy blaze of Saturday night light and color. The temperature was still well above freezing, and up and down Broadway and along Forty-second Street, endlessly flashing marquees backlit the titles of raunchy XXX-rated movies. Brazenly garish neon signs spoke of everything from unfettered sex to everything-must-go luggage sales. Up above, more lights on enormous electronic billboards. Waves of light. Green for Japanese film, red for soda pop, blue for German cars and Colombian coffee—the colored lights washed their sales pitches across the buildings. Even higher, the buildings themselves, dark and massive blocks of granite, were jeweled with lighted windows and floodlit peaks. And down on the littered sidewalks, weaving in and out around overflowing trash baskets, panhandlers, and sex shills forcing handbills on every male who made eye contact, were the faces of all the nations on earth—the stunned, the stoned, and the starry-eyed—invincibly jaywalking through unbroken lines of shiny yellow taxis, avoiding the puddles of filthy slush melting at each corner, spilling around knots of people who stopped to laugh and talk and argue about whether to go here for drinks or there for the show. Steam rose from a hundred grates and manholes. Back and forth, in and out, swirling in chilled circles were families of wide-eyed tourists, threesomes of pink-cheeked South American sailors. Bridge-and-tunnel kids, acting out, razzed the transvestites who braved the winter night in short fur jackets and crotch-high leather miniskirts. Over it all, mingled with the yeasty aroma of money, sex, and cold plastic, floated the smell of damp cement, diesel fumes, and slightly charred hot pretzels.