Five Night Stand: A Novel (23 page)

“Has he told you about Hamlet Giraud?”

“His friend the trombonist? Well, in passing, in stories of the road and gigs.”

“Sure, sure he did. Did he mention how Hamlet died?” Here, the sadness that had trembled her lip fills her eyes as well, those piercing emeralds going to pools of green in an instant.

“He died in a car accident, didn’t he? Here in New York?”

“He did. He died in a car accident while scuttling my father’s mistress away from our house. Away from my mother’s home, Mr. Severs.”

In all the research he’s done on Oliver that had led to information on Hamlet Giraud, he hasn’t read that story anywhere. There are accounts of Giraud dying young in an early morning wreck on the FDR, and rumors that he was with an unidentified woman—a woman not his wife.

“Who was she?” Frank’s reporter instincts have taken over and he assumes the crass, blunt questioning reserved for victims’ families.

“Her name was Marie Broussard, from Paris. I attended Hamlet’s funeral. I was eight at the time and I wondered then why we were there. We weren’t churchgoing people and it was the middle of the week. My mother wore black and my father cried. I’d never seen him cry before then. He played piano and a choir sang. My mother, through it all, stared straight ahead, not even turning to look at my father, who sobbed like a child as he played that slow funeral dirge. Once I put it all together, sometime as a young woman perhaps, if not later that day, I wondered at my mother’s attendance there at all. The circumstances surrounding the day, that week, make me realize just how strong my mother was.” She looks at Frank, the piercing green back again and driving through his brain. “And, Mr. Severs, just how weak Oliver could be.”

Frank is numb, yet his spine and scalp tingle at the same time. This story is one that’s been speculated on by music historians and pop-culture fanatics for years.

“I’ve kept it inside all this time. I don’t know why. To protect Oliver? To honor the memory of my mother? Who’s to say? But I know Hamlet’s children; we grew up together. I still see them and the knowledge of it, that it wasn’t their father’s mistress in that car, but
my
father’s, is something I feel I’m wearing pinned to the front of my coat every time they’re near. They know it, I’m sure of it. I can sense it every time I run across Johnny Giraud in the subway or his sister, Maddie, in the market. Their crowd knew, musicians know, but
musicians
”—this last word has been spat out—“protect their own. Well, I’m no musician and I ain’t here to protect nobody no more. You dig?”

She wipes her eyes and jumps up from the table to pour her tepid tea into the sink. She refills her cup with steaming water and places the discarded tea bag back into the cup.

“This story, Mrs. Wilson . . .”

“You do with it what you will, Frank Severs. I know why you’re here. I understand what it is you do and I’m telling you that I’m tired of it all. I’m too old now to keep secrets and it’s been too many years of hiding and hating. I told you the story; it’s yours now.”

“I need to ask you one other thing, if I could.”

“What else do I have? I’ve given it all, Mr. Severs, every drop.”

Frank shakes his head slowly. “I don’t mean any disrespect here, Mrs. Wilson. Christ, I never thought things would become so apparent and that the noise could be so loud, considering everybody’s intent to keep so quiet.”

“What are you getting at, Mr. Severs?”

“You know about Martin Lucchesi, the bookseller in Greenwich Village? You know about him and your mother, don’t you?”

When Frank had arrived, Charlene kept him waiting in a paneled study just inside the front door. He’d let his reporter’s eyes—working again and intensely investigative and curious—fall over the decorations, the knickknacks, and the family photos. The Wilsons collect African art and there were tribal masks, small carved idols of female shapes ripe with maternity, and photos of the Serengeti on every wall. He worked his way to the bookshelves and saw contemporary titles and a large selection of African American literature—Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, first editions all. Among them were older-looking volumes, the ghost of dust lining the shelves around the spines. He reached up and pulled one down on a hunch and there it was, on the inside cover, a printed “ML” with straight lines made with India ink and the wide nib of a fountain pen. It was bold, not only in its structure but also in the way it flew in the face of a marriage and with the full knowledge of both sides of the story as Frank now knew them. And then, in the back, was Francesca’s scripted, feminine “FP.” It was thin and lovely, almost sad, yet with a curl to the handwriting that evoked fun and a certain playfulness.

He took down another volume and found the same. Another, and there they were as well. Charlene knows, he’d realized. She’s known for at least as long as her mother has been dead, but how long before that, Frank wondered.

Charlene stands from the table again and walks to the window, and Frank allows the silence to permeate the room, welcomes it this time. She buries her face in her hands and her shoulders shake and quiver with sobbing. He’s sorry all of this came up, but something in him won’t let the inequality rest. He can’t stand to see Oliver’s side of the scales tip so far with guilt and regret.

“You know?” she finally says.

“Yes ma’am. I spoke with Lucchesi yesterday.”

“And he told you.”

“He told me he loved your mother very much and that your mother was very lonely. They both were. But it was understood she wouldn’t leave your father, or you and your brothers. Mrs. Wilson, I’m not saying this to defend any of Ollie’s actions. He did what he did and that’s for you and your family to work through. But your mother took comfort elsewhere and I’m just trying to understand how one is better than the other. If it is at all. Your mother was lonely, but your father is lonely now as well. He misses Francesca, and he misses you.”

Charlene doesn’t move from the window, but Frank feels that whatever anger she might have felt has lessened, has seeped through the chinked caulking around the century-old window and brick and cooled in the snow on the sill there. He stands and thanks Charlene for her time and for the tea. She doesn’t speak but only stares out at the children playing in the street. On his way out, a glance into a sunlit room opposite the study where he’d waited before shows him an old phonograph and a wall of shelves, like Francesca’s wall of books, and Charlene’s now, but filled with record albums. There is a comfortable sitting chair that looks from the window out to the street, where children play. The only other piece of furniture in that room is an antique upright piano that might have, at one time, been covered with handmade quilts and flour sacks, and rolled in place across a floor covered in sawdust.

Agnes and Frank sit at Oliver’s table and can sense the envy of this seating arrangement coming from the other patrons. Those patrons may even recognize the bottle of Campari that awaits him, or the blue pack of Gitanes and cut-glass ashtray. The couple could also feel the bitterness emanating from the hostess station as Ben bypassed Marcie to show them to this table. They talk about their day, though both hold back, not wanting to reveal their real destinations or purposes. Instead, the talk is a desultory tour of easily recognizable landmarks and sites. It’s idle talk without the telling.

For Agnes, however, it is mostly true. She’s spent the day alone in this city of millions, walking through the park, window-shopping, dipping into subway stations, not to board a train but to listen to the street musicians. Passing again alongside Mount Sinai, she’d spotted a tall man in a turban and rushed to catch up, but found it wasn’t Dr. Mundra. She wasn’t sure what she would have said, but he was on her mind. He and his offer of respite, or complete failure. The prospect of being healed, even if it’s a short while, is almost too much hope to place on such fragile shoulders. It is easier, she thought as she walked the avenues, to consider the previous night and the option of leaping into the black water of the East River. That is final; that’s a decision made on her own terms.

It’s an odd juxtaposition, she’d thought, as she took a moment to look at the massive lion guardians of the public library, to consider the peace and beauty of playing piano alone for Oliver Pleasant in his home and the very real possibility of falling to her death only an hour later. One should almost preclude the other. Almost. There was that nasty spill at the end of her playing, though. All control abandoning her and her body reacting to whatever the broken nerves had commanded. And that’s the crux of it all, that’s the push she might need while leaning over the rail of the wrong bridge.

Frank, meanwhile, had stood outside Charlene’s home to watch the kids there running and shouting with a wild abandon that throws all concern for decorum and, in some cases, safety out of the window. Playing in the snow is a happiness lost with adulthood for most people, and Frank misses it. He misses Karen, too, and had optimistically imagined her playing in the snow with their child. There was a bench nearby and he sat with his notebook to fill in the notes he’d taken at the kitchen table. It was cold, but he ignored it, focusing instead on what Charlene had said, wondering where it had all gone wrong within that family and wondering as well why she was too stubborn to put it all aside. Oliver has kept a table for his children these nights and wants desperately for them to show.

Midafternoon sun fell on his bench and it was pleasant sitting in Park Slope with kids playing nearby and nowhere to be until later that night. He took his phone out in hopes that he’d missed a call from Karen. He hadn’t, so he called her.

“How are you feeling?” It was the first thing he asked after the greetings.

“Better. I guess my body is getting used to it all.”

“Maybe that’s a good sign.” He couldn’t explain this burst of optimism, whether it had awakened after visiting the depths of despair on a bridge at midnight or hearing the secrets of an estranged family. Or perhaps it was the sun on a frigid winter day in Brooklyn. Frank looked around, hoping that maybe Paul Auster would walk past.

“Where are you?”

“Park Slope, Brooklyn. I came by to talk to Charlene Wilson, Oliver’s daughter.”

“How was it?” There was sincerity in Karen’s voice.

“Interesting. It’s a sad situation—the family is torn apart, though she lives so close by. It’s nothing new, though; the rift was born a long time ago when Charlene was a little girl.”

“That’s a shame.”

“It really is. I wish they’d reconnect, family should be closer. It’s too important.”

Karen told him she’d taken a sick day and was still in bed; it had turned colder in Memphis and she couldn’t face another gray day beyond their house. She was comfortable, she said, alternately reading and watching television. She was glad he called and he was, too. She wished he were there—again, sincerely—and he did, too. Desperately.

He thinks of the phone call now and imagines Karen at home in bed as Oliver plays “All of Me.” He’d wanted to leave Brooklyn as soon as the phone call had ended and catch a cab to the airport to get him home, but he knew that was impractical. Another two days and he’d be there with Karen to face whatever may come next in regards to career, his writing, and their lives together.

“Where she at? I know she’s out there, been here every night so far. There she is. Come on up here, Miss Cassady.” Oliver scans the crowd and finally points to his own table. The crowd turns to see who he’s talking about, to learn who this “Cassady” might be. They collectively don’t recognize her.

Frank is confused as he’s drawn from his daydream and glances at Agnes, who is just as confused. When Oliver’s words finally register, she shakes her head and tries to wave him off. But now everyone is staring at her; squinting eyes and wrinkled faces turn, smiling and toasting with cocktails, urging her onto the bandstand. She turns to Frank.

“Jump,” he says, and winks.

And she does.

Gazing down from the stage onto the room and people there is vastly different from anything she’s used to. Talent shows in Tipton County certainly didn’t carry the drama of Ben’s club. The bars in New Orleans are raucous and tourists, within an arm’s length of the bandstand, pay only cursory attention to what happens up there. There were nights when Agnes cussed them from the microphone and suggested the dive’s owner simply put in a goddamned jukebox for all the attention the band was being paid. At Landon’s parties, of course, she was meant to be backdrop, the liquor and young bodies circulating at the forefront. But here, with Oliver leaning back on a bar stool provided by Andrew Sexton and beside the piano with a microphone in hand, and looking around at this crowd that has come for only one person, she is truly terrified.

Placing her hand on his shoulder, she whispers to him, “Ollie, please, I can’t. My hand, I’ll fuck this up.”

“Baby, you just play it like you did last night, ain’t no difference. Look at me and play it for me. Just to me. ‘Night and Day,’” he calls to the band, and they take Agnes’s lead.