Chapter Twenty-Two
From The Reader’s Digest, April, 1946:
From Cartoon Quips: "One glamour girl to another: ‘We’re practically
engaged. He’s just waiting for his fiancée to return the ring.’ "
When I saw Paul Donner backstage and introduced myself to him I wasn’t really expecting much, I promise you that. He was just an old acquaintance, a friend of the family. I was just the kid who used to sit and listen in rapturous silence while he sang or spoke to us. There were no expectations on my part. I just wanted to say hello. Still, his reaction to me, standing there looking innocent, was one of utter and complete lust. I don’t remember anything like it ever.
Not that I was bothered by that. I’d been through a few things already that certainly mirrored this new experience, but the intensity of this one was different. So when I told him I was single and looking for work and that my parents were still in the game, so to speak, he parried that minor thrust with an offer to be his assistant, his valet and driver. Naturally I accepted the offer.
I knew, I suppose, that the three-pronged duties would expand quickly to include a fourth, the one I’d been avoiding since my teens, the one my mother liked to talk to me about. No family business interest for me, I promised myself. I was going to go to school, get a degree in something useful and marry Freddy, even if she was older than me. Maybe I’d keep seeing Mikhael, but that would be the extent of my outside sex life. I was aiming for normal as American Apple Pie life. But Paul was clearly over the top about me and he made an awfully nice offer and Brianna said I’d be hanged by my cohonies if I didn’t take the position, so to speak, so I agreed. And oddly enough, it worked out and I wasn’t too personally offended by it. Accidental decisions create our fate, I guess, and my fate was certainly the object of my family’s history no matter how hard I tried to change all that.
I did have real responsibilities beside the blow jobs and such. I did have his back on appointments and I pressed his suits and his ties, kept his household running and I did drive him to the concert halls, theaters and opera houses. When he had students, and there were always three students, I kept them in line, kept them waiting, kept them paying their bills on time. Now and then I’d cook something too. I wasn’t too bad. Mikhael had shown me a few tricks in the kitchen when we were still friendly. He had some weird Scandinavian recipes that were actually pretty tasty if you made them right.
So Paul was happy he had hired me and I was pleased about making the connection after so many years. My mother was pleased with my professional "progress" and my dad was delighted to reunite with an old friend, which was totally weird since I expected him to reject this "old guy-young guy" thing, especially with an old friend like Paul Donner. It was strange watching them together, like two old bowling buddies, except that one was screwing the other one’s son. Strange, indeed. I guess we never really know our parents in spite of ourselves.
It wasn’t until Helga Meerstadt appeared at the dressing room door that there was even a slight shadow in this sunlit path. She cast a huge, dark spot over the easy happiness I was having, but that wasn’t something I was willing to show to anyone, least of all Paul. I had learned early that giving him an advantage over me was not a good thing.
This is what had happened. I’d been working for him, sharing a life with him actually, for about three months when I got a call from my mother. Freddy, who had pretty much disappeared from my life for a while, had called looking for me. My mother, being a good and protective soul, had taken down her information and passed it along to me, rather than passing Freddy through the gauntlet and giving her any information about my life, my whereabouts, anything except that I was well. I held on to the contact numbers for a while, and then, when I was ready to face her, I phoned.
Just hearing her voice gave me chills. Old times, good ones, rushed backward at me, stunning me. It was as though I was fifteen again and not in my mid-twenties.
"It’s so good to hear your voice, Max," she cooed at me through the receiver.
"Yeah, it’s nice to hear yours, too, Freddy," I responded, a bit cooler than she.
"I’ve wanted to call you for so long."
"Well, what took you so long, then?"
"Well, you know how we got the last time...? I wasn’t sure..."
"Hey, I never hold a grudge, Freddy. I really don’t."
"I know. You’d said that. But you know how I am, right?"
"Sure."
"Can we get together? Coffee, maybe? Or a drink somewhere?"
"Still taking the initiative, I note."
"Max, come on. It’s not a date, just meet."
"Where?" I said. "When?" She gave me a few possibilities but they were awkward ones for me, either a class or an appointment for Paul. I suggested an alternative when my schedule looked pretty clear and she took it as a date without even batting an eyelash. I know I’d have heard her if she had batted one.
"I can’t wait, Max."
"Me, too," I said.
And so we met. The place: Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue, the restaurant. The time: a Monday afternoon at three. The weather: gloomy and unpredictable. I wore a grey suit, striped shirt, no tie, moccasins. She wore a grey suit - wouldn’t you know - striped blouse and a flowered tie, asters on a black background, which she kept knotted but not secured to the collar, and three inch heels. We looked like a committee meeting of some sort, sitting at the small steel and enamel table sipping tea and eating tiny cakes. You had to love it, or at least see it to believe it.
We beat around the bush for a few minutes, shared a reminiscence or two, laughed uncomfortably, and then got down to brass tacks.
"How long has it really been?" she asked me.
"How long has what really been? Be specific, okay?"
"Since we last sat and talked? Was it your party? Your graduation party?"
"No. We talked again after that."
"I don’t remember, Max. I only remember how angry you were with me that time."
"You did shock me with your good news, Freddy."
"I should have known, but I was naive, I guess."
"Yes. Naive. A good word for it."
"Be good, Max. I’m trying to be nice here."
"You have to be nice, Freddy. This whole thing is your idea, this get-together."
"I know. I’ll be nice."
We sipped our tea again.
"You’re looking very handsome, Max, very mature, too."
"I’m not a little kid anymore. Neither are you, by the way."
"What? A little kid or handsome? Or mature for that matter?"
"A kid, of course. You’re very handsome, Freddy. And frankly, you haven’t matured much, at least not physically. I guess marriage hasn’t brought you the breasts you always wanted."
"Oh," she said too quietly. "I’m not married, Max."
"You’re... what happened? I thought..."
"Yes, so did I."
"I’m sorry."
"I’m not."
We sat in silence and sipped again.
"What does one say in these situations?" I asked, not expecting an answer.
"Depends on who you are." She giggled, but there was no humor in it. "We were almost married. That’s something."
"I guess."
"It wasn’t anyone’s fault, Max. We were just two kids and we thought it could work. It couldn’t."
"Was it his... you know... his tendencies?"
"No." Again quiet, and again quick. "That would have been okay with me. As long as it wasn’t you."
"Then what, Sweetie?" I hadn’t called her that, ever, in my life but it just came out of me.
"That damned chair."
"The liddy-skiffy thing, or whatever."
"Yes, that one, the Lidskialfa. I’ll never forget how to say it, believe me."
"What happened?"
"I see you don’t read the big news magazines, Max. It made them all."
"I do, but I don’t read the right parts, it seems."
"Well, this was a scandal. Just the way Mikhael always said it might be."
"You mean someone got wind of the chair and the theft and all that?"
"Uh huh." She blushed and I knew that somehow she was connected to the bad news about the bad news. "My mother wanted a photo of me in the chair, just for herself, she said. So I convinced Mikhael to take one. It was an okay photo. I looked all right and the chair was pretty big so it photographed well. Too well."
"Don’t tell me.."
"Yep. She sent it to the Times with a wedding announcement and they printed it without knowing anything about the chair, but the international sections of Newsweek, and a bunch of other tomes picked it up and made a scandalous report about some American girl who had possession of this missing European heirloom. You’d have thought it was a Nazi treasure trove the way they descended on us."
"It was almost the same thing, Freddy."
"It was worse. It seems that Mikhael’s father was not the heir presumptive. He was only an ‘assumptive,’ a usurper wanted by Interpol. That’s partially why we never saw the man. He was truly on the lam."
"That must have so hard for Mikhael," I said without thinking.
"Of course it was. And it was hard for me because of the wrath I suffered from Mikhael. I had never heard so much abusive language in my life, not even in high school. It devastated me."
"That’s awful."
"It got worse, Max. The FBI got into it. The seized the damn chair, arrested Mikhael and detained me as a material witness."
"Really!"
"I was in a holding cell for five days while they continually isolated me and questioned me, and grilled me and questioned me. I didn’t know if I was coming or going some of the time."
"Why you? You were only the fiancée."
"That was why. They assumed I knew something. How stupid was I? they asked me. How stupid were they? I wondered. If I had known what was going on why would I allow myself to be photographed like that. That’s what I told them."
"And...?"
"And finally they believed me, bought my story and let me go."
"Mikhael?"
"I have no idea. He just disappeared into the system somewhere. I’ve never heard from him, or about him, again."
"That’s ridiculous!" I shouted, then turned my volume down. "They can’t just detain someone like that. He was a kid when they got here. He had a family that slowly disappeared and he was alone. What was he supposed to do?"
There was a short breath of deep silence between us after my outburst.
"So you do still care about Mikhael, Max." It was a statement of absolute fact and not a question this time.
"I don’t...really."
"You do. I can hear it. I can see it in your eyes."
"I don’t. Not anymore. Not after...this."
"Well, we’re not engaged any longer, Max. I sold the ring, took the dough and went to Atlantic City for a long weekend."
"Oh. How was that, then?"
"You won’t believe this, Max, but it was cathartic. I met Mikhael’s father there."
"The heir assumptive."
"The very one. He looked me up at my hotel, bought me a drink and told me, in no uncertain terms, what he would like to do to me. I threw my drink in his face and headed for the bus station and came home. It was definitely the final straw."
"So, you’re free and you came to find me."
"Not exactly. I waited a while. A long while actually. I was too ashamed, I think of the way I treated you all those years ago."
"Yeah, well," and I took a breath before I said this next, "that’s water under the bridge, I guess."
"That was gracious of you, Max."
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I sat there and I looked at Freddy and I reached across the table and took her hand and held it firmly within mine. She smiled at me and I smiled at her and I knew we probably wouldn’t have many more of these dates.
"I’m free and on the loose," she sang to me, a quote from some musical show I didn’t know.
I gave her a thin-lipped smile and nodded, then I turned it into a negative and slowly shook my head.
"But I’m not," I said, and I let her hand slip out of mine.
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