Her Story

Who by Fire: Chapter 29: Audible and prose

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Note: Update: Robert gets even closer to Lena’s secret …

You can start reading here or anywhere, then go back. See Table of Contents. Come in the middle? Robert is the narrator who discovers after his wife Lena has died that she had a lover, Isaac. Evan is Isaac’s wife. Robert is on a search for how he lost Lena: He’s creating the story through memory, invention and a search for the truth and his role in what happened—and by stalking Isaac.

Her Story

She was drinking Brompton’s cocktail. Morphine, heroine if she was lucky, vodka, cocaine (I never knew for sure what was in it and it didn’t matter). She sipped, slept. Dreamt? The dreamer that she was I would think so. When she came out of the hazy relief the cocktail gave, she told the story.

She told me about June. “She’d go up the stairs, and that silky scarf—an airy wake behind her.” And then, “That time she got in the little convertible, while I stood by her, when her hair blew in my face and I knew what she’d feel when he drove her away.”

“Who is June?”

“Evan knows her. Evan, with the heart-shaped face, who throws a scarf around her neck in just that careless but decorative way June had always done it—with an abandonment that meant the ends were never even and her throat was always exposed.”

“And you know her, too.”

“Who?”

“June.”

“I know her better.”

“Tell me.”

“And June went to the guest room to be alone, pulled from the closet the old orange blanket, the one she’d lain under when she was still bleeding from the birth. She lay down again under the blanket but on top of the white chenille bedspread. She wouldn’t think of disturbing the bed linens. What would Augusta say? More linens to wash! She lay alone until her sisters brought her tea, chicken soup, when they tried to wake her, bring her into the parlor.”

“Augusta?”

“Augusta was fertilizing the peonies. She grumbled about the ants, not understanding, even after all her years of gardening, how they helped the flowers open. She said, ‘Why do they crawl all over the top of the buds? It makes no sense.’ Augusta brushed and shook the flowers for cuttings while Gertrude leaned toward Evan across the garden fence. Augusta could be heard, ‘If I don’t get them off, they’ll be on the furniture, on our food.’”

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I hear the cocktail is not used much anymore, that it wasn’t in much use when she drank it. “Vodka, no rocks,” she said when I gave her the first shot—Gershon provided the shot glass that sat in the back of his cupboard with a bottle of Seagram’s Crown Royal that he kept in the velvet bag. Dr. Schwartz wasn’t much interested in what was in vogue. He said, “I hear it’s now the name of a rock band or an album and some film school kids or Actors-Studio types are making a film about a rock band that goes by the name. Allusions and illusions—we need both, don’t you think?” And he handed me the cocktail. “Rock-a-bye baby, cradle and all,” he said. His mouth twisted in a smile that reflected a certain distance from his work, from her certain death, and a decided grief his irony could not hide.

I asked, “So, Gertrude knows the story?”

“Yes.”

“And does she tell Evan?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Who is Gertrude?”

“Hamlet’s mother.”

“Could you tell me what Gertrude told Evan?”

“No, but June loved him.”

“Who?”

“The one who gave her the baby, the one who went away, the one no one knows about.”

“Where is the baby?”

“In the suitcase.”

And then she slept.△

Table of Contents

Coming next: “Evan” Chapter 30

Only Connect, all sections, and this serial novel come from my heart and soul—and ten years of research. I know the saying ‘time is money’: I couldn’t help but pursue this story. If you have already gone paid, my heart goes out to you with my thanks.

Love,