An Owl's Whisper (39 page)

Opera and
Mardi Gras

Eva and Stan stayed in the Garrity home for most of 1946—a year marked by the birth of their firstborn, Catherine, on June 6.

That year Stan and Jess worked together like father and son readying some land down in the river valley for a house, then doing the building. By Thanksgiving, they had a presentable cottage to show for their work, and Eva and Stan, along with baby Cat, moved in.

Carrie and Jess gave the young couple a bottle of Champagne as a housewarming gift. Sitting with Eva at the kitchen table the first evening in their new home, Stan reverently held the bottle and read the label. “Piper-Heidsieck. Reims, France.” He looked at Eva. “I’ll be jiggered, ain’t seen genuine fizz since the war. Didn’t know you could get the stuff here.”

“Carrie made special order of it through Mr. Cavendish, the proprietor of the saloon in town,” Eva said. “She’s
très gentille
.”

“Reims. Sounds familiar. Hon, isn’t that the town where your family’s from?”

Eva clenched her teeth and sat silent for a moment. Then she said, “No, it was somewhere else. Somewhere far from there.” Her tone was cold as gunmetal.

“Hmm? I coulda sworn…” Stan looked back at the bottle. “Gee whiz, this stuff reminds me of your uncle. Remember the champagne he was gettin’ for our GI Christmas party just before he got waylaid?” He shook his head. “Wish we knew what happened to the poor old coot.”

Eva burst into tears. Stan rushed to cradle her head in his arms. “There, there, honey. It’s OK. Shouldn’t have brought it up. I know how them memories pain you.”

“Stanley, so much you don’t know about him. About those days. About what was.”

Eva smiled when Stan kissed each of her wet eyes. “But that doesn’t matter now, does it?” she said. “We’re here together. We have Catherine. The past is broken from us now. Isn’t it?”

Stan stroked her hair. “Sure, it’s far away. Gone.” He swallowed hard. “Can’t touch us.” He was recalling a story he’d once heard, a story about geese with foxes’ teeth.

In January, 1948 a second daughter, Françoise, was born. Folks called her Françie.

As early as that, Eva was already changing things in Hooker County. By bringing in a bit of the outside world. Like the Saturday afternoon that spring, when she and Carrie were turning over the vegetable garden. Jess had been inside, listening to Act I of the Metropolitan Opera broadcast of
Aida,
and came out during intermission with lemonade for the ladies.

Eva drank half a glass. She looked up and shook her hair, letting the sunshine pour onto her face. “Jess, you must love the music to pass the chance to work in the soil on such a day.”

“Well, I reckon I do.”

“Carrie said me…said
to
me…you fell in that love of music in France. Yes?”

“Yep. I was recoverin’ after gettin’ clipped in 1918. I had sick pass in Paris. Me and a fellow Marine named Romani, an
I-talian
out of Philadelphia. Romani was an opera buff, and he dragged me to see a production of Puccini’s
Girl of the Golden West
. Said, ‘Come on. It’s an opera about the wild and wooly West. You’ll be right at home. Besides, come with me to the opera and after we’ll see the
can-can
girls in Montmartre.’”

Carrie crossed her arms dramatically. “And I felt bad for you boys,
fighting
over there!”

“Aw, shucks, dearie, I didn’t even know you then. If I’da had you waitin’ back home for me, I’d sure never bothered gawkin’ at
can-can
girls.” He kissed her cheek. “Besides, danged if I didn’t like that opera ’bout as well—maybe better—than the high-kickers. It wasn’t that I felt at home watchin’ gold minin’ owlhoots with names like Handsome and Happy struttin’ around, singin’ at each other. Naw. It was just a good story and ear-grabbin’ music, rolled into one. After I got home, I listened to opera music whenever I could.”

“’Course, back then you didn’t have much chance, except for the Victrola,” Carrie said. “You didn’t have records, but as I recall, Atilla Vlasik had a goodly number he moved from St. Louis, and he was agreeable to lending.”

“Good old Vlasik, rest his soul.” Jess turned back to Eva. “In the Thirties, The Metropolitan Opera of New York City started wireless broadcasts regular. That made it easier. Since I become sheriff, I regular spend Saturday afternoons in the office, cleanin’ up paperwork and listenin’ to the broadcasts.”

Eva took another sip of lemonade. “So you like the opera, listen nearly every week, but you’ve been to only one performance in your life?”

“Well, kiddo, you go see the opera if you live in Paris or New York, but in Hooker County you’re happy to listen on the wireless. That’s just the way it is.”

To Eva, not much had to be
the way it is
. She had never been to an opera, but in 1948, on Carrie’s and Jess’ wedding anniversary, she dropped in with a bouquet of zinnias and an envelope containing four tickets. “Stanley and I will take you to the opera. I sent for tickets from the company in Central City, Colorado for their
Norma
. We can travel together—Carrie, Jess, Stanley, and me.” She grinned. “Stanley complained about going until I tell him the other choice is staying home as nanny.”

That September, after leaving Cat and Françie with Carrie’s cousin Etta, the four piled into Stan’s new Plymouth and made tracks west. They stayed in a hotel and saw Bellini’s masterpiece sung in Central City’s grand old Victorian hall.

Walking back to the hotel after the performance, Stan said, “It’s a spectacle, all right. Just bothers me that Norma could offer up her life, knowin’ it’d mean leavin’ those kids alone.”

“But Stanley, she sacrifices herself for her children and for her people. To protect them. To save them.” Eva squeezed his hand. “You must understand—she had no choice.”

Stan grimaced as he held the hotel door. “Yeah. Just must’ve been tough on them kids.”

That night as he slipped into bed next to his wife, Jess told Carrie, “What a swell night, dearie. I’ll never forget it. Funny how it took knowin’ Eva Chandler to get us here.”

Eva brought magic to the whole county, too.

She gave French lessons to school kids Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. And in December every year, there was a
Chant de Noël
program she started. It became part of most county folks’ holiday tradition.

In January of 1947, Eva, with Carrie in cahoots, started cooking up something new. They wouldn’t say what it was, but a lot of cackling went on with the other women after church and on the telephone in the evenings. They were planning a
Mardi Gras
celebration.

When Stan approached the Garrity home as instructed after work that Tuesday night in February, it was cold and clear, the sky a sea of shimmering stars and just a dusting of snow on the ground. As he turned onto the limestoned drive, Stan saw a first clue that the night would be special—the billow of orange glow that loomed around each of the paper bag lanterns tracking the way in. That night candles flickered in every window of the two-story house and along the top of the fence out front—a magical scene. Stan parked the Plymouth. As he walked to the house, he heard the Yves Montand song
Métro
on the Victrola. Smiling, he whispered, “Eva.”

Miss Agatha, Carrie, Eva, and Jess were in the parlor, sipping plum wine. Eva was singing along with Yves, looking happy as a wren in springtime and sounding just as pretty. Soon other folks arrived. Two dozen of them. People, plum wine, cookies, tiny sandwiches with the bread crusts cut off, warm stove, flickering candles—Eva seemed to be the center of it all. It was a winter evening like none before in Hooker County.

As they drove home through the cold crispness, Stan told Eva, “You know, seein’ you in the spotlight tonight, I almost started feelin’ jealous.”

Eva slid close to Stan and slipped her arm into his. “Oh, Stanley you don’t need—”

Stan leaned over and kissed her forehead. “I
started
feelin’ jealous. Then I recollected the time in the hospital in Liege when you sang to all of us on the ward. How I looked around and saw what it meant to those GIs, some of ’em way more banged up than I was. How proud I was of you. That day I knew, if I ever hooked you, I’d be sharin’ you with the world and how that wouldn’t be so bad. And tonight, I saw it in the eyes of the folks at the party—what you’ve come to mean to them. I’m so dang proud of you, hon. So lucky.”

Eva looked at Stan. She didn’t let on she’d seen the tear in the corner of his eye. “I only follow my nature. It is you and this place that gives me what I can never before find. Here, I am finally myself. I’m the lucky one.”

The next day, Stan had lunch with his uncle. Between bites of cherry pie, Jess admitted, “Bein’ dumb as a tenor, I’d never even heard of
Mardi Gras
before last night. Now, Lent I heard of, though I’m no disciple of whichever religion calls for it. But I tell ya, I’m sold on this
Mardi Gras
stuff.” Jess poked his fork toward Stan, for emphasis. “Any religion that puts self-indulgence first and self-denial second ain’t half bad.”

After that first
Mardi Gras,
word went from person to person about Eva’s party. About the candles, about the charm, about the pleasure of celebrating a moment just to celebrate it. The next year upwards of a hundred people wanted to come. Too many for the Garrity house. So Eva talked Father Lambert of St. Mary’s—she had him wrapped around her finger, too—into having it in the church hall. Besides Eva’s charm, the priest’s partiality to “a tiny drop of the spirit now and then” helped sway him.

Eva threw shindigs on subsequent
Mardi Gras
, and each was a paper lantern, a warm and glowing light in the frozen, featureless landscape of a Hooker County winter. Happening year after year, Eva’s celebrations made a string of lanterns guiding pioneer folks from their natural wintertime mentality to a springlike one.

Talking about those parties one evening with Jess, Carrie said, “That Eva! Leave it to her to show us a load made lighter loses none of its value.”

“Yeah. ’Round her ya reckon maybe optimism ain’t out of your price range after all.” Jess scratched his head. “Askin’
why not?
is ’bout as important as askin’
why?
” He took a sip of his rye and looked at the glass. “Gets me thinkin’, dearie. Strugglin’s like good whiskey—better drunk in ounces than in quarts.”

Carrie broke out laughing. “Now Jesse Garrity,
that
is a revelation, coming from you!”

A Heroine Surely

In 1950 the British celebrated the tenth anniversary of their victory over the
Luftwaffe
in the Battle of Britain.
Life
Magazine ran pictures of grand parades passing review stands lined with proud limey flyboys decked out in old uniforms and medals. It seemed worlds away in Hooker County until a letter from the British Embassy in Washington, DC came to Mayor Ostranec. A nephew of the king wanted to travel to Mullen to settle a debt.

The letter explained that this royal relative, a Lord Smithwycke, was a pilot shot down over occupied Europe in 1943. A Belgian partisan, one Eva Messiaen, snuck him past German patrols and into the underground pipeline. He’d promised himself that someday he would find that woman to thank her. When the British Foreign Office determined that Smithwycke’s Eva had come to Hooker County as a war bride, Mrs. Stanley T. Chandler, Smithwycke could keep his promise. The visit was set for October 16, 1950.

Dawn cracked clean and clear on the big day. Smithwycke and his entourage were due on the Burlington westbound at mid-afternoon. Stan took off from work at noon to fetch Eva and their girls, Cat and Françie, and drive them to town. A dais had been built for the award ceremony. Located at the main intersection in town, right in front of the general store, it was made of fresh yellow pine lumber. The platform was a yard above ground level, with a set of steps leading up from behind. There was a waist-high railing across the front with red, white and blue bunting. The Stars and Stripes, the Nebraska state flag, and the Union Jack were displayed behind the eight chairs on the platform.