I'll See You in Paris (44 page)

If she had been looking at his face, Laurel would've noticed his lips trembling uncontrollably.

“I can't do that, luv,” he said, for Win truly believed she was making the best decision—for her. For him it felt like the end of the world.

“But he can find someone else,” Laurel said. “Women love him. They fawn over him. It's actually quite annoying.”

Where was it? Where was the love she used to have for Charlie? Of course, even at its best, it paled compared to how she felt about Win.

“He can find a girl much better than me,” Pru went on. “More pedigreed. You said it yourself, I'm an orphan.”

“A girl better than you? Impossible.”

“But his family hates orphans! They told me that! Tiggie Haley thinks they should be put in work camps instead of milking the dole. I'm not even kidding. That's a direct quote!”

Win peeled Laurel's fingers from his neck. He had to. Otherwise, he'd never let her leave.

“Laurel,” he said. “I'm no good for you. Just a grown-up writer-boy with nothing to offer. You have to go. Boston is where you belong. We can't ramble about Paris forever. No one lives like this for long.”

This, an echo of her prior thoughts. In other words: they were too good to be true.

“So that's it?” she said. “I leave with Charlie and never see you again? And you're fine with this?”

“I'm nowhere close to fine,” Win said. “And we will see each other. When GD finally buys it you'll have to fetch your art and dispose of your share of the Grange. We will meet again. The old gal's practically written it into law. Maybe you were right. Maybe Lady Marlborough does believe in love.”

It was comforting to think that they had this promise for the future, thanks to Mrs. Spencer.

“Who are we kidding?” Pru said. “Mrs. Spencer's going to outlive every person on this damned planet.”

Win managed a laugh, even as some part of him thought it might be true. Gladys Deacon Spencer-Churchill, aged ninety-two yet ageless all the same. They should've made out their wills to her, instead of the other way around.

“You can always come back,” Win said. “You know that, right? If things don't work out. Or even if they do. I will wait here, in this spot, forever.”

“Forever is a very long time,” Laurel said in a whisper.

She thought of the duchess, and of the duchess's mother. Florence Deacon chalked up Coco Abeille to standard Parisian flirtation. Laurel would try to convince herself that Win was the same.

“LAUREL!” Charlie shouted.

He clobbered the door with his hands. Laurel jumped. This would become a reflex for her. In the years that followed, she would very seldom feel at rest.

“The car is downstairs,” Charlie said. “If we're going, we need to go now.”

She inhaled, her breath rocky on the way down.

“I love you, Laurel,” Win said. “I always will.”

“
Laurel?
Since when do you call me ‘Laurel'?”

“Since this very second. Pru? Well, she's not here right now. She and Win, they're at the Caf
é
de Flore, walking through the iron and glass door. Tonight they'll go to Le Sept. Or that new cabaret show with the Brazilian transvestites.”

Pru—Laurel—gave a runny smile.

“Sounds perfect,” she said.

“You see, dear Laurel, Win and Pru are in Paris. And in Paris they'll remain.”

 

Eighty-three

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

1973–1979

The Charlie that Laurel married was not the person she met, or the boy whose proposal she accepted.

From the start the man was angry, violent, often drunk. The slightest door slam sent him reaching for a baseball bat or a gun. He cried out at night so frequently Laurel started sleeping in another room. She felt bad. It wasn't his fault. But she was afraid to lie beside him.

Charlie was quick to paranoia, quicker to fury. They had so many holes punched in the walls of their Back Bay town home, Laurel took a sledgehammer to them all and called in a contractor for a remodel.

What a successful and enterprising young couple! Renovating their Boston home to keep up with the latest trends! It's what their family and friends thought when they surveyed the mess.

Charlie had a position with the family business, his job duties and title a mystery. If Laurel had to guess it would've been something along the lines of vice president of boozy lunches and hours that happy forgot.

“Is he doing anything?” Laurel once asked her mother-in-law. “At the office?”

She tried to sound nonaccusatory but she couldn't imagine anyone trusting him to do actual work.

“Give him some time to adjust,” Tiggie Haley said. “He's been through a lot.”

Was still going through a lot, as far as Laurel could tell. It would not be a recognized affliction until the eighties, but post-traumatic stress disorder was a real thing for them.

During this time, Laurel wanted to go back to college, finish her degree. They were in Boston, with no shortage of universities from which to choose, but Charlie wouldn't hear of it. A proper wife stayed at home. His parents agreed. Each day the family, like a vise, closed more tightly around her.

“Charlie and I have something in common,” she wrote in her journal one evening after he'd passed out beside her on the couch. “We've both been POWs.”

As soon as the words were on the paper, Laurel felt ashamed. Likening a fancy home and ample food to what her husband endured? She was a horrible, small-minded person. Laurel ripped up the page. She never wrote again.

They tried to have children. Charlie himself was the oldest of five and so there were expectations, particularly to produce at least one son. Their lovemaking was a hurried, angry, sloppy affair, after which Laurel would pray that the sperm made union with a plump and healthy egg. Not that she particularly wanted kids, but maybe her husband would be kinder with a baby or two in the home. It seemed to be the only thing he desired, other than more booze.

Between 1973 and 1978, Laurel got pregnant five times. Babies lost at seven weeks, then ten, twelve, eighteen, and a gorgeous, dark-haired son stillborn at twenty-nine. Charlie blamed Laurel.

“Cut him some slack,” one of his sisters said when Laurel confessed she was thinking of leaving because their life felt toxic. The vanishing babies seemed proof of that. “He's been through so much. Be grateful for what you have.”

Be grateful. This was solid enough advice. What was she thinking? Laurel could never leave Charlie Haley. It simply wasn't an option.

When Charlie had been out of the war longer than he'd been in it, Laurel suggested medication and psychiatry. The summer she tried to more actively help, their home underwent another full-scale renovation.

As time pressed on, Laurel began believing that perhaps she
was
a tough shrew of a wife, just as Charlie said. How did you ask a person to “get over” the shooting of men or nine months of daily beatings and starvation? She hated herself for not being able to tolerate his moods.

Still. A hundred times Laurel thought of leaving, but where would she go? And who with? She had precisely no one in her life who wasn't Charlie's first. Her only true family was on some other continent, wrapped up with a girl named Pru.

She considered calling Win, or the duchess, or even Jamie. But there was no way to do it without leaving evidence. Charlie already accused her of slutting around and he inspected every canceled check and phone bill with exacting diligence. There was no way to reach out behind his back.

Then, one morning, Laurel received a telegram.

At the time, she was desperately sick with her sixth pregnancy, the vomiting so violent she hoped the inevitable miscarriage would happen sooner rather than later. If she'd never get a baby out of it, then what was the point of the suffering?

“A telegram?” she said when the man handed her a piece of paper. “For me? Are you sure?”

“If that's your name at the top, then yes.”

Was she Laurel Haley? They'd been married five years and she still didn't know.

“Uh, thanks,” she said.

With rickety hands, Laurel opened the envelope.

WESTERN UNION

TELEGRAM

2/22/1979

MRS LAUREL INNAMORATI HALEY

410 BEACON ST

BOSTON MA 02115

DEAR LAUREL

THIS IS A PRIVATE TELEGRAM FROM GADS TO NOTIFY YOU OF THE RECENT DEATH OF MRS SPENCER THE DUCHESS. A SUM OF 86200 USD HAS BEEN DEPOSITED IN YOUR NAME AT BANC OF BOSTON ON BOYLSTON ST. PAPERWORK FOR ART, PROPERTY IN SAFETY DEP BOX OF SAME INSTITUTION. COLLECT ART AT YOUR LEISURE. WISH YOU LUCK. YOU ARE MISSED. WARMEST REGARDS GEORGE WILLIAM COLIN SPENCER-CHURCHILL FONDLY KNOWN AS GADS.

Heart pounding, Laurel folded up the telegram and stuffed it down the front of her dress. She cringed, her breasts sore from the difficult pregnancy.

“Rest in peace, Mrs. Spencer,” she said with a smile, for she was not sad because the woman was probably right then in the most glittering salon in all of heaven, holding court over the lauded and the famed.

“I've thought about you every day,” Laurel mused.

She hurried toward her room, a hop in her step. On her way, Laurel flipped on the record player. The Steve Miller Band played. Her smile only grew. Mrs. Spencer had answered her prayers. She'd interfered in her Gladys Deacon sort of way.

“‘They got the money, hey,'” Laurel sang, reaching into the back of her closet for a suitcase. “‘You know they got away. They headed down south and they're still running today.'”

Singin' go on take the money and run.

Go on take the money and run.

And that's exactly what Laurel did.

 

Eighty-four

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

1979–1980

Thanks to Mrs. Spencer's generosity, Laurel was able to prepay a year's worth of rent in a building with a doorman and a guard. A week later, she enrolled at Wellesley.

Though she'd been a literature major, Laurel transferred all the credits she could and switched her concentration to finance. When she thought of novels and biographies and the great literature of the world, she thought of the duchess, and she thought of Win. She'd never graduate if she let herself get mired in the story of Pru. The season for burying herself in books had passed.

After she moved, Laurel tried calling Win. Twice. Both times a woman answered, identifying herself as Mrs. Seton. So much for “waiting forever,” she thought. Not that she truly expected he would.

Pregnant and fattening by the day, Laurel worked to finish her degree and also to formalize her break from Charlie. He refused to grant the divorce and took to harassing her, materializing on campus and appearing outside buildings late at night. Laurel lopped off her hair and dyed it brown, hoping the disguise might suffice, praying he'd eventually give up.

Former golden boy Charlie Haley soon became quite the adversary of campus security, who escorted him off the grounds on an almost daily basis. Charlie was by then a full-blown drunk, which meant he was mostly relegated to a wheelchair. The students who didn't know Laurel would forever remember him as the homeless wino that terrorized the Wellesley girls.

Laurel never told Charlie that she was pregnant, even before she left, but suspected he knew. As her due date approached, he circled closer, tighter, like a shark around its prey. Laurel dressed in baggy, flowing clothes but at some point the wind would've blown and revealed the budding Annie hidden inside.

On August 31, 1979, on the fifth floor of Massachusetts General Hospital, Laurel Innamorati Haley gave birth to a bald-headed, blue-eyed, seven-pound baby girl named Annabelle. She was so delicious this girl, slept six hours a night straight out of the gates. She hardly ever cried.

The only witnesses to the birth were one doctor, two nurses, and an Eastern European woman named Blanka who sometimes cleaned Laurel's apartment when she was too spent or sick to do it herself. On the birth certificate, Laurel wrote “unknown” in the place a father's name would go.

Shortly after Annie's arrival, Blanka, the maid who knew nothing about Charlie, told Laurel stories of a handicapped grifter who hung around the building's lobby. One morning she watched him argue with the security guard, a well-heeled older couple standing behind him.

“That's odd,” Laurel said, trying to hide her panic.

Charlie knew where she was and had the support and backing of his parents. The mere thought petrified Laurel. Bad dye jobs and ill-fitting clothes would serve no bulwark against the levels of wealth and fury Charlie's family had.

Could his family assert any sort of claim on Laurel? Her apartment? The chubby, happy, rosy-cheeked babe of perfection? Laurel was technically still Charlie's wife and Annie his child. Because of this, Laurel existed in a constant state of medium-grade fear, which was the very worst fear of all. You never knew when it might explode into full-blown terror.

One unusually warm winter morning, after a call to the admissions department at Georgetown Law, Laurel walked to the bank, baby Annie nestled in a wrap against her chest. She may not have been at Berkeley anymore, but she knew where to find all the good hippies, and therefore the best baby carriers.

Once at the bank, Laurel withdrew the sum of five hundred dollars and then chatted with the teller while another employee summoned the manager. He needed to speak with her, they said. Laurel braced herself as Annie wiggled against her chest.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Green?” she asked, heart thumping.

“I have a telegram for you, ma'am. Just came in this morning.”

“Oh, thank you,” Laurel said and took the paper.

She breathed in and started to read.

WESTERN UNION