Hide-and-Seek

“You bet you do,” Mr. Goldberg said, starting the engine. “Say hello to him from me and be sure to let me know the outcome of that conversation.”

Chapter 10

I couldn’t have that conversation with my dad because he passed away from some cold virus complications three days later. I had been going through the details of the proposal and postponing the talk to make sure I could present it correctly to him. I had missed a few calls from my mother and not bothered calling her back. I didn’t want to make any mistakes and miss any details, which was something I had been known for. When I thought I was ready, I had called my mother the day before and told her about my plans to visit them. My dad had been unwell for some time and couldn’t join the conversation, but my mother sounded happy and excited about seeing me. When she called me the next day to break the news, I’d thought she was merely wanting me to bring her the Turkish treats she liked and so didn’t bother to answer my phone. She always asked me to do that. When I saw that she’d tried to call me three times in a row, I picked up my phone.

No treats this time. Just a black suit.

“It happened so fast, Alex. He was doing better. He was excited about your visit and then he just stopped breathing while he was asleep last night. The doctor said it was some sort of a respiratory syndrome, a lung failure.”

She started to sob quietly. I was considering ways to console my mother, but all I could think about was the fact that my dad’s ancestors had all been buried in the family cemetery situated in one of the park’s corners, and he was probably going to be buried there as well. The corner wasn’t in the deal I was working on, but the idea of my dad’s headstone overlooking the house that wasn’t going to be ours anymore made me feel even sadder.

My father, Alexander Montague I, was the only child of Theodore and Adelaide Montague. He received a good education in the places where the children from upper class usually went to, worked with the tenants in the estate to make sure that everyone was happy, kept the income coming and started to develop some investment projects. He wasn’t susceptible to the charms of the local female candidates among the “equals” but was known as a desirable match for many. Before he was given the reins to Maple Grove House, he was sent to Europe to learn about art, for which he hadn’t shown any propensity but had been expected to understand well to help increase the family’s art collection. My grandfather had wanted him to know the difference between Manet and Monet and to be able to hang the right paintings in the right places in the house to impress guests. Not that the family had acquired a big art collection, but it was “an essential element of a good house” and Theodore had thought it was important. That was the trip on which my father met a young and beautiful French woman, Elizabeth Baudelaire-Nazarova, who spoke good English and who, a year later, would become his wife and, a year after that, my mother. He met her at a Roerich exhibition in Paris, while admiring Himalaya’s landscapes and the artist’s unusual choices of colors. He asked her if she liked the paintings, which he hadn’t really understood but kept that fact to himself. She did and the conversation went on for thirty indecent minutes, which neither of them could nor wanted to stop. My father was smitten and forgot all about social proprieties when he invited young Elizabeth, who was ten years younger than him, to have a cup of hot chocolate at a place on Rue de Rivoli where they discovered that they both had been fans of Jules Verne. The place was called Angelina, and this was what my father thought of this young woman, “an angel.” He had been calling her Lizzy my Angel ever since.

My mother was an independent spirit who wanted to see the world, but she willingly adjusted most of her dreams when she married my father. “Love makes you do things,” I often heard her saying. They had travelled a bit before my father became the head of Maple Grove House, they had children and slowly became “merry country folk,” as my mother liked to call themselves.

“Mother, I’ll be there later today, and I’ll take care of everything,” I said, feeling that I wasn’t doing well at consoling her.

“Thank you, Alex. I want you to know that I want him to be here with me.”

“Excuse me?”

“I want him to be buried here in France because I want to be buried here,” she said softly but resolutely.

“But Mother—”

“We made that decision together and you’ll find it in his last will. The reading will take place tomorrow morning. I trust you’ll be here to hear it.”

I didn’t have to literally bury my father amongst my entrepreneurial projects. Fewer complications, but it didn’t make me any happier. I tried to remember my time with him as a kid, which wasn’t that much. I was used to seeing him entertaining his guests more than his own children and going away on his business trips way more frequently than travelling with us. Nevertheless, there were a few rare moments – a couple fishing of trips and assembling a boat model together–which could’ve almost overshadowed the loneliness of a boy who spent more time with his nanny than with his parents. Almost, but not quite. I had never compared my parents to anyone. When it came to my parents, I dealt with what I had been given without even thinking that it could be any other way. Despite the status and social calendars, living in a big house could be quite solitary for a boy. It was before Charlie was born. When he came along, he instantly became the center of attention, and I realized that solitude had various levels. That initiated quite a lengthy period during which my tiny and fragile connection with my parents became stretched to its limit. I was lucky, though, that Charlier had adored his elder brother despite all my flaws, and I cherished that in my own way.

It was time to say goodbye to my father. I had done that many times when he was alive. This time was supposed to be different, and I was trying to feel the loss in my callused heart. I loved my father, and I was sure he loved me too. Unfortunately, we hadn’t had a strong enough connection to convey that feeling to each other.

“I’ll be there, Mother,” I said and rang off.

I suspected that I would be away for a considerable amount of time and decided to make one more phone call before I started packing. I felt that I needed to let Natasha know about what had happened. It was a curious feeling because I had never needed to report my movements to anyone. Was I developing some feelings for her, serious enough to make a phone call like that? Or was I simply trying to make sure she would feel too sorry for me to gallivant with other men while I was gone?

“I’m so sorry, Sasha.” She sounded genuine on the phone. “Would you like me to go with you?”

“Thank you, Natasha. I think I just need to spend some time with my mother, you know?” I did not feel that it was the real reason why I wanted to go alone, but that was all I could think of at that moment. “Why don’t I call you from France and will let you know how it goes? Will that be all right?”

“Sure. Whatever you need, Sasha,” she said and sighed. “I wish I could’ve met him.”

“He would’ve liked you, Natasha,” I said and suddenly realized that it could have been a real possibility even though Natasha was not of a noble rank. My father would have recognized the hardworking essence of her personality if he’d had a chance to meet her.

“I’ll let you go. Sorry. You’ll probably be insanely busy with all the funeral stuff and the inheritance.”

Oh, there it was. Natasha was sorry, but never missed an opportunity to get useful information.

“Yes. I suppose I will.”

***

My parents lived in a ch?teau in the picturesque eastern part of the Auvergne-Rh?ne-Alpes with my mother’s sister Lucy. The place was called Chateau de Rossignol. It was purchased by their father, Etienne Baudelaire, a successful French entrepreneur, for their mother, Anna Baudelaire-Nazarova, a daughter of Russian immigrants who had been quite wealthy before the Russian revolution but had lost everything during it. It was said that the place had reminded my grandmother of the estate her family had owned back in Russia, which she couldn’t really remember because she was too little when they left but saw it in the family photos. She did remember, or thought she did, nightingales singing beautifully in the morning outside her nursery. Her maiden name was, Nazarova, originated from the old Hebrew Nazar which meant “devoted to God.” Anna became quite religious and superstitious over the years, but she could never refuse her daughters anything. She loved them dearly and saw “a piece of the Motherland” in their eyes. Etienne was a serious businessman, but he loved his women more than anything.

My mother and Lucy had been inseparable when they were young until Lucy got swept off her feet by a young dashing motorist, George, who happened to stop by the chateau one summer day for a cold drink. Apparently, the feeling was mutual because only a few weeks later they announced their engagement to everyone’s surprise. What was supposed to be a magnificent love story ended up abruptly with George’s sudden death in an unfortunate car accident just before they were going to get married. He loved speed and fast cars. Lucy never found another man who could win her heart and had been keeping his photo in a sliver locket on her person ever since.

We used to go to Chateau de Rossignol often when we were kids. Even though, it was much smaller than our house, I quite liked the ambience and my French-Russian grandparents when I was a kid. When I became a teenager, however, the place didn’t seem cool enough for me to spend my “precious” time away from my friends. It was a decision I regretted later when my grandparents passed away and I didn’t have a chance to see them anymore. After what happened to Charlie, my mother insisted on moving to the chateau and my father reluctantly agreed. He didn’t want to leave his ancestral home, but he loved my mother more. At the time, Lucy was taking care of the place. My parents took the valet and the housekeeper with them. The rest of the employees were given generous severance payments and had been let go, except Harry and Benny. I hardly visited them there, being more occupied with whatever I thought was important at the time.

This time around I tried to spend as much time with my mother as I could, but the preparations for the funeral, the burial itself, a few meetings with our lawyers and the subsequent paperwork took up pretty much all my time over the next a few weeks. I was glad that she had her elder sister Lucy around. I liked Lucy. She was a nice lady who didn’t mind us kids singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” every time we saw her. She would laugh and sing along. She couldn’t care less what other people thought about her being a spinster. She had been with my grandparents until they died and then took care of the estate.

The clock on Jared’s offer was ticking and I–as the new owner–had to make the decision. When my father was finally resting under the black marble tomb my mother had ordered at the back of our French estate and the endless stream of visitors finally seemed to dry up, I decided to have a chat with her.

Lucy was out and my mother and I were sitting in the library, with some of the books from our house, and having a drink. After being married to my father for forty years, my mother never took up having scotch as her nightcap, but that evening she asked me to pour her some. She was holding the glass, smelling the aroma from time to time but never touching the drink itself.

“Now that you’re the owner, what are you going to do with the house?” my mother asked as if she had read my mind.

“That’s what I was going to talk with father and you about when I told you I was coming.”

“Out with it then,” she said and smelled the scotch in her hand.

“Well, I think I’m going to sell it. Do you remember the construction project I mentioned to you some time ago? Cottages for some well-off folks in the eastern part of the estate.”

“Your grandfather’s pig farm?”

“Yes. I want to build a small community there.”

I did not feel like sharing all the details of the deal with my mother; she wouldn’t have been interested anyway.

“As much I want to get rid of it, I still don’t understand why you’re selling the house. It’s at least a mile from there, isn’t it?”

“You see, Mother, I got a good offer for it. I’ll have some disposable cash for the project, and I have a few other things I’d like to invest in, like bitcoin and property. Besides, with your share, you won’t need to think about money for …” I stopped, not knowing how to end the sentence.

She smiled. “For the rest of my life?” She looked at me and put her hand on mine. “Mon chеri, I don’t want you to worry about me. Besides, I don’t think I have too many years left in me, and I will be following your father soon,” she said.

“Don’t say that.”

“Sell it!” she said and finally took a sip from her glass.

I looked at her reaction and admired the determination with which she swallowed the drink she hated. She wrinkled her face at the strength of the drink.

“Who’s buying it?” she said when she regained her composure.

“Jared Shannon,” I said, and I was about to tell her the whole story when she suddenly put her glass down.

“Susan’s son?”

“Do you remember him?”

She looked away for a minute, without saying anything, and then she gave a chuckle.