Maida Vale Chapter One

Maida Vale Opening Chapter

“Jack is the reason I’m traveling to London,” she spoke loudly over the deafening drone. “He is my father’s dog. A blue shepherd with a natural bob tail. Black and red-roan and silver. One eye is a patch of intense licorice black while the rest of him is ticked with grey over black and red roan markings. It looks like a silver net was thrown over him except ...” She stopped to see if her companion showed interest. She felt vaguely foolish. “Except for his eye.” Her voice trailed off.

She was speaking over the roar of the plane noise, seated as she was by the small porthole window. The old East Asian was wedged in the middle seat between her on one side and an American businessman on the aisle. The flight was crowded this last week in May 1972 which was both a blessing and a curse. Although cabin lights were dimmed and she was tired, Carol could not sleep. Neither could the cocoa skinned man in the immaculately wrapped turban beside her. She was cold and wrapped the meager airline blanket around her. She glanced at her temporary companion.

The East Asian man had been astonished and pleased to meet a young American who could discuss the Indian sub-continent. In her stead, Carol felt lucky to find someone with whom she could talk on the last leg of this long, sleepless flight to London from Baltimore. Small talk was unbearable to her. She had asked the old gentleman’s opinion on the independence of East Pakistan and enquired about the state of the conflict over Kashmir. He was delighted and spoke passionately and gently for the first few hours. To hear each other they leaned their heads together.

The two of them were small so the broad American business man on the aisle could have had a little extra space but he did not take the room. She glanced at the big man in wonder. How could a man his size sit so still and sleep so soundly? He was a consummate traveler it appeared. Upon arriving at the row of seats, he had nodded politely to the two of them, removed his shoes, and pulled a special travel pillow out of an attaché case. For all the world the pillow was a blue neck brace; it began at his occipital bone and sat low on his clavicle. When he put the pillow on after takeoff, he slipped into a corpse position. She envied him the peaceful slumber.

“One Eyed Jack,” said her temporary companion in the most luxurious and melodious voice she had ever heard in a man. “Your dog was named after the knave card.”

He laughed elegantly at her astonished expression. “I may be a British citizen but I have spent many years in America,” he said. “But why would this blue dog bring you to England?”

“My father is a Navy Commander assigned to NATO in London. He has been stationed there for about four years now. The Navy is sending him to Turkey for the next six months. I don’t really know what he does. Something in communications. I am coming to take care of his London flat and his dog while he is gone.”

“Your father is alone in England?”

“Except for Jack. And now me, of course.”

“Of course.”

London. She was anxious to be there. Anxious to be away. Away from the US. Away from the university. Away from home.

Was it just the night before that she was at university? Time had not only the feeling but also the smell of being so long ago. She was sitting on her bed last evening, her roommate in the spotlight at the twin desk. Carol had packed her dorm room into suitcases and boxes and was sitting on the edge of the narrow, lumpy matching bed. A noise escaped from her throat without warning. A yelp. Please hurry. Please hurry. She willed her stepfather’s arrival with wave upon wave of the little prayer. Please hurry. Please hurry.

She obsessively packed and repacked his car trunk in her mind’s eye with this box here and that box there. This to storage with her stepfather and that with her to the airport. Her roommate had watched surreptitiously from the corner where she was busy over books for finals. Finals. That glorious passage that would also soon free her roommate from the putrid décrète of the University of Virginia.

Carol would skip the graduation ceremony entirely and had placed out of three of her finals so she was safe from this corrupt terminus. She had placed out of her major classes by writing undergraduate theses. She had submitted each thesis by mid March. Two of the three professors had responded with critiques by the end of April. She had blasted back revisions by May 5. The third professor had asked if she needed recommendations to graduate school in economics.

Terrorism of the Luddites, Aerodynamic Stability of Hydrofoils, and Economics of the Emerging Indian Sub-continent. Subjects of these papers spun like a Buddhist prayer wheel flashing tricolor in a bright blue sky. She had worked on the subjects beginning Christmas break, relentlessly focused and brutally cold-hearted until completion. In April she had no idea where she would be in June. By May 1, she had received the invitation from her estranged father. I am being temporarily assigned to Turkey for six months. Come to London and take care of my small flat and my big dog. I’ll be back by October’s end.

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. Get me out, get me out, get me out. Please hurry, please hurry, please hurry. Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. She had not practiced her religion for – she didn’t remember when – but in these last five months she had prayed more fervently than during her previous 21 years combined. Even more than those years after her parents divorce.

Her parents had legally separated when Carol was six. Perhaps they had been separated longer in some fashion, perhaps always been separated, because her father was a career military man, a naval officer, graduate of Annapolis ‘45. Carol knew little more. Carol imagined that Mater must have enjoyed those ‘grand days in Annapolis’ where the handsome naval officer had charmed the beautiful daughter of a formerly wealthy Baltimore family with sailing on the bay, whirling ‘round the dance floor at formal balls, and finally marriage in full military regalia. Carol had seen pictures in albums at her grandmother’s house. But this young officer with the gift of languages and a degree in engineering seemed to be needed in far flung corners of the world. Berlin, Indochina, Korea, Egypt, Lebanon. The young family had been stationed first in Germany and then in the Philippines. Grandmama Sweeter said that Mater did not like the rigors of life with an ambitious naval officer and could not stand the loneliness of deployments and separations. “She couldn’t abide military life, childe. I can’t say much else.”

Mater came home after the Olympics in Australia ‘55, divorced the naval officer and soon married an oilman from Colorado. Mater told Carol ever after that the naval officer did not want them so they came home and she found someone who did love them.

Carol entered a Colorado high school in 1964, less than a month after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. She entered a Virginia university in the fall of 1968, just seven months after the Tet Offensive.

As she began her studies at the University of Virginia in 1968, unrest on campus against the Vietnam War intruded on her peace. Professors, fellow-students and faceless demonstrators began to apply increasing pressure on the skillfully, carefully mapped future she had chosen for herself. The unrest touched her peripherally and concerned her intellectually but she could not take sides because both sides seemed unsound to her.

Life at university was a blur of swirling, rampaging influences. She had kept her distance and her balance. All in all it was easy to do because it was easy to recognize the outrageous. The swirling eclectic psychedelic times went berserk with a lust for casual violence, irresponsible sex, indulgent alcohol, mindless drugs, self-destructive effrontery. Anything objectionable for any reason, any prescription of conduct or morals, was demeaned. Radical ways were calculated to incite outrage just for the sake of outrage. Haughty hedonistic excess threatened a carefully achieved stability. In fits like childish temper, students and professors became erratic, ever more erratic, in frenzied indulgences, and they bated police with lewd and offensive behavior and language.

It was the draft that frightened the student body. The boys dreaded being shipped off to Vietnam. As she went through the later years of high school and well into college, the young men talked long into the night about running away to Canada or Sweden. Or they spoke of joining before they were drafted. But with Nixon’s election in 1968 and a gradual draw down of troops in Southeast Asia throughout 1969, the specter of Vietnam began to diminish. Only the panic of the draft lottery, which began in December 1969, kept the adrenals hopping. That lottery number was all important. Plans and futures were made or broken with that wicked twist of fate. But life on campus began to ease back from the insanely fanatic and dissention seemed to go underground in the fall of her senior year.

But something was changing, really changing. If her three years at university before had been chaotic, these new times had turned inward, more vicious and more hateful, onto each other. She felt threatened by malevolence she could not name. It was creepy, destabilizing, degenerative. The Fulbright Commission broadcast testimony from antiwar soldiers who accused their fellow American soldiers of brutal, despicable war crimes. The melodrama felt manufactured. Shadowy groups built bombs in basements and overheated young men took over University offices.

Her charted center course had helped her through most of her university time. She watched the players but took no passionate side, suspicious of all overheated accounts.

She could have kept her center course in turbulent times. Yes, except for the revelation of the secrets about her personal life. Secrets that her mother had kept from her.

The revelation came in the form of five, heavy-duty cardboard filing boxes with an overseas APO address, postmarked on her 21st birthday. The letter from her father had said, “I want you to know that I love you. The day your mother took you away from me was the worst day in my life. I tried very hard for years to be allowed in your life. These boxes of legal filings, court briefs and court orders are the proof. Now that you are 21 and legally an adult, the court has no jurisdiction. Remember that I love you. I always have. Your father, Karoly Joseph Vincze”

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“You never even told me I was named after him.”

“Carol, I don’t know why that man would send you those papers. It’s just not right.”

“That man. That man is my father who fought in the courts to be a father to me. You hid it from me. So when were you going to tell me, Mater? When were you planning to tell me about this? What was your schedule going to be? When I was thirty? Forty? On your death bed? 'Oh, Carol, by the way,’” in a singsong voice, " 'Just as a matter of historical fact, your father did not abandon you after all.'”

“Well, Lolly, he did. He did, you know, he did abandon me.”

“Abandon you, Mother. You? That has always been your story. So what else are you hiding from me? And don’t try to lie to me anymore. I have read the court documents. I have made the timeline. I know everything.”

“You and your timelines. Always the timelines. Always”

“Yes, me and my timelines. Too logical for you. Too concrete for your fluffy, aristocratic, wavy-handed way of the world. Cocktail parties. Beautiful hair, beautiful clothes. Perfect family unit.”

“I wanted the best for you.”

“The best for me, the best for me. For yourself. I’m a bobble in your life, mother. A good daughter who does not embarrass you.”

Her mother waved both hands over her head as if fending off insects, not realizing the irony of the action in context. “What do you want from me? What do you want?”

“The truth, Mater-Otter-Otter. The truth.” She turned to her stepfather. “And you. What do you have to add?”

Carol’s stepfather just opened his hands in silent supplication.

“For your own good,” her mother jumped in. “For your own good. Your safety and security.”

“My ass, my safety. Your vanity and your status. So upstanding, so pure. Daughter of the Sweeties of Baltimore, by God, couldn’t be tainted with impropriety.”

“Don’t talk to your mother that way,” said her stepfather. “That language is unacceptable.”

“Lying is unacceptable. The essence of vulgar. Crude, offensive, uncouth and naughty. Yes, naughty, mother dear. Caught between the sheets naughty. Spreading your legs to a man naughty …”

“That’s enough!”

“I have reviewed the timeline, Daddy,” she said. “So don’t try to deceive me. And you know what happened.”

His voice softened with the inference of his familiar standing with her. “Lovey, please. Please be reasonable.”

“I am under no obligation in the face of brazen deception to pretend indifference to the trickery that has been perpetrated on me my entire life.” She reached out an accepting hand to him but the touch transformed into a pinch. “You. You have been my father. And you betrayed the fundamental bond between us.”

That word brought silence, all around.

Her mother woke from the stupor. “Carol, you must understand,” she whimpered. “You have to understand.”

“I do, Mother. Better than you wish for me to. So, tell me now. Do not lie. What did this man do that caused you to deny his right to be my father?”

“He chose a career in military intelligence. You would have been, you were, at risk.”

“What kind of risk?”

“The risk of your life. And mine. And mine too.”

“What data do you have that we were at risk?”

“It was during the Olympics. The Olympics in Australia in 1955 when you were just a child. We had to run for our lives. He was unable to protect us. He could not protect us.”

“What happened?”

“Richard protected us. Richard saved us.”

“That’s enough, Margaret. I said, that’s enough.”