Kathy Little Bird (23 page)

Then RCA bought my contract and I began rehearsals for a two-album release, and signed for a slot on a weekly variety hour, with my own TV show in the offing.

I insisted on continuing to sing to live audiences. I liked singing to people, and I pulled them in. Saturday night after my club date I was amazed to find a large crowd assembled outside. These were people who hadn’t the price to get in. An indelible memory was revived—a little girl standing outside singing, a little girl who never went inside or sang with the choir as a regular member—but stood outside.

I stopped where I was on the stairs. I told Freddy to hook up a mike and speakers. Then and there, practically on the street, I gave a concert. My voice rang out, it floated, it sobbed, it exulted. For an hour I gave them everything, ballads from the forties to my latest album, song after song. They cheered, clapped, and stamped their feet in the slush. It was exhilarating. Finally Mac plucked my arm. Only when I quit did I realize how exhausted I was.

Mac passed me on to Trimble, who got me into bed, telling me I would ruin my voice, citing examples of singers who abused their instrument. She enumerated the various ways it could happen: the smoke in bars, or forcing your voice through a cold. Plain greed ended many a career, and she’d seen it: over-booking, too many commitments, grabbing for the brass ring one time too often.

She was still talking when I dozed off. And when I woke
up, it was morning. Trimble tumbled half a dozen papers into my lap. “The free concert you gave the other evening was terrific P.R., but standing out in the chilly night is not something to repeat; it could lead to pneumonia.”

My glamor pictures looked up at me as I read of my generous response to ordinary people.

“You’re very clever,” Trimble said. “You can’t buy that kind of publicity—providing you don’t kill yourself, of course.”

I didn’t bother to explain that I hadn’t planned it, that it just happened. What was the use? Everything was scripted.

The syndicated variety show I was guesting on these days and the new sponsors insisted on a delivery that was belted out, stylized, not me, not me at all. The one thing that had been mine, the singing itself, the magic, they took. That wonderful time that had been mine from the moment I first stood outside the Mennonite church, they took away. They wanted a new tone.

I no longer sang to please myself.

I was making fabulous money, racking up a fortune, and the bank in Uppsala increased the flow to the bank in St. Paul.

I
T
was Mac who told me. “Gentle’s here in Nashville. Been here a couple of weeks, I understand. He hasn’t tried getting in touch, has he?”

“No. Of course not. Why should he?” I listened to my own words, cool, controlled, giving no indication of the schismatic quake below the surface. Fracturing, rupturing, but invisible.

His being here could have nothing to do with me. It had
been a full year; we weren’t the same people. So why the inner turmoil? He’d been in town several weeks and hadn’t called. On the off chance that he might, I’d tell Trimble to add him to the list of people I didn’t take calls from.

That feeble resolution came to nothing, because when I got home there was a note from him. I recognized the writing. He held the pen hard and pressed hard. The strokes were thick, black, and decisive.

When I read that I laughed out loud. How close he had things figured. He ended asking me to phone him.

Not on your life, Gentle. I refuse to get on that merry-go-round again.

A phone call the very next afternoon changed my life.

Not Gentle.

My father.

I knew it was him, even before he told me. It wasn’t an accent exactly, but the English was too perfect.

He’d received the letter, was now back in New York, and
wanted to see me. He proposed flying to Nashville next Friday and spending the weekend.

I made reservations at the hotel I stayed at, and upset Trimble by cancelling appointments right and left. I insisted on uninterrupted time with my father. There were two lifetimes to catch up on, his and mine.

When the time came to meet his plane, I had as bad a case of stage fright as I’ve ever experienced. I stood with a little crowd of expectant greeters and watched passengers deplane.

They straggled out, and then came in bunches. The knot of greeters was quickly diminishing, as friends, family, and lovers met, embraced, and left. Finally the gentleman with a cane I had been waiting for all my life. The different ways in which I had imagined this meeting coalesced. The reality was, I walked up to him, we looked at each other and knew each other.

I started to shake his hand, but he pulled me to him in a warm hug and kissed my cheek. “Kathy.”

I started to cry. It was the last thing I wanted to do.

“Let’s stop at one of these little places for coffee,” he suggested.

I blew my nose and nodded.

We ducked into a garish little cafe, one of many that line the aisles of an airport terminal. This was nicer than some; it had booths. I slid across the plastic seat. He did the same, but from the other side, so we faced each other.

“I knew you by your eyes,” he said. “You have your mother’s eyes.”

The waitress came to take our order. “Coffee, and some kind of sweet roll.” He looked across at me, “Or would you prefer a sandwich?”

“No, coffee and a roll will be fine.”

There was a slight pause. Where to begin? “Mum described you to me, many times.”

“You wrote she is dead.” He brought the fingers of his hands together, each touching the opposing one. “She was a unique person. Quite wonderful. She deserved a good life. Did she have one?”

“She made it good,” I said evasively.

“Did she marry again?”

“Yes,” I told him, and saw that he didn’t like this answer. For Mum’s sake I took pleasure in it. Then I remembered his loss and became gentler.

“Now can we hear about you?” he was saying. How nice he was. How glad I was he was my father. It was so easy to talk to him that I found myself telling him all sorts of things I hadn’t intended.

About Kathy. I didn’t want him to form a bad impression of me, but I had to tell him.

He listened, took my hand in his. “I see how it was.”

That simple sentence went a long way toward absolving me.

We had supper that evening in my suite and he ordered a bottle of merlot. I poured coffee, which we took to the couch. There was so much to say, so much to tell. We wanted to know each other and perhaps ourselves. “Elizabeth,” he said, drawing out the name as though behind it pictures formed.
“Her mother chose her schools, checked her friends, later her boyfriends.” He laughed. “She always lost boyfriends because she constantly beat them at tennis. She was a lefty, you see.”

“She too? I used to be left-handed.”

I could tell this simple, crazy happenstance endeared me to him. “Really? Now we know which side of the family it comes from.”

Elizabeth was a subject he kept returning to. He needed to talk about her, and until now I don’t think he had. “…Something of a tomboy growing up. Then when she shed her braces, suddenly she was this lovely, attractive young lady. I remember, on one of my trips back from New York, hardly recognizing her. Her mother took over at that point. But Liz and I got in some great times. A camping trip. We climbed Pizza Leone, went looking for fragoli, rode, pitched our tent under a waterfall. Then to give ourselves a rest, put up at The Elephant. Rupert Hapsburg’s one-time hunting lodge. Wonderful old place, I’ll take you there sometime….”

I leaned back and closed my eyes, wrapped in the old dream, my father supplying the details that had been missing all these years.

“A fireplace that extended over an entire wall. At one end it had built-in shelves that were used as beds. The actual opening where a fire would blaze was at your feet.”

Yes, yes. How many times I had been there. Slept in that wonderful chamber.

The last night of his stay, he told me about her death. He
brought out a picture from his wallet and I gazed into the eyes of my sister. She was lovely. Clear gray eyes like his, and a forehead like his, broad and high. A patrician face, with a touch of hauteur about the lips. What would she have thought of me, a part-Cree sister? Could we have been friends? The candid gray eyes claimed me, but I wondered.

“She came home from boarding school. And as a reward I wanted to take her with me the last trip to New York. But it was inconvenient. Her mother had planned a coming-out party, and all manner of things.” He paused, as though determining just how to proceed.

“I feel at this point I should explain Natalie, and perhaps myself a bit. I came back to Austria from a sense of duty. It’s not good to be on the losing side of a war. There was a great deal that needed doing, and my family had always served the government in one capacity or another. That was the rift between your mother and me. She understood, or said she did. But she felt strongly that she could have no part in such a life, such an endeavor. And she felt a Cree wife would be an insurmountable handicap for me. I did not agree with any of this, but at the same time I couldn’t escape what I conceived as my duty to return. Another factor was my mother, too old and frail to run the estate, or even track down its assets, which had been hidden during the war. It was quite a job, as you can well imagine.”

What I wanted to know was whether he had loved Mum. “It must have been hard, your decision to leave Canada, I mean.”

“I don’t know if I can explain it, but your mother and this great new continent were fused, one with the other. I was ready to start a new life. I won’t deny it was hard after the war—being an Austrian. I’d been trained as a naval engineer and an expert stress analyst and draftsman, but there weren’t many openings for a man with a German name, lacking one leg, and who might have torpedoed someone you knew. I don’t blame them. I was prepared to stick it out and prove myself. I was already starting to break through, and given time I would have, of that I’m quite sure. But my mother came, a perilous trip then when commercial air routes were in their infancy. But come she did. And made me see that my help was crucial if the family was to survive. I have no brothers, and my father was a casualty of the war, mentally that is.”

I nodded. His version pretty much tallied with Mum’s.

“As for the annulment, it was the only sensible step to take. We were separated by a continent and an ocean, and by our separate worlds. But one can’t annul feelings; those remained. Remain to this day.

“Eventually I married. Natalie was from an old family. In Europe that still means something. I am proud of the home she keeps. She has a place in Austria’s politics; no function is complete without her. She is, if anything, busier than I am.”

He was circling his intent, but he needed to tell me.

“Elizabeth was on vacation in the Italian Alps. She’d gotten engaged, you know. Her fiancé was driving, and there was another couple with them. I remember when she was old enough I taught her to drive. She was an excellent driver,
cautious without being overly so, and with splendid reflexes. The trouble is, the man generally does the driving. I remember at first, when some young wet-behind-the-ears chap would come calling, I’d make him take me for a test spin. Natalie laughed at me. ‘Do you suppose the way he drives with her father is the way he drives with her?’ But what can one do?

“It was on the road to Cortina. It’s spectacular driving, exhilarating, with sheer drops at every turn. I’ve driven it many times, you feel the sun on your face, the wind in your hair. Of course it’s not banked as an American road would be. It’s built by Italians with a small stone guardrail that comes maybe as high as your knee…a warning perhaps, but no protection if your car goes out of control. They never found her body. The wreckage was totally unrecoverable.”

After this there was nothing we could not say to each other. I told him the story of how I came to be dead to my daughter, about life on the road, about Jim Gentle.

He took my hand and began to stroke it. “You’re well out of that relationship, Kathy. A drug addict is almost always hooked for life. They are unreliable, desperate people.”

“I know, I know. And he had such dreams…” I went back further in my life—I was leaning out the window waving good-bye to Abram. But he wouldn’t wave back.

“I left the only person that ever loved me,” I told my father. “I married someone who took me out of St. Alban’s. My mother was dead, and I didn’t get on with my stepfather. So I left Abram to get away.

“You don’t want to know about the ups and downs, the
crazy life I led—still lead—like a gypsy, hardly ever laying my head down in the same place twice. My husband and I divorced…”