“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 Café 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.