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.