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part 3 of the story
Wind and Rain

Carl Parsons

9. Laurel

    There was a girl in the neighborhood, Laurel Downy. She had been in the same homeroom with Ash from fourth grade to ninth. The longer they knew each other, the more attracted to each other they became. When they were separated into girls’ and boys’ home rooms in the high school across town, but riding the same school bus, the attraction only increased. They shared lunches and walked to classes together when they could. By then, Ash had muscles he never thought possible, incongruent as they were with the baby face and angelic smile he retained and the slight torso he left behind. The new Ash appeared under a thick tousle of blond hair. His more muscular body also came with a deeper, more resonant voice that forced him to adjust his singing by an octave, sometimes two.
    As for the teenaged Laurel, by her high school years she had developed a figure with the flattering curves that boys leered at and joked about with one another whereas the child Laurel had been formless. Some called her chunky then, but no longer. Her abundant wavy hair looked sometimes blonde and sometimes pink in the sunlight as she tossed it about or turned her head this way and that. She parted it in the middle, except that there was another part toward the front to create the bangs she used to frame her face, so that if one looked down on her head, there appeared a T-intersection of parts. At the sides of her face billowed out the pinkish-blonde waves that one might be tempted to call luxurious if it were not for the reputation of Laurel’s mother that intervened to squelch even the thought of public compliments for her daughter.
    For even though all the boys desired Laurel, she was at the same time regarded as taboo, a social and sexual pariah, except by Ash. And this was so, again, because of Laurel’s mother, Jill, for she, it was said, was a prostitute. The truth of this rumor surrounded Laurel like the sulfurous smoke from the local plants that lingered over Southside. This disdain clung to her constantly from childhood, a childhood filled with shuns and taunts from classmates and retaliatory scoldings from her mother when Laurel would ask about her mother’s work, trying to understand what had gone wrong in their lives.
    Still, boys peered at Laurel through this haze of ignominy to catch a glimpse of her ankles or knees or later her maturing breasts. “Fitting herself out to be just like her mother,” their parents surmised. Bearing this warning in mind, boys never approached her, whispering and snickering from a distance instead. As for other girls, most of them simply shunned her, also on the advice of their parents. All of this hardened Laurel’s spirit against everyone in the world, except Ash and her aunt Marie. Her life’s only other consolation was the sewing and knitting she learned while staying with Aunt Marie, who, with a widow’s wisdom, said that Laurel needed some useful, reliable skills in life and kindly taught them to her. Laurel then used those skills as often as she could to earn her own spending money.
    But with Ash all was different. Unlike the other boys, he paid no attention to the rumors about Laurel, not even when the whispers about his own murdered mother and convicted father mingled with the condemnations of Laurel and her mother. Indeed, such talk only reinforced the bond that had developed between them. The two of them, Laurel felt, belonged together. From the first she felt that way and eventually, while cloaking her feelings with humor because she felt she must, she told Ash so. And he, to her great relief, confessed he felt that way too.
    With his aunt and uncle’s permission, even their encouragement, Ash often invited Laurel to Sunday dinner. On her first visit, after Ash had helped seat her at the table, carefully following his uncle’s instructions on the remnants of chivalry, she was ready to butter her bread until she saw the heads around her bow and heard Ethan begin to offer grace, something she had never before experienced. But she learned from this, just as Ash had learned when he first moved into the Vaughan household. Soon Laurel looked forward to meals with the Vaughans. It became a place of peace for her, much like the home of Aunt Marie.
    Before Ash and Laurel graduated from high school, Ash had developed a small but gradually increasing stream of royalty payments from his recordings. After graduation, he had more liberty to expand the live performances and promotions the record company and his business agent demanded, for he now had his own musicians to accompany him. Such was his success that he decided waiting for the future to unfold of its own accord was unnecessary.
    The day after his newest recording went on sale, Ash went to Laurel and raised his hands in front of her, playfully waggling his fingers in her face and laughing. “I make my own living with these, Laurel. I’ve learned to play better than anyone else, learned mostly from my uncle Ethan, it’s true, but taught myself a lot as well. Now when I look at a sheet of music, I don’t just see the notes, I hear them and hear not just the notes on the page but the runs and breaks and trills that I’ll improvise to fill them out, put flesh on their bones you might say, to turn them into my own bluegrass or blues or folk sounds—all in my own style. The notes on the page become the music in my mind and my mind sends new, fuller music to my fingers on the guitar, just like my heart sends them blood. And then I play. And people actually like what I play and pay me to hear that music.”
    Laurel grasped his hands with hers, interlacing her fingers with his, then kissed each of his fingers caught between hers before saying, “I’m glad, Ash. Glad you have this talent and the music you love. And glad others love it too. After all you’ve been through, you deserve your success.”
    “And you?” he asked. “Do you love my music?”
    “Yes, of course, I do,” she said with the sweetest smile he’d ever seen.
    Then he asked her, “And do you love me the way I love you?”
    “Oh yes, I love you most of all. I always have, you know that very well. Since we were little,” she replied with a smile that managed to eclipse the previous one until he covered it with kisses.
    “Then marry me,” he said. And without hesitation she agreed.
    O the wind and rain.

10. Crossroads

    Soon there came an exquisite moment between them when love long anticipation progressed through longing aching desire to blossom in consummation. Afterwards, Ash placed an engagement ring on Laurel’s finger even as their child was beginning to stir inside her womb, a discovery that greatly pleased her. For what she wanted most in life was the antithesis of what her mother had been able to provide—a family, a normal family with a husband, wife, and children, lots of them if possible, all together in a house. Definitely a house, she thought, instead of a shabby apartment over a grocery store like the one she had lived in with her mother. Even a small house would do, one with just a patch of lawn to mow and a few rose canes trellised beside a shady porch, close at hand to cut for flowers. For she had had none of these things in her life before and no hope of them until now—no father she knew of, no siblings, not even a mother she could rely on to meet with her teachers or tell about her taunted childhood. The only constant had been the parade of her mother’s clients, as Jill liked to call them, coming and going, then coming and going some more.
    But as Jill grew older and her beauty faded, fewer men came by. One day after Laurel started high school, when Jill thought Laurel was old enough to care for herself, she took all the money she had and put it in an envelope on which she had written Laurel’s name. She placed it on her daughter’s pillow together with a brief note of farewell. Then she took a bottle of sleeping pills and a glass of water into her own bedroom, lay down on the same bed where she earned a living and died.
    Despite these bashings of her soul, Laurel had built inside herself a reservoir of love which she hoped one day to bestow on her own family, a reservoir hollowed out by the absence of these very things in her early life. And Ash was the one she trusted to fulfill her hopes. She always knew he could.
    And so, they married, had a child they named Marie in honor of Laurel’s aunt, who had so often comforted and cared for Laurel when her mother was incarcerated or ill or just disappeared for days on end and took Laurel into her home when at last Jill died. The baby girl looked, Laurel said, very much like her aunt Marie, so the tribute was more than justified. But Ash, even after visits with Aunt Marie and studying the photographs from her youth that Laurel showed him, maintained the child looked just like Laurel and said that pleased him.
    Soon they had a house of their own, quite a nice one, on the north side of town, the wealthy side. All the while, the flow of Ash’s appearance fees and record royalties steadily increased. Piled up so fast, in fact, that he soon needed a bookkeeper’s service. Despite his youth, perhaps because of it, his skill seemed all the more astonishing. Ash was a success and commanded respect among his peers in bluegrass and folk music. Even the veteran players often asked him to perform with them. But before long it was Ash asking them to join him in concerts as a way of showing his gratitude. All this was more than Laurel ever dreamed of and came about for both of them as quickly as someone awakening from a nightmare to find the bright morning sun waiting at the window.
    But the demands of the record company and the constant pleadings of his business agent for new performance dates also increased. These pressures combined with the drive for success already inside him until success itself began to rule Ash’s life. Laurel saw it coming on, felt it, and tried to warn him, tried to have him close the window before the storm struck. But she couldn’t. He wouldn’t listen. Success made trouble seem far away.
    Worse, as his career demands expanded and his own desire for success sharpened, so too did his emotions. Sometimes he would snap at Laurel, would even raise his hand to strike her over minor irritations, though his hand never actually fell on her. At other times, jumpy and tense, he would overreact to Marie’s crying, or, worst of all, he would ignore them both for prolonged periods, sinking into a dark funk over nothing that Laurel could identify let alone assuage. What she did understand, however, and deeply feared, was that her dream of happiness was gradually slipping away. She tried to tell him so but to no effect.
    Finally, when he left for a four-day engagement without so much as a word to her, instead just leaving a scribbled note with his contact information on the kitchen counter, she decided to act. He returned to an empty house. There was a note from her written below his own. “If I’m not home, call your uncle’s house. We’ll be staying there.”
    Both angry and frightened, he did call. His uncle answered. “Just stay there, Ash. I’m coming over.” That was all he said. Ash tried to reply, to ask why, what was going on, but the line was already dead.
    When his uncle pulled into the driveway, Ash didn’t wait for him to come to the door. Instead, he went out to meet Ethan just as Ethan was getting out of his Nash Rambler.
    “Is Laurel okay?” Ash’s face was scrunched up with concern.
    “Yes, she’s fine and the baby too. Sorry, I should have said that on the phone. Nothing to worry about in that regard.” Ethan motioned toward the passenger door. “Why don’t you get in, Ash, we can talk on the way.”
    When they were both in the car, Ethan continued to speak as he backed out onto the street and then shifted into low gear. The Rambler lurched forward. “Laurel and your aunt Rachel were jabbering away and laughing when I left. And Marie was joining in as best she could. All three of them having a big time of it, I’d say. The stay has been good for them, I think, so don’t worry about their welfare. I know Rachel and I have enjoyed it.”
    “Then what is it? You said Laurel was all right ‘in that regard.’ What does that mean? What’s going on? Why isn’t Laurel here with Marie, at her own home where she belongs?”
    Ethan delayed his answer, giving Ash an anxious glance as he pulled onto the main street. “She’s concerned about you. She called and asked us to come over and spend some time this weekend while you were away, to talk with us about her concerns, and just to be with someone. Yesterday we asked her to stay a day longer, so you can blame us for her not being home to greet you.”
    “Why’s she concerned about me? She didn’t say anything about it before I left.”
    “Maybe not, or maybe you just didn’t hear her. She says she’s tried several times in the past with no luck. And before you left, she claims you didn’t say anything at all to her, not even where you were going this time. That really worried her. She also says lately you get cross with her when she tries to talk to you, even threaten to strike her at times.”
    “But I’ve never struck her—and never would!”
    “She didn’t say you did, only that you raised your hand to her more than once as though you wanted to. Also, she says you get real upset when the baby cries. Is she right about all that?”
    Ash was silent for a while before saying, “She’s really upset with me, then, is that it? Is that why she came to visit you all?”
    “Yes, she is upset, but more than that. She’s worried about you. She also told us several stories about how—when you two were still in school—you rescued her from bullies, both girls and boys. Kids who taunted her about her mother and made her life even more miserable than it already was. She thought you were brave and noble for doing that because you didn’t have to. You looked out for her when no one else would. That’s when she began to fall in love with you and felt you were in love with her too, despite her mother’s reputation. You were certainly her hero—and you still are.”
    “That’s because I really was in love with her and I still am.”
    “But now she says you’re changing. This business of raising your hand to her, for example. Who does that sound like, Ash?”
    Ash’s face went slack and whitened; he slumped in the seat. “Dad, I guess.”
    “Exactly. And is that what you want? Is that who you really want to be?”
    “No, of course not! That’s what I’ve tried not to be.”
    “Then don’t let it happen. You’ve often told me about how you can’t forget the image of your dad kneeling beside your mother’s body, holding her dead hand, regretting what in anger he’d just done to her. Don’t let that be you, Ash, not anything even close to it.”
    “I won’t—I couldn’t do anything like that to Laurel!”
    “Then tell her that. Make her feel that you two belong together again.”
    “But what I been doing—all the travel and work—I do that for her and the baby, for us and our future. There’s the record company to satisfy, my agent to satisfy, and all the appearances to plug the recordings and keep the band members employed and . . . and . . . . Well, at times she just doesn’t seem to understand any of that.”
    “You’re right, and she doesn’t care about it, either. She also doesn’t care all that much about the money or the success. She cares about you, about the two of you being together and raising Marie. And having more children. That’s what she cares about.”
    “But success in the entertainment business can come and go in a flash. You have to grab it while you can. And that’s what I’m doing.”
    “That’s what your agent says to do, isn’t it? And what the record execs want.”
    “Of course, because they know even better than I that it’s true. You have to make the money while you can because it may not be there tomorrow.”
    “But what they’re saying is all about what they want from you. They’ll twist and turn your life inside out until it’s lost its shape and won’t care at all about how it affects your family as long as they make their money. To them you’re just business—record and ticket sales. But think about it, Ash, you don’t work for the agent; he works for you and so needs to do what you tell him, not the other way around. Even before your success fades—and it will fade someday, they’re right about that part—they’ll have lined up somebody new, both of them will. No doubt they’re looking for that someone new right now. And when they find him or her, you might never even hear from them again. They’ll be out of your life before you know it. So, while they still need you and must listen to you to get what they want, dictate to them the terms of the relationship. When you need time for your family, take it. Laurel and little Marie are the ones who need you and will stay with you, not a business agent or a record company. Most important of all, Ash, don’t let your head get bigger than your heart. That’s all I can tell you. That and save the money while you can since it won’t always come so easily. And maybe, just maybe, this isn’t the life for you and Laurel anyway.”
    Ash was silent again. He kept his silence for several more blocks while they passed by some of the town’s landmarks—passed an old ice plant, drove under a train viaduct, and then crossed an aging bridge into Southside. Finally, he spoke up, “Is my old attic room still the same—with the bed and the furniture still set up?”
    “Sure is. Has a box or two of Christmas decorations we put up there this year, but otherwise it’s the same. Why?”
    “Well, could we stay with you one more day, me included? I’d like to have Laurel and the baby spend a night with me in that room.”
    “You can stay as long as you like, same as when you came before. But Eddie’s room is open now since he’s away at college, and it would be more comfortable for the three of you in there. That’s where Laurel’s been sleeping with the baby since she came over Friday.”
    “I understand, but the attic room is special to me. I want to share it once with Laurel and Marie. And talk with Laurel about what you’ve just told me. I think that’s the right place to do it. Should’ve brought some clothes along, I guess.”
    “Oh, don’t worry about that. Eddie’s clothes should fit you fine. He’s left a few things. Well, here we are.”
    Ethan pulled the Rambler onto the driveway’s two concrete tracks separated by a long but narrow strip of grass and dirt. He guided the car by the house and parked it in front of the garage near the back of the tiny lot. They entered the house through the back door, which opened to the kitchen. Rachel and Laurel were at the table, sipping coffee and talking. Rachel was still in her blue robe; Laurel was dressed and ready to leave but had a knitting project in her lap. Her bags were against the wall by the rear door.
    Ash and Laurel looked at each other, tentatively at first, Ash recalling his baleful gestures toward her, Laurel wondering how much Ethan had told him. But after a moment’s hesitation, Laurel rose, placed her knitting on the table, and went to him. Putting her hands on his shoulders, she kissed him, lightly at first and then more passionately.
    “Missed you,” she said, leaning her head back and smiling at him. “Missed you so much we thought we’d come over here for a while, Marie and me.”
    “I missed you too. Where’s the baby?”
    “Sleeping in Eddie’s room. Shall I get her? Aren’t we leaving now?”
    “No. No, I didn’t even bring the car. I’ve asked Uncle Ethan if we can stay tonight and the three of us sleep in my old bedroom in the attic, if that’s all right with you and . . .” Still embracing Laurel, Ash turned his head to his aunt. “And with you, too, Aunt Rachel.”
    “Of course, it is!” Rachel was quick to say. “So happy to have a baby in this house again, even if it’s only for a short while.”
    “Then I guess we’ll all stay for another night,” Laurel added with a laugh. “And Marie can finish her nap right now.”
    O the dreadful wind and rain.

11. Resolutions

    They talked well into the night, up in the attic, Ash and Laurel, back and forth, about what they wanted from each other and from their lives together. And before they slept, they were in love again, if ever they weren’t. Ash resolved to change things, many things, and she accepted his lead. And in the months that followed, one by one, he made the changes he promised.
    In fact, he started the very next day by contacting his business agent and cancelling the next month’s engagements, five in all. Angered by this demand, the agent told Ash he was forfeiting his career and those of his band members by such a move. It wasn’t professional! Ash replied that he would manage the band members and that the decision should be carried out at once so that substitute performers could be found.
    During the idle month that followed, the Evans sold their big house and moved back to Southside, near to the Vaughans, choosing this time a smaller, older, but good-enough house, one with a backyard enclosed by a chain link fence, something forbidden in their northside neighborhood. Laurel especially wanted a fence, not just for Marie and the other children they hoped for, but because she imagined it protecting her family from the specters of her childhood and Ash’s as well, specters which she felt still stalked about the verges of their lives.
    Next Ash enrolled in trade school, to become an electrician. And while he still had the benefit of record royalties, he opened his own repair shop and gradually developed a modest income repairing everything from household appliances to industrial motors, PA systems, and, of course, guitar amplifiers. In addition, with his uncle’s help and participation, he formed a new bluegrass band with local parttime players, performing at regional events—county fairs, charity jamborees, Fourth of July celebrations and the like—playing more for the joy of the music now than for the money. For her part, Laurel took in sewing on referrals from the local laundromat.
    Opinion in Southside was divided on this new Ash. Some felt he had moved back because his music career had failed, that he was now a has-been, forced to downsize his family’s lifestyle because of his failure. After all, who would give up such success as he was having, or seemed to have, and give it up voluntarily? No one would do such a thing without being forced to.
    A few claimed Laurel’s background was to blame, that Ash’s reputation collapsed once the record company learned about Laurel’s mother. She became a publicity liability, they said. But most people knew better, especially the ones who knew Ethan. And these folks admired Ash for what they saw as his determination to reign in pride and return instead to a simpler, purer, more familiar life, similar to that of his Uncle Ethan.
    This new life locked their family into place on the Southside. Within the next five years, two sons were born into the family. Marie started school at the same elementary school her parents had attended,
    By that time progress was beginning to change Southside. The old Broadway Cinema was gone, the members of the Evangelical Temple dispersed to other churches or lapsed into secularity, and the radio station and diner both gone out of business—their buildings demolished. The heirs of the former owner, Milt Barrow, built a large set of apartments on the site with its entrance where the theater formerly stood, flanked now at street level by a laundromat and a sandwich shop. The new building faced the former crime scene, and if anyone remembered an Evans family living there at all, that crime is what they remembered.
    The streetcars that had clanked and rumbled down the center of the avenue when Ash and Laurel were children had also long since disappeared, replaced by buses, the streetcar tracks either pulled up or covered intermittently along the avenue with landscaping islands containing shade trees, wildflower beds, and ornamental grasses. Many of the factories were also gone, slipping away one at a time or reducing their workforces to accommodate revenues lost to factories abroad, rebuilt and recovering at last from World War II. Eddie Vaughan, for one, never returned from college. He married a girl from Kentucky and moved to Detroit to work in accounting for General Motors. Such was the progress on Southside—buildings torn down, factories emptied, and people gone. Poverty did not so much descend on the Southside as rise up, like the sewage from the area’s crowded septic tanks in wet weather.
    But Ash and Laurel chose to stay. And when Aunt Rachel’s persistent illness finally claimed her, and Ethan could grieve no more, Ash and Laurel invited him to move in with them. He and Ash began converting the Evans’ garage into an apartment, a small house really, where Ethan could come to live with his latest set of comfort creatures—two beagle shelter pups he called Mix and Match.
    On the day Ethan and Ash were finishing the garage conversion, hanging the two exterior doors, one opening into the yard and the other onto the driveway, Laurel watched them from the back porch, where she sat sewing. With the last door in place, Ash and Ethan took turns opening and closing it until, satisfied with their work, they shouted together, “There it is!” and began to gather up their tools.
    Laurel also watched the children, three of her own now plus two neighbor children chasing after Ethan’s beagles. Ten year old Marie supervised their play. Back and forth they all ran, from the house to the end of the yard and back again, ran until the exhausted dogs finally plopped down in the shade of the house, their tongues lolling from their mouths. Marie came inside to fetch water for everyone.
    Laurel was mending the latest batch of garments gathered from the laundromat. After closing the seam on the torn cuff of a white blouse, she put down her needle, took up her scissors, and snipped the excess thread from the seam, snipped it close and neat. As she worked, she marveled at the transformation of the garage and the children’s play in the yard, which the beagles seemed to understand had no purpose other than joy. And she thought about the fraying and mending of lives—how Ash’s father and mother linked themselves in tragedy, how her own mother blotted out disgrace with endless sleep, how Ash rose so fast to fame but found arrogance and anger waiting for him before returning to love, how Rachel suffered the assaults of her disease both night and day for years, and how Uncle Ethan, always the salve for those around him, had comforted and counseled them all, and was doing so still. Satisfied with all this, she put the blouse aside and went to help Marie with the water.
    O the wind and rain.

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