Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [27]
Meanwhile, on the Delaware’s eastern shore, Lambertville was discovering itself—but without the sense of excess that had doomed New Hope to the scorn of local residents. Young professional couples were buying the handsome, sturdy town houses and fixing them up. Local businesses popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain. The town was slowly shaking off its years of depression and realizing that ugly ducklings too could become swans—and with a minimum of fairy lights, purple shutters and lime-green window boxes. (Lee liked New Hope, complete with purple shutters and fairy lights, but never would have admitted this to his mother, who represented the mainstream, local conservative taste. She had not shied away from pronouncing the harshest possible verdict on New Hope: it was, that horror of horrors, so tacky.)
Central to Lambertville’s renaissance was the Swan Hotel. A low wooden building dating from 1743, it had been built as a tavern, and, in the late 1950s, was returned to its original use. It quickly became a gathering place for groups of aging Yale graduates, whose rivalry with their fellow Ivy Leaguers from Princeton, just a few miles to the east, was well known. On any given night when Lee was a teenager, you could hear the inebriated strains of “The Whiffenpoof Song” coming from the piano bar at the back of the first floor.
Lee always thought it was an insipid melody with even worse lyrics, but those middle-aged Yalies loved it, and sang it, he suspected, just to encourage the inevitable rebuttal of the Princeton tiger song from their arch rivals, who also frequented the piano bar. The Princetonians never failed to take the bait: they would leap to their feet, red-faced from brandy and clogged arteries, and reciprocate just as unmelodiously, braying like the donkey from the Bremen Town Musicians.
The reason Lee came to the Swan was the piano player, a stocky local plumber who was a great favorite of the well-heeled clientele. A bulldog of a man with a face like Ernest Borgnine and sausages for fingers, he pounded the hell out of that baby grand piano. He could play anything—Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin, Bacharach, Beethoven. He could play by ear and he could play from sheet music—from Lee’s boyhood perspective, there was no limit to the man’s talent.
Now, as he swung the rented Saturn into a parking spot in front of the hotel, he was gripped with nostalgia for those sweet days of youth when he was attending Princeton and would come home for holidays. He and Laura would go together with their mother to Lambertville to eat at Phil and Dan’s Italian diner, then head over to the Swan for an hour or two of music. Laura had a pretty singing voice, and sometimes she would sing a solo, while Lee sat in the corner gripping his beer mug, silently urging her voice not to crack on the high notes, his chest full with pride in his pretty sister. He knew Fiona, too, was proud, though she was always sparing in her praise, true to her Scottish character.
Butts followed him into the building, grunting as he swung the heavy oak door closed behind him. The Swan was much as Lee remembered it, though the low ceilings and dimly lit rooms felt more claustrophobic than they had when he was a boy.
It was still an hour away from lunch, so the place was quiet. The maître d', a slim, dark, Middle Eastern man, led them to the atrium, a recent addition on the side of the building, to wait for the manager, who was expecting them. Lee was pleased to see that this part of New Jersey was finally acquiring a more multicultural look. When he lived there it had been very white—and very WASPy.
They settled themselves