The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [144]
Art. Raffy had claimed her father’s cons were works of art, that Jack had enough confidence in that art to save the whole city of Miami. Confidence. It meant “with faith.” But her father’s faith was specifically that he could con others into believing his lies. Even if the lie was his love. Hadn’t he conned her that way? Hadn’t she believed in the love he’d betrayed by disappearing? She looked a while at the love card, then she set her mojito down on it, sliding her glass around until the word blurred.
While con meant against, in Italian it was the word for with. So con amore was what Ruthie Nickerson had written on the sheet music of “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago that was in Sam’s piano bench at Pilgrim’s Rest—“with love.” With love to whom? For whom? Jack? Or had some old piano teacher just written that the song should be played passionately?
Annie might as well admit it; like Sam, like Raffy, like who knows else, she had loved the con man Jack Peregrine. But it was from him that she’d learned that love was the biggest con there was; he would make you feel confiding, confidential love, then when you loved him back, you got left in the road in the rain. You were conned by a pro and the art of it was you never saw it coming.
To hear her father tell the story, the only person who’d been able to resist this con-art love of his had been Annie’s mother, who’d walked away.
She looked at the unsigned postcard her father had given her, with the Life cover photo of Claudette Colbert smoking on the tropical balcony.
Claudette died today. Here’s to a great lady.
I’m fine. Hope you’re ditto. Better this way.
Reach for the sky…
Taking the flowery birthday card from her purse, she compared their handwritings. As she suspected, they had the same Greek final e’s, the same wide capital letters with their curving loops like smoke rings. She had little doubt that her father had written both in a fake hand.
Annie’s phone rang although it took her a while to hear it in the noise of La Loca. Georgette was calling from Emerald, where she was in bed reading about the Roman ruins at Baalbek. She just wanted to check in to hear the news from Miami. Annie gave her the highlights, then asked if Georgette knew what had happened to her mysterious aunt Ruthie, the one who’d run off with a married man when she was still a teenager.
Georgette found her friend’s interest in this distant past strange, given all that had happened to her in these last few days. Why would she ask about an aunt of Georgette’s that no one had seen or heard from in well over a decade? Annie explained how the woman at Golden Days yesterday had reminded her of images of Ruthie in the Nickerson house. Georgette thought it highly unlikely that her aunt Ruthie had flown first to St. Louis, then to Miami, merely to catch a glimpse of Jack Peregrine, particularly if—according to Kim—she had chewed him up and spit him out back when he was a teenager.
“Your mom didn’t stay in touch with Ruthie?”
“No way.” Georgette’s mother Kim had disliked her sister-in-law intensely, consistently calling her a “cold fish,” a “ball buster,” someone who “could care less about her family,” and who had ruined the life of the married man from Emerald with whom she’d “eloped,” abandoning him within weeks. (His wife had taken him back and they’d moved away.) By some unexplained means Ruthie had gotten herself admitted to an Ivy League college on a mysterious scholarship. After graduating, she had climbed some unknown ladder to success. According to Kim, she’d never given her only brother, Georgette’s father George, the time of day. In fact, when George had died of a sudden heart attack, all Ruthie had done was send flowers with a message that she was out of the country and unable to attend the funeral. Kim had