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= Woman in the Moon =

Mona Lisa Novel, or: Nocturne in Paris

by John Argo

Page 8.

Rob Wilson was on Skype daily with the new love of his life, Elise Gillen. She was from Luxembourg City, where her parents still lived in the Upper or Old City neighborhood of Limpertsberg, complete with remnants of cobbled sidewalks from long ago. The U.S. Embassy was in that tree-lined area, along with many fancy villas. Elise was a brunette with long, straight hair, chestnut, that glowed reddish in sunlight. She had beautiful dark eyes that could stare soulfully. She speaks with her eyes half the time, Rob thought.

He’d seen Hannah off to her plane at the Portland International Airport (PDX) and returned to Salem to wrap up some of Dad’s remaining affairs. Dan Wilson, without saying much to anyone, had recognized his impending departure and put his affairs in order. He’d left his papers neatly boxed and arranged for easy reading. The kids (Rob and Hannah) had already inherited jewelry, a painting or two, and other valuables from Nancy directly. Rob was puzzled, somewhere deep in his heart, but could not put his finger on what was bothering him. His mother had been quiet and reserved in her own way, but he had the feeling she’d kept no secrets. It was all out front with Nancy. Dad, on the other hand, had lived a more complicated life. For one thing, Nancy had married late, in her thirties, and had enjoyed a long afternoon of love, so to speak. Dan, on the other hand, had traveled a lot in his youth, including a long stint in the U.S. Army in Europe. There had been a shadowy, frightening first marriage to a German woman whose name Rob didn’t even recall. Dad had hardly ever talked about it, but it was clear it had been a dark two or three years in his life. There had been a baby, name again unknown, born with some congenital illness—heart defect, Rob seemed to recall Dad mentioning once or twice—who died at less than one year old in the great German medical center in Heidelberg. A lot of dark and awful drama had occurred near Heidelberg, the picturesque and historic city on the Neckar River, where Dad had been stationed as a junior enlisted man in the 1970s. He had returned a broken man, a lost soul, and taken a decade in Portland and Salem to put his life back together. Which he had, in the end, falling in love with steadfast, true-blue Nancy. And yet there always seemed to be a piece missing with him. Once, during a stormy argument between Hannah and Dad, Rob had sought comfort with his mother. Nancy had been steady-state as always, saying, “You know he often has bad dreams and wakes up in terror and cold sweat.” And once Dad had confided that there was a dream he often had, in which he was back in West Germany of the 1970s, walking the streets of the moderately small town near Heidelberg in which the U.S. Army at that time occupied an old 1700s vintage Pfälzisch (Palatinate) army Kaserne (barracks) with cobblestone streets, yellow turrets, and a mix of blue slate and orange brick roofing tiles.

Aunt Molly (Dad’s sister and only surviving sibling) and Uncle Stan, who lived in the East Lancaster section of town, came by with a van to pick up the boxes and other effects. One of the last moments for Rob, in the house where he had grown up along with Hannah, was to hand the keys to a pleasantly eager man and woman real estate agent team. The plan was to do a light renovation and then sell the house quickly during the current slight upturn in market values.

Rob gave the house a fond and wistful pat on the side as he walked down the driveway to a waiting private cab. He wished the house a happy future, and many more playing, screaming, growing children.

Time to go. Time to let go.

He picked up Dad’s old brown leather briefcase, which he planned to carry back to Europe with him. It was full of papers and photos—including a mysterious Journal III. Bidding farewell to Molly and Stan, he let the stranger drive him to the airport. It was an odd feeling, riding with a nice but unknown man who appeared to be a recent immigrant. The man told him during light conversation that he was of German-Samoan origin, and had been a U.S. citizen all his life. So much for guessing where people came from these days. Rob told him he had grown up in Salem, and wished him well. Never learning the man’s name, he shook hands heartily at the airport entrance, and wished him well. Inwardly, he felt similarly to when he’d said goodbye to the old house. Take good care of my city, he thought, as he strode across the concourse sidewalk with the briefcase in one hand, and gave a final wave with his free other hand.

During the long flight, Rob dozed a bit. He ate the light lunch they served, and enjoyed a hot cup of black coffee over Greenland. As the line of day and night crawled slowly past—meaning it was like dusk for at least four hours while the Airbus and the nightfall line raced each other eastward—Rob opened the briefcase and began reading Dad’s Journal III. He was puzzled. Why Journal III? Had there been Journals I and II? Or had Dad simply gotten a deal years ago at a stationery store on this particular fancy book. It was an old, worn black notebook with cheaply gilded edges. Nothing fancy. Two hundred pages inside, stitched with white thread, were standard-ruled with faint blue horizontal lines. Each page also had a faint red vertical line to make the left margin, like a zillion other notebooks Rob had seen. It was an old notebook, stuffed with loose papers and an occasional photo. There was Hannah on her first bicycle at age seven, missing her two upper front teeth and smiling sun-blinded on a summer day on the sidewalk outside the old house. There he was, Rob, kneeling on the grassy front lawn and playing with one of the series of mostly golden-orange retriever mutt mixes they’d had over the years. He flipped the photo over, but the dog’s name wasn’t on it, just his own written in Mom’s precise hand: David Robert Wilson, 6 yrs old. That brought a little mist to his vision. He wiped with one finger, and gave forth a soggy sniffle. This was an emotional time. Hannah would probably need a hankie when they got around to sitting in her place in Paris or his place in Frankfurt with these records before them. Near as she could figure, Journal III was a record and scrapbook of Dan Wilson’s final forty years spent in Salem, Oregon after returning from years stationed in Europe.

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