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Page 38.

Chapter 8. Marianne in New Haven, 1991: Catherine Nordhall

The Boeing 747 with Marianne Didier, Countess Troisroses on board approached North America on the North Atlantic route from London across Greenland. The plane made a customs stop in Bangor, Maine and then made a hop to Bradley Field in Hartford, Connecticut en route to points irrelevant. Marianne had not slept well the night before. She’d dozed on the plane and felt tired, but was anxious to meet her possible relatives in New Haven. The weather was rainy and chill, with a damp, icy wind blowing down from Canada, across the Great Lakes and upstate New York, into New England. Under a leaden sky, she rode in a limousine about a half hour from Hartford to New Haven. At the coast, she hardly noticed the annoying traffic, concentrating instead on the picturesque little villages visible through bare trees, and beyond them Long Island Sound, with a fuzzy, dark, misty Long Island lying in the distance.

Gino Franzese and his wife of many years, Catherine Nordhall-Franzese, came to meet her in a light blue Cadillac driven by their oldest son, Frankie. Catherine was Tim Nordhall’s sister, now a woman of 72 with medical problems but a still-chipper attitude. “That would make you my aunt,” Marianne told Catherine.

“I haven’t seen my brother and his wife in years,” Catherine said. “I don’t know if I can help you at all, dear.” She seemed oddly cold, guarded, and distant. These New Haven relatives all did—at ground zero of Tim’s birth and formative years, his clock-making apprenticeship, his broken engagement with a lovely redhead named Sally Levesque—all the paths not taken, and Marianne longed to find out the reasons.

“I’m trying to find my father and his...” Marianne said softly. Wife or wives? She wondered, but dared not ask for fear of offending her hosts. And her hosts seemed distant for some reason. Were they afraid of strangers, or was there something to hide?

Gino was 77, heavy-set, balding, a big silent man with a dutiful expression, heavy hands that staid powerfully knitted together under an overhanging paunch, and small lips that stayed quietly pursed though his quick eyes missed nothing. Francis, Frankie, already a graying man in his mid-40s (Marianne’s age) looked sleeker and more businesslike. He was edging his father out of a lucrative construction business as Gino grew tired. “I travel a bit,” Gino said humbly, “like maybe Canada or one day London. Nothing like all of your travels, I’m sure.” It was practically the longest sentence he spoke during their few hours together.

“You’re welcome to stay at our house if you’d like,” Catherine said airily. Her eyes betrayed deeper, suspicious thoughts: You didn’t bring a playboy friend? Have you remarried, you hoore? (a New Havenism, of antique Colonial English or Dutch roots).

“That is so generous of you,” Marianne said feeling a bit embarrassed. “Do you know, I have to be on a flight to San Francisco tonight for a meeting tomorrow. Why don’t we make it next time when I can really enjoy your company?”

“We’d love that,” Frankie said, waving his hands as he maneuvered the large car along New Haven’s maze of narrow one-way streets where every parking space was taken. It was a weekday around noon, and the sidewalks were jammed with Yale University students and faculty on their lunch break—going either to some downtown restaurant for a quick bite, or to one of the college dining halls or the university Commons. The New Haven Green looked soggy, with its three old Revolutionary War churches fuzzed over by a growing haze of drizzle. New Haven was a city of umbrellas today, of early darkness inscribed with neon blurs and squiggles.

“Why do you think my brother might be your dad, sweetie?” Catherine said with a speculative, calculating glance. Marianne sensed obligation here, and an urgency to get her on that plane and away from here. The walls of obtuseness closing in from all sides suggested that the less she learned here, the better.

She related her story again from the kidnapping of her pregnant mother in the last days of World War 2, forced by Soviet agents to board a Soviet freighter Kalinin in San Francisco, and abducted by the NKGB on Stalin’s orders to Siberia, to the death of her mother, and her adoption by a wealthy French family. Catherine blanched as she listened, and her chin actually trembled.

“My mother died before I could really speak with her,” Marianne said as if reciting an old drama, simply because it needed to be conveyed. “I had an auntie in Anadyr, an old woman of Russian and Inuit stock...”

“What stock?” Gino asked politely but blankly.

“Siberian,” Marianne said. “Auntie Dora. She ran a tavern in a sailors’ part of town, and she took us in. My mother washed dishes and served beer and swept floors, until winter took her away. I was barely three when she died in 1949, so I never really knew her. I lived with Auntie until I was about five, and she told me my father was a wonderful adventurer in San Francisco during the war. She said he had two wives, and was handsome enough to have all the women on earth.

“Two wives!” Catherine said with a mix of displeasure and incredulity. “That doesn’t sound like my brother.” If she knew anything, she was not going to tell.

Marianne backpedaled. “Well, these were the stories Auntie Dora used to tell on winter nights. And what would Auntie Dora know? She lived her whole life within a few miles of where she was born.”

“Was she a Communist?” Frankie asked.