The Four Corners of the Sky: A Novel by Michael Malone

Author:Michael Malone
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 1570717443
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Published: 2009-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 34

Reach for the Sky

From under his pillow, Jack slid a silver cigarette lighter, with the engraved initial C. He tumbled it between his fingers. Given his burns, Annie would have thought the movement would have been painful.

His cough stopped him and he rested, then went on with his story. “Here’s the way it was. Your mother is smart, super-smart, and she talks all the time about wanting to go to college. But she’s three months pregnant. We discuss abortion but she’s torn; it goes against something in her. We worry the thing back and forth, back and forth. Then, one day, she decides to have the baby. Why?”

Annie raised her eyebrow. “Why?”

“Claudette Colbert. We run into Claudette Colbert on Silver Sands Beach.”

She laughed. “Come on.”

He waved his hand. “I’m serious. We’re walking on the beach; Claudette Colbert’s having a picnic all by herself, sitting there in a canvas chair with a big striped umbrella, and a little table with champagne and coffee ice cream on it and she’s smoking. Chain smoker.” He held up the cigarette lighter. “She was a gorgeous woman. She really was.”

Disbelieving, Annie frowned. “You met Claudette Colbert on a beach in Barbados?”

“We get into a conversation. We hit it off.” Jack showed the silver lighter to Annie. “She gave me this lighter that day. It happened to be my birthday and I said so and right there on the beach she said, ‘Here, Jack, happy birthday.’”

Annie thought, It’s possible; things like that do happen.

“So she asks if your mother’s pregnant and we get into the abortion thing and she encourages us to have the baby. She was very sweet to your mom and me. Your mom was really listening to her advice. I mean, she was Claudette Colbert. Finally Colbert’s chauffeur drove up behind the beach and walked down to get her and we helped him pack her up and she gave us a ride back to the resort.”

Annie’s memories raced through snippets of all the Claudette Colbert films she’d studied so earnestly as a child. It was easy to imagine the star in the setting. “The movie star Claudette Colbert? It Happened One Night, Palm Beach Story, that Claudette?”

“Yes.” He dropped the lighter in her hand. “She had a home on the island; she sort of retired there.”

Annie studied the beautiful initial C on the slender silver lighter. She had always assumed that her father had chosen the actress’s name entirely randomly. But what if the story was real? On the other hand, C could be anybody’s initial. “So then what happened?”

He told her that at about this time they’d met a couple from Ohio whom they’d gotten to know by playing bridge with them at the resort. This couple hadn’t been able to have a baby. The wife was sweet and desperate; the husband was practical and rich. After weeks of talking it over, Annie’s mother, more and more feeling Jack and she weren’t ready for marriage, much less a family, finally decided to carry the baby to term and give it to this couple.

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