Captain Lee made it home after work to find out that his cousin Hopkins Lee Jr. (called Hoppy) had come down to call on his fiancee Margie, who just happened to be cousin Captain Lee's fiancee Maggie.
Margie Lee-to-be already knew Mrs. Slocum-Lofton and Mr. Worley, so when she found out that the older couple was planning to go out, she and Hoppy were planning to go out, and cousin Maggie was also planning a date with Harry (Captain Lee), she had an idea.
“Let's do a triple date!”
That was what Captain Lee literally walked into after a long day's work at the Blue Ridge precinct … the planning was well-advanced by the two more extroverted couples, and although Mrs. Thornton was saying, “I don't know if Harry is going to want to do all that,” the extroverts were charging full speed ahead.
Captain Lee assessed the tactical situation, sighed inwardly, calculated his share of the proposed expense, and put down a third of the money for the evening's adventures.
“This is some expensive eggnog,” he said in the restaurant where he and Mrs. Lee-to-be settled in while their loved ones were off running around the Lofton County Holiday Fair, “but, given that they are happily running loose and you look lovely in the holiday lights, I'd pay it again.”
She smiled.
“They were just having so much fun talking about the bazaar, and the reenactment of the Wise Men with 300 Wise Men coming through tonight with actual camels … thank you, Harry, for just being willing to work with the situation.”
“Well, our chaperones were leaving us – there was nothing else to do,” he said, “so, here we are anyhow. Did you have time to listen to the recordings I sent you?”
“Oh, yes – you know, I never even knew Rachmaninov wrote liturgical music, but his setting of 'Lord, Now Let Thy Servant Depart' is one of the most amazing things I have ever heard! Both performances were stunning! That tenor – and that basso profundo busting out that low B flat at the end – and all the gorgeous things in the middle!”
“That was what my first adult voice teacher wanted sung for his family at his funeral, Saturday. Those are live recordings, made with the permission of the family.”
“Oh, wow, Harry, I'm sorry!”
“Thank you, Maggie.”
“Losing an early adult mentor is so hard … and that was a terrible time for you.”
“Yes … yes. It was. Vladimir Belinkov and his family are among those God sent me to so I would be alive today … a half-mad tenor at West Point, wrapped up in new lessons, new music, a new family … I made it to age 19, and then age 20, and then age 21, and then age 22, knowing I had to make my lessons and my recitals … people do not understand that music education keeps troubled young people alive, gives them something positive to do with emotions that would otherwise destroy them … and others.”
Captain Lee paused, and shuddered.
“I have told you what happened the summer before I went back to West Point. My grandmother has admitted to her mocking Vanessa and Henry Victor's death. You know I nearly started the Ridgeline Fire in revenge. That was July 1994. I went back to West Point in September – but you look at the kind of destructive skill I already had, and the capacity to flip out like that at any time. The Army wanted to harness the ability, so there I was, skill-building on all of that, every year.”
“Yikes, Harry.”
“Vladimir Belinkov and his family gave me what I needed to balance all that. I could have been Bruce Deadwood, who set the Ridgeline Fire, or Lieutenant Dobson, who I dealt with yesterday, but God sent me a voice teacher who set me back in the midst of a family situation … after I had lost mine that I loved so much!”
This is where Henry Fitzhugh Lee had his breakthrough … as Captain Thompson had said to him on the phone two hours before, he had presented as a loner for 27 years, but he wasn't. He was bereft of and yet always needing and searching for and seeking to recreate his family. In the meantime, family – whether it was his Lee grandparents, his cousin Ironwood Hamilton and his family, the Belinkovs, the Mortons, the units he led in the Army, the cold case and Blue Ridge precinct – had always found him.
But there sat the widow Maggie Milano Thornton, and she and he were going to start their own family, and she, having lost her husband and infant child to a tragic accident, wanted exactly the same thing.
Mrs. Thornton, in the instant her fiance's voice trailed off, realized something enormous was happening before her eyes … Captain Lee's whole aspect changed as a series of realizations came over him … he looked, at the end, like he had just awakened from a long nightmare.
“I'm listening, Harry.”
“I don't know if I can describe what I just realized,” he said. “What I meant to say was that Mr. Belinkov's son hit that big B flat down there, and all his children are in that choir, but he did not have a son above baritone, and his grandsons are all still young boys – trebles. They sang soprano.”
“Oh, so there are children giving that extra sheen to the music!”
“Yes – not quite what the great Rachmaninov had in mind, but that is what happened, with me as the tenor lead.”
“Oh … no wonder I like that voice so much!”
“Mr. Belinkov taught me how to sing in Italian, Latin, French, Spanish, Russian, and Church Slavonic, which is what the piece is in. A general requested it for his funeral, and no one in the Army chorus could do the solo – so Cadet Lee filled in then, and that is how I got into the Army chorus … and so, instead of doing real R&R and coming home and getting depressed and committing suicide, I have traveled the world, singing, for 24 years. That is the gift Mr. Belinkov gave me – a bridge to staying alive.
“He called me in November to ask me to come and sing … he said he wanted the last memory people had was to know: he, the Lord's servant, was departing in peace to literally be in the presence of God's Salvation, the Lord Jesus Christ, and … and I was the tenor son God had given him, whom he loved so much.
“I couldn't cry Saturday – I had to sing, and you heard how high and clear those notes are and had to be. You cannot choke your way as a tenor through that choir texture without accompaniment – every voice must hold its part.”
“Everyone did, brilliantly.”
“Of course. We could not let our father down. All his students who are still alive and singing were there, singing in different pieces. It had to be perfect. We are his legacy. My problem is, I'm getting a bit too good at being perfect to the eyes of everyone else. I have so much locked in here –.”
And Captain Lee struck his chest.
“I know that it is killing me,” he said softly, “and I do not intend to leave you a widow in less than 40 years.”
“I am concerned about that, Harry,” she said softly, “but you've made so much progress just since September, and I'm so delighted that you were able and honored that you were willing to share all that with me.”
“I've been working hard since July,” he said, “but I have so far to go.”
“Well, you've got 40 years with me, at least! We'll get there!”
“That's all I need, Maggie – for real, that's all I need. You're the one that I am going to share it all with, until death do us part.”
Captain Lee reached out and took his fiancee's hand, and gently kissed it, and then was moved to tears when she took his hand and kissed it.
“I love you, Maggie Lee-to-be.”
“I love you, hubby Harry.”
“Tomorrow I have opportunity to have an extra therapy appointment, and I am going – I need to unpack the confrontation with Lieutenant Dobson.”
“Oh, my, yes, you should take the time to do that,” Mrs. Thornton said. “To get shot and still take that man down – that had to be some kind of moment.”
“That's not the part that I need to unpack,” Captain Lee said. “I've been shot at more times than I can count. Been grazed and even a little more – I have two Purple Hearts already, although both of those were not even close to life-threatening. What I need to go discuss is the sequence of how my mind worked all that out – and didn't kill him. That's the shocking part to me. How did I do that?”
“Progress, Harry!”
“I know, but I don't know where or how, so Captain Thompson and I have to dig. I would love for you to come along.”
“Tuesday is a big cook night for the Church in the Midst of Life and I'm on the rotation – but, what I can do is switch Thursday night for Wednesday night, and so come with you Thursday.”
“Just as good, Maggie, just as good.”
Mrs. Thornton's smile turned just a bit sultry.
“You know, once we are married, I'd like to kiss away the scar you got yesterday, and also the ones for which you get those Purple Hearts.”
Captain Lee's eyes went on up to blazing heat.
“I see now why the Lord had Margie getting us out of that apartment – I'm not about to strip down in the restaurant, but Maggie, I would have been naked to the waist in seconds over at the Rosewood, and in another second you'd have me getting my pants off – you know I have trouble with my mind!”
She started laughing and so did he, and then he ordered some more eggnog for them both just as Hoppy, Margie, and Mr. Worley and Mrs. Slocum-Lofton came back and covered their table with all the little things they had purchased at the bazaar. 30 minutes later, they would all be out in the minivan under the stars with the moon roof open, snacking on peppermint bark, fudge, popcorn, trail mix, cheese crisps and beef jerky and nuts (because Captain Lee really didn't do sugars or starches on a casual basis), and talking about everything the four extroverts had seen and done.
Really, the four extroverts did most of the talking, of which the two biggest were Margie and Mr. Worley. Mrs. Slocum-Lofton had time to notice her grandson and his fiancee sharing the protein-based snacks the grandmother had remembered to buy for her super-fit grandson, and had time to smile at the warm, deep, quiet connection her grandson had formed with “such a sweet and lovely and adorable young woman, that Magdalena girl!”
Mrs. Slocum-Lofton had her own little breakthrough. Would it have really mattered if Maggie Thornton were, say, Black, as Vanessa Morton had been? No. Mrs. Slocum-Lofton had missed the entire point with Vanessa – and, frankly, could have missed it again because Maggie Thornton was born Milano, was ethnically Italian, was from Catholic stock, wasn't rich, blah, blah, blah … .
“Thank You, Lord,” she said softly as Margie's laughter cut through all the sound, “for saving me from continuing to be a killjoy for my grandson, and from having to kill me to get me to stop being a fool, all those years ago!”
The fractal of interlocking hearts is by the author, Deeann D. Mathews