Chapter Eight
Julie Andrews was still in her twenties when she was cast in The Sound of Music, not much older than Patrick and Sara were when they auditioned for a summer stock production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical in Louisville. Sara was a born Maria, warm, free-spirited, with an easy conspiratorial wink and a soprano range well-suited for the part. Patrick fashioned himself as Captain von Trapp, and no doubt at that age he would have looked dashing in a military uniform, even if his face was still a tad boyish. They must have watched the movie a half-dozen times in Patrick’s dorm room and marveled at how much they both ached for Christopher Plummer. Each evening at dusk leading up to their audition, Patrick twirled Sara around a gazebo that anchored a nearby park as they made no shortage of plans for the summer. Alas, neither booked the part they were after; Patrick was offered the role of Max Detweiler, the children’s rakish uncle (which, looking back on it, was a pretty unsubtle precursor for his life as both an uncle and second banana), and Sara was cast as a nun. Patrick quickly made peace with the decision. He quite liked Max—the ultimate bachelor, cheeky and always well-kept—and also felt a kinship with him and his outlook on living. “I like rich people,” Max would confess. “I like the way they live, I like the way I live when I’m with them.” Patrick didn’t really know any rich people then, but he suspected he would quite like their lifestyle, too. Sara, however, was not at all happy with her role as a background player. If she couldn’t be the rebellious Sister that broke out of the abbey to bed a navy captain, she didn’t much see the point. She convinced Patrick they should drop out before rehearsals even began. Louisville was no Salzburg and Kentucky no Austria; she felt there were better ways to spend a perfectly good summer. Patrick agreed—he always agreed—and they spent the summer at the beach instead, like Sandy and Danny from Grease.
Patrick wasn’t quite sure when Austria came to mind as the next destination to take the kids, but knew he had all this talk of Greg marrying the Baroness to thank. He had shown them the 1965 Robert Wise film on several occasions after their mother had passed, explaining it was a favorite of hers, and while they enjoyed it more than he perhaps expected them to, he wasn’t sure they enjoyed it at the time quite as much as he needed them to on their mother’s behalf. But taking them to Salzburg on the official Sound of Music tour—something he and Sara promised they would one day do, but of course never did? This would be another lesson in love—doing something simply because you knew it would make someone you care about happy.
Patrick booked the overnight train to Salzburg, which was perhaps slightly less poetic than a midnight train to Georgia (singing nuns were fine and all, but they were no match for the Pips). It was an eight-hour journey, much of which he hoped to sleep through. Not that he needed a break from the kids per se (although he had come to appreciate a quiet hour or two to himself each night after they fell asleep), but rather the opportunity to reflect on their journey so far and plan a recalibration if needed. Night travel didn’t allow for much of a view; in fact in his exhaustion he forgot if this was the train that went through Zurich or Stuttgart and the absolute darkness transported him back to Grant’s freak-out in the Chunnel. With Italy drawing closer with each stop and Sara very much on his mind, Patrick was nearing his own breakdown.
With Maisie curled up on the seats across from him and Grant passed out by his side, two stitches and a fresh bandage on his neck where his mole used to be, Patrick wondered what would Sara think of him once again having custody of her kids? Was this what she imagined when she orchestrated their first summer together all those years ago? Certainly, she would approve of their next destination, but would she really be comfortable knowing her children were having a grand adventure with no one more responsible in charge? Patrick had regularly checked in with Greg via a series of texts and the kids had FaceTimed with him to both boast and gripe about the itinerary. But Greg was also busy readying himself for his own European travels, so Patrick didn’t bore him with every detail of their trip. If anyone, it was really Sara he wanted to update, and the question he was left with was this: Can grief and gratitude coexist? Could he miss the kids’ mother and also be grateful for his time with Maisie and Grant? Or did the gratitude just make him miss Sara more and wish she was the one on this train with him instead of her sleeping kids? And in helping them these past few years with their grief, had he once again neglected his own?
Patrick glanced out the window into the darkness, and for a brief second he thought he saw Sara’s reflection sitting with Maisie; it was nothing but a cruel optical illusion, the woman across the aisle from them reading her book, her red hair spilling over her face. He closed his eyes to shake the sight of it, and eventually fell asleep.
They checked into their hotel bright and early to catch some much-needed rest; Patrick was both disappointed and relieved to find the windows in their room were covered with linen shades and not old drapes in desperate need of replacing.
“I guess I won’t be making you any playclothes,” he bemoaned.
Maisie replied with a sour face. Stop being such a dork.
“I love making jokes about The Sound of Music,” Patrick confessed.
“Why?” Grant asked.
“I can’t help it. It’s my idle vice. Get it? ‘Edelweiss’? Idle vi—”
Both of them stared at him blankly.
“You kids are no fun.” Not that Patrick knew how to sew, but he’d witnessed enough designers on Project Runway fake their way through a challenge with little more than spit, pins, and a glue gun to be tempted. If nothing else, it would have made for a great photo, the three of them in lederhosen that looked tragically homemade. Content! Something Cassie was always encouraging him to make more of for his social media. He slowly lowered the shades until the room fell dark. “Come on. Let’s get some sleep.”
Patrick had reserved three tickets for the two o’clock tour, and when they arrived at their point of departure he was appalled to find their bus shrink-wrapped in a life-sized image of Julie Andrews leading the von Trapp children through the Alps. Yes, he was teaching the kids an act of love and to proudly embrace their passions, but as usual he had hoped to do it in style; the coach didn’t even have tinted windows. On top of everything, they were surrounded by dyed-in-the-wool fans from all over the world dressed like their favorite characters, Indian schoolchildren in the aforementioned playclothes, three goatherds who talked loudly about how they had traveled from Brazil, and two Japanese women dressed as nuns guiltily holding carburetors from Nazi vehicles they had just stripped.
“Why is everyone dressed like that?” Maisie asked.
He wished he had a snarky comment at the ready. Indeed he agreed many of them looked absurd; instead, only the truth sprang to mind. “They’re having fun.” And he hoped, despite their ordinary street clothes and general horror at the spectacle, they would eventually, too. “Your mother would get such a kick out of this,” he decided. “In fact, if she were here, she would have demanded we call her fr?ulein.” And with that he urged the kids to board the bus before some passerby could see him.
“What Guncle Love Language is this?” Grant asked as they pressed their way toward the back of the bus. Patrick was disappointed by the lack of tiered seating; what he wouldn’t give for the extra legroom of first class.
“Don’t say anything about goatherds,” Maisie warned.
“I’m not going to say anything about goatherds,” Patrick assured her, disquieted by the very thought. Although, he was making all of this up on the fly, and goatherd was the kind of irresistible word he could make a meal of. Plus, he and Sara had many a drunken night in college yodeling along to the movie’s most divisive song. He even felt wistful thinking of a particular lyric: Soon the duet will become a trio, lay ee odl lay ee odl-oo. His duet was down one member, and yet here they were now three. “Guncle Love Language number four: ‘Simply remember your favorite things.’?”
“Presents!” Grant exclaimed as he pumped his fist.
“Presents isn’t a Guncle Love Language. We have got to move on from that.”
“Yuh-huh,” Grant protested. “?‘Brown paper packages tied up with strings.’ Sounds like presents to me.”
Patrick pinched the bridge of his nose. “Think of your loved one’s favorite things. And do those.”
“Isn’t that just acts of service?” Maisie asked. “One of the ones you said was bullshit?”
“Bullshit!” Grant echoed, pointing a finger in the air.
“Stop it. There’s no swearing on the Sound of Music tour.” Patrick grimaced apologetically at two older women dressed to sing in the Salzburg Festival who were grumbling in Polish. “Now quit your pussyfooting and take a seat.” He ushered both kids into a row, while he settled himself across the aisle. “But yes, you do have a point. I guess they weren’t all ...” He made a gesture alluding back to do-re-mi-fa-so-la-bull-shit.
Their tour began at the Nonnberg Abbey, which is where the real Maria Auguste Kutschera lived as a novice before she was sent to be a governess for the family von Trapp. The nunnery was founded sometime around 715 CE and had operated continuously since, making it the oldest nunnery in the German-speaking region. The grounds were flanked by fortress walls wherever they were not protected by steep slopes. There are no interior shots of the abbey in the film, only of its grounds and cemetery, where the tour group now gathered to take photos.
“Where are we again?” Grant asked as he spun around to take in their surroundings.
“In the eastern foothills of the Festungsberg,” Patrick replied, glad at least he was paying attention to their tour guide.
Grant scoffed. “Like that’s a real place.” He stared up at the fortress walls.
“This is the nunnery.”
“Again,” Grant said, and then made a gesture like it was all going over his head.
“It’s where Maria spent her time before she left to be with the von Trapps.”
“Oh,” Maisie said. “So the boring parts of the film.”
“Why is that the boring part? Is the Mother Abbess boring? Is Peggy Wood boring? She received an Academy Award nomination, for heaven’s sake.” (Patrick liked to think it was specifically for her inspired delivery of the line “What is it you can’t face?” which, with her given accent, sounded perhaps more vulgar than intended.)
“Because!” Grant proclaimed. “It’s the part without any kids.” When put that way, Patrick had to concede he had a point.
“But also the climax! They hid from Nazis right here in this very cemetery.”
Grant looked at the tombstones with some skepticism. On the whole, it did not look like a big-enough place to hide. “So, we’re doing this for Mom?” he asked as they walked through the neatly trimmed hedges of the rose garden.
“That’s right. She always wanted to take this tour, and now we’re here taking it for her because we love her. And in that sense she’s here with us.”
Grant found that explanation acceptable. “Are we bringing her to Dad’s wedding, too?” he asked, quite certain she would be less welcome there.
“We bring her everywhere,” Maisie said—helpfully, Patrick thought. “But don’t worry. There isn’t going to be a wedding.” So much for her being of assistance.
The bus traveled on to the stately Leopoldskron Palace, the rococo building that stood in for the von Trapp family home and which currently operated as a hotel. The famed gazebo where Rolf and Liesl sang “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” used to stand on the palace’s grounds, but was moved to the park at Schloss Hellbrunn to accommodate more tourists (and would be a later stop on the tour). The palace’s interior Venetian Salon, with its intricate gold wall panels and smoky mirrors, was replicated for the film and served as a backdrop for several important scenes, including the big party that concluded the first half of the film (back when cinemas screened films with an intermission), and the puppet theater complete with marionettes.
“This is where the children were introduced to the Baroness,” Patrick explained as they walked along the lake to get a better view.
“It’s also where they drove her away.” Maisie had her arms firmly crossed.
“You’ve got to give people a chance. Sometimes they surprise you.”
“Not often,” Maisie replied with a weary tone like she had everyone’s number.
“I surprised you, didn’t I?”
Maisie looked at her uncle earnestly. “I think you surprised yourself.”
The tour also included stops at the Mondsee Abbey and several other locations, before their bus rolled to its final destination, the Mirabell Gardens, where Maria taught the children to sing by introducing them to the basic notes—the architecture behind music—before they were replaced by words. Actually she taught them on a nearby mountaintop, but continued the lesson through Salzburg, first on bicycle, then by horse and buggy, and finally ending at the gardens, where they marched around the famed Pegasus Fountain before ascending the Angel Staircase. The resulting earworm—“Do-Re-Mi”—was a showstopping moment in the film and Patrick had images of himself leading Maisie and Grant in song throughout the city as an equally showstopping end to their day. But instead of feeling moved to sing, twenty minutes into their stroll around the gardens, the children seemed ready to lie down and nap.
“You know, sooner or later I’m going to show you something that you do find impressive,” he said.
Maisie looked at an imaginary watch. They had a deal that expired in Italy. Tick tock.
Patrick felt a presence hovering peripherally and he cautiously turned to see a college-aged kid clad in a Wonder Bread T-shirt with sunglasses too big for his face. A few steps behind him was a young woman about the same age in a similarly ill-fitting purple shirt with a Smucker’s logo and hair that was begging to be washed.
“Sorry to bother you,” the kid began with a hitch in his voice. “We wanted to talk to you when you got off the coach, but you looked unapproachable.”
“And yet here you are,” Patrick groused.
Undaunted, Smucker’s stepped forward. “Are you Patrick O’Hara?” she asked.
Oh god, Patrick thought. He should have known this is where he’d be recognized. “No, I’m sorry I’m not.”
“Yes he is,” Maisie said, enjoying Patrick’s discomfort as he tried to focus on something intangible in the near distance.
“Wow,” Wonder Bread exclaimed. “We never thought we’d see someone famous on this tour.”
“Stars, they’re just like us,” Patrick muttered. And then, no longer able to contain himself, he asked, “What are you wearing?”
“Oh! We’re jam and bread,” the woman said proudly.
“You know, from the song.”
“I’m familiar,” Patrick confessed. And then he added, “Clever” with a tone somewhere between snark and genuine admiration. “Were you on our bus this whole time?”
“We were on the morning tour, but when it ended we just couldn’t bring ourselves to, you know, leave.” The young man said it while spinning a full three hundred and sixty degrees with the kind of genuine wonder that was on brand with his shirt—the very wonder Patrick had hoped to see on the faces of Maisie and Grant.
“He’s Kevin and I’m Mel,” the man’s friend interrupted. “We’re in the theater program at Tisch. Our friend Brian was supposed to come with us, but then he was cast in three different plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and had to back out.” Mel unzipped her backpack and pulled out a third T-shirt with a Lipton tea logo printed across the chest. Tea, a drink with jam and bread.
Patrick had never thought highly of Tisch, finding their graduates a tad pretentious, but held his tongue, since he didn’t know where this was going. “Are you in a throuple?”
Mel laughed. “With Kevin and Brian? Oh, god no. Why do you ask?”
Patrick pushed his sunglasses up his nose. “No reason. It’s just I knew a throuple once.”
“No, I’m straight, and they’re my gay BFFs.” It dawned on Patrick that Kevin and Mel looked like a young Patrick and Sara.
“I know you’re with your kids,” Mel continued apologetically.
“We’re not his kids,” Grant said, and Patrick’s head turned. It used to be him who made such denials.
“They’re my wards,” Patrick corrected, lest these Tisch students fear he had kidnapped them.
“Oh,” Kevin brightened. “Like Auntie Mame!”
Patrick softened. Exactly like that. Kevin and Mel were growing on him.
“We were wondering if you would take a photo.”
“Of you?” Patrick joked. Because of course they wanted a photo with him. He reached out his hand and snatched the Lipton tee. “What size is Kevin?”
“I’m Kevin,” Kevin corrected. “You mean Brian.”
Same difference. “What size is Brian?” Patrick playfully glanced at the label while sensing their growing excitement. Large, a perfect fit. Without being asked he slipped the T-shirt over his own and ushered them to stand by his side. “Maisie?” He gestured for Kevin to hand his phone over to his niece.
Maisie stepped up onto a concrete bench to take the photo.
“Higher,” Patrick and Kevin said together. Patrick did a double take.
“I’m standing on a bench!”
“So?”
“So I’ve been taking photos of you since I was nine. I know to hold the camera higher.”
It was true, she had made real progress since they first met. But Patrick was now five years older, and he didn’t see the harm in elevating the camera even more. He turned to Kevin and Mel. “Excuse us, we’re just having a family spat.”
“Maybe we should get you a drone...” Maisie suggested.
“Ignore her. She’s like a whiskey sour without the whiskey, if you know what I mean.”
“...Or contact the ISS. They can take your picture from space.”
Grant produced his little notebook and tugged on Mel’s purple tee. “Do you know the chief export of Australia? I’m writing a report for my teacher.”
Mel narrowed her eyes, confused. “Do you mean Austria?”
Grant turned to his uncle. “Where are we again?”
“Just tell him kangaroos and let’s do this.” Patrick stood between Kevin and Mel and extended his arms around them. He pulled them in tight and give his best smirk; Patrick was loathe to be anyone’s understudy, but knowing Kevin—brIAN!—knowing Brian would lose his mind when he received the photo in Oregon, ready to go on in The Taming of the Shrew, made this worth making an exception.
Maisie snapped the picture and handed the college kids back their phone. They looked at the photo and Mel in particular seemed quite pleased. “We’ll tag you,” she said.
“Great. You can post it on the dark web.”
“He means Facebook,” Maisie clarified.
“Now I need you to do something for me in return,” Patrick said to Kevin and Mel as Kevin tucked away his phone.
“Anything,” the two replied together, then glanced at each other, unsure of what they were getting themselves into.
“I need you to be Liesl and Friedrich to Maisie’s Marta and Grant’s what’s-his-name so that we can march around the Pegasus Fountain together.” Maisie started to turn away—she could see where this was going—but Patrick grabbed her by the scruff like a kitten.
“Kurt!” Mel laughed.
“Yes, Kurt. That’s the one I left out. God bless Kurt,” Patrick said, imitating Maria from the movie when she finally remembered the younger von Trapp boy’s name in her prayers. Maisie continued to squirm. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Connecticut,” she replied.
But Patrick held firmly on to her shoulders and quickly started marching the four of them around the Pegasus Fountain with others from their tour falling in line until they were all do-re-mi-fa-so-and-so-ing deep into song. Crowds gathered like they couldn’t believe their eyes, but honestly, Patrick wondered, what else did they expect to see at Mirabell Gardens? Even the two Polish women exhibited a crack in their unpleasant demeanors for the first time all day and joined in the singing with surprising gusto. The horde began snapping photos and Patrick grimaced, thinking this might end up on TMZ, even though they were well outside the thirty-mile studio zone the website was named for. But he didn’t ultimately care. This was, after all, an act of service.
Just as Maria lifted the children’s spirits through song, the absolute ridiculousness of their marching charmed Maisie and Grant until they, too, were singing through preposterous grins. Patrick hopped off the fountain’s edge and ran them through the Dwarf Garden, arms in the air, to the Angel Staircase, where they and others approximated the song’s climactic choreography, jumping up one step, then bouncing back two. There must have been thirty von Trapp children now following Patrick’s lead; they were like little gremlins who’d been pushed into the fountain and multiplied—Patrick could hardly keep count. When he finally reached the top step he plucked Mel from the crowd of “children” and enlisted her in hitting the song’s signature high note. Ti (La, So, Fa, Mi, Re) Ti DOOOOO! Mel jumped the octave like Julie Andrews without so much as blinking and held the note for so long Patrick was forced to reevaluate his opinion of Tisch. The crowd that had gathered burst into enthusiastic applause and whistled their appreciation. Patrick beamed and took a bow, singling out Jam and Bread for their contributions before looking up to the heavens above. Acts of service, he thought as he peeled off his Lipton tee. Not such bullshit after all.
Sara, that was for you.