by Joanna Scott
A moment later she could hardly remember what he’d written to her and still didn’t understand why he’d wanted her to destroy the letters. Maybe there were no letters. Had she even read them?
There was a knock on her door—the hotel maid was in the hall, she must have smelled the smoke, quick, open the window, Madame was terribly sorry, she had lit a candle, no, she had lit a cigarette, yes, it was true, Madame was a smoker, that was one of her secrets among many, yes, Madame had more secrets than the world would ever know.
But the maid hadn’t smelled smoke. She was just checking to see if Madame needed anything.
Madame needed only to make time go backward, to the day before her husband set out on his last tour, so she could keep him with her and prevent him from ever leaving home again.
* * *
The following morning she hired a hotel guide to lead the De Potter party on their hike while she stayed behind to send a telegram to the American consul in Athens. By the afternoon she had a response confirming that Armand de Potter had disappeared at sea, and his body had not been recovered.
She asked for a glass of water from the agent but couldn’t drink, her hand was shaking so. Yet somehow she managed not to faint. Somehow she managed to get herself back to the hotel and listen to the members of the party tell her all about the scenery she’d missed on their hike, the wild goats perched on rocky precipices, the tiny blue flowers poking out of the snow. What a wonderful time they were having on their Classic, Oriental, and Alpine Tour. Thank you, Madame de Potter, for being such a considerate hostess.
She traveled to the Italian city of Feltre in the Veneto with the touring party, then back north to Zurich and Lausanne. For three days, she played her part expertly—and why shouldn’t she? All her marriage had been training for this most demanding of roles. She was refined, cultivated, admirable in all respects. Her surface was impenetrable. No one in the party even caught a glimpse of her turmoil, and when another guide from the agency finally arrived to take her place, the travelers could only say that they were sorry to see her go, and that, as Miss Maxwell put it, Madame de Potter was the most gracious woman she’d ever met.
She took the train from Lausanne to Paris, arriving at ten thirty in the evening. She was met by the director of Armand’s Paris office, Edmond Gastineau, who helped her check in at the Hotel St. James on the avenue Bugeaud. She ate a sandwich alone in her room, then soaked for hours in the marble tub.
The next morning she discovered that she couldn’t withdraw money from their account at the Crédit Lyonnais Bank. She demanded to see the manager. She waited nearly an hour, and when the manager finally came out from his office, he had an oversize file, which he set on the table in front of Aimée without opening. Pinching and smoothing the tips of his long mustache, he explained that the de Potter account had been closed by Monsieur de Potter nearly a year ago.
She was beginning to understand what Armand had been trying to communicate in the letters that she’d burned. She returned immediately to her room at the St. James, packed her suitcase, and moved to the Hotel Oxford & Cambridge. From there she met Edmond Gastineau at the agency’s office. She told him about the closed account. And though she hardly knew the man and had never conferred with him on anything more pressing than what he would like in his tea, she said, “I need your help, Monsieur Gastineau. I need you to help me borrow from the agency’s account.”
He was honest with her: the agency couldn’t pay its bills, and Brown Brothers refused to extend more credit. She touched her fingers to her ears to remind herself which earrings she was wearing—the Venetian pearls Armand had given her for her fortieth birthday. Her mind whirled with calculations—what would the pawnbroker give her for her earrings, and how did that sum compare with their true value?—even as Edmond Gastineau offered to transfer money from his personal account into hers. She refused. He kept insisting, until she finally accepted his charity.
She sent telegrams to officials in Athens and Piraeus begging for news, but she didn’t wait for a reply. She bought a ticket for Greece, and on the fifth of July, at nine thirty in the evening, she left on the rapide, enduring a hot, tiring journey through the night to Marseille.
She spent the day waiting at the port on a bench. To people passing by she must have seemed a cold, arrogant woman, rigid in her posture, her mouth frozen in a severe line, the panic in her eyes hidden by the shadow of her hat. To Aimée, the world itself was cold and arrogant, and she cringed at everything: the smoke belching from the steamliners, the harsh sunlight reflecting off the water, the stevedores going about their work with brutal indifference, as if they’d heard the news but didn’t care that Armand de Potter was missing at sea.
* * *
She boarded the SS Yangtze for Piraeus at five in the afternoon. It took the steamer two days to reach Naples, and Aimée spent most of her time in her room, reading and sleeping. In Naples she stayed on board, watching the activity on the quay from the deck. Her husband had passed through Naples not much more than a month earlier. What did he experience when he stood on the deck of the steamer? Were there those same little boys, both of them shirtless, in short overalls, climbing up a stack of fishing nets on the pier? Did he feel faint from the heat? Did it occur to him that he might never return home?
She reached Piraeus on Monday at four in the afternoon. With an American woman, a missionary’s wife she’d met on the Yangtze, she hired a cab for the long ride into Athens. She checked in at the hotel where Armand had stayed one month earlier—the Hôtel d’Angleterre.
The next morning she met the local dragoman, Chorafas, and together they went to all the local hospitals to look over the lists of patients. Their last visit was to the city morgue, where Aimée waited on the street, sweltering in her long dress, while Chorafas went inside to make inquiries. He kept her waiting for so long that she began to grow light-headed. She became sure that he had found her husband and was postponing his announcement of the discovery while the corpse was prepared for viewing. She rehearsed her response to Chorafas when he finally came out: she would collapse in the dusty street, a crowd would gather round, they would carry her into the morgue, flutter fans around her and open a jar of smelling salts, and when she had sufficiently recovered, Chorafas would be speaking gently, telling Madame de Potter how sorry he was to have to inform her that …
“… no gentleman matching your husband has been delivered to the morgue.”
“What?”
“The coroner is certain.”
A dazed “Oh, then…” was all she could muster, though she wanted to ask Chorafas if he was surprised. She wanted to say how strange it was for a man to disappear without a trace.
He led her back to the hotel and offered to accompany her to dinner. She thanked him but declined—she would have dinner alone in her room.
* * *
The next day she moved to Mrs. McTaggert’s Pension and then took the train on her own to Piraeus. She went first to the police station, where she interviewed the police chief, who spoke limited French. He assured her that his officers had conducted a thorough investigation. Monsieur de Potter had been seen on the deck of the Regele Carol late at night by a steward and a stewardess. His room was empty the next morning, and he never appeared for breakfast. His last reported interaction with a fellow passenger was in the evening of the first day of the voyage. A clergyman who had shared his table at dinner said that he’d met Professor de Potter on deck later, and they’d had a friendly exchange. Evidence pointed to an accidental drowning as the cause of death, the police chief said. But he added that two details were suspicious: First, an empty belted wallet had been found in Monsieur de Potter’s trunk. She was confused, until she realized that he was referring to Armand’s pouch belt. Yet Armand’s pouch belt had been stolen from his hotel room in Constantinople—he’d written Aimée to tell her. She refrained from objecting and asked about the second detail. This involved another passenger, an American, on the Regele Carol. The American had
testified that he’d seen two peddlers in Piraeus trying to sell a small, antique bronze that he was sure had belonged to Monsieur de Potter. But the peddlers had left the area before they could be questioned, taking the bronze with them.
They were gone for good? Aimée asked tensely. The police chief regretted to inform Madame that the two peddlers would be impossible to track down. And the American who had given the testimony had already sailed for home.
She thanked the man for his thorough work. She was emphatic in agreeing with him that her husband had been the victim of an accident. No better explanation was available than that Professor de Potter had suffered a dizzy spell.
After leaving the police station, she went to the office of the Romanian Steamship Company. The manager repeated what the police chief had told her, then invited her on board the Regele Carol, which had returned from its most recent voyage to Constantinople that morning. He introduced her to the captain, who was just finishing the lunch that had been delivered to him on the bridge. He untucked his napkin from his collar, dismissed the officers at his table, and invited Madame de Potter to take a seat across from him.
The captain, who spoke English with admirable fluency, launched into an account that was so similar in phrasing to the previous reports that Aimée began to wonder if all the officials of Piraeus had been given a script. But the captain could do better than the others and support his story with witnesses. Before Aimée could think to ask to meet with them, he called in the steward who had seen Armand standing at the rail, along with the stewardess who had been with the steward at the time. He invited Madame de Potter to interview them.
She addressed the stewardess first, asking her in English if she, too, had seen Professor de Potter on deck late at night. The stewardess looked toward the captain in bewilderment. The captain motioned to her to answer the question.
“Yes, madame.”
“Do you mean to say you saw him?”
“We see him on top the rail.”
Aimée was confused. “On top?”
“I mean I see nothing, madame…”
The captain came to the aid of the stewardess, declaring that she had been conversing with the steward and was turned away from the foredeck at the time that the professor was at the rail. And on the steward’s behalf he explained in French that if the professor had been seen falling overboard, the alarm would have been sounded and a rescue attempted. It was unfortunate that no one discovered he was missing until the next morning.
The steward, a tall, thin Romanian with thick bottle glasses, burst into tears. He had done nothing wrong, he insisted. He’d seen Monsieur de Potter standing at the rail, looking out at the sea. Monsieur had tipped his hat to him in a friendly greeting. The steward naturally assumed that Monsieur would return to his stateroom after he’d finished smoking his pipe.
Aimée reassured the young man that he wasn’t to blame. She explained that her husband had a silver plate in his head from an old injury and was prone to dizzy spells—he must have lost his balance and fallen over the rail. It was no one’s fault, she said. She needed to emphasize the likelihood of an accident and prevent a lengthy investigation. She wouldn’t be able to stand by if innocent men—either the peddlers with the bronze or the steward—were wrongly accused of causing her husband’s death.
She asked if she could be shown the room Armand had occupied, Room 17, and then asked to be left alone. As she sat there, she tried to imagine how he had spent his last hours on the ship. It would have been preferable to believe, as the steward had suggested, that he’d gone outside to smoke his pipe. But she knew from his letters that after leaving Constantinople, he’d needed more than his pipe.
She sat on the bed until the captain came and gently urged her to leave. She didn’t want to leave. This was the last place her husband had slept. The mattress was thin, with uneven creases. His comfortable new bed had been carried into Grand Bois just a few months earlier. He had slept in it for the last time in his own house on the night of May 7. He had kissed her goodbye on May 8 and gone off without telling her that they were on the brink of financial ruin. He had launched himself into the sea for the sake of an insurance indemnity. Now, when she reached out her hand, he wasn’t there to hold it.
If only she had been there with him on the deck of the Regele Carol—she would have grabbed him by his shoulders and turned him away from the sea. She would have reminded him that they’d lived modestly in a rented one-bedroom apartment in Albany when they were young; they could do it again. She didn’t care about money. Armand was mistaken in his belief that she needed luxury to be satisfied. Yet she was filled with regret at the recognition of her own mistake. She hadn’t just been happy since they’d moved into Grand Bois—she’d been too happy, thus inviting a disaster to even the score.
* * *
Back at Mrs. McTaggert’s Pension at the end of the day, she opened Armand’s steamer trunk, which she had claimed from customs in Piraeus. Lying on top was his pocket watch, stopped at 12:23. She wound the stem and held it against her ear for a moment. Then she picked up the pouch belt, the same belt she had given him as a present last Christmas, which he was supposed to wear cinched over his shirt whenever he was traveling in foreign lands. This was the belt that had supposedly been stolen from his room in Constantinople. He must have decided to leave it on top of his clothes as his apology for his lie about the theft—concocted in desperation as an excuse to abandon his touring party.
She checked the pockets for contents, hoping there might be a letter to her. There was no letter, but the belt wasn’t empty, as the police chief in Piraeus had said it was. It contained Armand’s passport, now one of two copies, since she’d procured a duplicate for him in Budapest. Tucked in one of the side slots was his calling card with his name: Mr. P. L. Armand de Potter. And there was a card for Valentin’s Parfumerie on the avenue de la Gare in Nice.
The card from Valentin’s perplexed her the most. Why had he emptied the wallet of money but left the card? Had he forgotten it was there? Or had he left it behind for a reason? Could it be his final message to her? It was just a card for her favorite parfumerie. If he had enclosed the card in a letter to her, it would have been an invitation to buy the finest perfume Valentin’s sold. Instead of sending the card to her directly, he left it in his trunk, for no other reason, she decided, than to encourage her to indulge herself. It was a small token offered as his last gift to his wife: he wanted to assure her that he had outmaneuvered his creditors and preserved the remnants of his fortune for his survivors.
She couldn’t bear going through the rest of the trunk and prepared to lower the lid, though not before catching sight of her husband’s notebook. She opened it and ran her finger over the title of the first lecture, “The Sea Kings of the Aegean.” She couldn’t read the rest of it through the blur of her tears, but she could guess the stories it contained, the ones Armand loved to tell about monsters, labyrinths, jealous gods, and treasures buried for thousands of years.
This was a region where legends persisted and impossibilities became real. Why, then, couldn’t she tell a new story herself, one about a husband who was pulled from the sea by fishermen, but because of his ordeal he was suffering from amnesia and couldn’t remember his name? Or this: After throwing himself overboard, Armand de Potter swam for miles, reaching the shore of a distant island, where he was nursed back to health by a deaf, old woman who lived alone with her goats. Did the stories need to be credible? What about the incredible ones that offered miracles as facts? Wasn’t anything possible in this land of ruined temples and broken statues?
She opened her diary and recorded the events of the day. She wrote that she had gone on board the “Regele Carlo,” muddling the name in her grief. She reported that she’d spoken with the captain and the stewardess and sat in the room where her husband had slept. She wrote, “There is no longer any doubt—he is dead, Room 17!”
She meant it as a definitive conclusion. But the ink blotted as she drew the
exclamation mark, and the more she tried to sharpen the line, the more it looked like the curve of a question mark.
The Long Summer Tour
ONCE HE OPENED HIS OFFICE at 645 Broadway in Albany in the summer of 1879, everything seemed to fall easily into place. When he wasn’t teaching the girls at the Albany Academy to say “Regardez cette jolie oiseau dans le ciel,” he was at his desk reading his Baedekers, designing itineraries, and composing advertisements. He listed all foreseeable expenses and rehearsed train and steamer schedules. Soon he was making notes for a practical tourist guide to offer by mail order, writing essays about tourist sights for local newspapers, and giving lectures to community organizations about the joys of travel.
The American Bureau of Foreign Travel—sole agency for De Potter’s European Tours—was one of many similar businesses in the region, and it could easily have been one of the casualties of the growing competition. But he distinguished his enterprise in two ways: he put the emphasis on luxury travel, and he gave his tours a more pronounced educational component than his rivals did, even going so far as to include with his offerings a three-week program of courses in language and culture at De Potter’s Language Institute in Paris, which he billed as a finishing school for American girls.
He identified himself as a doctor of letters, born and raised in Europe, with degrees from universities in France and Italy. By the age of twenty-six, he could claim fluency in nine languages. He had already traveled widely and knew how to flatter the managers of the world’s finest hotels. He had extensive reference books on more subjects than he could count. Knowledge was his form of magic, and he aimed to awe his customers by putting his erudition on display.