De Potter's Grand Tour

by Joanna Scott

  In the event that the new trustees decide that my collection is cluttering their shelves, they should inform me promptly, and I will cover the expense of having it removed from the Museum. And do you want to know what I will do then? I will gather my little treasures into a heap and set them aflame, and I will invite the poor of the world to come and warm their hands at the bonfire. And then I will sweep the shards and ashes into the fine double coffin that I bought at your recommendation and drop it into the ocean somewhere between Sandy Hook and the Maldives. And you, dear Madame, will hear of it and know that you are to blame.

  For now, I am yours sincerely, Armand de Potter.

  He put stamps on the envelopes addressed to Professor Hilprecht and Edmond Gastineau and left them on the mail tray in the hall. Then he folded the letter to Mrs. Stevenson into quarters before ripping it into pieces and throwing it in the wastebasket.

  He spent some time organizing his papers, writing in page numbers on his essays, putting documents into appropriate folders. As he always did in preparation for a trip, he covered his desk with an embroidered satin runner, placed a bronze pedestal bowl on top, and arranged the drapery over the fireplace.

  As he stood in the doorway and surveyed the room one last time, the effect struck him as funereal. How terribly appropriate! murmured the demon who had taken up residence inside his mind, as if to suggest that Armand de Potter would never come home. But of course he was planning to return; he would be back in his beautiful home by August, God willing, and, with his family, he would stay there.

  He knew exactly what he had to do to protect Grand Bois and the remainder of his fortune. He was through with Sara Stevenson. Now that she was out of the picture, Armand needed someone of Hilprecht’s caliber to confirm the value of the De Potter Collection. He had no intention of waiting to hear what the new set of trustees thought of it. With Hilprecht’s help, he was going to put the entire collection on the auction block and earn back every penny he had spent on it—and then some.

  * * *

  Upstairs in his bedroom, he finished preparing for his trip, packing in the usual fashion, putting into his trunk:

  One summer suit, bought in Paris in 1901 on the rue de Rivoli

  One extra suit, broadcloth, bought last year in Nice

  One pair long johns

  One undershirt

  Linen for two weeks

  A black overcoat

  A toiletry bag with his shaving supplies, soap, and a toothbrush

  An extra pair of reading glasses

  A magnifying glass

  A leatherbound notebook containing his lectures

  The two pieces of his detachable walking stick

  One pair of kidskin gloves lined with silk

  His pipe and a pouch containing three ounces of tobacco

  Another pouch containing gold cuff links in the shape of the masks of comedy and tragedy

  A brown cardboard folder containing the appropriate maps

  The metal figurine with the broken shaft, bought in Damascus

  As he closed the lid and snapped the locks in place, he hummed a few measures of the first song that came to mind, “Aux armes, citoyens … Marchons! Marchons,” in an attempt to block the kind of thoughts that weren’t worth thinking. He carefully unfolded his leather Saint-Lanne money belt on top, exposing the side with his moniker in gold:

  ARMAND DE POTTER

  CANNES (A.M.)

  He tucked four hundred francs into the billfold. In an adjacent pocket he put his passport, folded into quarters. In another pocket he found a card for Valentin’s Parfumerie on the avenue de la Gare in Nice, where he had bought Aimée a present last Christmas. He tucked the card back into its slot in case he needed the address when he passed through Nice on his way home in July, and he inserted a recent photograph of Aimée and Victor. Finally, he filled the small pocket on the inside flap with a dozen copies of his calling card: Mr. P. L. Armand de Potter.

  The name on the card struck him as strangely inaccurate, as did the name embossed on his belt. Measuring the two names against each other, he had the distinct impression that he wasn’t fully known, even by his wife. Especially by his wife. No doubt that she loved him, and he loved her. But he had secrets: secret debts, secret ambitions, secret strategies for getting what he wanted.

  He was an expert at giving the impression that he was never disappointed and had grown so used to affecting an impenetrable superficiality that he’d forgotten there was more to him. His short-lived fits of anxiety were easily cured with a week of fresh air and water cures at a spa. His wife couldn’t be blamed for assuming that he was generally happy, since he had believed it for years, more than ever since they’d moved to Cannes. How could he not be happy here in their luxurious villa? They’d found a home at Grand Bois that suited them perfectly. It could only seem right that after wandering the world for twenty-five years, they had finally arrived in paradise.

  There was nothing to do but finish putting his things in order for the trip. The tour would do him good, he told himself. The scenery of Sicily and Greece would offer a soothing beauty. Most of all, he was eager to meet Hilprecht in Constantinople and persuade him to provide a comment that Armand might put in print when he was ready to sell his collection.

  He took a penknife to deepen the lettering of his name on the front plate of the trunk, a third variation: Pierre Louis Armand de Potter. He studied it for a moment, thinking how easy it was to substitute letters in a name, or to change it altogether. He scratched into the little space left at the edge of the plate, d’Elseghem. On one of the blank tags he kept in his bureau he wrote WANTED to indicate that the trunk should be delivered to his stateroom. And then he went to say good-night to his wife.

  PART SIX

  At Sea

  IT IS CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT on the Regele Carol. The last of the passengers have finally returned to their rooms, the stewards have stacked the deck chairs, and Armand is alone at the rail, searching the darkness in an effort to make out the coast of the nearest island. By his calculations, Lemnos should be a half mile off their starboard side, close enough to swim to if the steamer foundered. But he isn’t worried that the steamer will founder, not tonight, not with the sea perfectly calm, the sky starlit, the breeze barely strong enough to disperse the smoke from his pipe.

  He pictures his wife bundled in blankets in her hotel room in Lausanne, the window open a crack to let in the cool night air. In the morning she’ll ring for room service and enjoy her tea and brioche in bed. Later she will walk into town to shop with Victor, or maybe they’ll take a stroll along the Esplenade de Montbenon and have lunch on the terrace at La Grotte.

  If he’d had the foresight to recognize in the midst of his foolishness that his actions would lead him here, to the rail of the Regele Carol, he would have attempted to design a different outcome, including joining his wife and son tomorrow for lunch at La Grotte before boarding the train to return to Cannes. Instead he is compelled to stick to the original plan, to keep on leaning against the rail, to lean a little more and a little more, not far enough to fall, but far enough for his pencil to slip from his breast pocket and plummet into the boiling foam below.

  He feels a momentary pang but then reminds himself that he won’t be needing his pencil anymore. He won’t be needing much of anything where he’s going. He won’t need his pipe. He won’t need his buttermilk dress coat trimmed with silk lapels. He won’t even need his hat.

  He’s not sure which his wife will receive first: his last two letters or the official notice that he is missing at sea. He expects that she will weep for the appropriate period, perhaps even longer. But she is a resourceful woman, and sooner or later she will dry her eyes. After taking stock of her new circumstances, she will rebuild her life and watch over her son at Grand Bois.

  In the shorter of his last two letters to her, he included instructions on how to handle the estate. He couldn’t bring himself to warn her, however, that when she attempts to withdraw money fro
m the Crédit Lyonnais she will find the account has been closed, and then when she continues to the Société Générale, she will discover that their joint account contains far less than she thought and their fortune has shrunk to almost nothing. Divesting all their remaining assets won’t satisfy the creditors clamoring for payment. Only the sale of the De Potter Collection at its full value, along with the ample indemnity from his paid-up life insurance policy, will enable his wife and son to remain in their beloved home.

  He’d tucked the photograph of them into his pocket, and he takes it out now to examine it. Aimée with her funny topknot the size of an acorn. Victor with his melancholy eyes. Is it possible that he would never see them again? Why, it’s very possible! See how possible it is?

  He glances over his shoulder to check that the deck behind him is still empty. He looks toward the wall that hides the bridge from view to confirm once more that the quartermaster on watch can’t see him. Shadows moving below the light on the front deck catch his attention; he traces them up a pole to a pair of flags fluttering in the light wind. This, he tells himself, is as good a time as any to make his exit, and he would, he will … except that right then he hears a quick, muted thud that could have come from the interior of the ship or might signify that somewhere nearby a door has been opened and swung shut again.

  He looks around to see if he has company. A moment later he thinks he hears the same thud again, but it is fainter this time, and he wonders if he’d been mistaken. No one is in sight. Still, he is flustered.

  He takes a puff from his pipe to steady his nerves and looks down at the water. As he watches the white froth roll away from the hull into the night, breaking into patches and dissolving into the same wine-dark sea that the ancients sailed, the bitter thought comes to him that they might be passing over a sunken galley full of looted treasures.

  He is sorry to have created such a mess for his dear wife to clean up. That it has come to this and he must cause his family such anguish in order to protect their happiness is a reality as absurd as it is unavoidable. He is teetering above the ocean, about to fly away from his life on the presumption that he must take responsibility, he must make sure his creditors are paid, he must remove himself as the target of his enemies and keep his family from being turned out of their home—he can accomplish all this with one simple action, shattering the surface that hides death from human consciousness, subjecting himself to the cruelest agony because he must, he must … good God, he must pull himself together!

  He reaches for his pocket watch before remembering that he left it in the trunk in his room. He turns to see if the clock on the wooden pedestal inside the unlit dining room is visible through the window behind him. He can’t see the clock, but he does notice the steward and stewardess embracing near the funnel on the upper deck, locked in a kiss.

  When did they arrive? Everybody is supposed to be in bed by now. It is essential that his last act go unwitnessed. If the couple looks up just as he is throwing himself overboard, they will alert the crew and try to save him. Imagine being reeled back onto the ship, flopping and sputtering while passengers and crew gather round! Even if they don’t succeed in saving him, they will be asked for a full report of the incident, and their testimony would be enough proof that Armand de Potter’s death at sea wasn’t accidental.

  He wouldn’t have predicted that love would get in the way—love, with its impractical hope. Love is the reason he is standing here. How he loves his wife and son and wants only to protect them. How jealous he is of the young couple kissing on the upper deck.

  He could go to the back of the boat, where the couple wouldn’t be able to see him. But in truth he is relieved that they have intruded into the scene he has so carefully arranged. He is reassured by the evidence that the two young people are persisting in their devotion, despite all the obstacles the world has thrown in their way, and he doesn’t mind if he has to wait for them to get their fill of each other before he proceeds with his plan. On this journey he won’t miss a connection just because he is a little late. Keep kissing, he would like to urge the couple, kiss for as long as it pleases you. Though it’s unusual for him, the gentleman leaning against the rail of the Regele Carol is not in any hurry.

  Cannes to Boulogne

  THINGS ARE BECAUSE WE SAY THEY ARE. They were once or will turn out to have been. What might be this becomes that when expressed through a reasonably coherent sequence of words. Yet you can’t just declare that the moon has dropped from the sky into the pond and expect to be believed—or to believe everything that others tell you. By the time you’re fourteen, you should know better than to go running for your pitchfork in hopes of lifting the soggy moon from the water. Add to the normal eight years of formal education a record of travel unmatched by other boys your age, and you can be expected to demonstrate an advanced level of sophistication.

  Je ne veux pas décevoir.

  The challenge was to prove mastery by excelling in grammar and vocabulary and at the same time to develop an agile sense of skepticism, enabling him to differentiate between a true story and a false one.

  True: Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War.

  False: Your science teacher is a werewolf.

  True: Five times five is twenty-five.

  False: Your name is George.

  Skepticism, Victor had come to understand, is like a muscle—it needs to be exercised, tested, pushed beyond its limits with impossible affirmations so cleverly expressed they make it easy to forget they are lies. A boy must learn to stay alert and recognize a deception when he sees one. Proof is the key element in verifying any claim, and its absence is a sure signal to be suspicious. The world is in itself proof that God created it, as his Latin teacher, Father Roland, liked to remind him. But there is no proof that the world was created in seven days, according to Monsieur Pirette, his science teacher.

  Proof isn’t always easy to discern, and sometimes it could be contradictory—a lesson he remembered learning when they were visiting his mother’s family at the farmhouse in Tivoli, and they all piled into a wagon and rode to a cemetery, where, in the high grass at the top of the hill, they found the Beckwith family gravestones. One stone was lying flat, he remembered, but when his uncles tried to make it stand upright, it toppled right over again. Victor could read the name on the stone. He was told it marked the grave of his mother’s grandmother, but the name was the same as Maman’s name before she married Papa: AMY SUTHERLAND BECKWITH. By then he was old enough to understand that gravestones were proof that someone was dead. Why, then, was his mother’s name carved on a gravestone lying in the grass? Riding in the wagon away from the cemetery, he was quiet and didn’t tell anyone how he had the same feeling inside that he’d had when he’d sat on the rim of a bottomless well in the city of Carthage. The tombstone and the bottomless well were forms of proof that didn’t make sense, and he wanted to forget them but couldn’t.

  Victor craved proof in the months following his father’s disappearance: proof in the form of a bloated corpse found on a beach somewhere along the coast of Greece, proof in the form of a coffin. There wasn’t even a funeral to confirm that his father was dead. He could go into his mother’s bedroom on any given evening and find her crying—wasn’t this a form of proof? But then he remembered the rhyme he’d learned from his mother about little King Boggen who built a fine hall, pie crust and pastry crust, that was the wall. Wasn’t that just made up? Mothers especially were prone to be too trusting, and sometimes it took their skeptical sons to remind them that they shouldn’t believe everything they were told.

  That Papa would willingly leave his enviable life made no more sense than the overturned gravestone inscribed with his mother’s former name. And then Cousin Gertie saw Papa on the tram. Maman said it couldn’t have been Papa because if he was in Nice, he would have come to Cannes. Cousin Gertie was mistaken. Still, when the evidence was carefully examined, he had to agree with Gertie that his father was very much alive. If he wasn
’t on the tram in Nice, then he was somewhere else.

  “Maman, there’s someone in the garden! There he goes behind the shed—quick, tell François!”

  “Maman, look,” he said as they strolled along la Croisette, “doesn’t the man there look just like Papa? Could it be…?”

  Victor thought he saw Papa dressed in a sailor’s suit, smoking a cigarette at a café on the boulevard du Midi. He thought a Gypsy playing the accordion was Papa. Could that be Papa in the back pew at St. John’s? Or standing outside the gate of his school? There he was, with his back to Victor in the public urinal at the beach. Or there, at Victor’s bedroom window, with one eye swollen shut and the other like a cat’s eye in the dark, the gold iris nearly covered by the black disk of the pupil.

  “No, no, no! Make him go away!”

  * * *

  Aimée did what she could to persuade Victor that his father was gone forever. She read him comforting letters from family members and friends, she bought him a black mourning suit, she took him to church. But still the boy kept seeing his father everywhere, whether he wanted to or not.

  She was furious with Gertrude for infecting Victor’s imagination with her story about seeing her uncle on the tram in Nice. She decided it was time for Gertrude to return to her mother in Poughkeepsie. Gertrude pleaded to stay, but Aimée presented her with her steamer ticket the following week. “Now head upstairs and pack,” she said with a decisiveness that cowed her niece into obeying. And since she couldn’t make Armand go away, she decided that she and Victor would go away instead.