De Potter's Grand Tour

by Joanna Scott

  She began by repeating the same itineraries she’d followed with her husband—the Annual Vacation Tour through Italy and the Long Spring Tour across Germany and the Tyrol. When Victor was in school, she would invite one of her nieces or a friend to accompany her, and she would take charge of all the arrangements. In summer she traveled with Victor. Occasionally on shorter trips she traveled alone. Wherever she went, she tried to keep an extensive record in her diary, packing as much as possible into each entry. She wanted to be sure she included information she’d missed in the hurried entries she’d made when she was younger.

  She traveled confidently, her Baedeker in hand and her diary in her purse. She recorded, “Wyndcliffe outside of Wye is 970 ft-high,” the roses in Blenheim were arranged “in segments of colors, surrounded by arbor,” the tapestry in St. Michael’s Cathedral in Coventry “represents King Henry VI kneeling, courtiers behind.” Her lettering grew minute as she tried to squeeze in more on each page. She doubled the number of words she fit on a line, but her chronicle increasingly struck her as inadequate. Each day she added to her experiences, and each evening she added to her diary, but somehow the two diverged.

  Recognizing that she’d fallen out of the habit of saying anything about her emotions, she tried to write about her grief, but the familiar words were losing their meaning—she’d written the same thing too many times. She didn’t attempt to describe what she felt when she entered a hotel where she used to stay with her husband or looked at a painting they’d admired together. Instead she expressed disgust at herself for spending so much in stores. “I ought to reform,” she wrote, then went on to insist that she did not regret buying new boots and a fur coat. She expressed nervousness about traveling to Holland, which was in the midst of a cholera outbreak, but then didn’t mention cholera again. On her return to New York from a trip to Europe in 1909, she referred to “an undercurrent of thought, anguish, almost despair,” but in the same entry she expressed delight at the ease of the trip and described it as “perfect” and “most comfortable.”

  Inevitably, as she began to unpack her trunk in whatever apartment in New York she’d rented for the season and unwrapped the souvenirs she’d purchased—a silver crucifix from Rome, a handkerchief box from Palma de Majorca, a set of albumen prints from Tunisia—she’d feel a bitter disappointment, as if she’d spent the three months trying to reach a place that turned out to be a chimera. Yet she could be sure that just as inevitably her disappointment would pass with a good night’s rest, and by the next morning she was already paging through travel brochures and thinking about where she wanted to go next.

  In March 1909 she took her first trip to Bermuda, sailing with a friend from her childhood, Mary Rowley, on the SS Mohke. She wrote to Victor in Asheville that the roads in Bermuda were a slippery macadam, and she’d nearly fallen more than once. She told him that they must return together someday so he could see the rock formation that had been shaped by the wind and the sea to resemble a grand cathedral.

  By the time he’d graduated from the Asheville School, Victor’s confidence as a traveler began to take a different shape from his mother’s. Where Aimée always stuck to the itinerary she’d carefully planned before leaving the United States, Victor liked the freedom to extend a stay when he was enjoying himself, to cut it short when he was bored, or to take a side trip on the spur of the moment. For a period of several weeks in 1911, his mother lost track of him while they were traveling in Europe. He’d gone off to explore the Dalmatian coast on his own and was supposed to meet his mother at the station in Brussels, but he didn’t appear. Over the next few weeks she received scattered messages from him at her hotel. She grew so anxious that the entries in her diary began to echo the entries from the period following Armand’s disappearance: “Am almost frantic ’tho outwardly calm. I fear great trouble.” On the sixteenth of September, she went to Melle to visit her sister-in-law Leonie and visit the grave of Armand’s brother, who had died from a stroke the previous year. She found her son sitting in Leonie’s kitchen sipping tea. He said he’d met some boys on a train and they’d gone on a whim to Dunkirk. He apologized for worrying his mother and presented her with a lace shawl he’d bought in Brussels. He promised never to go off like that again.

  She attributed her son’s erratic behavior to his “nervous condition,” assuming that he’d inherited a minor version of the same ailment that had destroyed his father. Yet the difference was that Victor acted irrationally without provocation. She wrote in the secrecy of her diary that she wished he could have been “a more normal creature” and put on “a better front.” She called him her “poor lad” and a “strange compound,” wondering if she’d ever understand him.

  They had planned to spend the winter of 1911–12 in Europe, but Victor decided one day that he had to return to the United States, for reasons he wouldn’t explain. They sailed from Antwerp for New York on September 30, setting out on a night with high winds and rain. “So ends my trip,” Aimée wrote in her diary, “charming at first; terrible anxieties at last.”

  She complained about her rheumatism and gout. Even though her savings were considerable enough that she and Victor could live off the interest, she worried about paying her bills. But still she pressed on with her travels the following year, from Lisbon to Biarritz, from Biarritz up into the Pyrenees, then to Grenoble, Geneva, Venice, Montenegro, and Trieste, where, on a November day in 1913, she awaited the arrival of Victor, who had gone off to Berlin.

  Alone in her hotel room, she was packing her trunk and came across a cloth pouch containing a perfectly formed conch she’d found on the beach in Biarritz. She held it up to her ear to hear the rush of the surf. Then she opened her diary and wrote, “Fine warm day.” She paused, reflecting on the sights she’d seen, but when she failed to remember the name of the chapel in the cathedral in Trieste, she wrote instead, “Slept after lunch & watched beautiful sunset sea rosy & horizon shading into pale blue.” She stopped to open and close her stiff fingers for a moment, then added, “My heart is full of gratitude for all I have and for all I am allowed to see of this beautiful world.”

  * * *

  Aimée had an intrepid determination to see as much of this beautiful world as she could, though as time went on she worried that she was only drifting and longed for a permanent home. At the Hôtel d’Angleterre in Paris in the fall of 1914, she wrote that she would always be in love with France and was almost ready to settle there again. But by then France was at war.

  The war, in Aimée’s words, “poisoned all existence.” About the German occupation of Belgium, she would say, “It almost reconciles me to Armand’s death—for he would have been so furious and heartbroken over this war and the fate of his country.” Instead of taking long walks through the countryside, she spent her days working at a Red Cross station in Paris and her evenings talking with other English and American tourists, all of them “waiting here for some decisive event, as it is very uncomfortable now to go home.”

  But Aimée and Victor did manage to make it back to America. In early May 1915, they traveled by train from France to Italy, and one week after the sinking of the Lusitania, they boarded the Principe di Udine in Genoa, sailing first to Naples before heading for New York.

  At sea, the Marconi telegraph delivered a report about fighting in Trieste. When the news was conveyed to the passengers, an Italian woman seated at the next table burst into tears. On May 24, the ship started pitching unexpectedly and struck a wave, and Aimée jumped from her chair with a shout. That same day she recorded in her diary that the Marconi was reporting disturbances on the Austrian front. The next day the captain announced that war had formally been declared against Austria. Airplanes were over Venice, and the Austrian fleet was bombarding the Italian navy on the Adriatic.

  The Principe di Udine reached the Jersey City dock safely, and Aimée and Victor booked rooms at the Murray Hill Hotel. Through the months that followed, Aimée tried to make a home for herself in a series of rented roo
ms. She went regularly to the opera, to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for Sunday service, to art galleries, and lectures at the Brooklyn Women’s Luncheon. She complained about gray old age and her gouty fingers. She worried about friends in Europe and reported on the deaths of an entire family she’d met through Leonie—the parents and two children had been killed by chlorine gas the wind carried through the open windows of their home in Ypres.

  Victor spent several months in Florida, where he bought land and then sold it at a loss. He tried to enlist in the army but was rejected for poor vision. He came home to New York and announced that he was going to train to be a deacon but soon gave that idea up. He enrolled in Teachers College but never attended classes. He claimed he wasn’t feeling well and needed more time to decide on a profession. Soon he really did fall ill with bronchitis and for two weeks didn’t leave his mother’s apartment. When he recovered, he announced that he had decided to study law and would apply to school in the fall. Until then, he would keep his mother company, he said. When she decided to move to the Beckwith family house in Tivoli, he went with her.

  * * *

  She missed her travels, but shortly after moving to the country, she reported proudly that she was growing stout. She spent the days stemming gooseberries for jam, canning corn and tomatoes and pears, driving around with friends and family. Though she would write about her life in America, “Certainly a lovely country full of peace. Why am I not at home in it?,” and complain about “the incapables,” as she called the family members she was supporting, she had no desire to return to the city.

  She didn’t record the date when she made the offer on the old Moore house, but on September 25, she drove to Upper Red Hook with her friend Mary Rowley and walked along the boundary of her new purchase. The daughter of the owners showed her the garden, which Aimée hoped to improve. The house, a warreny, old farmhouse with tin ceilings, stood on a hilltop, with a view of the distant Catskills. She named it the Ridge and was eager to get to work. She didn’t care that Mary Rowley didn’t seem to like her purchase. Aimée looked forward to making the Ridge her home. “Think it will interest me,” she wrote in her diary.

  By October she was setting up stakes to indicate her property and looking out at the mountains, “superb with color,” from her back porch. She lived there with Victor, Leila, and Gertrude, who liked to get drunk at night and chatter about her happy memories of Cannes. Aimée would hardly listen, she was so worn-out from her work in the garden during the day. She planted bulbs, cut back the hedge, and cleared out the briar thickets that had grown up around the pond. The next spring she hired a gardener and his wife, the Donnerlys. The first thing she had Mr. Donnerly do was build a small grass terrace in back of the house. She bought clay pots to put around the perimeter of the terrace, and she filled them with hardy carnations.

  Jobs were difficult to come by in the area, but Victor finally found work at National Tailor for seven dollars a week. “A rather poor result of so many years of culture & travel,” Aimée complained, “but it may be a good beginning.”

  Meanwhile, she kept her own chronicle of the war, reporting, “The Allies are slowly gaining ground in the Somme, and Greek affairs are in chaos.” She thought of the old friends who now “bedecked cemeteries in France & Italy.” At the same time, she wanted it to be known that the flowers in the Shakespeare Garden in New York’s Central Park were still in bloom.

  Victor gave up his job at National Tailor after less than two weeks, but he reported to his mother that he was happy after his experience of manual labor. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be a lawyer anymore; he said he wanted to sample different jobs before committing himself to a profession. Aimée’s frustration at his aimlessness was offset by her relief that he seemed less agitated since they’d moved to the country. He’d begun courting a girl, Eleanor Meade, the daughter of Reverend Meade, and had hinted about the possibility of marriage. Later in the month he made a second attempt to enlist and proudly announced when he returned home that he’d been accepted into the ambulance corps.

  The week after Victor sailed for France, Aimée tried to distract herself from her worries about him and went alone into New York to a performance of Tosca. On December 13, she went with a Miss Coleman to the theater to see the one-legged Sarah Bernhardt, who performed the part of Cleopatra in a chair. “Still the greatest actress living, charm radiates from her,” Aimée reported.

  It wasn’t until nearly a year later when Aimée could write, “The armistice has been signed and Peace Conference is to meet in mid December. Wilson expects to sail Dec. 3rd. Last Thanksgiving we were so sad over the Italian retreat, and now we are so glad over the victory.… Germany is beaten & humiliated, after four years & four months of terrible fighting & destruction. King Albert has returned to his capital amid wild enthusiasm. Now comes the difficult task of making peace.”

  Through the years her garden grew lusher, her house more cluttered. She had a memorial erected for her husband in the cemetery of St. John’s Church—a stone surmounted by a Celtic cross, which her friend Mr. Emerson, a member of the local Masonic lodge, had told her was fitting for a man who would have been inducted into the brotherhood if he’d lived.

  Her son came home from the war and married his sweetheart, Eleanor. Soon there was a granddaughter to care for—

  And then a second granddaughter—

  Across the extended family, there were births and deaths and marriages. Gertrude married Dr. Cookingham after he prescribed whiskey for her sore throat. The Cookinghams became known as the town drunks, but Aimée continued to watch over them, and over Victor and Eleanor, who brought out in each other a giddy childishness to such a degree that sometimes they forgot they had their own children to care for. It was their grandmother who made sure the girls’ clothes were properly laundered and their shoes were shined for church. She shampooed and brushed their hair and tutored them in French. When they outgrew the schoolhouse down the road, she paid their tuition at boarding school. When she went abroad, she left the Ridge open for Victor and his family and paid the Donnerlys to attend to their needs.

  * * *

  She returned to Europe in 1920, and twice more in 1923—in April and again in October. On the second trip in 1923, she traveled with Mary Rowley, and they stopped in Cannes and stayed for three days in a small hotel on the rue de Fréjus. Since Mary complained about too much exertion, they avoided the hills and spent their time strolling along la Croisette, wandering through the flower markets and shopping for hats and gloves. On her own early one morning, Aimée walked up the avenue de Vallauris, all the way to the gate of Grand Bois.

  From the street she could see the tall peaks of the cypresses François had planted in 1904. She noticed that the wisteria vine that trailed the top of the wall had died. She wondered if the house itself had been kept up, but the tall metal gate blocked her view. Though she hadn’t planned to, she rang the bell.

  The backfire of an auto rounding the curve up the hill startled her, and she huddled against the gate as the driver raced past. When the street was empty again, she strained to hear some sign of life coming from the yard. For no reason, she opened her purse and snapped it shut before catching sight of a gaunt black cat that walked slowly beside the wall opposite, dragging one of its hind legs. She remembered watching a black cat at the Villa Fiorentina when she’d gone with Gertrude to climb the clock tower. The idea that the old cat across the street might have been the same cat she’d seen twenty years ago suddenly made her feel that she’d been all wrong in her estimation of time, and the distant past was only as recent as yesterday. She became nervous at the thought that the servants who’d worked for her might still be at Grand Bois, employed by the current owners. How plain and worn she would look to them, an old woman in her untrimmed straw hat and brown coat.

  She was relieved that no one came to the gate and she could slip away without having to explain herself. But just in case the driver who’d passed by earlier reported that he’d seen
a stranger idling on the street, she dropped a calling card into the mailbox to prove that she had nothing to hide.

  * * *

  At times she saw men who reminded her of her husband. In 1929, she sailed with Gertrude through the Panama Canal and up to Los Angeles. Walking out from her hotel one morning before Gertrude woke, she saw a man crossing the street who not only looked like Armand but was holding the same kind of mahogany walking stick he liked to use. He was nothing like what Armand would have been by then—his hair was hardly gray, and he walked with the firm step of a younger man. Yet she had to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from calling out to him. Then in 1930, she sailed with her niece Lilly on the RMS Aurania to Le Havre and spent the next four months traveling through Italy and Eastern Europe and up to England, and when they were at La Scala in Milan for a performance of Siegfried conducted by Wagner’s son, she saw an older man in a box across the theater, with glasses identical to Armand’s, and the same cut to his beard. He was with strangers, and the group left at intermission and didn’t return.

  Nineteen thirty was the same year that Aimée, back in America, commissioned the painter Wilfred S. Conroy to paint a portrait of her husband based on a set of photographs. She directed Conroy on all the details, from the suit Armand would be wearing to the book he would be shown holding and the map of the world behind him. For the back of the canvas, Aimée gave Conroy a biographical narrative to write out in pen.

  She described Armand as the “grandson of Louis de Potter, one of the 3 regents of Belgium.” She listed her husband’s honors, the date of their wedding, and Victor’s birthday. She said that Armand had been born in the “Château d’Elseghem” in Belgium. She called him a “World Traveler.”

  When Conroy delivered the painting in December, Aimée had it hung prominently above the fireplace in the dining room. She was pleased with the result and unconcerned that the biographical information on the back of the painting didn’t match the facts in the obituary she’d written for her husband years ago. She could tolerate inconsistencies in the story, as long as the portrait showed Armand as he would have wanted to be remembered.