by Joanna Scott
* * *
She took her last trip abroad in the spring of 1931 with Lilly. On April 21, she recorded that the Judas trees and wisteria were in bloom in Florence, and that she went to the American Church for Sunday service. Afterward, as she was holding out her glass to be filled with wine at the reception in the courtyard, she found herself standing next to the painter Wilfred Conroy. He kissed her hand, and the bristle of his silver beard against her skin left her speechless and confused. Handsome, suave Mr. Conroy, who knew how to please a patron. And she an old woman who, for an instant, was young again.
She sailed from Genoa at sunset on April 25. The next day they stopped in Marseille but had docked so far from the center of the city that Aimée and her niece decided to stay on the ship. “Left Port of M. at 5:30, alas!” she wrote in her diary. They had such a rough passage home that Aimée was forced to stay in bed for two days. It was the first time she’d ever suffered from seasickness, and she lay awake through the night listening to the crash of the surf against the ship’s hull. She couldn’t stop imagining the horror of being sucked below the surface of the waves. She knew she would never travel abroad again.
Back at the Ridge, she planted hyacinths and rosebushes and carnations. She had a raised porch built behind the kitchen so she could sit outside with Victor and Eleanor and watch the sunset. The granddaughters grew strong in the country air when they came home for the summer, and friends and family could always count on Aimée to provide them with a good meal. All the while, until the Ridge was sold and Aimée’s belongings were carted away, Armand de Potter looked out from his portrait at the life he was missing.
* * *
She is left with the task of occupying herself in ways that won’t strike her as futile when she thinks back on the day. She strives to make herself useful, and when she is satisfied that the needs of others have been met, she attends to herself. She still enjoys the thrill of the opera, the colors of a sunset, the taste of bonbons. She welcomes every opportunity to put on magic-lantern shows for her friends and lead them around the world without ever leaving her parlor. She has never lost her passion for artistic expression. And though she is too old to travel abroad, she is not too old to travel from the first page of a book to the last.
She has always found refuge in reading and has made a point of recording the title of every book she has read over the last three decades, fifty or more a year. These days she reads more avidly than ever. Having finished Lorna Doone, she looks around for something new. But it seems she has read all the other books in the house. Her gaze settles on the steamer trunk at the foot of her bed, where, below the piles of legal documents and loose photographs and the rest of the papers she’d brought from France, she has stored her old diaries.
It strikes her as strange that though she has chronicled her life going on fifty years, never before has she had the urge to read what she has written. She removes the stack and opens the earliest volume. Turning the brittle pages, she is surprised to see how her handwriting has changed, and that the entries grow longer with each passing year.
She brings the diary downstairs to the parlor, where the light is better, and begins with the first entry, reading through one year after another. She is fascinated but not dismayed to discover that she has forgotten so much. Is she really the same woman who celebrated Easter 1889 in Athens and walked up to the Acropolis with her husband? Who spent a “most interesting day viewing the cisterns of Carthage” with Victor and Armand in 1896? Who once wrote on her anniversary in 1900, in an apartment on 97 rue de la Pompe in Paris, “In afternoon we went to Exp. and up the Trocadéro tower, then to tea at Élysée Palace Hotel, saw King Leopold come in. In evening at dinner we ordered St. Honoré and champagne. M. Guerrier got up and improvised a poem and there was much gaiety and good humor. Armand gave me a gold watch charm”?
Ever since Gertrude read one of her diaries in the spring of 1906, Aimée has kept them hidden away. But now, so many years later, on a winter’s day in Upper Red Hook, she’s not afraid to page through her diary in front of the children while they play Chinese checkers on the floor at her feet. They will probably assume that she is reading a novel from her library.
It might as well be a novel. She becomes so absorbed that she goes on reading through most of the night, long after the girls have gone to bed. She nods off for a short time, but her dreams get all mixed up with the experiences she was just reading about, and she can’t tell them apart. At times she isn’t sure whether she’s awake or asleep.
She fetches the next diary from the stack, and for the first time since she wrote the entries, she reads through the period from 1903 to 1905, after they had settled in the Villa du Grand Bois. She reads about the weather, her plans for the garden, her new dresses and hats. She reads about their walks and teas and visits with friends. She reads about the last weeks she spent with her husband.
As she reads, she thinks about how she came to know Armand first by observing him from across a classroom, next from across a tea table, then intimately, as his wife. But she also came to know him in other ways after he was gone, by reading his last letters, then examining his papers and paying the debts he left behind. She continued to discover new things about him when she paged through the travel albums, packed up the curios in the gilt cabinet, and made a full inventory of the De Potter Collection. Which is why she can say to herself that she knows him better than he ever knew himself. She knows who he was beyond the man he pretended to be. She knows his true history and disguises, his desires, his failings. She knows him in his irrepressible potential. And after all these years she is confident that she knows him best for his capacity to love her. He was her darling, her sweetheart: Never leave me, she should have told him when she had a chance. Too late. He was gone, with the crash and suck of a wave, depriving her of her main purpose in life for no good reason.
The same man who had drawn from her a promise that would never be broken—to love him for the rest of her life—left behind an emptiness in his place. She has abided by her promise and continued to love him, yet to do that she has had to love an absence and so must feel the stab of loss all over again whenever she thinks of him, year after year, all the while hiding the truth of the manner of his death from the world.
June 11, 1906. Anniversary of that awful day. Damp & warm. Went to town to do errands in a.m. in p.m. worked at study. Insurance Co. refuse to pay without bond. Am almost glad as if there was still hope. Last night was troubled but today am calm as if turned to stone. Showery.
June 11, 1907. The anniversary. I wanted to pass the day quietly. It is after nine & the first moment to myself. Worked all day getting library in order. Was taking tea in garden when Manques arrived, stayed till 6:30. 2 years of increasing pain & regret. A perfect summer day.
June 11, 1908. In p.m. met Victor at Jersey City. Find him informed, more manly. Sent him to call on Miss C. This day finishes 3 years since my love left me & still my heart is bleeding.
If he had foreseen that thirty years later the wound of his death would be as fresh as ever, no matter if the weather was perfect or Victor was manly, he wouldn’t have hurled himself into the sea. But he must have foreseen it. His love for her would have made the consequences all too available to his perception, even amid the chaos of his unreason. Then how could he have chosen the ending that would hurt her more than any other?
On the evening Armand stood at the rail of the Regele Carol looking out into the darkness, Aimée was absorbed by a book in her hotel room in Lausanne. She doesn’t need her notes to jog her memory of that night. She remembers on her own, without the help of her diary, staying up late to follow the adventures of a man and his time machine, completely ignorant that her husband was readying himself for a fate he had decided was inevitable. At some point, perhaps as she turned a page, he must have started to climb over the rail to the outside lip of the deck. When she paused and looked up from her book to rest her eyes, he might have paused, too.
She pauses now,
for an interval long enough to enable her to come up with an idea, as striking and urgent as if it had come to her thirty years ago, when she was reading her book about time travel and her darling was preparing to enact his desperate sacrifice on behalf of his wife and son. The idea is born out of her abrupt certainty that the scenario as she’d been imagining it for thirty years made no sense. Once, her drunken niece Gertrude had said just that. Aimée is ready to admit at long last that her niece had been right, and to imagine the very possibility she’d refused to credit.
Her husband was too practiced in self-invention not to have considered the obvious alternative to the fatal action he’d been planning when he boarded the Regele Carol in Constantinople. He would have ruled it out as a coward’s choice and an untenable betrayal. He was a gentleman. Gentlemen do not run away from their loved ones and hide in a foreign land. But he also had an insatiable desire to keep seeing more of the world. To travel is to live—and he wasn’t finished traveling. She knew that about him, and he knew that she knew it. So there must have been a moment when he thought of his wife and in that instant, with his future hanging in the balance, was able to predict what she would have said to him if she’d been given the chance.
It has taken her this long to understand what her husband needed to hear, not just the obvious protest—Stop, do not throw yourself into the sea!—but the permission that would offer him the only form of release he would have been able to accept: My love, there is another way to disappear.… As he conjured her in the midst of his misguided effort to protect her, she conjures him now to communicate to him that she would be willing to tolerate a magnificent deception devised for the sake of a new beginning, opening up the possibility, however faint, of his return.
She pictures him perched on the rail of the Regele Carol, his head cocked as he listens, her voice reaching him with such magical clarity that she might as well be standing beside him, speaking across the warp of space and time, insisting, Life is the more daring option, giving him leave to start over again. After having spent decades studying the rules of courtesy as they’d been formulated in civilizations around the world, he will have to agree that a gentleman is never less than daring.
* * *
When she finally looks up from the diary, the room is full of sunlight. She can’t find her watch and isn’t sure of the time, but she estimates from the shadows crisscrossing the floor and the misty clouds of melted frost on the windows that it is already midmorning.
Down in the yard, the Donnerlys’ dog, General Grant, is barking with the steady rhythm of a church bell, as though it is his job to wake her. She is awake, thank you, and what a splendid day it is, Christmas Day in Upper Red Hook! She can smell the grease from the bacon and eggs Mrs. Donnerly fried earlier for the children, who probably were awake before dawn. They will be mad with impatience, waiting for their grandmother to appear so they can open their presents.
But first there is church to attend, then telephone calls to make. She remembers that her brother Tom is coming over—with Victor and Eleanor and the children, that will make six at the table. Mrs. Donnerly will serve dinner before she leaves to have dinner with her own family. Aimée will wash the dishes herself after Tom leaves. She’ll take a long bath before she opens her diary, the clothbound one she bought in Paris after discovering that the leather diaries she’d used for years were no longer being manufactured.
She’ll write, “Sunny. I went to church with Eleanor & Victor as Mr. Huntington stopped for us. On return opened parlor door & lit up glittering Christmas tree. Lots of presents for children & several for self. My family & Tom were only ones at dinner of goose and mince pie. Children very excited.”
Then, because she suspects she won’t have time to fill in the entries for the remainder of the month, she will decide that the volume is complete, and she’ll add it to the stack of the earlier diaries. Since no secret is worth the effort of keeping it if it isn’t eventually revealed, she won’t return the diaries to the bottom of the trunk, hiding them beneath the papers. She’ll nestle them on top, where they are sure to be found if anyone ever bothers to look.
PART EIGHT
Somewhere in Greece
THE REPRIEVE, he’d thought at the time, was entirely unexpected. He was committed to his fate. Yet it seems to him now that he’d been prepared for his plan to take a different turn, as if he’d somehow foreseen from the start that he would be granted permission to save himself. He can’t even summon a clear memory of the fear he must have felt as he straddled the rail of the Regele Carol. He doesn’t remember what the steward said to him, or what he said in reply. All he remembers is that his mind filled completely with the thought of the one who knows him best in the world. For her sake, he was compelled to climb down from the rail.
Newly beardless, in a black jacket with his fedora pulled low, he melts away from the gangway in the direction of the chain-link fence that separates the customs area from the wharf, aiming for an opening he’d taken note of when he’d traveled through Piraeus earlier in the week. He tucks his walking stick under his arm and keeps his eyes averted, pretending to be fascinated by something on the ground ahead of him. As officials call out orders in Greek, causing packs of baffled tourists to scramble toward the right, then left, then right again, he makes his way along the fence line until he comes to the opening. With a glance behind him to confirm that he hasn’t been followed, he slips through and continues hurriedly down the wharf away from the ship.
After having spent twenty-five years corralling tourists into the appropriate lines in ports around the world, earning favors with baksheesh and smooth talk, he is amazed at how easy it is to avoid the customs officials, as easy as it is to walk from one life into another. All he has to do is continue along the unmarked gravel path into the hills. No one tries to stop him. Two boys unknotting a fishing net don’t even look up when his shadow passes over them.
He walks through the barren fields and abandoned olive groves on the outskirts of the port, traverses a deserted churchyard, and continues for a mile along the path above the sea before circling back in the direction of Piraeus. He walks for hours. In midafternoon he finally reaches the Central Station, where, after helping himself to a long drink from the public fountain, he boards the third-class compartment of the electric train leaving for Athens. He sits as far to the rear as possible to be sure that the conductor won’t reach his seat, if he bothers to collect any tickets at all.
He disembarks as soon as the doors open, ahead of the other passengers, emerging like a puff from a smokestack onto the platform and a moment later reappearing across the busy street. He walks diagonally across the intersection and heads quickly down the avenue, as if to an appointment.
Farther along he passes a line of kiosks, and the smell of roasted nuts reminds him that he is hungry. This is one of the many problems he did not anticipate. Unused to traveling in such haphazard a fashion, he acts on impulse, reaching discreetly for a peach as he passes the bins of a grocer.
To think that he used to go to great lengths to warn others against the clever tricks of petty thieves and pickpockets, and now he has joined their ranks. He can’t believe he has come to this. He feels as if he were stuck in the romance he’d penned long ago, the one about the nobleman who flees from disgrace, dons a disguise, and lives out his years in exile. He would have expected the shame of it all to stun him into inertia. But there is one crucial difference: unlike his fictional counterpart, he intends to go home one day. He hasn’t abandoned Grand Bois forever; rather, he has taken the necessary action to preserve it for his wife and son, and his intention to join them there propels him forward. With every step he takes and every piece of fruit he steals, he is demonstrating a tenacity that would please his dear wife. He will be crafty and unscrupulous, never wandering from the route, however circuitous, that will lead back to the avenue de Vallauris in Cannes.
He is fortunate that no one sees him slip the peach into his hand. No one calls Stop, thief! as he
walks briskly up the boulevard. Unnoticed, he stops to eat his peach in a little park, in the shade of a monument to the Sacred Band. He watches the people wandering by—clerks coming from their offices at the National Bank, women wearing black mourning cloaks despite the heat, workmen pushing carts of gravel, and a pair of peddlers, who accost a party of British tourists, shaking ostrich feathers and strings of bells in their faces, offering them crucifixes and miniature clay models of the Parthenon.
He looks on as the tourists exchange money for trinkets, and the trades remind him of the one item he has kept from his previous life that he wishes to be rid of—the small bronze figure in the shape of Bacchus. He takes the piece from his pocket and approaches the peddlers. Only when both men turn their heads in his direction and he looks straight into their watery, red-rimmed eyes does he realize that he doesn’t register in their assessment. To them, he is not even another careless tourist they will use to their advantage. He is invisible. All they see is the treasure in his hand.
He trades the bronze for a silver spoon with a picture of the Acropolis on the finial—a crude souvenir, worth a fraction of the bronze, but he isn’t in the mood to bargain. At least it’s a start, he thinks to himself as he walks away.
He continues down to the rue Constantin. In the crowd outside the Peloponnesus railway station, he is singled out by a German couple asking for directions to their hotel. After showing them the route on their map, he sells them the souvenir spoon. He uses the money to buy himself a ticket, then boards the first train that is about to depart. He finds a seat in an otherwise empty compartment and closes his eyes.