by Amanda Cross
As it turned out, however, once they had been seated in a family sort of restaurant where Nellie apparently felt comfortable, had ordered, and Kate had been served with a larger portion than she could reasonably eat in a week, Nellie seemed more inclined to ask questions than to answer them. Like Dorinda and, of course, Anne, Nellie was over sixty, but Kate could not easily escape the conviction that she was the youngest of them all. Having inherited her grandmother’s English coloring and skin, Nellie looked as though she could be any age at all, one age one minute, another the next. Dorinda, on the other hand, despite her unchanging features, had given the impression of welcoming the evidence of her years and the relief she found in no longer being young.
If Nellie was, to Kate’s relief, willing to talk, it soon became clear that Gabrielle was not the main topic of her conversation.
“I’ve spoken to Dorinda about you,” Nellie said. “I called her the other day. She seemed astonished to hear from me on the telephone and assumed a catastrophe. She and I are the generation who still think long-distance calls spell emergency. But I, of course, am used to it now, from my work. I asked her about you, in fact. I wanted to know more about you; for my own reasons. I hope you won’t feel I’ve got you here on false pretensions.”
“Not if we can also talk about Gabrielle,” Kate said. “Later if you like.”
“Of course. Dorinda said you were a detective, a private eye.”
“Wholly inaccurate,” Kate said with more emphasis than seemed warranted. “Sorry to be so downright about it, but I’m not really a detective and certainly not a private investigator. For one thing, they get paid.”
“I am willing to pay,” Nellie said, to Kate’s horror. Was not she, after all, the one who was supposed to be asking the questions, the one who had crossed the ocean in considerable discomfort as was the condition of air travel these days, the one forced to the recontemplation of Rousseau and Calvin and silently flushing toilets? “Nellie,” Kate said, calling on all her patience. “I don’t want money, I don’t take money, except as a salary from a university for the performance of clearly defined academic duties. I had hoped,” she added as a way of bringing the conversation around to Gabrielle, “to make some money, a modest amount, from a biography of your grandmother, but otherwise I am totally and forever an amateur.”
“But you have solved crimes; even murder, no?”
Kate noticed that Nellie, perfect in so many languages, occasionally permitted herself a foreign intonation. “Not exactly,” Kate said. “That is, yes, but with reservations.”
“Reservations?” Nellie was clearly puzzled.
“A joke,” Kate said. “Woody Allen’s. His response when he was asked if he was Jewish.”
“I see,” said Nellie, who clearly didn’t. “You detect when the spirit moves you.”
“More or less. But why don’t we talk about you; you can hardly have expected me to fly all the way from New York to Geneva to talk about myself.”
“I’ll offer a trade,” Nellie said.
“A trade?” Kate had reached, she realized, the moment in certain conversations when she found herself merely echoing the words of her interlocutor. It was evidence of unhappiness.
“Let us just chatter,” Nellie said. “I’m being a poor hostess, harrying you. Have you ever been to Geneva before?”
“Once,” Kate said. “Perhaps after dinner we can go and look at the lake with Rousseau in the middle; I remember that. Is it safe at this time to walk there?”
“Switzerland is nowhere as safe as it was,” Nellie said, “but it is still safer than most places.”
“How long have you been working in Geneva?” Kate asked, and by mutual agreement they talked of current events and current occupations.
When Nellie had paid the bill, and they had left, wandering, Kate assumed, toward the Rousseau lake, Nellie began to talk earnestly, as though walking loosened her inhibitions. “You must wonder what I could possibly want to trade, or have to trade for that matter,” she began.
“Rather,” Kate said.
“I’m sorry about the letters, about having burned them. That is, to be honest, I’m sorry for you, but I still feel certain I did the right thing. Grandma was a very private person; she would have hated her letters being read years later by total strangers whose only interest was in Poppop. You have to believe me, she really would have minded.”
“I believe you. That is hardly the question. People who burn letters are in some ways less difficult to understand than those who preserve them. I know a poet whose poetry I don’t happen to admire who saves carbons of all his letters, convinced someone will want to do a biography of him; the fact is, that very impulse to save copies of his letters is identical with his failure as a poet.”
“Grandma was not a poet, and she did not keep carbons.”
“You must forgive me if I tend to wander off in all directions,” Kate said. “My point was that letters may be inversely important to the tendency to burn them.”
“Yes,” Nellie said, “I understand that. You are a very perceptive person.”
Kate resisted her usual inclination to deny compliments. “My point really is that your grandmother was probably, almost certainly, a more interesting person than anyone had thought; I sometimes suspect more interesting, even, than her famous husband. Since women in the past have a dreadful tendency to disappear into a cloud of anonymity and silence, one does feel impelled in some cases, like this one, to recover their voices and their stories.”
“But, at times their stories are other people’s stories too—ones they may not have any right to tell, no?”
“Why? Should not everyone have a right?” Kate asked. “Emmanuel Foxx told his story, and what he thought of as hers into the bargain. It’s time we heard her story, don’t you agree?”
“I wasn’t thinking of Poppop,” Nellie said. “I don’t care what story they tell about him. I was thinking of Emile.”
“Emile?” Kate asked, staring out at the statue of Rousseau, or rather where she knew it to be on the island, wondering what his famous book had to do with all this. And then she remembered. “Emile. The son. Your father,” she heard herself saying like an actor in a badly written play. “I’m sorry,” she added. “I seemed to have forgotten for a moment.”
“Everyone forgot him,” Nellie said. “That’s the whole point; don’t you see?”
“Well,” Kate said, “not exactly.” It was amazing, really, how little Emile figured in all the biographical accounts, despite Foxx’s joy at his birth. Even Anne seemed to have had to be reminded, when buying her nightwear, who he was. There is surely nothing worse than being the son of a famous father.
“I’ll walk you back to your hotel,” Nellie said, turning all the way around and setting off with Kate in the opposite direction. “You must be tired; jet lag and all that; they say your body gets out of its natural rhythms. Shall we talk tomorrow?”
“I have little else to do here,” Kate said. “Nothing, really. I’ll be happy to talk for as long as you like. I take it you really have burned the letters?”
“Yes,” Nellie said; “I burned them. All of them I could find.”
Kate wanted to ask her if she had read Anne’s memoir; if Gabrielle had talked to Nellie about those papers. If Nellie was interested in the money that might be earned through them. All those questions had better wait for tomorrow.
“Do you work all day?” Kate asked.
“I shall take the afternoon off. We shall go sightseeing and talk. It is easier to talk when sightseeing, is it not?”
Not, Kate would have liked to say; definitely not. But the asker of questions, whether professional or amateur or, as in this case, an awkward combination of both, must let the answerer choose the ambience. Unless of course one were le Carré’s Smiley and could have people swept up off pavements and delivered to secret houses where th
ey were questioned and confined and even beaten up if they didn’t properly respond. No wonder all the interesting people joined the secret service, Kate thought. In books, anyway. She had an idea though that Smiley was the exception, and that most people in the secret service of any country were no nearer to the truth than the rest of us.
Kate had great difficulty falling asleep: strange bed, strange country, strange situation. Smiley never got much sleep either. Hush, hush, she said to herself, whisper who dares. Le Carré, of course, knew Christopher Robin’s England was as dead as Kate’s WASP America, and a good thing too. But who is there who does not occasionally recall, even with irony, those simpler times? With the secret service, she thought, it is Russia and the United States; with me it is men and women, and who knows which shall first achieve reconciliation?
At which point, happily, she slept.
Nellie and Kate began their afternoon lunching at an outdoor café watching the passing scene. At least, they were supposed to be watching it, but by the end of the lunch Kate could not have told you if a herd of elephants had passed. As it happened, Kate’s gaze was fixed on Nellie as though she expected her to undergo some fundamental transformation which, in a sense, she was in the process of doing.
“Emile didn’t die during the war,” Nellie said.
Kate stared at her. This woman is over sixty, she had to keep reminding herself Somehow, after reading Anne’s memoir, the three of them remained young to her. Staring at Nellie, who was certainly not an adolescent, in no way shook that conviction. Perhaps, Kate thought, it is because Dorinda seems to me, and in a way Nellie too, as though they were not winding down their lives but starting them over; well, not over, exactly, but going off on a new tack. Dorinda had as much as said so. And yet, Kate thought, doing some fast arithmetic in her head, Emile must be eighty-three if he’s a day, supposing he is living. A large suppose.
“Has anyone seen him lately?” Kate asked.
“Not lately,” Nellie said. “Emile died a few years ago. But I saw him more than ten years after he disappeared. When I went to London to see Gabrielle, after Dorinda’s wedding.”
“Did you know he was alive before you heard from him?”
“None of us knew anything for sure. He had gone off to join the Resistance, about the time I left for America. That was what we all assumed or were led to assume. Gabrielle had a letter or two from him just after he left—yes, I burned those too—and in 1942 Poppop died. Then, sometime in 1944 Gabrielle heard from a man who said he had been in the Resistance with Emile; he said that Emile had died in a raid on a farm where he was hiding. The letter writer added that he had a few of Emile’s belongings, and would return them to Gabrielle or, if he did not survive, see that they were returned after the war. He did survive and after the war Gabrielle received a package with Emile’s watch in it, and a picture of me as a baby he used to carry with him, and a few other things. I imagine Emile got rid of everything that reminded him of who he was and the life he had lived.”
Kate pondered this. “Is there any evidence that Emile didn’t send the package himself?” she asked.
“I suspect he really got someone to send it for him, the same person who wrote the first letter. What is infinitely puzzling to me was why he wanted to see me. I could understand his wanting to see Gabrielle—she had adored him—but why me?”
“You look like Gabrielle,” Kate said. “At least, like the pictures I’ve seen of her; perhaps you were able to be you and remind him of her. A romantic thought.”
“Very romantic,” Nellie said, turning a stemmed glass between her fingers. “And like most romantic thoughts, powerfully convincing. You’d never guess how many people have seen that resemblance, have told me I am Gabrielle again, reborn to Emile. Even I used to pride myself on how much I looked like her. What people overlooked, however, was that Emmanuel Foxx was English too.”
Kate stared at Nellie, her brain refusing for a moment to comprehend what she thought was being told to her. A long silence hung between them.
Nellie broke it.
“I am no relation whatever to Gabrielle,” she said; “no relation by blood or biology, that is. I’m very much of a relation if love is the criterion.”
“It seems to have been an extremely well-kept secret,” Kate said at last for something to say.
“Gabrielle knew, of course. Hilda would have done anything to bear a child to a genius. Oh, I suspect she seduced Emile shortly afterward, to cover her tracks. To do her justice, if there is any justice to be done, she probably would have kept the secret from Emile, from everyone, even, after a time, herself. But Poppop couldn’t keep from gloating; he couldn’t keep his smirking pride at having a daughter off his face. Oh, he tried to remember, I’ve no doubt, to call me his granddaughter, but Poppop never saw any reason to hide his light under a bushel. Emmanuel had always wanted another child, but it had never happened; I don’t know why. Perhaps Gabrielle made sure it never happened. Emmanuel was famous for hating contraception, but she may not have told him; I doubt she told him anything she didn’t want to.”
“How long have you known?”
“Probably always. But denial or repression or whatever you choose to call it is a comfortable way of life. I never knew in the sense of having to know until Emile told me in 1951, just after Dorinda’s wedding. He felt he’d been cheated all his life, and I suspect he had been. But what he couldn’t stand was being constantly reminded of how great, how interesting, how famous his father was. So with the opportunity provided by the war, when so many records were lost or confused, to say nothing of people and whole countries if it comes to that, he simply decided to die and begin another life.”
“Why did he want to tell you?”
“Ah, there you are. That’s the question, isn’t it? He needed to have someone know. Anyway, Gabrielle knew, he was sure of that. He told me to make sure no one else would ever find out. He didn’t know if it was in any of the letters, but he wanted everything I could get my hands on burned. I’m sure Gabrielle never wrote of it, or mentioned it at all—I realize now that’s why she detested Hilda—but Emile was intent on covering all the tracks. I could understand why. Can’t you?”
Kate was not certain this was really a question, or how to answer it if it were. But apparently Nellie wanted an answer, and waited for one, still twirling her glass.
“Yet Gabrielle loved you very much,” Kate finally said.
“I know. I think back at how I must have hurt her, wanting so badly to go to America. But life was awful at home. If I had been older, and without the overwhelming selfishness of adolescence, I would have stayed to make Gabrielle’s life a little easier. She must have guessed how ill Poppop really was; she always knew everything, Gabrielle did. But I couldn’t wait to get away, dearly as I loved her. Don’t you see, that’s why now I have to do what she would have wanted me to do. I know in my heart that Gabrielle would have protected Emile, would not have wanted this to come out and hurt him more than he had already been hurt.”
For the first time since they had ordered their lunch, Kate focused her eyes on distant things, the street, the people, the cars. On the opposite sidewalk a woman and child walked along as they might have walked anywhere in the Western world. Gabrielle must have walked with Emile just so, and later, with Nellie. Now, Nellie was waiting for her to speak when she could think of nothing to say or, to be more exact, nothing suitable to say.
When Reed hears of this, Kate thought, he will be fascinated to know what sort of revelation it took to render me speechless. Kate could have responded to an immediate loss, or to a present problem however intricate and insoluble. But this story from the past, so filled with pain for those no longer here to feel it (and Kate had no doubt Emile felt it to the end), left Kate speechless.
“Did you ever try to see Emile again?” she finally asked.
“No,” Nellie said. “He married a simple French
woman, a peasant really, and they lived in the French countryside, a peaceful life, after all. I don’t think anyone around them had even heard of Emmanuel Foxx. Of course, the elegant people were encroaching, but not too near. Emile had told me he pretended to know no English, and to find their French difficult.”
“So he played a game to the end.”
“Not a special game. Emile and I after him thought of languages as a game; we spoke so many. Poppop used to say he didn’t want to hear English around him, he wanted to preserve it for his writing; he wanted only the English speech of his characters in his ears. So at home they always spoke something else, and did when I came along. Gabrielle spoke English to me, but only when Poppop was not around; it was our private language.”
“Is it strange that she loved you, or only my stupid conventional mind that thinks so?”
“I asked myself that,” Nellie said. “She was the perfect figure of love for me. Oh, I found Poppop and even Emile when he was around—I called him Pa—fun and somehow more exciting than Gabrielle. We are all geared to respond to men who appear seldom and smelling delightfully of adventure. But she was the one I loved. When I went to America and got to know Anne, I pitied her because she had no loving mother in her life. Her own mother was stern, not warm at all, always warning of dangers, and Eleanor was reserved, and saved her rather frantic love for Dorinda, though she was kind to all of us. But I had had this great woman to love me. Somehow, when I learned she wasn’t my grandmother, it no longer mattered to me. Whether it ever mattered to her, I don’t know; I don’t think so. But I don’t pretend to understand it.”