“Have you read these?” I asked.
“Those old letters?” He glanced up from the photographs he was sorting. “No.”
“My father wrote them,” I said.
His head snapped up, an expression of surprise. “Vraiment?” Truly?
“May I have them?”
He thought for a moment, shrugged, before he said, “Why not? You have a right to them.”
I tucked the bundle next to my leg as Freddy handed me a snapshot. What I saw knocked me right off my axis. There I was, again about age two, sitting atop Amy with Isabelle in the saddle behind me, holding me around the middle; the fromagerie was visible in the distance. Hand-written on the back was Marguerite sur sa Amie. Amy, amie: friend. We had been friends, the pony and I, before either of us was transported to Berkeley.
At some level I must have recognized her, and she me, I thought, remembering how she had come straight to me out of the horse trailer she arrived in and nuzzled me, stayed close to me. The big revelation here, however, was that it was Isabelle, and not Dad, who had given me the pony. I wondered if he was as surprised to see Amy as the rest of us were. And no wonder Mom was so furious.
As I studied that snapshot, Freddy spread others across the duvet. They were all taken of me after I left France: at about age eight, playing tetherball at recess at my neighborhood school; at nine or ten riding Amy on the Grizzly Peak fire road in tandem with my best friend, Sandy Bell; in a wet swimsuit at about fourteen, a high school swim meet, arms hugging my chest, obviously cold, probably shivering, as I hurried along the deck toward the team bench where my towel would have been. There were others, all taken when I was out in the open, vulnerable to the prying eye of the camera lens, and all taken with me unaware of the camera’s presence.
“Who took these?” I asked.
“Maman, I assume. She would get a big idea from time to time and go over to check on you. She would bring back photos to show the grandmothers and Aunt Louise.”
“I didn’t know she was there,” I said, looking at each of the pictures. I wouldn’t want to be Isabelle if Mom ever found out she was lurking around me. And my dad? No clue how he would react; I felt that I didn’t know him any longer. Maybe later, when I was alone with Dad’s letters, I would find some of the answers I wanted.
I heard Freddy sigh as he placed yet another photo of me on the duvet with the others.
“How did you feel about those visits, Freddy?”
“Oh.” He shrugged, thought over his answer. “I was jealous, of course. But not so jealous as my father, even after they were divorced. To compensate, to make us both feel better, he would always arrange a little trip for the two of us while she was gone.” The smallest smile crossed his face; bittersweet memories. “We went on manly adventures, like camping in the Black Forest or fishing in the Mediterranean. How do you say it? Guy stuff.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said.
“Yes.” A child’s handmade pencil drawing of a deer in the woods fell out of a store-bought birthday card. The card was addressed to MAMAN, and signed FREDDY. Carefully, he put the drawing back inside the card. “I hope you don’t judge my father by what you saw of him this afternoon, Maggie. He is the best father a son could hope for, constant, loving. Wise. I try to be all of that for my boys.”
“I’m sure you are,” I said. “Your boys are wonderful.”
“Lena deserves the credit. Their welfare is probably the only reason Lena still tolerates me.” He held up his palms: What’s to say? “Divorce, never. But murder?”
I cleared my throat, hesitated before I spoke. “You said your father was jealous. Jealous of me?”
He wagged his head from side to side, a sort of yes-and-no response. “You, your father, Maman’s success, the Martin family’s comfort and influence, and more, I think. Papa always felt he was an old brown shoe and the rest of Maman’s life was a shiny Gucci loafer; they never made a pair. He worried that in my eyes he did not measure up.”
“Am I a buckle on the Gucci loafer?”
He nodded. “And I think your father was another buckle, a very shiny one.”
“Did Isabelle talk to you about my father?”
“Not openly, no. But he was—what do you call it?—a leitmotif, a recurring theme. And for me, a very mysterious one.” Freddy studied me through narrowed eyes as he said, “I met your father once.”
“When?”
“I was about twelve years old. Maman had a professional meeting, a bunch of scientists, in New York, and she took me with her. We went to a musical on Broadway, saw the usual sights. And we went to dinner with your father.” He gathered the snapshots together and held them out to me. “I didn’t know he was your father at the time, but I have put it together since. He was Dr. Duchamps, an old acquaintance of Maman, that was all I knew; at home, your father was only referred to as ‘Alfred.’ ”
“Just a friendly dinner?” I tucked the photos in with Dad’s letters.
“Dinner was friendly, yes,” he said. “But afterward, at the hotel, there was a big row, and that’s why I remember the meeting so clearly. I don’t know what they argued about—they sent me to my room, and anyway, my English couldn’t keep up with them—but I know that both Maman and your father were furious. When your father left, he looked as if she had beaten him with a stick.”
“Wonder what it was about,” I said, though I had some suspicions. The more I saw of Freddy, the more he did not look like Claude. And the more he looked like Dad. “Do you remember anything they said?”
There was a pause, during which Freddy was very still. He seemed to be trying to dredge up some elusive nugget. In the end, he shook his head. “What was singular about that argument, other than seeing Maman argue so heatedly with a stranger, was that in the end he refused her. And she accepted his refusal. Maman never gave up easily. After that, her trips to America ended. Until, of course, week before last.”
“And, week before last, for the first time, she approached me,” I said. “Wish I knew what she expected from me.”
“Maggie.” He leaned forward, put his eyes level with mine. “Don’t you understand? The purpose was...” He searched for the word. “It was an interview, an audition, if you will. She wanted to know what sort of person you became, what decisions you might make about your inheritance when she was gone.”
Made sense, I thought. I said, “We’ll never know how I did in the audition, will we?”
He cocked his head and looked at me, a crooked little smile lifting a corner of his mouth. “You have heard of the telephone, sister?”
“Oh, right, she called you.”
“Yes, and Grand-mère, and Uncle Gérard, and her solicitor. She sent photos of your home, your horses....”
“And the studio where I work,” I said. “And what did she say about it?”
“You did well,” he said. “She was excited that you still have horses, and that you choose to live in the country. She was optimistic about you. And now, as you see, you have the job.”
There was a tap on the door.
“Entrez,” Freddy called out as he piled Isabelle’s mementoes back into the yellow candy box.
Kelly peered around the edge of the door. “Well, here you two are. We wondered what happened to you.”
“A little walk,” Freddy said as he rose and put the box back on its wardrobe shelf. “A little talk.”
“We’re having a light supper at our house.” Kelly spoke very rapidly; a habit from speaking French, or nerves? Too much family togetherness? “Clara made soup and there are salad and cold meat. Maggie, your uncle called. He and Casey are dining with a friend in Créances, though I should tell you that Grand-mère Élodie is not very happy about that. Both of the grandmothers are a bit frothy right now, wondering where you two got to. If I were you I’d get a move on, go over and kiss some old lady cheeks.”
Freddy snapped to attention, clicked his heels together—they would have clicked if he weren’t wearing velvet house shoes—and
saluted. “Jawohl, meine dame.”
“Shut up, Freddy.” But she was laughing. “What a day, huh kids? Maggie, is your daughter all right? Claude really did a number on you two, didn’t he? Shame on him.”
“We’re okay,” I said, looking away from Freddy as color rose in his cheeks, chagrined all over again. “But I’m glad Casey is with Uncle Max right now. This situation is very strange for us. She needs some time to process what’s happening.”
“It’s strange for us, too,” she said, matter-of-fact, as she headed out the door. She stopped and pointed at Freddy; damned American directness. “I asked your dad to join us, but he declined.”
“Probably for the best,” he said.
“Got that right,” she muttered. “We’ll send a plate over.”
We followed Kelly down the stairs. Freddy tilted his head and looked at me. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll find some time to go through Maman’s things.”
I held up the letters and pictures. “Freddy, I have everything of Isabelle’s that I want. But if you need a friend to be with you when you go through her things, I’ll be glad to help you.”
He shook his head. “You think she was a stranger to you. But she wasn’t. She wanted very much for you to be here.”
“Do you?”
“Me?” He laced his hand around my arm. There was no smile when he said, “Depends.”
16
“Lovely of you to meet me at the airport.”
“Pardon me?” Sergei Ludanov, Junior, raised his chin to take a bead on me down his hawk’s beak of a nose.
“I saw you at Charles de Gaulle yesterday,” I said. “Holding up a sign with my name on it.”
He scowled, turned abruptly from me as if to dismiss me as a lunatic. But I stuck close, the two of us off to the side of the salon in the house Gérard built, facing out a window overlooking a dark garden and seeing only the white streaks of falling ice refracting light emitted from our side of the glass.
When Freddy, Kelly and I walked inside, the house was abuzz with the usual pre-dinner activity. A collection of wives, Lena, Julie, and Gillian moved back and forth between the kitchen and the salon with Uncle Gérard, looking rudderless, drifting in their wakes and generally getting in the way. Bébé had gone with Antoine and Jacques to check on the progress of the day’s Camembert.
Both grandmothers were napping, Grand-mère Marie, snoring softly, on a sofa in front of the fireplace and Grand-mère Élodie at her own house, quiet now that all the guests were gone. I did wonder, when we learned this, why Kelly had told us they were, as she said, frothy about our absence. Seemed to me that it was Kelly who wanted to keep tabs on us. Freddy went to check on Grand-mère.
The voices of the young people and the beeps of the various electronic gizmos that generally accompanied them filtered down from upstairs. But it was Sergei, standing alone, separate from all the activity, who caught my attention right off.
Earlier that afternoon, when I glimpsed Sergei through the window of his Lamborghini, he had seemed vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t place him. From TV or the tabloids, maybe, I thought then. When I walked into the room and saw him standing at a distance, wearing his beautifully tailored charcoal suit, holding a glass of wine, I recognized him.
The dyed hair, the bruise—he had recently taken quite a blow on the point of his cheekbone—and the Lamborghini threw me off, but his posture gave him away. Unquestionably, he was the same young man I had seen at the airport when I first arrived in Paris, holding a sign that read MME MACGOWEN in the same way he now held his wine glass. He was the hire-car driver who disappeared when an airline staffer came and fetched me out of Customs and took me to David.
“Look, lady,” he said now, trying to dismiss me, but speaking quietly as if he didn’t want the others to hear.
“Maggie MacGowen,” I said, offering my hand. “But you know that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, keeping both hands wrapped around his glass. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So, thank you for coming for me,” I said to him, ignoring his denials. “There must have been some confusion about arrangements. Grand-mère sent her car for me. Who sent you?”
“You’re a crazy woman,” he said, and walked away. He got as far as the staircase, but paused for a moment with one foot resting on the bottom step, looking up into the open space above; he checked his watch. I wondered about the hesitation, and wondered why Jemima wasn’t with him. I had heard her laughter, so I knew she was upstairs with the others.
I went into a small study off the salon, took out my phone and dialed Dauvin, but the call went straight to voicemail; he had driven away after he dropped off me and Freddy. Speaking slowly in my best French, I left a message saying that I needed to talk to him, and to please return my call as soon as he could. I hoped Sergei stayed around until Dauvin called back.
After the second van incident, I began to think again about the disappearing airport driver: was he a spotter, getting a visual I.D. on me and the car I got into so that we could be tailed? Now that I recognized Sergei as the man who performed that vanishing act, idle wondering took on new weight. I was worried about Jemima, and glad Casey wasn’t in the house.
Waiting for Dauvin’s call, feeling on edge, I went into the kitchen looking for company.
The kitchen was a hive of female activity, very much like Mom’s house at Thanksgiving. I asked if there was something I could do to help. Julie pulled a long wooden spoon out of the soup pot and said I could bring her a glass of cider, please. Her face glowed hot from leaning over the stove.
On my way to fetch it, Lena, with an imperious little smile, handed me a platter of canapés, little toasts with chopped egg, caviar and onion, to take with me, and gave me the assignment usually relegated to kids at my house: “You can set the table.”
“Happy to,” I said, an excuse to get out of the kitchen where I felt like such an outsider. Whenever I walked into a room, conversation stopped dead, or suddenly changed course.
Kelly followed me out through the swinging door. “If you could set the table, that would be a big help. Julie is at meltdown stage and I want to stay close to her; she can’t stand to be in the same room with Gillian. Remember, Louise was her aunt, too.”
“Tell me what to do,” I said, grateful to have my hands busy. I poured cider into a tall glass and handed it to Kelly to take back into the kitchen to Julie.
“Let me see.” Kelly scanned the table quickly. “Oh!” She glanced down and noticed that I was wearing Isabelle’s Sherpa-lined mules. “Good for you.”
“Freddy insisted,” I said. “My shoes are wet.”
She dipped her head close to me as if we were sharing a confidence: “Someone should have told you to bring waders.” Then it was back to the business of setting the table. “Just a dinner plate at each place. Stack the bowls at the foot of the table by the trivet for the tureen. Cheese plates can stay on the sideboard.” She pointed out the cutlery and glasses to use, patted my shoulder and went back into the kitchen to whatever tasks I had interrupted.
I picked up a stack of dinner plates, sturdy country crockery, and began setting one in front of each chair. Some of the chairs had been carried over from Isabelle’s house.
The bustling around, everyone pitching in, felt so normal, so familiar. Not familiar because of that déjà vu thing that kept happening to me, but because gatherings at my parents’ house had the same sort of atmosphere, the swapping back and forth of chairs and serving pieces.
The difference between their parties and this one was that, with my parents, the community was friends of their choosing. Here, everyone was related by blood or marriage.
Until I arrived in France, my family was Mom, Casey, Uncle Max, and two cousins on the East Coast that I barely knew. Now, suddenly, in Normandy, I had a big family. And as suddenly I wasn’t at all certain where, or if, I fit in anywhere.
“May I help?” Uncle Gérard took the stack of plates from my hands and h
eld them for me to place, following me as I made my trip around the long table.
“Handsome boy, isn’t he?” Gérard said as I took a plate from the stack.
“Sergei?” I watched the young man’s back as he checked his phone and, finally, began to slowly, maybe reluctantly, mount the stairs. What was he waiting for? “I can’t say much for his manners.”
“Ah, well.” A very Gallic gesture of dismissal, a shrug, an exaggerated frown. “What can I say? He is Russian.”
“I say, ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ ”
Gérard seemed to be at a loss for only a moment before he recouped and launched into another topic, the one I suspect he intended to broach at the outset. “Dear niece, you promised your old uncle a few moments of your time. Now is as good as later, yes?”
“I suppose.” I dreaded this moment. But if it had to happen, better that it happen in a room with others around.
Gérard had refrained from bringing it up—the big scheme—until after the funeral. He’d had an opportunity that morning when we were alone at the convent, but, graciously, had not. So I would listen to his pitch now, but I would not be pressed for a firm answer to what I feared he might propose. I wondered whether, in the end, should he and I not close a deal to his liking, he would continue to be so genteel toward me.
Plates finished, he helped me place water and wineglasses on a tray. He held the tray for me as he had held the dinner plates while I set the full variety of glassware above each plate.
As we made our second tour around the table, he opened his appeal. “My dear, may I say first that your mother would have been delighted if she could walk through that door and see you here among your family. It was always her greatest wish to be reunited with you.”
“I’m beginning to understand that,” I said. He had said exactly the same thing the day before when we first met. Did he have a script?
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