April in Paris

by John J. Healey

  The property and the house and all its contents were left to me along with what she had in the bank, plus an impressive stock portfolio. There was a request in the will that all the staff be paid as usual until their deaths, regardless of whether I kept them on or not. A second point stipulated that the house be maintained as it was, that it not change hands or be sold until my death, and that it not suffer any additions or architectural reformations—a clause, much to the surprise of the lawyer, that pleased me.

  All this kept Carmen and me in Southampton for another week, and though some of that time was emotionally fraught, we managed to make the best of it. On our last night there before returning to Massachusetts I suggested we try some way of living together and she said yes. We celebrated by drinking more of the champagne Caro prescribed, and we took a late-night swim in the pool after making love on the grass next to it. Corru barked and we ignored him. After Carmen fell asleep in bed, I lay there and thought about Caro and my father and Edwin Anderson. I made a mental note to try to find Caro’s riding crop, but gave up the next day after a brief, half-hearted search. What I found instead were Edwin’s letters.

  – Part Four –

  There seems to me too much misery in the world.

  —Charles Darwin

  – 40 –

  Sept. 16th, 1967

  Dear Caroline,

  Our ship arrived safely at La Havre. From there we found another to take us to Gothenburg. Mother pretended to recognize it, if only for my benefit. It was from there that she sailed to America so long ago. We traveled by rail to Stockholm, and we are staying at a small hotel near the hospital. Mother continues to be in pain. Tomorrow the surgeons will remove the tumor.

  We speak like Swedes from the past, I who have never been here, and mother who left when she was fourteen. People are amused by it. It will take some time to master the current expressions and more time still to become accustomed to living here. It does feel familiar in odd and unexpected ways. The food, the manners. It reminds me of when mother and I lived alone in New York, until I came to work for your family.

  I will keep this small hotel room until she has recovered enough to travel. Then we shall go north to her family town. Although it has only been two weeks since I left Southampton, it feels like years ago. Perhaps that is normal for someone like me who has traveled so little.

  You made me promise to try to forget you, to try to find a new life for myself. I hope you will forgive me when I say that it is proving difficult. As a fifty-year-old man, born and raised in your country, a man whose only deep attachment, other than the one binding me to my mother, has been with you, I expect it will prove impossible. To be truthful, I prefer it that way.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Edwin

  Sept. 27th, 1967

  Dear Caroline,

  I apologize for my silence. I received your letter ten days ago and treasure it. Mother’s operation went as well as could be expected. Her recovery has been slow, and grueling, and she has only me to help her. She was in terrible pain after the surgery and even with the drugs her groans at night drew complaints from other guests. We have had to change hotels twice. Things are better now. We have come to her town, arriving yesterday. You can write to the address above, a cousin’s house, until, thanks to the funds you provided, we find a place for ourselves.

  I have held on to my sanity these past days thanks to your kind words, and thanks to my memories of us together. I miss your house, the land, and the beach. This town, Oppli, is as small as Water Mill, but isolated in the woods. It is already cold here at night. To keep myself occupied I assist a cousin of ours who is a carpenter. We mend chairs and tables. We plane floors and doors swollen from summer’s moisture. How I’ve come down in the world. I suspect you will forget me far sooner than I shall you.

  I miss the cars too. I miss the wines you’d bring. I miss your colorful clothes and the luxurious smell of you. I miss watching everyone arrive for your parties from my window above the garage, knowing you would come to me after Jimmy got too drunk to notice. How you would sneak across the lawn holding your shoes in one hand and a bottle in the other. How your feet would be wet with dew and covered with blades of cut grass. How your breath smelled of alcohol and cigarettes and perfume mixed together. I remember it like a dream, here in this place where liquor is so frowned upon and difficult to purchase, where people eat bread with lard and smoked reindeer, where they wear the same drab sweaters every morning. Yesterday I walked to a nearby lake, Lake Opplisjön, and swam there pretending I was in Mecox Bay. The comparison was so ridiculous it made me laugh aloud and swallow water. What an absurd though fitting way it would have been to drown.

  On the journey across the Atlantic I asked mother how she met father. She told me she arrived at Ellis Island in 1900, and though her brothers and her parents went west, to Minnesota and Colorado, she found work quickly with your family at their residence on Fifth Avenue. Like mother, like son? They treated her well, paid her well, respected and educated her. They were unhappy when, two years later, she met John August, the handsome metal worker who swept her off her feet. After they married your father found my father a job with the Consolidated Gas Company, working with chains and cables for the tunnels being dug. It was hard work but steady. Then they moved to Ogden Avenue in the Bronx and mother worked as a maid for the Culhanes on Woodycrest. Mrs. Culhane was also part Swedish and was glad to have her. She stayed with them until she became pregnant with my late sister Ingrid. Jimmy and his family lived on the floor below us. He and Ingrid played together. Often, they played at being mother and father and I would have to be their baby. One day Ingrid pretended to breastfeed me, and mother caught her and was angry and made your future husband leave.

  Mother said your family had been right, that she should never have married my father, that she would have become a proper woman if she had stayed with them, but that father had been so handsome and winning—at least at the beginning. And besides, she said, if she hadn’t married him, she never would have had me.

  What I never told you is that, after my sister died, father left us. I lived alone with mother for many years, until my early twenties, and by then I was a ruffian and a young man furious at the world. It was then she wrote to Jimmy and it was he and Judge Culhane who stepped in to help me, who got me to learn a trade and got me work with your family. This last part you know of course.

  I must tell you. The guilt I felt betraying Jim’s trust each time you and I were together was only bearable because of the pleasure of your company. I would do it again. I do not care if God forgives me, for I have not forgiven God for other things I cannot divulge even to you.

  Most sincerely yours,

  Edwin

  November 23rd, 1967

  Dear Caroline,

  Here is our new address, at our own place, a one-story red house in the woods, within walking distance of town. It has been snowing for days and gets dark by 2 p.m. Neighbors call this time of the year the suicide season. It lasts until summer!

  Mother knits and spends many hours in silence. I have taken to reading, books from the local library, books in English mostly. I recently finished Robinson Crusoe and identified with both the shipwrecked Englishman and his man Friday. I read Treasure Island and identified with young Jim Hawkins even though I am now fifty-one years old—this a tribute to the transporting magic of literature.

  You are right, of course. I apologize for the blasphemy contained within my last letter. I promise to keep my head and heart high and exemplary, even during these months of cold and darkness. And I will spare you the dismal facts about my life that you ask for. They have no bearing on us, now less than ever. I got into a fight at a tavern the other night with a drunken man who insulted the United States of America. I will not show my face in town for a week.

  Remember the night we stole away in your Mercedes to the parking lot by the Montauk lighthouse? Or have I dreamt it?

  Yours,

  Edwin
r />   December 24th, 1967

  Dear Caroline,

  You are a naughty woman. But of course, I knew that. You have even managed to get me in trouble from thousands of miles away. The books you suggested I read have scandalized the local librarian. I think if it had been one or the other, she would not have been so distressed, but it was the tandem, The Confessions of Saint Augustine with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that produced a scowl on the woman’s face I am still fearful of. I found as I read the latter work that, true to a pattern, I identified both with Oliver and Sir Clifford.

  What books! Knowing the contempt in which I hold priests, you were brave to suggest Augustine of Hippo’s text. And yet I found myself very moved by it. When I read these words, addressed to God, I only thought of you:

  “You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.”

  And then these words from the other book, the one the librarian handed me hidden inside a brown paper bag:

  “Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe.”

  And this:

  “In the short summer night, she learned so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame . . . She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.”

  And this:

  “All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.”

  This is what I dream of often, and when I awaken, when I look out the window and realize I’m staring at snow drifts obscuring trunks of pine, when I hear my mother wheezing in her sleep in the next room and remember where I am and where you are, my heart falls away from me.

  Merry Christmas,

  Edwin

  February 11, 1968

  Dear Caroline,

  Last week I borrowed Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame from the library. I finished it in bed early this morning. I savored it because it reminded me of the time when, shortly after you and Jim put the television set in my apartment over the garage, there was a show that came on each evening called Million Dollar Movie. This program showed the same film every night for a week. I remember seeing King Kong and Frankenstein in this manner. Over and over again. But my favorite film was The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara. It coincided with a trip you and Jim took to France. I was bereft without you. I felt like Quasimodo. You were Esmeralda, the beautiful wild gypsy dancer all the men were in love with. I was the one who protected you and saved you, but then you went off in the end with the man you truly loved, Pierre Gringoire, who in my mind was Jimmy of course. I felt like Quasimodo for other reasons too. My favorite scene—that I repeated in my head long after the show had ended—is the final one when Quasimodo looks down from his perch high above Paris. He leans against one of the gargoyles. Peering down he sees that you are happy and going off with Pierre Gringoire as the crowd cheers. Then Quasimodo looks at the gargoyle and asks, “Why was I not made of stone like thee?”

  The book is so different. In the book Pierre is a worthless coward. In the book, Frollo, the horrible priest, hands Esmeralda over to the authorities and she is hanged in a public square. Quasimodo finds her corpse in a huge graveyard, in a tomb on the outskirts of Paris where the condemned were interred. He stays with her body until he himself dies. When the tomb is opened long afterward and someone tries to separate them, the two entwined skeletons crumble into dust.

  The film is American. When I brought the book back to the library and looked up the film, I learned the Hollywood people built their own cathedral and medieval Paris on a ranch somewhere in southern California. The film is sunny and optimistic in the end. But also a lie. The book is real. The book reflects life as I have seen it.

  One of the reasons I love you so is that you are both— American, sunny, optimistic, but European too, dark, passionate, real.

  Edwin

  May 18th, 1968

  The Grand Hotel

  Stockholm

  Caroline,

  Only two hours have passed since we said goodbye. There is a good chance your plane has yet to take off.

  Rather than return north right away as I should—for mother will be alarmed by my prolonged absence—she frets whenever I am late for anything—I have come back here to the hotel to write you from the lobby on stationery I took from our room this morning. I want to savor a little bit more the pleasure and decadence your visit has given me. Perhaps there is a God after all, for clearly there are miracles, this one for instance made possible by you, you who remain a true believer.

  Were we really here? Might our suite upstairs facing the harbor still be in the state we left it? The sheets a-tangle, the bottle of champagne overturned in the watery bucket, the bath still graced with remnants of your bubbles, the mirrored closet doors by the bed reflecting our ravaged breakfast trays after they reflected last night’s frenzy of sin?

  Now that I am alone again, sitting here in this plush armchair, I feel out of place. I feel like an intruder who has gained access to the lobby sneaking in through the kitchen, a woodman, a retired mechanic who will be asked to leave at any moment. Your mechanic, your woodman, my Mellors to your Lady Chatterley. But no, the common, vulgar cut of my jacket does not betray me. One of the young men behind the reception desk recognizes me, nods at me and smiles. The miracle continues.

  May your God bless you, and, as you Irish like to say, may the Devil keep you. Though you would not let me say it this time, it is very possible we shall never see each other again. But then that is what we thought when I left Southampton. All I can say for sure is that I am filled with renewed strength. I will leave now, mail this, and stroll to the Central Station enlivened and content.

  Many kisses,

  Edwin

  This last letter surprised me the most. How had Caro managed a trip to Sweden? It was the same year I was living in Edwin’s quarters. The month of the Paris riots. I was watching programs on that same TV set. I did recall that she and my father sometimes went to the south of France in May. I supposed she found a way to break free for a few days without raising suspicion.

  – 41 –

  Curious how these things can go. Carmen gave me the pleasure of her company on my annual summer visit with Caro. The two of them took to each other. This led, as Carmen put it, to Caro’s “confession,” which led, it seemed, to her elegant suicide. Her unexpected death put Edwin’s letters into my hands. Her unexpected death delayed our travel plans.

  We drove back to Lenox and returned to the Wheatleigh. Rather than just relax and have dinner at the hotel, which would have been the wisest and easiest thing to do, I insisted we drive into the village for dinner at the wine bar where I’d had that good Bandol rosé. There were only two little tables left, right next to each other. As we got settled at one, I was hoping no one else would come to take the other. But just when I thought we were free and clear, it was shown to a former colleague of mine from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, a man with whom I’d never gotten along. This was a fellow who’d taken an instant dislike to me from the start. I hadn’t seen him in years, and suddenly I had to make nice, introduce Carmen, and generally feel uncomfortable. Then I had to leave the table because of a phone call from my lawyer concerning the Ogden Avenue project, leaving Carmen alone with him. Had Caro still been alive or if I’d just decided to remain at the hote
l where we would have had a perfectly lovely dinner, we never would have run into him.

  “Can’t believe he’s finally got a serious girlfriend,” he said to her. “How did you do it? He had quite a reputation. He was the most politically incorrect fellow in the building. He regularly warned students that he wouldn’t put up with any gender, class, or identity whining, as he called it. The guy’s got four billion dollars and was playing at being a professor. He took a dollar a year salary and made himself exempt from any committee work or department chairing, in return for fully funding half the new buildings at NYU back then, buildings he wouldn’t let them put his name on. He thought putting your name on a building was vulgar and ‘just not done,’ thus seriously dissing most of NYU’s other major donors and trustees. He had affairs and ruined a few marriages. And he hated putting up with other colleagues’ children. Many times, at dinner parties, I heard him say that people talking about their kids was the most boring thing imaginable.”

  All this and more during the five minutes I was out on the street hearing about a local community group in the Bronx that was protesting the Ogden Avenue project’s focus on an unknown Swedish immigrant from over a century ago. Reentering the restaurant, I could see Carmen had changed. She was still courteous and all smiles with our tablemate, but I knew her well enough by then to realize that something was up.

  In the car and back in our room she told me all of this and I did my best to defend myself against the homewrecking charge. Yes, there’d been a time when such a thing had happened, but it was many years ago and ever since Scarlett got ill and we moved up here, I never went down that road again. Also, times had changed, and I was older. Carmen did her best to listen and contextualize, but I certainly understood her irritation and disappointment. I would have reacted just as badly or worse if I’d been blindsided like that. It put a huge damper on the night.