by Meg Wolfe
Things were much the same at Aunt Sasha’s, there were still all the familiar faces, the writers, the artists. Picasso was there, and Hemingway, Gertrude Stein had just come back from a tour of America, there were strikes in the factories, and arguments about the Olympics going to Berlin instead of Barcelona. There was talk of a strange political situation in Germany, of the Depression in America and in Europe, as well. I felt as if I was let out of a box, seeing and hearing all the things I’d been missing in the sheltered dream world of Monte Carlo.
I begged my mother to let me stay, and Aunt Sasha begged her, as well, but my mother knew my father would not approve. After a blessed three weeks in my most favorite place on earth, we returned to the coast. When I was sixteen, my parents and Mr. Lamont began to introduce me to various young men, mostly local tutors, but after knowing the brilliant young men (and old) of Paris, those poor insipid boys held no charm—and I made no secret of it.
Thus, by the time I was seventeen, I was able to persuade my father to let me travel on my own to Paris, and I would stay for a month or two at a time and help Aunt Sasha and Henri at the bookstore. This went on for almost three years. The talk became more political than artistic among the bookstores and cafés. One day I met a young writer from Dublin named Seamus O’Dair. He was so tall and slim, with jutting cheekbones and his auburn hair was so thick it almost stood on end. He had such long slender fingers, like a pianist. He had come to Paris to help organize the strikes, and after the settlements he stayed in flats down the street from Sibylline. I thought he was so passionate and brave, and Aunt Sasha said he was brilliant and had a great future. I do not think he noticed me, though, other than a polite “thank you,” when I rang up his book purchase, and once when he forgot his cap and I ran for blocks to give it back to him.
Then France declared war on Germany. My parents were frantic, and Mr. Lamont sent my father in his car to retrieve me, and to bring Aunt Sasha and Aunt Henri, too. But my aunt was adamant: she would not leave Paris, nor would Henri. They felt such responsibility to the writers and artists there, and to Paris itself. It was the last time I would ever see Aunt Sasha; she was later executed by the Nazis for being part of the Resistance.
It was the Resistance, in the end, that would destroy me, as well, because I had not stayed. I was old enough, but I had not stayed, I had allowed my father to scoop me up and take me back to a world of privilege, to escape the war and reality itself in the entourage of the American, Mr. Lamont. Yet I was French. It was my country, I loved my country, and I loved Paris.
Twenty
Still Wednesday, September 25th
Charlotte read for hours, without realizing it was for hours, going faster as she became accustomed to Olivia’s handwriting, and as things made more and more sense. She felt compelled to keep going, all for the desire to know: what happened next?
The oldest notebook in her possession began in 1969. Olivia’s mood was dark and extreme; she was suffering anew from a deep sense of betrayal and guilt that she thought she had gotten past. As far as Charlotte could tell, it was a mix of attack, apology, resentment, and guilt. Passages seemed to be written as if to Ronson, with references to “your son,” and “I told him he could have his father’s book—why ever not?”
I know who it is you write about so cruelly, who you put through all the horrors of banishment, but I have taken, I really did take, the things you wanted most, just like you stole mine. You will never have them! I will kill him before you can have him, just like you killed me. How I wish I had not seen this, how I wish I had never met you….
Her eyes did not reflect the pictures that she saw in her mind, but they still told stories that broke my heart. Why couldn’t I tell those stories for her? I never meant any harm….
Something had happened prior to 1969 that triggered Olivia’s need to write again, after at least ten years of silence. She gave Helene a quick call to firm up some dates in Olivia’s life as best as possible, then made notes of her own.
Olivia spent the war years as a college student in Manhattan. She returned to Paris as soon as she could, around 1947, and wrote and published a book of poetry by 1948. She came back to New York after Aunt Henri died and the bookstore was sold, which was around 1952. She frequented jazz clubs and kept writing and publishing, before suddenly returning to Paris in ‘56. She sent a postcard to Helene to say she was in love with another writer, and writing plays. Then nobody hears from her until she suddenly reappears back home with Ronson and baby Donovan, in early 1959.
Something shattered Olivia between 1956 and 1959, something which caused her to stop writing and, essentially, disappear from the literary scene. Back then, having a baby out of wedlock stopped a lot of women in their tracks. Donovan was the spitting image of Seamus O’Dair, and she now had proof that Olivia had known him.
Charlotte looked up some entries on O’Dair. He was, indeed, living and working in Paris in a twenty-five year stretch from 1936 to 1961. He was also commended for his role in the French Resistance. As the professor said on Courtney at Corton, O’Dair and a group of other writers who had been in the Resistance got together and restored an old theater which they themselves had sabotaged while it was being used by the Nazis. There, they staged the unorthodox and experimental plays O’Dair came to be known for, and launched the careers of several New Wave actors, screenwriters, and directors.
In a side note, the theater once again burned down, during the 1968 student riots, but was not rebuilt. It was also the year O’Dair was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, along with Yasunari Kawabata.
It was a good fit. Would O’Dair have rejected Olivia if she was pregnant with his child? Or would she have told him? Either way, what would have happened if Olivia found herself pregnant, but, for whatever reason, could not involve Seamus O’Dair? A marriage of convenience was not far-fetched, if done early enough. Strict, controlling Ronson did not seem a likely candidate for marrying a woman for her convenience. Given Olivia’s secrecy about her writing, Charlotte thought it was a good bet that she let Ronson think that Donovan was his child. The things revealed in the notebooks, then, had to remain secret, hidden from both Donovan and Ronson.
Charlotte felt confident that she now had Olivia’s motivation for hiding the notebooks the way she did, in and among things that both Ronson and Donovan knew about—but didn’t concern themselves with. And if O’Dair was Donovan’s father, then the passages Charlotte first thought were written as if to Ronson were actually addressed to O’Dair—and made more sense. “I told him he could have his father’s book” could well have meant she gave Donovan the copy of Least Objects she had inherited from her mother. A nine- or ten-year old boy of the time would have played with model trains and turn a book into a homemade prop, especially back in those days.
As she continued reading, Charlotte picked up the rhythm of Olivia’s shifts between her life at the time of writing and the story of her life leading up to why things were as they were at the time of writing, past and present, present and past, back and forth. The furious anger ran through the first two notebooks Charlotte had, the ones that began in 1969 and 1970, respectively. There were more passages that only made sense if O’Dair was Donovan’s father, such as how she explained to Ronson that her grandparents were from Scotland, and that’s why Donovan’s hair was red. One passage said she kept Donovan in a buzz cut so he wouldn’t look so much like his father. Ronson was a military man, and very likely in a permanent buzz cut, so it only made sense if Donovan’s stiff auburn hair was inherited from O’Dair.
There were an increasing number of passages about the tediousness of the trips Ronson would make to track down baseball cards. He did, however, encourage her to start a collection of something of her own. Olivia had nothing but contempt for “collected junk,” and out of spite went to extremes with it, forming not one, but dozens of collections. Yet Ronson never complained. He complained about everything else, she wrote, but never about the one thing any sane m
an would have raised objections to. She suspected that he saw their collections as their children, and had more interest in them than in Donovan, which made her very uneasy.
Then there was a gap, with the next book beginning in 1976. That was the year Donovan graduated from high school, and Olivia wrote about her disappointment that he rejected college, even as she felt spiteful glee that he didn’t go into the military as Ronson wanted, all which corresponded with what Donovan himself said about his life at home. He liked to read and write as a child, until Ronson shamed him for not liking sports, after which he avoided both. Many sections sounded similar to things Olivia had written in the previous notebooks, like a retelling of scenes or incidents, but each time altered in some way, with a few words changed, or a shift in their emphasis. With the end of the Vietnam War, Ronson was home more often—and they went on more forays to shops and auctions for their collections. Olivia’s attitudes to the collections seemed to shift when some things suddenly skyrocketed in value. She was both fascinated and repelled by what she called “the American desire to turn mediocrity into a legacy.”
A knock on the door brought Charlotte
