Paris, 7 A.M.
Page 26
My father was terribly frightened by water, Cal says, or so my mother told me. All his life, he believed he would drown. But no. It was still a horrible death. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.
They wade in to their ankles. Cal helps Elizabeth into the canoe.
I’m going to take you on a tour first, Cal says, and then we’ll try to find the house.
I have to get to just the right place, he says, and then we can look down and see the cellar holes.
How can you tell them apart?
I have to see the hills a certain way. For a while, I came every year, on my mother’s birthday. But then once, I didn’t come, and it was as if a spell had been broken.
Spell?
The way boys love their mothers. He smiles as he says this.
Cal stops talking and looks up at the line of the hills, then shakes his head. He moves slowly, turning in a lazy circle, not fast enough to make them dizzy. After a few minutes, he begins to look down into the water, as well as up to the hills, taking off his sunglasses and putting them on again, counting silently.
That’s it, he says at last. Look down, Elizabeth. Here, this side, about three feet out.
She sees it, a short stack of stones, like a chimney or a ruined wall. They’re all over here. Ours was a bit tilted, canted to the left. It’s got a sort of drunken look to it.
They find the angle of the sun has to be just right, or else they can’t see them clearly, make out the individual stones. Without light upon them, the cellar holes resemble dark beasts, or men crouched and hiding, ready to shoot to the surface of the water. Elizabeth does not like the look of them.
That may be the one. A little to the west. There, Cal whispers. That’s it. The stack of squared-off stones that someone had tried to push over. Just on top of those stones. They were the stairs to the cellar.
It’s not very deep, Elizabeth says.
No, he says. The deepest water then was Sunk Pond. He points to the west. There. But now it’s all the same water.
That’s true.
I want to bring Harriet out here, but her mother says she’s too young. I think Lizzie is really afraid I’ll get distracted and Harriet will go overboard and drown.
A baby on a boat, Elizabeth says. It’s a terrifying idea.
1974
Louise sent the newspaper clipping from New York. My mother kept this. I thought you would want it.
Clara Longworth de Chambrun Dies in Paris.
Twenty years ago. They must all be gone now. So there is no one left to say what really happened.
Elizabeth loses a watch, three continents, North America, South America, and Europe. Write it.
Elizabeth loses a fountain pen that she bought in Paris. That Clara bought for her.
Elizabeth loses the keys to a steamer trunk. Elizabeth loses a photograph of George Sand’s statue in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Elizabeth loses all the fish off all the lines on all the Atlantic coasts.
Elizabeth loses everything she might bargain with.
Elizabeth loses ground—all the land beneath the plane, where the wing shades it from view.
Elizabeth loses the legend to the map.
Elizabeth loses too many kites. What to do with all that string?
Elizabeth loses an empty wasp’s nest.
Elizabeth loses three houses (but gains a condominium!).
Elizabeth never loses the key to the liquor cabinet.
Elizabeth loses a card on which she had written Clara’s telephone number. Even though she’s memorized the number, the card seems important evidence that she’d known Clara or had called Clara, or could have called her. The card is a very light gray, just a squint past white, really. She keeps it in her coat pocket. It is embossed, and the ridges and grooves of the letters settle her, calm her when she touches the card. Like Braille. This is the blindness with which she approached and then understood Clara. Clara was a thing mostly unseen. The thing unseen, buried, its grave never marked. But under Elizabeth’s worrying fingers, Clara becomes known, visible.
The card, like Clara, is both attractive and frightening, but now it is lost.
Write it. Write it. Write it. Write it.
No. Never.
1979
Number 437 Lewis Wharf. The yellow gratin dish sits in pieces on Elizabeth’s bedside table. It was for some years an assemblage of vessels, for jewelry: one quadrant each for rings, earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. Now it keeps lipstick (Chanel #87 Rendez-Vous), a train ticket (Paris to Caen), Sigrid’s left glove, blond leather. Two photographs, one of Robert Seaver and one of her mother as a child. Her mother’s broken wristwatch, which wasn’t lost after all. A spoon from Clara’s apartment and a key she never returned. A lock of black hair in an applewood clip. A small animal made entirely of lace. An origami sailboat.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to the work of Peter Brazeau, Bonnie Costello, Joanne Feit Diehl, Jonathan Ellis, Gary Fountain, David Kalstone, Megan Marshall, Brett Miller, George Monteiro, Andrew Motion, Camille Roman, and Colm Tóibín, as well as conversations with Philip Levine, Mark Strand, and Chris Castiglia.
Thank you, Kerry D’Agostino, Ira Silverberg, Julianna Haubner, Lashanda Anakwah, Marysue Ricci, Carina Guiterman, Samantha Hoback, Catherine Casalino, Carly Loman, Brigid Black, and the wonderful team at Simon & Schuster. Suzanne Guiod for your generosity, and Solveig Bosse for help with the German translations.
Mary Katherine Kinniburgh at the New York Public Library, and Dean Rogers at Vassar College Library Special Collections.
So many dear friends whose support and kindness during the writing of this book was essential.
My family, especially Georgia.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© DONNA KAIN
Liza Wieland is the author of seven works of fiction and a volume of poems. She graduated from Harvard College and Columbia University and is the winner of the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and a Bridgeport Prize. She lives in North Carolina.
SimonandSchuster.com
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Liza-Wieland
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Other Books by Liza Wieland
Land of Enchantment
Quickening
A Watch of Nightingales
Near Alcatraz
Bombshell
You Can Sleep While I Drive
Discovering America
The Names of the Lost
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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