In the final weeks of the life of Lady Isabelle, Cap sat at her bedside every day. Each day the doorman would call up to say that Mrs Celise Vanderbilt was in the lobby and wished to pay her respects. By then, in the aftermath of her stroke, the countess could speak but not in a manner easily understood. She could make half-words and grunting sounds but Cap could translate. Tell the doorman to keep that vulture away from me, was the gist of what the countess said.
Nevertheless flowers would be sent up daily. From your loving niece, Celise.
‘Niece Celise, call the police,’ the countess whispered fiercely one day, with startling clarity, though the effort exhausted her.
‘Shh, don’t tire yourself,’ Cap said, but she could not help chuckling. ‘What a wicked mouth you have. And you are the one who claimed I was a wild thing.’
The countess spluttered with laughter but the laughter turned into a harrowing coughing fit. In alarm, Cap pressed Medic Alert and within minutes the emergency nurse was there.
‘You should buffer her from any source of agitation,’ the nurse reproved.
‘I’ll speak to the doorman,’ Cap promised.
But just two days later Celise was suddenly there at the bedroom door. There must have been a few minutes when the doorman was otherwise engaged …
‘Oh my poor dear Isabelle,’ Celise said unctuously. She leaned over the bed and stroked the cheek of the dying woman with one hand. The voice and the touch had the effect of a violent adrenaline surge. Lady Isabelle de la Vallière Vanderbilt, bedridden for weeks, too frail to walk, partially paralysed, suddenly tried to sit upright in bed.
‘Poor dear Isabelle,’ Celise murmured, unperturbed. ‘I just wanted to see how you were.’ The countess subsided, exhausted, onto her pillows.
‘I’m calling the doorman,’ Cap said and buzzed the intercom.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Celise said smoothly, leaving the room.
Between the sailboat pond and the edge of the park, Cap leans against a tree until the image of Celise by the deathbed fades. She emerges from the park at Fifth Avenue and East 72nd. Crossing Fifth, she is almost hit by a bus and knows that she remains in an unsafe state. She anchors her body to the light pole on the corner until her heartbeat returns to something approximating normal. One person stops to ask if she needs help. Most pass without a second glance or assume she is drunk or stoned and turn away.
Cap takes deep slow breaths and counts to twenty then steadies herself and walks down Fifth to the Frick, then along East 70th to Madison. She is heading for the first sanctuary she knew after she left the chateau and the gardener’s cottage. The Goldbergs are no longer there – they moved to the Beth Shalom retirement community in Florida months ago – but their old pre-war building and its interior court and garden still cast an aura of calm. Cap only has to think of the Goldbergs and their apartment (crammed with books and art, floor to ceiling, two paintings on each side of every door, Soutine in the bathroom, Cocteau above the toilet, Modigliani in the bedroom), she has only to visualise the enclosed garden of their building to feel safe, something which, she realises now, is profoundly ironic.
How could two people so utterly subject to Category 5 dangers through so many years of their lives have made her feel so secure?
The doorman to what was once the Goldbergs’ apartment building is young and new and Cap does not know him.
‘I used to live here,’ she tells him. ‘A long time ago, apartment 6A, mid-sixties.’
‘People come back all the time,’ the doorman says. ‘Famous people. Sign the Former Residents Book, over there. We’ve got artists, writers, CEOs, ambassadors, secretaries of state and gangsters. What are you famous for?’
‘Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. I’m not famous for anything except maybe for having lived in this building.’
‘Well, sign the book and press the 6A buzzer,’ the doorman says. ‘You can talk on the intercom.’
‘No, no. I don’t know the people who live there now. I don’t want to bother them. I don’t know anyone in the building anymore. I was just wondering if you’d let me sit in the courtyard garden for a while.’
‘I’m not allowed to let anyone in unless they’re vouched for by a resident.’
‘I know,’ Cap says. ‘Good rule. I know the rules. This is … well, it’s a nostalgia thing. You lived in Manhattan all your life?’
‘Never lived in Manhattan. Can’t afford it. I go home to Newark every night.’
‘Grow up in New Jersey?’
‘No. Grew up in Minnesota and escaped to NYU six years ago. Theatre. Working here part-time between auditions and bit parts on stage.’
‘Ever go back to Minnesota?’
‘Thanksgiving. Christmas.’
‘To the house you grew up in?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Think of it twenty, thirty, forty years from now. Strangers living there. You think you might want to knock on the door and tell whoever opens it: I grew up in this house. I wonder if I could just sit under the apple tree my mother planted in the backyard?’
The doorman smiles. ‘Point made,’ he says. ‘Wow. Convincing case. You a theatre major too?’
‘Art History. I was an undergrad at NYU when I lived here.’
‘Okay,’ the doorman says. ‘But don’t leave the courtyard garden. You still have to sign in, and make sure you sign out before the end of my shift.’
‘You’re an angel,’ Cap says.
‘Yeah, yeah. Actually had a set of wings, would you believe, for one production.’
‘Angels in America?’
‘I wish. Walk-on part in a more-awful-than-usual episode of Touched By an Angel.’
‘Ugh!’ Cap sympathises. ‘But think about it: you have touched me. It’s going to get you brownie points in the universe somewhere.’
‘I’ll put it on my CV,’ the doorman grins.
From a bench in the courtyard garden, Cap studies the hostas and ferns, the lacy birch trees, the massed white caladiums, the bronze Lipchitz sculpture rising like an elongated supplicant from the waving green lily-turf lawn. There is a plaque, Cap knows, on its pedestal. Gift of Aaron and Myriam Goldberg, it says. In tribute to Lilith and Grand Loup.
In the sixth year of the tutelage of Father John Gabriel, who is dedicated to the preparation of his pupils for le bac and for eventual distinguished acceptance at the Sorbonne, in the year when Petit Loup is thirteen years old and Cap is whatever age she is, during Latin translation and under their schoolmaster’s stern policing eye, Ti-Loup slips a note across the table to Cap under his text of Cicero’s De Re Publica.
Urgent. Meet me by the wall, under apple tree, at mid-morning break.
Under the very apple tree where they first met, Ti-Loup tells Capucine, ‘Two strangers, Americans who speak good French, are walking around the village every day. Have you heard?’
‘No. Father JG’s watching us. He’s afraid he’ll be fired if he blinks.’
‘Probably would be. My mother’s orders.’
‘No. It’s not your mother. He’s afraid we’ll tell about Saturdays.’
‘It’s creepy the way he watches.’
‘He’s terrified we’ll tell. And he feels guilty for deceiving your mother. He makes up for that by being vigilant on weekdays.’
‘He’s thinking up a reason right now and he’ll join us in less than five minutes.’
‘I know. So these strangers? Be quick.’
‘Marie-Claire told me. She was there when I got to your father’s cottage last night. Marie-Claire says everyone’s talking about them, but she hasn’t seen them herself. Their names are Monsieur and Madame Goldberg.’
‘Jews.’
‘Obviously. But French Jews.’ These strangers are not staying in the village – which has no place for visitors to stay – but they have a hotel room in Chinon. They come every day in a car which they park in the village square. ‘Then they walk everywhere, Marie-Claire says. All day. They talk to everyone. They eat lunch at th
e Lion d’Or. They are very charming but everyone is wary. The visitors say they spent time here long ago, when they were young, and they wanted a trip down memory lane. They speak very good French, but no one remembers them. They speak Parisian French, not country French, that’s why.’
‘When did they stay here?’
‘They won’t say.’
The strangers have explained that their prior visit was brief. They are not surprised that no one remembers them. Sometimes they ask if Monsieur Grand Loup is still alive. No one knows who they mean. They say they will know Monsieur Grand Loup, if he is still alive, when they see him.
‘What did Papa say?’
‘He said, Marie-Claire, everyone promised they would return, but no one did. And Marie-Claire said, We don’t know how many ever got that chance.’
Petit Loup runs agitated fingers through his hair. ‘Cap, do you think …? Grand Loup, Petit Loup … What do you think?’
‘Did you ask Papa?’
‘I asked him if he knew who the strangers were. He said he would know the answer to that when he saw them. I asked him if he knew who Monsieur Grand Loup was, and he said yes, but this was not a subject about which he wanted to talk.’
Father John Gabriel’s afternoon class is interrupted by Pierre of the velvet pantaloons. ‘Madame la Comtesse wishes her son and Melusine to come to the salon immediately. She says distinguished visitors from America are here.’
In the salon, the countess is elegant in pale grey silk. Almost forty now, her body looks younger but her face looks older, still striking with its high cheekbones and large eyes, but with something dark in the hollows beneath the eye sockets and something disturbing in the lustrous force of her gaze.
‘Madame and Monsieur Goldberg,’ she says, ‘may I present my son, le vicomte Gwynne Patrice –’
‘Mon Dieu!’ Madame Goldberg says, with an intake of breath. ‘Lilith!’ She presses a hand over her heart before taking Cap’s hand between her own. ‘Lilith, c’est toi!’
‘And also,’ the countess says, with a courteous though starched intimation that impropriety has occurred, ‘I present Melusine, my gardener’s daughter. Mes enfants,’ she says, ‘the Goldbergs used to live in Paris before the war. They are art collectors from New York and my personal collection has come to their attention.’
‘C’est toi,’ Madame Goldberg says again, in a whisper. She is still holding Cap’s hand. And then, collecting herself, she says, ‘Enchantée.’
Cap senses the electricity of possibility, of some barely imaginable state of being that is far beyond the village, far beyond the valleys of the Vienne and the Cher and the Loire, far beyond Paris, far beyond France, back to the mists of a prior incarnation. For a second she has a fogged image of a Romanesque crypt, of nuns, of bloodied sheets, but the image dissolves and she is studying the face of Madame Goldberg as closely as Madame Goldberg is studying hers.
If the countess reminds her of the austerely beautiful and sorrowing face of the mother of Louis XIV in Philippe de Champaigne’s painting, then Madame Goldberg reminds her of a portrait de Champaigne did of his own wife, Charlotte Duchesne, daughter of his patron at court. It is a delicate face with dark hair and warm eyes, a hint of a smile on the lips. The eyes are cordial but intense. They suggest a churn of inquiry, of equivocation, of rebuttal and parrying in the mind behind the eyes. Cap is extremely familiar with this face. In the Musée des Beaux Arts in Tours, she has spent hours in contemplation of de Champaigne’s preliminary sketch for the painting of his wife, black chalk on parchment, highlights in white chalk, some red chalk accents. She is transfixed by the face of Myriam Goldberg, quite unaware that the Goldbergs, in return, are equally transfixed by her own.
‘Lilith!’ Madame Goldberg murmurs again. There are tears in her eyes. ‘Mon Dieu!’ She leans forward to kiss Cap’s cheeks. ‘You have come back to us.’ This is a whisper that only Capucine can hear.
‘You remind us of someone,’ Monsieur Goldberg explains, to cover an awkward stretch of silence. ‘Someone we knew in St Gilles.’
‘You had relatives in our village?’ the countess inquires.
‘Not relatives,’ Monsieur Goldberg responds. ‘Not exactly. But people close to us, yes.’
‘And for you also, Madame Goldberg?’ the countess asks with a hint of steel in her voice. ‘Melusine reminds you of someone?’
Madame Goldberg seems not to hear. She has touched Cap’s cheek with her hand, but her eye has been arrested by a watercolour-tinted charcoal sketch on the wall beyond Cap’s head. The sketch, of a man and a woman, consists of strong dark minimalist strokes – black clothing, stark white collars and cuffs – but is luminous with a wash of rose-gold flesh. The work is quite small, about twenty inches high and ten wide.
‘Ah yes,’ the countess says, following the sightline of her guest. ‘Rather out of keeping with the rest of my collection. It’s modern, not my taste at all, but my dealer applied an unusual amount of pressure. Very odd, when I think back. I bought it in ’41 or ’42, I think. My dealer was selling it cheaply, dirt cheap, to be honest. I don’t even know what happened to him, he just disappeared. The sketch isn’t signed, but my current appraiser says it could be an early Modigliani and quite valuable. Could be a preliminary sketch of a portrait of Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz, he thinks, but there’s no signature. He left drawings and paintings, you know, all over Paris. Modigliani, I mean. He kept being evicted and leaving canvases behind, or using them to pay overdue bills. His life was a mess. My dealer says his early work shows up in flea markets from time to time. The dealer said this sketch was called Man and Wife.’
‘It is definitely an early Modigliani,’ Monsieur Goldberg says. ‘As a knowledgeable collector of Modigliani, I can confirm that.’
‘So it is valuable?’ the countess asks.
‘Extremely. And rare. And uncatalogued. How did your dealer acquire it?’
‘At the time, you know,’ the countess explains, ‘it was necessary to be, shall we say, on careful terms with the Occupation. The seller, according to my dealer, was a German officer. I never wished to know how he acquired it.’
‘Understandable,’ Madame Goldberg says.
‘You are collectors yourselves?’
‘Yes. We have a considerable collection in New York. We have bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.’
‘Ah,’ the countess says fondly, ‘I used to spend so many hours there. I lived in New York for five years when I was first married. When Gwynne Patrice was an infant. But then I came back home to France.’
‘Were you here in 1944?’ Madame Goldberg asks.
‘Oh, indeed, yes,’ the countess says. ‘That was before I was married, before I left France. That is not a year I will ever forget, though it is not a year I like to remember. My mother died the year before, I think from the shock of having German officers move into our rooms. The rains came at the wrong time, the vintage was disappointing, and in other respects, we never knew how many mouths we would have to feed or how many hands we would have at harvest. We made what accommodations were necessary, you understand, but we never made them willingly. The Germans informed us that they would be billeting twelve officers in the chateau. We had to feed them. They had to have the best wines, the best lamb, the best steaks, the best of everything. My mother had a heart attack and a German officer moved into her room the week after she was buried. That’s the way it was all through ’42 and ’43 and ’44, right up until the Liberation. They were terrible years.’
‘Yes,’ Monsieur Goldberg says, ‘those were terrible years.’
‘And that dreadful winter of ’44. What a strange year. From the darkest of darks before June, and then suddenly a sunrise of hope. And then, end of August, the Free French and de Gaulle on the Champs-Elysées! Well, we went giddy with champagne and dances. I met my husband in Paris then. But before that, we had to take risks,’ the countess says. ‘Sometimes we had to put our own lives on the line. I personally – well, never mind. The
war ended and we survived.’
‘It’s quite unnerving, Lilith, to see you again. Unchanged.’
‘I’m Capucine.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course. But you look so like your mother,’ Myriam Goldberg says. ‘So like her at that terrible unforgettable moment in time …’ She gestures with her hands, she presses the back of one wrist against her lips. ‘Being here, it brings all the anxiety back.’
Six people are gathered in front of the cast-iron stove in the gardener’s cottage: the Goldbergs; Christophe le Jardinier and his two children, now aged twenty-three and perhaps fifteen; also Marie-Claire (though many years have passed since Marie-Claire was the gardener’s housekeeper, and even Noisette, her replacement, moved on to Chinon years ago).
‘She was just a slip of a girl,’ Aaron Goldberg says.
‘She was twenty,’ the gardener says gruffly.
‘Such courage. Such ingenuity. We owe her our lives.’
‘She was an escort,’ the gardener shrugs. ‘That was her job. There were many young women and young men who did the same thing. Some survived, more didn’t.’
The story is an old one but one that is not retold in St Gilles except in pieces and whispered bits: how every week Lilith escorted boatloads downriver from Tours (sometimes two people, sometimes four, sometimes six), then through the forest to Chinon.
Myriam cannot take her eyes off Capucine. ‘Lilith was so quick-thinking and daring.’
‘Reckless,’ Marie-Claire says.
‘Young.’ Christophe le Jardinier busies himself with stoking the fire.
Lilith had actually brought the Goldbergs from Chinon by daylight, in a laundry van fitted with false floor. ‘I made that floor,’ the gardener interjects. The van had been stopped en route by German soldiers. Lilith flirted a little and asked if the men would like a lift. She was a laundry maid, she explained, and she was taking linens back to the officers in the chateau in St Gilles. On the sub-floor, the Goldbergs lay flat on their backs with ten inches of space between their foreheads and the sheets stacked above. They could not see what was happening but they could hear. When two of the soldiers said yes, they would like a lift, Lilith said, ‘Get in. But you’ll have to be extremely careful not to put marks or creases into those starched sheets because some of the SS are absolute fanatics when it comes to their laundry.’ And the soldiers changed their minds and waved her on.
The Claimant Page 24
