I would never have believed I’d feel nostalgic for Father JG, but I’d give anything to be back in his classroom right now.
When the plane stopped climbing and levelled out, the American woman let go of my arm and apologised. I’m sorry, she said. I didn’t realise what I was doing. That’s okay, I said. She said, My husband wanted to go to Paris when he retired, but I refused because I’m terrified of flying. He died one year ago and I felt as though I had to do it for him on the anniversary of his death. I should have done it with him. I’m so sorry.
She began to cry.
I offered her my pillowslip from the loft and she wiped her eyes with it. I said, I’m sorry your husband died.
I am too, she said. How old are you?
I’ll be fifteen in November, I told her.
Why are you flying alone? she wanted to know, and I said, My father’s meeting me in New York.
But you’re frightened, she said. Like me. I can tell. And you’ve been crying too, though you’re trying to hide it.
I haven’t been crying, I said, but I am sad. And I’m not frightened of flying. It’s something else.
Do you want to talk about it? she asked, and I said no.
It was very kind of you – she patted my arm – to lend me your security blanket.
It’s a pillowslip, I said. It’s just a pillowslip for when I feel sleepy.
And then the Air France stewardess stopped in our aisle and wanted to know if I was young Mr Vanderbilt.
Yes, I said.
Your mother asked us to check on you and make sure that everything is okay, the stewardess said.
Everything is okay, I assured her.
We have a very special meal prepared for you, the stewardess said. It’s not on the menu. It’s coq au vin, specially requested by your mother, Mr Vanderbilt. Enjoy.
Well, the woman in 34B said, a VIP with a security blanket, that’s one for the records. Then she said, Vanderbilt? You’re a Vanderbilt?
I pulled my boarding pass out of my Cicero (it was my bookmark) and flashed it.
But not one of those Vanderbilts, surely? she said.
And I said, No, not one of those Vanderbilts. It’s actually a very common name in Europe. Dutch, you know, in Dutch it’s as common as Smith, and very common in America too. New Amsterdam, New York. There are hundreds of us.
Go back a few generations, she said, and you’re probably all related. But if you were part of those Vanderbilts, you wouldn’t be sardined back here. You’d be sitting up front in first class.
It hadn’t really registered with me that I was in second class but I have a vague memory that when I was five and Maman and I flew to Paris, we flew first class. There was more room and it was nicer and the stewardess served Maman champagne and served me orange juice in a champagne glass. That time, we had linen cloths and linen napkins. In 34A, the napkins are paper and there is no cloth, no silver butter dish, no salt and pepper shakers, just plastic and little paper packets for sugar and pepper and such. Last week Maman gave me a letter in a sealed envelope and told me to open it and read it after my flight left Paris. I am reading it now. This is what it says.
I have to warn you that your father made the arrangements for this flight. Unfortunately, by both French and American law, I don’t have access to my own money. Your father does. All I have is the chateau and its paintings and antiques. As for my mother’s French stocks and bonds and bank accounts, your father got those. My mother was smart enough to keep them out of my father’s hands by not marrying him. I wasn’t so smart. Your father is as parsimonious as he is rich. He will probably send a yellow cab to the airport for you.
I am sorry that your flight will be cheap and nasty but at least it will give you a taste of what being a butcher would be like. Believe me, that life would be even cheaper and nastier. There would be nothing remotely romantic about it. This flight to rescue you from a future of unrelenting despair – the kind of despair you cannot even begin to imagine – is not the kind of flight I would have wanted for you, but that’s always been your father’s way.
And there is this to admit about your father’s school: you won’t get as good an education as you would in France, certainly not as intellectual and certainly culturally deficient in art and music, but you will be well prepared for the cut-throat world of American business. You will make all the right contacts and will learn how to be as vulgarly rich as your father. But just the same, I’m sorry I let your father arrange this flight. I should have had my banker in Paris sell another painting and I should have sent you to New York in style.
Of course, it makes no difference. First class would have been nicer, I suppose, but I do know that I wouldn’t be any less lonely and miserable sitting up there instead of back here in 34A.
I will never let you be sneered at by society, Maman’s letter says. I’m doing this so you can fly free.
I feel strapped into a very small cage, but if I shut my eyes and pretend I am sleeping in the loft, then I feel free. But then I think of Ti-Christophe and I try not to think of anything at all.
Love,
Ti-Loup
August 5, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
Well, not only did my father not show up to ‘collect’ me in Boissy or in Paris (as you well know), but he did not show up at Idlewild Airport to meet me either. He sent a chauffeur, not even a Vanderbilt chauffeur, but a driver from a limousine company. When I came out of customs, there was a row of men in uniforms holding signs with names on them. I didn’t pay any attention because I was looking for my father, but then suddenly – out of the corner of my eye – I noticed one name, black lettering on white card, that said GWYNNE VANDERBILT. I was startled, but you know what is really strange? It didn’t occur to me that this was me. What I thought was that one of my cousins or second cousins or third cousins or some relation or other must be arriving in New York at the same time. So I just sort of wandered around vaguely, looking for my father, wondering if I would recognise him and if he would recognise me.
I stopped at an airport bookstore because the window was eye-catching and dramatic. Multiple copies of one single title were cunningly stacked in a pyramid, a delicate castle of books. At the top of the pyramid were three flags: the American Stars and Stripes and the Confederate flag (remember Father JG’s classes on the Civil War?), and in the middle, higher than either of those two, a white flag with a black symbol I don’t recognise, a circle with a kind of arrowhead inside it. There was a placard that said: The just-published instant bestseller that will break your heart no matter which flag you fly. The book was called To Kill a Mockingbird and the author was Harper Lee. I wanted to buy a copy but I don’t know how to buy things. Servants do that. Besides, I don’t have any money. I don’t have French francs and I don’t have American dollars. When I asked Maman, she said: ‘You don’t need money. Your father will take care of all that.’
Then she said: ‘I never have money either. Thank God, the chateau runs on its own income and my lawyer and banker handle the bills.’
‘I didn’t know we had a lawyer and a banker,’ I said.
‘Their offices are in Paris. When I need things, I charge them to the chateau’s account. But if it were not for Melusine’s father, the chateau would barely be supporting itself.’
‘Can my father take the chateau income too?’ I asked her.
‘He would if he could. But by royal decree and by French inheritance laws, he can’t. The chateau will always belong to me until it belongs to you.’
I was still looking through the bookstore window when I heard an announcement like the voice of God. It was loud and reverberating and everywhere. From out of the hubbub of sound, I gradually distinguished these words: Would Gwynne Vanderbilt, who has just arrived from Paris on an Air France flight, please report to the information desk. So I did. And there was the chauffeur in the uniform with his sign and he said, ‘Your father has sent me to pick you up.’ And so I went. And so here I am
in the apartment where I spent my first five years and my father is not here either.
Does my father really exist, or did my mother invent him? That is what I am asking myself. Is he just a lawyer’s office in New York? Is all this just to keep me away from a butcher’s block and a boning knife?
Love,
Ti-Loup
August 8, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
He exists. Apparently my father exists, although I still haven’t seen him. I think I must have slept for two days. When I woke I smelled something I recognised, the smell of sadness, the smell of hopelessness, the smell of not wanting to get up and get dressed, the smell of a blue dress, the smell of a big angry man, the smell of fear. The smell was dark and damp and it made me want to put my head under the pillow and never wake up again.
Someone pulled the pillow off my head and it was a black woman in a black dress with a white apron with white lace frills and she said, ‘Master Gwynne! Don’t you remember me? I’m Shannay.’ And she gave me a huge hug and pulled my face into her chest and her breasts were like pillows. And I did remember. I remembered her smell. I remembered the boat cake she made and the three candles. I remembered the sparkler cake. I remembered that I used to love her and I couldn’t help it, I started to cry.
‘There, there, there,’ she said, ‘Oh my, how you have grown up. But ain’t you jus’ the same sad little boy you always been?’
‘No, I ain’t,’ I said. ‘I ain’t that same sad little boy.’ I can’t believe I said that, but I did. I know I did. And I know I said it in a way that sounded exactly like Shannay. I can’t seem to help doing this.
Shannay threw back her head and laughed. ‘Maybe you ain’t that sad little boy anymore,’ she said, ‘but you ain’t much changed either. You still your same strange self, Master Gwynne. You always talked Upper East Side to your father, French to your mama, and black folks’ talk to me. You could be on Broadway, you could.’
‘Where’s my father?’ I asked.
And she said: ‘Lord knows. He sure is the same son of a bitch he always was.’
And then we both started laughing and we laughed and laughed and she grabbed my hands and we danced a jig and I thought maybe it will be different this time.
Love,
Ti-Loup
August 9, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
I have seen him. I have seen my father.
At five o’clock Shannay came to my room and told me that my father expected me to join him for dinner at nine.
Nine o’clock! ‘That’s four hours away, Shannay,’ I said. ‘I’m hungry. I didn’t eat lunch. I slept through it.’
‘Jetlag,’ Shannay said. ‘I’ll make you a snack to keep your motor running till nine, but mind you don’t snitch on me.’ She brought me a big fat roast-beef sandwich with mustard and mayonnaise and lettuce and tomato and it was good.
I remembered the dining room though I’d hardly ever seen it before and I’d never eaten there, not even once. My parents always dined with the chandeliers and the servants waiting on them and the guests, sometimes six, sometimes twelve, sometimes twenty, sometimes actors, sometimes bankers, sometimes football players, congressmen, movie stars, English royalty, White Russian princes, sheiks. Of course I didn’t know who they were back then, but Shannay has shown me the photographs that have signatures all over the back. I realise now that my parents were terrified of being alone with each other.
‘Your daddy gonna make money off these photographs,’ Shannay told me.
Back then, I used to eat upstairs with Shannay and the au pair. (Shannay and I spoke English; the au pair and I spoke French; my father and I spoke English; Maman and I spoke French.) The servants lived up in the attic, under the gables, and my room was up there too (and still is). The penthouse has two levels. The main level is the lobby, the living room, the dining room, the library, the ballroom, my parents’ suite, and a wide outdoor terrace overlooking Central Park. The dining room is not much different from the one in the chateau. It’s just as large. Even the table and chairs are Louis XIV so I don’t know if Maman bought them when she first got married or if my Vanderbilt relations always bought the same stuff.
My father was sitting at the head of the table when Shannay gave me a little push. I didn’t feel ready so I resisted, I pushed back, but Shannay whispered in my ear: ‘Soonest begun, soonest done,’ and then I let myself be shot in like a cork from a champagne bottle and my father raised his eyebrows and laughed. He stood up. ‘Let’s have a look at you then,’ he said. We shook hands.
‘Not like that,’ he said. ‘Put some energy into it. That’s more like it.’
I think my knuckles were crushed but I was not going to let him see me wince. (Today my fingers have blue and purple bruise marks.) He stood back and looked me up and down as though I were a horse he was buying. (He does buy horses.) ‘Your mother has turned you into a pampered neurotic weakling,’ he said, ‘but to her credit she recognises what she has done and is making amends. I just hope it isn’t too late.’ He sounded full of disgust. He dropped my hand and sort of flicked it away from him, as though he were batting off a cockroach. ‘Let’s hope Dryden can make a man out of you,’ he said, ‘though they’ll have their work cut out. Well, what do you have to say for yourself?’
I tried to think of what you would have said to him. I know you would have thrown a verbal grenade that would have stopped him in his tracks and stunned him and he would have been dumbfounded and he would have had to parry and he would have liked it. It would have challenged him. It would have excited him. Coming from you, it would have turned him on.
But I couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Can you ride a horse?’ he asked. ‘Can you hunt? Can you do steeplechase, hurdles?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ I said. ‘I’ve never tried. I’m sure I could learn.’
‘I doubt it,’ he said.
He doesn’t want me here. He despises me. This makes me as murderously angry as it makes me feel like a bug that should be squashed. We ate dinner in absolute silence, with the butler and the maid (equally nervous, I observed) coming and going and never speaking, and then my father simply got up and left. I did say something then. I said, Goodnight, sir. But I didn’t say it until he had closed the door behind him.
Love,
Ti-Loup
P.S. I put my first three letters in the mail to you yesterday (the two I wrote on the flight and the one I wrote on my first night here). I asked Shannay how to mail a letter and she said she’d take care of it. She said she’d buy the stamps. When I asked how much that would cost, she said, ‘Don’t you go fretting yourself. I know your father too damn well. He never give your mama a tin nickel of her own to spend, and I know he don’t give you nothing.’
I don’t know how long it will take for my letters to get to St Gilles.
Have you got them yet?
August 10, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
This morning I took the Dryden entrance exam. I thought I would have to go to a courthouse or to la mairie or somewhere like that but the examiner came to our penthouse. I sat at a table in the library – it’s not as elegant as the chateau library – and the Dryden man said: ‘You have two hours. I will be invigilating. You may begin.’
I needn’t have worried. I can imagine Father JG saying: ‘They call that an entrance exam?’
In the afternoon Shannay told me that my father expected me for dinner. In the dining room he said: ‘Well, at least you’re good for something. Apparently, as far as academics go, you’re in the top percentile, whatever that means. I know it doesn’t mean any head for business, that’s for sure. Dumbest people I ever met teach at Columbia or Harvard or Yale.’
Then he clasped my upper arms in his hands and bored in with his thumbs as though he planned to push holes right through my flesh and bones until he touched his own fingers. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘You’re jel
lo. You’re pastry dough before it goes in the oven. Okay, so you’ve got a brain in your head but until you can do as well with a hunting rifle and a football, you’ll bring me nothing but shame at my own school. Jenkins will serve you dinner. You may eat here. I’m going out.’
And that was that.
Love,
Ti-Loup
August 12, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
Every day I ask Shannay if there are any letters for me and every day she says no.
You promised you’d write. Why haven’t you answered my letters?
How is Grand Loup? I had a dream last night. In the dream we were under the bridge and we saw Ti-Christophe and Michel Monsard and Olivier but this time I rushed out and ran between them. Michel Monsard and Olivier were so shocked that they stabbed each other over and over. Ti-Christophe crossed himself and said, ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ then he hoisted me onto his shoulders and we walked back to the cottage. Grand Loup said, ‘Well done, well done, well done. Justice takes her time,’ he said, ‘because she has to stumble in her own blind way, but in the long run she always shows up.’
I woke from this dream very happy.
And then Shannay came in with my breakfast and I remembered that Ti-Christophe was dead. I couldn’t eat anything.
Why haven’t you written?
Love,
Ti-Loup
August 14, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
I have had a letter from Maman. She says you have moved back into your father’s cottage. She does not think this is a good idea.
The Claimant Page 29
