I quote: I fear that Melusine may slip backwards, socially speaking. There is a risk that she will revert to the habits of the wild creature she used to be. This is not a criticism of her father, for whom I have the greatest respect, but he is, after all, a peasant and a farmer. I’m not sure if he owns any books and there is no moderating feminine influence in that cottage. I can only countenance this as a temporary measure. After all, my gardener is not the only one who has lost a son or who feels lonely.
She says she has arranged for you to attend one of the small convent schools in Tours in the fall because seven years of Jesuit education should not be wasted. She intends that you will go to the Sorbonne and be trained in art history and art appraisal. She intends that you will be a boarder at the convent during the week but will come back to Boissy and St Gilles on weekends.
She intends, she intends …
She does not say how you respond to her intentions. I try to imagine. You and my mother can both spit ice. In a fight to the death, I wouldn’t know how to place my bet. She does say that you have reluctantly agreed to spend the week with the nuns but that you insist that you will stay in your father’s cottage on weekends. She says she has agreed to this provided you have Sunday dinner in the chateau.
Why haven’t I heard all this from you? She says you will begin at the convent in September. Will you write before then or are you enjoying much too much being the only daughter on both sides of the chateau wall, having the loft all to yourself, being chatelaine-in-residence, chatelaine-in-waiting? If I’ve received a letter from my mother, why haven’t I received one from you?
She says your father is getting forgetful and strange since Ti-Christophe disappeared and Chantal killed herself and the baby. She says the servants tell her that gossip in Boissy and St Gilles is equally divided as to whether the butcher killed Ti-Christophe (for which most of the villagers believe he would be justified since his daughter was carrying your brother’s child) or whether Ti-Christophe fled to Paris because he was afraid that the butcher would kill him.
So at least we have kept the lid tightly shut on what actually happened – not that Grand Loup knows what happened. Not all that happened. Only four people know for certain that Ti-Christophe is dead. Your father will say nothing and Michel Monsard won’t dare talk. And we two will never speak of that day. It is always possible that your father sometimes does not believe what we told him. It is possible that he chooses to believe Ti-Christophe is alive, just as he sometimes seems to hope that your mother is still alive. If that eases his grief, can we blame him? When there is no body to bury, I think hope dies hard.
What I want to know is what is being said in Tours about the disappearance of Olivier? Has anyone noticed? I’m not surprised no one would notice his absence in Boissy or St Gilles, but surely the newspapers in Tours might have mentioned his disappearance And surely rumour would reach St Gilles? People would ask questions in the butcher shop and stories would spawn and spread.
Maman says your father seems to have aged overnight. She says his hands shake and he can’t remember what happened yesterday. She says you had to water the vines by yourself last week. Also you had to harvest vegetables from the potager because your father forgot to do it. She will not permit this state of affairs to continue. She may have to hire a new manager, she says.
She wants to know how I am. She says my father always wanted to own me and turn me into a proper Vanderbilt and a proper American so she’s sure he’s happy and she hopes I am too. She hopes I understand the sacrifice she has made.
I’m not going to answer her letter.
Why don’t you write?
Love,
Ti-Loup
August 18, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
Today is Grand Loup’s 46th birthday. Are you celebrating with roasted rabbits and roasted potatoes? I would give my father’s racehorses to be there with you. Did you cook the birthday feast yourself? Did Marie-Claire come? Does her husband still not remember who he is? Was my mother invited to the birthday dinner?
Why wasn’t I invited? Even though you know I wouldn’t be able to come, the gesture would have mattered to me.
Why don’t you write? Give Grand Loup a birthday hug from me. Tell him I love him more than anyone else in the world after Ti-Christophe and you.
Love,
Ti-Loup
August 20, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
Something very strange happened today. Shannay brought me an envelope. She said, ‘I was aksed’ (yes, arkst, that’s what she said; I see these dialects, you know. I see the words in phonetic script in my head, one of Father JG’s gifts) ‘I was aksed to give you this, Master Gwynne, but not to let anyone see. A messenger boy come to the door with it.’
Inside there was a handwritten letter and two small paintings, postcard size, both oil on thick card, one of you (but, I know, it’s really of your mother and it’s called Lilith). It’s the same as the one your father showed us at the last supper. The other painting is of him and it’s called Grand Loup. The paintings are signed MG in the lower right corner. This is what the letter says.
Dear Petit Loup,
Grand Loup gave us your father’s address and wrote that you were living with him now. We thought you would like these little gifts and we send them as mementos of two people who changed our lives as much as we believe they did yours. Do you remember us? We visited the chateau last year. We suspect that your father would probably not want you to have contact with us, so we are being discreet, but we would love to have you visit if you can. We are just walking distance away.
Sincerely,
Myriam & Aaron Goldberg
Remember those people? My mother was impressed because they identified one of her paintings (one she didn’t like very much) as an early Modigliani. They said it was worth a small fortune, which excited her. Remember? How come they have heard from Grand Loup and I haven’t? How come I haven’t heard from you? I will visit them if Shannay will help me escape from the building and show me the way. I will keep the paintings of you and Grand Loup under my mattress, safe between cardboard, but at night I will take them out and lean them against the dressing-table mirror. They will be the first thing I see when I wake in the morning.
Love,
Ti-Loup
August 23, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
Shannay took me for a walk in Central Park today. She had to ask my father’s permission. She told him I was getting pale and pasty-looking from never going outside and he said, ‘Good God, get him walking! Toughen him up a bit and bronze him up before he gets to Dryden or they’ll kill him. They’ll tear him apart.’
Central Park is just the other side of the street, but crossing Fifth Avenue is like walking in the Forest of Chinon in hunting season. You take your life in your hands. It’s the first time I’ve been allowed out of the house. Shannay said: ‘We’ll walk around the park for a bit, then we’ll walk down to 59th, then east to Madison and then north a couple of blocks, just in case someone is spying for your father.’
Entering Central Park (after escaping live from Fifth Avenue) was like climbing out of my window all those years ago and walking into your kitchen. You were roasting rabbits. I understood in that moment that I had travelled from one galaxy to another. Central Park is like that, a place of witchery, a Midsummer Night’s Dream kind of place. It’s not Manhattan, it’s not New York, it is somewhere else.
We walked up the Mall to the lake. There is a great fountain and a terrace and there were people in boats on the water. There is a very beautiful bridge with woods on the other side like the woods around the chateau. I want to walk in the woods, I told Shannay, but she said, ‘That’s the Ramble and people say it’s not safe, not even in daytime. You get mugged there. It’s full of drug addicts and thieves.’
So we walked back down to 59th Street and then to Madison and then north for two blocks. ‘This is the place,’ Shanna
y said. ‘We’ll have to speak to the doorman first.’
‘Six-A,’ she said to the doorman, and he pressed a button and talked to someone on the phone.
‘Take the elevator, young man, sixth floor,’ he said to me. He told Shannay she’d have to wait in the lobby.
When the elevator doors opened on the sixth floor, those people who visited us at the chateau were waiting. ‘Petit Loup!’ they said, and they hugged me as though I were the son of Lilith (your mother Lilith) and Grand Loup. ‘Come in, come in,’ they said.
I told them Shannay had brought me and I didn’t like to leave her down in the lobby, so they called the doorman on the phone and told him to send her up. They served us a cheese platter and afternoon tea and Dubonnet. Afterwards Shannay said to me, ‘The Goldbergs are a lot nicer than your folks, Master Gwynne.’
‘Grand Loup wrote to us,’ the Goldbergs said. ‘He told us about Petit Christophe.’
I waited. I thought about it. And then I asked them carefully, ‘What did he tell you?’
He told us Petit Christophe had been killed in an honourable fight, they said, with a man who had raped his fiancée. He said his son’s body had not been found and he believed the killer had dragged it away and buried it, or possibly had tied weights to it and dumped it in the Vienne or the Loire. He knew the killer was the butcher’s son, but he didn’t know if the son or the butcher himself had disposed of the body. He said that Petit Christophe’s fiancée had killed herself, either from grief or shame, and that she had killed his grandchild within her. He told us he felt that the weight of his own sorrow was crushing him.
Shannay said, ‘Jesus have mercy!’
‘Did you know about this?’ they asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean, I know Petit Christophe and Chantal and her baby are all dead.’
I asked them if they had any news about you.
Yes, they said. Grand Loup told them you are the one ray of sunlight in his life, that you are living at home again and working with him in the potager and the vineyard.
Are you happy back in the cottage and in the fields? You used to love it. You used to miss it. But then I think you crossed over. You speak French like my mother, you speak English like Father JG. I can’t imagine you now with mud under your fingernails or your dress torn from climbing the apple tree and dropping over the wall.
The Goldbergs said that you will enter the convent school in Tours in September.
‘Your mother,’ they told me, ‘your mother, la comtesse, has no idea, but it is the very same convent which served as a safe house during the Occupation. We spent two nights in hiding there. It is where we first met Lilith.’
It is where you were born, Cap. This must mean something, don’t you think? But I don’t know what. I bet even Father JG would believe it means something (if he were to know the facts), but he wouldn’t know what it meant either.
Even the Goldbergs said that the coincidence was so strange and so fitting that they were tempted to see it as a good omen, except that they do not believe in signs or magic or any such supernatural intervention in human life. We make our own fates, they said. We ourselves are responsible for how we play whatever hands we are dealt. Nevertheless, they said, they did agree with Borges. Madame Goldberg showed me a painting she had done in acrylics on canvas. A dragon was swallowing its own tail and inside the circle she had painted in cursive: Reality is partial to symmetries and slight anachronisms. (Jorge Luis Borges)
Grand Loup does believe in signs and wonders, the Goldbergs said. He believes that the convent in Tours will be your safe house and that your mother is watching over your life. He is not sure anymore where his own safe house is, or whether he has one.
Then Madame Goldberg took one of my hands in both of hers and looked me in the eye. ‘Grand Loup’s daughter is depressed,’ she said, ‘because you never answer her letters.’
‘She never answers my letters!’ I said. ‘I write to her almost every day.’
‘Ah,’ they said. ‘Well then. Perhaps when Lilith is living in Tours, she should mail her letters from there and send them to us and we can pass them along to you. Perhaps you should bring your letters to us and we will mail them to Tours.’
Shannay looked upset. ‘I take Master Gwynne’s letters direct to the mailbox,’ she said.
‘How do you address them?’ Madame Goldberg asked me.
‘To the chateau,’ I said.
‘And what about mail arriving at the Vanderbilt residence?’ Madame Goldberg asked Shannay.
‘It doesn’t arrive at the residence,’ Shannay said. ‘It arrives at Mr Vanderbilt’s post office box and his personal secretary collects it.’
So that explains everything and Shannay will take this letter to the Goldbergs tomorrow, but I suppose it won’t reach you until you are in the convent at Tours. Anything mailed to Grand Loup would have to be addressed to the gardener’s cottage, in care of the chateau, and we know what would happen to that.
Love,
Ti-Loup
September 2, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
Today a telegram arrived from my mother. Shannay answered the doorbell and it was the Western Union man. It’s for you, Shannay said. This is what it said:
CRISTOPHE THE GARDENER HAD HEART ATTACK. TAKEN TO HOSPITAL IN TOURS. DOCTORS SAY RISK OF SUBSEQUENT STROKE IS HIGH. WILL HAVE TO FIND NEW MANAGER. MELUSINE BEING DIFFICULT ABOUT CONVENT IN TOURS. REFUSING TO LEAVE HER FATHER. NOT ACCEPTABLE BUT DIPLOMACY WILL BE REQUIRED. WILL HAVE TO MAKE NURSING HOME ARRANGMENTS FOR GARDENER. MAMAN.
How is Grand Loup?
How are you?
I wish I could be with you.
Love,
Ti-Loup
September 5, 1960
New York
Dear Cap,
Of course, I am worried sick about Grand Loup. How is he? I have had no further reports from Maman so I have to hope that means no stroke, no further decline. Today is a public holiday. It’s called Labor Day here, which is strange, since everywhere else in the world Labor Day is on May 1st. Tomorrow my father will take me to Massachusetts to register me at his old boarding school. Classes begin next week and my third life will also begin. One more new world where I won’t belong. My father is at his seaside house in the Hamptons for the holiday weekend. I wasn’t invited. I’ve never been there. Anyway, I’d rather stay here with Shannay.
My father’s chauffeur will drive us tomorrow. It’s a four-hour drive. I cannot imagine a more unpleasant way to spend the last day of my second life: all that time in the back seat with my father!
What will we talk about?
I know the answer to that: we won’t talk at all. But I am rehearsing over and over what I am going to say to him just before we get to the school. I am going to say: Could I have my letters now please?
I also like to imagine what you would say to him and that makes me smile.
Shannay and I walked in Central Park this morning and then we walked to the Goldbergs’ for lunch. Still no letters. I know that can’t happen before you move to Tours. They have my Dryden address but they don’t have your convent address in Tours yet. How is Grand Loup? Do you ever see Michel Monsard? Has anything been said about Olivier? Surely the newspapers in Tours …? How has his disappearance been explained? Has nobody noticed?
I have been practising my questions for my father, watching myself in the mirror. ‘Why are you censoring my mail?’ I practise saying this in a neutral way. Sometimes I practise with a drop of acid added. ‘What exactly are you and my mother afraid of?’ I ask. I watch my face in the mirror. I practise looking calm. I practise looking confident of my right to an answer. My face in the mirror is not convincing. I try anger, which is easier to manage. ‘Did you know that Henry VIII and Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin were all obsessed with reading other people’s mail?’ I demand. ‘And what happened to all those regimes? Did it save the censors from what they most feared?’
I imagine you asking any o
f those questions which I hope to ask, but which of course I probably won’t. If I do say anything it will be polite, if not downright pleading. ‘Could I please have my letters from Cap?’
Love,
Ti-Loup
P.S. I am giving this letter to the Goldbergs now and it should be the first letter you get.
2.
Shannay appeared in the doorway of his room with a large flat box. It was the sixth of September 1960. ‘School uniform,’ she said. ‘Came from Saks on your father’s account. You’re supposed to put it on now.’
‘Oh my my my,’ she said, when he reappeared in wool slacks, white shirt, blazer and tie. ‘Ain’t you the gentleman, Mr Gwynne?’
He did think he looked rather smart.
‘You gonna break a lotta girls’ hearts,’ Shannay said.
‘There aren’t any girls at Dryden.’
‘Never stopped your father, from what I hear,’ Shannay said. ‘There’s girls’ schools a bike ride away and plenty rich preppies that do a major in hanky-pank. Not just the boys, the girls too. I hear the jokes when the Old Dryden stags come around for cigars and drinks. I got to clean up after. Who cleans up the girls’ lives, I can’t say. Chauffeur waiting in the lobby, by the way.’
‘Is my father here?’
Shannay frowned and lifted her hands, palms up. ‘You think he ever checks in with me? You think he keeps me informed? Waiting in the limo, maybe?’
‘I have to spend the next four hours with him in that car.’
‘I know, baby, I know.’ Shannay opened her arms wide and he walked into that warm space and was embarrassed by how much he did not want to leave. It was not the kind of embrace that Grand Loup or Ti-Christophe or Cap ever gave, but it made him think of them. ‘I already sent your luggage down,’ Shannay said. ‘I’ll be naming you in my prayers every day, you keep that in mind, Mr Gwynne. Lord bless you and keep you.’
‘I will miss you, Shannay.’
‘I will miss you too, honey chile.’
The Claimant Page 30
