Ofelia’s small glass bell continued to ring as I took the stairs. I passed Leone on the landing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried, but she’s asking for you.” His eyes, large and brown with a slight downward slope, could be comforting, warm, but just then they seemed emptied of that warmth, simply sad, tired. We were all tired.
When I got to her room, Ofelia looked asleep, but as I walked closer to her bed, she pushed herself up and announced in a loud whisper, “I cannot fall asleep.”
“Why not?”
“Why not, why not. How am I to know, Miss Jüül?” Her voice sounded both angry and close to tears, and I knew how thin the edge was between the two. “I just want to get some rest!” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I need some rest.”
“The duke couldn’t comfort you?”
“Leone – he thinks it’s all in my mind. That man and his mind. I try to tell him there is more – that our bodies have their own language and sometimes they scream within us, screech, frustrated because we don’t know what they are trying to say.”
“Ofelia, darling.” She calmed a bit when I called her this endearment. “There are times when, loud as they are, we need to tell our bodies to hush.”
“If it were only that easy, Marie. You know I want to, don’t you?”
I nodded, rubbed her arm. She was cold – as was I, all the warmth I’d felt from Earl Fumer gone.
“Leone says that I shouldn’t take anything to help me sleep, that I’ve been doing that too often.” Ofelia clutched my wrist and pulled me closer, her grip surprisingly strong. “My body, my mind, they’re like Babel, all the chattering, so much I can’t understand. I just need some sleep, Miss Jüül.” She let go of my arm, fell back to the bed. “You’ll get me a Veronal, yes? So I can stop the clamour of my blasted nerves and fall asleep?”
“Of course.” It seemed unreasonable that the duke refused Ofelia medication that had been prescribed by her doctor.
I brought the prescription to Ofelia, placed two on her palm, poured her a glass of water from the jug beside the bed.
After she swallowed, she held one of my hands in both of hers. “Stay with me.”
“Of course.” My answer was a reflex before I thought of Earl Fumer somewhere in the house – would he still be in the parlour, staring into the fire? If he took the back stairs to the guest quarters, would I hear the house shift and creak from where I was?
Before slipping into sleep, Ofelia said, “Be careful, Miss Jüül.”
“Of what?”
“Your reputation, your heart. In equal measure.”
I left her room quietly, stood on the landing and listened, as though this would tell me if Earl Fumer was still in the parlour, waiting for me. The only sound I heard was from outside, the rounded hoots of an owl before it settled on the last long O of its call. It sounded again, once, twice, and I wasn’t sure if it was one bird repeating or two, a call-and-response. I went back to the parlour so quietly that Earl didn’t hear me when I entered. He was looking into his glass, empty of liquor. I whispered, “Not here,” and startled him.
“Pardon?” he whispered as he stood.
I held a finger to my lips and motioned with my hand for him to follow. I took him to the three-season room off the kitchen, the place where we kept the icebox. There was a small seating arrangement in the room, a place to view the back garden. Most importantly, it was off the back of the house, with no rooms above it. I closed and locked the door to the kitchen behind us, led Earl to a chair and then stood in front of him. He wasn’t the man I wanted him to be – nearly two decades already separated me from that man – but I unbuttoned my dress and let it fall as though he were. When Earl Fumer lifted my slip and pulled me to straddle his lap, I closed my eyes and moved against him as I once had the man I still wanted. Too much time had passed, that man was gone, yet I tried to bring him back. These weren’t his hands, this wasn’t his smell. I felt a pleasure so sharp it was painful and called out in a kind of yelp, thankful I’d chosen a room from which it would be unlikely I’d be heard. I kept my eyes closed a few moments more. When I opened them, I could see Earl Fumer’s face in the low light, his expression so benign and thankful it made me sad.
He continued to write all through the next winter. He sent pamphlets for Jasper Park Lodge, newspaper clippings praising its luxury, and suggested that if I couldn’t come on my own, that the whole family should come, assured me that even my lady would enjoy it there. I chuckled at this suggestion. Imagine, Ofelia and me in Jasper with our lovers. The men could hunt grizzlies in the craggy mountains while we went to therapeutic spas, water springing hot from stones, steam and the smell of sulphur cloaking us. Ofelia and I could consult each other on our gowns before we met for dinner in the dining room, the four of us debating politics over aperitifs. The more I imagined scenarios, the more absurd they seemed. I might be Earl Fumer’s equal, but I was in an entirely different class than the duke and Ofelia. If we were to go together, would I be staff or contemporary? What use in questioning this when it seemed all but impossible?
Eventually, we stopped writing to each other. I can no longer remember who wrote last. I imagined that Mr. Fumer eventually found a lady who would accompany him to Jasper Park Lodge. That they breathed in the high mountain air together and felt reinvigorated, so very alive.
TWO
We All Found Small Kingdoms
So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:
the ideal burns in you like a fever.
Or not like a fever, like a second heart.
– Louise Glück, “October”
Twenty-Two
Canada, 1931
The duke and Ofelia could no longer afford private tutors and governesses, so each night after Sveva went to bed, they considered schools in England and France, discussed the size and state of the residence and grounds of various boarding schools, whether or not their daughter would be able to have a private room and bath as she was accustomed. It was always the duke looking for the best opportunity for their brilliant daughter and Ofelia saying, “It’s too far, Leone. You can’t take her so far from me, from us.”
In the end, Sveva went no farther than Vancouver to Crofton House School for girls. I knew the decision must have been based partly on cost. Despite this, there were several letters from the headmistress imploring the Caetanis to stop sending so much to her for allowance. I collected these, as well as letter after letter from Sveva imploring her parents to visit more often. There are girls whose parents come every weekend! she wrote. If you’re not going to permit me to leave the school grounds on weekends, at least come visit me! I miss you both so much, my dearest most darling Daddy, my beloved Mau-Mau! They developed a new routine while their daughter was gone, one in which the duke convinced Ofelia to come to the woodlot each day. They, the dogs and sometimes even I would all pile into the duke’s Ford Model A to drive there. I didn’t go often. Because the two-seater was so small, I would offer to sit in the back with the dogs. “You can’t be serious, Miss Jüül,” Ofelia would protest each time I did.
“Do you know me to be a joker?” At this, the duke laughed. Ofelia thought it was absurd that I should ride in the back like one of the Japanese or Ukrainian labourers who worked in the orchards. She didn’t believe me when I told her I thought it good fun – which I did. I knew we made the people of Vernon talk; we always had. Why not give them one more thing to mutter about? They already didn’t know what to make of us. I was often assumed to be either a nanny or a housekeeper, though of course I was neither. What would they make of me riding along with the dogs? It mattered more what I made of it myself, which was an opportunity for fresh air, being separate from expectations.
Once at the woodlot, Ofelia would sit and read on a chair that the duke had fashioned for her from a stump. She would turn her face toward the sun. The duke would throw an axe over his shoulders and into the newly felled lu
mber over and over again until it became firewood. He was never shirtless in our presence, though he would remind us nearly every morning that if we weren’t there with him, he would be. “Not that it’s anything you haven’t seen before, Miss Jüül, I’m sure,” Leone once said. “Of good Viking farm stock, our Scandinavian Virgin!”
He laughed and Ofelia looked at him as though he were a small child, said, “Really,” but it stuck, both the name and the use of it in my presence, though never often. When Sveva was home for Christmas that year, I heard her say, “So, where is our Scandinavian Virgin?” I was between the dining room and the kitchen. She had a lilt in her voice, a hitch of glee. Later, I would hear him and Ofelia refer to me as this when they thought I was out of earshot.
The winter of her second year away at school, shortly after Christmas, we got word from the headmistress that Sveva had the measles. We were told that her fever had risen considerably and that she was sequestered in the nurse’s quarters of the school. As soon as we found out, Ofelia and I boarded a train to the coast. We went first to Sveva in seclusion, next to the headmistress’s office, where Ofelia yelled, “Why weren’t we called earlier? This is unacceptable!”
“You were called as soon as diagnosis was certain, Duchess,” said the headmistress, standing stiffly beside her desk. I wished that the duke had been there. He had a way of being both imposing and charming. Ofelia, I feared, was being imperious.
We moved Sveva to a room in a private clinic on Georgia Street. Beside her daughter’s bed, Ofelia lodged a ragged vigil. I felt like she cried too much, that it wasn’t good for her daughter. While Sveva seemed as comfortable as she could be in her condition, it was Ofelia that I found myself trying to console with handkerchiefs and warm cloths. “Ofelia, she’s sure to recover.”
“How can you know this, Miss Jüül? Everyone seems so certain, and yet we cannot know what will happen. I’ve told you of the curse, haven’t I?”
“Yes, you have.” The Caetani curse. Like Leone, his father was a parliamentarian as well. After a national referendum, he was the minster tasked with telling Pope Pius that Italy would be a republic, no longer a papal state. Legend was that in response, Pope Pius cursed the Caetani family line to die out within two generations. “But the family seems to be doing fine in Italy, don’t they?”
“For now, yes, but as each generation passes, there are fewer carrying on the line. All those children and only three grandchildren so far, two of them girls. And we can never know what will happen, can we, Miss Jüül? It’s up to me to keep Sveva safe.”
One evening, I came into the room to wake Ofelia so that we could make our way back to our hotel. She was slumped over, asleep across the bottom of Sveva’s bed, a letter open in her hand. I shook her awake, gently. The first thing she said was, “I knew that he would be upset about the cost. We’ve got to get her back to Vernon.”
I booked a sleeping berth for Sveva and we left the next day, each of us sitting beside her as she slept, neither of us speaking much. When we disembarked in Vernon, the duke was there with the car. He’d made the backseat into a bed even though we had such a short drive home. I sat cramped between Ofelia and the duke in the front while Sveva lay out in the back. When we got home, her father helped Sveva upstairs. “Only a few weeks, my donetta,” I heard him tell her. “You’ll be well soon and then you’ll be back at school. It will take you no time to catch up, you’ll see.” I felt like we would all need to catch up, eventually. Yet, with what? The shape and topography of both our inner and outer worlds had shifted so many times already. There was nothing constant to either catch up with or run from. We imagined our possible futures as foreign countries we would one day visit, but as we struggled with language and climate, the future became the present. What had once been familiar was now gone, replaced with the reality of our lives.
Twenty-Three
The summer of 1934, windows closed against the heat that pushed in through the drapes, the duke began to complain about his aching throat, the pain radiating from his neck. They were small complaints – “Oh, just a bit of discomfort here,” his hand on his chest – but the way he rubbed at his neck, his strained expression as he swallowed when eating, suggested something more.
In September, days were edged with a hem of cold and the first leaves had begun to turn. It was quiet in the middle of the day. Children had returned to school. The summer people were gone. The duke began to miss meals, and without him at the table, the three of us sat stiffly and said little. In the evenings, Ofelia and the duke began to retreat to their quarters without Sveva, and she was left moving from room to room, sighing and looking out windows. I didn’t think she should still be there, with us. She should’ve been with her contemporaries, back at school – even a parochial school.
I heard calls being made, words between Leone and Ofelia. Sveva and I cast about the house, each alone. I felt as though I should tell her to go outside, get some fresh air, but I didn’t. Sveva was sixteen, no longer a little girl. Gone were her insistent cheer and theatrics, replaced with earnestness marked either by despondency or what she called “great intellectual fervour” when she spoke about the books she read or artists she studied.
One afternoon, the duke called us both into the parlour. “We’ve found out some unfortunate news.”
“Unfortunate? What does unfortunate mean?” asked Sveva. We each looked toward Ofelia, sitting on the couch, twisting a kerchief, her hands trembling.
“I’m afraid I’ve been diagnosed –” The duke stopped.
“Diagnosed with what?” Sveva looked from parent to parent.
“It’s a cancer of the throat.”
Sveva circled the outer edge of the furniture. “What does that mean?” Her voice was raised, thin and crackling. Ofelia remained seated, her hands stilled, a muffled choke catching, a match on rough paper, lighting into sobs.
“We have a plan.” The duke held out his hand to stop Sveva’s pacing. “I’ll be able to travel to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota – world-class cancer treatment. The best there is.”
“The best there is.” Ofelia nodded.
“Of course!” Sveva hugged her father, clung to him like a little girl, though she was nearly as tall as he was by then. “We can leave right away. We can be ready by tomorrow – can’t we, Mau-Mau?”
Leone gently loosened her hold. “You’ll stay here with your mother, Sveva. I’ll need you to be here with her.”
Ofelia looked up, dabbed her eyes with her kerchief, then held it up to her nose as she sniffled once, quietly. “Miss Jüül will accompany your father to the clinic.”
It was the first I was told of it.
“What?” Sveva yelled. “She is going with him and we are staying behind? I don’t want to be left here! I want to go with you, Daddy. Miss Jüül can stay.”
“I can stay,” I agreed, though I understood that, of the three of us, I was likely the most fit to accompany the duke, the least at the mercy of emotional fragility or unchecked zeal. Is this why was I being dispatched without a preliminary request?
“No, your mother and I have decided that this is what is best. We don’t all need to go – I’ll be back soon. It won’t be long. I’ll be back soon,” Leone said, as though saying it more than once would make this certain.
* * *
In the months at the Mayo Clinic, the duke’s pain seemed like something other than his own, a spectre that had taken him over. He slept, or tried to sleep, propped up by pillows. If he was prone, the pain in his throat increased and he would pull at it, try to call out. Upright, he was more stoic, though the pain passed over his face even as he slept or lay drugged. When he could write, he scribbled notes to the medical staff to ask for whatever he thought could ease the agony – water, drugs – again and again, though nothing seemed to help.
I sat beside the duke as he grasped at his throat and struggled. I delivered his notes to the
medical staff, brought him water, tried to help him drink. I piled letters neatly on a table beside him, sorted and stacked them. Most were from Ofelia and Sveva. They arrived daily for a while. If a day went by without one, the next day two or three would arrive. They implored Leone to write back. They begged me to write to tell them how he was. I could tell from their letters, though they were desperate, almost hysterical, that each woman expected Leone would eventually return to them, healthy. And I knew, there in the clinic in Rochester, that he wouldn’t, so I stared at the stationery poised on my lap until I wrote letters to my siblings, my cousin Kristine, eventually to my former lover, though the latter I never sent. For a time, the letters from Sveva and Ofelia stopped, and then the telegrams began to arrive, each more desperate than the last. Please send word full stop. We are going mad with not knowing full stop.
Though the pain the duke was in was constant, his ability to speak came and went. One afternoon, when his throat was too sore to speak, he wrote on a piece of paper – tell me your story – and held it out to me.
“About what?”
Before – Denmark – Egypt –
So, I did. It took me days. Leone passed in and out of wakefulness, and doctors and nurses came to check on him and administer medications. He slept and woke fitfully, the pain lurching through him. Some days he could speak, others he could not. Whenever he had moments of both wakefulness and lucidity, he would look toward me, and I knew this meant carry on. I told him about leaving the farm and the men I didn’t love. About carrying, birthing and giving away a child. About the man who would have made me his wife if I could have resigned myself to a life with him and his children on a wind-battered island in a northern sea. I told him about my first trip overseas, through the Mediterranean and down the Suez Canal. About Egypt before the war, and how the war changed the shape of our household and our villa, nearly abandoned but for a very small staff.
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