On one of the afternoons when Leone could speak again, he turned his face to me, his eyelids heavy. “I’m leaving too soon, leaving them. This wasn’t meant to happen.” He tried to cough but only sputtered. “I was so certain for so long that it was the right thing to do, leaving Italy, coming here. It was the only way I could stay with Sveva and her mother. I’m not so certain anymore.” He faltered, his voice strained. “They’re not ready for this.”
“No one can be ready for the loss of –” I stopped myself. “There’s still a chance –”
“There’s no chance, Marie. You know this as well as I do.” There was an intimacy not only in him using my first name, but in this knowledge he and I now shared. He closed his eyes and pain passed across his face like lightning across the sky. Leone took a shallow, scraping breath. “Please, help Ofelia – and help Sveva. Ofelia won’t be able to and I am leaving them so little.”
“No, sir, you have given them so much.”
When Leone laughed at this, it looked as though he was about to cry. “Everything you’ve given us.” He said this as a statement. I wasn’t used to the duke speaking to me this way. The medication usually made him quiet. I began to respond but he lifted his hand, then dropped it heavily. He closed his eyes and rolled his head to the side. “I know it is so unfair to ask this of you. You should be able to go now, to lead your own life – but I worry about what will happen to them if you do.” Each word was carved out of his throat. “I worry that without anyone, Ofelia will go under and –” He stopped here, then rasped, “I worry she may take Sveva with her.”
Given the variance and extremes of Ofelia’s emotional states, it was a valid concern.
“I can’t ask you to do this, I know that I can’t ask you this now, but –”
I waited.
His words were hoarse, nearly a whisper. “Will you stay with them?”
This didn’t seem like too much to ask. I’d stayed with them for seventeen years already. “Of course I will.”
Once the duke fell asleep again, I left for the hotel where I slept nights. When we’d arrived it was still mild, but the weather had turned. As I rounded the street outside the clinic, the wind slapped me, tore the hat from my head. I pushed against it for two flat blocks to the hotel, watched the last of the fall leaves stripped from branches, shot down the middle of the street. There was little traffic, few people out. At the hotel, the awning was snapping in the wind, and moments later, as I crossed the lobby, there was a loud crack, then rumbling that could be felt through the thick carpet. By the time I reached my room, hail was coming down. I opened the window and listened to it clatter and ping off everything it could hit – posts, cars, street, awnings. A glorious racket, dissolving into the steady shh, shh of ordinary rain.
Twenty-Four
The duke was transferred back to Canada, but not Vernon. Lying in a hospital room in Vancouver, dull with weak light strained through clouds, windows streaked with rain, his bones, which had always been prominent, were now the most substantial part of him. His skin draped over his figure, seeming as thin as the hospital sheets. “Because of his condition, Duke Caetani is being fed intravenously,” a doctor told us as we sat beside the outline of him on the bed.
It was December, and someone had hung strings of cranberries and popped corn over the railings around the mint-green halls. Near the nurse’s station there was a spindly little tree with shining jewel-toned decorations that I imagined must have been castoffs from a hospital patron’s household. Everything seemed strange – the glittering ornaments on the pathetic tree, the strings of cranberries and corn as though we were in someone’s country home, the long halls an artificial green – as incongruous as the person the duke had once been.
On Christmas Eve, the archbishop of Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church swung his robes down the halls toward the duke, trailing the smell of incense with him. The archbishop paid no attention to Sveva or me but turned to Ofelia, bowed and crossed the air in front of her before he began to chant and pray and intone over the duke. When he left the room, Sveva did as well, and I followed. “I can’t go back in there yet, Jüül.”
The lights crackled overhead, our skin mottled with a weak, cold hue. “Would you like to go back to the hotel? To Mass?”
“No, no, I can’t be that far from him. I just can’t go back in yet.”
We both fell asleep in the waiting area on chairs sticky with cold vinyl. A nurse woke us. “Your father.” She looked at Sveva and, instead of finishing her thought, turned to me. “The duchess.” She left this incomplete as well.
Sveva pushed herself to standing, swayed slightly and steadied herself. “What?” she yelled. “My father what?” She ran down the hall to her father’s room.
* * *
Ofelia was too weak to wail. What few tears she had left drained her until she was wrung dry, her eyes rimmed with red, nose raw. Her mouth so pale. Later, there were huge, hacking dry sobs. Ofelia’s face contorted, her mouth gaping, body prone on the hotel bed. Sveva and I sat in armchairs, the drapes drawn, the sound of rain against the window, and watched over her. At some point, we all slept. I woke to a wet pillow, whether from tears or sweat I didn’t know. The room was dark and I had no idea if it was day or night. Ofelia was lying beside me, her eyes open. “We need to get the death mask done.” She startled me, her voice thin, words slow. “We need to get the death mask done and the body prepared to be sent back home.”
In the next couple of days, I found a sculptor on Granville Street who had made death masks before. “The man was noble, a prince, a duke,” I told him. “His mask will be on display in Rome.” The sculptor assured me everything would be done perfectly.
I returned to Ofelia and Sveva in the hotel, the curtains still closed, neither talking. “The masks will be done soon – the face and the right hand. And then he’ll be able to be transported.”
“He needs to go back to Italy, Marie. He needs to go home.” It was one of the only things Ofelia said in those days.
“I know, Ofelia. I know.”
Over the next week in Vancouver, I researched the costs of embalming the body and preparing the casket for travel. There were fees for storage before a sailing could be secured, and for the packaging for the crossing, then transport and delivery once in Italy. I ran my fingers up and down rows of numbers and calculations. Eventually, it was up to me to tell the ladies, “I’m afraid our financial situation will not allow it.”
Ofelia seemed resigned by then. Sveva was indignant, furious. “Our financial situation will not allow it!” she hollered. “Our financial situation! You insult my father when you speak about him like that. Of course, people will help us – our family will help us. He’s Duke Caetani di Sermoneta!”
“Yes, yes, of course he is.” I suspected she knew as well that there was something more in not sending the body to Italy. We certainly could not afford to accompany it. I suspected that if Ofelia could not go with him, the duke’s remains would not go. The separation, even in death, would be too much. It took another two weeks in Vancouver for me to make all the arrangements for the duke to be brought back to Vernon in a solid bronze casket.
The day in late January that we buried the duke was unseasonably mild. Instead of fresh white skiffs and the cold burn of blue skies, there was melting snow, wet earth and the damp press of low clouds. In the days that followed, papers and magazines delivered to us carried not only the weight of dank paper but the duke’s obituaries from around the world. News of his death came to us from Rome, London, Paris, Cairo, New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Montreal. The Guardian, Match, Times, Chronicle, Globe, Gazette and more gave him one paragraph, half a page, an entire article, his face speckled in shades of newsprint. I read each of the obituaries then filed them away, organized neatly in a box in the basement, while Ofelia slept.
Twenty-Five
After we buried Leone, Ofelia could not get
out of bed. The mild weather at the end of January changed to a cruel cold in February. We closed the drapes to insulate against the chill, burned coal in the furnace, kept the fires lit, ate hot oatmeal in the morning, soup later in the day, and drank pot after pot of tea. Cold crept along the floorboards, licked the corners, hit us in banks as we came downstairs or passed by windows and doors. We dressed in dark colours, though it hardly mattered. With the drapes drawn, everything was cloaked with grey, dimly lit. I collected the mail and opened each letter of condolence sent to us from around the world, then took them upstairs to Ofelia. She kept her eyes closed as I read them to her, her chest rising and falling slowly, her breathing laboured.
Sveva and I waited. We waited for the day when we would leave the house and go out into the world again. The weather broke in the middle of March. We’d been in mourning for nearly three months and I thought we could open the curtains. It took Ofelia a few more days to get out of bed. Once she did, she dressed in black and walked from room to room as though the house and furniture were new to her, or so old that she had only scant memories of them. Once she had gone through every part of the house, she called me to her. “Miss Jüül, I’m so tired. Can you help me get undressed?”
She wanted Sveva to tuck her in. Ofelia ran her hand down her daughter’s jaw, dropped it to her arm and rubbed the skin there. “You’re such a good girl, Sveva,” she said.
Sveva laughed at this, “Oh, I am now, am I? I haven’t always been, though, right, Mau?”
“Oh no, you’ve always been our darling girl, Beo, our best girl.” Ofelia let go of her and turned her head into the pillow. “Sveva, the rooms will have to be cleared.”
“What do you mean?” Sveva looked to me as though I might have an answer.
“There’s too much. Too much in the rooms. All these things, these things. It’s all too much for me. They collect dust, germs. We don’t need so much.”
I nearly laughed – I had never heard Ofelia say that we didn’t need much.
“You’ll clear the rooms, darling?” Ofelia looked at her daughter, then to me. “Clear them of everything but the essentials. I just can’t live with all these things, this clutter around me. Nor should either of you. It’s not good for us.”
“But the art, the china, the rugs – surely those aren’t clutter?” Sveva asked.
I thought of their collections from around the world – the duke’s artifacts from the Middle East and North Africa, Persian rugs, Ofelia’s china, the oil paintings that had been so carefully wrapped and packed in Italy to accompany us to Canada so we could hang them on our walls here.
“We’ll keep the china out. I think most everything else – except some of the furniture, of course – should be packed away.” Ofelia looked at us, her head on the pillow, lids low but gaze steady. She even had the slight bow of a smile on her lips. She seemed so calm, so certain in that moment.
When spring arrived that year with flocks of early migrators alighting on exposed branches and flushing out again, the house was clean, so very clean, and nearly bare. Leaves budded, the ground softened. Between the first day of spring and the summer solstice was an increasing arc of light, leaves opening the valley. Ofelia asked us to push the windows up so we could get cross-drafts through the house, had me hire boys to replace the screens on the kitchen and porch doors so they wouldn’t creak and bang the frames. The new doors would close so softly and lightly we wouldn’t even hear them. Most of our belongings were stored in the basement, as Ofelia had asked of us, and the rooms were so lightly furnished that dust was visible as soon as it began to build. There were no rugs on the floors, no art on the walls. Books still lined the shelves of the library, but we pulled them out each week to dust. Sveva and I spent our days cycling through the house, washing one room after another from the first to the third floors before we began again.
* * *
After Leone’s death, how simple it could have been to leave. Really. It could have been easy for me to go alone or for all three of us to set out on the train one day. Easy, simple – had we been other people. We were not. We were ourselves and where would we have gone? Ofelia’s parents had died years before; her sister, Emerika, had immigrated to Argentina, then gotten ill and passed away. She had no family left in Italy. Sveva’s father’s family, the once-mighty Caetanis, implored her to return – the favourite son’s daughter – but what would Ofelia and I do? Leone’s family was so much sparser by then, the younger generation dispersed by marriage, war and misfortune. Would those left in the family have taken us in? If not, where would we go? Never mind the answers. We swung closed the gate at the end of the drive, our dogs circling us, latched closed the doors of the house.
I can still see the duke’s hands, his long, slim fingers. I see them against Ofelia’s back, along buttons and hems, and I shake the image from my mind. Again, his hands are there, this time bent around cards, then the flick and shuffle of them. The duke adored playing cards – for money or otherwise. Ofelia was not as keen though she humoured him. She preferred to make structures with playing decks – houses constructed of cards placed carefully and balanced in ways that could sustain their swaying weight, add enough support to hold them up. They were amazing, her creations. When she was finished, Ofelia would present them to us, then smile as though she held the sweetest cream in her mouth before pulling one, just one, card. For a moment, the structures would remain upright; then, a moment later, they would flatten around us.
It was fine if Ofelia dissembled her own structures. She seemed to delight in making a show of that as much as she did in building them. One afternoon, Sveva was playing in the study, where she should not have been, and knocked one over. She wrote her mother one of her letters of apology and asked me to give it to Ofelia like so many that I’d been asked to pass from daughter to mother. In it, she asked her darling mother, her beloved, her Mau Tau Fracapau, to forgive her for her stupidity, her selfishness, her ignorance. As with other letters, she asked that her mother please, please, please forgive her or she wouldn’t be able to eat or sleep or go on. Sveva would promise her mother kittens and puppies in exchange for forgiveness. She wrote about her mother’s kiss as balm on an open wound, that her embrace held more in it than the universe itself, then signed her letters Your cruel and adoring daughter.
In another letter, Sveva imagined her mother thinking life was not worth living, her heart beating with “only poor old Miss Jüül beside you.” Poor old me. I have saved these letters in the basement with all our correspondence. What I wouldn’t give for a house of cards, a careless child, a sudden gust.
Twenty-Six
Egypt, 1913
I was to meet Mrs. Ingeborg Brandt at port nineteen, the Iceland Quay, on the waterfront in Copenhagen to board the ship for Cairo. I’d arrived at the port early and hired a boy to transport my trunk down to the dock, then I stood beside it. I didn’t want to be seated when my new employer arrived. The city was behind me but I could see it in my mind, lined up in blocks of colour, while I looked ahead at the flat, grey sea, terns and kestrels spinning in the sky. Gulls dove and shrieked above.
I had been standing for half an hour or more, an ache beginning to twist around my legs, stiffness setting in my knees, when I saw Mrs. Brandt. She was as tall, blond and distinctive as I remembered, her appearance a bit muted by the size of her hat and the grey of her coat. I stood at attention beside my trunk and waited for her to see me. She scanned over several people before she smiled, briefly and tightly, and walked toward me. Beside her, a woman who looked so like her it was unnerving held the hand of a small boy. A young woman followed behind them with a leather satchel and a small stuffed bear.
“Miss Jüül.” Mrs. Brandt took my hand with both of hers. “Oh, I’m so glad that my correspondence made it to you. I wasn’t sure if we’d see you here or not.”
“Oh? I sent a response to you. You didn’t receive it?”
“No, no
, I don’t think so.” She turned to the woman beside her, the one holding the boy’s hand. “Elspeth, did we receive anything?”
“Oh, you know I can’t keep track of your things too, Ingeborg.” The woman’s tone was somewhere between playfulness and genuine exasperation.
“Well, never mind. You’re here now.” She looked over my head, as though searching for someone else, and motioned with her hand. “This is my sister, Mrs. Elspeth Anker Huugard, and Sven’s governess, Miss Freja Anderson.” Both ladies smiled. I had not yet been introduced to the boy. “This is Miss Inger-Marie Jüül.”
“Hello.” I nodded my head slightly to each of them, a bit more to the sister than the governess, who seemed barely more than a girl.
“Miss Anderson’s been helping me care for Sven since we’ve been in Copenhagen. She won’t be making the journey to Cairo. She’s here to see us off.”
At the mention of his governess’s name, the boy tore out of his aunt’s hand and toward the young woman. He clung to her leg, then raised his arms, “Up, up,” though Miss Anderson’s arms were full. He kept his eyes on me the whole time, wary.
“And this!” Mrs. Brandt leaned over to pick up the boy. “Is our little Sven.” She held him stiffly as he struggled in her arms, reaching back toward his governess. He looked three or four years old and appeared sickly, his skin pale and body slight, a cloudiness in his eyes.
“Hello, Sven,” I said. His mother placed him down and he reached his arms up to his governess again.
“Oh, Sven.” His aunt took the things from Miss Anderson’s arms so that she could pick up the boy.
Mrs. Brandt looked at my trunk. “Well, we’ll want to find someone to get that on board as soon as possible. All of our things are already loaded and we need to ensure that everything is together.” She looked around as though someone might be there waiting to help us. “Miss Anderson, can you see if you can find us a steward?”
Little Fortress Page 14
