De Potter's Grand Tour (22 page)

 

Cannes to Boulogne

T
HINGS ARE BECAUSE WE SAY THEY ARE
. They were once or will turn out to have been. What might be this becomes that when expressed through a reasonably coherent sequence of words. Yet you can't just declare that the moon has dropped from the sky into the pond and expect to be believed—or to believe everything that others tell you. By the time you're fourteen, you should know better than to go running for your pitchfork in hopes of lifting the soggy moon from the water. Add to the normal eight years of formal education a record of travel unmatched by other boys your age, and you can be expected to demonstrate an advanced level of sophistication.

Je ne veux pas décevoir
.

The challenge was to prove mastery by excelling in grammar and vocabulary and at the same time to develop an agile sense of skepticism, enabling him to differentiate between a true story and a false one.

True: Thucydides wrote the
History of the Peloponnesian War.

False: Your science teacher is a werewolf.

True: Five times five is twenty-five.

False: Your name is George.

Skepticism, Victor had come to understand, is like a muscle—it needs to be exercised, tested, pushed beyond its limits with impossible affirmations so cleverly expressed they make it easy to forget they are lies. A boy must learn to stay alert and recognize a deception when he sees one.
Proof
is the key element in verifying any claim, and its absence is a sure signal to be suspicious. The world is in itself proof that God created it, as his Latin teacher, Father Roland, liked to remind him. But there is no proof that the world was created in seven days, according to Monsieur Pirette, his science teacher.

Proof isn't always easy to discern, and sometimes it could be contradictory—a lesson he remembered learning when they were visiting his mother's family at the farmhouse in Tivoli, and they all piled into a wagon and rode to a cemetery, where, in the high grass at the top of the hill, they found the Beckwith family gravestones. One stone was lying flat, he remembered, but when his uncles tried to make it stand upright, it toppled right over again. Victor could read the name on the stone. He was told it marked the grave of his mother's grandmother, but the name was the same as Maman's name before she married Papa:
AMY SUTHERLAND BECKWITH
. By then he was old enough to understand that gravestones were proof that someone was dead. Why, then, was his mother's name carved on a gravestone lying in the grass? Riding in the wagon away from the cemetery, he was quiet and didn't tell anyone how he had the same feeling inside that he'd had when he'd sat on the rim of a bottomless well in the city of Carthage. The tombstone and the bottomless well were forms of proof that didn't make sense, and he wanted to forget them but couldn't.

Victor craved proof in the months following his father's disappearance: proof in the form of a bloated corpse found on a beach somewhere along the coast of Greece, proof in the form of a coffin. There wasn't even a funeral to confirm that his father was dead. He could go into his mother's bedroom on any given evening and find her crying—wasn't this a form of proof? But then he remembered the rhyme he'd learned from his mother about
little King Boggen who built a fine hall, pie crust and pastry crust, that was the wall
. Wasn't that just made up? Mothers especially were prone to be too trusting, and sometimes it took their skeptical sons to remind them that they shouldn't believe everything they were told.

That Papa would willingly leave his enviable life made no more sense than the overturned gravestone inscribed with his mother's former name. And then Cousin Gertie saw Papa on the tram. Maman said it couldn't have been Papa because if he was in Nice, he would have come to Cannes. Cousin Gertie was mistaken. Still, when the evidence was carefully examined, he had to agree with Gertie that his father was very much alive. If he wasn't on the tram in Nice, then he was somewhere else.

“Maman, there's someone in the garden! There he goes behind the shed—quick, tell François!”

“Maman, look,” he said as they strolled along la Croisette, “doesn't the man there look just like Papa? Could it be…?”

Victor thought he saw Papa dressed in a sailor's suit, smoking a cigarette at a café on the boulevard du Midi. He thought a Gypsy playing the accordion was Papa. Could that be Papa in the back pew at St. John's? Or standing outside the gate of his school? There he was, with his back to Victor in the public urinal at the beach. Or there, at Victor's bedroom window, with one eye swollen shut and the other like a cat's eye in the dark, the gold iris nearly covered by the black disk of the pupil.

“No, no, no! Make him go away!”

*   *   *

Aimée did what she could to persuade Victor that his father was gone forever. She read him comforting letters from family members and friends, she bought him a black mourning suit, she took him to church. But still the boy kept seeing his father everywhere, whether he wanted to or not.

She was furious with Gertrude for infecting Victor's imagination with her story about seeing her uncle on the tram in Nice. She decided it was time for Gertrude to return to her mother in Poughkeepsie. Gertrude pleaded to stay, but Aimée presented her with her steamer ticket the following week. “Now head upstairs and pack,” she said with a decisiveness that cowed her niece into obeying. And since she couldn't make Armand go away, she decided that she and Victor would go away instead.

*   *   *

On a long walk into the hills above the spa at Vittel, with the sun shining and the skylarks singing, Aimée made up her own story about Victor's father. She said that after Papa died, his wallet was never found. She reminded Victor that Papa always kept lots of money in his wallet.

“What do you think happened to his wallet?” Victor couldn't guess, so Aimée helped him out. “Maybe Papa didn't fall overboard. Maybe he was robbed. There were no witnesses. Maybe he was robbed and—” She left the possibility unspoken.

She said they couldn't be sure about what happened that night. It was awful not knowing, but she didn't want Victor thinking either that his father had chosen to end his own life or that he was still alive.

Victor wanted to hear exactly what had been in Papa's wallet. He asked how much money had been lost. He wanted to know how God would punish the thief in hell. When his mother said weakly, “It's all a mystery,” he wept so hard that he exhausted himself. They'd arranged their picnic of cheese and bread on a blanket, and he fell asleep across her lap. As she watched him sleep, Aimée regretted her white lie. But it seemed to have the desired effect. After Victor woke, he was resigned to his father's death. He asked no more questions about the wallet, and in the days that followed, he was cured of his visions.

How guilty she felt then—not because she'd deceived her son but because she missed having reason to comfort him. Even though she was convinced that her husband was gone from the world forever, she missed the moment of her own heartaching credulity when she'd look in the direction that Victor was pointing, half-expecting to see what he saw.

Aimée thought endlessly about Armand, imagining the sequence of his last days, hour by hour. She pictured him riding in his carriage from the top of Pera to the customhouse, then waiting on the bench until it was time to board the
Regele Carol
. She followed him onto the ship, into his stateroom, and back out on deck. She imagined him in conversation with strangers at his table in the dining room. She hoped he'd helped himself to an extra brandy. The thought that he might have been thoroughly drunk occurred to her for the first time. She tried and failed to imagine the storm of his thoughts as he stood at the rail.

She decided she didn't want to stay in Vittel any longer and led Victor to Lausanne and up to Geneva. As they traveled, Aimée regularly received the letters and bills that had been forwarded from Cannes. A letter from Mrs. Stevenson arrived for her at the hotel in Geneva. She'd written to Mrs. Stevenson to tell her of the death of her husband and to offer the De Potter Collection for sale to the University Museum. Mrs. Stevenson wrote to extend her sympathies and explain that she was no longer affiliated with the museum. A few days later Aimée was shocked when another letter arrived from Professor Randall-MacIver, who, on behalf of the Board of Trustees, was writing to inform Mrs. de Potter that the University of Pennsylvania was not interested in buying the De Potter Collection. She had expected the sale to go swiftly. Instead, Professor Randall-MacIver asked her kindly to remove the items from the building at her convenience.

One night in a little hotel in the Alps she had a dream that she was sitting on a seaside bench in Cannes and two policemen appeared and announced that they were arresting her for vagrant lunacy. She woke wondering how she could have remained oblivious to her husband's growing debts. She wished they had never left their first apartment in Albany.

The next day she and Victor climbed up the path behind the hotel and had a picnic in the mountains, surrounded by snow peaks and the slope of the glacier. The sun warmed their backs even as they dipped their bare feet into the ice-cold stream. Victor told a joke about the glass ears of the Swiss. Aimée was puzzled. “Glass ears are the glaciers, Maman.” She heard herself laugh for the first time in weeks.

In mid-August they traveled to Brussels and took the local train to the town of Melle, where they were met at the station by Armand's brother, Victor, and his wife, Leonie. It was the first time they had seen one another since 1898, when Armand and Aimée had brought their son to meet the uncle he'd been named after. The boy hardly remembered that meeting. Now their greeting was stiff, and when they stopped for tea at a café near the station, their conversation about the weather led to an awkward silence that was broken only when Leonie began testing her young nephew on his French, challenging him to conjugate a series of irregular verbs, clucking playfully when he made a mistake.

No one spoke of Armand. The elder Victor did not speak at all, though Aimée could see that he had something he wanted to tell her. She was sure it was unpleasant and hoped he would keep it to himself.

His silence lasted until the next morning, when he was preparing to take his sister-in-law and nephew back to the station and they were waiting outside on the road for the hackney cab. He presented young Victor with a wooden flintlock dueling pistol, one of a pair, he said, that had belonged to Louis de Potter. The boy whooped as he took the pistol from its case. He tested its weight and pointed it at the sky. “Bang!” he shouted.

The elder Victor said that he had once watched his grandfather Louis shoot a weather vane on a barn roof with this pistol. The weather vane, in the shape of a rooster, had spun round and round—he whirled his hand to imitate the motion. They laughed at the story, all except the storyteller.

“You know the truth about Louis de Potter, I assume,” he said when they'd stopped laughing.

Aimée said, “Of course,” though she had no idea what he was talking about.

“You know, then, that our grandmother was not the wife of the great Louis. She was his mistress, employed by the family as a cook. A cook! Do you understand what I am telling you! You did not know, did you? You are surprised!”

Leonie warned him that he must get control of himself, that she feared for his weak heart. Victor was desperate to have the fact acknowledged. He had kept the secret for too long and wanted someone else to guard it. Aimée lied and assured him that this wasn't a secret—Armand had been forthright about the family history, she said. She pretended to be bored, even annoyed at having to return to a subject that was so tiresome. She told her son to thank his uncle for the gift of the pistol and then said that they'd better hurry—they didn't want to miss their train.

*   *   *

Her husband's father was a bastard. Armand had left that detail out of his family history. She might once have resented him for the omission, but now she understood that it fit his ambition to present a front of civility that would be pleasing to all. Anyway, as she pointed out to her son, Louis de Potter must have loved his illegitimate child as much as the children of his legal wife. He had given him a fine dueling pistol, after all. And now that pistol belonged to his great-grandson.

Aimée began to feel renewed again by their week in Paris. But after they returned to Cannes at the beginning of September, she was forced to confront the reality of her debts. They were in the midst of a stretch of stifling, dry weather, and she felt weak, helpless, weary. She longed for rain. She was oppressed by the present and dreaded the future. Walking along the boulevard de la Croisette, she looked out at the sunset, golden red over the sea, and thought it cruel that the glorious light was reflected in the same sea that had stolen her husband from her. She kept thinking about Gertrude's vision of Armand on the tram in Nice. She began to wake in the night soaked in sweat.

One Sunday night in late October, a light rain fell. Aimée reported in her diary that she spent the entire day reading and then in the evening took a short walk up to the observatory. The next morning she had her first Italian lesson and declared that she enjoyed it greatly. After tea she called on her neighbors the Tamours and surprised herself by announcing that she wished to sell Grand Bois.

Did she mean it? they asked.

No, she thought. “Yes,” she said.

She told herself that she had no choice—the upkeep was too much, she couldn't afford to pay all the servants and still pay for Victor's education. That she missed her family and friends back in America was not a factor. She would have stayed in Grand Bois if she could have afforded to. She imagined her husband insisting that he'd left her sufficient resources; he hadn't foreseen the complexity of the expenses she was facing. She'd come to recognize that his courtly manner hid more than a little naïveté. The money from Mutual Life may have been enough to pay off his debts, but was not enough to sustain the luxurious life they'd grown used to in Cannes. And now she didn't know if she'd be able to sell the De Potter Collection at all.