The car grew dark as the snow accumulated on the windows.
“Claire,” he said, his breath a puff in the cold air.
She waited.
“This baby,” he said, but nothing more.
Claire reached for his hand. The leather of his glove was cold beneath her woolen ones. She was glad he didn’t pull away.
Peter turned to look at her. She thought he might be crying.
“Peter,” she said softly, her heart breaking for him, for the mess she’d made of everything. “Don’t even think it,” she told him.
He looked away. “I need to clean off the windshield,” he said, and got out of the car.
They had met on a flight from New York to Paris. Claire had been a TWA air hostess for exactly five years. You flew until you found a husband, that’s how it went. By the time they had stopped to refuel in Gander, Claire already thought Peter would make a very good husband. He had gone to Columbia University, and graduate school at MIT, and now he was off to work at the Pentagon for Hyman Rickover, the man known as the Father of the Nuclear Navy. Peter had an air of importance about him; all of the other girls noticed too. But he only noticed Claire. In Shannon, as they waited to refuel again, he asked her if she’d have dinner with him that night in Paris. They ate in the Eiffel Tower, and had their first kiss at the top. Such a storybook beginning could only lead to happily ever after, Claire had thought.
She had loved her light blue uniform with the silver wing pinned to her chest and the way her hat fit just so above her blond French twist. She loved mixing cocktails for the passengers and the way the men eyed her when she walked down the aisle past them. She and Rose shared a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan on East 65th Street. They placed an Oriental screen in the middle of the bedroom, with their beds on either side of it. Before they fell asleep, they shared stories about their layovers: the places they’d seen—the Acropolis and the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower—and the men who had taken them to dinner or for a tour of the city. He’s the one, she told Rose when she got back from that trip. They would move to a big house outside Washington, D.C., and have babies and always remember that dinner in Paris, that dramatic first kiss.
She was lucky, that’s what Claire thought. She was a pretty girl from a small town in Indiana, and she had the whole world right at her fingertips. Then Peter walked onto that Super Constellation, and everything changed.
4
The Key to the Majestic
VIVIEN, 1919
Every Friday morning Vivien went to the library. Today she would return the Cather novel, and Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons. The library was small, just three rooms and a sagging front porch. On cold days like today, a fire roared in the hearth in the largest room, and Kay Pendleton, the librarian, had a pot of strong coffee warming. Vivien poured herself some in a chipped cup decorated with pink roses and sat in her usual place at the long oak table in the Reference Room. Kay collected castoffs, like the mismatched coffee cups she kept here and the out-of-print books she bought at estate sales and the like. The books lined a shelf with a handwritten sign hung from it: Kay’s Personal Oddities and Curiosities.
Kay Pendleton herself was something of an oddity and a curiosity. She appeared to be a woman who could plow a field and birth a dozen babies easily. But as far as Vivien knew, Kay was a spinster like her. Her fine blond hair was always falling in soft tendrils from the bun she wore, and her pale blue eyes behind her wire-rimmed glasses showed a hint of mischief. Kay wore low-cut blouses that showed off her ample cleavage and the sprinkling of freckles that dotted her chest. Sometimes, Kay Pendleton wore men’s trousers that on her looked feminine and chic. But more often, like today, she wore skirts that hugged her hips seductively. Vivien had seen men have to avert their eyes when they checked out their books, or risk blushing or ogling. How she had landed here in Napa, unmarried and working in a library, remained a mystery to Vivien.
As she did every Friday, Vivien opened her leather-bound scrapbook and read the first page, a habit now since she could recite it by heart.
The causes of amnesia have traditionally been divided into the “organic” or the “functional.” Organic causes include damage to the brain, through physical injury, neurological disease or the use of certain (generally sedative) drugs. Functional causes are psychological factors, such as mental disorder, post-traumatic stress or, in psychoanalytic terms, defense mechanisms.