I didn’t answer. If he couldn’t keep track of tea and groceries, what was next? What else would slip away?
My grandfather did not seem bothered by such questions at all. “Did you see I rearranged my library?”
“No, I hadn’t noticed.” My grandfather had so many books, he had to store them in double rows on his bookshelves, except in the dining room, where he kept a wall of white shelves only partially full, a promise to himself that there would always be room for more.
“Well, not the whole library,” he amended. “I just rearranged the shelf behind you.”
He gave me a little tour of the books there, explaining how he’d placed his leather-bound editions of Lessing and Mendelssohn side by side, since the two men had been friends in real life. I ran my hands over the gold-embossed spines. On the next shelf I saw an anthology of contemporary poetry whose brightly colored paper cover clashed with the other volumes around it. I picked it up and thumbed through it.
“Which is that one?” my grandfather inquired. I handed it to him.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I bought that in a St. Pancras bookshop because of the name of one of the poets.”
“Which one?”
He smiled. This was exactly the kind of guessing game he liked. “Which do you think?”
I looked through the list of authors. None of them seemed familiar. I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
He pointed to a name: “Fraenkel.”
“Who was he?”
My grandfather closed the book and put it away. “I had a friend by the same name. Fébus Fraenkel. An Austro-Hungarian medical student. He played chess—he made money by writing chess problems, actually. A truly extraordinary chess player. We used to play together. He’d let me open with one extra move. A clever man.” He sighed. “He’s the person who introduced me to your grandmother.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
“When was this? When did you and … my grandmother meet?” Grandpa had by now acquired the faraway look on his face that often preceded his rages about my grandmother, and I tensed, waiting for the inevitable explosion.
“In the mid-thirties.”
“Nineteen thirty-five? Thirty-six?”
“I don’t remember. It must have been after 1935—I had entered the university. She wanted me to edit her thesis.” He went silent.
“Did you?”
“A bit.”
“How did your friend introduce you?”
“Oh, Fraenkel was very clever—very clever. Much cleverer than I—if I had known … He was looking to get rid of her, you see.”
“And?”
“Well, he knew he could escape her clutches more painlessly if she had someone else to latch on to. Quite the dirty trick, no?”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
“I was very na?ve at the time. Have you read Proust?”
I nodded, feeling a little wounded. “Of course I have—you used to read Proust to me.”
“Really?”
“Right here at the dining room table. You’d give me linden tea and madeleines and read aloud to me.”
He looked pleased with himself. “How clever of me.”
This wasn’t the first time he’d compared his affair with my grandmother to that of Swann and Odette, and I’d already searched Swann’s Way for passages that seemed pertinent:
He was introduced … by one of his old friends, who had spoken of her as stunning, a woman with whom he might be able to start something up, but he had made her out to be more unattainable than she really was, so that his introducing them would seem even nicer than it really was.
“Did she look like Odette?”
“Who?”
I tried again. “What was she like? What did you like about her?”
“She had beautiful hair. Coal black. Pale, white skin. Blue eyes.”
“Like Snow White?”
“Yes. Like Snow White.”
We were both silent. Eventually, my grandfather’s dry, clean voice startled me away from my thoughts. “Does she visit you, Seraphina?” I looked up. He leaned forward. “I call her that as an ironic nickname, you know.”
At least that’s one thing he hasn’t forgotten, I thought. His voice had taken on that dangerous edge I knew so well, but this time relief mixed with the nervous tension that gripped me when he skated to the edge of a rage about my grandmother.
“Does she still visit you, Miranda?” Grandpa queried again.
I chose my words carefully. “She’s getting older, too. It’s difficult for her to travel.”
He puffed on his pipe, which made the dining room smell rich and warm. “You don’t have much to do with her, do you?”
I shifted in my seat, tucking my feet onto the beam in the middle of the table. “I write to her,” I replied warily. “I see her.”
His voice was wound tight as thread on a spool: “You don’t know her as I do.”
“No,” I conceded, feeling the limpid beauty of his airy apartment constrict around us. “I don’t think I do.”
“I should have known even then.”
“Known what?”
He gave me a baleful stare. “Once I came to fetch her to go work on the thesis. And she wouldn’t let me into her room. She just stuck her head out and said, ‘Wait,’ ” he adopted the high, mincing voice he used when imitating her. “Then she closed the door again. So I waited, and I heard noises, and then she sidled out a crack in the door—like a crab,” he waved imaginary pincers, “and closed it behind her, and smiled,” his mouth formed a treacly smile, “and said, ‘We can go now.’ ”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said, leaning across the dining room table again and looking over his glasses at me, his pale blue eyes wide with anger, “it means she was hiding a man in there.”
CHAPTER NINE
SINCE THE HOUSE IN LA ROCHE HAD NO HEAT, I returned to the guest room in David’s apartment in Avignon, which he had offered to rent me if I ever wanted a place to stay. I would live there until the weather got warm enough to move to Alba, I decided. Initially, I thought I would use the cold months to sort out what I did and didn’t know about my grandparents, to begin sketching out their stories and figure out what questions I needed—and dared—to ask them. My temporary new home, with its tall windows and crowded bookshelves and richly colored carpets, felt like a reprieve from my nascent worries about my grandfather—and it offered the additional advantage of being an easy train ride to Geneva.