“What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Doctor. I’d like to think he sacrificed himself. More likely he went back to work, doing what he did best.” I opened my mouth to tell him about James Merriwether, and stopped the words at the back of my throat. “So. Did Lightfoot demand his money back?”
“Actually. Astonishingly. He didn’t. The strangest thing. I gave him back the two hundred, told him I’d pay the rest when I could, and he said not to worry about it. A blank slate. I guess Gogo got to him, or else he just wanted to wash his hands of the whole thing. Anyway, I will pay him back. Set aside something every month, like a mortgage on my own soul.”
Flippantly: “Or your dad could pay him back. It’s his debt, remember.”
He made some movement behind me. “Pops? No. Pops is dead.”
“What?” I turned.
Paul was staring at me. His eyes were old and blue and something else. Glassy, if I had to put a name to it. His cigarette was almost out, burning right up to his fingers. “They think it was a heart attack. He didn’t even know I’d settled the money for him, you know? So it was all for nothing, I guess.”
My first bitter thought was How convenient. I know. I know. What a darling I was.
He tossed his cigarette in the ashtray just in time and dropped his gaze to his water glass. His beautiful finger circled the rim. I loved him, I loved him. Why was this so difficult?
He said, “I’m leaving first thing tomorrow to settle his affairs, arrange the funeral, all that. So you really don’t need to worry, Vivian. I wasn’t going to make a pest of myself. I just wanted to see you again, before I said good-bye to Pops. That’s all. That’s the honest truth. Tell you eye-to-eye, look, I did my best to make things right.”
You know something? The oddest picture came into my mind just then. I saw Dadums in the chair in the hospital waiting room, cradling my mother’s sleeping head on his lap, raising his finger to his lips so no one would disturb her. And. I heard Violet’s voice in my ears, as kind and clean as water: He loved me as much as it was possible for him to love another person.
I thought, out of the blue, maybe this isn’t so hard after all.
Maybe it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.
I removed my golden-yellow pillbox hat and shook out my hair until it released the smell of the cold Paris night. I braced my hands on the narrow table behind me, and I said, in the husky voice of compassion: “Would you like me to come with you? To pay my respects?”
Doctor Paul lifted his face to mine. The expression of wonder there made my heart fall and fall, still beating, gathump gathump.
“Vivian. More than anything.”
? ? ?
AT TWO O’CLOCK in the morning, I startled awake in the grip of a sudden conjecture. I slipped out of bed, threw on a dressing gown, and went into the sitting room, where I picked up the telephone and asked the hotel to send a cable for me, to Mrs. Vivian Schuyler, Fifth Avenue, New York City.
The reply came in with the breakfast tray.
YES STOP SOLD A FEW OLD JEWELS STOP COMING OUT OF YOUR INHERITANCE STOP LOVE MUMS
“Something wrong?” Paul looked up from his coffee.
I slid the telegram under my plate and took the coffee cup from his hand.
“Look here!” But he was smiling. (Oh, how he smiled.)
I straddled his lap with my long bare legs, cupped his face in my hands, and kissed him. (Oh, how I kissed him.) “Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.”
AFTERMATH
O, never say that I was false of heart, Though absence seem’d my flame to qualify.
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie: That is my home of love: if I have ranged, Like him that travels I return again,
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged, So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe, though in my nature reign’d All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood, That it could so preposterously be stain’d, To leave for nothing all thy sum of good; For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.
—Sonnet 109, William Shakespeare
Lionel, 1914
The thin edge of a fingernail moon lingers above the roofline of the Hotel Baur au Lac. For an instant, Lionel recalls the last time he saw Zurich, my God, was it only the year before? It seems like another life, another Europe, another Lionel. He was just passing through. A few posh nights at the Baur, a few lavish dinners. There was a woman. She had dark hair and small, graceful breasts. A diplomat’s wife, a Russian, enthusiastic and not very useful.
But the golden windows now before him eclipse the recollection of that distant Zurich. That other epoch. For one thing, he has a job to do, a last and vital task. (He repeats that to himself: last. For such a small word, it has a heart-stopping sound, glittering, final, the word of the future.) For another thing, behind one of those golden windows breathes Violet.