“Then why are you here?”
“To drink this wine.” Liesl lifted the bottle. Proof of her good intentions.
“I had other invitations, you know.”
“I don’t doubt you did.”
“People aren’t so terrible as to leave a widow alone at Christmas.” Softening a bit, Marie turned and led Liesl out of the foyer, into the quiet of the house.
“So why stay home?” Liesl asked.
“No one here to ask me any questions.”
Liesl followed Marie into the kitchen to get a corkscrew. They passed the dining room. Candle still lit. Single place mat ready for tomorrow’s breakfast.
“Would you like to see his office?” Marie asked.
Liesl didn’t move from where she was leaning against the kitchen counter.
“Not at all,” she said.
Liesl poured them each a glass. “To a Merry Christmas,” she said, raising hers.
“Yes,” Marie said, failing to return the gesture and bringing the glass right to her lips instead. “What a festive year it is.”
“You can’t cut yourself off from all happiness.”
“Can’t I?” Marie said. “I’ll accept that challenge.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
“It seems that you do.”
“I’m not here for the gossip, Marie. I’m here to check if you’re all right.”
“But only now that I’ve helped you…” Marie said, drinking again.
“That isn’t fair,” Liesl said. “I would have come before.”
Marie’s glass was empty, and Liesl moved to refill it. She hadn’t drunk a sip of her own.
“But you didn’t.”
“I wasn’t sure if you wanted to see me.”
“My husband had just died.”
“I should have come.”
“Ask me. That’s why you’re here, I know it is, so just ask me. Ask me why I sent you the pages. Ask me if I knew.”
The cracks in Marie’s lips were stained red from the wine. They must have been very dry to take on the color so quickly. Liesl had always thought of Marie as the type of woman who took very good care of her skin. But the cracks were showing.
“Did you know?” Liesl asked.
“No.”
“I believe you. There’s no reason for you to lie about it now.”
Liesl set down her glass on the white marble counter. She’d never thought much about what Marie and Christopher’s kitchen might look like, but she didn’t expect it to be so sleek. So modern. She still hadn’t had any of her wine.
“Except for the small matter of prosecution,” Marie said.
“That would never happen,” Liesl said, nonetheless conjuring a picture of tiny Marie in her twin set being led away in handcuffs.
“Wouldn’t it? Isn’t it what I deserve?”
“You just said you didn’t know.”
“But I should have. I can be prosecuted for being stupid.”
She sprayed spit when she slurred the word stupid. The wine wasn’t the first she’d had to drink that night. It couldn’t have been.
“That’s enough.” Liesl reached across the counter and pulled a sheet of paper towel off the roll, handed it to Marie, and cast her eyes downward to give the woman a second of privacy to pat her mouth dry.
“There’s a second part of the question,” Marie said. “Ask me.”
Marie was very drunk, and Liesl was very sober. They were not on even ground, and the right thing to do would have been to pour Marie a glass of water, put her to bed, and continue the conversation another day. Liesl refilled Marie’s glass.
“Why?” Liesl said. “Why send me the chapter once you found out?”
Marie. Marie with the chapped lips, Marie with the finger-spotted wineglass pulled herself into a chair by the kitchen counter.
“I never went into his home office. Did you know that?” Marie set her glass down on the counter. Too hard. Liesl cringed, sure it would crack, but it held.
“No,” Liesl said.
“We agreed. It was his private work space. A brilliant man can’t be interrupted.”
Feeling awkward about Marie’s condition, Liesl tried to sound maternal.
“I’m surprised you agreed to that.”
“The cleaning lady would go in,” Marie said, her face breaking into a mean grin that put her stained gums on display. “So there was really no reason for me to ever enter.”
“Until after.” Liesl reached forward from where she was standing, and Marie pulled back as if Liesl were coming in for a hug, but she was reaching for Marie’s glass, sliding it out of the way of the woman’s hands that were waving the more agitated she became.
“He was so sure of my stupidity that he didn’t even try to hide it.”
“We’ve had too much wine,” Liesl said. “Let’s talk another day.”
“You haven’t had any wine.”
“All the same,” Liesl said. “Another day.”
“It’s Christmas,” Marie said. “You won’t leave a poor old widow alone on Christmas.”
She swayed her way down from her stool and stumbled out of the kitchen. Liesl wasn’t sure what to do, wasn’t sure whether Marie was going to go to bed, was going to go vomit. But she didn’t feel right leaving the woman alone, so she finally got up and went to follow her. She found her standing in the doorway to Christopher’s office.
“He couldn’t even respect me enough to try to hide it.”
“He did, though,” Liesl said. “They were in the filing cabinet.”
Liesl walked into the room where uniformed officers had removed thousands of books from built-in shelves. They’d left only papers. Piles and piles of papers that Christopher had refused to read on a screen, had refused to save in a folder so that someone after him could make sense of them. Marie staggered forward and grabbed a pile of printouts from the desk, sloppily handing them to Liesl.
They were emails. They were emails from Miriam to Christopher. The old man had set up an email account after all.
“Right here on the desk,” Marie said. “He left that woman’s pleading letters to him right here on the desk under his manuscript.”
Liesl glanced at the stack and almost immediately wanted to look away from the ugliness of what the messages exposed, but in the brief moments she laid eyes on the typed lines, she saw references to embraces held, to promises broken, to a heart shattered, to a mind that was fragmenting, and to a man who didn’t care any longer.
“Marie, I’m so sorry,” Liesl said.
“That poor girl killed herself, and that snake got to die quietly without ever taking any responsibility.”
With that, Marie buckled over and vomited red wine all over the polished wooden floorboards in Christopher’s office.
Twenty-One Years Earlier
The library basement, 3:30 p.m. Liesl had just about made it; ninety minutes and the workday would be over.
Francis was waiting for her by the elevator. “Hello, stranger.”
Liesl pressed the elevator call button. “I have a list I have to pull for a class tomorrow. Head of the history department, he can be a real shark. Sorry to have missed you on your first day.”
“Sorry to have missed me, or sorry to be avoiding me?”
He stepped toward her; she stepped back. “Christopher had a lot planned for you,” Liesl said.
“And I have a lot planned for you, darling,” Francis said, stepping closer still. “I’ve had a lot of time and a lot of miles to think about it.”
“Francis. You can’t call me darling.”
“There isn’t anyone down here to hear.”
Liesl shook her head. “I mean not ever. Not ever again.”
“Liesl, what is this? I haven’t seen you since the Boston conference. You just about arranged this job for me…”
Liesl tucked her head down to recall their last meeting, a long embrace in a small hotel room. Liesl might be reserved, but she was too human to do away with the memories altogether, no matter the decisions she had made after. Those annual encounters, the afternoons in the small hotel room as rare-books scholars spoke in the ballroom downstairs; those afternoons lingered.
“I arranged the interview. Christopher loves you, and your credentials are good. You got the job yourself.”