“Claudia’s in a lot of pain today.” Selma spoke from the back of her throat to lower her voice. “Of course, she refused to stay in bed, so we’ve set her up in the library.” She gestured past the foyer. “Up two flights of stairs and on your left.”
The library, easily two-thirds the size of my entire apartment, could have been plucked from my daydreams. Grand walnut shelves extended to the ceiling, lined reverently with books. A tasteful assembly of plush seating beckoned hours of reading. Diffused sunlight streamed through arched windows, setting the space mildly aglow. And propped up in the corner was Sebastian’s cello.
I was still trying to reconcile my shift in feelings at the concert. Was appreciating his talent the same as being attracted to him? It was hard to know if the resistance I still felt had more to do with working with Claudia than about Sebastian, specifically. I wished I had some experience to compare it to. But since I’d never had a male friend my age, let alone a boyfriend, I couldn’t tell the difference between platonic admiration and the lukewarm beginnings of romantic attraction.
Claudia was lying on a mahogany chaise longue, her diminishing frame propped up almost doll-like by an arsenal of ornate pillows. A jacquard duvet covered her up to her armpits. Though her eyes were closed, her hand tapped in time to the Duke Ellington riff wafting from a small speaker on the nearby side table. The squeak of old floorboards under my feet alerted her to my arrival and she greeted me with a sleepy smile.
“I met Duke Ellington at a party once,” Claudia said, her voice soft, dreamlike.
“I bet there’s an interesting story there.” I sat in a tufted wingback armchair within her sight line.
“Actually, I mostly remember that evening because of the argument I had with my husband,” Claudia said, trying to sit up. I stood to help, supporting her weight as I adjusted the pillows behind her. “He wasn’t fond of me chatting with other men, no matter how interesting they might be. It was a sticking point in our relationship—one of many—because I enjoyed conversing with strangers. It’s what had made me a good photojournalist.”
“It must’ve been hard, leaving that career behind,” I said. “Did you know many other female photographers at the time?”
“There was only a handful in my day, as you can imagine. And really, it was women like Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Martha Gellhorn who paved the way for the rest of us.”
“I just read Martha’s book, Travels with Myself and Another. What a fascinating woman.” It was one of several memoirs by intrepid, independent women that Bessie had recommended to me. “Did you ever meet her?”
“We crossed paths a few times in the fifties—she was prickly. But she was also the only one of Hemingway’s wives sensible enough to divorce him.”
“I can only imagine how tough it must have been to be a female war journalist back then,” I said. “You probably had no choice but to be prickly as a way of self-preservation.”
“You’re sharp, Clover,” Claudia said. “I like that about you.”
“Did you ever consider going back to it? After your son was older?”
“Hardly,” she responded wearily. “In those days, most women in our social circles didn’t even work, let alone go gallivanting across the world without their families, taking photos of strangers. My husband would have never allowed it. It’s no wonder Gellhorn and Bourke-White were both divorced twice over. There’s an intimacy to being a journalist and photographer that men at the time just didn’t understand.”
“Still, you must have some pretty compelling stories from your travels before you married.” I looked around at the bookshelves flanking the chaise longue. “I’d love to see more of your photos sometime.” I hoped it might help her reflect on her life.
Claudia nodded toward the opposite side of the room to a large teak desk. “You’ll find a key under the paperweight. Most of my photos are locked away in the basement—I suppose now is as good a time as any to start sorting through them, since the clock’s ticking and all that. Lord knows that brood of mine will likely just throw them away as soon as I’m gone.”
“I’m not so sure that Sebastian would allow that.” I knew he was too sentimental to be that ruthless.
“Ah, yes, he’s certainly a dedicated grandson, even if he’s a bit of a mess in other areas of his life,” Claudia said. “I’ve been hoping he might find someone to settle down with before I go. It would be nice to know he’s happy. But while his lady friends are always very lovely, they never seem to be the right fit for him. I sometimes suspect his relationships have less to do with compatibility and more the fact that he doesn’t like to be alone.”
I thought of the woman we’d run into at the cocktail bar—I had no idea if she was a good fit for Sebastian. I realized I hadn’t even asked myself if he was compatible with me. And what did compatibility really mean? It felt unfair to hold someone’s pet allergies against them, but that would definitely make a relationship with him harder.
I walked quickly over to the desk and found the key under a small brass whale. “What should I be looking for in the basement?”
“You may have to dig a little, but you’ll see a stack of old bankers boxes—if they haven’t all disintegrated by now. It’s been years since anyone has gone through them.”
“Got it!” I scooted out the door before Claudia could delve further into Sebastian’s personal life.
* * *
The contents of the basement defied gravity. Furniture, artwork, old leather suitcases, and snow equipment all balanced precariously as if waiting for the faintest of nudges to send the pile tumbling. So this was how people kept their homes so elegantly minimal—by cramming all their real belongings out of sight.
The thick coat of dust on every surface meant that allergy-prone Sebastian likely rarely ventured down here. It even managed to irritate my usually robust senses and I sneezed four times in a row. As I navigated the crypt of forgotten objects, I made a mental note to do an inventory of what was down here at a later date. Claudia might want certain things to go certain places rather than just be sold off at an estate sale or tossed out on the curb. It wasn’t officially part of my job, but I’d often watched as lifetimes of memories were unceremoniously discarded by bereaved family members eager to sell a home of the recently departed. The promise of a chunk of money often robbed people of their scruples.
The boxes in question were wedged under an old wooden toboggan. The deep indentation from the toboggan’s runner suggested that they hadn’t been touched for several decades. I gingerly pried the boxes free and returned triumphantly to the library, stray cobwebs laced into my hair.
“You look like you’ve been on an adventure,” Claudia remarked. “I hope you’ll find it worth the trouble.”
“I’m sure I will,” I said, trying to remove the cobwebs, my eyes gritty from the dust. I rested the first box on the glass coffee table. “Should we dive in?”
Claudia’s face flinched with the vulnerability of an artist unveiling a painting for the first time. “I suppose so.”
The box probably held close to three hundred photographs, all printed on cardboard stock. Most were matte, all were black-and-white, many were faded to nothing more than ghostly outlines of figures and structures. I selected a stack of photos tied with twine and began flipping through them.
First was an image of a woman in an elaborately patterned dress sitting by the roadside, two voluminous bunches of bananas positioned in front of her.
I read the inscription on the back. “Tunisia, 1956. Wow, you were in Tunisia?”
“My first and only trip to North Africa,” Claudia beamed. “I’d been stationed in Marseille and I begged my editor to let me go there to cover the tail end of the Tunisian independence movement. When he said no, I traveled there on my own—by flirting my way onto a boat—and sent a telegram from Tunis asking his permission again. Then he had no choice.”