Virginia history is in my blood. I didn’t have to read much about it in books, because much of my family, particularly my father’s sisters, talked about it as though it had happened in their lifetimes. Neighbors and acquaintances identified themselves by their links to the Revolutionary or the Civil War, and there were a few people still alive who had witnessed the latter. One of my very distant uncles had served under General Washington, and as Virginians my family’s loyalties were hardly split when it came to the Civil War—or The Recent Unpleasantness, as one of my aunts liked to call it. As a child, all my school holidays were spent tromping around battlefields with my father: New Market, Fredericksburg, Fort Sumter, Shiloh, Gettysburg, Malvern Hill.
But college showed me so much more. We took bus trips to Washington, D.C., and New York City. We prowled through museums and great houses. We stood quietly in artists’ studios, letting the smell of oil paint permeate our skin while we listened to artists tell their stories as they worked. (Painters have a reputation as introverts, but the ones I met were full of information—gossip and history and opinions of the world that were remarkably observant. And they loved an audience.) Back at school, I reveled in my art and art history classes. Painting or drawing, and often sitting in the dark auditorium staring up at slides of the artwork that wasn’t readily available to us. Artwork from the Louvre and Florence and Amsterdam. Of course, many of the girls at school had traveled extensively and found the classes dull. But that was never true for me.
As I sat in Olivia’s morning room, the curtains drawn, a cooling pot of tea nearby, I tried to remember the way I’d felt at school: calm but ready for something new. I closed my eyes, resting in the quiet, listening to the electrical hum of the projector. Had my last days of calm really been before I’d married Press and come to this place? If anyone had asked me weeks or even a few years earlier, surely I would have said that I was happy. I loved my children. I loved Press. Didn’t I love him? Now I just felt like I didn’t know him. He had always given me everything I needed. If I had suspected him of being selfish, it wasn’t that he had kept things that were rightfully mine for himself. With me he was always generous—even if he wasn’t quite with others.
A few hours earlier, I had wondered what he would think of my being in this room, looking at these old slides. I doubted that he would care. As much as he professed to love us, and loved Bliss House, he was so often elsewhere. But I belonged where I was, and had a feeling that he wouldn’t believe me if I told him how the room itself seemed to sigh with pleasure, grateful to have me there.
Anxious not to spoil the aura of adventure about what I was doing, I chose sections of slides to view at random, rather than begin with the box labeled A–F.
Terrance had given me careful instructions, and I handled the slides gingerly, doing my best not to touch the housing that had turned dangerously warm when the bulb was lighted.
I almost wept at the beauty of those first images. It was Paris—a place I’d never been. Press had promised that we would go, someday. More than ten years after the last World War, it was a popular place for honeymoons. Jack and Rachel had gone, and Rachel had come back with a trunk full of expensive, perfectly tailored dresses and suits.
These images were more than a half century old, even from the 1890s and earlier. There were, of course, the obligatory shots of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the palace at Versailles, the stately Louvre with its parade of windows and chimneys. Carefully framed shots that must have been taken by professional photographers, then hand-colored. The skies were a perfect blue, the stone of Notre Dame a sallow cream, down to the shadowy arches fanning into the doors of its western face. Such rich, extravagant color, as though the photographer had invented each blue, each bit of yellow in the cathedral windows and dabbed red in the flag or on a man’s cap just in that moment, just for that picture. Was it real? No. It was day, and no doubt the colors would be dull in the sunlight from the outside. But this was a fantasy world. The perfect colors gave each location a kind of fairytale quality as though they were in a Paris that never rained, that was never smudged with coal smoke or grit.
The streets of this Paris were nearly empty of people and carriages. No cars. The focus was on the architecture, the structures’ forms and lines.
The flowers in the Jardin du Luxembourg in front of the palace were like jewels, the grass beyond a fervent green, the palace solid and settled in its landscape like a dowager queen.
There were landscapes, too, of beaches and a mountainous area that was nothing like our nearby Blue Ridge. These mountains looked less populated, with the occasional tidy valley village nestled between them. Pristine mountain lakes, again colored a luminous blue, against forests of near-black pine trees and jagged gray rock faces. No people. How happy could I be, standing in the shallows of one of these remote lakes, listening to the birds, small fish fluttering around my ankles? Alone.
I had never lived alone for more than a week at a time. The idea at once thrilled and frightened me. Olivia had never lived alone until her husband died. Nor had my own mother or Nonie. We were all, always, attached to men. Fathers or husbands or employers or children. Could I ever live on my own, given the chance? Was I strong enough?