Still. Those silly, awful words kept on repeating in my head, in time with the whining rotation of Hunka Tin’s engine. My father’s a millionaire.
The news had come from Sophie. Of course. A letter arrived soon after I reported for duty at the new American base hospital in Rouen. I remember how the sun lay high and hot in the pale August sky, and the few men—training accidents, mostly—were drunk and cheerful. They hadn’t seen battle yet. I dropped into my chair in the mess and caressed the envelope. Sophie wrote several times a week, but the letters tended to come in bursts because of the shipping, or not to come at all. Sometimes I had to piece the information together and guess at what was missing. I’d asked her to number the letters, so at least I knew what I didn’t know, but she rarely remembered, or else muddled the numbers because she had forgotten where she was. You would think, with her mechanical aptitude, she would be more methodical. But she wasn’t methodical, not unless she had a machine to focus her mind.
I didn’t mind. The rush of pleasurable relief engulfed me so entirely, I was only happy to know she was alive. That a letter existed, and so did Sophie. There was only one envelope this time, so I took my time opening it. The windows stood open, allowing a warm draft to shiver the paper, which I held to my nose—as always—in hope of catching some scent of home. Sometimes I thought I found it: the faint smoke of the parlor fire, the honeysuckle of Sophie’s soap. And then it was gone, and I figured the sensation was just my imagination: the smell of hope.
Darlingest Virgo . . .
She always started off that way. We were everything to each other, after all.
It’s been a few days since I last wrote, and I’m sorry for that, but Brigid left us on Wednesday without any notice at all [naturally, Sophie didn’t specify which Wednesday, and she’d neglected to put either the date or the number at the top of the page] so I’ve had to do all the cooking and cleaning besides my schoolwork. I made a horrible mess of a chicken pie last night—lost track of time, as usual, and the crust nearly broke poor Father’s teeth—but I guess today’s soup isn’t so bad. The agency is sending over a new one tomorrow. A cookmaid, I mean, not a soup!
So it went. It was morning, and I was about to eat my breakfast, one hand gripping my fork and one hand gripping my letter. There was no more well-stocked sideboard here, no fresh cheese and fresh bread and tender new carrots from the garden Mrs. DeForest had decreed at the chateau last April. Just canned meat and a sticky, unsweetened porridge. The other nurses had already eaten, and there wasn’t much left.
I set the fork on my plate and turned the page over.
But that’s not the most exciting news, oh no! I’ve saved that for last. Brace yourself, my dearest one! Would you believe that we got a letter yesterday, and the Prudent Manufacturing Company wants to license Father’s patent for the pneumatic oxifying drill for its new factory? They’re offering him a dizzying amount of money so he won’t go to a competitor first. He won’t say how much, but I can tell it’s heaps and heaps, because he’s going about the house whistling. Whistling, Virgo! I know you’d disapprove if you were here, but I can’t help smiling. Who knew Father could whistle?
Now, you must understand something. Since our arrival in New York, after Mama died, we had been poor. Well, maybe poor wasn’t quite the right word. We’d been getting by, mostly on the money and the jewelry that Father managed to bring with him, and the income from renting out the basement apartment. But prosperity? I could hardly, in that summer of 1917, remember what prosperity was like—what it meant to live in a spacious house, smelling of lumber and fresh air and flowers, and watch the lugubrious sea twitch beyond your window. To have lots of pretty dresses to wear, and luxurious lunches you couldn’t possibly finish. Horses to ride, and tennis racquets, and hazy afternoons at the club. Sailing on your own boat. Opulent picnics on a lawn of green velvet.
But there’s so much difference between prosperity and getting by. We had a cheap cookmaid, it’s true, and Father always managed to scrape together the tuition for the Kingston Girls Academy each year. So we weren’t dead broke. And yet, when I thought of money, there came this idea of finitude. There was only so much money, in a small imaginary pot you couldn’t refill. At the bottom of that pot lay poverty. Lay starvation and misery and humiliation.
So at first I couldn’t quite fathom the notion of such a great quantity of money—so great, it encouraged Father to whistle—and I set the letter aside. I thought Sophie had been mistaken, or had taken a few facts and daydreamed them into a fortune. But as the weeks and months passed, it became clear that, if anything, Sophie had underestimated the scale of Father’s success. That small imaginary pot of money had grown to a colossal dimension, an infinite dimension. The strangest twist of fate. My father’s a millionaire.
Only four words. Nothing at all, really, compared with the terrifying scope of what I had revealed to Simon, by the side of the Grand Canal in the gardens of Versailles. Since then, I had taken such care. I hadn’t said any more about the murder or the circumstances of our life in New York—not because I didn’t trust Simon to keep my secrets but because I couldn’t bear the sight of his face when he learned them. The possibility of his doubt, the idea that he might not share my faith in my father. And who would want a woman whose father might be a murderer?
So I had answered his gentle questions in the way I had been trained—revealing things without really revealing anything. A few small, unimportant details to make him think he understood. Anyway, we didn’t leave much time for talking, did we? On the four occasions we had managed to meet since last August, we wanted only to make love and to sleep—that peculiar, enchanted depth of sleep that comes only after intense physical release—and that was all. We were so exhausted, you see. The war was extracting everything out of us. We had nothing left to give each other, except a peculiar carnal comfort, and silence, and slumber. Precious gifts we could obtain nowhere else.
We wrote, of course. We wrote as often as we could, but the wonderful thing about letters was that you could choose the subject. You could conveniently forget to answer any questions from his letter, or choose your answer carefully, or write in such haste—We are moving again; I can hear the German shells beating closer—that you couldn’t write everything.
Until yesterday, then, I thought I was cured, that I had cured myself of this stupid tendency to lay myself bare. To confess such secrets as I could never, ever reveal. I thought I had regained control of my lips.