“Very interesting.” Sybil defended them immediately. “Your great-grandmother and her family were actually Scottish. And they were all quite colorful. Your great-uncle was a war hero in the First World War, and your great-grandfather was a very respected banker.”
“And lost all his money in the Depression, as I recall,” he said succinctly. “My mother got her fortune from her father on the French side. Her mother’s family had lost everything, except what she inherited from my French grandfather, from what she always told me. Her mother was only able to buy her family home back with what her husband left her. She went back to the States as soon as he died.” He had a very cut and dried way of talking about it, which ignored entirely who they’d been as people, and what they went through. “My mother always said that her mother became a recluse when she went back, living with her memories. She sounded like a sad woman. She never returned to France. And my mother’s health deteriorated and she couldn’t travel shortly after her mother left. She was only able to visit her a few times. She developed severe Parkinson’s when she was quite young. As a result, I really never knew my grandmother. I’m much closer to my French relatives. The American ones were all gone when I was a child, except for my grandmother. She sent me a check every year for Christmas and my birthday until she died, but I had no other contact with her. She left everything to my mother. And my mother never went back to see the house. She had no history there, and she was quite ill by then, so she sold it. Are there ghosts there?” He laughed as he said it, and she almost wanted to say yes, to jolt him out of his supercilious attitude about the Butterfields, as though he believed them to be lesser people than his French relations. It made her feel that Augusta was right about the French.
“They were a wonderful family, and their spirit and history are certainly here. We love the house. It’s a beautiful place. And they gave so much of themselves to it.” She sounded emotional as she said it.
“It’s very large as I recall, from what my mother said.” But their chateau in Dordogne was larger, and older. He had inherited it but was thinking of selling it. It was too much trouble and expensive to keep up, and his parents and grandparents were long gone. His daughter wanted him to keep it, but it didn’t make sense for her either. “My daughter might like to see it,” he said thoughtfully then. “She’s an architecture student at the Beaux-Arts and fascinated with old houses.” It surprised Sybil that at seventy-three he had a daughter young enough to be a student. “Her mother is an art professor, and I teach art history,” he said, and then answered Sybil’s unspoken question, as though he’d sensed it. “I married very late. It’s a tradition in my family. My grandfather married my grandmother when he was older too. I married at fifty, to a younger woman. My daughter, Laure, is twenty-two. She’s a terrific girl. Her mother and I are divorced, but she spends a lot of time with me, and we share a passion for art and history. My father was a doctor, and my mother a nurse during the war, but none of the medical genes seem to have come through. The artistic and historical sides have won out.” He laughed again as he said it, and Sybil couldn’t decide if she liked him or not. He sounded a little pompous and very French, but he had softened considerably when he mentioned his daughter. “Unfortunately my mother didn’t live long enough to see my daughter, since I married late. She died six years before, ten years after her own mother.” He was filling Sybil in on all the more recent details she didn’t know. It told her that Lili had died in 1990, if it was ten years after Bettina. And Michael Stanton had been right when he said that he had the feeling that Lili was no longer alive when he toured the house. She had died at seventy-two, which wasn’t very old in that case. And it was clear to her that although Samuel didn’t know much about the Butterfields or the house, he had a passion for history.
“I think you would love the house,” she said to him, trying to interest him in coming to see it. And he could meet his ancestors, if they were willing, or at least see where they had lived and learn more about them. She wanted to encourage him to do that, but wasn’t sure how.
“I probably would,” he said, “but it’s very far away. San Francisco is a long way from Paris.” It was an eleven-hour flight, and a nine-hour time difference. “Maybe my daughter will come sometime. I have a heavy teaching schedule right now, and I’m about to start a new book,” he said, sounding pompous again.
“I’m just finishing one,” Sybil said. So there. Match point. But that wasn’t what the call was about.
“You’re a historian?” he inquired, curious about her. She seemed to know a great deal about his relatives, the previous owners of her house.
“No, I curate exhibits on mid-century modern design for museums, and I write about design. Sybil Gregory.” In case he wanted to check her credentials on the Internet and make sure she wasn’t some crackpot calling him. Their interests were not very different, and overlapped to some extent, since her book was about a more extended period of design history than just mid-century.
“You should write about the Butterfields, if they’re interesting enough. Or at least the house, if it’s still handsome,” he suggested.
“Very much so. But I was thinking you should write about them, since you’re a historian. I don’t know why, but I thought you would be intrigued by the house and should know about it, and your family.” She tried to make it more personal for him, to pique his interest, which seemed to be her mission. And even Gwyneth had looked interested in the idea of a great-grandson through Bettina. None of their other children had lived to marry and have children, and Bettina had only had one, Lili. Samuel was the last surviving member of a wonderful family and a great legacy, and his daughter, Laure, whom Sybil had just discovered when he told her. She was Gwyneth’s great-great-granddaughter, which seemed amazing to Sybil. And even more so if they could meet each other. It was an extraordinary opportunity for both Gwyneth and Laure, and the others.
“I can’t imagine writing about a family I’m related to but really never knew, but send me the book. I’d like to read it. You’ve sparked my interest. You’re a good ambassador for them, posthumously,” he added, and Sybil smiled. Not as posthumously as he thought, but there was no way she could explain that to him, certainly not on the phone, the first time they talked. He would have hung up on her immediately if she’d told him, and she wouldn’t have blamed him.