De Potter's Grand Tour (14 page)

She was too absorbed in her self-pity to hear her son calling to her from the adjacent bedroom. When she didn't go to him, he came to her.

He was standing there watching her when she finally lowered the pillow from her face. She was ashamed to be seen by Victor in such a state. She smoothed her lace nightcap and tried blinking away her tears in an effort to hide the truth, all too obvious, that she who presented a front of formidable composure to the world was the weakest of women.

“I can't sleep,” Victor announced, oblivious to his mother's misery, forcing a little cough to earn her sympathy. The light of the fire reflected in his glasses. His flushed cheeks were enough of a prompt for Aimée to focus all her worry: a fever might signal pneumonia. Here it was closing in on midnight on New Year's Eve, and somehow she must find a doctor. The proprietress, Madame Vollard, lived on the ground floor and was nearly deaf. Would she hear when Aimée pounded on her door? All these thoughts were going through her mind as Victor climbed onto her lap. She felt his forehead and was reassured by the coolness of his skin. She kissed the tip of his nose.

“It's very late, darling. Why are you awake?”

“I don't know.”

She could tell from his pout that he had a confession to make, but he would need coaxing. “Have you been coughing?” she asked gently.

He shook his head.

“Does your throat hurt?”

“No.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Will you tell me what's wrong?”

He picked up the string of her cap and coiled it around his finger. He stared sullenly at the floor.

“I lost something,” he finally admitted.

“What did you lose?”

“Nothing.”

“Something isn't nothing. Tell me the truth, Victor. I won't be angry with you.”

“My halfpenny Rose Red.”

“Why were you looking through your album when you were supposed to be sleeping?”

“You promised you wouldn't be angry!” He burst into tears. She assured him that she wasn't angry at all and held him close, hiding her amusement at the melodrama—her dear, sweet boy was upset about losing a halfpenny postage stamp! She was glad to have the chance to comfort him, to be a source of strength, to provide a model of serenity—this made her feel like herself again. She wasn't going to waste her time feeling sorry for herself. She was Madame de Potter inside and out. And after she and Victor had scoured his room and she had finally found the stamp, which had fallen beneath the bureau, after she'd tucked him back in bed and set his beloved album on the table close to him, after she'd listened to him talking about all the stamps he wanted to collect to fill the empty slots still left in the album, she considered how lucky she was at having two treasure hunters to love.

 

PART FOUR

 

At Sea

H
E ONLY MEANT TO REST
for a few minutes and is not aware of having fallen asleep in his steamer chair. But when Armand opens his eyes, the sun is lower in the sky and the strait has widened, melting into the sea. The shoreline is barely visible in the distance. On the chair beside him, the banker from Virginia is paging through a book about Greece.

Armand realizes he could be of service. Without invitation, he advises the banker to start his tour with the Agora and avoid climbing up to the Acropolis in the heat of the midday sun. The banker thanks him for the advice and announces that he has already climbed up to the Acropolis—twice—during the previous week of his tour, before he set out for Constantinople. He is on his way home, he says, and yes, it has been a splendid trip, except that he failed to find anything to bring back to his wife. She is afraid of sea travel, the banker explains. Ever since she suffered terribly from sickness on the Chesapeake when she was a girl of ten, she won't go near any kind of boat. If the banker wants to travel overseas, he has to travel alone. But his wife always enjoys the gifts he brings back from foreign lands. And here he is returning to her empty-handed.

An idea comes to Armand as he listens to the banker's story. “If you'll excuse me, sir,” he says, “I'll be right back.” It takes only a minute or two for him to hurry to his stateroom and open his trunk and find the box containing his most recent acquisition—the small bronze statue of Bacchus that he'd procured in Constantinople. Back at the banker's side, he hands him the box. “Please give this to your wife, with kind regards.”

The banker hesitates, as suspicious as the steward and stewardess had been in the face of Armand's generosity.

“Go on,” Armand urges. “Open it.”

The banker raises the lid and examines the figure, turning it over in his hand. “It's marvelous, but I expect it cost you a fortune.”

“Honestly, the dealer didn't know the value of it, and I bought it for next to nothing. Really, he practically gave it away. And now I'm giving it to you to give to your wife. Take it. I insist!”

The banker is cannier than the steward and stewardess and less reluctant than they had been to close a deal he is sure to profit by. “Well, then, I accept,” he says, adding, if it isn't too much trouble, that he would like a receipt, even though no money has changed hands. Armand obliges by writing out a bill of sale and signing it over to the banker. “I hope your wife enjoys it,” he says kindly. “Oh, and by the way, I wouldn't declare it at customs if I were you. The Ottomans have strict rules about exporting antiquities.”

Armand offers the warning as helpful advice, not expecting that it would be enough to annoy the banker, who clearly prides himself on being impeccably virtuous in his business dealings. If he can't declare it at customs, then he doesn't want it. He snaps the lid closed and hands the box back to Armand with a grunt of displeasure. “Thank you,” he says, “but I prefer to find a gift for my wife on my own.”

As he takes possession again of his little bronze, Armand considers how difficult it is to be magnanimous in a world that rewards suspicion. The banker goes back to reading his book about Greece, leaving Professor de Potter stuck with a treasure so lacking in interest that he can't even give it away.

 

Grand Bois

T
HE DAY SHE RETURNED
from Greece—five weeks after her husband disappeared at sea—Aimée began to dream about him. In the first dream, he was in bed with her. The lamp was off, and the shutters of her window were closed tight. She couldn't see him in the darkness, but she could feel him.

In the second dream, she was standing with a group of tourists outside the front door of the château in the Touraine they'd rented for the first half of 1887, the Château Montagland. The door opened, and Armand was there, ready to welcome the party and greeting his wife as if she were a stranger.

A servant stood nearby, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the piccolo. American-flag bunting was draped from the corbels. The wall alongside the stairway was decorated with circular Toledo swords from Armand's early collection. A plaque of hammered brass, with a portrait of the wife of Francis I, hung above the entranceway.

Armand led the group into the kitchen, where a servant Aimée had never seen before was arranging brioche on a plate. His expression was somber, but he had the ruddy, fat-cheeked face of a cherub. A rustic knotted-wool rug was on the floor, and a fire burned in the hearth.

Armand continued past the servant without a word, through the kitchen, down the hall, and pushed back a pair of pocket doors, revealing the room he called “the
petit salon des arts
,” which was identical to the salon in Grand Bois, except that there was no gilt cabinet.

Armand gestured toward the clock on the mantel, the one given to the de Potters by members of the Long Summer Tour of 1884, made of black Egina marble, with miniature pillars in imitation of a Greek temple. As if on command, the clock began to chime, and the sound woke the white marble Venus de Milo, who bent her head from one side to the other as though to stretch her stiff neck. The bronze Italian soldier across the room caught Aimée's eye and winked at her lasciviously. The wooden Daughter of Madame Angot raised herself on her rosetted slippers and pointed first toward the miniature bronze Psyche, who was embracing her dying gladiator, and then toward the marble Moses, who thrust his fingers into the flowing billows of his white beard as if to search for something there.

It was wondrous and frightening and beautiful all at once. Even in the dream, though, Aimée was aware that some trick must be involved. Before she could ask their guide about the lights and mirrors he used to create the illusion, she woke up.

*   *   *

The day after this second dream, she went into her husband's study, lifted the pedestal bowl, folded the embroidered runner, and carefully opened her husband's desk, only briefly sifting through its contents before closing the lid.

“Gray day,” she wrote in her diary that night. “Opened A's desk—like uncovering the face of a corpse—& his hand placed all these things as they are. How can I go through all this & live.”

Every day that week she had meetings with bankers, lawyers, and once with the Entrepreneur, as the consultant called himself. He'd been recommended by Edmond Gastineau, who knew of him only by reputation. He was famous, Gastineau said, for saving his clients unnecessary fees. But the famous Entrepreneur, who sat across from her veiled by the haze of his cigar smoke, had only one piece of advice on how to handle the debts Armand had left behind: Madame de Potter
must, must, must
avoid giving the impression that she was desperate.

She may have been desperate to find money to pay her bills; she would have no difficulty, though, disguising the reality of her finances. As Madame de Potter, she had learned to play her part with seemingly artless grace. Now as a widow, she had already developed a new confidence in her ability to hide the truth. All she had to do was tell people what she wanted them to believe.

She wanted them to believe that there was no crisis her husband hadn't been capable of handling. That's what he'd persuaded her to believe while he was still alive, successfully shielding her from the scope of his debts. Looking over the bank records, she wondered if there were investments he had made long ago that he'd forgotten to record. She doubted it, but the next day she opened her husband's desk for a second time, knowing that among the stack of his passports and visas, she would find the key to his safe-deposit box, along with a copy of his will:

“In the name of God, Amen: I, Pierre Louis de Potter d'Elseghem, commonly known and subscribing myself as Armand de Potter, being of sound and disposing mind, memory and understanding, but realizing the uncertainty of human life…”

He indicated that he wanted all his just and legal debts to be paid as soon as possible after his death; he bequeathed to his wife all his stocks and bonds on deposit and his Paid Up Life Insurance Policy; he bequeathed to his wife and son the total value of his Tourist Business in New York and Paris, and his collection of Egyptian Antiquities. He requested, “In the event of my body being lost at sea that a monument be erected to my memory by my wife.”

She paused, rereading the stipulation he'd put in years ago.
A monument be erected to my memory … A monument …
How strange it was to read these words now. What sort of monument had he imagined for himself? A weeping angel? A pyramid?

They were supposed to grow old together and had already begun to enjoy a kind of retirement from the frenzy of the tourist business—reading, art study, travel, long walks in this beautiful country, returning to the home they called Paradise. She remembered asking her husband if it was possible to be
too
happy. How she regretted the comment.

Her regret was worsened by the mystery of his end, which made death insubstantial. A telegram or a ring at the gate in the evening would make her start. When a letter arrived containing a Kodak taken of Armand during his last weeks alive, she almost called out, as if to summon him from the next room:
Come see, my love, come look at yourself!
But her voice caught in her throat when she realized that in this photograph taken of her husband during his final tour, he had his own camera in his hand, as if he were preparing to take a picture of her as she looked at him, and he was seated on the base of a tombstone.

*   *   *

She tried to stay occupied in the days that followed. She went to the dressmaker's in Nice and bought hyacinth bulbs at the market. She ordered mourning cards and wrote letters. Eventually she forced herself to open her husband's desk once more.

Looking through his passports and visas, she was puzzled by certain inconsistencies. From the documents, she couldn't be sure whether her husband first arrived in New York in 1871 or 1873, whether he was born in Belgium or France and stood five feet six inches or five feet eight inches tall. She attributed such mistakes to Armand's accent. A news clipping dated September 18, 1875, announced that a man named “Mr. T. De Potter” would be in charge of the French Department at St. Agnes's School in Albany. The
T
, she guessed, was misheard when Armand pronounced the initial
P
of his first name. In a later report, Mr. T. De Potter had become “Prof. Pierce L. De Potter, the French instructor in St. Agnes's School,” who was praised for giving a “particularly vivid” lecture, “The History of France from Francis II to the Present Time,” with “choice selections from the poets” interspersed.