The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (21 page)

“How many on staff?” she asked.

“You mean
paid
employees?” Regina paused, counting on her fingers. She didn’t need, Suzanne noted, to use both hands. “I’m not really sure. Our funding is so erratic. Foundations and wills and then some government ha’pennies raining down from heaven now and again. We used to pay our doctor, because he was so important to all the women—health issues are connected to everything we do. The stress of poverty is the most unhealthy thing there is. About two years ago, he got married and moved to Birmingham. We were bloody desperate for a while, until the Baron saved us.”

“The Baron?”

“Dr. Gabriel. It’s a nickname he hates. He just walked in one day and rolled up his sleeves. After a few months, we actually begged him to take some money, but he just waved us away like were mosquitoes. He’s a godsend. The women adore him, and so do the kids.”

“Sounds lovely,” Suzanne murmured, imagining some bald, potbellied old dear retired from the National Health Service come to do some good works before showing his time card to St. Peter. Well, better late than never, she sighed.

“Could I see some of your informational handouts, especially the ones to abused women?” she asked.

“Sure.” Regina started opening drawers and pulling leaflets out of cubbyholes.

“Number fifty-six,” the nurse called out, and there was a momentary hum of consternation in the crowded waiting area as the women anxiously pulled out their numbers and compared them.

Suzanne glanced through the open door to the clinic. She blinked, then looked again, long and hard.

He was sitting casually on his desk, a tall young man in his late twenties with the clean, bold shine of the golden college boy. His hair was shoulder-length, thick and blond, held back neatly in a ponytail. And in one ear, she saw the unmistakable shine of a small gold earring. Just before the door closed again, she glimpsed that beneath his white doctor’s coat he wore a Spanish vest embroidered in elaborate and beautiful colors.

She looked down listlessly at the brochures offering sensible advice and numerous useful phone numbers to London’s most fragile inhabitants, all the while waiting for the door to open again so she could make sure the vision wasn’t a mirage.

The next patient, who looked like a sixteen-year-old who had been married for twenty years, was cradling a baby and had a two-year-old clinging with awesome tenacity to her milk-stained sari. But as hard as the mother pulled, and as vociferously as she insisted, the terrified child would simply not budge.

“Problem?” The doctor leaned against the door frame, his upperclass elegance incongruously framed by its peeling, chipped wood. He looked at the mother and child with slanting blue eyes full of gently amused concern. Then he crouched, holding out large, beckoning hands to the child, whose fright had already mellowed into uncertainty. The doctor was saying something in low, coaxing tones, his face all the while serious and respectful. The child suddenly smiled. Magically, Suzanne watched him take small, but eager steps forward, finally placing his hand in the doctor’s.

She found herself staring, mesmerized by the sight of the long white fingers wrapped around the small brown ones. And when the door closed behind them, she had a strange sense of emptiness and loss, as if she’d been somehow shut out.

“So that’s the Baron?”

“Who?” Regina murmured, still sifting through the papers.

“Your Dr. Gabriel. Is he young, blond?” Suzanne finally asked, point-blank.

Regina grinned knowingly. “Love at first sight, eh? Well, my dear. Take a number. Around here, we queue up for that, as well,” she said, laughing.

Suzanne did something she hadn’t done since Gran had caught her with a naked stranger in her bed. She blushed.

She said her good-byes soon after, curiously disturbed and eager to be alone. Outside, she noticed a red Alfa-Romeo convertible with a sign in the window:
PHYSICIAN ON DUTY
.

She went straight back to the hotel, where she roamed aimlessly around her room, fingering the wallpaper and twirling her silver bracelet around her wrist. She paused in front of the mirror, staring. My eyes are desolate, she thought, frightened, getting into bed and hugging herself long and hard against an almost unendurable ache of loneliness.

Lost, she thought, picking up the phone and dialing Paris.

“
Thierry, bonsoir! C’est moi. Suzanne. Ça va…? Moi? Bien, bien!
” she said, trying to muster a little sincere enthusiasm. “
A Londre en famille
.” She got tired of the French. “Have you seen Renaldo lately? Really, how is he?…Good, good.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “What’s he teaching?…Ah, Impressionists. He’ll be in Paris, then, all summer…. Brazil? To see his children? Are you sure?…Oh, not definite…. No, no reason, I just wondered. If you see him…no. Nothing. Give Artur, Sylvan, and Cecilia my love. Tell them to call me? Here’s the number.” She read it to him quickly. “I’ll be here a few days at least, and then, I don’t know…. Thanks, Thierry.
Au revoir, chéri
.”

She put the receiver down and held her face in her hands, squeezing the temples. Lost, she thought. Lost, lost, lost.

She laid down and pulled the covers over her head, trying hard to picture Renaldo’s large, dark head, his unruly hair, and deep, laughing eyes. But the picture wouldn’t hold still. It kept getting displaced by long, thick, blond hair and gentle, white hands that beckoned with the promise of kindness.

18

They turned down The Strand, a busy London street lined with stores selling computers and cellular phones. Set back, and almost as removed in time as it was in space, was the Savoy hotel.

A doorman in a gold-braided uniform opened the doors and tipped his cap. Inside, one expected to see Winston Churchill, or to hear a radio announcing the latest news from the front. Time seemed simply to have stopped in 1940.

Overstuffed sofas and mahogany bookcases filled with leather-bound books framed a warming fireplace with blazing logs. Elsewhere, ladylike chairs clustered around small tea tables spread with pink-linen tablecloths and fresh flowers. In the center of the room was a white, trellised gazebo surrounded by baskets of fresh flowers.

“Wow!” Francesca whistled.

“Wait,” Catherine smiled.

The restaurant was at the far end of the lobby, set off by etched glass. It was almost dark, lit by flickering pink candles and a few wall sconces that bathed the room in a delicate, almost magical light. Pink-marble columns with gilded capitals divided the room, and gracefully draped mauve-satin curtains framed the windows. In the far corner stood a small silver gazebo beneath which a band played swing music.

But the true beauty of the room was the stretch of windows overlooking the Thames. The lights of the National Theatre and Royal Festival Hall danced over the calm waters, joining the wall sconces and candles to bathe the large silver dessert carts and the enormous silver chafing dishes in a soft, charming glow.

“There used to be a terrace,” Catherine said, suddenly remembering. “On a summer evening, you could sit outside and watch the boats along the Thames. There were fewer lights then—just Waterloo Station and the docks.”

“But otherwise, is it really the same as you remember, Gran?” Francesca marveled, eying a slender woman in a backless black evening gown, wishing she had one just like it.

Catherine nodded. “The most romantic place in the world. A perfect setting to talk about the memoirs.” She turned to them, her face suffused in a lovely, joyous glow. “Have you read it?”

“Couldn’t put it down! It was…mesmerizing,” Francesca said, her eyes wide. “She seemed so near, somehow. Her problems, her attitudes. And what a love story! Fabulous!”

A short, distinguished waiter with graying hair seated them immediately.

“I’m glad.” Catherine nodded, very pleased. “What about you, Suzanne?”

Suzanne picked up a fork and tapped it lightly, first the handle, then the prongs, in an irritable rhythm. She was wondering if she should be nice and lie, or tell the truth and get into enormous trouble. The former, probably. But, somehow, she couldn’t muster the necessary energy. She hadn’t read it and had only the slightest curiosity about what someone five hundred years dead had to say.

Humanity was entering a new stage. The old ways of thinking were dismal failures. Just look at the world! All the old mechanisms that had separated people for so long had to break down. The answer was to cast off our failed history, the useless traditions that weighed us down, preventing us from coming together to ensure our survival on the planet….

She looked around the room. After spending the afternoon listening to the problems of single mothers and new immigrants, crushed by Britain’s antediluvian class system, such a place made her want to sock someone in the mouth.

“You know what’s the matter with this place?” she said, ignoring the question. “It hasn’t changed, but the world sure has. This is a dinosaur. I mean, evening gowns? And the prices. You could feed a family of five for two weeks.” She shook her head, staring at the menu.

“A dinosaur,” Catherine repeated. “That’s what anything preserved out of the past is to you, isn’t it? Some useless old fossil to be buried, or used for fertilizer? I suppose it would be better if they’d renovated the hotel with the times. We could all be eating fast food out of Styrofoam containers, standing up by Formica counters, for the cost of a McDonald’s burger.”

“Gran, really. I just meant…what has all this got to do with me?”

“That’s really how you feel about the manuscript, too, isn’t it?” Catherine asked evenly.

“In a way,” Suzanne answered defiantly.

Catherine felt the waves of a monster headache begin at the back of her head. It was all such a farce, she thought hopelessly, just as she’d secretly feared it would be.

“‘What does it have to do with me? Me,
me, ME
?’” Catherine mimicked in a rising crescendo of indignation. “That’s all you ever hear nowadays! Women living alone because they can’t find the perfect man for ‘me’; married women refusing to put aside the ‘me’ for even a little while to care for others. Men out grabbing whatever’s dangling from the branches of Eden, no questions asked and anyone else but ‘me’ be damned!”

“Look, Gran, I didn’t mean to upset…” Suzanne began contritely, startled by her anger.

“No, let me finish! A generation of the damned, you all are! Everybody out for themselves, because ‘me’ is the only thing that matters. You’ve all forgotten…”

“Please, Gran, calm down,” Francesca begged, glaring at Suzanne.

“Forgotten what?” Suzanne demanded, sick and tired of the whole thing.

“That you’re a link. And a link cannot pick itself up and walk off.”

“Shackles,” Suzanne muttered to herself.

“Yes, shackles. But also a golden chain, a lifeline that’ll keep you from stumbling off the cliff and falling into the vat of sleaze that some people are calling their lives these days!”

“Hmm. So let me get this straight: vats of sleaze, that’s what you automatically dive into when you break with family tradition. Interesting. Let’s take this to its logical conclusion,” Suzanne continued with mock reasonableness, tapping her chin mildly with the tip of her finger. “Let’s say you’re from a tribe of headhunters and you decide you don’t want to follow Granddad’s footsteps and decapitate your neighbors and feast on their livers…”

“Be serious!” Catherine demanded.

She shrugged helplessly. “I
am
serious, Gran.”

The rising tones were gathering odd stares around the room, Catherine noticed, taking a deep, calming breath. “I was once at a lecture given at Cambridge. ‘Christianity and History,’ I think it was called. I have no idea why I went, except perhaps to keep your grandfather company. And there was this marvelous, articulate don—Butterfield was his name, I believe—standing there very calmly presenting his learned case. For some reason, what he said made a great impression upon me. He said that there were many things you could do with the past. You could sing songs about it, or tell tales. And there were some people, like the Germans, who romanticized it until it became a national disease, and a terminal one at that. But what every person had to do, he insisted, was have an attitude toward it. He said, ‘You’ve got to examine
your
past and make a decision. Because it’s going to affect how you see the world, and your place in it.’”

She felt hot tears sting her eyes as she looked at both her granddaughters. “And I’m telling you both,” she said fiercely, “that when you look at
your
history you’re going to be glad and proud. And if you’ve got any heart or intelligence, you’re going to want to do exactly what Gracia did—pass it on to those who’ll come after. She understood what I just recently learned, that it’s really the only way to protect them.”

“Protect them from what, Gran?” Francesca asked, intrigued.

“From the bottomless pettiness of an unattached and unexamined life! From waking up one morning and finding you’re seventy-odd years old and there’s nothing! Nothing in your life worth having or preserving or passing on! That you might as well not have been here at all,” she whispered, swallowing hard. “My two beautiful, precious grandchildren…. How can I make you understand before it’s too late? You think your life is your own, that you’re free to do anything, think anything you please, unconnected to what came before and what will come after. And you believe that it is a good thing, a wonderful thing, that freedom.

“It isn’t. It’s a terrible illusion, the temptation to completely waste your life. Because if you’re not connected, your life is a fragment: a bit of cloth, a random page torn out of the middle of a book, useless, meaningless. We’re meant to be connected! We’re conduits. The past is supposed to pass through us, to connect us to the future.

“Like trees,” she murmured, her mind suddenly focusing, her hands clasped hard in her lap. “We’re planted in old soil enriched by the lives and deaths of so many who came before us. The nourishment is meant to flow through us, on to the newest branches, so that every branch grows a little taller, and blooms more beautifully still. If you refuse to understand that, if you act as if the world began the day you were born and will end the day you die, then the branches wither, the tree dies….”