The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (22 page)

She leaned back in her chair in utter exhaustion, closing her eyes.

“Do you want to go lie down?” Suzanne suggested gently, wanting nothing more than to climb back into bed herself. She, too, felt suddenly exhausted. Nothing had been said that she hadn’t heard a million times, yet, nevertheless, she felt a particular anguish. It was the fright in her grandmother’s tired, almost desperate voice; the wretchedness in her fiercely loving eyes.

I love her, she understood with sudden clarity.

And she really is dying.

Catherine opened her eyes and leaned forward with a brave, but weary, smile. “I don’t think bed rest is actually necessary right at the moment. But an aspirin would be helpful.” She reached into her purse and took out a vial of pills, popping several in her mouth and swallowing them with ice water. The thunderous crashing at the nape of her neck subsided into the lap of water at the river’s edge.

Francesca cocked her head and rested it nervously on her fingertips. Those were no aspirins. Anyone could see that. And Gran suddenly looked terrible, the pink blusher almost comical on her floury-white cheeks.

“I’m sorry I got so upset. I suppose you’re right, Suzanne. This place is rather an extravagance. But I’d wanted this to be such a memorable occasion. A celebration.” Catherine smiled ruefully, looking around the warm, glowing room. “And it had to be here. You see, this is such a special place for me. The place I fell in love.”

The girls looked at her, startled.

“There,” Catherine said, pointing across the room at a table near the windows. “Right there. That’s where he was sitting the first time I saw him.”

“Saw who?” Suzanne asked.

“Why, Carl, of course.”

She didn’t say “Grandpa Carl,” they thought, surprised and oddly disturbed.

But it wasn’t their elderly, beloved grandfather Catherine was seeing as she stared across the room. It was a young RAF pilot, impossibly handsome, full of dash and charm, whose slanting black eyes peered at her with mesmerizing intensity from his lean, dark face. He smiled at her, and waved his jaunty wave. Her face lit up and she almost waved back when the vision suddenly vanished. She felt her skin rise in small, cold bumps.

“Were you here alone?” Francesca asked, trying to picture it.

“No.” Catherine passed her palm over her welling eyes, baptizing the vision now lost to her. “I was here with my fiancé. It was three weeks before our wedding.”

There was a stunned silence.

“Do you mean to say you broke your engagement three weeks before your wedding and ran off with Grandpa instead?” Suzanne tittered with glee.

“There is no reason to laugh!” Catherine frowned. “It was wildly romantic and—I would have to add if it all hadn’t worked out so well—impetuous and foolish. I was sitting here with Alex Serouya…”

“What?” Francesca gasped.

“But you just said that you were here with your fiancé. What does Alex Serouya have to do…?” Suzanne interjected. “Wait a second! You can’t mean that you and Alex Serouya—”

“YOU WERE ONCE ENGAGED TO ALEX SEROUYA?!” Francesca exclaimed, choking on her wine.

“Quiet, Francesca, manners, please!” Suzanne mocked, doing a perfect imitation of Francesca the Level-Headed.

“Sorry.” Francesca gasped, trying to catch her breath.

“Yes. Alex Serouya and I were once engaged to be married.” Catherine paused, the light in her eyes deepening. “We’d known each other since we were children. Our families were very close. It was always assumed that he and I would marry. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t love him. He was—is—a very intelligent, warm, kind-hearted person. And he loved me.” She looked down into her lap, where her fingers were twisting a napkin into knots. “As I was saying, we were sitting here, Alex and I, discussing our wedding plans, our new home. I had his beautiful engagement ring on my finger—a family heirloom over two hundred years old, little rubies surrounding a perfect three-carat diamond—when I looked up and saw Carl.

“He was sitting with my cousin Blanche on the terrace. It was summer. He was in uniform, the handsomest man I’d ever seen in my life,” she said dreamily, winding a lock of gray hair idly around her finger.

The contrast between that gesture, so young and girlishly sweet, and the drooping, creased flesh of those aged arms made Suzanne want to weep. And she would have, were not the lecture on the joys of tradition and adherence to the hallowed past now coupled with her grandmother’s sudden admission of flagrant disregard for both not so deliciously amusing.

Way to go, Gran! Seize the day! Suzanne thought, exhilarated. But could it be seized? Any more than you could seize a wave and prevent it from turning into mist? she wondered, studying her grandmother’s sagging chin.

This, she realized, not death, was her deepest fear. This slow, irreversible decay where your young, vital self simply vanished irretrievably into tired layers of aging flesh….

“I just can’t picture you doing it, Gran. Dumping a fiancé and running off with a stranger right before your wedding!” Francesca declared, unsettled.

“I…uh…suppose one might put it that way,” Catherine admitted, squirming. And then, strangely, she giggled, her eyes sparkling. “I know it sounds shocking. How can I make you understand?”

She closed her eyes.

There was music, wasn’t there? Violins? No! That’s old movies. A pianist in a white evening gown. Chopin. An étude? And Alex’s warm hand cupped over hers. And then her eyes suddenly looking up as the music filled the room like sparkling Champagne.

“It was the middle of the war. Pilots were dying every day, every day. And houses all around us were getting bombed, everyone dead in a minute. And he looked so carefree, laughing, a cigarette dangling from his lips.” And suddenly, with no warning, the urge to touch him, to press her fingers into the thick dark hair, to hear his heart pump the good, strong lifeblood through undamaged veins, and the sudden knowledge of her own young blood throbbing and warm and fragile beyond imagining. The idea that she, too, at that moment, was alive and full of passion, and that the next bomb could end that in the blink of an eye…And then, as if he’d read her mind, Carl walking across the room until he was standing in front of her.

“He came over with my cousin….”

Polite words, barely heard, and then his sitting opposite, the warmth of his body somehow already part of hers, and knowing, just knowing that this connection was going to be forever.

For an instant, Suzanne and Francesca had the startling sensation that they were sitting with someone else, someone younger whose body radiated feminine power. The blue eyes, clear and tender, flashed with excitement in the center of her lovely heart-shaped face. For the first time in their lives they sensed the woman in her, the peer, someone a strange man could fall desperately in love with by simply glimpsing her across a crowded room.

Perhaps then, Suzanne thought, our youth always breathed still within us, contained, not lost? Conduits, she thought, startled. “How did Alex take it?”

“He was devastated,” Catherine admitted, gripping a spoon with white-knuckled fingers. “But there was nothing I could do. How can I make you understand?” She struggled, overwhelmed by the task. “It was…it’s like…” Her features suddenly relaxed, serene. “It was like hearing something you had always known was true, something that matched exactly all the information stored in your heart. There was no question of disagreeing, of finding reasons to resist.”

“But Gran, what about the ‘family’?” Suzanne mocked, her face full of theatrical opprobrium and wicked humor.

Catherine flinched. “It was very painful for them, in the beginning.”

Harsh and demolishing, the pain. But like childbirth, so necessary and unavoidable that in advance one had to forgive and plan to forget. “But everyone got over it. Carl was Jewish, also from a good Sephardic family.”

“Oh, now I get it! How convenient for you! I suppose if he hadn’t been, the family would have had a little talk with him and he would have simply vanished! Excuse me. I’m going to powder my nose,” Suzanne said with a bitterness she herself found startling. She grabbed her purse and walked out of the room.

Catherine watched her, devastated.

Would she have given him up if he had been from the wrong family, the wrong religion? Or run off with him anyway, abandoning her family forever? There was no point in pretending she knew the answer. Either act required a kind of courage that had never been asked of her.

She faced the humbling thought that it was neither courage nor virtue that allowed her to now sit before her granddaughters championing all the traditional values. It was simply luck. Or the guiding, providential hand of some
memuneh
.

That old word! Resurrected from memories long past of her own grandmother’s artful tales. A word connected to summer evenings and rocking chairs, her head resting on her loving
abuela
’s broad, soft lap. Everything had a
memuneh
. Every blade of grass, every tree, every human. A guardian angel who helped arrange your future by guiding you through the present; celestial lawyers who pleaded before the heavenly court when you erred, convincing G-d to give you another chance before assigning your sins their just desserts.

She looked down at her own white, blue-veined hands. Had she the right or the skill to play her granddaughters’
memuneh?

Francesca—who had not been able to get beyond the news of her grandmother’s wild, passionate fling—sat there thinking: Did that mean that the unbearable cliché sometimes actually happened? Eyes meeting across a crowded room. Instant love that lasts forever? And how ironic, the memoirs, too…!”

It seemed unlikely. After all, what could you really know about such a person? Appearances were so untrustworthy. The moment you got into bed with a man, it wasn’t his attractive face or the strong shape of his body that was important, but simply the tenderness of being touched like a cherished thing.

Case in point: tall, handsome Peter. He had never made her feel cherished, only used. He hadn’t loved her. That was the short of it.
Her
story as opposed to her grandmother’s, who had had the luxury of sitting with an adoring, diamond-bestowing fiancé while a handsome stranger fell madly in love with her. Who had had two men who loved her, simultaneously.

I still haven’t found one, she mourned, smiling at the absurdity of her jealousy. Well, if such a thing were going to happen, this certainly was the right setting for it, she admitted, looking across the elegant, crowded spaces of the magical room. She blanched.

“It’s him!” she exclaimed.

“Who?” Catherine looked up, not quite sure of her own eyes anymore.

“The guy with the beard. The manuscript hunter.”

“Marius?”

Francesca nodded. He was suddenly looking across at her, smiling—a wide, beautiful smile of great vitality that seemed to blaze across the floor.

“He’s getting up and he’s bringing someone with him!”

He took long strides, deliberate yet leisurely, as if every step were bringing him pleasure.

“Mrs. da Costa, Francesca.” He bowed, looking at both women meaningfully.

He remembers my name, Francesca thought, embarrassed by how much it meant to her. He looked remarkably different in a suit, even though his shirt was still open-collared and he wore no tie. Like a diplomat from a small, informal country, Francesca thought. Distinguished and somehow more mysterious than ever.

“May I introduce my friend, Dr. Gabriel Fonseca.”

Catherine looked up at the young man, examining the ponytail, the earring, and the embroidered Spanish vest. She was not fooled by the lapses in his appearance. He was a British aristocrat, scion of a distinguished Church of England family, one of those champion Cambridge rowers who slide along the Cam with the graceful, steady strength of those born to it. She was sure of it. She bit her lower lip furiously.

“I’m afraid I can’t ask you to join us. We’ll be leaving shortly,” Catherine said coolly.

Marius seemed surprised by the rebuff, but his companion looked positively relieved.

“It is just as well, as we would be tragically unable to accept, having a train to catch and an appointment to keep,” Gabriel Fonseca said, nudging Marius.

“And where is Miss Suzanne?” Marius asked with determined politeness, ignoring them both, his eyes restlessly searching the room.

Francesca fingered her rib cage, rubbing away what felt like a physical stab of pain. Suzanne, always Suzanne.

“Oh, powdering her nose, I think she said,” Catherine replied, her eyes darting around the room with panic, praying they’d leave before she returned. There was just too much mesmerizing male power in this blond Adonis to introduce him to her impetuous granddaughter. “And there’s no telling how long that might take. Please, don’t let us keep you,” she said with a firmness bordering on outright rudeness.

Francesca stared, bewildered.

“Then perhaps another time. How long do you plan to remain in London?” Marius inquired stubbornly.

“Only another week, I’m afraid.”

“What! I had no idea you were leaving so soon! I have so much still to tell you. Gabriel has the beginnings of one of the finest rare-manuscript collections in London. His father—the Baron of Avernas de Gras—has one of the most valuable eighteenth-century collections of French first editions in England. I’m sure both of them could be quite helpful to you.”

Avernas de Gras, Catherine mused, as if trying to remember something. She studied the blond stranger more carefully. “And do you share Marius’s passion for the past?”

“The first time I went manuscript hunting with Marius, we came across a leather-bound book in the attic of a condemned old building in a Polish village. Something about the smell of the books—so old and full of the scent of so many different hands—hooked me. I can’t even explain why. As for my collection, I’m afraid I owe that to the prudence of forebears who left me with the means to indulge quite a few private passions.”

“And his good fortune has been my good fortune. He’s a delightful partner, and he often pays the bills,” Marius laughed. “If we had time, we could tell you all about our trip to the jungles of Brazil. But unfortunately…” he glanced at his watch and tapped it, annoyed at the information it gave him. “Can I talk you into extending your stay? I promise it will be worth it. Here, take my card. Call me whenever you can and I’ll arrange something. Please do!” he pleaded. “Uncle is wonderful, but his methods and advice are a bit too…conservative. Let me help you to find the rest of it. If it’s anything like what I’ve already read…”