“Where are you going?”
“Miami Beach. Call me at the Flamingo if you hear anything. There’s your breakfast tray. I suggest you start by eating something, if you still want to call yourself a mother.”
He slams the door behind him, and I stare for some time at the white-painted wood that replaces him. At the shattered lamp next to the wall. At the silver dome on the tray on the bedside table, keeping my breakfast warm.
Maybe it’s the scorn in Samuel’s eyes. The doctor’s eyes. Nobody’s ever looked at me that way before. Pity’s bad enough—I’ve had plenty of that, especially during Father’s trial. Oh, the pity in everyone’s eyes, as they gazed upon Sophie and me, the motherless girls, practically orphans, sitting quietly in that courtroom! But scorn. That’s another perspective altogether. And the tone of his voice! If you still want to call yourself a mother.
Nothing quite so vicious as that, is there? If you still want to call yourself a mother. You can bear anything but that. Anything but the accusation that you, Virginia Fitzwilliam, have failed your own daughter.
When you have lived the past three years in devotion to her. When your daughter is the temple at which you have worshipped, the single clean object left in your universe, the magnet, the gravitational force, the molecular glue that holds you together. Keeps your component pieces from cracking apart and falling in noisy shards to the floor, the way your own mother fell to pieces.
Like any really effective blow, the denunciation takes a moment or two to work its intended effect. First, there’s the instinctive No, but—! The angry Stupid bastard! The resistant He doesn’t understand. And then the truth, you know, the truth of it works its inevitable way into my gut. Fills my eyes. Sticks and chokes in my throat.
My Evelyn, my daughter. I’ve failed her.
Aspirin, indeed. I knew all along, and still I went on fooling myself, taking any little excuse to grant myself relief. Now look at me. Look at me! I deserve Samuel’s scorn. I have fallen apart. I have deconstituted my mind and my body into a thousand broken pieces. I am not Virginia anymore. I’m not even a human being anymore, not even a mother, and it’s all my own doing. My undoing is my own doing. I am not strong enough. The same method by which I fell in love with Simon: I thought I was stronger than I really was.
And it turns out, I was only untried.
Like you, Mama? Were you only untried? And then the rains came, the darkness came, and you succumbed to them. You gave in. You fell apart and reassembled your brokenness into somebody else. And I judged you for it, I found you wanting, and it turns out we’re the same. I’m no better than you were.
All of which reflection, you might say, represents nothing more than a giant salt bath of self-pity in which to wallow without purpose. Oh, I know about all this modern psychology. How helpless we are in the aftermath of our parents’ crimes, how imprisoned by the iron facts of our childhoods.
But as I lie there, wallowing, face immersed in a white down pillow of my husband’s choosing, I start to get a little angry, too. At what, exactly, I’m not sure. I’ll leave that to all those fashionable new head doctors to decide. Just a sort of inchoate fury, or frustration, or some damned thing. I don’t want to be this person, lying on this bed. I don’t want to be my mother, just because of some universal law of human transmutation, some inevitable psychological destiny.
I want to be Virginia. Whoever she is.
And I’m sick, you know, I’m feeling pretty damned lousy, as a purely physical diagnosis, and I think, well, I’ve been sick before, haven’t I, and I’ve pushed myself out of bed. Because I had to. Because there was no other choice. One leg after another. One limb at a time. One foot sliding down the mattress to the rug, like that, and then you brace your good left palm against the pillow and lift yourself upright, and the other foot slides down to the nice soft rug, right next to the first foot. And there you are. Standing. Miserable, but standing. On your own two feet.
A somnolent late-morning atmosphere sits on the walls and the furniture, the few objects in Simon’s parlor. The clock on the wall says half past ten. In the wake of the thunderstorms last night, the sky has cleared to a pungent, unclouded blue, and the Indian River glitters restlessly outside the windows. I grip the back of a nearby sofa and consider the emptiness of the apartment, the lazy lonesomeness. No one to bother us up here. Door bolted, our whereabouts unknown. Except to Samuel, and he’s miles out of town by now, on his way to Miami Beach, to save his sister. Wouldn’t that be lovely, to have a brother desperate to save me? A man I could trust.
But I don’t pause to savor the beauty and the pity of it all. I make my way straight to Evelyn’s room, as quickly as my unsteady legs and uncertain balance will carry me. That’s why I’m upright to begin with, isn’t it? What got me out of bed: that sensation of danger streaming through my innards, like the unstoppable river that passes outside, carrying goods to market.
Goods. Goods, indeed.
Evelyn’s bedroom lies down a hallway on the other side of the parlor. One of three chambers, in fact, all of which are decorated in warm pastels, in soft furniture, as if waiting for children to populate them. A month ago, the sight of those expectant rooms touched me with an uncertain tenderness, almost like hope. Now I regard Evelyn’s white-painted door—left a few inches ajar—in panic. The nausea strikes again, overturning my guts, so that I lurch against the wall, holding myself up with one palm, and I make a drunken, disgraceful path down those remaining yards, until my hand pushes forth from the wall to land on Evelyn’s doorknob. The hinges give way silently, sending me staggering inside.
The room is cool, shielded from the sun by a set of thick curtains, and for an instant I can’t see the bed, or my daughter inside, and my heart stops beating. I blink and blink, trying to penetrate the shadows, and as my pupils dilate, taking their time, I stretch out my impatient hands and step forward.
The bed. There it is, framed in white iron, clean and hygienic. The mattress, the soft quilt.
A small, oblong lump: Evelyn’s foot.
The breath rushes from my chest. I slump forward, supporting myself on my hands, one bare and the other clubbed in bandages, and inch my way upward to the pillows until I find her shoulder, the smooth fiber of her hair. Her ribs, moving steadily in the rhythm of a deep and untroubled sleep. Her cool, healthy cheek.
I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that kind of relief. I suppose everyone has—everyone who’s ever loved another person, I mean. Because sooner or later we all experience that extraordinary, irrational terror, all the more paralyzing because you don’t quite know why you’re so afraid. Someone’s late coming home on a stormy night, or a child goes to bed with a fever, or a siren wails delicately in the distance, and you’re certain, you’re certain, you’re certain something must be terribly wrong, this is it, your number’s come up. The bell tolls for thee.
And then comes the deliverance. The door opens, the child wakes up smiling, the siren passes. And the relief, my God, the relief almost kills you, it’s so mighty. You double over, you’re faint. You press your hand to your stomach and thank God, thank God. You’re safe. For this moment, your world remains intact. Your daughter’s alive and well, sleeping under your fingers, inside the sanctum of her bed. You tuck a lock of hair behind her darling ear and listen to the whisper of her breath. You smell the nectar of her skin. You say, maybe out loud or maybe just in your head, I’ll never let this happen again. I’ll never let anything harm you again.
And I mean it, you know. I tuck the blanket an inch or two higher on Evelyn’s chest, and I kiss her forehead and her white, exposed cheek, and I drag my bag of bones into the hallway and the telephone in its cubby in the wall.
I instruct the hotel operator to connect me to the front desk, and I ask the front desk if I have received any letters.
Yes, madam. Shall we send them up?
Yes, please.
You might think, after a month’s absence, I’d have any number of letters waiting for me in my pigeonhole in the
hotel’s front desk. In fact, I’ve taken the strictest care to make sure this isn’t the case. I didn’t want any curious being to know where to find me. Not even Sophie. To my lawyers in New York I gave the address of the Phantom Shipping Company, care of. So when the red-suited Phantom Hotel bellboy arrives at the apartment door, trying not to widen his eyes at the derelict sight of me, he’s carrying only two white envelopes. One bears no identification, other than my name and that of the Phantom Hotel. The other one is from the National City Bank of New York.
I sit down at the desk in the corner of the drawing room and open the anonymous note first. I’m not surprised to learn that Agent Marshall—in his brief, efficient manner—inquires after my health and well-being, and any information I may have discovered in the weeks since my injury in Cocoa Beach. How kind. I fold the note back into its original creases and then rip it into small, fastidious pieces, an action that requires just about all the strength I’ve got left in my fingers.
The second letter, on the other hand. That’s the one I really want, and yet I find, as I gather the scraps of Agent Marshall into a neat pile, which I then brush over the side of the table into the small metal wastebasket I’ve fetched from the corner for that purpose, that I’m delaying the moment of discovery. That I really don’t want to know the details. That I’m afraid. Of course. I’m always afraid, aren’t I? Fear and dread, my old companions. I set down the wastebasket and pick up the remaining letter. My name is typed on the outside of the envelope, rather than written, and it’s a solid new type, black and unscarred, punched in by ten expert fingers that make no mistakes. The kind of professionalism you expect from your New York City bank.
Except it isn’t my bank, exactly. I’ve never had an account at the National City Bank. That was, more or less, the substance of the inquiry I wrote and mailed to their offices a month ago, in between my visit to the First National Bank of Miami and my excursion to the Miami Beach casino, along with a cheerful postcard sent to my sister. This, I presume, is the bank’s answer. A vital piece of the puzzle, you might say, and yet I think I already know what it says. The gist of what’s happening here. And I find, as I slide a slim silver letter opener along the edge of the envelope and pull the contents free—two pieces of ecru paper, folded together into precise crosswise thirds—that I’m right. Of course I’m right. Didn’t I expect all this from the beginning?
Dear Mrs. Fitzwilliam,
In response to your inquiry of the 21st of June, I regret to inform you that, since the account holder is now deceased, the Bank cannot divulge any such information without proof of your identity as his legal agent. We can, however, confirm the details to which you referred in your inquiry: namely, that the account holder instructed payment in the amount of $100,000.00 to be made on the account of Mr. Fitzwilliam at the First National Bank of Miami. Any further details must be applied for in person . . .
The usual compliments follow, but I don’t read them. Instead I fold the letter and slide it back into its envelope, and I tread carefully across the enormous drawing room to the master bedroom, where my valise lies under the bed. My valise of important papers. I open the valise and find my father’s cracked leather portfolio, the one marked fitzwilliam, and I slide the bank correspondence inside, next to the thirty-odd envelopes postmarked from Florida, with nothing inside them.
My hand pauses. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the muddle in my head, the uncertainty that roils between the folds of my brain. Outside the window, a steamship lets out a distant, prolonged belch. A Phantom steamship, possibly? I pull the stack of empty envelopes from the portfolio and untie the string that holds them together.
Again, that handwriting. Strikes me in the stomach, where I need it least. I touch my finger to the word Virginia and think how I once used to welcome the sight of this word, in that particular pen stroke, how it used to send a current of joy into that selfsame stomach that troubles me now. As the tip of my finger glides across the ink, wondering what kind of letter ought to have been contained inside, and what information it should have contained, so does my eye wander across the paper, until it lands on the round, black, innocuous postmark in the corner. Just to be sure. Just to make certain I wasn’t dreaming, or hallucinating, or merely mistaken.
And while I’m sitting there, reabsorbing the meaning of this information, a sound drifts through the open bedroom door and interrupts the rhythm of my thoughts, such as they are.
The distant, unmistakable voice of a metal doorknob, when it’s rattled by a hand without a key.
The funny thing about courage—at least in my observation—is that it tends to rise and fall in proportion to what’s at stake. I now shudder to remember the way I drove that damned Hunka Tin through mud and shellfire, without regard for my own safety. But why wouldn’t I? I had only my own paltry life to lose, and who gave a damn if I lost that? Certainly not me. Simon, maybe, but not for the reasons I then imagined.
Now it’s different. Now I have Evelyn, and while I still don’t particularly value my life for its own sake, I value it for hers. I know what it’s like to grow up without a mother.
And, of course, there’s Evelyn’s life. My daughter’s precious, irreplaceable life. I could die this moment, and Evelyn would grieve, but she would go on. Like Sophie, who was three when Father killed Mama, she wouldn’t even really remember me. Though the loss of me would open a giant chasm in her life, she would survive it. But if my daughter died, and I lived? I couldn’t survive that. I could not survive the loss of Evelyn.
As I stand in the doorway of the bedroom and listen to the rattling knob—carrying across the drawing room, from the direction of the entry hall—the sound changes entirely, replaced by jolts, as if someone’s given up on the lock and has now resorted to brute force. I realize I have two choices, if I want to live, and I want Evelyn to live. I can hide us both, or I can fight. Which is really no choice at all, because where could we possibly hide where a determined intruder won’t find us? We’re on the eighth floor of a hotel in a strange, hostile town. There’s nowhere to go.
So it’s not really courage that propels me from the bedroom’s threshold, closing the door behind me, but fear. I have no choice. There’s nowhere else to go. Nothing else to be done.
Outside, in the drawing room, the air’s gone quiet. Maybe he’s given up; maybe he’s left. Maybe it’s just Samuel, returning for a forgotten object. My nightgown is damp, sticking to my skin, and my vision swims. I walk across the room and gaze about in search of a weapon of some kind, a thing that could be used as a weapon, anything. A painting? Too heavy, even if I could operate both hands.
The knob rattles again, more softly. As if there’s a key this time, a key trying to loosen a stiff lock. Someone who lives here, or used to live here.
Knives. The kitchen. But the kitchen’s all the way on the other side of the apartment. I cast about, frantic now, and with my uninjured left hand I snatch a ceramic vase from a sleek modern sideboard and secure it with my right thumb. I turn toward the entry foyer just as the door cracks open and a hand wraps around the edge.
There’s nowhere to hide. I turn and flatten myself against the wall, just around the corner from the foyer, and listen to the creak of the door. The careful footsteps on the rug. The clink of something landing in the china bowl on the entry table.
Footsteps again.
I lift the vase above my head, thinking that at least I have surprise on my side, at least I’ll go down fighting, by God, a vengeful pale Valkyrie in a sweat-soaked nightgown, hair matted, head swimming, limbs as weak as a kitten’s.
A foot appears—not the foot I was expecting—but my reflexes are so primed that I whirl anyway, hurling the vase before I can stop myself.
Clara screams, ducks, and collapses onto the floor, while the vase shatters against the door. In her distant bedroom, Evelyn wakes up and starts to cry.
Chapter 24
Cornwall, England, April 1919
The gale died away during the night, a
nd the sky was now a chilly, uncertain blue, pockmarked by dark-bottomed clouds. Simon put the top down on the Wolseley and glanced anxiously upward as we plowed down the muddy road along the coast, toward Plymouth.
She had disappeared a few weeks after Christmas, he had told me the night before. He had gotten the telephone call soon after arriving in London, in the days following his demobilization. No sign of her anywhere, her suitcase untouched, her wardrobe full. I had asked if there was a note, and he said there wasn’t. Just the customary pile of clothes next to the sea. Her father had died of the ’flu during the autumn, and though she had escaped the illness herself, she went into a decline. Shut herself in her room, wouldn’t talk to anyone. Everyone said it was her broken heart, of course. She had drowned herself out of heartbreak.
I stared out the side of the motorcar, bundled against the draft in my thick service overcoat and Simon’s woolen muffler, which he had wound around my neck with his own hands as we stood in the courtyard of the inn. The distant sea appeared and disappeared in little glimpses between the cliffs. “They’re going to hate me, aren’t they?” I said wearily. “Your family and friends.”
“They’re going to hate us both. I’m the faithless husband, remember? The blackguard who slept with London whores on leave, while the sainted Lydia tended to our child in the country.”
“And you won’t tell them the truth.”
“I can’t. For one thing, they wouldn’t believe me.”
“No, of course.”
“Anyway, there’s my brother. Still refuses to own the child.”
“But that’s disgraceful!”
“It’s a bloody mess, is what it is.” He glanced at me, and back at the road ahead, which was in terrible condition: unpaved, slick with mud from yesterday’s rain, rimmed by treacherous hedgerows. “In fact, I was rather thinking, as soon as we’ve done our duty here . . .”