De Potter's Grand Tour (27 page)

June 11, 1907. The
anniversary
. I wanted to pass the day quietly. It is after nine & the first moment to myself. Worked all day getting library in order. Was taking tea in garden when Manques arrived, stayed till 6:30. 2 years of increasing pain & regret. A perfect summer day.

June 11, 1908. In p.m. met Victor at Jersey City. Find him informed, more manly. Sent him to call on Miss C. This day finishes 3 years since my love left me & still my heart is bleeding.

If he had foreseen that thirty years later the wound of his death would be as fresh as ever, no matter if the weather was perfect or Victor was manly, he wouldn't have hurled himself into the sea. But he must have foreseen it. His love for her would have made the consequences all too available to his perception, even amid the chaos of his unreason. Then how could he have chosen the ending that would hurt her more than any other?

On the evening Armand stood at the rail of the
Regele Carol
looking out into the darkness, Aimée was absorbed by a book in her hotel room in Lausanne. She doesn't need her notes to jog her memory of that night. She remembers on her own, without the help of her diary, staying up late to follow the adventures of a man and his time machine, completely ignorant that her husband was readying himself for a fate he had decided was inevitable. At some point, perhaps as she turned a page, he must have started to climb over the rail to the outside lip of the deck. When she paused and looked up from her book to rest her eyes, he might have paused, too.

She pauses now, for an interval long enough to enable her to come up with an idea, as striking and urgent as if it had come to her thirty years ago, when she was reading her book about time travel and her darling was preparing to enact his desperate sacrifice on behalf of his wife and son. The idea is born out of her abrupt certainty that the scenario as she'd been imagining it for thirty years made no sense. Once, her drunken niece Gertrude had said just that. Aimée is ready to admit at long last that her niece had been right, and to imagine the very possibility she'd refused to credit.

Her husband was too practiced in self-invention not to have considered the obvious alternative to the fatal action he'd been planning when he boarded the
Regele Carol
in Constantinople. He would have ruled it out as a coward's choice and an untenable betrayal. He was a gentleman. Gentlemen do not run away from their loved ones and hide in a foreign land. But he also had an insatiable desire to keep seeing more of the world.
To travel is to live
—and he wasn't finished traveling. She knew that about him, and he knew that she knew it. So there must have been a moment when he thought of his wife and in that instant, with his future hanging in the balance, was able to predict what she would have said to him if she'd been given the chance.

It has taken her this long to understand what her husband needed to hear, not just the obvious protest—
Stop, do not throw yourself into the sea!—
but the permission that would offer him the only form of release he would have been able to accept:
My love, there is another way to disappear
.… As he conjured her in the midst of his misguided effort to protect her, she conjures him now to communicate to him that she would be willing to tolerate a magnificent deception devised for the sake of a new beginning, opening up the possibility, however faint, of his return.

She pictures him perched on the rail of the
Regele Carol
, his head cocked as he listens, her voice reaching him with such magical clarity that she might as well be standing beside him, speaking across the warp of space and time, insisting,
Life is the more daring option,
giving him leave to start over again. After having spent decades studying the rules of courtesy as they'd been formulated in civilizations around the world, he will have to agree that a gentleman is never less than daring.

*   *   *

When she finally looks up from the diary, the room is full of sunlight. She can't find her watch and isn't sure of the time, but she estimates from the shadows crisscrossing the floor and the misty clouds of melted frost on the windows that it is already midmorning.

Down in the yard, the Donnerlys' dog, General Grant, is barking with the steady rhythm of a church bell, as though it is his job to wake her. She is awake, thank you, and what a splendid day it is, Christmas Day in Upper Red Hook! She can smell the grease from the bacon and eggs Mrs. Donnerly fried earlier for the children, who probably were awake before dawn. They will be mad with impatience, waiting for their grandmother to appear so they can open their presents.

But first there is church to attend, then telephone calls to make. She remembers that her brother Tom is coming over—with Victor and Eleanor and the children, that will make six at the table. Mrs. Donnerly will serve dinner before she leaves to have dinner with her own family. Aimée will wash the dishes herself after Tom leaves. She'll take a long bath before she opens her diary, the clothbound one she bought in Paris after discovering that the leather diaries she'd used for years were no longer being manufactured.

She'll write, “Sunny. I went to church with Eleanor & Victor as Mr. Huntington stopped for us. On return opened parlor door & lit up glittering Christmas tree. Lots of presents for children & several for self. My family & Tom were only ones at dinner of goose and mince pie. Children very excited.”

Then, because she suspects she won't have time to fill in the entries for the remainder of the month, she will decide that the volume is complete, and she'll add it to the stack of the earlier diaries. Since no secret is worth the effort of keeping it if it isn't eventually revealed, she won't return the diaries to the bottom of the trunk, hiding them beneath the papers. She'll nestle them on top, where they are sure to be found if anyone ever bothers to look.

 

PART EIGHT

 

Somewhere in Greece

T
HE REPRIEVE
, he'd thought at the time, was entirely unexpected. He was committed to his fate. Yet it seems to him now that he'd been prepared for his plan to take a different turn, as if he'd somehow foreseen from the start that he would be granted permission to save himself. He can't even summon a clear memory of the fear he must have felt as he straddled the rail of the
Regele Carol
. He doesn't remember what the steward said to him, or what he said in reply. All he remembers is that his mind filled completely with the thought of the one who knows him best in the world. For her sake, he was compelled to climb down from the rail.

Newly beardless, in a black jacket with his fedora pulled low, he melts away from the gangway in the direction of the chain-link fence that separates the customs area from the wharf, aiming for an opening he'd taken note of when he'd traveled through Piraeus earlier in the week. He tucks his walking stick under his arm and keeps his eyes averted, pretending to be fascinated by something on the ground ahead of him. As officials call out orders in Greek, causing packs of baffled tourists to scramble toward the right, then left, then right again, he makes his way along the fence line until he comes to the opening. With a glance behind him to confirm that he hasn't been followed, he slips through and continues hurriedly down the wharf away from the ship.

After having spent twenty-five years corralling tourists into the appropriate lines in ports around the world, earning favors with baksheesh and smooth talk, he is amazed at how easy it is to avoid the customs officials, as easy as it is to walk from one life into another. All he has to do is continue along the unmarked gravel path into the hills. No one tries to stop him. Two boys unknotting a fishing net don't even look up when his shadow passes over them.

He walks through the barren fields and abandoned olive groves on the outskirts of the port, traverses a deserted churchyard, and continues for a mile along the path above the sea before circling back in the direction of Piraeus. He walks for hours. In midafternoon he finally reaches the Central Station, where, after helping himself to a long drink from the public fountain, he boards the third-class compartment of the electric train leaving for Athens. He sits as far to the rear as possible to be sure that the conductor won't reach his seat, if he bothers to collect any tickets at all.

He disembarks as soon as the doors open, ahead of the other passengers, emerging like a puff from a smokestack onto the platform and a moment later reappearing across the busy street. He walks diagonally across the intersection and heads quickly down the avenue, as if to an appointment.

Farther along he passes a line of kiosks, and the smell of roasted nuts reminds him that he is hungry. This is one of the many problems he did not anticipate. Unused to traveling in such haphazard a fashion, he acts on impulse, reaching discreetly for a peach as he passes the bins of a grocer.

To think that he used to go to great lengths to warn others against the clever tricks of petty thieves and pickpockets, and now he has joined their ranks. He can't believe he has come to this. He feels as if he were stuck in the romance he'd penned long ago, the one about the nobleman who flees from disgrace, dons a disguise, and lives out his years in exile. He would have expected the shame of it all to stun him into inertia. But there is one crucial difference: unlike his fictional counterpart, he intends to go home one day. He hasn't abandoned Grand Bois forever; rather, he has taken the necessary action to preserve it for his wife and son, and his intention to join them there propels him forward. With every step he takes and every piece of fruit he steals, he is demonstrating a tenacity that would please his dear wife. He will be crafty and unscrupulous, never wandering from the route, however circuitous, that will lead back to the avenue de Vallauris in Cannes.

He is fortunate that no one sees him slip the peach into his hand. No one calls
Stop, thief!
as he walks briskly up the boulevard. Unnoticed, he stops to eat his peach in a little park, in the shade of a monument to the Sacred Band. He watches the people wandering by—clerks coming from their offices at the National Bank, women wearing black mourning cloaks despite the heat, workmen pushing carts of gravel, and a pair of peddlers, who accost a party of British tourists, shaking ostrich feathers and strings of bells in their faces, offering them crucifixes and miniature clay models of the Parthenon.

He looks on as the tourists exchange money for trinkets, and the trades remind him of the one item he has kept from his previous life that he wishes to be rid of—the small bronze figure in the shape of Bacchus. He takes the piece from his pocket and approaches the peddlers. Only when both men turn their heads in his direction and he looks straight into their watery, red-rimmed eyes does he realize that he doesn't register in their assessment. To them, he is not even another careless tourist they will use to their advantage. He is invisible. All they see is the treasure in his hand.

He trades the bronze for a silver spoon with a picture of the Acropolis on the finial—a crude souvenir, worth a fraction of the bronze, but he isn't in the mood to bargain. At least it's a start, he thinks to himself as he walks away.

He continues down to the rue Constantin. In the crowd outside the Peloponnesus railway station, he is singled out by a German couple asking for directions to their hotel. After showing them the route on their map, he sells them the souvenir spoon. He uses the money to buy himself a ticket, then boards the first train that is about to depart. He finds a seat in an otherwise empty compartment and closes his eyes.

Sometime later he is jostled when the train grinds to a halt. He tucks the burlap curtain around the hook and sees that they have stopped between stations and a solitary soldier is standing beside the tracks. Worrying that the soldier has been stationed there to search for the passenger who disappeared from the
Regele Carol
, he closes the curtains and waits. The compartment is airless, stifling. A few minutes later he hears the murmuring of men in the corridor and the squeaking of their boots as they pass along to the next car.

He is relieved when the train begins moving again. He pulls the curtain aside and peeks out at the soldier, who stands in the same place as before and is studying a document he has been handed.

The train picks up speed. As they pass between piles of rubble and rocky outcrops, he wonders whether he should get off at the next station. He hasn't decided on any particular destination. He hasn't decided on much of anything yet. He is as unformed and unknown as when he first arrived in America, full of potential that mustn't be squandered, given its terrible cost.

Most of all, he yearns to go home. He will wait for as long as it takes before he can stroll along the streets of Cannes unrecognized, but he
will go home
one day, he is determined. He will let himself in through the gate at night and slip unseen into Grand Bois, surprising his wife. They will fall in love all over again.