De Potter's Grand Tour (26 page)

The week after Victor sailed for France, Aimée tried to distract herself from her worries about him and went alone into New York to a performance of
Tosca
. On December 13, she went with a Miss Coleman to the theater to see the one-legged Sarah Bernhardt, who performed the part of Cleopatra in a chair. “Still the greatest actress living, charm radiates from her,” Aimée reported.

It wasn't until nearly a year later when Aimée could write, “The armistice has been signed and Peace Conference is to meet in mid December. Wilson expects to sail Dec. 3rd. Last Thanksgiving we were so sad over the Italian retreat, and now we are so glad over the victory.… Germany is beaten & humiliated, after four years & four months of terrible fighting & destruction. King Albert has returned to his capital amid wild enthusiasm. Now comes the difficult task of making peace.”

Through the years her garden grew lusher, her house more cluttered. She had a memorial erected for her husband in the cemetery of St. John's Church—a stone surmounted by a Celtic cross, which her friend Mr. Emerson, a member of the local Masonic lodge, had told her was fitting for a man who would have been inducted into the brotherhood if he'd lived.

Her son came home from the war and married his sweetheart, Eleanor. Soon there was a granddaughter to care for—

And then a second granddaughter—

Across the extended family, there were births and deaths and marriages. Gertrude married Dr. Cookingham after he prescribed whiskey for her sore throat. The Cookinghams became known as the town drunks, but Aimée continued to watch over them, and over Victor and Eleanor, who brought out in each other a giddy childishness to such a degree that sometimes they forgot they had their own children to care for. It was their grandmother who made sure the girls' clothes were properly laundered and their shoes were shined for church. She shampooed and brushed their hair and tutored them in French. When they outgrew the schoolhouse down the road, she paid their tuition at boarding school. When she went abroad, she left the Ridge open for Victor and his family and paid the Donnerlys to attend to their needs.

*   *   *

She returned to Europe in 1920, and twice more in 1923—in April and again in October. On the second trip in 1923, she traveled with Mary Rowley, and they stopped in Cannes and stayed for three days in a small hotel on the rue de Fréjus. Since Mary complained about too much exertion, they avoided the hills and spent their time strolling along la Croisette, wandering through the flower markets and shopping for hats and gloves. On her own early one morning, Aimée walked up the avenue de Vallauris, all the way to the gate of Grand Bois.

From the street she could see the tall peaks of the cypresses François had planted in 1904. She noticed that the wisteria vine that trailed the top of the wall had died. She wondered if the house itself had been kept up, but the tall metal gate blocked her view. Though she hadn't planned to, she rang the bell.

The backfire of an auto rounding the curve up the hill startled her, and she huddled against the gate as the driver raced past. When the street was empty again, she strained to hear some sign of life coming from the yard. For no reason, she opened her purse and snapped it shut before catching sight of a gaunt black cat that walked slowly beside the wall opposite, dragging one of its hind legs. She remembered watching a black cat at the Villa Fiorentina when she'd gone with Gertrude to climb the clock tower. The idea that the old cat across the street might have been the same cat she'd seen twenty years ago suddenly made her feel that she'd been all wrong in her estimation of time, and the distant past was only as recent as yesterday. She became nervous at the thought that the servants who'd worked for her might still be at Grand Bois, employed by the current owners. How plain and worn she would look to them, an old woman in her untrimmed straw hat and brown coat.

She was relieved that no one came to the gate and she could slip away without having to explain herself. But just in case the driver who'd passed by earlier reported that he'd seen a stranger idling on the street, she dropped a calling card into the mailbox to prove that she had nothing to hide.

*   *   *

At times she saw men who reminded her of her husband. In 1929, she sailed with Gertrude through the Panama Canal and up to Los Angeles. Walking out from her hotel one morning before Gertrude woke, she saw a man crossing the street who not only looked like Armand but was holding the same kind of mahogany walking stick he liked to use. He was nothing like what Armand would have been by then—his hair was hardly gray, and he walked with the firm step of a younger man. Yet she had to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from calling out to him. Then in 1930, she sailed with her niece Lilly on the RMS
Aurania
to Le Havre and spent the next four months traveling through Italy and Eastern Europe and up to England, and when they were at La Scala in Milan for a performance of
Siegfried
conducted by Wagner's son, she saw an older man in a box across the theater, with glasses identical to Armand's, and the same cut to his beard. He was with strangers, and the group left at intermission and didn't return.

Nineteen thirty was the same year that Aimée, back in America, commissioned the painter Wilfred S. Conroy to paint a portrait of her husband based on a set of photographs. She directed Conroy on all the details, from the suit Armand would be wearing to the book he would be shown holding and the map of the world behind him. For the back of the canvas, Aimée gave Conroy a biographical narrative to write out in pen.

She described Armand as the “grandson of Louis de Potter, one of the 3 regents of Belgium.” She listed her husband's honors, the date of their wedding, and Victor's birthday. She said that Armand had been born in the “Château d'Elseghem” in Belgium. She called him a “World Traveler.”

When Conroy delivered the painting in December, Aimée had it hung prominently above the fireplace in the dining room. She was pleased with the result and unconcerned that the biographical information on the back of the painting didn't match the facts in the obituary she'd written for her husband years ago. She could tolerate inconsistencies in the story, as long as the portrait showed Armand as he would have wanted to be remembered.

*   *   *

She took her last trip abroad in the spring of 1931 with Lilly. On April 21, she recorded that the Judas trees and wisteria were in bloom in Florence, and that she went to the American Church for Sunday service. Afterward, as she was holding out her glass to be filled with wine at the reception in the courtyard, she found herself standing next to the painter Wilfred Conroy. He kissed her hand, and the bristle of his silver beard against her skin left her speechless and confused. Handsome, suave Mr. Conroy, who knew how to please a patron. And she an old woman who, for an instant, was young again.

She sailed from Genoa at sunset on April 25. The next day they stopped in Marseille but had docked so far from the center of the city that Aimée and her niece decided to stay on the ship. “Left Port of M. at 5:30, alas!” she wrote in her diary. They had such a rough passage home that Aimée was forced to stay in bed for two days. It was the first time she'd ever suffered from seasickness, and she lay awake through the night listening to the crash of the surf against the ship's hull. She couldn't stop imagining the horror of being sucked below the surface of the waves. She knew she would never travel abroad again.

Back at the Ridge, she planted hyacinths and rosebushes and carnations. She had a raised porch built behind the kitchen so she could sit outside with Victor and Eleanor and watch the sunset. The granddaughters grew strong in the country air when they came home for the summer, and friends and family could always count on Aimée to provide them with a good meal. All the while, until the Ridge was sold and Aimée's belongings were carted away, Armand de Potter looked out from his portrait at the life he was missing.

*   *   *

She is left with the task of occupying herself in ways that won't strike her as futile when she thinks back on the day. She strives to make herself useful, and when she is satisfied that the needs of others have been met, she attends to herself. She still enjoys the thrill of the opera, the colors of a sunset, the taste of bonbons. She welcomes every opportunity to put on magic-lantern shows for her friends and lead them around the world without ever leaving her parlor. She has never lost her passion for artistic expression. And though she is too old to travel abroad, she is not too old to travel from the first page of a book to the last.

She has always found refuge in reading and has made a point of recording the title of every book she has read over the last three decades, fifty or more a year. These days she reads more avidly than ever. Having finished
Lorna Doone
, she looks around for something new. But it seems she has read all the other books in the house. Her gaze settles on the steamer trunk at the foot of her bed, where, below the piles of legal documents and loose photographs and the rest of the papers she'd brought from France, she has stored her old diaries.

It strikes her as strange that though she has chronicled her life going on fifty years, never before has she had the urge to read what she has written. She removes the stack and opens the earliest volume. Turning the brittle pages, she is surprised to see how her handwriting has changed, and that the entries grow longer with each passing year.

She brings the diary downstairs to the parlor, where the light is better, and begins with the first entry, reading through one year after another. She is fascinated but not dismayed to discover that she has forgotten so much. Is she really the same woman who celebrated Easter 1889 in Athens and walked up to the Acropolis with her husband? Who spent a “most interesting day viewing the cisterns of Carthage” with Victor and Armand in 1896? Who once wrote on her anniversary in 1900, in an apartment on 97 rue de la Pompe in Paris, “In afternoon we went to Exp. and up the Trocadéro tower, then to tea at Élysée Palace Hotel, saw King Leopold come in. In evening at dinner we ordered St. Honoré and champagne. M. Guerrier got up and improvised a poem and there was much gaiety and good humor. Armand gave me a gold watch charm”?

Ever since Gertrude read one of her diaries in the spring of 1906, Aimée has kept them hidden away. But now, so many years later, on a winter's day in Upper Red Hook, she's not afraid to page through her diary in front of the children while they play Chinese checkers on the floor at her feet. They will probably assume that she is reading a novel from her library.

It might as well be a novel. She becomes so absorbed that she goes on reading through most of the night, long after the girls have gone to bed. She nods off for a short time, but her dreams get all mixed up with the experiences she was just reading about, and she can't tell them apart. At times she isn't sure whether she's awake or asleep.

She fetches the next diary from the stack, and for the first time since she wrote the entries, she reads through the period from 1903 to 1905, after they had settled in the Villa du Grand Bois. She reads about the weather, her plans for the garden, her new dresses and hats. She reads about their walks and teas and visits with friends. She reads about the last weeks she spent with her husband.

As she reads, she thinks about how she came to know Armand first by observing him from across a classroom, next from across a tea table, then intimately, as his wife. But she also came to know him in other ways after he was gone, by reading his last letters, then examining his papers and paying the debts he left behind. She continued to discover new things about him when she paged through the travel albums, packed up the curios in the gilt cabinet, and made a full inventory of the De Potter Collection. Which is why she can say to herself that she knows him better than he ever knew himself. She knows who he was beyond the man he pretended to be. She knows his true history and disguises, his desires, his failings. She knows him in his irrepressible potential. And after all these years she is confident that she knows him best for his capacity to love her. He was her darling, her sweetheart:
Never leave me
, she should have told him when she had a chance. Too late. He was gone, with the crash and suck of a wave, depriving her of her main purpose in life for no good reason.

The same man who had drawn from her a promise that would never be broken—to love him for the rest of her life—left behind an emptiness in his place. She has abided by her promise and continued to love him, yet to do that she has had to love an absence and so must feel the stab of loss all over again whenever she thinks of him, year after year, all the while hiding the truth of the manner of his death from the world.

June 11, 1906. Anniversary of that awful day. Damp & warm. Went to town to do errands in a.m. in p.m. worked at study. Insurance Co. refuse to pay without bond. Am almost glad as if there was still hope. Last night was troubled but today am calm as if turned to stone. Showery.