Only the Beautiful, page 20
“Why aren’t you flying to California, too?” one of my students asked at my farewell party. I didn’t want to confess to the eleven-year-old boy, a lover of all things aeronautical even though he’s never been on an airplane, that I was already dreading the flight to New York. I wasn’t going to subject myself to that fear twice.
“I like the train,” I told him. “I haven’t seen America in a long time. It will be nice to see it again. That way.”
“But . . . ,” he said in a polite tone that nevertheless suggested I hadn’t thought this through. “You could see it from the sky. You’ve never seen it that way. And you’d be home in hours instead of days.”
And then he guessed without my saying it that it was already proving too much for me to believe that a winged cylinder full of people could soar birdlike across the ocean, let alone the whole of the United States.
“The DC-4 is a good airplane, Fraulein Calvert,” he said. “I can show you a picture of one in my aviation book.”
The model number of the plane meant nothing to me. And I really hadn’t wanted to see a photo of it; all I cared about was wrangling the courage to board one. Just the one. But I glanced at his book with half-closed eyes and then tried to forget what I saw. As the days for my departure neared, I wondered if I was simply too old to do something so innovative as air travel.
I don’t feel old at sixty-two. I’m trim and I’ve always treated my body with care and respect. For the nearly forty years I’ve been a nanny and then lately a teacher, I’ve felt full of energy, eager to guide and protect my young charges, ready to help them seize the most from every day and prepare for a meaningful life beyond their childhood years. But my dear Truman had been right about what war can do. It changes everything. It changes you. It changes how you look at the world, how you look at yourself.
Sister Gertrude was also right, I tell myself, as in my peripheral vision the city disappears and countryside begins to fly past.
I am tired and ready to go home.
What a strange concept home is, though. I’m headed to the vineyard, a place that has never been my address. When I wrote Celine and asked if I might come home for the holidays while I figure out my next steps, she said yes, without so much as a hint of correction that her home had never been mine. And yet the vineyard—strangely so—feels like the only home I have now. Celine and Wilson are my only family.
Even after five years, I still have trouble accepting the fact that Truman is gone. I still think of things I want to tell him, or I’ll sip a cocktail and think to myself, Truman would like this. When the news of his death reached me, I wasn’t prepared to be the last of my immediate family. Our father had already passed, dying of a heart attack the same day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Then, four months later, Truman was killed in that horrible accident. I have no one now, really, having never married or had children of my own. Celine and my nephew, Wilson, are all I have left.
I know I don’t want to stay with Celine indefinitely, though I am yearning to walk her peaceful acreage and to bask in its beauty. There is so much I want to forget, so much I want to forgive myself for, if that is possible. I’m trusting that the vineyard—blessedly untouched by the hell of war—will provide the solace I need to come to terms at last with what happened in Vienna. For I know I must.
My old college friend Lila Petrakis and her husband, George, have invited me to stay with them in San Francisco after the holidays while I figure out what is next for me. The idea appeals to me. Lila and I have kept in touch by letter all throughout the years. I didn’t complete my teacher’s certificate like Lila did, but she and I have stayed good friends. George and Lila even visited me years ago in Paris, when they sailed to France for their twentieth wedding anniversary. In my darkest hours during the war—and after it—I missed having a friend like Lila to lean on more than any other deprivation.
In what seems like only a handful of minutes, the train is pulling to a stop at the Zurich station. I trimmed my belongings such that everything I own now fits into two suitcases and an overnight bag for taking onto the plane. A porter helps me take my luggage to the taxi rank.
I look out the window as the driver maneuvers the streets of Zurich, and gazing at the busy people and the zipping cyclists and the mothers pushing young ones in prams momentarily eases my nervousness about the impending flight.
I need help checking my luggage through and finding my gate, but there are seasoned travelers at every turn who lend a hand or offer a word of advice. When it is time to board, I follow the other passengers outside to the brilliantly shining airplane; it looks just like the picture my student showed me.
I take steadying breaths as I step aboard, find my seat, buckle myself in. I close my eyes and count to two hundred as the rest of the passengers board and the engines began to roar and the propellers to spin. I grip the armrests tight as the plane gathers speed on the runway like a locomotive and then leaves the ground and begins to climb into the sky. I slowly open my eyes to peer out the oval window next to me. The sight of the city below takes my breath away. How small Zurich looks. How tiny the automobiles and buildings are. How big the generous sky stretches! Like a never-ending and translucent sea where no evil and dark things swim.
So this is what it is like, I muse to myself, to soar far, far beyond where you used to be.
22
SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA
DECEMBER 1947
I arrive at the Santa Rosa train station more than a week after leaving Switzerland and to weather that is balmy compared to what I left behind. A happy sun is shining in the bold California sky, and the temperature hovers at sixty-five pleasant degrees.
I wrote to Celine earlier not to worry about coming to get me, that I would just get a taxi for the six-mile jaunt to the vineyard.
As the taxi pulls away from the station, I can’t keep my gaze from the window. It has been seventeen years since I set foot on the land of my childhood. So much has happened since then.
Truman and I were raised in Sebastopol, a sleepy little farming town seven miles west of Santa Rosa where our father once owned a hardware store. My wanderlust grew out of wanting to escape country life but also out of nighttime cuddles with my mother before she died. It was my mother who told me about faraway places that she longed to visit someday. She was the one who wanted to see London and Paris and Cairo and Rome. When she was taken from us by a blood disease no one understood, I grieved for her by assuming all of her dreams. I didn’t know at the time that she never actually thought she would go to those places, that she knew my father was far too practical a man to indulge in fantasies like that when there would never be the money to indulge in them. When I turned eighteen and all my friends went off to either secretarial or nursing school or teachers’ college—or to chapels to get married—my father insisted I make my choice. The world will always need teachers and nurses and secretaries, he said, and since I didn’t have any marriage proposals, those were my only choices. I didn’t want to be a nurse and I hated the idea of sitting at a typewriter all day long, so to college I went to become a teacher. I enjoyed being around children, had always enjoyed it, but the truth was, I didn’t want to be a classroom teacher, either. It took three years of college and nearly finishing my teaching certificate before I figured out I didn’t have to become what someone else had chosen for me.
I got my first nanny job in San Francisco working for a British family with twin boys. When they returned home to London eighteen months later, they took me with them, as they’d promised they would when they’d interviewed me. My father was still barely speaking to me then, he was so angry about my leaving college to “wipe the noses of other people’s children,” and when I came home to say good-bye to Truman, Pops left the room.
“I can’t watch you make this mistake,” he grumbled on his way past me.
I couldn’t wait to get away. And then I loved Europe so much, it was easy to stay.
But even though I longed for city life and all the places my mother had dreamed of, and even though I wanted to get as far away from Pops’s disappointment as I could, I still loved Sonoma County—the acres and acres of plum and apple trees and vineyards and rolling hills and the tall pepper trees and scrub oak and sycamores. As the taxi drives me out to Celine’s, I am so happy to see the landscape is the same. When I arrive at the Rosseau Vineyard, it’s as if nothing has changed here, either. The trees are taller and there is a different car in the driveway, but the grapevines are the same, and so is the stuccoed house with its red-tile roof and terra-cotta pots of hardy geraniums. The driver helps me retrieve my luggage, and as I am paying him, Celine opens the front door. She also looks virtually the same; the years have been kind to her. The only discernible difference I can see is faint lines of weariness under her eyes. Truman has been dead for five years, but I can see that Celine still has sleepless nights.
I wasn’t in the States when Truman married Celine, and when I finally did meet her, I was surprised this assertive and confident woman was the one Truman had fallen for. He seemed so deferential around his petite wife. In quiet awe of her more than in love with her.
“How did you know Celine was the one for you?” I asked him when we were alone. I was curious, but also worried that my little brother was in a marriage that might one day disappoint him.
Truman thought for a long moment. “It was Celine saying that I was the one for her, I guess. Here was this beautiful woman raised in wealth and privilege, declaring she wanted me—a lowly clerk at the firm that did the vineyard’s taxes. She wanted me. I fell for that like a stone in water.”
I remember wondering—as I still wonder five years after his death—if it was Celine my brother had fallen in love with or just the idea that she’d chosen him.
“Hello, Helen,” Celine says, coming down the steps and giving me a featherlight kiss on the cheek.
“It’s so wonderful to see you,” I say in return.
“Is this everything?”
I look down at the two suitcases on the gravel. Check to see that I have my purse and overnight bag on my arm. “Yes. I think I’m all set.”
We step inside the house after the taxi leaves, and I’m happy to see that Celine decorated the house for Christmas. There is a tall Douglas fir in the living room draped with lights, sparkling ornaments, and garlands. The tables and shelves and mantel are lined from end to end with festive evergreen boughs and candles.
“The house looks so pretty,” I say.
Celine casts a glance around her. “I suppose it seems silly to decorate it just for me.”
“Not at all. And it’s not just for you.”
“I don’t even know if Wilson and Louise are coming up during the holidays.”
“Louise?”
“His fiancée. He proposed last week. They’re going to her parents’ for Christmas. In Pasadena. I don’t know when I’ll see them.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll miss seeing him, too. But I am happy to hear he’s engaged. What wonderful news.”
Celine shrugs. “I suppose I knew this would happen at some point. Children grow up. They leave home.” But then she seems to catch the irony of her words. She is fifty-two years old and still living in the house she grew up in. Celine starts down the hallway with my suitcases. “So I have you in Wilson’s old room. It’s a guest room now,” she says over her shoulder.
I follow her.
A moment later, Celine is setting the luggage down in the spacious bedroom.
“Do you want to unpack or do you want to lie down or do you want something to eat?” Celine asks in a rush. I am getting the impression that it’s been a while since she has had company.
“I don’t need to unpack right now, and I had breakfast on the train. Maybe we can just sit on the patio and have some coffee?”
Celine nods casually, as though it does not matter to her what we do next.
I follow her back through the house and to the kitchen, where she begins to get a percolator going. I notice the door to the room that was the maid’s is open, and that there is no longer a bed inside it, but a desk and shelves and filing cabinets. Celine is moving about the kitchen as if she knows exactly where everything is and is quite at home in it.
“You don’t have a maid anymore?” I nod toward the little room.
Celine glances over her shoulder at the room and then brings her attention back to getting cups and saucers out of the cupboard. “No. That room is my office now. I decided I didn’t like having people who weren’t family in the house, living in it as if they were. The last maid was an utter disappointment. I should have guessed she would be.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“And there I was trying to help her out by giving her a home here and a job, and because her parents had just died. I should’ve known better.”
I feel my mouth drop open a little. I know whom Celine is talking about.
“You mean Rosie?”
Celine tips her head to look at me curiously. She is frowning. “You remember her?”
“Of course I remember her. You and Truman took her in after her family died. She was a pretty little thing.”
Celine is staring at me like I don’t know what I’m talking about.
“You and Truman started giving her my letters after they’d been read so that she could have the stamps. I wrote to her a few times so that she could have her own envelopes.”
And still she is staring at me as though I’m recalling it all wrong.
“Celine, I sent Rosie the amaryllis that first Christmas after she lost her family. Remember?”
“I remember the amaryllis you sent,” she says evenly, but her gaze on me is hard and strange.
“You told me the county found a different place for her not long after that. I had written her a couple more times in the New Year, and you told me to stop.”
“That’s right,” she says, but not as if we are finally talking about the same girl.
“I didn’t know Rosie was your maid, too,” I say. “Wasn’t that kind of . . .” I search for the right word. Cruel is too harsh. Odd is too vague.
“Kind of what?” A slight note of irritation creeps into Celine’s voice.
“I don’t know. Unkind? Shouldn’t she have been in school?”
“How was it unkind to give her the work experience she’d need as an adult? Her parents left her nothing.”
“Of course, but—”
“And they were the ones who took her out of school, not me,” Celine continues. “Rosie did poorly in school, if you must know. I was doing her an immense favor by giving her a job and a paycheck. I was the only one thinking about her future. The only one.”
I have annoyed Celine with this conversation, and I’m not sure why. “I see,” I tell her.
Celine opens up a drawer and gets out two spoons, and then shoves it closed. “No, I don’t think you do. You weren’t here. It was a mistake bringing that girl into this house. I never should’ve let the county talk me into it.”
“I really am sorry to hear that. It was very kind of you and Truman to try to make a go of it with her. I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t.”
Celine exhales heavily and closes her eyes a second. “I really don’t want to talk about her.”
I’m curious as to what became of Rosie Maras—I actually have been for a long while—but I sense the need to change the subject. “All right. We don’t have to.”
Celine turns to me. “Are you sure you don’t want a cookie or something? I have some pastries.”
“A pastry would be nice.”
Minutes later, we are out on the patio, and I’m glad I suggested it. The late morning is golden, and the little that remains of the spent vines is toasty brown in the sun.
“It really is so beautiful here,” I say, letting the vista freshen my spirit. “No wonder you love this place so much.”
Celine takes a sip of her coffee and gazes out over her inheritance. “Sometimes I think it’s only the vineyard that hasn’t failed me. Everything else in my life . . .” She lets her words die away.
I can see so clearly that Celine is still grieving. It must be so difficult to lose a husband the way she lost Truman.
I wonder if she was as surprised as I was at my brother’s decision to reenlist. He wrote to me shortly after Pearl Harbor that the army didn’t care that he was forty-nine years old and that he’d learned to hide the slight limp in his step from the last war he’d fought in.
Letters from Celine after Truman died were few. The war made correspondence between us a problem, to be sure, but her short and sparse notes led me to believe she was adapting to the loss of my brother the way she did everything—or so it always had seemed to me, even from thousands of miles away: with resolve and control.
But now I wonder.
“Are you managing all right, Celine?” I ask as gently as I can.
She hesitates only a second. “I’m fine.”
“Truman’s passing must’ve been very hard for you.”
Celine sets her cup down on its saucer on the table between us. “Many things about having Truman as my husband were hard. So, yes, it was all very hard.”
Her tone tells me in no uncertain terms that she does not want to talk about Truman or how his death is affecting her. She doesn’t want to invite me into her grief or her life as a widow or even her life in general.
In fact, over the next several days, I get the distinct impression that Celine has allowed me to come only because I have no place of my own yet. She is not expecting or wanting me to stay for any great length of time. I can see this in the way she keeps me at arm’s length. She is polite and attentive but only in the most distant of ways. She asks no questions about my experiences during the war or what it was like in Europe after it or what I plan to do now. It’s almost as if I am a traveling stranger at her home and not her sister-in-law of thirty years.
