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Also Wednesday, September 18th
Simon wanted to get on with making the rest of valuation video, and Charlotte wanted to see the basement before continuing working on the clues in the notebooks.
The key to the basement door had a long shank and scalloped bow, which Charlotte grasped as she turned it in the old brass lock. The dark stairwell sent up a whiff of stale basement air mixed with moth balls, but it didn’t smell of anything that suggested excessive damp, mildew, or decaying mice. Charlotte could not abide the smell of a dead mouse stuck somewhere out of reach in a house. She tread down the stairs carefully, hanging onto the wood rail, into a classic old basement of the kind she hadn’t seen since early childhood. At the bottom, she pulled on a string that turned on a bare overhead bulb.
A forced-air furnace on the opposite wall was new enough to gleam here and there in the light. There were stacks of cardboard and wooden boxes on pallets, a pair of workbenches with tools hanging on pegboards, a laundry area with a washtub and an avocado green washer and dryer set from the late 60’s, and a table made out of sawhorses topped with a sheet of plywood supporting stacks of more boxes and large items like a 50-cup coffeemaker. There were also dry-cleaning type bags filled with curtains and bedspreads, and a few boxes of toys from the 60’s, building block sets, and boxed games that were popular at the time, many of which Charlotte once played herself. Two medium-sized containers held several vintage model railroad cars in original orange Lionel boxes. Neither container was full, and Charlotte supposed that Donovan had been raiding it a few cars or props at a time.
A darker area closer to the center of the house held the remains of an old boiler, which was near a raised area in the floor that ran all the way to the outside wall. There were cobwebs here and there, but nothing too awful.
Simon had to stoop occasionally to avoid hitting his head on various pipes and beams. “Well,” he said, looking around slowly, “it’s not as bad as I feared it would be. Probably only because it was hard for Olivia to get up and down these stairs.”
Charlotte nodded. “I don’t think anyone’s been down here for a long, long time, either, maybe not since her husband got sick.”
“I’ll bring down the camera and stuff. Might as well get it over with.” Simon went back up the stairs.
The basement really did look as if it were frozen in time. Some of the boxes on the pallets looked out of alignment, but it was impossible to say how, when, or why. Charlotte thought of her own basement, and how easily things got out of place when one searched for something that had been stored in a stack of boxes. Olivia’s boxes were labeled, for the most part. Some were even the colorful printed-cardboard storage boxes that were popular back in the 70’s and 80’s, which were labeled with writing on masking tape on the ends: Blue Bedroom Set, Pink Bedroom Set, Ron’s Uniforms, Coats, Tablecloths and Towels, Donnie’s Clothes, etc. Charlotte lifted the lid on one of the ones on top of the stacks, labeled Tablecloths and Towels, and saw nothing special, just various cloth and vinyl tablecloths and placemats with various kitchen towels and hot pads that coordinated with them, the vast majority in the green, yellow, and orange colors popular in the 60’s and 70’s. These were the things that Olivia and her family had used themselves, not things that she had collected just to collect them, as many of the things were upstairs. She didn’t value these things in quite the same way, did not worry if they became damaged from damp. But for some reason she didn’t let go of them when she no longer liked them enough to use—much like myself, thought Charlotte. These were just the things Olivia was tired of or wanted out of the way, and to Charlotte they looked highly unlikely to contain the valuable notebooks. Out of sight, out of mind.
Simon came back with the equipment and once again she was impressed by how quickly and efficiently he set it up. The smell of mothballs in the boxes with clothes and blankets was beginning to give her a buzzy headache, and the dark basement in general made her feel claustrophobic. She sighed, stretched her back and neck, and went back upstairs, where she helped Helene to successfully decipher the clue in the notebook (it turned out to refer to the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and the notebook was taped to the back of a framed poster of the film); by the time Simon finished with the videos of the basement and kitchen contents, they’d found three more volumes.
Charlotte read the latest clue: “Painting the Music of Time.”
Helene took it up. “This one sort of makes sense. The last one referenced Books Do Furnish a Room, which is part of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.”
“So maybe we go look on the bookshelf?”
Simon interrupted. “Poussin. There’s a painting of that name by him in the Wallace Collection in London. Got any Poussin?” He smiled ever so slightly.
They went looking around the house again, but found no prints of the painting, not even among the stacks of jigsaw puzzles or among the art books on the bottom shelf in the living room.
“Well!” sighed Charlotte. “We know there isn’t any music in the place, nor any Poussin paintings depicted in the things we can see up here. What about the basement, Simon? Did you spot anything worth looking at?
“The only things I wonder about are a couple of boxes that aren’t labeled, that probably bear looking into.”
Charlotte followed Simon down to the basement and helped him to uncover the boxes, which were stacked near the containers with Donovan’s model train set. Both boxes turned out to be full of books.
One of the books was a worn-looking copy of The Paintings of Nicholas Poussin.
“Huh,” said Simon. “The old spy Blunt wrote that.”
The binding was broken, and pages appeared to be missing. As Charlotte went through it, she saw that it had been forced to hold one of Olivia’s notebooks.
“There’s a couple of Seamus O’Dair books, too,” said Simon, as he checked the various titles. “Reprints, no first editions. But what have we here?”
The small dark book he pulled out looked as if it had seen rough treatment, but was still intact. The gold leaf title was almost worn away: Faux Silence.
Inside, the title was repeated, with the subtitle, Poèmes de la Résistance.
The author: Olivia Bernadin.
It was published in 1948 by the Sibylline Press, Paris.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the only copy,” said Charlotte, feeling as if she was holding the very essence of Olivia’s existence.
“It’s nice to see it for real. Shame it was left down here.”
“We should take these up to Helene. I bet she’ll be surprised.”
“Check the clue in the notebook first. We might get lucky.”
Inside the cover of the eighth book, Olivia had written: Wheel of Fortune!
“The game show?” she wondered aloud.
“Or the board game. A stack of them over here.” Simon moved to the end of the table and started looking.
Charlotte recalled that Olivia didn’t remember if there were nine or ten notebooks. “You know,” she said, “if there’s no clue inside this next notebook, that means we’ve got them all, that there were nine, and not ten.”
“Keep ‘em crossed, then,” he said. “Found it.” He pulled it out of the stack of other board games.
The ninth notebook lay inside.
And it’s clue: Snakes and Ladders.
“That one ought to be here—”
Charlotte was puzzled. “I don’t know that it’s right. I know there’s “Chutes and Ladders,” but not snakes.”
Simon insisted. “You Americans have to rename everything. Everywhere else on the planet it’s called “Snakes and Ladders,” and it’s an old, old game. Here we are.” He found the game (and the cover said “Chutes and Ladders”), and pulled it out as well.
There was no notebook inside the box, however.
They both sighed.
“That would have made it too easy, of course,” Simon grumbled.
“Of course.”
Helene was thrilled at their finds, and couldn’t stop looking through the little book of poems. “I can’t believe I’m actually holding this book. There were so few copies printed, you know. My parents had a copy, but I don’t know what happened to it. This might have been theirs. In fact, I think that box of books you found might have been my mother’s. Olivia got most of their things when they died, because Paul and I moved and traveled so much. I often wondered what happened to them.”
This gave Charlotte an idea. “Could the copy of Least Objects that Donovan sold have been your parents’?”
“Yes!” said Helene, nodding in agreement. “It’s very likely. My mother, especially, would have kept up with literature, and her preferences were high-brow. A Nobel-winning author would have been right up her alley, and in New York you could get any book the minute it came out.”
“I’m going to bring those boxes up here,” said Simon. “You can have a look, then.”
“Oh, Simon,” said Helene, “that would be wonderful, but maybe we should wait and not move anything until we find that last notebook. Just in case?”
“Right. I forgot about that.” He opened up the ninth notebook and showed her the clue. “Does Snakes and Ladders suggest anything to you other than the game?”
Helene shook her head. “Nothing other than pythons and stepladders.”
“Plumbing snakes?” Charlotte speculated. “Ladders in pantyhose?”
“How about sleeping on it?” Simon was looking at his watch. “I’ve got to get back to campus. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m uneasy about the two of you being here alone when the likes of Toley Banks and Mitchell are involved.”
“Oh, I agree, Simon.” Helene rose from her chair, still holding the book of poems. “I need to put my feet up a while. You two are doing all the hard work, but it’s making me tired, anyway.”
Charlotte wanted to plow through with finding the last notebook, but knew better than to argue with Simon and Helene. She would use the time to think and read.
“I’d like to take the most recent ledger books with me, along with these notebooks. If there’s anything I need to double-check online, I can, and then maybe I can sort out what we know from what we are just guessing at.” She turned to Simon. “I could use a copy of your pictures and videos, too.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “I’ll get it to you later on today, if that’s okay.”
“Perfect.”
Charlotte walked more slowly than usual back to her apartment, as her canvas messenger bag was heavy with notebooks and ledgers. As the blocks were covered, she still experienced the past overlaid with the present. To the right, for instance, there was the library, now doubled in size from the decade before, but she still felt the way the old front steps were spaced, and the way it felt to hold Ellis’ hand as they went into the lobby, then around the pillars to the children’s section. Further down the block, across the street, an architectural firm had renovated an old feed and seed store to serve as their offices. As she looked at it, she could still vividly remember the smell of fertilizer, the cool dampness of the bulk containers of seeds and bulbs, and the shiny troughs of the hanging scales.
The smell of pizza, however, brought her firmly into the present, as it usually did. She was now across the street from The Good Stuff and her apartment, waiting for the “Walk” sign at the busy intersection. The pizza joint next to her beckoned, but she resisted, despite her watering mouth and growling stomach. There were still some good things to eat from Helene’s basket. The “Walk” sign came on, and as she crossed the street, she could see the tuxedo cat in the shop window, watching her. She went into the shop, looking for Larry, but didn’t see him.
The woman behind the counter looked up, then eyed her bulging messenger bag, as if Charlotte was a potential shoplifter. “Can I help you with anything?”
“Um, yeah. What’s the cat’s name?”
“Shamus. Why? You want him?”
A rather unfriendly woman, thought Charlotte. Good thing there weren’t a lot of customers at the moment. “Well, he’s the shop cat, isn’t he?” Was it Shamus or Seamus, she wondered.
“By default. One of Larry’s customers gave us the cat, and that was okay for a while, but our younger daughter is allergic. Larry won’t give him up, so we compromise by keeping the cat down here.”
“Oh, you’re Larry’s wife! I’m Charlotte Anthony, I’ve taken the studio apartment.”
“Yeah, he was telling me about you.” The woman was looking Charlotte up and down, as if she were a rival. “Wendy.” She didn’t proffer a hand, but at least set down the catalogue she was reading. “Thanks for taking care of the cleanup, ‘though I’m surprised he gave you that much of a break on the rent.”
Her manner insinuated that Charlotte had done something more than clean up the apartment to get the rent break. “It was pretty bad. A lot of work, but I’m grateful to get a place I can afford.”
A customer came in, and Charlotte took the opportunity to get away. “Well, um, nice meeting you. Gotta go.” Wendy just gave a nod and went back to looking at the catalogue.
Charlotte looked by the window for Shamus/Seamus on the way out, but he wasn’t there.
He was, instead, sitting on the newel post in her apartment, waiting for her to come up the stairs. She was pleased. Clearly, she and this cat had an understanding: Wendy doesn’t like either one of us. We don’t like Wendy, either.
“Hello, Shamus.” She reached out to give him a pat, but he reached out with his own paw, and they played a silly pretend-swatting game for a few moments before she went over to the table and unloaded the bag of notebooks.
“So, are you a Shamus, or a Seamus?” She watched him leap from the newel to the table, and then try to see what was in the bag. He stuck a paw down in a gap along the side, and pulled out a pen, which he then batted around the table top.
“You’re a snoop. Shamus it is.”
Charlotte fixed a light lunch of cheese, crackers, and apple slices while waiting for a fresh half-pot of coffee to brew. She’d been drinking far too much coffee, and it was probably time to wean herself off the caffeine. There would be a small grocery run on Friday, on the way back from signing off with Stanton Estates, since the supermarket was out on the highway. She made a list of what to get from both the store and the house, and then wondered what, if anything, would be left after the sale? Martin had said that she could keep anything that hadn’t been sold, or let them donate it to charity.
The dark red leather of the old sofa gleamed in the soft sunlight, and brought out the faded reds of the kilim. Shamus was sitting on the back of the sofa, looking out the window, watching birds coming and going from the young tree planted in the sidewalk below. Charlotte wondered how big the tree would get, and if she would ever be eye-to-eye with a crow, or at least a cardinal or blue jay.
The big library table stretched across the west wall, from the window on the right to the stairwell on the left. It was a handsome table, if a little too big for the space, same as the sofa. But within minutes, she was grateful for every square inch of it, spreading out the notebooks in chronological order. There was still room for her laptop and her lunch. Her scanner/printer was propped on a file box under the table, ready to go. The table had four deep drawers, as well, of which only one had a few office-type supplies and batteries and charging cables. The rest of the drawers were still empty.
Now, where do I begin? Each notebook had dated entries, so she labeled them with the year each one began. The autobiographical passages, combined with ledger entries from the same time period, might give some idea of what was going on in Olivia’s life. She began with the earliest notebook she had, which started in 1969, even though it really wasn’t the beginning, typing the passages in English on the computer, and making notes of passages in French, including a loose translation if it didn’t take too long.
But as she progressed through the notebook, she found herself abandoning the typing and just reading, curled up on the sofa with Shamus dozing on the back of the sofa, next to her head.
In our house we spoke both English and French. My mother, Sophie Vinerman, was a Jew from Edinburgh, Scotland, where her father was a scholar. When she was seventeen, she traveled with her parents to find various relatives left in Europe after the Great War. In Paris, they lodged with Mme. Bernadin, a widow with a bookish daughter named Anastasia and a son named Marcellus. Marcellus was an apprentice chef. My mother and Sasha became fast friends, as mother was quite well-read, and she enthusiastically supported Sasha’s dream of owning a bookshop. When my mother and father first met, they were quite shy around one another. Sasha thought my mother would make the perfect wife for her brother, and was shameless in her matchmaking. My grandparents, though, were so absorbed in looking for their relations that they didn’t even notice the blossoming romance growing beneath their noses. When they returned to Edinburgh, Sophie and Marcellus wrote to one another faithfully for two years, while Marcellus advanced and began to earn something of a living. That was when he traveled to Edinburgh and spoke to my grandfather, asking for my mother’s hand in marriage. Grandfather reluctantly agreed, because Marcellus was not Jewish, but a Huguenot. He only agreed because my mother threatened to run away with Marcellus.
I came along a year after they married. We lived with my Grandmother Bernadin in Paris, and my mother helped her with the lodgers and the cooking and cleaning. Sasha lived there, too, and we read books and went to plays and lectures and art exhibitions. Sasha knew so many people, and she would often bring me along, being quite okay with people thinking that I was her child. Later I realized it was because she had no liking for the male sex, and most men would not want to be bothered with a woman who already had a child. No, Aunt Sasha preferred the company of women, as I came to realize when I was older. She introduced me to her friend Henriette one day at a café, and said that they were going to open a bookshop together. I was thrilled. Grand-mère Bernadin was less thrilled, but my mother, as always, was very supportive and persuaded my father and grandmother that this would be a very good thing for Aunt Sasha and she would be very successful and very happy.
I adored the bookshop, which they named Sibylline. It was probably not the best sort of environment for a young female child—this was the time of the Lost Generation, after all, and everyone came to Paris to drink and loosen their morals. I read things that I probably should not have read at such a tender age, and let myself be touched in ways that I should never have allowed, but that was how things were in Paris in those days.
My mother and my grandmother remained sheltered from much of this, because I knew, instinctively, not to tell. Nor did my father, who was also exposed to licentiousness, because he had worked his way up to sous-chef at a small but well-known restaurant.
When I was ten, two things happened which changed everything. My grandmother died and my father came to the notice of Mr. Lamont, a very wealthy American who lived in Monte Carlo. Mr. Lamont wanted my father to become his personal chef. This was attractive to my father in many ways. First, the pay was phenomenal—and steady. Second, Mr. Lamont entertained frequently, and his guests were wealthy and sophisticated; some were even royalty. Third, it was a live-in arrangement, and a wife and two little girls were more than welcome. Fourth, as I later discovered, my father had great concerns about my exposure to Aunt Sasha’s world, and saw this as a way to protect me.
I, however, did not like it one bit! Monte Carlo was not Paris. The people were so different. I loved my aunt’s scruffy friends who wrote great things and made great art, the whole world of books and paint and café crème. I did not like the marble floors and the salty sea air of the mansion at Monte Carlo. I did not like the feeling of being of the servant class after running loose as an equal, if a child, among the men and women of talent. But my father thrived in the appreciation and the security, and if my father thrived, so too did my mother.
My sister Helene, however, was as if born to the manor. She had no self-consciousness and her outgoing nature and blonde looks made her adorable to Mr. Lamont’s children, whereas I always felt they looked down on me.
But a chef was not like a maid, particularly not one of my father’s quality. He was regarded as a talented asset to be treated with respect, in much the same way as the Lamont children’s music teacher. Monsieur Czerny followed his nose to the kitchens, where he would discover all sorts of delicacies and pastries being made, and Monsieur never met one he didn’t immediately proclaim as perfection and devour it on the spot, along with several more if he could get his hands on them. Both my parents thought him great fun, and my mother, in particular, saw an opportunity to provide me with the piano lessons like she herself had had as a child. With Mr. Lamont’s permission, I took lessons with M. Czerny in the music room, but only when it wasn’t being used by the children or guests. I was a tolerable student, and felt somewhat accomplished—until my sister Helene turned three and began to show an interest in the piano herself.
How can I explain the deflating realization that my baby sister, ten years younger than myself, could easily play—and by memory—what I struggled to learn? This cheerful little blond prodigy won everyone’s heart and attention. We were taught to play Solfiegetto as a duet, my left hand on the melody, her little hands the bass line. By the time she was five, she played the treble, and I the bass, and she played it with more musicality than I ever managed, even while I lurched high above her and her feet couldn’t even reach the pedals. They dressed us in identical white lace frocks with pink ribbons, which suited her and made me cringe. But she became so good so quickly, that soon I got away with staying in my room to read while she performed.
My mother promised me that I could visit Aunt Sasha for my fifteenth birthday. Little Hell was to be left behind with our father and the Lamont’s old nanny. I had my mother all to myself for the journey to Paris and back, and we talked about books and I told her that I wanted to be a writer. It was 1936. Things were much the same at Aunt Sasha’s, there were still all the familiar faces, the writers, the artists. Picasso was there, and Hemingway, Gertrude Stein had just come back from a tour of America, there were strikes in the factories, and arguments about the Olympics going to Berlin instead of Barcelona. There was talk of a strange political situation in Germany, of the Depression in America and in Europe, as well. I felt as if I was let out of a box, seeing and hearing all the things I’d been missing in the sheltered dream world of Monte Carlo.
I begged my mother to let me stay, and Aunt Sasha begged her, as well, but my mother knew my father would not approve. After a blessed three weeks in my most favorite place on earth, we returned to the coast. When I was sixteen, my parents and Mr. Lamont began to introduce me to various young men, mostly local tutors, but after knowing the brilliant young men (and old) of Paris, those poor insipid boys held no charm—and I made no secret of it.
Thus, by the time I was seventeen, I was able to persuade my father to let me travel on my own to Paris, and I would stay for a month or two at a time and help Aunt Sasha and Henri at the bookstore. This went on for almost three years. The talk became more political than artistic among the bookstores and cafés. One day I met a young writer from Dublin named Seamus O’Dair. He was so tall and slim, with jutting cheekbones and his auburn hair was so thick it almost stood on end. He had such long slender fingers, like a pianist. He had come to Paris to help organize the strikes, and after the settlements he stayed in flats down the street from Sibylline. I thought he was so passionate and brave, and Aunt Sasha said he was brilliant and had a great future. I do not think he noticed me, though, other than a polite “thank you,” when I rang up his book purchase, and once when he forgot his cap and I ran for blocks to give it back to him.
Then France declared war on Germany. My parents were frantic, and Mr. Lamont sent my father in his car to retrieve me, and to bring Aunt Sasha and Aunt Henri, too. But my aunt was adamant: she would not leave Paris, nor would Henri. They felt such responsibility to the writers and artists there, and to Paris itself. It was the last time I would ever see Aunt Sasha; she was later executed by the Nazis for being part of the Resistance.
It was the Resistance, in the end, that would destroy me, as well, because I had not stayed. I was old enough, but I had not stayed, I had allowed my father to scoop me up and take me back to a world of privilege, to escape the war and reality itself in the entourage of the American, Mr. Lamont. Yet I was French. It was my country, I loved my country, and I loved Paris.