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Saturday, September 28th, through Sunday, September 29th
Shamus hopped up on the bed, brought his face close to hers to sniff for a few seconds, then curled up against her tummy. Charlotte was neither awake nor sound asleep, just conscious enough to wrap her arm around the cat and hold him a little closer, as Ellis used to do with her stuffed bunny rabbit. Shamus purred, a soothing noise that did, finally, send her into a deeper sleep for a little while.
It was raining again, and the particular way it sounded here was starting to become familiar. Charlotte had lowered the upper sash of one of the windows, to take advantage of the warm front, and the rain-intensified autumn scents finally overcame the new-paint smell. Dawn was breaking. Shamus had moved out from under her arm, but was still close by. She hadn’t bothered to put the folding screens back in place, and could see the whole apartment from where she lay.
Her sense of smell and touch were still in place, maybe even taste, but she still felt numb, exhausted. Shamus opened an eye, then yawned and stretched. She stretched too, but it only emphasized the aches and pains of her exhausted body, especially in her bruised knees and neck. The rain quieted as the daylight grew. Charlotte could see more and more of the apartment, but part of her didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to embrace being in a new space, or the idea that this was her home now, with its bare walls without art, with its scruffy masculine sofa and not her butter soft sleek one. She wanted the comfort of the old and familiar, of Ellis in her room down the hall, of an entire lake to view from the deck, of a place in the working world, knowing what she was going to do next for the magazines, of scheduling meetings and video conferences, of going shopping, of planning vacations, of Lake Parkerton before the steel mill closed and the economy went bust, all the old familiar things and ways, even the annoying parts.
Shamus hopped down and a few seconds later Charlotte could hear him crunching on the kibble in his bowl. She rubbed the light coating of black cat hair that he left on the duvet, and rolled it into a clump. Wendy hadn’t brought over a brush. Maybe Larry had one. I’m becoming a cat lady—living alone and becoming a cat lady. Maybe I’ll have ten cats by the end of the year—
Oh, snap out of it. Get up, put on a pot of coffee, have a shower and breakfast.
––––––––
CHARLOTTE LEANED BACK in her office chair and propped her feet on the work table, ankles crossed. This, she thought, was the moment she’d been waiting for, to be able to sit down and read Olivia’s first notebook, the one she hoped would explain the whole sad saga. The big red mug was full of coffee, the cat’s litterbox was clean and his food and water bowls were topped up. The computer was fired up and online, ready for notes and research. Shamus hopped into the basket she brought for him and placed close by on the table. He settled himself in and watched her.
It all began with my first return to Paris after the war. Aunt Sasha Bernadin was a Resistance martyr, and Aunt Henri was keeping the bookstore and press on as best she could, with the well-earned good will of the literati of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Henri was so full of sadness, pride, regret, and reflected glory, and she would keep taking my face in her hands, and tell me how much I looked like a dark-haired version of my dear aunt. Indeed, as I walked through the store and their apartment, and walked through the mix of the familiar and the devastated in the neighborhood, I felt myself taking on my aunt’s very soul. Or was it her soul taking possession of mine?
As the weeks went by, I felt I had become Sasha and stopped being Olivia. Night after night I would sit by the small fire with Henri, and listen to the stories that Sasha had told her, of the quiet ways in which messages were sent and scenes playacted, of the atrocities she’d witnessed first-hand. At what point did the words no longer matter, at what point was the story told only in Henri’s eyes? It was as if Sasha had transmitted what she’d seen into Henri’s eyes, and Henri in turn was transmitting them into mine. I could see, I swear I could see, what Sasha had seen, I could feel what she felt, I knew every sensation of every step she’d taken, from delivering a loaf of bread with a message baked inside, to swiping a German uniform for a refugee.
I knew every moment, and I knew what it felt like to face the firing squad, in a line with a dozen others from my team, and to be thrown into a pit before I was even dead. And I knew what it felt like to be glad that at least Henri would know what had happened to me, that I wasn’t whisked away in the dark, never to be heard from again, an anonymous naked body on a pile of others in a gas chamber.
The bookstore was part of Sasha’s cover—and she never, not once, hid anything in any of the books she carried. Instead, she would be given a complex series of numbers to memorize by those in charge, which she would relay in person to the recipient of the books. The numbers represented the page and word position in a book of each word of the message. She deliberately never looked for the messages, in case she was ever questioned or tortured. Twice she was held and questioned, and twice she was let go—she was able to convince them that she did not know any messages. She likely would never have been caught, but for the traitor on her team, who was executed with them.
Then followed many short stories of different ways in which Sasha served as a courier, and then later as a saboteur, mixed in with the periods of waiting and emotional pain that Henri endured. Olivia’s immersion into her aunt’s persona was only reinforced by Henri’s love and grief. Olivia was aware of what was happening, but welcomed it, seeing it as her way of honoring her aunt, and of fulfilling her own thwarted desire to stay in France and fight, instead of being coddled in New York. The first result of this immersion was the book of poems that Charlotte and Simon found: Faux Silence. It brought her encouraging reviews. But the literary scene in Paris was no longer the same one she fondly recalled from before the war. With Henriette’s encouragement, Olivia returned to New York to advance her writing career and to be part of the vanguard in Greenwich Village. She took a staff position at The New Yorker magazine, and wrote another book of poems, this time in English: My Enemy, My Mercy, which garnered solid critical acclaim.
While she loved the Village jazz scene, she soon tired of what she considered the “Beatnik coarseness.” She learned of the nouvelle roman writers and New Wave filmmakers “back home,” but hesitated to leave her job and growing professional profile. When she learned of Henri’s failing health, however, she dropped everything to return to Paris and help out.
This was when she became re-acquainted with Seamus O’Dair, whose group of friends and fellow writers—every last one of them involved in the Resistance efforts—often met at Sibylline. After the odd and self-indulgent literary world in America, this group, by contrast, were heroes. Olivia wrote that, in retrospect, they were probably no less full of themselves than the Beatniks—or herself—but at the time they could do no wrong in her romantic eyes. Her teenage crush on O’Dair in the 1930’s renewed itself with the power and conviction of a woman determined to have what she wanted—and she wanted O’Dair, body and soul.
But he only noticed her when he was made aware that she’d written Faux Silence, and the person who brought it to his attention was under the impression that it was autobiographical. She wanted O’Dair’s attention so deeply, she did not dissuade him of the notion that she was a Resistance courier based in Marseilles.
We loved, we wrote, we drank, we acted. You called me your muse, I called you my demon.
When Henriette passed away, Olivia continued the book store and the Sibylline Press, although it became more and more difficult as time went on, as Henriette had accumulated bills. An American made an offer for it to Henriette’s attorney, who made the arrangements. There was only a small amount of money left after the bills were settled, but it went to Olivia, by way of Henriette’s will. Olivia then gave the money to O’Dair’s group, to enable them to purchase an old theater that was burned out during the war. In fact, it was O’Dair’s Resistance team that had sabotaged it in the first place, when it was occupied by the Nazis. They wanted to restore it, and use it for their theatrical productions, calling it a phoenix that would rise from the literal ashes. The money Olivia brought helped to make it possible, and raised her esteem in their eyes.
All went well until one day a fellow Resistance fighter from Marseilles came to pay his respects to his hero O’Dair and the troupe rebuilding the theater. The passage of time and hardship of the war had changed his appearance, so that Olivia did not recognize him as one of what she referred to as “local tutors” and “poor insipid boys” from her days in Monte Carlo—but he recognized her. In this way it was revealed that far from being a Resistance fighter, she had escaped with her family to America, in the entourage of the millionaire Beauregard Lamont.
At first, Olivia was not concerned, convinced that she would be forgiven for her way of memorializing her Aunt Sasha, and that any of that group of friends would have been grateful to be memorialized in such a manner.
What she didn’t expect was the vitriol and contempt she received for her deception. O’Dair himself was the worst. And then she realized, shortly after, she was pregnant. By then, his rejection of her was so complete, he refused to believe her. After a few weeks, she realized he would never forgive her, nor would anyone else. She was a pariah. She was so full of her own connection to Sasha, that she had completely underestimated the depth of their Resistance convictions, and could not see what their objections were.
Her poetry and fiction were her manifestation of Sasha, as well. But O’Dair and everyone in her whole world in Paris now claimed her work was fraudulent, insulting to the Resistance effort. They swore they would expose her for the liar she was and condemn every word she had published, would ever publish. They took every copy of her books and every issue of Sibylline in which she had an entry, and burned them in a pile on the street. She could have handled all the contempt, all the rejection, in time, but it was O’Dair’s look of utter disgust when she told him she was carrying his child that destroyed her. She wanted, quite sincerely, to die.
Friendless, homeless, and pregnant, she spent her time going from church to church, praying and sleeping during the day, and nightclub to nightclub in the evenings, making superficial friendships along the way and finding solace in music and alcohol. One night a group she fell in with drove to a club in Orleans, where there was an American military base. Tired of dancing, she remained at her table with a drink, brooding over the wreck of her life, of the meaninglessness of her art, her love, her home.
Ronson Targman was at the next table over, also alone. Small talk ensued. He asked her to join him for a meal, and, by this time quite hungry, she accepted. She could tell he fancied her. She liked the fact he was an officer, if a low-level one. He was sensible, solid, and had no trouble telling her new friends she was with him now. His quiet confidence calmed her, made her feel protected, a little less like wanting to die. It suited her just fine.
She could tell that the fact that she was French by birth, fluent in English, and with American connections—yet, somehow, a bit hard up and lost, like a refugee—appealed to him. Her survival instinct grew into self-preservation. Once again, she didn’t dissuade the man in her life from what he wanted to believe, and said “yes” the second he proposed. He had no idea who she really was, and that suited her just fine, too, because she had decided she would never write another word as long as she lived.
This bitter vow held fast until shortly after her mother’s death:
I had expected the box, but not my reaction to it. There they were, my mother’s books, and seeing the titles and the authors was a sudden plunge back home, back to who I’d always thought I was, back to my youth in Paris and listening in on these very writers as they talked and argued and pontificated and flirted and swore, back to the days when I was determined to be there with the best of them when I grew up. And the books were in different languages, English, French, German, Italian, and Hebrew. The Hebrew ones I quickly threw in the trash, because Ronson must never know about my mother’s heritage. I didn’t think he would care about the rest, just assume that it was common for a European like my mother to read many languages. But there were three of Seamus’ books in there, all three in English. Two of them I’d read years ago, but the one, the one I tried to ignore when there would be fleeting mentions of it in the newspaper, in the magazines, on television, was the one that came out after I left France. Ronson was on base. I was bored. When Donovan was in school, I would read.
What I read, I could not believe. I could not believe that my story, my life, my love for my aunt could be so twisted, so abused, so tortured. All my sense of betrayal and rage fomented, burst anew in an eruption that I thought would kill me. Six weeks after I read it, they announced his Nobel Prize. It was my story—my story, told with his hatred.
I write this, in secret, for now. I will write until I cannot write anymore. Some day, perhaps, I can tell my story, and tell Sasha’s story, the way it was meant to be told. And as I write, I find the will to go on. I am not Margot, I will not die as Margot. I damn you, Seamus O’Dair. I damn you.
Charlotte was not aware of the passage of time, that she’d read from sunup to long after sundown. The notebook was larger than the others, and written in a very small, strong script, as if Olivia thought she would be able to get everything into a single volume. Page after page, she remained engrossed as Olivia went through a complete and devastating critique of Least Objects, sometimes line by line, showing which parts were not true, which parts were things she’d actually said—and written—herself. She and O’Dair had, after all, collaborated on several projects, including a screenplay based on Sasha’s life that they were working on at the time of their breakup—the original concept for An Uncollected Death. O’Dair’s spiteful treatment of the Margot character as a version of Olivia did not happen until he rewrote An Uncollected Death in English, when it became Least Objects.
Thus, decades later, when Olivia stumbled across the original French novella, which she wrote about in her final notebook, she saw something much closer to the truth, with much more heartbreak than spite, and an element of self-doubt. And she saw that it was published by Sibylline Press, four months before Donovan was born. In the last volume of her notebooks, in the passages that Helene had translated, Olivia speculated that O’Dair had begun to soften his stance toward her—but by that time, she had married Ronson Targman, and no one in Paris knew where to find her. The prima donna O’Dair would have taken her disappearance as an act of contempt—which, in a way, it was, particularly if she did, indeed, have his child. She could see how he would express his fury at her by altering the character and story of Margot when he wrote Least Objects.
Charlotte’s phone rang, startling her back into the present: it was Simon.
“I know this is short notice, but would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”
Charlotte’s jaw dropped a little, and she sat up much straighter. “Yes, I would like that very much. When and where?”
“I caught an opening for eight-thirty at Amaretto. It’s a bit posh, but I—”
“I would love it, Simon. I haven’t been there in years.” She looked at the time. It was already a quarter to eight.
He laughed. “I’m glad, then. Shall I call for you and we walk down, or meet at the bar, if you need a little more time to get ready?”
“Let’s meet there. I think I can manage to look respectable in half an hour, but an extra few minutes couldn’t hurt.”
Showered and in her robe, with a towel wrapped around her head, Charlotte stood in front of her only closet and was glad that her choice was practically made for her: one single little black dress, a sleeveless sheath. Finished with black pumps and with the short denim jacket to keep it from looking too stuffy, she would feel attractive and comfortable. But her nails were a mess from everything she had been doing the past two weeks, and an extra ten minutes went for a quick manicure. Fluff the hair, add the lipstick and a bit of mascara, the hoop earrings and the silver bracelet—done.
Walking in pumps on the way to Amaretto felt odd after not wearing them for so long—the last time was at Ellis’ performance at the state competition. It seemed like years ago now. The sidewalks were full of people walking to and from the restaurants and bars, and here and there a couple kissed, or a group of young adults laughed at something one of them said. It was a lively little downtown, much more so now than it had been a decade before.
She’d long wondered what a date with Simon would be like, and now she was about to find out. Her palms were slightly damp again from nervousness. I wish I didn’t like him quite so much, and could just be cool about it. Whatever I do, I mustn’t gush. Ellis would be more mature than this.
Amaretto was full, as was usual on a Saturday night, and Charlotte was impressed that Simon got a table at such short notice. She spotted him standing at the crowded bar, his back to her, talking to someone she couldn’t see. Even if she didn’t know who he was, she would have picked him out in a crowd as “her type.” He turned toward the bar just then, and she took in his gray sports jacket over a plain black knit sweater and a fresh pair of black jeans. As Charlotte approached, she could see a woman standing next to him put her arm around his waist and pull him toward her, and he placed a hand on her shoulder and laughed. It was Lola, in spandex, cleavage, and very shiny red lipstick, a good bit of which was left on Simon’s cheek.
Charlotte almost turned around and left, and probably would have, except the bartender noticed her and smiled, and Simon turned to look, as well, with an expression that was, for him, hapless.
“Charlotte!” Lola squealed, and strutted over in red stilettos to give her a hug and air kisses. “You look fabulous!” She then went on a bit in a tipsy monologue about how great it was that Toley Banks was in jail, at long last. Simon, standing behind Lola, made a face that almost sent Charlotte into hysterics.
To Charlotte’s relief, however, they were called to their table, and it was in a quiet corner.
When they sat down, she pointed to his cheek. “Lola left her brand on you.”
Simon winced at the realization. “She means well, but she’s awfully full on.” He picked up his napkin to wipe his cheek, and handed it to Charlotte to finish when he missed a spot. When she handed it back, he looked at it with distaste and set it at the edge of the table. “I think I’ll ask for a fresh one.”
He picked up the wine menu. Charlotte took in the details of his face, the line of his nose, the way his hands held the menu.
Simon looked up, first at her face, then at the rest of her, taking in the way she looked, and somehow managed to make her feel, without saying a word, that he liked what he saw. “Let’s do this properly, what do you say? A good bottle, an appetizer, an over-the-top main course, and maybe even a little dessert if we’ve room? Something to make the whole world go away for a while?”
He gets it. He read her expression, and chuckled. She grinned, inside as well as out.
Sunday, Charlotte slept in, after ten solid hours of the kind of sleep that had eluded her for weeks. She’d had a lot to drink and eat at the restaurant, but there were no ill effects, and she practically purred at the memory of an utterly enjoyable evening. Simon had walked her back to the apartment, where he gave her a long, warm full-body hug, and then a kiss that landed on her jaw, close to her earlobe, as if he was going to kiss her neck and then stopped to move up to her cheek and didn’t quite make it. They laughed and tried again, this time getting it right. Then once again he looked at her with an inscrutable expression, thanked her “for a wonderful evening,” and went on his way. No matter where it went from here, they had a connection, of that she was now absolutely certain. It made her feel ten years younger.
As she moved to get out of bed, something shiny on the duvet caught her attention: a stainless steel tea ball. What on earth? Then she noticed Shamus sitting a few feet away from the foot of the bed.
“Did you bring this to me?” she asked him.
The tip of his tail moved, but that was the only answer he had.
The tea ball still had a price tag attached to it, and then Charlotte recalled there was a box of them in the kitchen section of The Good Stuff. How in the world did Shamus get it in here, with the pet door closed off?
“You are one very mysterious cat.”
He looked up at her, and once again she could have sworn he was smiling, a happy, pleased with himself, feline smile.
They all met at The Coffee Grove for brunch, sharing the Sunday paper’s headline story about Toley Banks’ arrest and his ties to Olivia and Wesley Warren. Diane, as usual, was effusive in both her surprise and praise, and Jimmy looked thoroughly entertained. Helene set aside her usual elegant reserve for a moment in the limelight, retelling the story of luring Mitchell and Doc from the basement. Lola staggered in late with a hangover. Simon gave her his chair, then grabbed another chair and squeezed in next to Charlotte.
“So, then?” Diane asked Helene. “Is the whole thing figured out? You’ve got all the notebooks, you’ve got a rare book you didn’t know about in the beginning, and you’ve got the people responsible for the crime. But do you know why, or did I miss that?”
Helene gestured toward Charlotte. “There’s the one to ask, Diane. Charlotte’s been trying to make sense of all this from day one.”
Charlotte put up her hands in protest. “Hey, I couldn’t have done it without you and Simon, or without everyone’s help when I moved and tried to get settled in the middle of everything.” She shared an encapsulated version of Olivia’s story, then concluded, “I still have a few more things I’m wondering about, but maybe the answers will turn up over time. Or maybe not. Some of it might always remain a mystery.”
Jimmy nodded at the last bit. “Human motivation is rarely as clean-cut in real life as it is in a detective story.”
As the conversation around the table continued, Charlotte thought of Olivia’s promise as a writer, a whole career lost to spite, and how it contributed to Donovan’s wasted potential, as well. She recalled Helene’s remark about how parents set the stage, set the tone for the future, and hoped that she gave Ellis a chance to blossom by letting her go to Paris so young.
“People sometimes make terrible choices,” said Helene, “or are afraid to make any choices at all. The next thing you know, entire lifetimes are wasted.”
Simon shifted to get comfortable in the tight space, stretching his arm across the back of Charlotte’s chair, and settling in closer to her. She turned to give him a big smile. He grinned back.
“It was never easy to please Olivia,” Helene was saying to Charlotte, “but I like to think you would have come close.”
Regardless of Helene’s praise for her efforts, after a couple of hours more research into the French Resistance, Seamus O’Dair, and the various people known to associate with him in his Paris days, Charlotte debated whether she should continue with the project or not—it would, in essence, amount to a comprehensive research project that might be best left to O’Dair specialists. Then again, there was no reason she couldn’t become such an expert, given time and devotion. Olivia’s story could certainly change some perceptions about O’Dair, Least Objects, and his Nobel Prize.
She read through the composition book with Donovan’s story in it. Like Helene, she could see Olivia cherishing something that showed a shared interest between herself and her son. Charlotte expected an immature tone, a naive point of view, or something cartoonish, but to her surprise Donovan’s story was about a soldier in the Vietnam War, one that seemed to be based on Ronson Targman, and in a decidedly negative light. The structure was simple: a scene where the soldier describes cruel treatment of captured enemy soldiers, then of locals suspected of being guerilla fighters, and then finally of innocents, interspersed with scenes of the same soldier’s harsh, abusive treatment of people and family members back home, including firing at protesting college students “like the ones at Kent State.” It was a rough draft, but the descriptive passages were perceptive and direct—too well written, she thought, for a ten-year-old, which was how old Donovan was in 1968. Perhaps it was placed in the coal chute at a later date? She looked up the Kent State shootings: May 4th, 1970. The story was written when Donovan was at least twelve years old. Much more plausible.
Here and there the pages were torn and stained, as was the cover. The notebook had suffered abuse. Had it been thrown away, and Olivia found it and saved it? There was no mention of it in her own notebook from 1970, or the next one from 1976. Charlotte did spot a passage where Olivia mentioned cringing at times at how much Donovan resembled O’Dair, yet at times bursting with a sense of rightness, because he was conceived from love, no matter what happened afterward.
The story of the composition book was added to the list of questions that Charlotte still had for Donovan. She recalled his complete lack of shock at hearing that O’Dair was his father, or any sign of embarrassment or unease. It was something, she was convinced, that he had known about for a long time. If he did, it opened up a lot of questions about his involvement in his mother’s death and in the search for the book.
An odd noise from the direction of the stairwell interrupted her thoughts. It sounded like scratching. She went to investigate, moving quietly down the steps in her socks. She could just make out Shamus by the pet door. He turned to look at her, then back at the door, pawing at the flap until his paw went under it, then moving against the wall in such a way that he was scratching upwards. Charlotte perched on the steps and watched as he scratched and scratched, until the panel blocking his way began to slide up, and he stuck in his head, then the rest of his body, and Charlotte heard the panel land shut after the last of his tail disappeared.
So that’s how he did it, she thought. I’ve got a cat burglar. Literally.