London House, page 9
Mom sat straight. “I expect you’ll find that in the diaries. She adored him her whole life. I doubt she had any idea of the twists and turns her heart would take.”
Mom reached into the box and pulled out a black-and-white photo. Two men close together. One perhaps sixteen or seventeen, the other broader, more assured, even smarmy, and in his early to mid-twenties.
“The younger is Randolph, your grandfather, and the older is his brother Frederick. They grew up with the “Waite Girls,” as they were called. Their parents were best friends. The stories she told about their childhoods. It felt magical.”
I studied the picture, imagining magical. Nothing about my grandfather conjured such images for me, but looking at this young man, I could see it. He was alive. Handsome and tall with light hair and a smile that lit his whole face. Mischief danced in his eyes.
Mom gestured to the letter still resting in my hands. “I suspect that was why she ripped it and why she returned to it. First in despair, then as a barbed reminder of her real situation.”
“But it wasn’t her real situation.”
Mom shrugged. “How we feel can become our reality, Caroline. Nothing is objective.”
Mat. Again.
I hadn’t thought of him in years, yet memories of him surrounded me. The two of us leaning across library cubicles in college debating history, perspective, and weekend plans. The two of us organizing our schedules so we could take at least two classes together each quarter. His constant chirping about how we created our reality by what we chose to keep, what we chose to remember, and what we called truth.
“So he gave up.” I sighed.
“‘There are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.’”
“That sounds like Dad.” I raised a brow.
“His quotes were sometimes spot on. Credit that one to Pride and Prejudice’s Charlotte Lucas.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes. She scanned the piles of papers. My mind felt numb.
“Speaking of your dad,” she ventured. “I didn’t want to ask earlier, but what did he say when you told him you were coming here?”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“Oh, honey. Didn’t you say he threatened to sue the reporter?”
I twisted to face Mom straight on. “He was just upset.”
“Exactly . . . This is upsetting for him.” Mom studied me with equal directness. “You’re doing this to help him?” Her eyes softened. “He may not see it that way.”
“Does he ever?”
She laughed. It was small, sad, even a touch self-deprecating. There were layers within it I could barely trace before it ended. “Be careful, sweetheart. What you’re learning here . . .” She waved her hands over the letters and the bin of diaries I hadn’t touched yet. “None of this ended in 1941. That’s where it began, and these bands stretched over the years and bound us all, especially your dad.”
She pushed off her stool and walked toward the stairs.
I called after her, “You aren’t going to tell him, are you?”
She turned back. “It’s not my story to tell. I’m bringing you coffee before I head to bed. You’ll need it.”
She disappeared from view and I returned to the letters, far more intrigued now by a love story than my family’s history, but wondering, perhaps, if they were one and the same.
Eleven
At midnight, I called Mat.
“Hello?” He sounded distracted. I grimaced as I did the math in my head. Seven o’clock on a Sunday night.
“It’s Caroline. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize the time. You’re probably eating dinner.”
“This is fine.” I heard background chatter. “Hang on. Let me grab my computer.” Voices called out. “I’ve got a few friends over for burgers. Are you ready to comment?”
“No,” I exclaimed. I felt like once he turned on his computer everything would be set. There’d be no turning back. No room for what I wanted to propose. “I didn’t call for that. In fact, I called to say you’ve got it wrong.”
“How’s that?” Mat’s voice fell in fatigue-tinged sarcasm.
“I have all Caroline Waite’s letters to her sister and all my grandmother’s diary entries covering the same time. Caroline was British—loyal British—and she had a lover, but not a German. He was an Englishman named George. And she mentioned your Paul Arnim—openly, as a good man in love with his wife.” I pulled that letter toward me. The one that inspired the call.
“Listen to this, from a letter dated March 3, 1940:
“‘There’s a German industrialist in Paris—Paul Arnim. I’ve mentioned him before. He’s about forty, and his wife the same, with two small children you want to eat up. Schiap is horrified when the kids come to the salon, but they are angels. Last night at the party, Mrs. Arnim was anxious, almost skittish. I didn’t understand why until I was delivering a gown to her in one of the dressing rooms. I gather they leave for America soon and she was frightened. While all soldiers were, of course, recalled to Germany last year, Mr. Arnim, like many private citizens, stayed for his work. Something has now changed. Her voice pitched high as I raised my hand to knock on the door and I heard Mr. Arnim say, “We will be fine, my love. Trust me. I will always be with you.”’
“That’s not a man involved in an illicit affair, Mat.”
When he didn’t reply, I rushed on. “She goes on to write about how he’d been in the salon several times before and how they’d become friends—how anything Caro set aside for his wife, he purchased. Caro wouldn’t do that or write that way if she was going to betray the woman. Not only that, it doesn’t fit anything I’ve read about her.”
I drew a breath. My spiel had felt like the mock trials in law school, but with less breathing. Now I awaited the verdict. The silence drew out between us.
“Mat? Are you there?”
“I’m here. And . . . I didn’t have any of that. Nothing in my files says Paul Arnim left France before his conscription and subsequent transfer east. You’ve simply got a husband placating a wife.”
“Or a trail to follow.”
“It’s irrelevant, Caroline. He’s not mentioned in the article.”
“He’s the basis of your unvalidated assumptions about my aunt,” I ground out.
“Unvalidated—” he shot back then stopped. “Are we done here? I’ve got guests.”
Something in his tone flashed a memory of another night, another fight, another hurt long ago. Our senior year. The last time we spoke. I took a deep breath to stay in the present.
“Look, this is going wrong . . . I didn’t call to fight. I called because it’s different. The story feels different from anything I expected, and I think if you were to read all this, you’d change your mind.”
“Perhaps I would.” He sighed. “But the affair is irrelevant. Yes, it adds color to her defection, and love affairs add marketability, but I’m talking about history and how we remember it, change as we examine it, and grow from it.”
“But we haven’t grown from it.” The words slipped out.
Mat had no quick retort. Instead silence again filled the line. He had stepped away from wherever he was before and I could no longer hear the din of chatter in the background.
“I’m sorry, Caroline. When I reached out to your dad and to you, I had no idea this was news for you. I . . . I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’ll help me?”
“Fine.” He sighed. “How?”
“I figure if you’re wrong about the affair, you could be wrong about a lot else. Just read the letters.”
“Fine,” he repeated. “I’ll meet you tomorrow.”
“Sorry . . . no . . . I forgot that part. I’m in London.” I wrinkled my nose. “But I’m flying back Tuesday and I’ll bring them with me. You’ve got to see some of this. I’ve read about World War Two politics and rations, some Nazi named Dubbell who made passes at Caro when she first arrived in Paris, and incredible nights in restaurants and clubs. And you were wrong about her being a secretary. When she got back to England, she worked in fabrics. She wrote Margaret that ISRB sent her to Arisaig and Morar in Scotland for a couple months to develop new zippers and canvas. And she didn’t agree with Schiaparelli’s politics at all. In fact—”
“What did you just say?”
“Caro wrote that Schiaparelli was mercenary and implied that, despite being a Communist, she was spying for the Germans.”
“Everyone suspected that. The FBI had her under surveillance the whole time she lived here during the war. I mean about Arisaig and Morar? She wrote about those towns? She mentioned them?”
“Of course. Unless you’re Tolkien, you can’t make up those names.” I expected Mat to laugh. He didn’t. “Mat?”
“I—” He stalled out. “I don’t think she was a secretary.”
“That’s what I’m telling you. She worked fabrics. Designed uniforms.”
“There was no manufacturing anywhere near those towns, Caroline. There were no fabrics in the Scottish Highlands . . . But there was demolition and paramilitary training. Could your aunt have been a spy? Impossible. She’d be the first . . . the first woman? That would make her defection huge . . .” Mat’s voice drifted away.
“Wait. What?”
“You need to stay.” His voice snapped from contemplative to directive. “You need to get over to the National Archives. I can send you what file numbers to request, but they’re a mess so you’ll need to canvas everything from the time Caro left France to that October 1941 letter. No, you’ll need to go beyond. Get files for the next year at least. Then—”
“Slow down. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This is a bigger story, Caroline. If she got training, if she was a spy, this is something new.”
“I’m trying to tell you—”
“And I’m telling you—”
We started talking over each other.
“Stop,” I cried out. “We aren’t getting anywhere. Just come and read everything for yourself. We’ll go to the Archives together.”
Mat huffed a long, loud breath. “Caroline, as much as I want this story—and maybe even to help you—I don’t have that kind of money. I already used most of the Arnim family’s deposit for my last trip to Paris and London. It’s not good business to use everything you’re paid just to do the job.”
“I’ll pay half your ticket.”
“What?” Mat scoffed. I heard typing in the background. “You want to pay over a thousand dollars? One way.”
“I need you.” I blurted the words before thinking them through. They hung between us, heavy with the past, the present, and some undefined future. Three words never felt more weighted and, in many ways, terrifying, but I couldn’t let him turn me down.
I felt his intake of breath and rushed to cut him off. “I’m hiring you. I don’t want a presentation about my family, but I need answers. I’m hiring you to research my family, with me. You just said this is a bigger story, so it’s a win-win for you.”
“I can’t write what I want if you hire me. Is that what you’re doing? Tying my hands? Because—”
“No.” The word came out strong and clear. I knew what it felt like to be backed into decisions by guilt or by trying to please another. Pick this school . . . Take this job . . . Go home to help. “What you write is up to you and I’ll sign anything you want that says that.”
I imagined him rubbing his brows together with his thumb and forefinger as if trying to ease tension in his brain. He’d done it during our chat at the coffee shop. He’d done it during long-ago late-night study sessions.
“I can only imagine what’s in those letters,” he muttered before raising his tone back to full volume. “Look, Caroline, if I want a full-time job and, better yet, best yet, a tenure track position, I need to become a voice in the public forum, an expert outside academia, because that’s what it takes now. The old ‘publish or perish’ is now ‘panel, publish, promote, or perish.’ I can’t let one article go because another may or may not be better.”
“I get it.” I slowed my breathing. “I’m not trying to trick you . . . Unless you choose otherwise, Friday remains your deadline with your current story. Just consider other possible angles.”
As I stated the words, something shifted within me. I wasn’t talking to Mat, the guy who was writing an article about my family; I was talking to Mat, my friend, my secret crush, the smartest guy in the room, and the kindest. Yes, I wanted answers for me, but I also wanted something for him. I’d hurt him our senior year—in ways I was only now recognizing. Not only that, but he’d filled my thoughts over the past forty hours as surely as my aunt and grandmother had. The cacophony of emotions jangling within me was hard to sort and harder to silence—I just knew he was a vital part of whatever this was.
“Trust me, Mat. There’s something here. Something good, for both of us. I can feel it.”
“Why did I ever call you?” he whispered over the line.
It made me smile. I recognized that tone. Mat was coming to London. “What’s that flight you were looking at?”
“This one leaves Boston at ten o’clock, connects in New York, and flies to Heathrow at 11:30 p.m. Tonight.”
“Book it.” I sounded confident, but I was shaking inside. A well of hope had opened within me over the letters, over my aunt, and now over Mat. I was desperate to hang on to it. “Please. You said you aren’t teaching this summer; you’re doing research on your own time. We only have until Friday.”
With a little more back-and-forth—and complaints that he had to kick out his dinner guests—he booked the flight.
“Thank you, Mat. This means a lot to me. It’s not history. It’s . . .” Here we came to the heart of it. The heart Jason saw right away. “It’s my family. My father needs this. So do I.”
“What if you don’t like what we find?”
We.
“It’ll be the truth.” My statement settled within me. I felt comfortable with it. “We’ve lived in lies long enough.”
Twelve
I sat stunned by what I’d done. It was both harder and easier than I imagined. I stared at my phone. It had been the medium of a revolution over the past several minutes, and I was unsure how to approach the fallout. I quickly left a message on my boss’s voicemail asking for more days. Then, still nervous, I texted Jason. Someone needed to know what had just happened.
Finding a treasure trove of information in London. I called Mat, the Atlantic writer, and invited him over. I think I can change the article.
Instantly the three dots appeared . . .
I hope you know what you’re doing.
I waited. No more dots. I hoped I did too.
I laid my phone on the table and rustled through the piles of letters before me. “I blame you,” I whispered.
After all, she was responsible for this. Caroline Amelia Waite—not only for the events eighty years ago but for those of the last ten minutes.
But how could she not change me? All day, I’d read about a woman who chased life and made bold choices. She was only twenty-three when she defected or disappeared or died in 1941, yet she had lived far more than I had, despite my already being five years older. Her words had left me feeling as though I’d experienced nothing, stood for nothing, hoped for nothing.
And those recriminations weren’t wrong. In my heart, I acknowledged I was biding my time, wasting it really, in hopes of finding someplace I belonged. But I wasn’t chasing it. I was waiting for it to come to me. I was waiting—like Sleeping Beauty for her prince—for my life to come.
No more.
It felt as if my destiny was tied to my aunt’s. If I could find her story, I could start my own. Because that’s what it would take—finding her story by discovering the truth. Her letters revealed that, in many ways, she ran from the same demons I did—the same feelings of loss and displacement, abandonment and regret. I was so tired of running, and running in a gray, hazy world compared to the vivid color she evoked.
She wrote of the frenetic Paris scene, hashing out political arguments deep into the night in Montmartre, just as the Lost Generation had done the decade before her. She wrote of weighing Schiap and Dalí’s Communism against Fascism and how those ideas differed from her childhood dinner discussions at Parkley with the likes of Churchill and even King George VI at the table. She conveyed dynamic scenes through her descriptions of the House of Schiaparelli, with its lobster- and circus-themed parties, and Germans and Parisians in a silent, taut standoff. She marked the movements of people from two nations sitting side by side in cafés and then, with the declaration of war, the tense anticipation that held France captive awaiting her enemy’s return. And when the Germans did storm across the border, she wrote of the devastation of France. She wrote of love and life, with a passion when she referred to George, and with concern and wonder over who was going to make the first move in another true World War—and who the last.
There was so much to learn. Mat knew how to conduct the research and I possessed the letters. Perhaps one could inform the other and together we could find the answers.
We.
The word pulled me in. Caro referred to Margaret as such—the better half of her “we.” It was alluring and inviting to think in those terms, to not be alone.
It was late. I was tired. Mat, I reminded myself, was not my friend now. He had been, once long ago, but years had passed between us. I needed to be careful not to presume too much and not to trust him too far.
But he had answered my call and listened. He was coming to London. I couldn’t help letting hope creep close.
I picked up one of Margaret’s diaries to pair with Caro’s letters. I needed a timeline, context, and a better understanding of what exactly I’d invited Mat into.
I’d barely begun when Mom came up the stairs with coffee and a slice of cake on a tray.
“What’s this?”
“I couldn’t decide if you needed a sweet dessert to end your day or a savory one to start it.” She set down the tray and placed the plate and coffee before me. “I landed in the middle and made you a lemon olive oil cake.”
