De Potter's Grand Tour (13 page)

As he refolded his shirt, pressing the creases flat, he decided two things. First, in the unfortunate case that God so willed it and one day he followed poor Mrs. Martel overboard, he would add a stipulation to his will:
In the event of my body being lost at sea, that a monument in my memory be erected by my wife, in such a place as she may select but where she will also choose to be buried.
And second, he would make full use of the time he was allotted and prove once and for all that he was worth something.

He considered that the jewels he'd bought from the brothers in Egypt were worth something. He should be worth something, too, because of the metal plate in his head. As he touched his finger to his head, he remembered that the doctors had told him the plate was silver. Why hadn't they used gold? He was convinced that if the plate in his head had been made of gold, it wouldn't cause him such pain.

The pain was worsening. He thought he might vomit and reached for the basin. No, he wasn't going to vomit. He was going to faint. He was going to fall, just as he had once fallen off the parallel bars, careening backward in his stateroom, his head about to hit the floor as he braced himself against the sound, that awful crack, but first—

“Poor dear, what's wrong? Oh, you're ill, my love.”

He was her love, and she was his.
Ma bien-aimée.
She had arrived in time to save him and knew exactly what to do when he had one of his spells. She would begin by helping him into bed, and the rest would follow: the cold cloth draped over his forehead to cool the molten metal in his head; the menthol cone; the soothing touch of her hand.

Dantès survived, and Armand would, too. His love had kept him from falling. He vowed that someday he would do the same for her.

 

Shelter Island to Nice

A
NYONE WHO KNEW
the de Potters when they were young saw that success came easily to them. The pieces of their material lives fell neatly into place. Aimée could point to a painting in a gallery, and it was hers. Armand was known for his talent of always being in the right place at the right time, when the rarest ancient treasures were first offered for sale. Together, the de Potters kept adding to their possessions, filling their rooms with art and antiquities gathered from around the world. As the tourist business grew, they had more money to spend on beautiful things. They were always on the lookout when they traveled, with cash in hand.

The one addition to their lives that eluded them was a child. For the first few years of their marriage they enjoyed their freedom, even as they prepared themselves for what they assumed was inevitable. But by their fourth anniversary, the inevitable hadn't happened. They launched a more concerted effort, but nothing came of it. A year passed, two years, five years. Aimée began to fear that she would never be a mother. Armand assured her that their child would come along in his own time—and he finally did, ten years into their marriage and three weeks before his due date, on June 8, when Aimée had gone to visit her brother Tom in his summer cottage on Shelter Island.

Luckily, Armand had returned to America from his most recent tour and reached the island in time for the birth of their son. And luckily for Aimée, she was vigorous enough to tolerate a labor complicated by excessive bleeding. When Victor emerged, his lips were a shade of blue that the doctor thought ominous. But he soon brightened with a good rubbing, and both his mother and he grew stronger with each passing day.

For the first six years of his life, Victor was carried around the world as if he were a porcelain doll. He was as portable as a doll, as willing a traveler. He was reasonable about sampling the foods of different cultures, as long as he could have a sweet at the end of the meal. He spoke French fluently by the age of four. He loved steamships and the adventure of stormy transatlantic passages. But he was also fragile, always thinner than other boys his age, with weak vision and prone to fevers and respiratory ailments. After a doctor in Cairo finally warned the de Potters against taking their son on extended excursions, Aimée stayed behind to care for him.

She stayed behind with Victor in the fall of 1897, when Armand set off on his third tour around the world. They boarded at the Villa Francinelli in Nice, where Aimée experienced the unfamiliar discomfort of idleness. Victor was enrolled in the neighborhood school, and in the afternoon their nursemaid, Rachel, took him to the park. At her meals with other boarders, Aimée pretended that she had somewhere to go each day. Alone in her room, she passed the time writing long letters to her husband.

She was secretly glad when, in December, Rachel announced that she was returning to Dijon to help with the care of her aunt's new baby. With Rachel gone and the school closed for the winter vacation, Aimée had Victor all to herself. She dressed him in his trim little sailor suit and took him for strolls along the Promenade des Anglais. On warm afternoons, they spent hours on the beach, stacking smooth flat pebbles into towers.

A box arrived the day before Christmas with presents from Armand. For Aimée there was an antique ceramic bowl with a dragon crowning the lid. For Victor there was a thick leatherbound stamp album, and he immediately set out to fill it with his collection of postage stamps.

She watched her son as he sat on the floor beside his box of loose stamps. From time to time he would push away his black curls that kept falling across his glasses. He hummed softly, absorbed in his work.

She was about to pick up a book when he asked, “What's this one, Maman?”

“Let's see—why, it's from Algeria.”

As she examined the stamp, she was surprised at how clearly she could remember its source. They had sailed to Algiers on the SS
Columbia
in December 1893 and bought stamps and postcards the day they arrived.

“This must be from Egypt,” Victor said, separating the stamp from the others. Aimée sat on the floor beside him to see the stamp more clearly.

It was, in fact, from a shop in Ghizeh. They'd first taken Victor to see the Pyramids when he was three. She remembered clutching him as they rode together on a camel across the desert. Then, on the little steamer that carried them up the Nile, she'd tied a leash around Victor's waist so she could keep him from wandering to the foredeck, where the rail was low.

Here was a stamp from the Vatican, purchased the same day in 1894 that they'd taken Victor to mass at St. Peter's, and he'd copied the other worshippers and lowered himself to his knees when the papal procession came up the aisle.

And these were American stamps Armand had brought home from a trade show of philatelists when they were renting a furnished cottage on West Twenty-Third Street in Los Angeles. Aimée remembered New Year's Day was mild that year, and they had taken the train to Pasadena to see the Flower Tournament.

“Is this a real stamp, Maman?”

It was the souvenir stamp of the Chicago Exhibition, where they'd gone in the spring of 1893 to see Armand's collection of bronzes on display. They'd left Los Angeles on the Santa Fe route that April, and in western Kansas the train was brought to a halt by a dust storm, which turned to snow. Victor had developed a hacking cough that persisted through the night. They were all exhausted when they arrived in Chicago thirty-six hours late.

“This is just an ordinary one,” Victor said, a little hurt, as if he'd been tricked. Aimée recognized it as a Duval stamp from Paris, where they'd lived for three months in an apartment at 60 avenue d'Iéna, in the sixteenth arrondissement. She remembered that she'd decorated Victor's birthday cake with roses. A few days later, she had hired Rachel to help with Victor's care. She was amused to recall that they'd brought Rachel with them when they traveled to the seaside in Brittany, discovering too late that Victor's nursemaid had a sensitivity to the sun. While Rachel stayed behind to read magazines in the cabana, Victor and Armand and Aimée splashed in the water and built sand castles. After Victor caught a crab, he carried it about in a pail with him all day. He was still small enough that when they took long walks along the beach, Armand and Aimée could hold his hands and swing him between them.

That was the same summer when Armand surprised Aimée with his announcement that he had arranged for them to go to a spa near Nevers. They'd been there twice before, and each time it had been awfully hot. It was as hot as ever in Nevers that year, but Armand was hopeful that the water treatment at the spa would provide relief from his headaches. After three weeks, he had declared himself cured, and they returned to Paris. But the cure didn't last forever.

“This one is from India, I think.”

No, Victor was mistaken—it was a stamp from the bazaar in Tunis. They'd sailed to Tunis in December 1895 and celebrated Christmas in their hotel room. That was the year she'd bought curtains at the bazaar, Armand had found a cartouche bag for himself, and they'd bought the stamp for Victor.

Here was a souvenir stamp from Carthage, where they'd spent the day wandering through the ruins and peering into cisterns. And one from Oudna, where they'd gone in a carriage on New Year's Day to see the Roman ruins. She would never forget how the wind had whipped up sand spouts, and the driver stopped the horse in the shelter under an ancient aqueduct. They'd kept the blinds pulled closed and eaten their lunch inside the carriage, but still enough sand had gotten into the carriage that Victor had a coughing fit, which relented only when the windstorm had passed.

Here was a stamp from Malta, and another from Egypt that must have been bought the year they stayed for an entire month in Cairo, when Victor was five. They did not bring Rachel along to Egypt, and Aimée was frantic trying to keep up with Victor, who wanted to dart across the busy streets when he saw a flash of something interesting on a merchant's cart. She had expected it would be easier when they met up with a De Potter touring party for a trip up the Nile. But the day before they were to board the steamer, Victor developed a high fever and coughed up yellow phlegm. They'd called in a German doctor, who diagnosed pneumonia. Armand was obliged to leave his family and lead the Nile cruise on his own, while Aimée had stayed with Victor at the hotel in Cairo. She sat up with him for four nights in a row and would have collapsed from exhaustion if the hotel hadn't found her a Sudanese girl to fill in while she rested in the afternoons.

Though Victor had recovered completely, the illness marked a turning point for the family. That was their last trip together to Egypt and the last time Aimée and Victor joined Armand on any of the extended tours to the south and east. The family still traveled on trips to the United States and across France and Northern Europe. But while Armand led his tours around the world, Aimée stayed behind to keep watch over their delicate son.

*   *   *

Following his tradition of falling ill during the holiday season, Victor caught a cold and sneezed and coughed through the week after Christmas. On New Year's Eve, Aimée put him to bed early and then spent the evening alone in her room. She had a sore throat herself, and except for the warm crackling of the wood fire, her surroundings were unbearably dreary. Her husband was across the world, and though Aimée and Victor had been given the chance, they couldn't keep up with him. And if they couldn't keep up with him, then they would be confined to the prison of whatever place they were expected to call home. What was home but a cell with four walls and a door with a glass knob that had a spiderweb of cracks across one facet? And why hadn't any of her friends in Nice called on her that day? And what if Victor's health worsened?

Armand would have insisted that Victor was more robust than she allowed, and his frequent illnesses would make him stronger in the long run—that's what a doctor in Geneva had once told them, and Armand would have repeated it, if he'd been there to comfort her. She brooded about her husband's absence, the emptiness that seemed to rub against her skin, the pasty feeling on her tongue. It struck her as absurdly wrong that on the last day of December in the year 1897, Armand wasn't there for her to kiss. She was a spirited American woman, it was New Year's Eve, and she was alone in her room, watching the flames devour a log while her husband was off frolicking with his party in the gardens of Macao.

Her dear mother had died two years earlier, when the de Potters were in Damascus. Aimée hadn't had a chance to say goodbye. And now there was her father to worry over, a widower, sickly and confined to his farmhouse in Tivoli. He had what she liked to describe as an indomitable disposition, yet it seemed the world was going to have its way and make him suffer, along with everyone else. A letter from him to Victor had arrived the previous week. He had explained that he had “pleurisy of the left side” and encouraged his grandson to obey his parents and say his prayers. He had signed the letter, “Good night.”

It was all too much for her, and she began to weep. She wept silently, pressing her fist against her lips. She wept loudly, muffling the sound with her pillow. She wept with disgust at her inability to control her emotions. She wouldn't have thought it possible to feel so alone—this despite that she could have picked up her pen and written to her husband, imploring him to come home, and he would have obliged, finding a substitute to conduct his Grand Tour. Her awareness of the strength of their love should have been enough to ease her loneliness. But she couldn't ask him to come home, and it would be seven months before she and Armand were together again.