The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti by Annie Vanderbilt

Author:Annie Vanderbilt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

Four

Lily trotted down the beach along a narrow, breathtakingly beautiful sweep of white sand. A short way along she stopped, stripped down to her black one-piece swimsuit, and ran splashing into the water.

She had the sea to herself, the warm salty sea where one morning in June, Justine Lafond had met Freddy Crisp for a swim—just like this, before breakfast. As the story went, oft repeated in the family, Freddy was a sober American not given to frolicking in water or on land, so he lay on his back, buoyed by the salt, still wearing his glasses, considering the soft, romantic Mediterranean sky. Justine, who was by no means a sober woman, came up under him and tipped him onto his toes. He was tall enough that his feet touched bottom and his glasses stayed dry, but Justine, like a silvery minnow, darted around and down and between his legs. On the second floor of the Hotel de la Plage, Mrs. Crisp, dressed in a peignoir, strolled onto the balcony with her feckless dachshund, Fritzy, squirming in her arms. Justine closed her legs at the same moment as Freddy lost his footing and, catching sight of his mother, went under. Mrs. Crisp, on shore, held her breath, as did her son underwater, though he was not, as she supposed, searching for his glasses.

It was later the same day, after lunch, that Freddy had announced his intention to marry, and Mrs. Crisp had observed, “It’s about time.”

Lily loved to remember. Here, in France, in the village where Paul’s mother had grown up and met her Freddy and sailed off to the New World, to a ranch in Idaho, Lily felt the past strongly—her own wayward history as well as the incestuously flavored past of the French Lafonds. Memories and rumors shadowed her in the mornings as she trotted down the hill to the beach, as she stood on the terrace of the Hotel de la Plage and chatted with Adèle, as she slid into the sea and felt its limpid grip, its slow caress. As she stroked and kicked in a sudden, energetic burst toward shore.

How different this was from the landscape of her youth, the small wooded lake and varnished, yellowing pine log cabin her parents had owned in northern Wisconsin. As children, she and her two sisters had spent their summers there, swimming to the canvas-covered raft anchored off the end of the dock, climbing up the ladder and then plunging again into the water, snorkeling over the fish beds behind their mother in her leopard-print swimsuit, on the lookout for Mr. Renquist’s remains. Mrs. Renquist had scattered her husband’s ashes on the lake and Oscar Fern had teased his daughters, “If you find something that resembles a shell, it may be Mr. Renquist.” Lily’s older sister, Esther, had collected what she claimed were traces of their deceased neighbor in a peanut butter jar that she kept on a shelf above the couch, between a tinfoil-wrapped copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and a shiny black rock.

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