Just as they topped the long climb and spied through a phalanx of trees a villa atop the hill, white with green shutters, a voice called out, “This is private property!”
A stooped man was hurrying toward them across two wooden planks over an irrigation ditch. Nanée called to him that they were looking for a place to rent.
Dr. Balthazar Thumin, as the man introduced himself, feigned reluctance—it would be very expensive—but led them up a steep walk to a three-story villa with ivy climbing to a terra-cotta roof. He retrieved a huge key ring from a groom’s cottage, opened a squeaky iron gate, and led them up an untended walk, the gravel poking at Nanée’s feet; she’d had her shoes resoled, but she’d already worn them through again delivering messages for Varian.
The gardens were in disrepair, the oval pond covered in a foul-smelling green mold and surrounded by rangy hedges and geraniums, zinnias, and marigolds long past bloom, the paths distinguishable only by the difference between weeds fighting through gravel and ones thriving in loamy soil. The view from the belvedere, though—just an open gallery flanked by plane trees, but belvedere sounded so much more poetic—was wide and forever, begging for a painter to set up an easel. Sharp-needled pines and the soft silvers and gray-greens of olive trees stretched to the parallel railroad and trolley tracks and, beyond them, a stunning sea and cloud-dotted sky. For the briefest moment Nanée was standing on the belvedere of Marigold Lodge, looking down the manicured lawn-and-willow-tree stretch of Superior Point to Pine Creek Bay and Lake Macatawa.
As the doctor began opening the shutters on the villa’s six sets of French doors, T whispered that even if the inside were as ruined as the gardens, Danny and she could never afford this. It didn’t cost anything to look, though, and what was Nanée’s wealth but an accident of birth, anyway? She might keep her downtown room too, but she wanted, suddenly, to have Peterkin grow up in a house like she’d grown up in, where he might settle into a window seat or the branches of one of these trees with a book about King Arthur or Joan of Arc, reading English with her the way she’d read French with her governess and piecing together a suit of armor from tin foil. She found herself longing to have room about her, quiet gardens to walk in, people she loved and who loved her sleeping under the same oddly meandering roof.
It must be her age—newly thirty-one—or perhaps this moment in time. She’d turned thirty in a world that had declared itself at war without really doing much about it. The Nazis had taken care of that, occupying Paris and half of France and installing their Vichy lapdogs to run the rest of the country. Now, with peace declared, the war seemed so much more real, and only begun. Just that morning they’d woken to shocking newspaper photos of Pétain shaking Hitler’s hand at Montoire. Yet despite her American passport, France had become the only home Nanée knew, the only one she wanted.
“Do let’s have a look,” she insisted. Then more loudly, for the doctor’s hearing, “This reminds me of home, although of course it’s much smaller.”
The doctor took a pack of Gauloises Bleues from his pocket and lit one. He didn’t offer them cigarettes. He was that kind of old-fashioned; he couldn’t imagine any decent woman would smoke.
“There are eighteen bedrooms,” he said. “As I said, it will be very expensive.”
“You’ll negotiate the price before you show us the place?” Nanée asked.
Inside, a black-and-white-marble entry hall opened into the “Grand Salon,” one of three salons on the ground floor. It had a piano, an elaborate candelabra, plenty of Louis XV furniture, a stone fireplace as tall as Nanée, cold now but with brass andirons welcoming new logs, and ugly wires running along the baseboards everywhere. Electricity! Nanée caught her own reflection in an age-spotted mirror over the mantel, the thing huge and gilt and, if she wasn’t careful, revealing her absolute glee in its smoky glass. Beside the mirror, the unmoving hands of a round brass clock read 11:45 although it was midafternoon. Stairs to the second floor opened into a library much like the one back in Evanston, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a ladder to reach the higher books. Doors from the library led to spacious bedrooms, each with a mahogany double bed, a marble fireplace, an armoire, and, Nanée was a bit discouraged to see, a washstand with chamber pot discreetly tucked away. But there was, blessedly, a flush toilet on this floor and one on the third floor too. And everything was in awfully good shape for a house that appeared to be inhabited by nothing but ghosts.