How to break it to him gently? “Willie, do you mean for us to live at Chavaniac? Because otherwise, it’d seem somehow disrespectful to transform it into just another place to throw parties.”
He leaned back like a man rejected. “Make it into a museum, for all I care.”
A museum? That too seemed like an impractical thing to think about during a war, but maybe if people had learned the lessons of the past, the war wouldn’t have come about in the first place. I knew monuments to kings and conquerors veritably littered the French countryside, but I was aware of only a few memorials for Lafayette—the hero who set the French on a path to becoming the republic they were now dying in trenches to defend.
I gripped Willie’s arm. “A museum is a marvelous idea.”
My husband’s expression warred between confusion, irritation, and surprise. He hadn’t made the suggestion with any seriousness, but seemed happy that I was happy. “A museum?”
“Yes!” I felt something growing in the hollow place inside me—a new creation we might conceive together. Something other than our children that might outlive us both. “It could be a museum to the alliance of democracies. Even if France, Britain, and America don’t always agree, we share a history of ideals worth fighting for.”
And perhaps it wasn’t the only alliance that could be reinvigorated . . .
Willie squinted, and I could almost think his thoughts. It was one thing to buy me real estate. An investment. Something he could sell if times got hard. I was suggesting the wholesale donation to charity, which made it all the more touching that he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. Just to please me, he was actually considering the monumental folly of buying this chateau with his own money only to turn it into a public museum. So I let him off the hook. “We’ll start an international subscription. Create a foundation. Recruit contributors. No need to bankrupt our children.”
My husband exhaled in relief before his sense of competitiveness kicked in. “We’ll have to move swiftly and bargain in person before someone buys it out from under us. I’ll go to France to arrange it before the winter makes a crossing even more dangerous than it already is.”
This was a rare and important opportunity that might never come again—too exciting for me to quibble about any ulterior motives. It was worth the risk, which is why I said, “I’m going with you.”
* * *
—
On a cold blustery day, as our trunks were being loaded into our ship bound for France, our son Billy asked, “Why c-can’t we come with you to see Lafayette’s castle?”
“It’s not safe,” my husband barked, unsteady with his crutch. I shot him a warning look, for we’d been quarreling about this for days, but he was too drunk to heed me. “The sea is riddled with mines, not to mention submarines waiting to torpedo ships, and yet your mother insists on risking her life.”
Until recently, Willie had somehow convinced himself that I didn’t really mean to go. For the past few weeks, we’d worked together to raise, almost overnight, a veritable fortune to buy Lafayette’s birthplace. We’d thrown ourselves into the venture, enjoying every minute of it. It had been quite like the old days—a reminder that we could move mountains together if we tried. But when Willie learned I’d booked passage with him to France, he’d lapsed into drunken fury, telling me it was a mother’s place to stay with her children.
I might’ve excused his behavior as romantic chivalry if only he’d refrained from mentioning mines and torpedoes in front of the boys. Now he’d frightened our children, and I felt consumed by a fury of my own. “Oh, you mustn’t worry about us,” I hastened to reassure the boys. “We’ll be gone only a few weeks, and by then you’ll be back at your boarding school with all your friends, having too much fun to miss us. In the meantime, the governess will spoil you with every sort of candy, and I shall not be any the wiser!”
Unfortunately, my boys were both too old now to be distracted this way. They knew Mr. Vanderbilt had died making this same crossing, which is why we now owned the hotel. The dangers of war had become painfully real when their cousin Victor had been shot down. Now Ashley quietly sobbed against my side, and Billy pleaded with us not to go.
Since there was no way to convince my sons there was no danger, I decided it was wrong to try. Like Minnie, they would have to face, sooner or later, that life was full of partings, and that none of us was ever truly safe. “You must be very brave, my darlings. Your father and I are doing something important that we hope you may one day be quite proud of.”