Chapter Fourteen
Charlotte
New York City, 1938
After Charlotte returned to New York from Egypt, she had nightmares that sent her mother running into her room in the middle of the night. While her other friends had gotten married and moved out of their parents’ homes, Charlotte was still in her childhood bedroom, and needing her mother’s comfort when she awoke screaming about storms and Layla only made her feel more ashamed. Her mother never asked what had caused her to lash out in her sleep; she preferred to offer a cup of tea or a glass of water instead, and, once Charlotte had calmed down enough, slip back to the bedroom she shared with Charlotte’s father just down the hall.
At home, Charlotte was discouraged from mentioning her lost husband and baby. She didn’t speak of the days after the ship sank when, soaking wet and shaking with cold and confusion, two ribs broken, she’d been transported to a hospital and then, when she fought the nurses and refused to stop yelling no matter how much it hurt, she was given a shot and woke up in what turned out to be a women’s psychiatric hospital. She could still remember the pungent smell of disinfectant that permeated every surface. Finally, once she was considered to be reasonably subdued, it was arranged for her to return to New York. By then, she had given up hope. If Henry was alive, surely he would have found her.
Perhaps it was for the best that she not discuss the horrifying end to her time in Egypt, because otherwise she would’ve never engaged in small talk with visitors, instead preferring to relive the way her child had barely been able to catch a breath in between screams as she was carried up to the top deck of the steamer, or how the raindrops on the baby’s cheeks were indistinguishable from her tears.
Charlotte, in her madness, would have been subjected to the concerned looks of her parents’ friends when they stopped by or, worse, the subtle disapproval of the fact that she had lived her life wildly and chosen recklessly. Mothers would point her out to their daughters in church, whisper warnings about what might happen if a young girl roamed too far out of sight.
Ruin and destruction.
One day, in her grief-laden haze, she heard the doorbell ring and recognized the voice of Mr. Zimmerman speaking to her mother down on the front landing. She crept unsteadily into the hallway to eavesdrop, still wearing her nightgown. Her mother curtly informed him that Charlotte had come down with a tropical fever and was unable to have visitors. That there was no telling when she’d be well, and it was best to let her recover.
Mr. Zimmerman told her mother that he would be happy to offer Charlotte a position at the Met once she did, and handed her a letter to pass on to Charlotte. That letter never made it to Charlotte’s hands, but she’d spied the remains of it in the parlor fireplace later that day.
Not long after, she dressed for the first time in weeks and left the house while her mother was out running errands. Inside the Met Museum, she told Mr. Zimmerman that she’d made a swift recovery and requested a position that didn’t require much public interaction. He suggested she join the team as a part-time researcher, working in the Met’s library. When he started to offer his condolences on her loss, she cut him off, explaining that she would prefer not to speak of the past, only the present, and he respected her wishes. On nights that she worked late, she would venture into the Egyptian Art collection, drawn to the Cerulean Queen, where she’d stand and stare at the statue for a good five minutes before moving on.
Hathorkare’s tranquil expression, even with most of her face missing, seemed to convey that Charlotte wasn’t alone, that other women had suffered over the centuries before her and continued living, even if what was scarred and shattered was invisible to the outside world.
For a long time, Charlotte kept herself busy working part-time at the museum while finishing up her undergraduate degree. Most of her friends were occupied with babies and family life that Charlotte had no wish to witness—though every year on Layla’s birthday, she forced herself to walk to the elementary school playground on West 11th Street and observe the girls who were around the same age that Layla would have been as a kind of bittersweet punishment for her sins. If only she and Henry had returned to New York, they might have been here with Layla, pushing her on the swing set. All three of them would be safe. Her parents would have fawned over Layla and accepted Henry within days. Charlotte had been young and stupid, her perspective skewed.
But whenever she spiraled into shame and bitterness, she remembered that there had been extenuating circumstances. Henry and Leon had gotten mixed up in something nefarious, and it was very possible they were in a rush to leave because they were close to getting caught. Which would explain why Henry had become short and distracted around Charlotte and Layla during the last few weeks of their time there. But there was no way to get answers, no way to punish Henry as she desperately wished she could. Rail at him, make him bleed. Even worse, she was alone in her grief. He was the only other person who’d been an integral part of Layla’s short life.
In the meantime, Charlotte began her graduate studies at the Institute of Fine Arts and rose quickly in the museum’s hierarchy despite the fact that she was a woman, mainly due to her industriousness and single-minded focus. When the war finally came to an end, she worried she’d lose her position to a returning veteran, as had happened to several of her female colleagues, but Mr. Zimmerman kept her on staff.
Around the same time, her parents began holding dinner parties at home every week in an obvious effort to pair Charlotte up with an eligible bachelor, and to make her ailing father happy, Charlotte reluctantly obliged, although she still refused to dye her gray streak, despite her mother’s haranguing. At one such party, she was seated next to a former Yale quarterback and current Wall Street banker named Everett, who insisted she expound on the mummification rituals of the ancient Egyptians over the soup course, which turned everyone at the table green except him. They laughed later at the fact that it was his strong stomach that first caught her fancy.
Everett delighted in being surrounded by other vivacious, outgoing sorts, where Charlotte barely tolerated it, but he didn’t seem to mind when her mood darkened and she turned inward, refusing to see him for several days in a row. No doubt Charlotte’s mother had told Everett that Charlotte suffered from some sort of womanly hysteria; he never asked, and Charlotte never volunteered the reason for her capriciousness. In fact, her unavailability probably intrigued Everett, who was considered a top catch in their social circles and had mothers shoving their daughters in his path regularly.
He was intelligent and fun to be around, which was why Charlotte said yes when he proposed to her during dinner at Fraunces Tavern, which he’d chosen because it was the longest-running restaurant in New York City and he knew she appreciated “old things.” They spent the next week up at his family’s house in Maine, where the snow was deep and the fireplaces enormous. His family accepted Charlotte easily, happy to have Everett’s wild days as a single fellow finally curtailed. She enjoyed most the daily sleigh rides. The bitter cold on her cheeks—so different from the furnace-like climate of Egypt—kept the bad memories at bay.
Like many of his generation, Everett had been sent to Europe during the war and fought in terrible battles, but he shared a camaraderie with the other surviving soldiers he’d served with that appeared to soften the worst of the memories. For Charlotte, the frightening wartime years had put her own travails in perspective: Her tragedy was just one of many horrors that existed in the world. Not that the pain eased in any way, but instead of eating away at her insides like an ulcer, it had hardened into a cyst.
Two and a half months before the wedding, when she and her mother were at the dining room table sorting through the guest list prior to sending out invitations, Charlotte mentioned that she was going to tell Everett about Henry and Layla. Of course she didn’t say their names out loud. “I want to tell Everett about what happened in Egypt,” she said instead.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” answered her mother quickly. “There’s no need to bring all that up.”
“But he should know I was married before. It’s only right.”
“You were on the other side of the world. It doesn’t really count. And it wasn’t even for one year.”
Charlotte was surprised that her mother even knew the length of the marriage, as she’d been averse to hearing any details.
Her mother continued. “Consider it the same as having a marriage annulled, like the Catholics do. Poof, never happened. Now, where did I put those stamps?” She bustled off into another room, unwilling to discuss the matter further.
But as Everett escorted Charlotte home a week later, after a party they’d attended at an apartment overlooking Gramercy Park, he announced that they would stop by Egypt after their honeymoon in Greece. “You can take me to all your old haunts,” he said. “After all, if I’m the husband of a curator in the Egyptian Art collection, I ought to have visited at least once.”
“I’m not the curator,” she said, pulling her hand out of his.
“Assistant curator, then. You’ll be curator soon enough.”
“There’s no need to stop in Egypt. Besides, I’ll have to get back to work. And you will as well.”
She tried switching the subject to the groomsmen’s tuxedos, which she couldn’t have cared less about, but Everett wasn’t deterred, insisting he’d change their itinerary first thing the next morning.
So she began to tell him about Egypt. At Fifth Avenue, she spoke of the Met dig team and meeting Henry. By Sixth Avenue, she’d covered their shotgun wedding at the Metropolitan House. By Seventh Avenue, Layla was born. By Eighth Avenue, Henry and Layla were lost to the Nile. Charlotte didn’t explain the accident in detail, as it was too painful. However, the joy of being able to say their names out loud and speak of a time that had been tucked away in the dark recesses of her brain made her almost giddy, like she’d drunk several glasses of champagne.
When they reached the doorstep of her parents’ brownstone, Everett assured Charlotte that he understood why she hadn’t told him, and said he loved her no matter what. But then he didn’t call for two days, which was unusual, and when he finally did, he said he was off to Boston for a work trip.
A week later, just before the invitations were to be mailed, the wedding was called off in a hurried telephone call between their two fathers. Less than a year later, Charlotte’s father died, and her mother began to fail soon after, taking to her bed, uninterested in drink or food. It was right around the time Charlotte had decided to attempt to travel to Egypt with several PhD candidates from her department, a trip that she never made. One night, as Charlotte sat vigil by her bedside, her mother reached up and grabbed Charlotte’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice hoarse.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“No, there is. He was looking for you.”
“Who?”
“We shouldn’t have interfered.”
She closed her eyes, and by the next morning, she was gone. Charlotte figured her last words were those of a confused, frail woman.
Not long after, Charlotte moved out of the brownstone and into the small Greenwich Village apartment on Barrow Street, and fitted her life tightly around her job at the Met.
And that worked, for a time.