THIRTEEN

Victor

Victor had not moved an inch in his sleep. He woke to what sounded like the Ocean Sounds setting on a noise machine. The morning waves were faint, coming from the other side of the house, peppered by the guttural hecklings of tropical birds. His jacket was cool from drool. Gone was the cat, replaced by a wheeze in his chest. He sat up, scanning the room for a device that would tell him the time. Instead he found Felix’s mother, Johanna, sitting beside him.

“Oh, shit.” He fumbled for his glasses.

“Come here often?” she said, amused by her own joke.

Victor shot up, glancing down to make sure his pants were zipped, that he hadn’t inadvertently exposed himself. He often woke with his hand resting on his crotch. It would migrate there in the night like a dog seeking heat.

“Here.” Johanna handed him his glasses.

She had changed into jeans and a white shirt with ruffles down the front. The mother-of-the-groom jewelry had been put away in exchange for a gold chain that ended somewhere in her mom cleavage. She looked like a woman you’d see in the supermarket, never suspecting she’d come home to this. When she slapped Victor on his cheek, which she did and pretty hard, he could see the looseness of her skin over the side of her bra.

“Up you go.”

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Castillo.”

“Did you enjoy yourself last night?”

It made him uncomfortable to watch an older woman, leaning back, asking him if he had enjoyed himself. She used to snuggle up with a hairy Cuban man in this bed. He looked out the window. Had Kezia really left with that walking can of hairspray?

“You’re a strange boy.” She scrunched her face at him.

“I don’t mean to be.”

“Do you have a lot of friends?”

“That’s a personal question.” Victor cleaned his glasses on his shirt.

“Not if you have a lot of friends.”

He could sense Johanna trying to recall the dossier that Caroline had surely given her. Nathaniel would be the one officiating her son’s wedding. Paul would only want to talk finance and home design. So who was the likable goofball, Victor or Sam? She had thought it was Victor. Now she could see she had been mistaken.

“I can call a cab back to the hotel,” he offered.

“You can call for one,” she said, laughing, “but it won’t come here. It’s okay. Rest. We were debating if we should wake you up.”

“We?”

“Felix and his new bride. They spent the night in the junior bedroom.”

“Is that the one with the bathroom with the wooden stall attached to it?”

Had he had diarrhea in the honeymoon suite? Typical.

“We can all go over to the brunch in an hour.” Johanna glanced at her wristwatch. “Caroline thought I should kick you out,” she confided, “but I’m fine with sleeping in a guest room. I don’t need to sleep somewhere specific. Such a big house. Sometimes I like to sleep in a different room. I like waking up to a different ceiling.”

She was lost in thought, looking at the picture of her late husband and Wilbur. Some pig. Victor found himself hoping for something selfish: to love someone for so long that when that person died, he was the primary person to whom people offered condolences.

“It’s good to make little changes,” Johanna continued. “Look at the cat. He can say: I have had such a full day—I ate a tin of fish and I woke up on a pile of laundry!”

He liked the idea of Johanna’s hair crunched against a new surface every night, running around, marking her own house with naps.

“Anyway.” She examined one of her buttons. “I am glad you had a nice time. You just want to give your child something he’ll remember.”

“Barring blunt-force trauma, I can’t see how either of them will forget.”

“What is ‘blood-first trauma’?”

“It means conked on the head. It means they’ll remember the wedding.”

“Oh. It’s funny. Memory is funny, you know? I remember Felix in that photo, the one with the blowfish, and I remember thinking: Will today be the first day he remembers? Will this be the formative experience?”

“Felix turned out all right.”

“What is your earliest memory?”

Victor could think of nothing. He was unaccustomed to being asked such candid questions about himself. Certainly not by his family members, who were not pensive by nature, and certainly not by his friends, who seemed to feel Victor was pensive enough without prodding.

“You should shower outside.” She bounced off the bed with surprising agility. “The pressure is very good.”

“I can shower back at the hotel,” he said, unsure if this was true since, last he checked, the bathroom was locked.

“It’s cedar and flagstone,” she said, settling the argument.

Rich people had a thing for outdoor showers. They needed to reconnect with nature. Victor, who had the occasional roach problem, knew just how unnecessary this was. If you do nothing, nature will reconnect with you. Only people safe in the knowledge that their moments of roughing it are fake and their moments of comfort are real get a kick out of standing on a rock and fiddling with a corroded knob.

He got up and Johanna froze, staring over his shoulder. His gaze merged with hers as they looked back at the bedspread. A silver key glinted on the fabric. Victor had forgotten to put it back in the shell. Then he had slept on it.

“You would not make a very good Princess Pea.” Johanna tossed the key in her hand. “Did you manage to open the drawers with this?”

“I—I was just playing with it before I passed out,” he said, ashamed. “Sorry.”

“You were snooping. You shouldn’t snoop,” she said flatly.

“Not unless you’re going to do it effectively.”

She placed the key in the shell and moved to the side of her dresser. It hadn’t occurred to him to access the drawer through the side, but that was the point. She felt for a seam in the wood, moving her nails along a crack. Then she paused and lifted the chain from inside her shirt to reveal a small gold key at the end.

“I wear this all the time.”

Victor tried not to imagine how warm that key must be.

She strummed the row of drawer fronts. “These are for show.”

She shook the dresser, tilting it so that Victor could see the drawers rattle in a synchronized fashion. They weren’t separate but a row of fake drawers, the same as beneath the kitchen sink in his apartment. Johanna backed herself against the wall and removed a long metal box until she was practically stabbing herself in the gut with it. She gestured at Victor to come over and have a look.

“You don’t have to show me what’s in there,” Victor said.

She was probably making a big deal out of a small deal. Like how his grandfather used to slip him five dollars and tell him not to spend it all in one place.

“Why? Are you a thief ?”

“I just don’t want you to feel like I was going through your things.”

“But you were going through my things.”

She unlocked the drawer with the key still attached to her neck, like a businessman getting his tie stuck in the office shredder. Victor wasn’t sure what to expect. Gold bricks? Rare cigars? Passports from twelve different countries, each with her photo? She cracked open a black satin case on its tiny hinges.

He was not a jewelry person. As a heterosexual male, his interest in jewelry was confined to female body piercings and the vague dread of one day sacrificing two months’ salary for an engagement ring. But he was not a blind person either. Inside the case were necklaces and lockets, strings of pearls that looked like they had been bought by the yard off the world’s most expensive spool, jade brooches, pins with scarabs and cartouches, emeralds as dark as the bottom of a well, earrings the size of tribal earlobe expanders. It was like looking into a pirate’s chest.

She winked at him. “Not bad, huh?”

He had heard rich people brag about their wealth plenty. Caroline, in particular, turned false modesty into an art. But it was charming to hear Johanna do it, as if she had won her life on a fluke. It’s how he hoped he would behave if he were in her shoes.

“These are ancient.” She gestured at the emeralds. “Your great-great-great-great-grandmother could have bought them.”

“No, she couldn’t have.”

Victor had no way of knowing this. Maybe he was descended from rich dukes and duchesses. But someone in his family would have mentioned something by now. And they would have kept mentioning it at every Passover for the past three decades.

“I kept everything in a safe but moved all my jewelry to my bedroom after Diego died. I like having it near me when I go to sleep. Besides, it always struck me as a little criminal, keeping jewelry like this in a cold box. You know what I mean?”

“I don’t know much about jewelry.”

“You don’t need to know about something to see how special it is.”

He couldn’t wait to tell Kezia about this. Kezia, who would have one of two reactions: (a) gasp as Victor described the Holy Grail for any jewelry lover or (b) tell him it’s nice that he was impressed, but anyone who didn’t know what the hell they were looking at would be.

Johanna snapped the case shut. He felt jarred by his inability to see her stash, followed by a discomfort at his own jarring by ladies’ jewelry being taken away. Maybe he was just upset by the idea of all of this being taken away. Every minute that passed was a minute that brought him closer to cold pizza breakfasts in Sunset Park.

Johanna began shifting the drawer back into place.

“What’s that?” Victor spotted a folded piece of paper in the back.

“Oh, that . . .” She looked at it as if she, too, were seeing it for the first time.

She watched him unfold it. It was a faded drawing. On the bottom was the same type of writing as on the seating cards from last night, a delicate cursive. In the center was a necklace with a fist-sized blue stone hanging from a V of diamonds and multiple cords of pearls. It was more of a neck brace than a piece of jewelry. It would obscure the nationality of whoever wore it. More diamonds formed a tight wreath around the blue stone, as if creating a protective circle of worship. And cut at the very center of the stone, barely visible, was the shape of a teardrop.

They examined the page like lost tourists studying a map. When he brought it closer to his face, he realized the script was in French. He had been expecting German.

“Cool,” Victor said because he didn’t know what else to say.

“Nifty” was something else he said, unfortunately. “Is it in here?”

“The necklace? No.” She smiled ruefully and dropped the paper back in the drawer. “In spirit, maybe.”

“Or in France? This is French, yeah?”

“Yes, somewhere in France. One likes to think. I hope to see it before I die.”

Victor had no response to this. He feared reminding her of mortality, feared she would suddenly remember her husband, feared his own hubris in thinking he had ever distracted her enough to forget. He was left to shut the drawer while Johanna walked slowly over to the window.

“I’ve had that sketch for a very long time.”

She was starting to sound like a vampire: Yes, but how long have you been seventeen?

“My mother still has a Michael Dukakis campaign mug.”

She turned from the window to shoot him a look, a quicksilver shift in facial muscles that startled him. He wondered if maybe she had dementia, the way she kept looking at him as if for the first time. But then she gathered herself and leaned on her palms on the sill behind her, her shoulders rounding.

“I never talk about this.” She smirked, wrinkles springing from the corners of her eyes. “You’ve been to Paris, yes?”

Victor shook his head.

“Really?”

Her surprise comforted him. Everyone at this wedding looked at him like he never left the house. It was nice to have just one person assume that he did.

“Well, I don’t have to sell you on Paris. But you must go. There is no place like it. The bridges and the parks, the museums, the cafés you can sit in for hours, and then, at night, the Seine making the reflection of the lights wiggle. And there’s always a landmark. It’s impossible to get lost. Unless you want to. Diego and I used to go every year on the first weekend in May.”

“That’s this weekend.”

“I know that.” She smiled. “He knew all the restaurants, I knew all the hidden corners. We made a good pair. I used to show him the apartment where I lived as a girl—it had this beautiful courtyard with a rosebush and a bench everyone used to tie their bicycles to—and he’d always pretend to see something new each time. He’d say, ‘Oh, look, they put plants on the sill’ or ‘I never noticed how many window panes there are.’ I think he thought I would be disappointed if we didn’t see something new. But I didn’t care. I went out of habit, a selfish little pilgrimage to my childhood.”

“You don’t sound like you’re from Paris.”

“I’m not. I was raised in a suburb of Berlin. My parents got married too young. They were headed toward a divorce but my mother was fighting it. After the war, there were not so many German boys to marry if the first one didn’t take. She wanted a little time to make it work without me in the picture so she sent me away.”

“That’s awful.”

Johanna swung her legs up and tucked her whole body into the windowsill. “Well, certainly different from now—aisles of books filled with instructions on how not to make the child feel like it’s her fault. But in the summer of 1956, I lived with my aunt, my mother’s older half sister. Her father was French and he left her a beautiful apartment on rue Charlot, which was not so nice a neighborhood but très charmant. She had the entire top floor, bending around the courtyard so she could wave good night to me from her window. It was perfect. You can’t imagine what it is to be in Paris as a twelve-year-old girl.”

“Probably not.” Victor sat back down on the bed.

“Ella Fitzgerald and Edith Piaf coming from the radio, little cars putting around with their round headlights like the eyes of snakes. Notre Dame, still covered in soot. The day I arrived, I walked from the train station to my aunt’s apartment by myself. I was so proud. I was also dressed like a German. Socks up to here, no scarf, sweater ten sizes too big, and my hair pulled back like this—”

She combed her fingers through her hair, giving herself a temporary facelift.

“That’s what that picture is from.” She nodded at the photo of herself outside the café. “I hadn’t unpacked my trunk when my aunt marched me out of the house, to La Samaritaine, to buy me a dress and shoes. I remember suggesting that she go through my luggage first because my mother would be unhappy if my aunt wasted money buying me something I already owned. She just looked me up and down, you know, like a bubble in the wallpaper that needed to be popped, and said, “I don’t think we’re in danger of that, ma bichette.”

“So wait—she was all French?”

“No, she was half German. Everyone in this story is at least a little bit German.”

“Oh.”

“It was still . . . unfashionable to be German in France. But my aunt was French in every way that counted. She loved Paris so much. She took me to see every museum, though there wasn’t one on every corner as there is now. She showed me the sites from a glass-roofed bus. She bought me pastels on the Quai Voltaire and we’d sit in the Tuileries and sketch the statues. But I knew her favorite activity was to be by herself, playing with her jewelry. She was a widow by then, alone in this big apartment—I think of her a lot these days, with Diego gone, what that must have been like, to be in that space without her husband. Sometimes, at night, I spied on her from across the courtyard. My French was so bad. Granuleux, she called it. Plus I had no friends in Paris except for an older lady. So when night fell, I think we were in the same boat. Or two separate lonely boats. I’d see the lightbulb go on in her closet and watch her remove this wooden box from the top shelf. She’d sit on her bed in her nightgown with her legs splayed out like a girl and paw through her jewelry.”

“What was she looking for?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was she organizing it?”

Johanna shrugged. “Same thing I am looking for when I show you my collection. These are a woman’s museum, curated by memory. I know girls like their sparkly things, which is how love often starts, from the outside. But then it finds its depth. Imagine the feeling you have when you look at a painting. You think of who made it and how, where it’s been, what the value of the painting is to the world and what its value is to you personally, how powerful it becomes when those values overlap.”

“I hate that feeling, actually.”

“Me, too.” She smiled. “I like to think that no one else understands my favorite art except for me and the artist.”

“And you want everyone else out of your gallery.”

“Exactly! But with jewelry, you do not have this problem. Imagine you can poke your head through the canvas of Monet’s water lilies and put them around your neck. You can rub them when you’re nervous or bite them in your teeth. Imagine you can lay them over your heart, know that people who are dead and gone have laid them over their hearts. Jewelry is as alive as whomever it touches. Its purpose is the reverse of a painting: it is a blank canvas that gets filled by the person who wears it, not the person who made it.”

“Like a mood ring.”

“A moonstone?”

“No, like a . . . never mind. Go on, sorry.”

“So one day in early August, I see a boy my age, maybe a few years older, handing out flyers at a bookstall. I never went through a phase where I didn’t like boys. Never.”

Victor smiled and wiped at the layer of cat hair on his pants.

“He was passing out flyers for a show in the ninth and I convinced my aunt to take me. First she said it wasn’t safe at night, then she said there were too many hills and steps, then she said she didn’t like music—and that’s when I knew she was running out of excuses. She didn’t want me going alone so we went together, but we couldn’t find the place. We kept circling back over the same cobblestone bends. I insisted we look just a little longer. I wanted to play at being an adult, at sitting at a bar and listening to French music as if I could understand a whole line of it. But it was getting dark. She was tired. I looked at her flushed face, the zipper on her skirt twisting forward as she walked, and I saw her age for the first time. So we gave up and hailed a taxi.

“When we got home, I knew right away that something was wrong. The key turned too easily in the lock because the door wasn’t locked. I remember knowing. My aunt was in every molecule in that apartment and the molecules had been absorbing someone else while we were out. Somehow—I have no idea how—she knew to go to the breakfront, where she kept the sterling silverware. She flipped open the velvet maze of slats. It was empty. Except for the knives. They lay there, as if nothing had happened. Later, the police explained that these were professional thieves. Apparently, you can’t melt down knives. They are nickel at the core, not silver. Useless.

“While my aunt surveyed the apartment, I tiptoed to my room. I climbed up on my bed and kept my eyes low so she wouldn’t see me spying. The wooden box was already on her bed with all the drawers open. The same part of her that turned into a little girl when all her jewelry was there had a little girl’s reaction when it was gone. She punched her fists against the mattress. She paced back and forth in front of the window. I became frightened. She threw a glass lamp out the window. Lunged it into the courtyard. A couple of lights went on in the other apartments below. I became embarrassed. I also knew this was my fault. If I had not dragged her to see some green-eyed boy, this never would have happened.”

“You can’t actually have thought that.”

“Of course I thought that. I was interfering with my parents’ marriage and then they sent me to Paris because I was interfering with their divorce. You have no idea what it is to feel like you’re always in the way.”

“I can guess.”

“Anyway, after a while I walked down the hallway. She had splashed cold water on her face. She took me by the hand and led me into her bedroom, where she opened her jewelry box. It was like a beehive with all the bees missing. That’s when she handed me that sketch.”

Victor looked at Johanna’s dresser and back at her. The morning light was becoming more pronounced and he was starting to feel the secondary realities of a hangover: a sour stomach, an aching thirst.

“A lifetime of jewelry,” Johanna continued, “and this sketch was all that was left.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Before she met my uncle, she had a secret love affair. She was living in occupied Paris during the war and fell in love with a German soldier who was teaching at a school for officers’ children in Normandy. He had come down for the weekend with friends— Paris was an abandoned and skittish place. The Germans had their own guidebook to it, warning soldiers not to get too taken in by the food. They were intruders but, you know, my aunt was also half French and making a life there. She had a job, doing some kind of secretarial work, and she and the soldier met on the street like in the movies. She dropped a bunch of papers. He helped her pick them up. They were nearly married.

“The night of the burglary was the first I’d heard about any of this. Even my mother never knew. She was very judgmental, so to hear that her sister was in love with a . . . a . . .”

“Nazi.” Victor gulped.

Johanna adjusted herself in the window.

“Yes, technically.”

“Technically?”

He didn’t want to gum up the works with semantics but was being “kind of ” a Nazi not like being “a little bit” pregnant? You own one dish with a swastika, you might as well buy the full set.

“Well, I don’t think he killed anyone. He wasn’t an officer and he wasn’t raiding homes. He taught at a school for German children.”

Victor bit his tongue.

“The school was in a château somewhere in Normandy,” she continued, “a château that belonged to a French family who moved into a smaller house on the property.”

“That was generous of them.”

“Victor.”

She hadn’t said his name before. He didn’t realize she knew it. It sounded like someone else’s name, tripping off her tongue.

“I’m Jewish.”

“Yes, I know that.” Johanna gave him a look that was both shameful and leveling. “And they were not. And that is why they moved to a different house on the property. By the time the Germans had set up the school, all the valuables had been stolen or confiscated. One day the soldier went on an errand to the cellar and spotted a pouch behind one of the dusty wine bottles. According to my aunt, he opened it and inside was a necklace and that drawing.”

Johanna nodded at the drawer.

“He knew how much my aunt loved jewelry. So he showed her the drawing and promised to give her the necklace as soon as he felt he could take it.”

“That’s fucked up.”

“I know.” Johanna didn’t flinch at the cursing and Victor didn’t apologize for it. “Apparently his main concern was that his superiors would take the necklace during a security check. And no, it did not occur to him or to my aunt to give it directly to the family. What can I tell you? They were imperfect people. And who knew if it even belonged to the family, if they knew it was there? It was ancient. He shoved it in the pouch and hid it behind a brick in his round turret bedroom with a view of the flowers. I remember that part because it sounded like a princess trapped in a tower.”

“A Nazi princess.”

“Yes, a Nazi princess. Either way, that was that.”

“Sorry—what was what?”

“They continued their romance. But by then it was 1944. The war had come to the château’s front lawn, the allied troops invaded, and my aunt never saw the soldier again. Maybe he was taken to an internment camp, maybe he starved to death in the forest. No one knows. Her first love had vanished along with any clue to where the necklace might be. She never knew where the school was. She only saw him in Paris.”

“But . . . I mean, how many châteaus were turned into schools during World War Two?”

“You’d be surprised.” She shrugged. “These things are not public record, not so easy to just plug into the computer.”

“But maybe Felix could help you track it down.”

“Felix doesn’t know about the necklace. He’s very sensitive about anything having to do with Nazi heritage.”

“How uptight of him.”

“And who knows if it’s still where the soldier hid it? I don’t even know his name. And it is not mine to claim.”

“But shouldn’t it be returned?”

“To whom?” Johanna smiled, familiar with this particular conundrum. “It was never missing.”

Victor had heard of objects like this before—Fabergé eggs and copies of the Declaration of Independence, whose fate was to bide their time and hope. They were not stolen like kidnapping victims. They were more like the infirm elderly who have slipped in their own homes and now must wait in the dark for someone to find them.

“Come,” Johanna commanded, seeming to recall her own omertà on the subject. “This is a boring topic for a young man who needs to bathe and eat.”

“I don’t think it’s boring.”

She went over to the drawer and locked it. Without her blocking the window, Victor had a clear view of the tropical pastiche of palm fringe and blue water in the distance. It was disorienting to be in present-day Florida again.

“I will escort you down the hallway.”

“Straight passage just outside this door?”

“A joke!” She stroked the center of his nose with her finger. “So you are the funny one.”