The Claimant Read online

  Quite unexpectedly, the girl smiled and turned kittenish. She pointed to the tree that hung over the wall. ‘You want to climb the apple tree and escape? That’s how I get in.’

  ‘I am not allowed to play with you, and you are not allowed inside the gate.’

  ‘I never come through the gate. You want to see the secret entrance to the cellars?’

  ‘The entrance to the cellars is in our grange,’ the boy said. He pointed to a wing of the chateau.

  ‘There’s another way in, a secret one in the woods. My brother showed me.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. What’s your name?’

  ‘Cap. What’s yours?’

  ‘Cap isn’t a name.’

  ‘It’s my name. What’s yours?’

  ‘Gwynne.’

  ‘Gwynne? That’s not a name.’

  ‘Gwynne Patrice de la Vallière Vanderbilt,’ he recited. ‘De la Vallière was my mother’s name, but I was baptised Gwynne because that is a Vanderbilt name.’

  ‘There is a secret cellar and you can’t get into it from your grange.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘You’ll find out when I show you where it is.’

  From the window of the chateau a high-pitched breathy voice, both imperious and needy, called out, ‘Gwynne! Gwynne Patrice! Viens, mon petit.’

  ‘It’s Maman,’ the boy said, alarmed. ‘I have to go.’

  Lilith does not know for certain what the name on her birth certificate might have been, but her father has always called her Capucine, nasturtium, his little flower, Cap for short. If there ever had been an original birth certificate (but apparently, because of the hazardous circumstances of giving birth while in the Resistance and on the run, no such certificate has ever existed as far as anyone has been able to ascertain), but just supposing that the nuns in the convent in Tours had – safely later, presumably much later – registered a live birth and a date of birth, or at least a baptismal certificate, that document presumably would either be in the parish records of the cathedral of St Gatien in Tours or possibly in the mairie of the village of St Gilles or even possibly hidden in secret coffers kept by the nuns who risked their lives for the Resistance. If such a document exists somewhere it would probably show Lilith’s last name as that of her father, Jardinier. But Lilith is by no means sure that Jardinier was her father’s legal name because her father was born in the gardener’s cottage of the chateau, like his father before him. Within the grounds of the Château de Boissy, and in the village of St Gilles surrounding those grounds, her father was referred to as Christophe le Jardinier, Christopher the gardener, which may have morphed into Christophe Jardinier.

  Her father was a skilled viticulteur, as wise and knowledgeable and gentle with his vines and with the vegetables in his potager and with the trees in the orchard and in the orangerie as with his children. Cap had an older brother, eight years her senior, also named Christophe, and built like an ox as their father was. At the age of thirteen, Christophe the Younger – Petit Christophe – was apprenticed to the village butcher. It was general knowledge in the village of St Gilles that Cap and Petit Christophe had different mothers, but if Cap ever met either of them she had no memory of the encounters, not even a shadowy one, not even a dream visitation. She heard whispers on all sides, bien sûr. She heard that she and her brother were hush-up children, their mothers nuns and their father a priest. This kind of thing happened. The babies were placed in good Catholic homes, no questions asked. She heard that Petit Christophe might be the illegitimate son of the countess herself. After all, before her marriage and before the war broke out, the countess had gone into religious retreat in a convent for several months. The villagers had to ask themselves why.

  But Gwynne, the boy in the blue dress who would die in Vietnam and whose fraudulent supplanter would come to be inaccurately described decades later as the ‘Vanderbilt claimant’, told her in Boston – in the late sixties – that this was beyond the bounds of possibility. ‘Not even the angel Gabriel could have pried my mother’s legs apart,’ he said. ‘She wore a cast-iron chastity belt and nobody had the key.’ He crossed himself reflexively, without mockery. ‘God forgive me for being disrespectful to my mother.’

  ‘You are not fair to her. And obviously your father found the key.’

  ‘Not so obvious,’ Gwynne Patrice said, though he was Patrick McVie at the time. We were in a bar below street level just off Harvard Square, all three of us high, and on high bar stools, looking up through basement windows at passing feet. His mother, McVie reminded Lilith, had always treated him as though he were immaculately conceived, but the butcher’s son – the son of the butcher in St Gilles – had claimed that Gwynne Patrice and Cap might have the same Vanderbilt father. They might have been spawned on two different women, the countess and one of the maids.

  ‘That’s obscene,’ Lilith said. ‘And typical of the filthy mind of the butcher’s son. It’s also stupid. You were born on Fifth Avenue and I was born in St Gilles and I’m a year older than you.’

  ‘We don’t know that, do we? Not for sure. There’s no way to pin your birth date down.’

  ‘There might be. We could search the cathedral archives in Tours. The nuns must have kept secret records. I know they would have had me baptised. I know the priest would be dead and the witnesses would be dead and the nuns who were my godmothers would probably be dead or would be past remembering much of anything at all, but I can’t believe they wouldn’t have kept a secret record. It must be somewhere.’

  ‘The nuns would have been too afraid. Hiding resisters could get you shot.’

  ‘I know I was born before the Liberation. Papa told me. And you were born after. When I was born your father wasn’t even around.’

  ‘He wasn’t far off,’ McVie said. ‘He was in the army and the Liberation arrived in Paris when American forces did.’

  ‘But your mother wasn’t in Paris; she spent the Occupation in St Gilles.’

  ‘She did. But at first word of the Liberation, she went to Paris. She was staying with some aunt or other, doing the rounds of the balls, husband-hunting. All that froth was part of late ’44 when they met. Dances every night, American uniforms and pretty French women.’

  ‘I was already born,’ Lilith said.

  ‘We don’t know, do we?’

  ‘Yes we do. How can you take seriously any dirt the butcher’s son would spew out?’

  ‘Well, you’re right. But we learned the hard way not to take him lightly, didn’t we? So I worry about it sometimes. There was no sign of a baby in the gardener’s cottage when my parents were married in February ’45. If you’d been born, you would have been there at the wedding.’

  ‘No I wouldn’t. I was still in the convent in Tours and the nuns were still hiding me. Marie-Claire calculates I was born in November ’44 and your parents weren’t even married yet. She told me all about your parents’ wedding because she was there in the church and she was there in the chateau afterwards. She danced with the wine stewards and the stable boys even though she still didn’t know what had happened to her husband in the war. She said your father was besotted with your mother. Everyone says that.’

  ‘Hard to believe in retrospect, but I know it’s true. There’s written evidence. He wrote to his buddies in the army and they wrote letters home and I’ve got copies.’

  ‘How did you get them?’

  ‘Found them in an anthology, which is as disturbing as it gets: total strangers reading my father’s drunken thoughts.’ The memory made McVie so angry that he folded a cardboard coaster into a pellet and threw it across the bar. ‘Soldiers’ Letters Home from Post-Liberation Paris. Lots of jokes about some little French beauty who’s put a ring through the nose of a certain lieutenant-colonel from a family with very deep pockets, a New York family that cannot be identified in case the military censor doesn’t let my letter through. Mademoiselle from Armentières or some such place is leading him into her trap. My father sent her flowers and cha
mpagne for weeks on end.’

  ‘So obviously that did the trick. Unlocked the chastity belt.’

  ‘Apparently. More’s the pity.’

  Now this is the sort of comment that piques insatiable curiosity. Didn’t McVie consider himself fortunate, I asked, to have proof that his parents were in love? Were madly in love? At least on their wedding night?

  Of course it was stupid of me to interject. They both stared at me as though I had horns sprouting from my forehead. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘None of my business. Shouldn’t have been listening and didn’t mean to.’

  ‘In your experience,’ McVie asked me in his grave intellectual way, ‘how long does passionate love last?’

  ‘Five minutes,’ I said. I laughed. ‘Actually, I’ve never seen it close up. It was certainly never in evidence in my family.’

  ‘In my experience,’ he said, ‘it turns into its flip side very fast.’

  ‘Flip side?’

  ‘Passionate hate,’ he said.

  His parents, he told me, were married in the Catholic church (the one and only church) in St Gilles in November 1944. His father had a week’s leave from the US Army and at the end of that week he packed his bride off to his family in New York. His father was still in Europe when McVie himself was born in Manhattan.

  I don’t think he gave a second thought to these tossed-off comments. We’d been passing a reefer around. In those days, the days of sit-ins and marches and demos, you could smoke weed openly in the dives off Harvard Square. Mind you, I always suspected he was faking being drunk or high because there was something so guarded about him. Still. That particular time, he must have been out of it or he never would have revealed so much. I don’t think it occurred to him (at least not then) that I kept records.

  ‘I arrived exactly nine months later,’ he said, ‘so I must have been conceived in the chateau. It must have been wedding-night duty on Maman’s part, or wedding-night rape on my father’s. I’m sure they never did it again.’

  ‘You are not fair to your mother,’ Lilith protested. ‘I know her better than you do.’

  ‘You know her differently.’

  ‘She saved Papa from the Gestapo. I won’t let you insult her. You never really knew her.’

  ‘She never let me know her.’ McVie closed his eyes. For several minutes, he might have been praying.

  ‘She is a very kind woman,’ Lilith said. ‘And a very sad one. And a lonely one. She has always been good to me.’

  ‘She wasn’t good to me,’ McVie said.

  ‘That is so untrue. She changed my life. Now that she’s moved back to New York, I’ll be visiting her as often as I can.’

  ‘Fine. Just don’t expect me to go with you. And don’t tell her anything about me.’

  ‘There’s not much I know about you anymore.’

  McVie covered his face with his hands. ‘There’s too much we don’t know about too many things, that’s our problem. The nuns in Tours, for example – how much did they never tell your father? And Petit Christophe, how much did he know that he never had a chance to tell us or never could?’

  ‘Ti-Christophe.’ Lilith pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes and lowered her head and let her long hair fall over her face.

  ‘I take sleeping pills,’ McVie said.

  ‘I don’t. I just lie awake.’

  ‘They don’t stop my nightmares,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t stop mine either. Even though I don’t sleep, I still have them.’

  Something very strange happened then. There was something unnervingly intense about the way they held each other’s eyes. Seconds passed and I was asking myself: Just what the hell is going on here? What is this really about? And then McVie shook himself and laughed in a lightly dismissive way that struck me as totally fake. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you look so like him that I can’t –’

  ‘I know. I see him in the mirror all the time. Like Banquo showing up for dinner at Macbeth’s.’

  ‘What happened to Petit Christophe?’ I asked.

  It was as though I’d touched their wrists with a cattle prod. They had become oblivious to me. There was a beat or two of stunned silence, then McVie said, ‘This is just a weird kind of game we play. A sick game, I suppose you could say.’

  ‘Sort of like chess for people at a wake,’ Lilith said. ‘You know. After the funeral. The way folks do things to keep the time passing. We take turns.’

  ‘What’s the point of it?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘The point is to avoid checkmate.’

  ‘Not the point of chess,’ I said. ‘I mean the point of your game.’

  ‘Same thing.’ The way McVie smiled, I knew he was thinking that he’d caught me, that he’d cut off discussion, that he had placed my king in check or captured my queen. ‘It’s about strategies.’

  I thought: You are three moves away from checkmate.

  ‘It’s about memory,’ Lilith offered. ‘About rearranging the pieces on the board. We had –’ she paused for what seemed like a very long time but was probably only a minute – ‘we had unconventional childhoods, I think that might be the right word, so we …’

  ‘We re-do them,’ McVie said. ‘Give them a makeover.’

  ‘Re-imagine them,’ Lilith explained. ‘Try to make them turn out better.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ McVie added. ‘But it does make the past more interesting.’

  ‘And more tolerable,’ Lilith said.

  ‘We make up strategy as we go. And we change the plays each time.’

  ‘So Petit Christophe?’ I asked. ‘What happened to him?’

  McVie busied himself with writing something on his paper napkin. I could not see what he wrote. Lilith was folding hers, origami-style, into a bird. ‘It depends,’ she said, ‘on the strategy. On which chess board we happen to be on.’

  ‘Do you mean,’ I persisted, ‘that you invent people?’

  ‘We do, sometimes. When it helps. Yes.’

  ‘So you invented Petit Christophe?’

  ‘In a way, yes. We invented him.’

  ‘He doesn’t exist?’

  Lilith pointed her paper swallow at the ceiling and lofted it into the room. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t exist.’

  Now, of course, since the trial, since the post-trial frenzy of investigative journalism, I know how crucial and unsettling my question was. Thinking back, I believe I saw the silence that passed between them as a huge black shadow with a wingspan that stretched from birth to death. I saw them make some kind of sign, a secret sign, as though they were passing imaginary beads between their fingers. I think I saw that. I know I saw, in dreams, with the utmost clarity, several versions of what McVie wrote on his napkin.

  Queen’s bishop to rook, I saw. There were arrows and diagrams.

  Faut pas rêver, he wrote another time.

  Once he wrote in Latin, not French. Noli me tangere.

  In the bar off Harvard Square, when he caught me looking over his shoulder, he scrunched the napkin into a ball and tossed it into a bin behind the bar.

  ‘Bullseye!’ the bartender called.

  ‘Let’s get back to the game,’ McVie said. ‘If you want to play, you can write yourself into the script.’

  ‘I had a pretty strange childhood myself,’ I said. ‘In spite of family privilege and affluence and parents who couldn’t stand each other and all that stuff.’

  ‘Okay,’ McVie said. ‘You’re a contender. Pitch in.’

  ‘What did Petit Christophe look like?’ I demanded.

  ‘Before or after?’ McVie asked.

  ‘Like me and my father,’ Lilith said.

  From that moment to this, I’ve never known whether to believe a word that either one of them said. I already knew the rules of this game. I’d been playing it all my life. You plan your moves. If you can get away with it, when your opponent is glancing across the room, you change the board. You slide a pawn this way or that. You deny the evidence. Even when you and you
r hearer both know you are making it up, you still tell elaborate lies without blinking. You cross your heart and swear you are telling the truth.

  Gwynne de la Vallière Vanderbilt’s mother, as is well documented in Dictionnaire de la Noblesse de France, was of royal descent but her lineage was on the wrong side of the sheets. That was how she inherited the chateau and the consolation title of Lady Isabelle de la Vallière, Comtesse de Boissy de St Gilles. It was the sort of title and the sort of estate that made the legitimate heirs and the true Princes of the Blood snicker. She could trace her descent, according to Parisian gossip, from a long line of sumptuously maintained whores. The widespread and barely disguised disdain made Lady Isabelle bitter and hysterically pious and ferociously determined to marry power, preferably power with money, preferably Old Power with Old Money, but she was willing to settle for new American wealth and the title of wife instead of mistress. She may have been a fanatically devout Catholic, she may have been sexually inhibited even by Catholic standards, but she was a notable beauty and an irresistible flirt.

  Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt, US Army officer stationed in Europe, extramarital by-blow of one of his own father’s brief affairs, not in need of money but in need of shoring up status within the family and on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was swept off his feet. Because he was insignificant in the family hierarchy and low in the inheritance chain, there was no reason for the Vanderbilt family council or the Vanderbilt lawyers to object, though they certainly did disapprove. They viewed the Comtesse Isabelle’s Catholic piety much as they might have viewed a birth defect such as an extra toe. Lawrence Gwynne’s father asked his son if he were out of his mind.

  On the other hand, the family rather liked the hint of royal connection via a scandal safely distant, centuries distant; a matter of compensatory balance, the family felt.