A Wife of Noble Character (32 page)

The next morning, she returned to the Ritz as if to an alien place. It was incomprehensible that only yesterday morning she strode through it as though she belonged. At the front desk she found her orphaned suitcase. She went to the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth, and to change into jeans and a sweatshirt, and saw her things had been packed with care, everything folded neatly, nothing missing. In the front flap, where Waverly must have known Vivienne would look for her phone charger, she found a note. A heart, and inside the heart, in Waverly's cursive,
Thinking of you
. Vivienne knelt beside her open suitcase and let her face fall into her hands.

She spent the afternoon petting Ulysses in the garden while Kitty told stories and drank Panhandle coffee from the tin camping mug. Kitty admitted she'd had a sour sense about Karlie from the beginning of the meal. Preston she liked. “He has something to him,” she said. But Vivienne didn't want to talk about Preston.

Kitty gave her a small, framed watercolor of the flat green marshes along the Texas coast near Matagorda Bay. The gray sky blended into the gray and green water; the skinny brown reeds stood upright and still. Kitty had painted it from memory. It was a muted landscape, not claiming to be much else than what it humbly was and, in that way, very true to the real place. “To keep you grounded,” Kitty said. When Vivienne told Kitty she wanted to travel, Kitty replied, “Switzerland,” and gave her the address of her old friend Tom.

She took the night train to Zurich. The train tore through station after station, wiping the brightly lit platforms into darkness like a hand over wet paint; as the sun rose, mountains cut a shadow into the horizon. Her heart beat hard. At dawn, the train slowed into a gaping skylit station.

She rode three more trains that day, each one older and slower. The final train wound up and through the most immense mountains she'd ever seen. She'd skied the Rockies on trips with the Blanks; the mountains before her now seemed like their great-grandparents, though she knew they were millions of years younger. More vital, stronger. The train took her to a red gabled station that looked like a wooden toy she might have played with as a little girl. A yellow sign above the tracks read,
WILKOMME TO THE
TOP OF EUROPE!

The town was one short pedestrian street, with gabled cottages dotting the surrounding hills. It was late afternoon, and the sun was setting. The air smelled intensely of pine and autumn, that crisp scent of change she loved. She walked down the street: on one side, wooden chalets with white shutters housing gift and specialty shops, on the other, an empty playground and a panoramic view. The mountains were inconceivable. Snow and sharp granite became green meadow and forest. Narrow waterfalls poured down wide valleys into dark-green depths. She stopped in the middle of the street and stared, trying to make sense of it. The quiet enveloped everything. She only heard the wind. It bit her nose and seeped beneath her cotton sweatshirt. It howled through the passes like an animal and then settled, leaving the rusty playground swings creaking. She felt bewilderingly alone.

She found Kitty's friend Tom by asking the receptionist at the hostel. He made a call, and within a few minutes she was squeezing the waist of a stranger on the backseat of an electric scooter. He drove up a hill to a three-story house with warmly lit windows and deep eaves. Overgrown flower boxes hung from the sills; smoked curled from the stone chimney. The house had a bright-blue pitched roof.

Tom was waiting on the front step. Vivienne figured Kitty had called him, because he hugged her like an old friend, but then he laughed, “And who are you?”

When he heard she was Kitty's friend, he jumped up and down. Tom was tall and lean, with a mop of gray curls; he wore a pair of baggy striped pants and a linty fleece sweatshirt. Vivienne thought he must be in his seventies, but he smiled with his entire face. He showed her upstairs to a cozy room with a twin bed, gave her a parka to borrow, and took her on a tour of the property by lantern light. There was a barn in the back, where a donkey and a goat were sleeping, and a cabin art studio.

In the main room of the house, a man about Tom's age sat at a chess table beside the fire. A pair of clear round glasses rested low on his round cheeks. He wore a black knit hat and a set of plaid pajamas. This was Charlie, visiting from Austin. Tom poured Vivienne a cup of peppermint tea and invited her to watch the conclusion of the game. Vivienne learned Charlie was a retired high school history teacher with early Parkinson's. Charlie had come to Switzerland to paint. He'd always wanted to paint, and now for the first time in his life he had the time. Tom was originally from El Paso. He'd bought the house with money he made on a patent in 1989. Now he lived off cash work—handyman jobs, renting extra rooms. He rarely left the mountains, except to cope with visa troubles. “Twenty years here and still not a citizen,” he said. “One of these days they'll send me back to El Paso.” Both Charlie and Tom had known Kitty for thirty years, since Texas.

“One of us was her lover for a while,” Tom said, his voice thick and mischievous. “But I'm not going to tell you who.”

Vivienne sat in a folding chair and watched the men play chess, a game no one had ever taught her to play. Her impulse was to feel suspicious of the ease with which Tom and Charlie integrated her into the house. Why were they so nice? They regarded her with delight, but not so much delight that the evening changed course or that they asked her a bunch of questions. They were happy to have another Texan around and glad that Kitty was doing well, but these sentiments were expressed with a complete lack of nosiness. They asked what brought her to Switzerland and she said, “I wanted to see the mountains.” This response was accepted without further inquiry. Tom said she'd come at the most beautiful time of year, right before the first snow.

The silences that fell as the men played were silences that felt like being alone. She'd expected to have to explain herself, but the only thing expected of her was that she drink her peppermint tea—made with leaves foraged by Charlie. The firelight flickered over things laid about the room. Stacks of
National Geographic
along the baseboards, a row of rusty hand-churn coffee grinders atop the kitchen cabinets, an overstuffed brown corduroy couch. Mobiles constructed with pencils and forks hung from the exposed beams, refracting bits of light on the knotty-pine walls. Vivienne recognized one of Kitty's paintings, the sunrise desert, probably somewhere in the Big Bend.

“You know she paints those herself, right?” Charlie asked.

“She told me,” Vivienne said.

“Then she likes you,” Tom said.

That night Vivienne slept for fourteen hours. She woke to birdsong. Outside, the mountains were bathed in white sun, the sky pure, empty blue.

For the next three weeks, Vivienne walked. She walked through meadows, on trails over loose rock or spongy green moss, alongside herds of brown cattle wearing big brass bells around their necks. She plucked the grass and tied it in knots. She hiked as high as she could in her tennis shoes and sat on hard tracts of last winter's snow. She tore up her ankle in the stems of an alpine thistle and got to know a family of busy marmots. One day she saw an ibex fifty feet away, grazing on a steep incline. Another day she met a little girl near the playground who told her dandelion fuzz was made of fairies. You blow on the dandelion and the fairies go flying off to grant your wish. She ate chocolate every day.

Water came from a spring adjacent to the house. This amazed Vivienne almost as much as the fact that no one pried into her life. For the first few days, she worried they didn't like her. She didn't know where she was or how to be, but each day she realized more that she didn't have to be any particular way. Neither Tom nor Charlie ever complimented her at all, which, to her surprise, she appreciated. She found a book about alpine plants on Tom's shelf and taught herself how to identify the wildflowers growing on the hillsides.

Charlie painted in the cabin behind the house, whistling, using many colors. Vivienne loved his paintings. They were close-ups of the human body, of organs sliced apart and enlarged, out of tenderness, not violence. A broken human heart magnified and peeled open, or a human brain fallen in love at first sight, butterflied. They looked as if they could be folded back together again safely. He was working on a pair of hands. Charlie wanted to paint his hands before they would no longer sit still. When Vivienne asked him about his work, he was modest.

“I'm just trying to imagine what a feeling looks like in the body,” he said.

Tom and Charlie played chess almost every night. Tom usually won, then carried his cup of tea off to bed. He never went to bed without his cup of tea. He told Vivienne the story of how, ten years ago, after his brother died, he began to keep a cup of tea beside his bed to ward off nightmares. If he woke and sipped the tea, the nightmare broke. It comforted him just to know it was there. Before she died, his wife used to make the tea for him.

By twilight, the stars were electric and infinite. She saw the Milky Way for the first time and discovered she didn't know any constellations. Charlie showed her the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion's Belt. She felt the sky pulled into relief, as if she'd been staring at a painting her entire life and only just now saw that the image had dimension.

From her bed, she could see a corner of the black sky. Migrating birds clipped through her view like ghosts. Frogs chirped high-pitched songs along the spring. An owl hooted—not the sweet hoots of the screech owls from home, but a deep, shadowy hoot. The owl spooked her sometimes, and the foreignness of it all became too much. She switched on the light and wrote Blad a postcard or scrolled through her phone looking at pictures from Paris. Other times, she lay awake listening, thinking about Preston. Where was he? What was he doing? Moments passed in which she felt him there, listening with her. Or she thought of Waverly; memories came to her, games they played as young girls, schemes they'd planned, notes they'd written in class. Instead of forcing the thoughts away, she lay with them till she fell asleep. In the morning, she usually woke with a sharp pain in her heart. Had it all really happened? Yes, it had. And now this—the autumn world outside, Tom's hot pot of coffee in the kitchen—was happening too.

She didn't read or listen to music. Her phone hadn't had service since Zurich. She wore the same clothes every day. There were days when she felt the feeling in her body had risen to the surface of her skin, amplifying every emotion. The uncertainty of home, of the future, buckled her spirit in fear, but the joy she felt in the mountains was something altogether new and whole. On her walks she felt healed, from what she wasn't sure.

When she finally got the email, at the hostel's big tourist computer, Katherine had been dead three days. Vivienne left Switzerland on the morning of the first snow; the sky was white, and she caught the first flakes in her open palms.

 

II

The humidity in the Jetway at George Bush Intercontinental Airport was a thick and insolent thing. Baggage claim was loud and inexplicably organized, everyone moving, no one touching. Vivienne stood on the curb outside, exhaust trapping her breath. Families hugged, couples kissed. No one was coming to pick her up.

Two hours later, a shuttle bus dropped her off to a house filled with people.

Lawyers. Bridge friends. Neighbors she'd never seen, bearing casseroles, lingering at the door. Would there be an estate sale? Cousins she'd never met or heard of calling the house—everyone asking for things. The
Chronicle
calling to fact-check a prewritten obituary. Such a stream of voices, in a house that had always been so hushed. What surprised Vivienne in the topsy-turvy days after death was how urgent the concerns of other people became, as if their grief over Katherine's death granted them permission to admit need for various pieces of furniture and glassware. Blad checked in but avoided the scene. Waverly left a message, which Vivienne didn't return.

A trio of church and bridge friends came to talk among themselves and pack boxes. They regarded Vivienne with scolding eyes, as if she were a naughty child. Everyone expected her to feel guilty, but secretly Vivienne was relieved she hadn't been home to find Katherine. The chilling thought was that it might have taken Vivienne longer than a few hours to find her; she never looked for Katherine at home. The women spoke of their friendships with Katherine with ardent tenderness, reiterating that she died peacefully, that her faith kept her strong, that this sort of quick exit was exactly what Katherine would have wanted. They told Vivienne, “She loved you,” as if to defend their friend. At moments, in the whirlwind of so many strangers, Vivienne felt she wasn't even a Cally. But she was actually the only Cally.

Katherine had named her priest as executor. Father Bennison was about seventy and bald, a man who embodied the expectations of his profession: He listened, spoke carefully, maintained eye contact, and nodded a lot. Vivienne liked him. God only knew what he'd heard from Katherine over the years, but still he treated her with kindness. He also didn't ask for anything, only the occasional glass of water.

He told Vivienne that Katherine had bequeathed her estate to the Diocese of Harris County, all assets totaling 2.8 million dollars. The great surprise—to everyone but Vivienne—was not Katherine's beneficiary but the comparatively small estate for a Cally. The
Chronicle
ran a story full of anonymous quotes about the lost Cally fortune. Vivienne didn't read it but figured everyone else did. Waverly called and left another message:

“Vivienne, it's me. I'm so sorry about Katherine. Please call me back. I'm confused. I want to come to the funeral, but I don't know if you want to talk to me? I won't go unless you call. I hope you're okay. Please call me.”