You Deserve to Know

Chapter 13

13

NOW

Gwen stands in the middle of her kitchen and stares at her to-do list.

She can’t put it off any longer—it’s time to call Anton’s father, Henri.

The thought terrifies her. Henri is a taciturn man who had moved back to France after Anton’s mother died, retiring to a small town about thirty miles north of Marseille. She and Anton had one awful visit with him in France. It was a few years after the publication of The Last Cyclamen , a time when she and the rest of the world thought a follow-up novel was imminent. The month-long trip to the South of France was a chance for the twins, who were small, to spend a good chunk of time with their grandfather, as well as an opportunity for Anton to do some research on his new book. The whole trip went poorly. The crumbling seventeenth-century house that Henri lived in was not child-friendly, and Gwen spent the first two weeks chasing after the boys, barely three at the time, making sure they didn’t crack their skulls falling down stone steps or cut themselves on the rusty metal scraps in the overgrown garden. George and Rafi failed to live up to Henri’s expectations about how little boys should behave, and Gwen felt judged and embarrassed. Anton abdicated any parental responsibility on the trip, as if being in a foreign country absolved him, spending his days driving around the countryside solo “for his book.” His father had never approved of Anton’s choices—to study literature instead of something practical, to abandon his Catholic faith, to pursue a career as a writer. Marrying Gwen was just another bad choice. Henri didn’t consider his son a serious person.

At the beginning of the third week, Gwen witnessed a blowout between the two men. The fight in the kitchen started with yelling and hurled insults. It was the sound of broken pottery that sent her scurrying outside with Rafi and George. She took them on a long walk into the village to get treats, only to arrive just as the town’s bakery and sweet shop had shut down for their customary two-hour lunch. When she returned to the house bedraggled, Anton had packed their bags. They were leaving immediately, he said.

He never told her what had led to the break with his father. He made it seem like it was a long time coming, but not about anything specific.

And now she had to phone Henri and tell him his son was dead.

Ignoring the empty wine bottle and dirty glasses, Gwen makes coffee. She is both sad and grateful that the boys aren’t here. It’s as if her mother cast a magic spell on her by suggesting she was a mess, and now she has to become one. She takes her coffee into Anton’s office and sits at his desk. It is five hours later in France. When is a good time to call and tell a man that his son is dead? Murdered? Isn’t there someone else who could do this for her?

She picks up her phone and dials her mother.

“Sweetie, I’m so glad to hear from you.”

“How are the kids?” Gwen asks.

“Wonderful. They’re at the club with Daddy.”

“They have school tomorrow.”

“I thought I would drive them home sometime tomorrow. We can break the news to them together. How does that sound? Do you think you are up to that?”

“What about school?”

“Gwen, honey, you’re not thinking straight. Their father is dead. They’re going to be missing some school.”

She feels chagrined. She had heard it was good to keep routines going for children when they experience a trauma, that their whole life shouldn’t be disrupted. But maybe she had remembered that wrong. Her mother seems very confident.

“I guess you’re right. I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I don’t want to bring the boys back to the house and find you in your pajamas, or drunk. Not that you don’t deserve to be both things, sweetie, but we must remember to put on a brave face.”

“I need you to call Anton’s dad.”

“Henri doesn’t know yet? Gwen!”

“I couldn’t do it yesterday.”

“Give me the number, I’ll take care of it. I always liked him.”

Gwen scrolls through her phone for his number, feeling both relieved and disgusted with herself. As much as she rails against her parents, she has never really grown into a full adult, has she? She depends on them financially. Always has. She didn’t have the burden of college loans, and when she entered the working world, they subsidized her meager salary. Would she have been better off if they had told her no? She would have hated them for it at the time, but maybe she wouldn’t be where she is now. If she had developed some strength early on, she would have left Anton the first time he cheated on her, before they were even married, with another writer at his MFA program.

“I can’t find it,” she says. “I must have deleted it by accident.”

“You don’t have your father-in-law’s number?”

“I will find it and text you as soon as I do.”

“Don’t put this off, Gwen. He needs to be told.”

Gwen hangs up, trying to decide where to look for Henri’s number. The police still have Anton’s phone, but he has to have information on his dad somewhere. She opens a drawer to the right of the desk and finds a jumble of office supplies and a half-empty pack of Camels.

The one below it holds a random assortment of notebooks, magazines, stories ripped out of the newspaper. The detritus of a writer’s life, but no signs of information about Henri. She spots a photograph and pulls it out.

Her throat catches when she sees it’s a picture of the night they first met, fifteen years ago. A casual selfie taken at a party in New York City. Gwen had been living in the city, churning out press releases for a PR firm in Soho that specialized in luxury brands, when she bumped into a friend from college who was getting her master’s in fiction at Columbia. They had been in a creative writing class together, back when Gwen had flirted with the idea of becoming a writer.

But she didn’t have the confidence, and her parents insisted that she study something more practical, so she decided on marketing for her major.

Her friend invited her to a party, but Gwen almost didn’t go. It wasn’t only that the party was all the way uptown in Morningside Heights, at least thirty minutes on the subway from her apartment on a quiet street in Greenwich Village, it was the fear of seeing all these burgeoning writers embarking on a life she wished she could have had. If she only had the courage to say no to her parents. She was talented, but she had no guts.

At the last minute she decided to go and it was a decision that altered the course of her life, because that’s where she met Anton. She felt awkward and out of place as soon as she showed up. Almost everyone was from the writing program, along with a few other random Columbia graduate students. She flitted in and out of conversations but was unable to get a toehold in any of them. She felt ashamed and took refuge in the bedroom, where she walked in on a man examining the books on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf—Anton. They started talking and when it was time to go, he walked her to the 116th Street subway station, but at the last minute they decided they would keep talking and he would walk her to 110th, then 103rd, and so on until they had walked all the way down Broadway to the Village, the conversation never ceasing. They didn’t stop talking all the way up the five flights to her small studio apartment. By the time he left two days later, Gwen was in love.

Tears fill her eyes. They were happy once. She yanks open the drawer on her right, searching for a tissue packet.

Instead, she finds an overstuffed manila folder. It’s addressed to Henri Khoury in France, and the return address is their old house in Boston, written in Anton’s familiar block lettering.

Bingo , she thinks and empties the contents onto the desk. A parcel wrapped in a piece of blue-and-white cloth slides out along with an unmarked white envelope.

As Gwen turns the parcel over in her hand, confused, the cloth falls away, revealing a worn leather journal. Gwen opens it but cannot make out the small, tidy cursive. She recognizes a word here and there and realizes it’s all in French. Every page has a date on top; the first page’s date is June 1, 1968. She flips to the last page and her stomach lurches when she finds a pencil sketch of a lone flower.

Le dernier cyclamen

The Last Cyclamen. This must be where Anton got the name for his book.

Gwen takes the heavy white envelope in her hand, recognizing it as the expensive stationery she gave to Anton on their first anniversary—the paper anniversary. Inside is one folded sheet, which she takes out and begins to read. It’s dated right after they returned from that awful trip to France.

Dear Father,

In France you called me a fraud. A thief.

You said that if Maman were alive she would be aghast to know that her innermost thoughts, her dreams and her fears were published for the world to see.

But I don’t see it that way. I see my book as a testament to her strength and courage, a way of honoring what a beautiful writer she was.

You say it’s plagiarism, using her words. That she’s the one who wrote it and I just slapped my name on it. That I’m profiting from her pain, stealing her glory.

But did you ever consider that she would want that for me? For her suffering to be transformed into my success? Isn’t that what every mother wants? For her children to become somebody?

I am somebody, thanks to her journal. I think if Maman were alive she would be thrilled for me. And even if she weren’t, she would never do what you have done. She would never cut me out.

I am your only child.

You have two grandchildren who deserve to have you in their lives.

I have enclosed Maman’s dairy. I don’t need it anymore and I thought you might want it back. I don’t regret writing The Last Cyclamen , but I do regret what has happened to us.

Always your son, Anton

Gwen drops the letter on the desk, stunned. She opens the journal to a random page and tries to make sense of the words printed in neat script. She took four years of high school French, but she can only make out a few words here or there. When she turns the page, she finds a section that has been underlined in pencil. Did Anton make these marks?

She boots up Anton’s computer and opens Google Translate. There are two boxes next to each other—one in which to type in the original text and a second where the translation will appear. She begins to enter the underlined words from the diary. Aujourd’hui, il faisait une chaleur insupportable. J’ai rencontré J à La Gondola pour le déjeuner. Nos sièges étaient juste au bord de l’eau. Nous naviguerons sur cette mer ensemble, a-t-il dit en me prenant la main.

Like magic, as soon as she types in a combination of letters that make no sense to her, a series of English words appear in the second box. The words of Anton’s mother. It’s almost as if she is speaking directly to her from the grave.

Today was unbearably hot. I met J at La Gondola for lunch. Our seats were right by the water. We will sail that sea together, he said, taking my hand.

A chill runs through her. The Gondola restaurant played a large part in The Last Cyclamen . It’s the setting of several meals at which the main character, a sheltered young woman, is seduced by an older, wealthy man. The Gondola represents the world she desires to be a part of, one of privilege and freedom.

Gwen recalls one New York Times review of the book mentioning The Gondola by name as an example of how Anton’s book captured the sophistication of Beirut in the 1960s before the civil war broke out.

Gwen turns to Anton’s bookshelf and pulls out a leatherbound copy of The Last Cyclamen , a gift from her to Anton upon its publication. The pages are gilded, the spine uncracked. It takes her a few moments to find what she is looking for, but about halfway through the book she sees it. Gwen traces the lines with her finger as she reads the now familiar words.

Today was unbearably hot. I met J at La Gondola for lunch. Our seats were right by the water. “We will sail that sea together,” he said, taking my hand.

Gwen drops the book in shock. Anton had stolen the words of his dead mother and passed them off as his own. That’s what the fight with his father had been about.

He had written this confession to his father, but he couldn’t bring himself to send it.

Of course Anton hadn’t been able to finish a second book in the past eight years , Gwen thinks with bitterness. He had nothing original to say.

He never did.