Chapter 23
MEDMENHAM, ENGLAND
They were nestled in the rear seat of the family sedan, Rita and her fiancé, knees touching, his right hand covering her left, as the car began to crunch along the drive on its way to the village train station.
Giuseppe had to return to Italy; there was no choice about it.
He’d lingered at Winter Queen as long as he could, but he was as caught up now in the war machine as any other patriotic Italian.
There was so much work to do now, so much planning, so much girding of loins. He could not ignore his home.
Rita was still going back to the States, as she’d promised her sister, but she’d sort through all her business there as quickly as she could, and then they’d meet up again somewhere. Naples or New York or here. Anywhere, anywhere safe.
“And then, perhaps,” he’d whispered in her ear last night, their last night together at Winter Queen, “a wedding ceremony.”
“And then a wedding ceremony,” she’d agreed, turning her head so their lips touched.
The auto was gathering speed down the drive, but still traveling slowly enough that Rita could see very well the boy on a bicycle pedaling toward them, then skirting past them along the edge of the way, his khaki shirt and trousers, black shoes and socks, a cap shoved low over his forehead.
She had a crisply clear view of his flushed cheeks and the tips of his ears and his frowning eyebrows, sunlight burning along his back and shoulders.
He shot a brief glance at the sedan as it passed; their eyes met.
Her blood froze. Every hair on her body stood on end.
She released the count’s hand, turned around to follow the boy through the rear window as he kept pedaling toward the manor house, along a drive now lightly clouded with dust.
“Stop,” she said, choked, too soft. “Stop!” she cried again, much louder, and pounded a hand on the back of the driver’s seat.
“Amore?”
“Oh, God, stop the auto!”
The bewildered chauffeur did so. Before the sedan had even come to a full halt, Rita was yanking on the door handle, tumbling out, pelting back up the drive.
She reached the front door just as Pauline opened it, responding to the telegram boy’s knock.
IT WAS THREE days before her body had been discovered. Not by the housekeeper but the landlord, who had read about the death of Mr. Vernon and thought perhaps his widow might be enticed into ending the lease early, as he could raise the rent significantly if she did.
The news made the New York papers first, a small bit of sensational information taking up a few column inches. Nothing like the sinking, of course, but connected enough to the sinking to matter. Tragic young Lusitania widow, despondent over the loss of her husband. Talented, lovely, rich. Suicide.
Hours later, just in time for the next morning’s deadlines, the national wires picked up the story, which subsequently spread up and down the nation, from Maine to Florida to sunny California.
By the time the details made it across the Atlantic (a few of the London periodicals taking note of Mrs. Vernon’s British roots), nearly twenty hours had passed, and that telegram from the authorities in New York had already arrived at Winter Queen’s door.
That luckless girl, the locals murmured over their tea or pints, some with genuine sympathy, some with simmering relish.
That fey, foreign girl, never was quite right in the head, was she?
So quiet and peculiar. And then that terrible shock, the ship, her husband.
Suppose she just couldn’t bear it, her simple mind just broke.
But anyone in Medmenham who’d ever heard Inez coax sonatas and concertos and fantasies from her violin, in her parents’ parlor or performing outside in the meadows and woods—even the leathery old men at the pub—found themselves frowning into their drinks, blinking away a tear or two when no one was looking.
RITA DELIBERATELY AVOIDED the papers. She avoided reading them; she avoided giving interviews; she avoided the sun and the moon and her own inner rage, so saturated with sorrow she could no longer distinguish one emotion from the other.
More telegrams arrived, these all offering condolences, and Rita avoided those as well, even the ones from Cecil and Alvin and House. Even the one from the king.
She’d already sent her own condolence telegrams to Charles Frohman’s family and to George’s, not long after she’d come home from Ireland. She already knew exactly what those thin slips of paper would say, and how little they mattered because nothing they said would help.
BUT DESPITE HER efforts, two weeks later, in her Fifth Avenue penthouse, Rita came across a mention of it in the New York World, only because she was flipping through the tower of mail that had been growing during her absence, and she wanted to verify that there was nothing important in that mess of envelopes and magazines and newspapers before departing the United States again.
Her eyes picked out Inez’s name in a headline, Mrs. George Vernon, above a short article. Before she could stop herself, she’d read the whole thing.
The reporter briefly mentioned her life, her skill with the violin, but lingered gleefully on the macabre: detailed descriptions of Mrs. Vernon’s jewels and her expensive, formal black frock.
The fact that her body had been found kneeling at the foot of her bed, as if in prayer. The pistol. The blood.
Rita flung the paper across the room in a fury, knocking over a vase and scattering the sheets through the air like frenzied, flapping wings. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, hard enough to hurt. When she lowered her hand, teeth marks bit red into her skin.
She wiped her eyes and returned to packing.
She was taking her sister back to her husband.
IT WAS A season of loss. It was a year of loss, one that would stretch into several more years to come, as it would happen. Many years, many losses.
But this year, this loss, ate through her.
Rita couldn’t remember a time when her sister wasn’t glued to her side, either physically or spiritually.
They’d shared the same parents, the same childhood, the same memories, the same sense of humor and tastes and the same artistic gift that allowed them each to tap into the Sacred Unknown, albeit in different ways.
But Inez had forsaken all that. Inez had left behind Rita and their family, on purpose. And now Rita had to figure out how to keep moving through the universe without her.
On the voyage back to Great Britain, she had plenty of time to ponder it all.
She’d booked an American-flagged steamer, nothing so fancy as the Lusy had been, and nothing so dangerous either.
In future years, whenever anyone would ask her the name of that liner, she honestly wouldn’t remember.
It wasn’t about the ship, anyway, which had surely been anodyne and elegant and pleasant enough to blend in with all the others in anyone’s memory. It was about Inez. Reckoning with Inez.
On this, their final voyage together, with Rita installed in a cabin high above (an exterior one with two portholes, although it was still very hard to look at the water) and her sister’s casket strapped in place decks below, she took the time to imagine what she might say to Inez, if she had the chance. What needed to be said.
She composed her letter over the course of the passage in a bright reading and writing room, frequently with the ship’s cat curled on her lap, a calico beauty with green eyes and a ringed tail that she whipped hard against Rita’s legs whenever she tried to get up.
Inez,
I don’t know that I can forgive you. I hope I can, someday. I’m trying. I’m not sure it’s really fair of you to even ask me to.
I’m so mad at you. I’m so mad.
And I miss you with all of my heart. I miss your smile and your voice and your hand in mine.
I miss your music. I miss the children you never had.
I miss you at the wedding I’m going to have without you, because I have no choice.
I miss our old lady years together, our sons and daughters growing up together, becoming best friends.
I hate you, almost, for taking that away from me, from all of us, just because you could.
I wish you had told me what you were truly feeling.
I wish I had been smart enough to guess.
Would it have helped at all? I’ll never know.
You can pour your love into the ocean of another’s heart, but that doesn’t mean it shifts the current or changes the tide by even an inch.
It’s only you, pouring and pouring. Hoping for the best.
Did you ever once think about how what you did would affect Alfred, stationed heavens knows where, doing the best he can amid the bullets and mud? Or Maman and Papa? Was it really so bad we were reduced to nothing for you?
The cat is clawing at my thigh.
Maybe I’m being unfair. Probably I am. Who can ever truly plumb the depths of another’s grief? I only thought, after that chandlery in Queenstown, after the terrible days that followed, wading our way through the disaster, coming out on the other side …
Well.
I’ve been thinking about everything that’s happened, obsessing over it really, day after day, fact after fact falling in place like some sort of horrible game of doomsday dominos.
The Lusitania’s fourth boiler room shuttered.
The Admiralty’s abandonment. That U-boat’s blind luck in finding us after the fog lifted, while our own very much ran out.
(I can say that here because this letter is just between you and me. I will toss these pages into the ocean before anyone else reads them, right into the deep blue Celtic Sea, my words melting away, the paper dissolving, just as I almost once did. Ironic, no?)
Anyway, my stupid obsession. The sinking, the suffering.
The injustice of it all, the goddamned waste of lives.
I’ve been thinking about how to make it sear for everyone.
Everyone around the world, even more than it does.
The war numbs us at some point; I’ve already seen it happening.
The great sacrifices demanded of us become reasonable.
The lack of food, of fuel, of connection with loved ones and hope becomes reasonable.
All of this loss is so bloody reasonable.
So what I’ve been thinking, sissy, is this.
I’m going to make a movie about it, a good one.
I’ll make a movie, and to ensure it’s good, I’ll star in it and produce it myself.
I know I’ve never done anything like this before, but I’m tenacious and tough and pretty certain I can do it.
That way no one will ever, ever forget what happened.
No one will forget either of us.
But I’m still mad.
I love you. Forever and ever, I promise.
YEARS WOULD PASS, not many, only two, but Rita would make that movie.
By then, she was Margherita, Countess de Cippico, and although she was not afraid of the water, she still couldn’t be induced to like it.
It took an act of will greater than she’d anticipated to submerge herself in the mighty Hudson for the filming of Lest We Forget, to allow herself to sink and rise and sink again beneath the liquid gray.
To splash and act as if she were in danger of drowning, although she wasn’t.
A model ship was constructed specifically for the sinking sequence, big enough and realistic enough that Rita could easily pick out which door would lead where, which section of the deck had hosted the games of quoits versus the egg-and-spoon races.
The portholes of the washroom where she’d taken her saltwater baths.
Where she had stood in the steamer’s final moments, holding hands with George and Charles, clinging tight to their last precious few seconds of life.
For the scenes representing those strange, gilded days as they’d crossed the Atlantic, the United States Navy had given them permission to film aboard one of the seized German luxury liners that had been trapped in the harbor since the beginning of the war.
Rita found a savage satisfaction in that.
IT WAS HER nightmare, reliving those days.
Her redemption. Lest We Forget would be released around the world, but in America first, to fervid acclaim.
It would place Rita Jolivet in cinema houses large and small and anything in-between, but also strand her squarely in front of the unrelenting eye of the United States government, which took note of her beauty, her charisma. Her personal and professional losses.
That same government would convince her to spend the rest of the war years selling Liberty Bonds while lecturing about the Lusitania, which Rita would do with great hidden anguish and unprecedented success.
She outsold every other major moving-picture star, Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin.
In October 1917, before her photoplay was even released, she would be summoned to raise an American flag over a captured U-boat, photographers crowding near.
Her audience applauded so furiously that the din of traffic along the pier was drowned to nothing.
The Rita Jolivet Film Corporation produced just one film. One. But it resonated, that film. Drama, spectacle, propaganda, true-to-life atrocities. It struck a chord in the souls of all red-blooded patriots and played for years as the Great War dragged on.
The Countess de Cippico was determined to do her part to see the Germans defeated. She was determined to avenge her losses, those hours on the blooded sea, her murdered friends, even if she never said those words aloud, or ever would.
One hot summer day in 1917, their last day of filming aboard the German liner, she’d found a way to say what she needed to say without making a sound.
During the lunch break, while everyone else in the cast and crew was off with their sandwiches and beer and iced tea on the top deck, Rita slipped alone into the ship’s first-class saloon.
She found the most prominent, most expensive-looking mahogany pillar, took out a penknife, and carved her initials into it, rough and deep.
I was here, you sons of whores.
I’m still here.