Chapter 13
It wasn’t till the following afternoon that Aurora saw Lorelei again.
By chance, she ran into her in the kitchen of the family apartment, where Lorelei was making herself a sandwich and reading something on her phone.
Aurora remembered, now, that Lorelei had moved from the upstairs suite to one of the family bedrooms. Aurora chanced a glance to see that the text on her mother’s phone was from her father, something about reaching Rome and heading straight into work.
“Ciao, Mama,” Aurora said.
Lorelei nearly leaped from her skin. Fixing her smile, she said, “Hi, sweetheart. I haven’t seen you all day.”
Aurora had spent the morning in her bedroom, going over her notes for the next interview that she, Kenny, and Oren planned to conduct for their documentary.
This time, they were going to interview Benjamin Whitmore—the son of Charles and the nephew of Edmund Whitmore.
They wanted to get to the heart of that family tragedy of Edmund’s death through Benjamin’s stories.
Of course, Grandpa Benjamin still didn’t know what they planned to interview him about.
They’d suggested it was something vague about the White Oak Lodge and its history.
They wanted to see genuine emotion. They wanted him to get reflective.
At least, that was what Oren had said. Aurora wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about surprising her grandfather with those particular questions. Then again, she hardly knew Benjamin Whitmore.
Now, Aurora opened the fridge and considered what to say to her mother, this woman she’d thought she’d known previously, whom, as it turned out, she knew very little about.
Last night, via her mother’s journals, she’d discovered that, at age eighteen, her mother had had a pregnancy, her boyfriend had abandoned her, and she’d had a miscarriage immediately after that.
That was quite a lineup. It was enough to change the geometry of someone’s heart.
Aurora searched her mother’s face for any sign of that pain.
She wondered why Lorelei hadn’t mentioned it before.
She wondered why, when Lorelei had come to Berlin to fetch Aurora after Sebastian’s accident, Lorelei hadn’t said, “I’ve gone through my own share of heartbreaks, too. ” Aurora would have loved to know.
Aurora would have loved to know it more recently, as well—this past semester, in fact, when her life had very seriously fallen off the rails again.
Not that she was willing to think about that yet.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Lorelei asked now.
Aurora tried to laugh it off. “Like what?”
Lorelei set down her butter knife. She looked nervous, as though she knew that Aurora had been going through her journals. “Everyone’s back in Rome,” she said instead. “Safe. They say it’s stifling. One hundred and five degrees.”
Aurora hissed. “No thank you.”
Lorelei laughed. Aurora ached to ask her mother if she missed her father. She ached to ask Lorelei if seeing Carter again brought back painful memories. But there was a great distance between them, a cavern.
“I have to head to the front desk to help your Aunt Allegra,” Lorelei said. “What are your plans today?”
“More film work with the guys,” Aurora answered.
Lorelei looked as though she wanted to say something, maybe offer a piece of advice. But her eyes widened and all she said was, “Wonderful. Enjoy yourself.”
They parted ways.
Aurora planned to meet the guys in the stables at half-past four. After that, they had a meeting with Benjamin Whitmore in his personal study, which he’d had refurbished to look precisely as it had before the fire.
There was an air of expectation about everything, a bubbling. It felt even more exciting than it had before they’d interviewed Marybelle, maybe because they didn’t know what to expect.
En route to the study, Kenny and Oren checked their sound equipment and their cameras to make sure that everything was set to go.
Sometimes, Aurora caught Oren’s eyes on her.
Sometimes, she caught Kenny’s. She wondered what they said to one another about their pursuit of her.
She wondered if they’d fought about her at all.
She told herself she didn’t want either of them, that her main attraction was to making a documentary and returning to the world of art.
Why did men have to make everything so complicated?
When they reached the hallway that led to Benjamin’s study, Aurora reflected on her mother’s history with her grandfather.
She remembered how angry Grandpa Benjamin had been about Lorelei’s desire to leave Nantucket behind.
Her heartbeat escalated, and she found herself imagining her own father behind the door of the study, waiting for her.
She imagined him scolding her and saying, “I know you dropped out of business school. I know what messes you made of your life.”
But of course, he couldn’t possibly know! Could he?
Oren knocked on the door of the study, and Benjamin called for them to enter.
They did, discovering Benjamin already seated in a leather-backed chair, wearing a pair of slacks and a linen button-down.
He looked respectable and intelligent, his glasses little squares balanced halfway down his nose and his thick beard reminiscent of old European philosophers.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” Benjamin said as Aurora and the guys assembled their equipment. “A documentary about the history of the White Oak Lodge! I think we’re due for something like that.”
Aurora smiled and sat down before him. “Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed, Grandpa,” she said.
“I’d do anything for my granddaughter,” Benjamin said.
“And Kenny and Oren, I think it’s great that you find time in your busy schedule at the stables to make your art.
It’s one of the reasons we hired you, you know?
We wanted well-rounded people at the Lodge.
We wanted people who understood not only the history of this place but what we want it to transform into.
A place for great thinkers to celebrate life! ”
“It’s already becoming that.” Oren smiled.
When the camera and sound equipment were set up, Kenny said, “We’re rolling now, Mr. Whitmore.”
“Let’s get it going!” Benjamin said, rubbing his palms together. “Shall we start from the beginning? The place was built in 1862, but—”
“Actually, we have some questions we want to ask you,” Oren interrupted, turning to look at Aurora. With his eyes, he seemed to tell her that it’s her time to shine.
Aurora’s throat tightened. She hadn’t expected to be frightened. But seeing her grandfather so boisterous and happy despite everything gave her pause.
“The thing is, Grandpa,” she said, “we want to talk about your father.”
Benjamin tilted his head. “My father.”
“And his loss,” Aurora continued. “We learned about what happened back in the forties. During the war.”
“Yes, my father was in the war,” Benjamin said sadly.
“Many people told me, growing up, that my father was once boisterous and very happy, always one with a joke, always ready to laugh. When he got back from the war, this was not so, apparently. He’d been with my mother before the war, and he married her a couple of years after the war… but he wasn’t the same man.”
Aurora’s heart pumped. It sometimes boggled her mind to think of the millions, if not billions, of lives affected by that heinous world war.
“What did he say about his brother?” Aurora asked. “Did he ever talk about him?”
Benjamin’s lips parted with surprise. For a long time, he looked at Aurora, as though he couldn’t speak whatever language she’d said.
And then he offered, “Well, his brother died when they were babies. His twin brother. So, since he never really knew him, maybe there wasn’t very much to say?
Anyway, I can talk a lot about the architecture of the original White Oak Lodge.
I have the plans right here…” He gestured toward a stack of aged papers on his desk.
Aurora turned to look at both Oren and Kenny. Kenny looked vaguely panicked, like he wanted to stop recording, but Oren’s eyes urged her on. It was clear they’d struck on something.
“According to our research,” Aurora said delicately, “Edmund died in battle. In the war.”
Benjamin wrinkled his brow. “No, that’s not right. He died as a baby.”
Aurora had brought Great-Grandpa Charles’s journal upstairs with her, but she hadn’t imagined she’d need to use it. Now, she dug through her bag and pulled it out, handing it over to her grandfather. Benjamin took it, looking mystified. He hadn’t imagined the discussion going this way.
“I don’t think you have your facts right,” Benjamin said, his voice jagged. “My father would have told me if he’d lost his brother in the war.” But even as he said it, there was a ring of falseness to it. It was clear that his father had been cagey. There had been secrets.
Aurora sliced her hand over her neck, telling Kenny and Oren to stop filming. She no longer wanted anything to do with digging through her grandfather’s memories. It felt ugly to her.
But Oren shrugged and kept filming. Benjamin seemed to have forgotten that any of them were around, save for Aurora. With shaking hands, he opened the journal to the pages that Aurora had marked. His eyes were wet. Aurora watched him read, panic lacing through her.
Suddenly, Aurora stood and glared at Kenny and Oren. “I told you to stop,” she said.
Kenny looked shocked. He reached down and stopped the camera, while Oren extended his hands. “He agreed to be interviewed and filmed,” he said.
A tear drifted down her grandfather’s cheek. Aurora’s heart felt cracked. All at once, all she could think about was herself at nineteen, waiting in that hospital room in Berlin, waiting for the news that her boyfriend was either dead or too injured ever to walk again.
Bad news like that could hit you like a bomb.
Just because the bad news that Benjamin read about now had happened eighty years ago didn’t mean that it wasn’t enormous. She could feel it playing heavily on her mind.
“Let’s wrap this up another time, boys,” Benjamin said, unable to look at Oren and Kenny.
Oren looked irate and made a big show of packing up his things.
Kenny was quieter about it, more respectful.
It took them no more than three minutes to get everything together and leave the office.
After they closed the door, Aurora thought, I’ve really done it now.
I’ve destroyed my relationship with them. We’ll never finish that documentary.
But the look on her grandfather’s face told her she’d done the right thing.
“I can’t believe he never told me,” Benjamin said. “You probably think I’m foolish, not to know this about my uncle. I never knew my father had to mourn him. I never knew he died in battle, for goodness’ sake.” He closed his eyes for a long time.
Aurora couldn’t believe how secretive her family was.
She couldn’t believe how secretive she was, in fact. It seemed that she’d come by it honestly. It seemed that Aurora and Lorelei and Benjamin and Charles had all kept secrets from their family. But why? Why did they want to preserve themselves and their lives within themselves? What was the point?
Benjamin rubbed his temples. “Aurora, I’m sorry. I imagine you wanted that to go differently.”
“No, Grandpa. I’m sorry.” Aurora was endlessly embarrassed. She reached for her grandfather’s wrinkled hand.
“It’s just that, well, I lost my own brother.
Ronald. He drowned in the Nantucket Sound.
” Benjamin told a story that Aurora had only heard vaguely.
“It pains me so much to hear what happened to my uncle, my father’s twin.
Because I know it means my father had to go through such incredible pain twice in his life.
He had to say goodbye to so many people he loved.
Why should anyone have to go through that? ”
“It’s senseless,” Aurora said quietly.
“It really is.”
Aurora considered all the awful things that had happened to Benjamin, all the bad things that had happened to her. She considered Oren and Kenny, probably back in the stables by now, complaining about her.
“Does it ever end, Grandpa?” Aurora asked. She surprised herself with her naive question, but it spilled out regardless.
Her grandfather considered this. “You mean, loss? Does loss end?”
Aurora closed her eyes as an answer.
Benjamin squeezed her hand again.
“I feel like I’ve lost so much the past few years,” Aurora said. “I don’t know how to rebuild my life. It feels like bad things keep happening and knocking me down.”
Benjamin was quiet for a long time. When Aurora finally opened her eyes again, she saw honesty and strength in her grandfather’s eyes.
“We’ve rebuilt the White Oak Lodge,” Grandpa Benjamin said quietly. “It means that we can rebuild anything, even our hope.”