I know I don’t want to stay with Celine indefinitely, though I am yearning to walk her peaceful acreage and to bask in its beauty. There is so much I want to forget, so much I want to forgive myself for, if that is possible. I’m trusting that the vineyard—blessedly untouched by the hell of war—will provide the solace I need to come to terms at last with what happened in Vienna. For I know I must.
My old college friend Lila Petrakis and her husband, George, have invited me to stay with them in San Francisco after the holidays while I figure out what is next for me. The idea appeals to me. Lila and I have kept in touch by letter all throughout the years. I didn’t complete my teacher’s certificate like Lila did, but she and I have stayed good friends. George and Lila even visited me years ago in Paris, when they sailed to France for their twentieth wedding anniversary. In my darkest hours during the war—and after it—I missed having a friend like Lila to lean on more than any other deprivation.
In what seems like only a handful of minutes, the train is pulling to a stop at the Zurich station. I trimmed my belongings such that everything I own now fits into two suitcases and an overnight bag for taking onto the plane. A porter helps me take my luggage to the taxi rank.
I look out the window as the driver maneuvers the streets of Zurich, and gazing at the busy people and the zipping cyclists and the mothers pushing young ones in prams momentarily eases my nervousness about the impending flight.
I need help checking my luggage through and finding my gate, but there are seasoned travelers at every turn who lend a hand or offer a word of advice. When it is time to board, I follow the other passengers outside to the brilliantly shining airplane; it looks just like the picture my student showed me.
I take steadying breaths as I step aboard, find my seat, buckle myself in. I close my eyes and count to two hundred as the rest of the passengers board and the engines began to roar and the propellers to spin. I grip the armrests tight as the plane gathers speed on the runway like a locomotive and then leaves the ground and begins to climb into the sky. I slowly open my eyes to peer out the oval window next to me. The sight of the city below takes my breath away. How small Zurich looks. How tiny the automobilesand buildings are. How big the generous sky stretches! Like a never-ending and translucent sea where no evil and dark things swim.
So this is what it is like, I muse to myself,to soar far, far beyond where you used to be.
22
SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA
DECEMBER 1947
I arrive at the Santa Rosa train station more than a week after leaving Switzerland and to weather that is balmy compared to what I left behind. A happy sun is shining in the bold California sky, and the temperature hovers at sixty-five pleasant degrees.
I wrote to Celine earlier not to worry about coming to get me, that I would just get a taxi for the six-mile jaunt to the vineyard.
As the taxi pulls away from the station, I can’t keep my gaze from the window. It has been seventeen years since I set foot on the land of my childhood. So much has happened since then.
Truman and I were raised in Sebastopol, a sleepy little farming town seven miles west of Santa Rosa where our father once owned a hardware store. My wanderlust grew out of wanting to escape country life but also out of nighttime cuddles with my mother before she died. It was my mother who told me about faraway places that she longed to visit someday. She was the one who wanted to see London and Paris and Cairo and Rome. When she was taken from us by a blood disease no one understood, I grieved for her by assuming all of her dreams. I didn’t know atthe time that she never actually thought she would go to those places, that she knew my father was far too practical a man to indulge in fantasies like that when there would never be the money to indulge in them. When I turned eighteen and all my friends went off to either secretarial or nursing school or teachers’ college—or to chapels to get married—my father insisted I make my choice. The world will always need teachers and nurses and secretaries, he said, and since I didn’t have any marriage proposals, those were my only choices. I didn’t want to be a nurse and I hated the idea of sitting at a typewriter all day long, so to college I went to become a teacher. I enjoyed being around children, had always enjoyed it, but the truth was, I didn’t want to be a classroom teacher, either. It took three years of college and nearly finishing my teaching certificate before I figured out I didn’t have to become what someone else had chosen for me.
I got my first nanny job in San Francisco working for a British family with twin boys. When they returned home to London eighteen months later, they took me with them, as they’d promised they would when they’d interviewed me. My father was still barely speaking to me then, he was so angry about my leaving college to “wipe the noses of other people’s children,” and when I came home to say good-bye to Truman, Pops left the room.
“I can’t watch you make this mistake,” he grumbled on his way past me.
I couldn’t wait to get away. And then I loved Europe so much, it was easy to stay.
But even though I longed for city life and all the places my mother had dreamed of, and even though I wanted to get as far away from Pops’s disappointment as I could, I still loved Sonoma County—the acres and acres of plum and apple trees and vineyards and rolling hills and the tall pepper trees and scrub oak and sycamores. As the taxi drives me out to Celine’s, I am so happy to see the landscape is the same. When I arrive at the RosseauVineyard, it’s as if nothing has changed here, either. The trees are taller and there is a different car in the driveway, but the grapevines are the same, and so is the stuccoed house with its red-tile roof and terra-cotta pots of hardy geraniums. The driver helps me retrieve my luggage, and as I am paying him, Celine opens the front door. She also looks virtually the same; the years have been kind to her. The only discernible difference I can see is faint lines of weariness under her eyes. Truman has been dead for five years, but I can see that Celine still has sleepless nights.
I wasn’t in the States when Truman married Celine, and when I finally did meet her, I was surprised this assertive and confident woman was the one Truman had fallen for. He seemed so deferential around his petite wife. In quiet awe of her more than in love with her.
“How did you know Celine was the one for you?” I asked him when we were alone. I was curious, but also worried that my little brother was in a marriage that might one day disappoint him.
Truman thought for a long moment. “It was Celine saying that I was the one for her, I guess. Here was this beautiful woman raised in wealth and privilege, declaring she wantedme—a lowly clerk at the firm that did the vineyard’s taxes. She wanted me. I fell for that like a stone in water.”
I remember wondering—as I still wonder five years after his death—if it was Celine my brother had fallen in love with or just the idea that she’d chosen him.
“Hello, Helen,” Celine says, coming down the steps and giving me a featherlight kiss on the cheek.
“It’s so wonderful to see you,” I say in return.
“Is this everything?”
I look down at the two suitcases on the gravel. Check to see that I have my purse and overnight bag on my arm. “Yes. I think I’m all set.”
We step inside the house after the taxi leaves, and I’m happyto see that Celine decorated the house for Christmas. There is a tall Douglas fir in the living room draped with lights, sparkling ornaments, and garlands. The tables and shelves and mantel are lined from end to end with festive evergreen boughs and candles.
“The house looks so pretty,” I say.
Celine casts a glance around her. “I suppose it seems silly to decorate it just for me.”
“Not at all. And it’s not just for you.”
