Page 4 of The Missing Pages
Violet had been happy to oblige. Now, as she placed the flowers down on the desk, she felt her body relax as she glanced at all the beautiful books that filled the space.
Violet had not felt well that morning, as she’d slept poorly yet again. She had stayed up late staring at her computer screen trying to finish a paper on the impact of Emily Dickinson and Feminist theory, only to spill coffee on it after she’d printed it out. She had to rush to print another copy early this morning at the science center, dropping it off at Professor Gupta’s office before racing to the library to make sure she would be able to retrieve the early-morning floral delivery and get the bouquet to Harry’s desk before Madeline arrived for work.
Violet felt something spiritual about entering the room. It wasn’t just the intimacy of being in a space that was created to evoke an Edwardian gentleman’s private reading room; it was all of the details that had been placed there with such consideration and care.
Behind the reflection of glass, the shelves were alight with different-colored leather bindings, a patterned rainbow of oxblood red, cognac, and pine green. Above the black marble fireplace hung an oil portrait of its namesake, Harry. Forever twenty-seven in his finely cut suit; his dark hair carefully parted in the middle; his gaze prescient and calm.
Framed by oak panels and decorated by a frieze of gilded laurel leaves with a female head at its crown, the painting was a focal point in the room. The artist, Gabriel Ferrer, had rendered Harry sitting in the comfort of a chair upholstered in claret-colored silk. One hand tipped to his cheek and the other held a book with a single finger between its pages, as if the painter had just caught him taking a momentary break from his current read.
Violet looked up at the portrait and a bittersweet feeling came over her. Here was yet another young life cut short. A tragic death, just like her Hugo’s. Every day she now spent at Harvard seemed like she was walking around without a key part of herself.
“A phantom limb,” her therapist had called the sensation. The way an amputee might feel after having lost a part of their physical self.
But, honestly, Violet felt she’d lost more than a limb. A missing appendage she could have dealt with, but losing Hugo was not an ancillary loss, it permeated her whole being. They had been inseparable. Gone were the conversations where she and Hugo argued who had the best rocky road—J.P. Licks on Charles Street or Emack & Bolio’s in the Square. She missed him pulling a melting ice-cream cone from her hand, helping her so it didn’t drip all over her cotton dress. She missed him sneaking glances at her while they studied in Lamont, the light flickering in his amber eyes. She missed his throaty laugh. The sound of his voice.
Violet and Hugo had been together since the fall of their freshman year. They had been as entwined as any two bodies could be. Even now,nearly three months after his death, Violet struggled to believe he was really gone. She’d lost track of how many times she’d been some place on campus, whether it be the leafy, overgrown Dudley Garden or outside the Athletic Center, and thought she’d seen the back of his head, his distinct mop of curly brown hair.
Although she knew she wasn’t meant to linger in the room, Violet stepped closer to the carved mantel and looked up at the portrait hanging above it. It was strange, almost as if her mind were playing tricks on her again. In the past, she’d heard other students mention that when they visited the Louvre in Paris, the eyes of theMona Lisafelt as though they were gazing solely upon them. “You could move to another corner, take a step back or to the side, and you felt like her eyes always followed you,” one student had shared during her freshman art history class. Now Violet felt the same way about the eyes in Harry Widener’s portrait.
She was tired. That had to be the explanation. She wasn’t just dealing with her grief, but also the demands of her new classes and work obligations.
Violet tried to settle her nerves, but suddenly she was struck by another odd sensation. Cold air rippled through the room. She glanced to see if there was a window open somewhere nearby. But there were no windows in this interior space. Violet stood absolutely still, trying to find the source of the breeze.
Another gust of cold air soon hit her; this time she was certain it had come down through the fireplace. It traveled eerily through the study, moving across the room to Harry’s desk, where the vase of fresh flowers seemed to shiver. A few petals fell to the desk’s wooden surface.
Violet’s eyes traveled up once more toward the portrait of Harry. She knew it sounded absurd, but she felt as if he were looking right at her.
CHAPTER THREE
DEATH DID NOT SILENCE ME.IT DID NOT STIFLE MY ABILITYto feel or to love. It did not pull me forever into the depths of the great, dark sea and extinguish my spirit. I emerged after the boat’s sinking, no longer in my physical form, but limitless, light-filled, and transformed.
It would be wrong to think that the dead remain static. Our curiosity does not die with us. We seek knowledge. We crave empathy. A ghost is the greatest reader of all.
Over the years, I have turned countless pages while watching the lives of those I love unfold. In the case of my mother, I witnessed her unfathomable grief, followed by her ultimately discovering a new sense of purpose in building a library to ensure that my books had a permanent home.
I have witnessed births and deaths. Peaks of triumph and valleys of despair.
And I have my own memories that return to me. My mother, sitting in her Philadelphia drawing room, dressed in waves of blue silk, a book spread open on her lap.
“You will love it,” she informs me. She had just purchased a new translation ofThe Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.The verdant green cover, with its title pressed in gold foil, looked almost like a piece of jewelry as she lifted it up for me to see.
She always loved tales from distant lands. She was born with an explorer’s soul. Behind her dove gray eyes, a fiery inquisitiveness and desire to learn smoldered.
When she quoted one of the verses from this Persian poet, a smile rippled across her face, as if she were revealing a secret only the two of us shared.
It was my mother who revealed to me the world that existed in the inches between the reader and the writer, where two souls could mingle without ever touching. She believed a good book spoke through you. That is why she never collected books merely as display items. She instead had her menageries, her collections of French porcelain, her silver, and her jewels to fill her appetite for beauty. With books, she simply purchased what she loved to read.
That was my first lesson I learned from her about collecting. “Only buy what you love” was one of her favorite mottoes.
The men in my family, on the other hand, often bought prized pieces to elevate their reputation as connoisseurs. They wanted to rise above the adage that those with new money didn’t appreciate elegance and good taste. On the walls of Lynnewood Hall, my uncle and grandfather worked together to build one of the most enviable art collections in the country. The walls of our family’s estate were adorned with paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Titian, and Raphael. Grandfather commissioned the famous John Singer Sargent to paint his portrait and others in our family, hoping the outcome would be reminiscent of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish painters he so admired.
But there was always something deeper to the way grandfather collected. For beneath the facade of a shrewd businessman, he was particularly sensitive to the fragility of life.
He did not speak often about the two children my grandmother and he had lost in the early years of their marriage. I had been named after my uncle Harry who had died at the age of eleven, and the weight of that loss often returned to him.
“You’re still too young to know this,” he reminded me as we stood outside our family’s estate, Lynnewood Hall, in its final days of completion. Above the grand columns, inside the limestone pediment, Grandfather had commissioned a rather unusual design. In the center, above the small circular window was a carving of an hourglass. Flanking its sides were four figures: a mother, a father, and their two children.
“But the two most important things in this world arefamily andtime,” he reminded me.
