Nora squinted at the three of them. “Do you have a strong stomach?”
“Sure,” Fiona said. Roman looked suddenly uncomfortable.
“Some friends of Modi’s wanted to make a death mask. One was Kisling, the painter, who’d become a friend of Ranko’s in the war. And Lipchitz the sculptor. They had no idea what they were doing. The third was an astrologer. And they invited Ranko to watch. I was jealous, because I’d wanted to say goodbye to Modi, and Ranko, who’d hated him, got to go instead. The trouble was, Lipchitz used the wrong plaster, something too abrasive, so when they took it off”—she glanced at each of them—“it peeled off his cheek, and his eyelids. The men panicked and dropped the cast right on the floor. In the end, they pieced it back together, and Lipchitz ended up essentially carving the face. It’s in the museum at Harvard now, and I’ve no desire to see it.”
Fiona seemed fine but Roman looked pale. The imagination that had been allowing him to picture Ranko so vividly was probably not his friend right now. Yale felt woozy himself.
“It drove Ranko over the edge,” Nora said. “He’d already been a wreck, but I think seeing someone—someone of great talent, no less—turn into a skeleton before his eyes . . . Well, he managed to tell me the story, but it was about the last thing he ever said to me. I’m sure he’d seen worse in the war, but this was different.
“And meanwhile, Jeanne killed herself over Modi. She leapt out the window of her parents’ house, unborn baby and all. I wonder about that, too, the effect on Ranko. You know, when they call us the Lost Generation—Was it Hemingway who said that, or Fitzgerald?”
Roman said, “It was—sorry—it was something Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. But, I mean, he was the one who wrote it down.”
“Good. Well. I can’t see a better way to put it. We’d been through something our parents hadn’t. The war made us older than our parents. And when you’re older than your parents, what are you going to do? Who’s going to show you how to live?”
Nora ran her finger along the edge of the shoebox. She said, “The funeral was a circus, just the worst sort of irony. He’d died cold and hungry, and here was this opulent affair at Père Lachaise. Now—Yale, you need to tell me when to stop. You’ve driven so far, and I’m ruining everyone’s day. You should know we had so much joy as well! But when you boil a story down, you end up with something macabre. All stories end the same way, don’t they.”
Yale wasn’t actually sure he could take one more mention of death, but he said, “Keep going.”
“You know the basic fact, which is that Ranko killed himself. It was the same day as Modi’s funeral. A group of us went, afterward, to La Rotonde. We were drinking and carrying on, and I wasn’t looking at Ranko. Someone said later they saw him put his hand to his mouth. All we saw was that he started shaking violently, fell off his chair. Everyone thought he was having a seizure. But then he wasn’t breathing, and blisters popped up around his lips. I couldn’t stop screaming. By the time the medics came, he was dead. What they figured later, from the powder on his hand and in his pocket, was he’d swallowed cyanide crystals. Popped them straight in his mouth. Why he chose that particular moment, I’ve spent a lifetime wondering.”
“Cyanide!” Roman said. “So he—he had to have planned it, right? You don’t just carry that stuff around.”
Yale said, “Why do you think he did it?”
“Good lord. People take their reasons with them, don’t they?”
Debra was back with the groceries, and she refused help carrying them, but then she banged through the room four times.
Roman stepped outside to smoke, and when he was gone, Nora said, “I’m sure you think I’m foolish to stay so devoted to someone so difficult.” Neither of them protested. “It’s not as if it kept me from living my life. If he’d lived, we’d have parted ways soon enough. He’d have had a life out there in the world, outside my mind. But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all