A French Star in New York (The French Girl Series Book 2)

by Anna Adams

  And that’s what she got when she stepped into Elder Williams’ home in Brooklyn with the Baldwins.

  The door swung wide open and curiosity greeted them. Curiosity wore a crown of white hair matted into braids, and reading glasses clutching her nose. Of course Winnie Win, James’ mother would have wanted to be the first to see that French girl everyone had been fussing about since her son had travelled to Paris. That singing girl who walked with a piano tucked underneath her fingernails.

  “So you’re that French girl everyone’s been gossiping about,” Winnie Win greeted, surveying Maude with a critical eye. “You don’t look French to me. But you’re pretty enough. Come on in. The other guests haven’t arrived yet.”

  Winnie Win welcomed Maude into the Elder Williams home and wondered at her not wearing a beret and a baguette under her arm. What kind of French girl was she?

  The sort of French girl who inhaled every African detail in the Elder Williams house with keen interest. The ancient house bore a gloomy charm about it. A postcard for a Halloween haunted house, except nobody knew whether kind or menacing ghosts haunted it. The living room tipped in a cauldron of African charm with statuettes and masks neatly displayed in every corner, wall, and piece of furniture. The most interesting mask, no doubt, was the grim one the Elder Williams had latched on his face once he’d understood respect originated first and foremost from fear.

  Victoria had narrated few tales concerning the stern man. Maude had imagined him tall, muscular with an imposing, booming, thunderous voice like a djinn from Arabian tales. In his place she found a frail, but healthy septuagenarian held by an ivory cane. No booming voice raged, but a steady clump, clump, clump from a stick more similar to a scepter than a cane.

  “Dad,” Victoria started pleasantly. “This is Maude, Aaron’s daughter,” she added. She’d stopped fearing her father years ago, but he still managed to inspire a certain awe and a silent thanks to the heavens she no longer lived under his roof.

  The Elder Williams eyes didn’t linger on that “French Granddaughter” of his. He never needed to stare at people. He read her in a split second. Her amused smile, the tiny crinkles about her mouth when she did so, her resemblance to his long-lost son. He hated her. Then loved her. Then feared her and hated her once more, because loving represented a commodity he refused at his age, not when he knew what he knew. Not when he’d lived what he’d lived.

  One could love someone at twenty, thirty, forty. But one stopped discovering loved ones at sixty. By then, his affections (as seldom as he demonstrated them) had been set on the family he knew, not the strange fruit that randomly fell off his family tree. The season for falling in love with loved ones had withered, replaced by a cold winter, freezing his emotions around the family ties he’d cultivated his entire life. How was it then that when he read Maude’s unabashed eyes, the hinges of his rusty heart rotated back to life? For sure, he had to hate her, or he wouldn’t live his remaining years in peace. That wouldn’t be too hard.

  After all, he’d always hated the French.

  “Maude Williams, welcome to our family,” he finally decided to greet, his grim mask safely pinned to his face.

  “I’m Maude Laurent,” Maude corrected with stiff politeness. She had an uncanny inkling her grandfather had left out her French name on purpose and preferred he hadn’t. “That is until I’m officially adopted. Then I’ll be Maude Laurent-Baldwin.”

  The doorbell’s loud summoning drowned Elder Williams’s derisive snort out. An undeniable wave of relief washed over Jazmine when the doorbell rang: Elder Williams always treated her like she had two left hands, left feet, and drove on the left side of the street.

  “Uncle Stephen, Auntie Loretta! Jordan!” she squealed with delight upon seeing her cousin. Her aunt and uncle were the most boring people she knew, but, with Jordan, fun took a whole new meaning. “Where are Trey and Harriet?” she asked quizzically. It was an uncanny sight to see Jordan without Trey, like seeing peanut butter without jelly. Acceptable, but odd nevertheless.

  “They’re coming up with Maude’s gift. But who cares? You’ve got the best-looking Williams in the house!” Jordan swayed and danced right into the living room, under his grandfather’s irate glare and Maude’s bewildered eyes.

  Jordan tripped over the ancient rug when he saw Maude.

  “You!” he yelled out with frantic astonishment. “You’re that Maude!” He emphasized the word Maude as if he’d discovered America’s most wanted criminal.

  Maude herself seemed to have a hard time recovering her power of speech. The young man standing before her was the same one she’d helped at Jason Taylor’s party and who had in return erased her from his memory in the blink of an eye.

  “You?” Maude asked. “You’re my cousin?” To think she had a cousin who could drink to the point of complete oblivion was disturbing in the least.

  “You two know each other?” Cynthia asked, wondering how much she’d missed during her summer retreat.

  “Do I know her?” Jordan spluttered. “She ruined my evening! She completely wrecked any chance I had of_—”

  “If by ruining your evening you mean saving your life, I take that as a compliment!” Maude retorted.

  “Saving my life! I didn’t know gorgeous redheads were a life-threatening disease!”

  “Redheads! I’m sure you don’t even remember her name. No wonder Jennifer wants nothing more to do with you!”

  “Who the hell is that Jennifer you keep talking about?”

  “I think you’re talking about my Jennifer, aren’t you?”

  Maude turned to the doorway and sure enough, Jordan’s identical twin brother stood there like the logical explanation to their very twisted tale.

  Maude and Jordan turned to Trey, then to each other, and erupted in fits of laughter that might have shaken the Earth more thoroughly than Atlas sneezing.

  Jordan and Trey hugged their newfound cousin with unaffected merriness while their parents and sister Harriet greeted Maude with a wary eye.

  Victoria’s older brother Stephen and his wife Loretta hated indignity. Finding out about a lost niece, raised by wolves in the jungle of a remote French town was weird to say the least. Ordinary for all, but the Joneses, like the strand of hair sticking out from a tight bun, the red eyes that stood out from a Polaroid picture. It didn’t help that they detected none of the refinery they thought all French young girls ought to display.

  Their daughter, on the other hand, had the airs of a nineteenth-century duchess. Prim and proper was the mantra she held on to tighter than her gloved hands clung to the leather handles of her Chanel bag.

  “Where are Rocky and Aunt Pearl? Late as usual, I’m sure,” Harriet commented, her eye wandering around the room as if her aunt would pop out of the chimney. “Tardiness in a female is a most insufferable trait,” she added as she sat on the nearest sofa with an air of dignified boredom.

  “I doubt tardiness is valued in any person, male or female, Harriet,” Victoria admonished with caution. She’d promised James she would show uncommon restraint and ignore Harriet’s outdated remarks on female etiquette even if she had to choke on her own tongue. Listening to a member of her own family regurgitate such chauvinistic views was mildly bearable on a normal basis, but on that particular day, called for the exercise of a herculean effort.

  But then, she would do anything to allow Maude to spend a peaceful birthday gathering.

  “We’re here! Pop the bubbly!” Aunt Pearl cried as she made her long-waited entrance into the living room, accompanied by her son.

  Maude’s grandfather grumbled something about the invention of doorbells, but absorbed with her new aunt’s joyful demeanor, she ignored her grandfather’s confusing speech.

  “So, that’s the new hair color you went for, Pearl,” Uncle Stephen sniffed. “A very appropriate color to meet your new niece.”

  If Aunt Pearl was called the “wild child” of the Williams family with embarrassment on Uncle Stephen’s part, and
admiration from Victoria’s, only she knew how little truth existed in the nickname she’d never chosen to ascribe herself. The only wild thing about her at the moment was the growling of her ravenous stomach. As well as the fluorescence of her thick, red-dyed mane. Her acting career had been similar to the toilet paper commercial she’d just appeared in: short, unmemorable, and over before it began. The only thing she had to boast for stood next to her as the handsome, twenty-year-old fellow she’d raised on her own.

  “I’m sure Maude won’t mind having one eccentric aunt. Every family needs at least one, no?” Rocky observed.

  “We have an archaeologist. Isn’t that eccentric enough?” Jordan teased, elbowing his cousin.

  “I’m sure it is,” Elder Williams scowled as he left the room and headed for the dining room. “With brains like that, Rocky could’ve been anything: a doctor, a businessman, an astronaut. Anything.”

  A cantankerous individual’s affections, seldom bestowed, are wont to affix themselves on a particular person for no other reason but that of their whimsical perceptions. Rocky was Elder Williams’ soft spot, a black hole where his ill-humor would stay trapped.

  Rocky deserved his name from having spent hours among minerals, digging up what in his eyes appeared as diamonds but in his mother’s were just her son’s best friends. What was thought a mere infatuation at eight spawned into a full-blown passion at eighteen and a desire to become an archeologist to his beloved grandfather’s vocal disapproval.

  As soon as Maude and Rocky laid eyes on each other, they knew they would get along just fine. They barely had time to exchange more than a hello before Maude’s aunt and cousins grabbed her wanting to know everything about this French girl who had taken New York by storm.

  “I don’t understand: why don’t you wear a beret?” asked Winnie Win, settling next to Maude at the dinner table. She peered at Maude’s head as if she could make a beret appear out of thin air.

  “Not everyone wears berets in France, Winnie,” Harriet replied, rolling her eyes. “The French are more refined than that. Most of them are at least,” she said, pinning Maude with the stone gaze she reserved for people who’d erupted from the gutter. Maude met her reproof with puzzlement. To think she was being given the once-over by a girl who’d stepped right out of the little house on the prairie.

  “Who cares about refinement? Parisian parties are the best!” Jordan exclaimed. “Remember the one we went to on the Champs-Elysées with Matt on New Year’s Eve?”

  Maude choked on her drink.

  “You’ve been to parties on the Champs? With Matt?”

  “That happened before he decided to become a serious artist,” Trey explained with a tinge of regret. There were way too many serious artists out there, and he never could understand why Matt had decided to join their boring ranks.

  “The French president’s son came, too. That party was sweeeeet.”

  “You two should be thinking less about jet-setting and more about your studies,” Winnie Win remarked. She’d raised her only son to a sturdy, dependable man. What was it with those Williams twins and their passion for burning money they’d never earned?

  “I think it’s important for young men to have all the fun they can while they’re young,” Aunt Loretta pointed out, before shutting her lips back into a thin firm line.

  “Only young men,” Victoria mumbled, biting her lip in exasperation.

  “Here comes Queen Victoria, the feminist of the year, wearing her self-righteous halo, wanting to free all womanhood from shackles imposed by domineering men,” Uncle Stephen sneered.

  Victoria protested, but silent pleas from Jazmine and Cynthia slowed her revolutionary fervor to a stop. Besides, her older brother was a lost cause she didn’t want to waste her breath on. And she’d promised to be on her best behavior.

  “I’m a woman,” Harriet declared as if anybody might have thought otherwise. “But I don’t care for all this feminist talk one bit,” she stated, cutting her meat with her dainty little fingers.

  “Have you found a husband yet?” Ben asked, relishing from the knowledge the dinner was two steps from skidding off the rails.

  “Ben!” James cried with horror.

  Harriet dropped her knife with shaky hands and warm cheeks. Stephen’s daughter never dropped anything and might’ve been an incredible juggler if she’d thought it an appropriate pastime for a young female of her station. But every time the dreadful question hung in the air (and Ben asked it several times a year to harass his arrogant cousin), she lost her wits. She’d turned twenty-five this year and still had found no respectable man to gift her hand with the long-awaited engagement ring she’d chosen at Tiffany’s on her seventeenth birthday.

  “I haven’t,” she croaked, on the verge of tears as she picked up the knife she wanted to stab her little cousin with.

  Cynthia, who sat next to her, touched her shoulder with sympathy.

  “You’ll find your Prince Charming soon, I’m sure,” she said. Cynthia, the only Baldwin who managed to comprehend the workings of Harriet’s mind, was taken aback when her cousin burst into tears.

  Jazmine sighed in exasperation. Neither Jazmine, nor Ben had the patience to deal with Harriet’s antics, and Maude presently understood why.

  “I’m such a disgrace! I’m twenty-five and all my friends are married, and I’m noooooot!”

  “I’ve never been married, and I assure you there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Aunt Pearl said with a coaxing smile.

  “Please, Pearl, don’t give matrimonial advice. I don’t expect you to understand. My daughter won’t make the mistakes you made,” Uncle Stephen inserted.

  “Mistakes! Rocky is not, and will never be called a mistake in this house. Do you understand me, Stephen?” Pearl hissed.

  “Rocky may not have been a mistake,” Aunt Loretta huffed, “but that toilet paper commercial you were in wasn’t your finest hour.”

  “Don’t talk to my sister that way, Loretta,” Victoria warned. “I’d rather see my sister being chased by flying toilet paper rolls any day, than sit next to a girl who thinks her wedding day is the alpha and omega of her existence.”

  James winced as Victoria’s self-restraint flapped its wings and flew happily out the window. So much for that promise Victoria had made that same morning.

  “We can’t all be like you, Victoria. Always wanting to save the world,” Stephen snarled. “I’d rather enjoy what life gives me.”

  “You mean what Dad gives you, Stephen,” Victoria retorted. “Dad and Williams Enterprise.”

  “I tend to agree with Stephen on this one, Victoria,” Elder Williams finally spoke up. “You might want to reconsider your lifestyle, Vic. James will have to work for me now that he’s lost what he considered a career.”

  “Actually,” James intervened, “ I didn’t want to talk about it today, but I was offered a position in another music company.” No way he’d put up with Elder Williams embarrassing him in front of his family again.

  “Really?” Jazmine shrieked as if he’d announced he’d found the cure to cancer. That was a huge weight off her chest. “Where?”

  “Jazmine, this is neither the time nor the place,” James admonished, glancing at a distraught Maude.

  “Are you going to work for Tenacious Records? Or better yet for Motown? I’m sure you’d make the perfect fit, Uncle James!” Trey exclaimed.

  “Tell us where you’ll work, James. Unless you’re making all of this up.” Elder Williams had never approved of the young bluesman Victoria had brought home one day at twenty-six, and his contempt had increased when he’d been apprised of James’ predicament.

  “My son wouldn’t make stuff up, Saul,” Winnie Win said, sternness crisping her face. “I raised my son right,” she added pointedly, sniffing in Stephen’s direction.

  James saw another argument brewing and decided to intervene before things went askew anew.

  “I’ll be working for Glitter Records,” he revealed, avoiding Maude's que
stioning glance. “I’ll be working on Lindsey Linton’s new album.”

  “Glitter?” Maude choked. This birthday was going horribly amiss. Not remotely how she had pictured her first family gathering. But Uncle James working with Lindsey?

  “She’s hot! Would you mind if I dropped by your workplace one of these days, Uncle James?” Jordan asked, unaware of his cousin’s discomfort.

  “ Nah, bro. She’s dating Matt or Thomas Bradfield. Or Matt left her for Maude and then Maude dumped him for Thomas. Haven’t you heard all these rumors about that love triangle or square or whatever their twisted deal is?”

  “And how much will they pay you? Much less than what you got with your own company for sure,” Elder Williams interrupted, still intent on squeezing information out of James.

  “Lindsey Linton is not going out with Matt. Maude and Thomas aren’t a couple. It’s all lies,” Jazmine answered hotly, glancing at Maude who preferred listening to what James had to say.

  “The pay is fine,” James was saying. “I’m more preoccupied with Glitter’s politics. Our idea of music isn’t exactly the same.”

  “I forgot how big of a dreamer you were, James Baldwin. That’s why Soulville always made less money than Glitter. Maybe your internship there won’t be for nothing.”

  “It’s not an internship.”

  “Might teach you a thing or two. You and Victoria are like children,” Elder Williams shook his head, his white curls moving to the rhythm of his reproach. “You got dreams, you want to make this world a better place. It’s all vanity. Fighting for lost causes didn’t get Aaron anywhere did it? Other than his grave. Him and that ridiculous French wife of his, wife whom we know nothing of and who, for all we know, might’ve married him for his family’s money.”

  Dead silence filled the room.

  “How dare you.” Maude whispered in a menacing voice. “How dare you speak of my parents that way! My mother! You never . . . ” Maude took a deep breath to steady her voice “You never even knew her!”

  “I know the French, I know things about them you wouldn’t even suspect. And I know you’re one, too, so you can’t be altogether different. That’s quite enough information for me,” Elder Williams said, pointing his ivory cane accusingly at Maude.