Lilac Girls

by Martha Hall Kelly

  “Dancing around things never feels authentic. The audience feels that.”

  “Can you just stick to the script, Monsieur?”

  “Worrying can lead to heart failure, Miss Ferriday.”

  I pulled the pin from the lily of the valley. “Here—a boutonnière for the guest of honor.”

  “Muguet?” M. Rodierre said. “Where did you find that this time of year?”

  “You can get anything in New York. Our florist forces it from pips.”

  I rested my palm against his lapel and dug the pin deep into the French velvet. Was that lovely fragrance from him or the flowers? Why didn’t American men smell like this, of tuberose and wood musk and—

  “You know lily of the valley is poisonous, right?” M. Rodierre said.

  “So don’t eat it. At least not until you’ve finished speaking. Or if the crowd turns on you.”

  He laughed, causing me to step back. Such a genuine laugh, something rarely found in polite society, especially where my jokes were concerned.

  I escorted M. Rodierre backstage and stood awed by the enormity of the stage, twice the size of any I’d stood upon on Broadway. We looked out over the ballroom to the sea of tables lit by candlelight, like flowery ships in the darkness. Though dimmed, the Waterford crystal chandelier and its six satellites shimmered.

  “This stage is enormous,” I said. “Can you carry it?”

  M. Rodierre turned to me. “I do this for a living, Miss Ferriday.”

  Fearing I’d only antagonize him further, I left M. Rodierre and the script backstage, trying to dismiss my brown-suede-shoe fixation. I hurried to the ballroom to see if Pia had executed my seating chart, more detailed and dangerous than a Luftwaffe flight plan. I saw she’d simply tossed several cards onto the six Rockefeller tables, so I rearranged them and took my place close to the stage between the kitchen and the head table. Three stories of red-draped boxes rose up around the vast room, each with its own dinner table. All seventeen hundred seats would be filled, a lot of unhappy people if all didn’t go well.

  The guests assembled and took their seats, an ocean of white ties, old mine diamonds, and enough rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré gowns to clean out most of Paris’s best shops. The girdles alone would ensure both Bergdorf and Goodman reached their third-quarter sales goals.

  A row of journalists collected alongside me, pulling their pencils out from behind their ears. The headwaiter stood poised at my elbow, awaiting the cue to serve. Elsa Maxwell entered the room—gossipmonger, professional party hostess, and self-promoter ne plus ultra. Would she remove her gloves to write terrible things about this night in her column or just memorize the horror of it all?

  The tables were almost full when Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, known to Roger as “Her Grace,” arrived, her four-story Cartier diamond necklace ablaze at her chest. I gave the signal to serve as Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bottom made contact with her seat cushion, her white fox stole, complete with head and feet, draped over her chair back. The lights dimmed, and Roger lumbered to the spotlighted podium to heartfelt applause. I’d never been this nervous when I was the one onstage.

  “Mesdames et Messieurs, Foreign Minister Bonnet sends his sincerest apologies, but he cannot be here tonight.” The crowd buzzed, not sure how to react to disappointment. Did one ask for one’s money refunded by mail? Call Washington?

  Roger held up one hand. “But we have convinced another Frenchman to speak tonight. Though not appointed to a government role, he is a man cast in one of the best roles on Broadway.”

  The guests whispered to one another. There is nothing like a surprise, provided it’s a good one.

  “Please allow me to welcome M. Paul Rodierre.”

  M. Rodierre bypassed the podium and headed for center stage. What was he doing? The spotlight cast around the stage for a few moments, trying to locate him. Roger took his seat at the head table, next to Mrs. Vanderbilt. I stood nearby, but outside of strangling range.

  “It’s my great pleasure to be here tonight,” M. Rodierre said, once the spotlight found him. “I am terribly sorry M. Bonnet could not make it.”

  Even sans microphone, M. Rodierre’s voice filled the room. He practically glowed in the spotlight.

  “I am a poor replacement for such a distinguished guest. I hope it wasn’t trouble with his plane. I’m sure President Roosevelt will be happy to send him a new one if it was.”

  A swell of nervous laughter rolled around the room. I didn’t have to look at the journalists to know they were scribbling. Roger, skilled in the art of the tête-à-tête, managed to speak with Mrs. Vanderbilt and send daggers my way at the same time.

  “True, I cannot talk to you about politics,” M. Rodierre continued.

  “Thank God!” someone shouted from a back table. The crowd laughed again, louder this time.

  “But I can talk to you about the America I know, a place that surprises me every day. A place where open-minded people embrace not only French theater and books and cinema and fashion but French people as well, despite our faults.”

  “Shit,” said the reporter next to me to his broken pencil. I handed him mine.

  “Every day I see people help others. Americans inspired by Mrs. Roosevelt, who reaches her hand across the Atlantic to help French children. Americans like Miss Caroline Ferriday, who works every day to help French families here in America and keeps French orphans clothed.”

  Roger and Mrs. Vanderbilt looked my way. The spotlight found me, standing at the wall, and the familiar light blinded me. Her Grace clapped, and the crowd followed. I waved until the light, mercifully quickly, whipped back to the stage, leaving me in cool darkness. I didn’t miss the Broadway stage really, but it was good to feel the warmth of the spotlight on my skin again.

  “This is an America not afraid to sell planes to the people who stood beside them in the trenches of the Great War. An America not afraid to help keep Hitler from the streets of Paris. An America not afraid of standing shoulder to shoulder again with us if that terrible time does come…”

  I watched, only able to look away for a few peeks at the crowd. They were engrossed and certainly not focused on his shoes. Half an hour passed in an instant, and I held my breath as M. Rodierre took his bow. The applause started small but rose in waves like a tremendous rainstorm pelting the roof. A teary-eyed Elsa Maxwell used a hotel napkin to dry her eyes, and by the time the audience rose to their feet and belted out “La Marseillaise,” I was glad Bonnet didn’t have to follow that performance. Even the staff sang, hands over their hearts.

  As the lights came up, Roger looked relieved and greeted the crush of well-wishers that lingered near the head table. When the evening wound down, he left for the Rainbow Room with a gaggle of our best donors and a few Rockettes, the only women in New York who made me look short.

  M. Rodierre touched my shoulder as we left the dining room. “I know a place over on the Hudson with great wine.”

  “I need to get home,” I said, though I hadn’t eaten a thing. Warm bread and buttery escargot came to mind, but it was never smart to be seen out alone with a married man. “Not tonight, Monsieur, but thank you.” I could be home in minutes, to a cold apartment and the leftover Waldorf salad.

  “You’ll make me eat alone after our triumph?” M. Rodierre said.

  Why not go? My set ate at only certain restaurants, which you could count on one hand, all within a four-block radius of the Waldorf, nowhere near the Hudson. What harm could one dinner do?

  We took a cab to Le Grenier, a lovely bistro on the West Side. The French ocean liners sailed up the Hudson River and docked at Fifty-first Street, so some of New York’s best little places popped up near there, like chanterelles after a good rain. Le Grenier lived in the shadow of the SS Normandie, in the attic of a former harbormaster’s building. When we exited the cab, the great ship rose high above us, deck bright with spotlights, four floors of portholes aglow. A welder at her bow sent apricot sparks into the night sky as deckhands lowered a spotl
ight down her side to painters on a scaffold. She made me feel small standing there, below that great, black prow, her three red smokestacks, each bigger than any of the warehouse buildings that extended down the pier. Salt hung in the end-of-summer air as Atlantic seawater met Hudson River fresh.

  The tables at Le Grenier were packed with a nice enough looking crowd, mostly middle-class types, including a reporter from the gala and what looked like ocean-liner passengers happy to be on terra firma. We chose a tight, shellacked wooden booth, built like something from the inside of a ship, where every inch counts. Le Grenier’s maître d’, M. Bernard, fawned over M. Rodierre, told him he’d seen The Streets of Paris three times, and shared in great detail the specifics of his own Hoboken Community Theater career.

  M. Bernard turned to me. “And you, Mademoiselle. Haven’t I seen you on the stage with Miss Helen Hayes?”

  “An actress?” M. Rodierre said with a smile.

  At close range, that smile was unsafe. I had to keep my wits about me, since Frenchmen were my Achilles’ heel. In fact, if Achilles had been French, I probably would have carried him around until his tendon healed.

  M. Bernard continued. “I thought the reviews were unfair—”

  “We’ll order,” I said.

  “One used the word ‘stiffish,’ I believe—”

  “We’ll have the escargot, Monsieur. Light on the cream, please—”

  “And what was it the Times said about Twelfth Night? ‘Miss Ferriday sufficed as Olivia’? Harsh, I thought—”

  “—And no garlic. Undercook them, please, so they are not too tough.”

  “Would you like them to crawl to the table, Mademoiselle?” M. Bernard scratched down our order and headed for the kitchen.

  M. Rodierre studied the champagne list, lingering over the details. “An actress, eh? I’d never have guessed.” There was something appealing about his unkempt look, like a potager in need of weeding.

  “The consulate suits me better. Mother’s known Roger for years, and when he suggested I help him, I couldn’t resist.”

  M. Bernard placed a basket of bread on our table, lingering a moment to gaze at M. Rodierre, as if memorizing him.

  “Hope I’m not running off a boyfriend tonight,” Paul said. He reached for the breadbasket as I did, and my hand brushed his, warm and soft. I darted my hand back to my lap.

  “I’m too busy for all that. You know New York—parties and all. Exhausting, really.”

  “Never see you at Sardi’s.” He pulled apart the loaf, steam rising to the light.

  “Oh, I work a lot.”

  “I have a feeling you don’t work for the money.”

  “It’s an unsalaried position, if that’s what you mean, but that’s not a question asked in polite society, Monsieur.”

  “Can we dispense with the ‘Monsieur’? Makes me feel ancient.”

  “First names? We’ve only just met.”

  “It’s 1939.”

  “Manhattan society is like a solar system with its own order. A single woman dining with a married man is enough to throw planets out of alignment.”

  “No one will see us here,” Paul said, pointing out a champagne on the list to M. Bernard.

  “Tell that to Miss Evelyn Shimmerhorn over there in the back booth.”

  “Are you ruined?” he said with a certain type of kindness seldom found in achingly beautiful men. Maybe the black shirt was a good choice for him after all.

  “Evelyn won’t talk. She’s having a child, poorly timed, dear thing.”

  “Children. They complicate everything, don’t they? No place for that in an actor’s life.”

  Another selfish actor.

  “How does your father earn your place in this solar system?”

  Paul was asking a lot of questions for a new acquaintance.

  “Earned, actually. He was in dry goods.”

  “Where?”

  M. Bernard slid a silver bucket with handles like gypsy’s earrings onto the table, the emerald-green throat of the champagne bottle lounging against one side.

  “Partnered with James Harper Poor.”

  “Of Poor Brothers? Been to his house in East Hampton. He’s not exactly poor. Do you visit France often?”

  “Paris every year. Mother inherited an apartment…on rue Chauveau Lagarde.”

  M. Bernard eased the cork from the champagne with a satisfying sound, more thud than pop. He tipped the golden liquid into my glass, and the bubbles rose to the rim, almost overflowed, then settled at the perfect level. An expert pour.

  “My wife, Rena, has a little shop near there called Les Jolies Choses. Have you seen it?”

  I sipped my champagne, the bubbles teasing my lips.

  Paul slid her picture from his wallet. Rena was younger than I had imagined and wore her dark hair in a china doll haircut. She was smiling, eyes open wide, as if sharing some delicious little secret. Rena was precious and perhaps my complete opposite. I imagined Rena’s to be the type of chic little place that helped women put themselves together in that famous French way—nothing too coordinated, with just the right amount of wrong.

  “No, I don’t know it,” I said. I handed the picture back. “She’s lovely, though.”

  I finished the champagne in my glass.

  Paul shrugged. “Too young for me, of course, but—” He looked at the photo a few moments as if seeing it for the first time, head tilted to one side, before slipping it back into his wallet. “We don’t see much of each other.”

  I fluttered at the thought and then settled, weighted by the realization that even if Paul were available my forceful nature would root out and extinguish any spark of romance.

  The radio in the kitchen blared scratchy Edith Piaf.

  Paul lifted the bottle from the bucket and tipped more champagne into my glass. It effervesced, riotous bubbles tumbling over the glass’s edge. I glanced at him. We both knew what that meant, of course. The tradition. Anyone who’s spent any time at all in France knows it. Had he overpoured on purpose?

  Without hesitation, Paul tapped his finger to the spilled champagne along the base of my glass, reached across to me, and dabbed the cool liquid behind my left ear. I almost jumped at his touch, then waited as he brushed my hair aside and touched behind my right ear, his finger lingering there a moment. He then anointed himself behind each ear, smiling.

  Why did I suddenly feel warm all over?

  “Does Rena ever visit?” I asked. I tried to rub a tea stain off my hand only to find it was an age spot. Delightful.

  “Not yet. She has no interest in theater. Hasn’t even come over here to see The Streets of Paris yet, but I don’t know if I can stay. Hitler has everyone on edge back home.”

  Somewhere in the kitchen, two men argued. Where was our escargot? Had they sent to Perpignan for the snails?

  “At least France has the Maginot Line,” I said.

  “The Maginot Line? Please. A concrete wall and some observation posts? That’s only a gauntlet slap to Hitler.”

  “It’s fifteen miles wide.”

  “Nothing will deter Hitler if he wants something,” Paul said.

  There was a full-blown ruckus in the kitchen. No wonder our entrée had not arrived. The cook, mercurial artiste no doubt, was having a fit about something.

  M. Bernard emerged from the kitchen. The portholed kitchen door swung closed behind him, flapped open and shut a few times, and then stood still. He walked to the center of the dining room. Had he been crying?

  “Excusez-moi, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Someone tapped a glass with a spoon, and the room quieted.

  “I have just heard from a reliable source…” M. Bernard took a breath, his chest expanding like leather fireplace bellows. “We have it on good authority that…”

  He paused, overcome for a moment, then went on.

  “Adolf Hitler has invaded Poland.”

  “My God,” Paul said.

  We stared at each other as the room erupted with exci
ted exchanges, a racket of speculation and dread. The reporter from the gala stood, tossed some crumpled dollars on the table, grabbed his fedora, and bounded out.

  In the hubbub that followed his announcement, M. Bernard’s final words were almost lost.

  “May God help us all.”

  1939

  It really was Pietrik Bakoski’s idea to go up to the bluff at Deer Meadow to see the refugees. Just want to set straight the record. Matka never did believe me about that.

  Hitler had declared war on Poland on September 1, but his soldiers took their time getting to Lublin. I was glad, for I didn’t want anything to change. Lublin was perfect as it was. We heard radio addresses from Berlin about new rules, and some bombs fell on the outskirts of town, but nothing else. The Germans concentrated on Warsaw, and as troops closed in there, refugees by the thousands fled down to us in Lublin. Families came in droves, traveling southeast one hundred miles, and slept in the potato fields below town.

  Before the war, nothing exciting ever happened in Lublin, so we appreciated a good sunrise, sometimes more than a picture at the cinema. We’d reached the summit overlooking the meadow on the morning of September 8 just before dawn and could make out thousands of people below us in the fields, dreaming in the dark. I lay between my two best friends, Nadia Watroba and Pietrik Bakoski, watching it all from a flattened bowl of straw, still warm where a mother deer had slept with her fawns. The deer were gone by then—early risers. This they had in common with Hitler.

  As dawn suddenly breached the horizon, the breath caught in my throat, the kind of gasp that can surprise you when you see something so beautiful it hurts, such as a baby anything or fresh cream running over oatmeal or Pietrik Bakoski’s profile in dawn’s first light. His profile, 98 percent perfect, was especially nice drenched in dawn, like something off a ten-zlotych coin. At that moment, Pietrik looked the way all boys do upon waking, before they’ve washed up: his hair, the color of fresh butter, matted on the side where he’d slept.