Chloe

by Lyn Cote

  “Of course, I haven’t.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I haven’t seen him since Kitty was released from the hospital this spring. Why would I call him and why should you care if I did? He’s just an old family friend.”

  Through the tall window, the garish night lights flashed into the room, glimmering on her white satin lounging gown, outlining her slender silhouette. In the low light, her skin glowed like ripe peaches. He imagined nuzzling her nape, breathing in her subtle floral perfume. Physical desire for this woman made his whole body clench. It drove him, lashed him to expose his need. “I recall how you looked at that ‘old family friend’ that night in ’21 when I dogged you to that club in Harlem.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Her calm reply drove him to the ropes. “You were in love with him.”

  “That’s not true,” she fired up, still not turning. “I’ve never been in love with Roarke. He’s just . . . he was just such a special friend. Roarke always understood me better than I did myself. I just wanted him back that way, the way it had always been between us.”

  Maybe she was unaware of her feelings for Roarke. He should let it drop. Again, he couldn’t stop himself. He came up behind her. “I’m sure that’s what you believe, but that’s not what I sensed.” He turned her to face him.

  Chloe wouldn’t meet Drake’s eyes. “I’m engaged to you. I will not break our engagement. I am a woman of my word. Do you believe me?”

  He didn’t say yes. Instead, he lifted her chin and reveled in her beauty all over again. Other women he tired of—they grew stale and clung. But not Chloe. Never Chloe. “Very well, make this pilgrimage if you must.” He smoothed his hand over her soft cheek, feeling the delicate bones underneath. He slid his fingers up through the shingled hair above her nape. You will be mine, Chloe. He dipped into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out an antique red velvet ring box. “This was my grandmother’s engagement ring.” He opened the box. “It’s for you.”

  Chloe hesitated.

  “Are we engaged or not?” His voice sounded rusty, like an unoiled hinge.

  She looked up then. “Have you spoken to my father lately?”

  He stared into her eyes, trying to fathom the significance of this odd question. “No.”

  Chloe studied him.

  Needing to brand her as his, he leaned forward and kissed her. He took his time, drawing all the sweetness from this woman he loved, needed, was desperate to have. “I’ve never loved any woman but you,” he whispered.

  In reply, she slipped on his ring.

  Relief sighed through him. “I warn you, Chloe Black,” he said, keeping his voice a whisper, but added a hint of steel, “you better come back for our November first wedding or I’ll come and get you myself.”

  “You have my promise, don’t you?” She looked him straight in the eye. “If anyone breaks our engagement, it will have to be you. I will not.”

  “Then we will marry on November first. In your absence, I’m sure my mother will be glad to make the arrangements for us.”

  Chloe stood on tiptoe and kissed him. She lost herself in the feel of his lips and the contrast of textures, her soft skin rasped by his new growth of beard. “Thank her for me,” she said, her forehead resting against his chin, “I just need to work out some things for myself and then I’ll become your wife—fully and forever.” And be free from Daddy once and for all.

  Sometime she’d have to tell Drake about her father’s scheme to use him. But it could wait. She was sure now that Drake hadn’t betrayed her to him. He had nothing to gain from doing so.

  Her eyes looked over his shoulder toward the phone. How had he guessed she’d been thinking of Roarke? Did Drake fear Roarke? He shouldn’t. She recalled the proprietary look in Miss Edna Talbot’s expression. And the very capable Miss Talbot didn’t look like the type who failed at anything. She would marry Roarke.

  A month later in early October, Chloe sat in the back of the Paris taxi trying to get up enough nerve to emerge from the vehicle. Finally, when the driver started casting furtive backward glances at her, she gave in and got out. She paid off the cabbie and entered the shop that bore the name in gold letters on the show window: “MENER LA MODE.” Under this in the same gold lettering was a name familiar to Chloe. Inside, a shop girl came forward to greet her. “Is Madame Blanche in?” Chloe gave the girl her card. Then she waited, fingering the lace collar on a mannequin.

  “Chloe, mon amie!” Madame Blanche burst from the back room and threw her arms around Chloe. The Frenchwoman looked much the same as she had the first day Chloe had laid eyes on her. Tall, still pencil-thin, still dark-haired, Blanche was dressed in a fuchsia-and-black dress, knee-length in the front and ankle-length in the back. Chloe breathed in the woman’s rich Chanel N°5 perfume and luxuriated in a genuine welcome in this foreign land.

  “But what has brought you here?” Madame drew her to a chair near a rear fitting room.

  “I came to visit my husband’s grave.”

  Madame Blanche made no reply, merely gazed at Chloe as if her words had made no sense.

  Chloe voiced the reason for looking up her old friend, “And I’m looking for a wedding dress. I’m to marry again on the first of November.”

  Madame stared at her for several moments. “You did not come to Madame Blanche for fashions or to find your husband’s grave. You wish to . . .” Madame looked into Chloe’s eyes and lifted her own eyebrows.

  Madame’s words flustered Chloe, as if she were a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “But I did. I need a wedding dress.”

  “Non.” But Madame led Chloe to the rear. Through the back door near the fitting room was a sight both familiar and nostalgic to Chloe—the messy designing and sewing room. Madame pointed to a mannequin with a half-finished dress of royal blue. “This will be your second wedding so we do not have to use le blanc, white.”

  Chloe studied the dress. “Too daring. I want something simpler and in a paler color.”

  Madame led her over to another. This dress, nearly finished, was in a light-rose crepe de chine. “Why are you marrying again? You do not look like a woman in love.”

  The unexpected, unwelcome question made Chloe fumble, sorting through her thoughts. She avoided an answer. “May I try it on?”

  “Bien. Of course.”

  Madame helped Chloe slip off her dress and then took the silk dress off the mannequin. “Careful of the pins,” she warned.

  Hearing again the familiar words from the past moistened Chloe’s eyes. In the rose-pink dress, she walked back out to the three-way mirror in the rear of the shop and looked at herself.

  “Exquisite, as always,” Madame murmured. “You are still one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever been pleased to dress.”

  Chloe stared at herself in the mirror. She didn’t see the beauty. She saw the doubt in her eyes. “I went to the US embassy, but no one seems to know where my husband was buried. If he’d died in a battle, it would be easy. But since he died in Paris of food poisoning—”

  “You notice that the skirts are dropping in the back,” Madame interrupted as if she hadn’t been listening.

  “I went to one of the battleground cemeteries. It was awful. All those rows of white crosses—”

  “I think this color is excellent for you—”

  “Why aren’t you listening to me?” Chloe snapped.

  Madame met her gaze. “When you say something you really mean, something worth listening to, I will attend.”

  Chloe floundered as she gazed into Madame’s unflinching eyes. At last she said, “I don’t . . . I don’t seem to be able to get it right.”

  “What right, ma chere?”

  “My life.” Everything. What am I doing here in Paris?

  “That is much to fail. I do not believe it. The Chloe Black I knew did much right. She brought her friend Minnie from the unhappy . . . situation to New York City and now Minnie is on the stage, a success.”

  “
That’s the only thing I did right. And I didn’t do much.”

  Madame Blanche shook her head. “Non.”

  “I can’t put it all into words.”

  “What of the man you will marry?”

  Chloe could hardly keep up with Madame’s quick changes. “Drake loves me very much.”

  “Ah. He loves you, but you do not love him. He must be very rich.”

  Chloe flushed. “It’s not like that. I do care for him and he loves me.”

  “I do not doubt many men love you. You are irresistible, oui?”

  “Don’t make fun of me.” Chloe slumped into one of the nearby velvet chairs, disregarding the pins that pricked her.

  “I cannot give you advice.” Madame sat in the adjoining chair. “I am a modiste, not a psychiatrist or a priest. But I can tell you that always you mistrust your beauty—you do not revel in it as a woman should. You fear it. You also fear to show any true emotion. Only twice did I see your eyes shine with honesty.”

  “When?” Did anyone else realize this about her?

  “The first showing at my shop on Fifth Avenue. You stared down the ladies who would scorn Minnie as a model. Your eyes blazed with passion.”

  Chloe remembered. “And the second time?”

  “When we marched down the avenue and I sang ‘La Marseillaise.’”

  “I remember.” Kitty had taunted her with this in August, a lifetime ago. I was real with Jamie, too.

  “I also remember the day your little friend, the cat, brought the news of your husband’s death.”

  Chloe stared down at her lap, unable to speak. That awful day.

  “It broke something in you, mon amie—not your heart, I think, but something else.”

  Stung, Chloe looked up. “I loved my husband.”

  “My dear, ma chere, you only knew him for two days. Is love possible in that short time? I think, non.”

  Tears clogged Chloe’s throat. She looked away.

  “Love comes in many forms. I think you had passion for your husband, but love takes longer. I will not, cannot give you advice, but I will ask you these questions.” Madame paused as though gathering her next words.

  Chloe held still as if Madame was about to take a spade to her life, digging deep and finding what?

  “Why can you not show the truth of what you feel? Why do you seek your husband’s grave? You know that will not bring him back or you back the way you were in 1917. Why do you agree to marry a man you do not love?”

  Chloe felt all resistance to Madame shrivel up. “I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t know your heart, ma Chloe, who does?”

  Paris, November 1, 1929

  After replying to Jackson’s stunning early morning telegram, Chloe walked trancelike out of her small hotel and down the few blocks toward the Seine. She walked along the banks of the sluggish gray river that mirrored her own mood. In spite of the chilling drizzle, she sat down on a park bench. Today was supposed to be my wedding day.

  A man, probably an American, sat reading a London paper. The headline blazed: “STOCKS STILL FALLING.” Jackson’s telegram lay crumpled in her pocket. Part of her wanted to take it out and read it again and another part wanted to shred it into little pieces and throw it into the Seine. Restless anxiety forced her up and she began walking again, head down, unwilling to meet any stranger’s eye.

  It wasn’t only Jackson’s telegram. She’d saved all of Drake’s cables in her drawer at her hotel. The first one she’d received on October tenth had read: “Chloe, may we postpone wedding? Press of business is overwhelming. Love, Drake.”

  She’d been so preoccupied with her inner struggle that she’d passed this warning off lightly. Too lightly. The ensuing telegrams had become more and more intense and more and more disturbing. The US stock market was rattled and Drake and other businessmen were trying to prop it up.

  On October 29 their efforts had failed. Vast “paper” wealth had been lost. Drake had not told her the extent of his losses, but he had admitted that he had lost a fortune that day. How? How could money vanish with something like the wave of a magician’s wand?

  Now, the sound of chanting penetrated her thoughts. She found herself outside the gray-stone Cathedral of Notre Dame. In spite of the morning’s damp chill, the doors had been propped open while the mass was being performed inside. Taking a place just outside the doors, Chloe looked up at the hideous gargoyles that sprang from of the stone exterior. Their ugliness jogged her mind and a memory came to her. She was a little girl, standing outside the parlor at Ivy Manor listening to her parents quarrel over her. Then she’d run away down the path to Granny Raney’s cottage. Her heart pounded at the memory. Flashes of endless arguments shouted and sneered over her head from childhood on raced through her mind.

  I didn’t want my Bette to end up a pawn. I want her to be a person, not a bargaining chip. I left Bette at Ivy Manor so that wouldn’t happen over her. But did it make it better for her? I love her, but how will she ever know that? I’ve run away from the conflict over her just as I ran away with her father. I’ve run away all my life. Now I’ve run away to Paris.

  “You have to go back tonight,” her conscience spoke up.

  They don’t need me, don’t want me.

  “Your father’s heart attack freed him from the consequences of his buying too much stock on too slim a margin. He died in debt. You know how your mother is.”

  I can’t face it.

  Her conscience ignored her. “Your daughter will suffer if you don’t go home and take charge. This has nothing to do with loving and being loved. This is survival.”

  Breaking into her thoughts, the sound of the priest chanting his singsong benediction in Latin drew Chloe closer. She stepped just within the open double doors and listened to the Latin liturgy that she did not understand. She pressed her quivering lips together. The church service taunted her. The congregants kneeling inside the church, the priest and acolytes belonged there, had a place in the solemn sacrament. Even if she walked inside, she would still be a stranger, still be unable to take part in the solemn ceremony.

  I always stand outside. This thought went through her like electric current. All my life, what did I want to run to? The reply was easy: until she’d eloped with Theran she’d had no destination. Had she tried to run to Drake now and then away from him here? What did I hope to find in Paris? Questions—questions like the ones Madame Blanche had posed. But the last one had been the hardest: “If you don’t know, ma Chloe, who does?”

  I have to go back. I have no choice. I have my ticket and enough funds to get home. That’s all. I just don’t want to go back and face everything. Even with Daddy dead, nothing will be different, not really. My life was a sham.

  How did a person begin to live a real life, not just stand outside and watch others? How could she let Bette know she was valued for herself, not as a prize in a war?

  The chanting inside the cathedral ended and a bell in the tower tolled. Chloe watched the priest walk down the aisle, swinging a censer. The fragrance of strong incense was carried to her on the breeze. The urge to plunge inside the dim cathedral and drop to her knees swept through her like the wild wind that swooped down the tall sides of the cathedral and tugged at her hat. How do I come inside? How do I live my real life? How do I become a real mother to Bette and show her what a real mother is?

  The answers to these questions eluded her. But she couldn’t delay any longer. She had to go back to the hotel and pack her bags. The ship left tonight and she had to be on it. And among this welter, her postponed marriage to Drake still swirled and teased her. Did she have the nerve to go through with it? Would he still want her? A voice in her mind sang something. She couldn’t catch it and it was soon gone.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Chloe waited under the center arch at the entrance of the Baltimore Union Station. It was a November evening—darkening, breezy, and chilling. Shadows cast by the overhead lamps stretched down the steps. Against the penetrat
ing wind, she pulled the fashionable wool cape she wore tighter around herself. I must call Drake right away when I get home. Her guilt over arriving in and then leaving New York without calling him gnawed at her. Why had calling him been so impossible?

  She’d called her mother from New York, giving her the time and number of the train she’d be arriving on and asking her to have the car come for her. Her mother had sounded affronted and miffed, just like she always did. Chloe wished she were going anywhere but home.

  For a moment, she let her mind wander, remembering the first time she’d come to these arches, the night she’d eloped with Theran. She had been innocent, hopeful but afraid that night. But that had been 1917, a lifetime ago. Then that tune that kept singing in her mind started up again. If she could only come up with the words, she knew it would probably stop plaguing her. But the lyrics always stayed just beyond her reach.

  “Chloe.” The voice that hailed her out of her thoughts was the last one she’d expected to hear. She turned in disbelief. In a dark, neat suit as though on his way to Wall Street, Roarke stood in front of her. For one long, heavy moment, they stared at each other. Why wasn’t he in New York? She took a step forward. “Roarke,” she murmured.

  And then another voice came, breaking in, “Miss Chloe?” It was Jamie, looking up at her shyly.

  And then another, more tentative, “Mother?”

  Her daughter had come, too. Bette looked down and then up, hope flaring in her shining eyes.

  Awash in sudden joy, Chloe stooped and threw her arms around both children, pulling them close. “Children, dearest children.” Her heart soared. Tears moistened her eyes. “Bette. Jamie.” She hugged them to her, weeping and laughing. “I’ve missed you so.”

  “I’ve missed you, too, Miss Chloe,” Jamie said. “Did you know that Mr. Thomas and Miss Estelle ’dopted me?”

  “Yes.” Chloe stood up and took a hankie out of her black suede purse to wipe her eyes. Jamie looked happy and well fed. He wore obviously new black-flannel slacks, a white shirt, and a blue-and-black plaid-wool jacket. “Yes, I’m so happy for you, Jamie. They’re wonderful people.”