The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Davis, Barbara

  Bridal Couture Comes to Boston.

  The Roussel Bow: A Must-Have For This Year’s Bride.

  The photos were wonderful—Soline hovering over a frothy creation with a mouthful of pins; perched on a ladder, pulling a bolt of cloth from a shelf; tweaking a large taffeta bow at the waist of a whip-thin blonde. Rory lingered over that one a moment, studying Soline’s hands. Long, tapered fingers and neatly manicured nails. Beautiful and so capable—but ruined now.

  The most recent photo was of the salon itself, taken four years ago for a spread in Boston Bride—less than a year before the fire. It was strange to see it as it had been then, elegantly furnished in shades of pewter and cream. Everything carefully chosen—and very French. Or at least what she’d always imagined French decor to look like.

  There was also a shot of the large bay window, taken from the street. The salon name was lettered on the glass in elegant gold script, but she couldn’t make it out. She turned to Soline. “What does it say?”

  “L’Aiguille Enchantée,” Soline answered softly. “It means the Charmed Needle.”

  “The Charmed Needle,” Rory repeated with a dreamy air. Even the name smacked of magic. “A perfect name for a shop that sells fairy-tale dresses and happy endings.”

  “Make-believe,” Soline shot back. “Silliness passed down through generations of Roussels.”

  “You don’t believe in fairy tales?”

  “Not for a long time now.”

  Rory peered at Soline’s reflection, captured in the glass of the picture frame. “But you did once?”

  “Fairy tales can be dangerous, Aurore. It’s easy to forget they’re not real. And then, before we know it, we’re lost in them. Which is why we must learn to let go of what’s gone and live with what is.”

  Rory felt a shiver run down her neck. Soline had been referring to her own loss, of course—of A.W.P. But the words could just as easily have been meant for her. There was no denying the similarities in their stories. Their passion for the creative, their lost loves, their penchant for withdrawing from the world—and now the row house.

  A coincidence? Or had some invisible hand nudged her into the path of this tragic woman and her forsaken dress? A cautionary tale, perhaps, about what happened when one clung too desperately to the hope of a happy ending?

  “A.W.P. . . . ,” Rory said quietly.

  “His name was Anson.”

  “Anson, then. Do you still . . . Have you forgotten his face?”

  “I thought I might. But no, I haven’t forgotten.” She pulled in a breath, letting it out slowly. “I saw him everywhere at first. On the street, hailing a cab. At the bar in a crowded restaurant. Through the window of a barber shop. He was everywhere—and nowhere.”

  “Does it still happen?”

  “Sometimes.”

  The response filled Rory with a vague dread. “How do you bear it?”

  Soline lowered her lashes. “We all have our ghosts, chérie. Faces that belong to our past. Except they don’t always stay in the past. Sometimes they reappear when we least expect them. That’s why I put the box under the stairs. Because I couldn’t bear it.”

  Rory understood that kind of pain, the ache that waited for you every night when you closed your eyes and was still there in the morning when you woke. The empty place where your heart should be. Before she could check herself, her eyes had filled with tears.

  Soline narrowed her gaze, clearly alarmed. “Chérie, what is it? Are you unwell?”

  “No. I’m fine. But I should go.”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “No. Really. I shouldn’t have pestered you.” She nearly tripped over the dress box as she sidled past Soline toward the door. “You don’t need to show me out. I can find my way.”

  “Aurore . . .”

  Rory kept moving, desperate to reach the front door before she was reduced to a pathetic puddle. She’d gotten what she wanted. She’d been determined to learn Soline Roussel’s story, and she had. Now, as she beat a hasty retreat, she couldn’t help wondering if she’d been given a glimpse of her own in the bargain.

  TWELVE

  SOLINE

  We traffic in the promise of happily-ever-after, but not all are destined for such fairy-tale endings. Some are unable, others unwilling, and still more have been taught they are undeserving. It is up to the Spell Weaver to discern which is which.

  —Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch

  20 June 1985—Boston

  I close my eyes as the first sip of wine goes down. Louis Jadot Gevrey-Chambertin. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine. Chocolate and ripe cherry, chalky on the tongue, velvety on the way down. Plush and pricey. It’s funny, I had to come all the way to America to learn to appreciate French wines—Maman never had wine in the house—but I have learned to appreciate them. Perhaps a little more than is good for me. But it helps with my hands. With the pain. And with . . . other things. Or at least, I pretend it does.

  Today’s events have shaken me. For reasons I understand too well and for others I do not understand at all. I don’t often have guests in my home. In fact, I never have guests in my home. No dinners, or cocktail parties, or lunches with friends. No friends. Oui, I know how awful that sounds. How sad and pathetic. But I don’t want pity. It’s a choice I made years ago. After the fire. It seems my whole life is marked as either before the fire or after the fire. Not that there’s been much of a life since that terrible night. Again, my choice.

  I can’t remember when I last had company. A year? No, longer than that. And then it was only Daniel and his wife the Christmas before last. I’m comfortable alone—or at least used to it. Still, I was surprised by the pang of regret I felt when I heard the front door close behind that girl. But then, so much about today has surprised me. A phone call from a stranger. A packet of old letters. The dress. Mon dieu . . . the dress. Memories I’ve been hiding from for more years than I care to admit. And now they’ve found me. Because Aurora Grant found me.

  Rory—the girl who has resurrected my past.

  When she entered the patisserie, for the tiniest moment I thought I knew her. One of my clients perhaps. Or a bride I’d turned down. There was something familiar about her, a connection I sensed the instant our eyes met. And yet, as she drew closer, I saw that I was wrong. I didn’t know her.

  Except I did recognize her. She was me. Or a shadow of me when I was her age. Lost. Grieving. Desperate for a glint of light at the end of a very dark tunnel. She was lovely. A sharp, pretty face and a pink-and-cream complexion. Eyes the color of the sky when a storm approaches, neither blue nor gray, and a mane of honey-hued waves forever falling across her face—a clever way to hide from the world.

  I understand that part, not wanting the world to see your sadness. You think you’re the only one, singled out by fate to suffer. You’re not, of course, but it feels that way. The rest of the world is moving forward, living their lives and dreaming their dreams, while you’re frozen, forever suspended in that terrible moment when your world stopped turning and the ground suddenly fell away. You exist in a void, where everything’s empty and endlessly dark, until little by little the light becomes unbearable.

  She wanted to know my story, wanted me to open the box then and there, and was disappointed when she saw that I wouldn’t. Still, she’d gone out of her way to do me a good turn. I felt obliged to satisfy at least part of her curiosity.

  She was delicate with her questions, careful of my feelings. There’s a particular brand of sympathy that comes with shared sorrow. An invisible thread that connects us, wound to wound. Why else would I have let her drive me home? And then that awful business with the gloves—when I invited her to look at my hands.

  I can still see the look on her face when I held them out. Tenderness rather than pity. I could have kissed her for that. And then later, when her eyes filled with tears and she rushed out of the house, I wanted to go after her, to put my arms around her and let her cry her poor heart out. There’s a story
there. A sad one, I think. So sad she couldn’t hide it, though she did try.

  I don’t know what’s happened to Aurora Grant to make her sad. I only know that something has. But she’s young. There’s time for her to escape the void. Her gallery will be her lifeline. As the shop was mine. I like the idea of it, a gallery for undiscovered artists. And the title—Unheard Of. I like the girl, too, and what she said about the building—that it felt like it had been waiting for her. Perhaps it’s right that her lifeline should begin where mine ended. Fate has taken up our threads and woven them together. Not seamless, perhaps, but inextricable now.

  I top off my wineglass and return to the study, lingering in front of the wall of framed photographs. I rarely look at them these days—even now, the loss is hard—but this afternoon, when Rory was here, I found myself peering over her shoulder, trying to see them as she did, for the very first time. She was staring at a photo of the front window, asking if I still remembered Anson’s face, when I suddenly caught our reflections in the frame’s glass. She was looking back at me, and for a fraction of an instant, Anson seemed to be standing there too, his face superimposed over hers. Then I blinked and he was gone, leaving only our faces in the glass. It was only a fluke, a trick of the light and memory, but it felt so real at that moment, so startlingly and achingly real.

  The dress box is still on the floor where she left it. I carry it to the chair and sit with it in my lap for a time. I don’t need to open it. I know what’s inside: pieces of my past threatening to burrow into my heart like wounded things. Reminders of my lost happy endings. I thought them gone, relegated to the dark space beneath the stairs, then reduced to ash. But they’ve been exhumed now, and I have no choice but to remember.

  I feel my breath catch as I lift the lid and peel back the tissue. The dress is just as I remember, shimmery and frothy white. I run my hands over the beading, recalling long nights spent sewing in secret. Maman would never have approved had she known. She would have thought it a terrible waste, since there were precious few grooms left in France by the time I finished it. Still, I brought it with me when I left. Because I had dreams of my own happy ending. One day I would wear my lovely dress with its clever enchantment, and I would prove Maman wrong. I would prove all the Roussels wrong. It nearly worked too. Instead, I lost everything.

  Tears scorch my throat as I set the box aside and turn out the light. I thought I was ready, but I’m not.

  My wineglass dangles from my fingers as I make my way down the hall to my bedroom. I’m tired, and my head aches. I forget how loud public places are and how much they take out of me. My thoughts drift to the plastic vial in the nightstand, a prescription one of my doctors wrote the day I left the hospital, to help manage the pain. I stopped taking them after a week. They made me feel so heavy. But the vial is still there, an insurance policy should the nights get too long or the days too empty. I think of them now and then. Sometimes I even take them out, pour them into my palm, imagine swallowing them all at once. I won’t, of course. I have other things on my mind tonight.

  I undress in the dark and climb into bed, my thoughts wandering back to Rory. If I were to read her the way Maman taught me, what would I see? She would be easy, I think. She’s like me in that way too—or how I used to be. Wide open to the world. Maman used to scold me for it. She said I could never hide anything, that my face would always give me away.

  It was true once, but I’ve learned over the years to hide a great many things from the world. From myself too, I suppose. Pain has a way of hardening us, each new heartbreak laying down a fresh layer of protection, like the nacre of a pearl, until we think ourselves impenetrable, immune to both our present and our past.

  What fools we are to believe it.

  THIRTEEN

  SOLINE

  The temptation may arise to use la magie for selfish ends. But such transgressions will always bring an ill wind, which will then be visited upon future generations.

  —Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch

  11 December 1942—Paris

  Two and a half years of Nazi occupation have decimated Paris.

  I will never forget the morning they came. I heard the soldiers before I saw them, like the distant roll of thunder as I hurried along the Rue Legendre, and made my way to the Place de la Concorde. I don’t know what I expected as I turned onto the Champs-Élysées. War, I suppose. Panicked Parisians taking to the streets in one last attempt to stave off the invaders. Soldiers brandishing weapons and taking prisoners. Guns. Bombs. Fire. Blood. The chaos of war.

  But there was no chaos. In fact, there had been a strange and sinister order to it all, a steely precision that was almost breathtaking. Motorcycles, horses, columns of tanks and armored cars, and thousands upon thousands of soldiers moving in lockstep, immaculate in their helmets and gray-green uniforms. As for Parisians taking to the streets, there had been none of that either. Instead, onlookers lined the sidewalks, silent and slack-jawed, awed by the machine that was swallowing their city whole. Or what remained of it at that point.

  The wealthy and well connected had been pouring out of Paris for weeks: cars, trains, horse-drawn carts clogging the roads, bound for the coast as l’exode began in earnest. Shops had closed. Hotels had emptied. Theaters went dark. Even the market stalls had gone quiet in anticipation of the invasion. And finally, in June of 1940, it came to pass. Hitler’s Wehrmacht entered Paris without firing a shot, and by late afternoon, swastikas flew over the Arc de Triomphe and the Tour Eiffel.

  Life has been a blur since that terrible day. Curfews are in effect and strictly enforced. German street signs have replaced French ones, and clocks are now set to German time, a thumb in the eye of a city already demoralized. Not even our time is our own now.

  French newspapers have been shut down, and all radios must be tuned to German propaganda stations. There are posters, too, tacked up all over, urging us to see our occupiers as friends. As if we can’t feel them steadily tightening their grip around our throats.

  Ration cards have been issued for food and clothing, resulting in endless queues for the barest of necessities. Paris has become a city obsessed with food. Finding it, affording it, making it stretch. Women spend the better part of their days in search of an egg or a soupbone, while magazines teach us how to stretch butter with gelatin and make a cake without eggs. Maman’s careful hoarding means we suffer less than most, but our stores are thinning at an alarming rate.

  Getting around is also difficult. There’s no petrol to be had, leaving only bicycles and the Métro. Or walking, which is what I usually do. Nazi soldiers are everywhere, in the cafés and the shops, drinking our wine and clearing our shelves, loitering on corners and chatting up our women, as if everything in France is theirs for the taking, which I suppose it is. But no one suffers more than the Jews.

  In addition to having their property and possessions seized, the Statut des Juifs prohibits them from working in certain professions, going to the theater, shopping in most stores, and even owning radios. All Jews over the age of six must wear a yellow star printed with the word Juif over their heart, to more easily mark them for persecution. For this honor, they are made to use an entire month’s cloth ration. Some defy the new law, though they do so at great risk. Those caught or denounced by Nazi sympathizers are beaten or worse.

  And the roundups have begun. Thousands of Jews, mostly women and children, detained for days, without food or water, shipped first to the holding camp at Drancy before eventually being stuffed into cattle cars and taken away. Operation Spring Breeze, one of the roundups was called, organized and carried out by the French police.

  By our own police.

  But it was only the beginning. Details of the death camps have begun to leak out. Whispers of gas chambers and ovens, shallow trenches filled with bodies. All over Europe, Jews are being erased. And the French government is helping to do it.

  We get our news—the real news—the way most Parisians do, from banned BBC broadcasts on Rad
io Londres or from whatever underground paper is being quietly passed from hand to hand. Like everything else these days, being caught means severe punishment.

  Maman has been taking the news especially hard, which surprises me a little. I’ve never known her to be weepy, but after two years of the boches, we are all worn to a raveling. Her illness has taken a firm hold now, her fits of coughing so severe she’s forced to submit to nightly sleeping draughts in order to rest. And there are the blood-flecked handkerchiefs I pretended not to know about until she could no longer hide them from me. Now, as another winter sets in with no fuel for warmth, her condition has become dire.

  What little work there is has fallen to me now. It’s fittings mostly, but I’m grateful for anything that fills the days. And then in the evenings, when the blackout curtains are drawn and Maman is asleep, I continue to work on my dress, though I doubt she will live long enough to see it finished.

  One night, she calls me to her room and tells me to pull up a chair. It’s painful to see the changes that have come over her. We’re all thinner these days, but Maman’s thinness is of a crueler variety, a slow ravaging that has left the skin stretched taut over the bones of her face. And yet, her eyes are bright and hectic as they move over me.

  “Sit,” she says, swatting my hand when I reach out to touch her forehead. “I have something to tell you. Something I should have told you years ago.”

  “You should be resting,” I reply, hoping to put her off. I don’t want to talk about death. Or Nazis. Or how hard things are going to get. We’ve spoken of little else lately. “We can talk later. After you’ve had some sleep.”

  “What I have to say cannot wait until tomorrow.”

  I nod, waiting.

  “Go to my dresser. In the top drawer, near the back, you’ll find a box. Bring it to me.”

  The box is where she said it would be, a jeweler’s case of dark-green velvet about the size of my palm. I carry it back to the bed and return to my chair, watching with a kind of fascination as she presses the case to her chest with inexplicable tenderness. When her gaze finally lifts to mine, it’s as if she’d forgotten I was there.