The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Davis, Barbara

  Camilla stiffened. “Sometimes I think you have too much of your father in you.”

  Of course. It had to be about her father. Because one way or another, everything was about her father. “Can we please leave Daddy out of this? I don’t know who I’m like. Or why I have to be like anyone. Can’t I just be me?”

  “Of course you can. I’ve never stopped you from doing what you wanted.”

  “Stopped me?” Rory snapped. “No. You never stopped me. But you’ve never been shy about voicing your opinion anytime I strayed from the blueprint you had for me. The clothes I wore. The sports I played. Even the people I hung around with. When I told you Hux proposed, you asked if I said yes just to spite you.”

  “I’m your mother, Aurora. It’s my job to shape you—to keep you from making the same mistakes I did.”

  “Are we talking about Daddy again?”

  Camilla looked down at the neatly stacked rings on her left hand: wedding ring, engagement ring, the three-carat eternity band her husband’s secretary had picked out for their twentieth anniversary. Three years after Geoffrey Grant’s death, she still wore them. “You said something the other day about my track record with marriage. It made me think. Maybe I’m just not wired for love. Or happiness. Some people aren’t, you know.”

  Rory found herself frowning. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected her to say, but it certainly wasn’t that. “Not wired for love? That’s a strange thing to say.”

  Camilla smiled sadly. “Not when you look at the history. The Lowells aren’t exactly known for their stellar marriages.” She glanced at her rings again, spinning them absently. When she brought her eyes back to Rory the smile had gone brittle. “But we do look good on the society page, which is what’s really important. Or so my mother always said.”

  It was Rory’s turn to wonder what was going on. Camilla rarely spoke of her family and never of her mother. Not even when prompted. Now, quite unexpectedly, she had introduced her into the conversation.

  “You never talk about your parents, about your childhood or growing up.”

  Camilla turned away, lining up the newly purchased cold remedies on the counter.

  “Your mother,” Rory pressed. “Was she . . . wired for love?”

  “No,” Camilla said simply and without hesitation. “I don’t think she was.”

  “Did you fight?”

  “Like us, you mean? No, we didn’t fight. No one fought with Gwendolyn Lowell.”

  Gwendolyn. Rory rolled the name around in her head, realizing just how seldom she’d heard it growing up. “Why didn’t anyone fight with her?”

  “Because she was never wrong. About anything. And woe to anyone who crossed her. Especially my father. He was forty-seven when he died. A heart attack. I used to wonder if he died to get away from her. I was furious with him for leaving me alone with her.”

  “Maybe it’s genetic,” Rory said quietly. “Not being wired for love, I mean. Maybe it’s passed from mother to daughter, like blue eyes or curly hair.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Aurora.”

  “You said it yourself—the Lowells aren’t known for their stellar marriages. What if Hux—”

  “For heaven’s sake, Aurora. You are not a Lowell!”

  Rory blinked at her. “What?”

  Camilla closed her eyes as a pair of red splotches appeared on her cheeks. “You’re a Grant, Aurora. Aurora Millicent Grant. My mother and her . . . wiring . . . have nothing to do with you.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Camilla ran a hand over her already perfect hair, then smoothed the front of her blouse. “I’m sorry for snapping. It’s just that my relationship with my mother was . . . complicated.”

  “Is that why you never talk about her?”

  “I don’t talk about her because there’s nothing to talk about. She paid for my schooling, exposed me to art and music, arranged for dance lessons, elocution lessons, lessons on which fork to use. Everything she was required to do—and nothing more.”

  “You didn’t mention love,” Rory pointed out. “Were you loved?”

  “I was groomed,” Camilla replied carefully. “Trained to live up to the position I’d been given as a Lowell, to do and be exactly what was expected of me.”

  Something about her use of the word given made Rory bristle. She was starting to see why her mother avoided the subject of family. “And did you? Live up to it, I mean?”

  “Almost never.”

  The words hung between them as Rory stood studying her. It was startling to discover this unexpected chink in her mother’s armor, a raw place in her childhood that had never quite healed. Perhaps they could find common ground after all. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  Camilla shook her head, her eyes clouded with emotion. She was hurting and doing her damnedest to pretend she wasn’t. “I didn’t mean it the way it came out. It was years ago, when I was just a girl. Everything’s a drama when you’re a little girl. Please forget I said it.”

  Rory was torn between pressing her for more and letting the matter drop. Today’s clash had started like all the others, but something new had crept into the conversation. Something that might finally explain the tension always simmering just beneath the surface of their relationship.

  “You don’t have to pretend with me,” she told Camilla, aware that she was repeating Soline’s words almost exactly. “It’s okay to be sad. Or mad. Or both.”

  Camilla forced a smile. “It’s nothing. Really. Spilled milk, as they say.”

  Rory reached for her hand. “We don’t have to talk about it now. We don’t ever have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But I’m here if you ever want someone to just listen.”

  The doorbell rang before Camilla could answer, but her relief was plain. “You have company,” she said, reclaiming her hand. “I’ll go.”

  “It’s just my dinner. Eggplant Parm and an antipasto from Gerardo’s. Stay. We can split it.”

  Camilla shook her head, her face already shuttered as she sidled past. “I’m sure you have work to do. Enjoy your eggplant.”

  “You’re not interfering. Stay and let me make up for this morning.”

  “I’m fine,” she tossed over her shoulder as she opened the door and pushed past the startled delivery boy. “Fine. Really.”

  Rory paid for her food and carried the bag to the kitchen, convinced that her mother was anything but fine.

  EIGHTEEN

  SOLINE

  Every heart has a signature, a unique echo that ripples out into the world. And every echo has a match. When those echoes connect, they become so attuned that even if they be separated, they continue to seek one another.

  —Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch

  23 June 1985—Boston

  I stare out the window as I seed a tomato. Perhaps I’ll eat on the terrace and watch the sun go down. But even as the thought flits through my head, I know I won’t. I’m in one of my moods tonight, the kind that calls for an especially good bottle of wine. I reach for my glass and take a deep mouthful, still brooding over this morning’s conversation with Aurora.

  I wanted to check on her, to make sure she was all right, and I’m glad I went. She needs looking after just now, and a little cherishing too. More, I think, than even she knows.

  She was surprised when I told her she reminded me of myself, and a little embarrassed, too, to be seen so clearly. But I was telling the truth. The girl—she is still a girl to me—is in a dark place, a limbo of uncertainty and darkness, where no light can get through. She’s so much in love with her young man. Hux—what kind of name is that for a boy? But it’s what she calls him, so it’s how I’ll try to think of him too. He’s certainly a handsome one. American in all the best ways. And a good heart into the bargain. She’s lucky to have found him.

  It’s true, I tell myself. She is. But I wonder. Can it really be called lucky to find someone whose heartbeat matches your own, only to lose them?

  He
r story is so much a mirror of my own that it was hard to sit across from her and listen. Like Anson, her Hux was trying to do good, volunteering to do work most aren’t brave enough to undertake. And like Anson, he appears to have paid a price for his courage. Perhaps the ultimate price.

  I pick up my wineglass and swallow the rest, waiting for the slow wash of warmth to bloom in my belly, my chest, but it isn’t enough. I refill the glass and abandon my salad, no longer hungry. Instead, I take both glass and bottle to my study and sit down at my desk, fumbling through the middle drawer for the engraved cigarette case and lighter I keep there—gifts from an old friend.

  It takes several tries to get the thing to light—my hands are a little shaky tonight—but finally the cigarette is lit. I pull in a lungful of smoke, holding it there until I feel dizzy. It’s been a while since I felt the need to smoke. It’s been a while since I felt a lot of things.

  Erich Freede stares back at me from an enameled frame on the desk. Father, stranger, lover of Esmée Roussel. Fate unknown. I’ve had the photo from Maman’s locket enlarged and look at it often, because I promised her I would. And today, I told Aurore—no, she prefers Rory—to do the same with Hux, to hold him in her heart. I hope it will help. I have no photograph of Anson. No image to cherish. But I do have something.

  My eyes slide to the dress box, still sitting where I left it that first night. I can feel the pull of it, the whisper of its contents coaxing me to revisit the old sorrows. I’ve resisted until now, like a wound I can’t bear to reawaken. But the wine and cigarettes are like old friends, reminding me of the many nights spent weeping over the remnants of my dreams. Holding his shaving kit, savoring the smell of him. Untying the packet of letters and reading them one by one. I’d fancied myself a kind of historian—le gardien des fins heureuses—the keeper of happy endings. Except for my own, of course. But I was happy for a while—we both were—at a time when there was very little happiness to go around.

  The war ground on, until all of Paris felt gray and dead. My days at the hospital were long and taxing, a blur of haunted faces and broken lives that seemed to go on forever. But through it all, there was Anson.

  He was forever making excuses to hang around the mess, hoping to catch me on a break or at lunch. I confess, I made a few unnecessary trips there myself, particularly after new casualties arrived and he was likely to be about. We would sip terrible coffee and make small talk about music and movies, until the mess finally emptied and his hand would steal across the table and find mine.

  We fancied ourselves discreet, convinced that no one else knew of our blooming affection. There were rules about fraternization, but in those days, when life felt so precious and precarious, no one had the heart to come between young lovers.

  Eventually, we became more brazen, slipping away whenever we could for a quick bite or a walk. We took turns telling our stories. I couldn’t tell him everything, of course—Maman had brought me up to be careful of our gifts—but I told him what I could, how brides would come from miles away for a Roussel gown, about the letters people left when she died. And I talked about having my own salon when the war was over and the beautiful dresses I would make.

  Anson talked about growing up as Newport royalty, about parties at the yacht club, boarding school in Boston, endless summers spent sailing with friends. And he talked about his family, about his father, who came home a hero after being wounded in World War I and promptly seized the reins of the family business from his older brother; his mother, Lydia, who died after a harrowing battle with pneumonia; his little sister, who painted and wrote songs and wanted to be famous one day and live in a garret in Paris; the boats his family had built for generations, sailboats famous for winning something called the America’s Cup.

  But my favorite topic that summer was Anson himself, hearing how he grew up, how he’d been packed off to boarding school at the age of eight, how he learned to race himself and became the captain of his own team, then gave up sailing entirely after an ugly fight with his father—and the argument he and his father had the day he announced he was leaving school to join the AFS.

  I could listen to him talk for hours, but we never had hours. Our duties meant we had to settle for stolen moments when our shifts happened to allow, and it seemed petty to complain when so many were sacrificing so much.

  Then one day, he told me he had arranged a night off for us both. I didn’t ask how or whom he had spoken to. I didn’t care. He took me to a café. Not one of the noisy places frequented by the boche but a quaint brasserie on Rue Saint-Benoît that had music and candles on the table. We were shown to a booth in one of the back corners. Anson ordered a bottle of good red wine, which went to his head after only one glass. And we ate such food, no doubt procured through the black market. There was a velvety pink soup with bits of lobster, roasted pork with apples and onions, and for dessert, an almond merengue torte. It was the grandest meal I’d ever eaten and must have cost Anson a fortune, but for those few brief hours, we could forget the war and simply be together.

  He walked me home after, our fingers twined warmly. I don’t think my feet touched the ground the entire way. When we reached the door, I fumbled with my key, my hands suddenly damp. Finally, it slid home, but as I reached for the knob, he caught my hand, and his eyes found mine in the darkness. He whispered my name, touched my face, then pressed his lips to mine with maddening slowness.

  The night fell away as I swayed into him, until there was only his pulse and mine—his echo and mine. It felt like déjà vu, like finding something I didn’t know I had lost. And I never wanted it to end. It had to, of course. There were rules for good girls. But the touch paper had been lit in earnest.

  By the end of the summer, I was in love with Anson Purcell. And he was in love with me.

  NINETEEN

  SOLINE

  To ensure a happy ending, a bride must be willing to give her whole heart to the man she marries. Her spine, however, must at all times remain her own.

  —Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch

  14 August 1943—Paris

  Things have been getting tighter and tighter at the hospital. Food has begun to dwindle, despite the supplies the Americans continue to send. Our numbers swelled horribly as we entered the summer months. Nearly five hundred counting wounded and staff—all needing to be fed three times a day.

  The mood has changed too. There are growing concerns that we will be shut down, our patients sent to the camps—or worse. The Germans are becoming impatient, suspicious that somehow the hospital—Dr. Jack in particular—is involved in aiding the Resistance to help soldiers and French Jews evade capture.

  Things got worse last month after an entire unit of American airmen managed to avoid capture when their planes were shot down. The Germans stepped up their efforts, mounting a sweeping search of the area, but the men appear to have vanished. Rewards are now posted for anyone having knowledge of groups or persons suspected of aiding them. Neighbors have begun turning on one another, offering up information—some of it true, much of it false—in exchange for a franc or two.

  Even the hospital has fallen under suspicion. Rumors spread through the corridors like a brushfire, and suddenly the subject no one has wanted to talk about—the suspicious number of sudden deaths and empty beds—is all anyone can talk about, though only in hushed tones. We’re all on edge. Collaborators are everywhere these days, snooping for information that might earn them a fat reward. There’s talk of a spy in our midst, someone pretending to fight for the cause who’s actually in league with the Nazis. And so we’re all on our guard, for fear one wrong word will land the Gestapo on our doorsteps.

  It’s whispered that Dr. Jack will be arrested any day and that he keeps a suitcase packed, so he’ll be ready when the time comes. Meanwhile, we do our best to go about our business—because what else is there to do? The soldiers keep coming, every day, a steady stream. Wounded. Broken. Hollowed out.

  We’re all frightfully tired, and time passes
slowly despite the bustle. Perhaps it’s how infrequently I see Anson these days that makes me feel so restless. After weeks of deliciously clandestine moments—breathless kisses stolen in the storage room or the back row of the cinema, quiet dinners and endless talk about what we’ll do when the war ends—he has suddenly grown distant.

  I understand that his job is critical. The war never stops—not even for young lovers—but lately, Anson’s work has been keeping him away from the hospital for longer and longer stretches. And then, when I do see him, it’s impossible not to mark the change in him. He seems edgy and distracted, always glancing over his shoulder, as if he expects to find someone on his heels. He’s become evasive with me, vague and even distant. And he’s begun to disappear for days at a time. When he finally reappears, he offers some flimsy excuse, and I do my best to believe.

  But this morning, I saw him talking to one of the nurses. Elise is her name. She’s older than I am and a good deal more worldly, with full lips and a deep, throaty laugh. They were huddled together on the stairs, their heads bent so close her mouth nearly grazed the side of Anson’s neck as she slipped what looked like a note into his jacket pocket. I must have made some sort of sound, because he turned suddenly and saw me watching.

  He stepped away, but it was too late. I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen. Or hide my tears from Adeline when I came around the corner and careened into her. She didn’t seem surprised when I told her what I’d seen. She said she always thought him too handsome for his own good and that it was best that I learn the truth before things went too far. But for me, things have already gone too far.

  A few hours ago, I saw him duck out the door. He hesitated when he saw me, an awkward, unfathomable plea in his eyes. I turned away. If he wanted Elise, he could have her. At least that’s what I told myself.