I'll See You in Paris

by Michelle Gable

  Pru struggled to inhale. She could not catch her breath.

  “But that’s over,” he said. “Because I found you and we’re together at last.”

  Charlie uncurled his fist, which was until that time balled into a knot. He stretched his fingers, reaching his hand toward Pru.

  In the middle of his palm sat a ring. A platinum band with a four-carat diamond in the center, two-carat baguettes on either side. The privileged in England inherited titles. In America, it was grandmother’s jewels.

  “I’d ask you to marry me,” Charlie said, and let his eyes flick briefly in my direction. “But you already said yes. Nothing’s changed. Unless you have something against cripples.”

  “Charlie…” Pru said in a whisper. “Don’t…”

  “Come back with me. I’ve never loved you more than I do at this moment. We’ll start over. I’ll work at a goddamned desk, the biggest bodily threat a paper cut. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”

  As Pru remained in a fog, Charlie leaned into her and glided the ring onto her finger. It was far too big. The diamond fell immediately out of sight.

  “Come back with me,” he said again. “Paris is nice, Laurel. Paris is great, but God Bless America.”

  Eighty-one

  ÎLE SAINT-LOUIS

  PARIS

  NOVEMBER 2001

  There wasn’t a person in that apartment not floored to see Laurel standing in the doorway. Even Annie, who’d called her in the first place.

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull,” Laurel said, face beating and hair chaotic around her. “But you don’t go running off to foreign countries without telling me.”

  Laurel ranted on for several more minutes, sounding like a top candidate for Strictest Mom on Earth. But Annie understood it was for show. Mostly Laurel lit into her daughter so she didn’t have to acknowledge the other people in the room.

  “I left you a message,” Annie pointed out. “So I did tell you. And what choice did I have? And, P.S., I’m an adult.”

  “This is not like you, Annabelle. What were you planning to do? Sleep in some strange man’s apartment?”

  “He’s not a strange man.”

  “Well, we’re both a little strange,” Jamie tried to joke.

  Laurel closed her eyes. Around them the apartment creaked and sighed. Annie felt Gus quaking behind her.

  “Well, now I finally get why you’re so anti Eric,” Annie said. “Charlie? The dead soldier? He was my dad?”

  “He was. And I am not anti Eric. I’m pro you.”

  “These past few weeks,” Annie said. “I thought you didn’t want us together because we didn’t know each other. Then I thought it was because you were afraid I’d lose him. You had me questioning everything—me, him, whether we should even be together. But now I know. It’s not that you were afraid he’d never come home. You were afraid that he would and I’d marry him anyway.”

  It couldn’t have been clearer if she’d written it out, or engraved it on a luggage tag. Laurel didn’t love Charlie when she married him. She left with him out of guilt. Or nostalgia. Or because she’d loved him once.

  Oh, her mother had tried. Laurel tried her hand at a bohemian Parisian lifestyle, but she couldn’t make it stick. She was forced to act like an adult from a young age, after losing both parents, and then losing Charlie the first time. Responsible adult was how Laurel behaved, “doing the right thing” her default mode. Laurel’s character and her personal history were too ingrained to overcome.

  “Annie,” Laurel said, eyes avoiding Gus as if he were the sun. “Whatever you think right now, you’re wrong. You don’t know the whole story.”

  “So where is he?” Gus asked.

  Annie whipped her head in his direction and was surprised to find a different man standing there. She thought of Gus as tall, broad-shouldered, and strong. But he suddenly appeared thin, anemic almost. She wondered if he was ill.

  “Where is Charlie?” he asked.

  The muscles in Laurel’s neck rose as she strained to keep her head from turning.

  “Please warn me if a third member of this esteemed family is going to show up,” Gus said. “I can’t do that again.”

  “Not bloody likely,” Jamie mumbled. “Mate, he’s dead.”

  “He’s dead?” Gus said, gaping. “When? How? He’s dead?”

  For real this time was the question hanging in the air. But Gus did not dare ask it.

  “January 1980,” Laurel said and at long last turned in his direction.

  Gus jolted when her eyes landed on him. What must they look like to each other? As though they’d aged thirty years in one day? Or did they seem exactly the same?

  “Pru,” he said in a whisper.

  “Wait a minute,” Annie said. “He died when I was a baby? You made it sound like you left him.”

  “I did,” Laurel said. She pulled her gaze away from Gus. “I left him when I was pregnant. I was alone when I had you and then I came here. Perhaps you two gentlemen remember the baby who was with me, though her hair is much better now, in that she actually has some.”

  “Bloody hell,” Jamie muttered.

  “So Charlie was gone?” Gus said. “When you came back?”

  “He was alive but we were not together.”

  “Listen, folks,” Jamie said. “I have a brilliant scheme. Annie, you come with me.”

  “No way,” she said. “I’m staying.”

  Annie wanted to see how this was all going to pan out. Not to mention, she had about a million questions to ask.

  “Sorry, little lass,” Jamie said. “You’re coming with me. We’ll enjoy a glass of wine or three, let these two long-lost chums reconnect.”

  “I want to know—” she started.

  “And you shall know.” Jamie took her hand. “But they need to know first.”

  While Annie’s mouth remained open, he led her down the hallway and through the front door. As it closed behind them, she heard her mom let out a small cry.

  “We’ll give them an hour,” Jamie said. “It’s the least we can do. After all, they have a lifetime to catch up on.”

  Eighty-two

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  1973

  And so Laurel went back to Boston with Charlie.

  Charlie thought it was inevitable, this return. But as for Laurel, maybe she would’ve stayed in Paris had he not brought his grandmother’s ring. Or if he’d asked for her hand a second time instead of reminding her that she’d already said yes.

  Perhaps Laurel would’ve stayed if he’d shown up with two legs instead of only one. Or if he still displayed that old Charlie Haley swagger. Laurel saw from the start he had a few chinks in the armor, a handful of wires shorted out. Some part of her didn’t want to tinker with the already-damaged man.

  “I understand,” Win assured her when Laurel announced that she was choosing Charlie. “I understand completely.”

  She was a runny-nosed mess as they sat on his bed—their bed—Charlie clomping up and down the hall outside the door as they said their good-byes. Laurel tried not to think of Win and instead her old feelings for Charlie. But they were too far down to reach.

  “Don’t cry,” Win said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  He was strong. Stoic. Realistic. Nothing like the man Laurel loved. As Win would later tell his brother, he was a better actor than he was a writer. A better actor than he was a man.

  “Win,” she said, crying into his shoulder, hands wrapped around his neck. “Convince me to stay. Convince me to hide out in this room until he leaves.”

  If she had been looking at his face, Laurel would’ve noticed his lips trembling uncontrollably.

  “I can’t do that, luv,” he said, for Win truly believed she was making the best decision—for her. For him it felt like the end of the world.

  “But he can find someone else,” Laurel said. “Women love him. They fawn over him. It’s actually quite annoying.”

  Where was
it? Where was the love she used to have for Charlie? Of course, even at its best, it paled compared to how she felt about Win.

  “He can find a girl much better than me,” Pru went on. “More pedigreed. You said it yourself, I’m an orphan.”

  “A girl better than you? Impossible.”

  “But his family hates orphans! They told me that! Tiggie Haley thinks they should be put in work camps instead of milking the dole. I’m not even kidding. That’s a direct quote!”

  Win peeled Laurel’s fingers from his neck. He had to. Otherwise, he’d never let her leave.

  “Laurel,” he said. “I’m no good for you. Just a grown-up writer-boy with nothing to offer. You have to go. Boston is where you belong. We can’t ramble about Paris forever. No one lives like this for long.”

  This, an echo of her prior thoughts. In other words: they were too good to be true.

  “So that’s it?” she said. “I leave with Charlie and never see you again? And you’re fine with this?”

  “I’m nowhere close to fine,” Win said. “And we will see each other. When GD finally buys it you’ll have to fetch your art and dispose of your share of the Grange. We will meet again. The old gal’s practically written it into law. Maybe you were right. Maybe Lady Marlborough does believe in love.”

  It was comforting to think that they had this promise for the future, thanks to Mrs. Spencer.

  “Who are we kidding?” Pru said. “Mrs. Spencer’s going to outlive every person on this damned planet.”

  Win managed a laugh, even as some part of him thought it might be true. Gladys Deacon Spencer-Churchill, aged ninety-two yet ageless all the same. They should’ve made out their wills to her, instead of the other way around.

  “You can always come back,” Win said. “You know that, right? If things don’t work out. Or even if they do. I will wait here, in this spot, forever.”

  “Forever is a very long time,” Laurel said in a whisper.

  She thought of the duchess, and of the duchess’s mother. Florence Deacon chalked up Coco Abeille to standard Parisian flirtation. Laurel would try to convince herself that Win was the same.

  “LAUREL!” Charlie shouted.

  He clobbered the door with his hands. Laurel jumped. This would become a reflex for her. In the years that followed, she would very seldom feel at rest.

  “The car is downstairs,” Charlie said. “If we’re going, we need to go now.”

  She inhaled, her breath rocky on the way down.

  “I love you, Laurel,” Win said. “I always will.”

  “Laurel? Since when do you call me ‘Laurel’?”

  “Since this very second. Pru? Well, she’s not here right now. She and Win, they’re at the Café de Flore, walking through the iron and glass door. Tonight they’ll go to Le Sept. Or that new cabaret show with the Brazilian transvestites.”

  Pru—Laurel—gave a runny smile.

  “Sounds perfect,” she said.

  “You see, dear Laurel, Win and Pru are in Paris. And in Paris they’ll remain.”

  Eighty-three

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  1973–1979

  The Charlie that Laurel married was not the person she met, or the boy whose proposal she accepted.

  From the start the man was angry, violent, often drunk. The slightest door slam sent him reaching for a baseball bat or a gun. He cried out at night so frequently Laurel started sleeping in another room. She felt bad. It wasn’t his fault. But she was afraid to lie beside him.

  Charlie was quick to paranoia, quicker to fury. They had so many holes punched in the walls of their Back Bay town home, Laurel took a sledgehammer to them all and called in a contractor for a remodel.

  What a successful and enterprising young couple! Renovating their Boston home to keep up with the latest trends! It’s what their family and friends thought when they surveyed the mess.

  Charlie had a position with the family business, his job duties and title a mystery. If Laurel had to guess it would’ve been something along the lines of vice president of boozy lunches and hours that happy forgot.

  “Is he doing anything?” Laurel once asked her mother-in-law. “At the office?”

  She tried to sound nonaccusatory but she couldn’t imagine anyone trusting him to do actual work.

  “Give him some time to adjust,” Tiggie Haley said. “He’s been through a lot.”

  Was still going through a lot, as far as Laurel could tell. It would not be a recognized affliction until the eighties, but post-traumatic stress disorder was a real thing for them.

  During this time, Laurel wanted to go back to college, finish her degree. They were in Boston, with no shortage of universities from which to choose, but Charlie wouldn’t hear of it. A proper wife stayed at home. His parents agreed. Each day the family, like a vise, closed more tightly around her.

  “Charlie and I have something in common,” she wrote in her journal one evening after he’d passed out beside her on the couch. “We’ve both been POWs.”

  As soon as the words were on the paper, Laurel felt ashamed. Likening a fancy home and ample food to what her husband endured? She was a horrible, small-minded person. Laurel ripped up the page. She never wrote again.

  They tried to have children. Charlie himself was the oldest of five and so there were expectations, particularly to produce at least one son. Their lovemaking was a hurried, angry, sloppy affair, after which Laurel would pray that the sperm made union with a plump and healthy egg. Not that she particularly wanted kids, but maybe her husband would be kinder with a baby or two in the home. It seemed to be the only thing he desired, other than more booze.

  Between 1973 and 1978, Laurel got pregnant five times. Babies lost at seven weeks, then ten, twelve, eighteen, and a gorgeous, dark-haired son stillborn at twenty-nine. Charlie blamed Laurel.

  “Cut him some slack,” one of his sisters said when Laurel confessed she was thinking of leaving because their life felt toxic. The vanishing babies seemed proof of that. “He’s been through so much. Be grateful for what you have.”

  Be grateful. This was solid enough advice. What was she thinking? Laurel could never leave Charlie Haley. It simply wasn’t an option.

  When Charlie had been out of the war longer than he’d been in it, Laurel suggested medication and psychiatry. The summer she tried to more actively help, their home underwent another full-scale renovation.

  As time pressed on, Laurel began believing that perhaps she was a tough shrew of a wife, just as Charlie said. How did you ask a person to “get over” the shooting of men or nine months of daily beatings and starvation? She hated herself for not being able to tolerate his moods.

  Still. A hundred times Laurel thought of leaving, but where would she go? And who with? She had precisely no one in her life who wasn’t Charlie’s first. Her only true family was on some other continent, wrapped up with a girl named Pru.

  She considered calling Win, or the duchess, or even Jamie. But there was no way to do it without leaving evidence. Charlie already accused her of slutting around and he inspected every canceled check and phone bill with exacting diligence. There was no way to reach out behind his back.

  Then, one morning, Laurel received a telegram.

  At the time, she was desperately sick with her sixth pregnancy, the vomiting so violent she hoped the inevitable miscarriage would happen sooner rather than later. If she’d never get a baby out of it, then what was the point of the suffering?

  “A telegram?” she said when the man handed her a piece of paper. “For me? Are you sure?”

  “If that’s your name at the top, then yes.”

  Was she Laurel Haley? They’d been married five years and she still didn’t know.

  “Uh, thanks,” she said.

  With rickety hands, Laurel opened the envelope.

  WESTERN UNION

  TELEGRAM

  2/22/1979

  MRS LAUREL INNAMORATI HALEY

  410 BEACON ST

  BOSTO
N MA 02115

  DEAR LAUREL

  THIS IS A PRIVATE TELEGRAM FROM GADS TO NOTIFY YOU OF THE RECENT DEATH OF MRS SPENCER THE DUCHESS. A SUM OF 86200 USD HAS BEEN DEPOSITED IN YOUR NAME AT BANC OF BOSTON ON BOYLSTON ST. PAPERWORK FOR ART, PROPERTY IN SAFETY DEP BOX OF SAME INSTITUTION. COLLECT ART AT YOUR LEISURE. WISH YOU LUCK. YOU ARE MISSED. WARMEST REGARDS GEORGE WILLIAM COLIN SPENCER-CHURCHILL FONDLY KNOWN AS GADS.

  Heart pounding, Laurel folded up the telegram and stuffed it down the front of her dress. She cringed, her breasts sore from the difficult pregnancy.

  “Rest in peace, Mrs. Spencer,” she said with a smile, for she was not sad because the woman was probably right then in the most glittering salon in all of heaven, holding court over the lauded and the famed.

  “I’ve thought about you every day,” Laurel mused.

  She hurried toward her room, a hop in her step. On her way, Laurel flipped on the record player. The Steve Miller Band played. Her smile only grew. Mrs. Spencer had answered her prayers. She’d interfered in her Gladys Deacon sort of way.

  “‘They got the money, hey,’” Laurel sang, reaching into the back of her closet for a suitcase. “‘You know they got away. They headed down south and they’re still running today.’”

  Singin’ go on take the money and run.

  Go on take the money and run.

  And that’s exactly what Laurel did.

  Eighty-four

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  1979–1980

  Thanks to Mrs. Spencer’s generosity, Laurel was able to prepay a year’s worth of rent in a building with a doorman and a guard. A week later, she enrolled at Wellesley.

  Though she’d been a literature major, Laurel transferred all the credits she could and switched her concentration to finance. When she thought of novels and biographies and the great literature of the world, she thought of the duchess, and she thought of Win. She’d never graduate if she let herself get mired in the story of Pru. The season for burying herself in books had passed.

  After she moved, Laurel tried calling Win. Twice. Both times a woman answered, identifying herself as Mrs. Seton. So much for “waiting forever,” she thought. Not that she truly expected he would.