by M. J. Rose
After my cousin left and my brother had returned to his own villa at the end of Palm Beach, my parents kissed me good night. Upstairs in my childhood bed, I fell asleep almost right away and had my first dreamless slumber since the party on Fifth Avenue almost two months before.
When I woke up, I guessed the reason. After I had breakfast with my parents on the terrace overlooking the sea and my father left for his office, my mother asked me if I’d like a second café au lait.
“Yes, thank you. And speaking of coffee, what did you put in my tea last night?”
“Did you sleep well?” she asked slyly.
“You know the answer as well as I do.”
“Wasn’t it a relief?”
“Yes, but you should have asked me, Maman. I’m not a child. You can’t trick me into taking medicine.”
“It wasn’t medicine. Just a sleep draft to give you some peace. I can see how much you need it.” She smiled at me, as if her interference was completely acceptable, and smoothed my curls down with the flat of her hand.
The sun was shining into the kitchen, and even in the direct light, my mother looked like a young woman, no more than thirty instead of a fifty-five-year-old mother of four grown children. My father and great-grandmother both also looked at least twenty years younger than their actual ages. We all knew that the spells my mother used to reverse an illness or save a life sometimes resulted in slowing down the aging process.
She’d worried that when she restored my eyesight, she might have interfered with my development and that I would be stunted at age nine, but I’d grown up according to schedule after all.
My mother had taught me many of her spells. And as was the custom among daughters of La Lune, she gifted me with my own grimoire when my menses arrived at age fourteen. Unlike my sister Opaline, who was a jeweler and had initially avoided learning the witch’s trade, I’d sought out lessons from a young age. I craved the power and ability that my mother had. Much of it was subtle, but she could sway people’s minds with a glance. She was a great seductress. Even though she clearly was devoted to my father, she enjoyed melting men’s reserves in her presence. Often after a party, I heard her and my father laughing about how so-and-so had left smitten or this one had made a fool of himself trying to impress her.
But nowhere was my mother’s talent more visible than in her paintings. She captured magick in every canvas. Her elaborate creations were unique, although you could see the lingering echoes of her symbolist teacher Gustave Moreau in her decorative work. She used Greek and Roman mythology to create illustrative tales that often no one but she understood but that everyone was drawn to. She also did portraits, very personal studies highlighting the obsessions of close family and friends. Opaline’s portrait showed her inside the facets of a ruby. Sebastian appeared on a ten-franc note. I was portrayed in pools of paint on an artist’s palette. She painted my father in the reflections of all the windows of a building he’d designed.
“We need to speak of some things,” she said now, as she walked toward the table with the fresh coffee. “All right?”
“Yes. Of course.”
I’d been dreading this postmortem conversation. But given the depth of my mother’s insight—a combination of empathy and sorcery—I had expected it.
“I was on my way to New York to get you myself, when I got sick,” she said, as she poured hot milk and coffee into my cup at the same time.
“Sebastian told me. He said it was food poisoning.”
“Yes. But I don’t think it was as simple as that.”
“You think it was more than just food poisoning that ailed you?”
“I think I was being a mother, sick with worry over her two grown yet still quite young children,” she said.
“Children? What do you mean? Does someone else need rescuing?” I asked.
“Sebastian. He’s not the same when you’re not around, you know that?”
“No, not really.”
“Since childhood you relied on him in many ways, but you functioned fine emotionally without him. Sebastian, on the other hand, is always a bit adrift without you as an anchor.”
I took a sip of the coffee, surprised by her revelation.
“The letters we got from New York, first Clifford’s and then Tommy’s, worried us all,” she said.
“I can understand why. I’m sorry they wrote. It wasn’t their right. I needed to sort things out on my own.”
“But you weren’t doing a good job of that, according to them.”
I resented her comment. Most mothers have no choice but to watch their children make mistakes and subsequently learn from them or not. But my mother was different. She could influence and even reverse what appeared to be reality. My brother and sisters and I all felt that as a mother, Sandrine was too powerful, that we were often at her mercy, even though she meant well.
“That’s your opinion. You weren’t there,” I countered.
“Either way, you’re here now. That’s what matters. You’re home, where you can heal. And you will. You have the strength to do it. You are like me that way. But Sebastian isn’t, and …” An odd expression crossed my mother’s face.
“What is it?”
She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have brought this up on your first morning home. But Sebastian was so clearly back to himself last night with you in his orbit. It was difficult to miss. I can see his aura dim when he’s been away from you for too long. You fuel him, ma belle. I’ve always known that his talent feeds off yours. And some of that is all right. He’s a showman, a salesman, a dealer. He needs to have artists to present and promote. But he’s too dependent on you. And it worries me.”
My mother had never been so forthright with me about my twin. I had always thought of myself as the weaker one. I had never considered that he might be dependent on me.
“There’s no harm to it, though, is there?” I asked.
She drank some coffee before continuing. “I’m not so sure. I don’t often get uneasy, and when I do …” She stopped talking. Took another sip. “Sebastian is just too reliant on you. Be aware of it, Delphine. All right? I don’t want him to drain your spirit.”
“Of course.”
“Now, let’s unpack your paintings,” she said, standing, seeming relieved. “I want to see the work you were doing.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready for a critique,” I said.
“I’ll go easy on you.”
“You never have before.”
“You never needed me to before.” She smiled down at me and smoothed down my unruly curls again, the way she’d been doing since I was a child. She was my beautiful mother, La Belle Lune, the extraordinary artist who had restored my sight, had given me my talent, and yet could be as critical of my work as a stranger.
The crates weren’t in the house but just down the path, in my mother’s studio. With our arms linked, we walked there together.
Inside, we pried open the wooden containers and pulled out my Petal Mystique series of canvases. My mother didn’t examine them until we’d removed them all and leaned them against the walls.
I’d never seen them all in one grouping that way, and I, too, studied them closely. She nodded as she stood before one and then another.
“These are good. Almost groundbreaking. Surrealistic, with a decided féministe bent. The boys will be angry when they see them. They haven’t accepted a mere female into their midst except as a model.”
Then she unrolled the drawings and canvases I’d done since the accident.
The jungle settings and hyperrealistic beastly men and women in various states of passionate embraces were hard for me to look at for long. I hated recalling my state of mind when I’d created them. Despite what they were missing—technical polish and more resolution—I couldn’t deny that a part of my soul, dark, angry, and wasted, was exposed in these charcoal strokes. They were nothing like anything else I had ever produced. I couldn’t predict if my mother was going to like the work or what
it told her about me.
As she looked at them, I didn’t see my mother but the artist, Sandrine Duplessi, in her studio, seriously contemplating a young painter’s frenzied work of two months.
Finally, she turned to me, her benign expression unreadable. “I’m sorry, ma petite belle.”
She turned away from my work and walked to the center of the room, where I’d been standing, and joined me. It wasn’t until she got closer that I realized she had tears streaming down her face.
“What a terrible time you’ve had. I knew it was bad. I felt it when I shut my eyes and focused on you, but I didn’t have any idea. How lost you have been. Yes? And still not found.”
And then she took me in her arms, and I let my own tears flow freely.
Chapter 14
Book of Hours
June 9, 1920
My secret outings with Mathieu have affected all areas of my life. When I am not with him, everyday activities such as studying, painting portraits, and dining with Grand-mère seem hazy and unfocused. As if I am in limbo, waiting for when we will be together. Everything only comes into focus, all of my senses only come alive, when I see Mathieu.
“Here is a place lovers come to hide,” Mathieu told me, as we walked through the Jardin des Plantes. He pointed out a Lebanese cedar planted in 1734 and led me up a stone walkway to a shining pergola made of iron, copper, bronze, and lead. Beneath that, we walked through a tunnel into a deep green valley with a stream running through it and masses of delicate flowers.
We sat among them and kissed.
“Victor Hugo once said that life is the flower for which love is the honey,” Mathieu said, when we broke apart, breathless, both of us wanting more.
I buried my face in his neck and inhaled his scent. “Honey! There’s honey in the fragrance you wear. What is it called?” I asked him.
“A perfumer makes it for me, quite near your great-grandmother’s house. Let me take you there. I want to buy you a perfume. And then put it on you here …” He touched behind my ear. “And here …” He ran his finger down my neck. I arched to expose more skin to him. “And here, too …” He touched my collarbone. “And then here …” His fingers slipped down my chemise to my décolletage. “Will you allow me?”
I was about to say of course, when he kissed me again, and all words were lost.
The shop was, in fact, on the same street as Grand-mère’s house. I knew it well. My great-grandmother bought her perfume there. But I’d never stepped inside until Mathieu took me there this afternoon.
All the walls were paneled in mottled antique mirror. The ceiling, too, was mirrored. The corners were decorated with pink-tinged fat angels and flowers in a mélange of pastels, painted in the style of Fragonard. The four small Louis XIV desks scattered around the room looked like originals, as did the smattering of chairs with avocado-green velvet seats and the glass and rosewood cabinets filled with antique perfume paraphernalia. Oversized bottles of the house’s fragrances lined mirrored shelves, with the signature fragrances front and center: Blanc, Verte, Rouge, and Noir.
Mathieu introduced me to an older man whose son he’d served with in the war. Charles L’Etoile invited us to sit down.
“Now, tell me about yourself,” Monsieur L’Etoile asked. “What colors do you favor?”
“Very deep burgundy, silver lavender—”
“Turquoise,” Mathieu added.
I smiled at him.
Monsieur L’Etoile dipped his pen in a crystal inkwell and wrote down my answers.
“Do you prefer the forest or the beach or the garden?”
“The garden and the beach. We had both growing up.”
“Where was that?” he asked.
“Cannes.”
“I know the area well.” Monsieur made more notes. “We grow our own roses not far from there, in Grasse. Just a few more questions. What is your favorite fabric?”
“Cashmere.”
“And do you prefer the sunlight or a night sky of stars?”
“A moonlit sky.”
He wrote down my answer with a smile. Then he looked at me and held my glance for a long moment. He turned to Mathieu. “If you’d like to wait, it will be about fifteen minutes to a half hour. It’s pleasant in the garden. We’d be happy to bring you some chocolat chaud or coffee?”
“The garden, bien sûr,” Mathieu answered. “It’s one of my favorite ways to spend the time it takes to make up a scent. Delphine, choose the chocolate; it’s as velvety here as at Angelina’s,” he said, mentioning my great-grandmother’s favorite tearoom.
Outside, we sat in wicker chairs with thick cushions in an ornate rose garden. In a few minutes, a young woman came out carrying a silver tray with a plate of madeleines, a pot of chocolate, and fine Limoges cups. She poured the ambrosia and left with a nod.
“Charles planted these rosebushes, importing heirlooms from all over France and England. He cultivates hybrids here before he has them grown in Grasse. His goal is to create scents other houses can’t imitate.”
I sipped the fine chocolate and munched on a freshly baked cookie, marveling at the exceptional garden, drunk on the tastes and the scents swirling around me.
Mathieu reached out and ran his fingers around my wrist and then up my arm.
“What is this?” he asked, touching the mark near my shoulder.
I was wearing a new rust-colored watered-silk dress and hadn’t realized the cap sleeves had little slits in them until that moment.
We never spoke of my birthmark outside the family, but I wanted Mathieu to know about it. I told him about the crescent-moon-shaped mark every daughter of La Lune carried somewhere on her body.
“It’s a secret,” I warned. Even after a dozen years, the memory of how my schoolmates had taunted me and hurt me for being different still lingered.
“I promise never to tell,” he said, and then leaned over and kissed the sliver of my pale moon.
Monsieur’s assistant came to get us and escorted us back into the shop. We sat down with the perfumer, and he presented me with a crystal flacon. There was no label. On the silver cap was the engraving of a crescent moon with a star inside it.
I started.
“What is wrong?” Monsieur asked.
“This sign—is it your insignia?”
“Yes, the House of L’Etoile has used it since we opened our first shop in 1780.”
“It’s a symbol that’s part of my family history, too,” I said.
“I’m aware of that, Mademoiselle Duplessi. Our families have been acquainted for a long time. My father was a good friend of your great-grandmother. As was my grandfather.”
I felt myself blush. A good friend was how Grand-mère always referred to the gentlemen who’d availed themselves of her salon when she was one of Paris’s great courtesans.
“Now, for your scent.”
He opened the bottle, tipped and pressed it to a pale green swatch of fabric, and then, with ceremony, handed it to me.
I inhaled. The fragrance was creamy and well rounded. I couldn’t identify any particular flower or spice, but rather I was treated to an impression. The perfume smelled like colors: deep burgundy, pale pink, and midnight blue streaked with silver. Mysterious like the night, it was secretive.
“If you like it, you can try it on,” Monsieur said. “It will smell different once it warms on your skin.”
I reached for the bottle, but Mathieu took it first. He pressed his forefinger to the opening and then, with a lover’s gentle touch, stroked the perfume onto the insides of my wrists, the space behind my right ear and then my left, and after that ran his finger down my neck.
I had forgotten that Monsieur L’Etoile was watching. Was it shameful of me not to care? I stretched out my neck as the scent released its full bouquet, which was both an invitation and a promise.
“What is it called?” I asked Monsieur L’Etoile.
“Custom scents don’t have names as such. We mark them with a number that corresponds
to the customer. This is Duplessi number sixteen. Are you pleased with it?”
“It’s perfect,” I said. “I’ll never wear anything else.” I was delighted at the idea that I now had my own scent. I turned to Mathieu. “Thank you for my gift.”
Mathieu paid for the purchase, and once we were out in the street, he stopped to bury his face in my neck.
“It smells like you, only with roses and lilacs and wind and salt from the sea added. But that’s just on your neck. I will have to test it and see how it smells on other parts of you before I can make an absolute determination. Will you allow that?”
He was asking me if I was ready for us to become lovers. Did I dare say yes? I wanted to. To say yes, yes, please, now, today, before it’s too late. There it was again. That terrible feeling that our time was limited. A verse I had learned in school came back to me, Andrew Marvell’s cautionary poem:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime… .
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vaults, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Chapter 15
My mother wanted to coddle me, and for the next few weeks I let her. I ate what she cooked, drank what she poured, read the light and frivolous novels she purchased for me, walked on my beloved beach, and inspected all the new shops that had sprung up in Cannes in the years I’d been gone. Most of all, I stayed away from pencils, charcoal, paintbrushes, and canvases. And although I tried to keep my Book of Hours hidden away, I found myself reading a passage every night, wistfully indulging in glorious memories, punishing myself for even thinking I could have lived the rest of my days with someone like Tommy.
