“Oh, Madame Vogt,” Agnès said and started to laugh.
The laugh turned into a cough that morphed into a hack that brought four previously unseen household workers running. Someone prepared honey tea. April sat frozen as Luc rubbed her back. People fussed and swirled around the old woman.
“Pardon me,” Madame Vannier said once the commotion died down and her assistants disappeared into the woodwork from which they’d come. “I am quite on my last legs. Where were we?”
“I said something that sent you into a fit of hysterics. But if you can’t continue, I understand.”
“Ah. Yes. ‘Hysterics.’ Madame Vogt, surely you know there is always more to a person than what you see, or what they decide to show you.”
“But—”
“Shush. Enough. You came to find the missing pieces? Well, the missing piece was Lisette. Did you not figure? She has a story, too.”
Chapitre LXXV
Agnès Vannier, Prewar Paris
Elisabetta de Florian looked exactly like her grandmother. They shared similar dark, curled hair, matching black eyes, and the same long, proud nose. Lisette hated it.
She did not want to be like the woman who raised her, all wild-eyed and desperate. Grand-mère was frightening, unpredictable, a kitten one second, a ferocious wildcat the next. More than her moods, Lisette feared the endless stream of men who pounded into and out of their flat. These so-called gentlemen were usually rude and often violent and almost always drunk. Whenever one came to call while Grand-mère was out, Lisette hid the calling card behind a painting or tucked it up inside a bureau.
“Did anyone stop by while I was away?” Grand-mère might ask.
“No,” Lisette would tell her. “It was quiet as a morgue.”
There was never much to eat. Grand-mère would dine at restaurants with the men, these interlopers, and come home smelling of chicken grease and something more acrid. As the years moved on, Grand-mère’s belly went from flat to puffy to distended. It took her longer to get dressed in the mornings as she attempted to wheedle her sausage arms into dresses that went out of style years before.
“I am rather hungry,” Lisette often told her.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Grand-mère always replied. “But money is hard to come by these days. We must do our best with what little we have and continue to prepare for the worst.”
Whenever Grand-mère was absent from the flat, Lisette would look around at her grandmother’s things. She studied them, envying their solidarity, their permanent place in the world. There were vases and chandeliers and paintings, a million relics collected and accumulated and piled up. They called to mind excess, thus made young Lisette wonder why they could not afford to eat.
Once, after Grand-mère went missing for several days, Lisette took a candelabrum to the corner pawnbroker and sold it for a pittance. She knew it was worth at least five times what the oily little man paid for it, but at that moment a full stomach was worth more.
When Grand-mère returned home and passed by the pawnbroker’s window she recognized the piece as something from her flat. How she distinguished it from the forty others exactly like it Lisette would never know. After assaulting the owner with a walking cane (once the prime minister’s, now hers) and accusing him of being a thief and a “dirty, filthy Jew,” Grand-mère learned it was her own granddaughter who sold the piece.
Grand-mère stormed into the flat, shouting for the head of Lisette. Lisette, knowing her grandmother had trouble moving about, barricaded herself behind several pieces of furniture. It was one benefit of their cramped, crowded apartment: There were many places to hide.
“Things will get much worse before it’s over with!” Grand-mère shouted. “We need to save our pennies! We need to prepare for the worst! The worst will come!”
Lisette never understood. Her grandmother was saving these objects for a rainy day, yet it was already pouring outside.
As the years went on Grand-mère’s compassion and mental clarity continued to decline. Often she screamed at Lisette for no reason, claiming the girl had said something she hadn’t or lain with someone she’d never met. Despite her grandmother’s profession, when accused of sex Lisette had no earthly idea what Marthe meant. She only knew it was something she’d never done.
The screaming always commenced at high pitch, and Lisette learned to hide behind a dresser or an armoire and wait for the storm to pass. After bellowing on for many minutes, Grand-mère would stop suddenly, in midsentence, as if her vocal cords had been pulled from her neck. Her face would freeze on one side, the other half drooping and dripping like candle wax.
By the time she was ten, Lisette knew there were only two people in her life to count on: Grand-mère’s old friend Giovanni Boldini, and her even older friend Marguérite. Grand-mère refused to speak to Boldini, the war between them having gone on for years, but Marguérite took her to see the man. She told Lisette that whenever she needed someone there was always her, Marguérite, and this man, the painter Boldini. In the years that followed, whether hungry or lonely or sad, Lisette went to see one of these two people. She spent many nights sleeping in their guest quarters, many happy, full hours dining at their tables.
Boldini passed away when Lisette was twelve, but Marguérite remained in her life. It was Marguérite who fed Lisette when she was hungry, who mended her dresses, who taught her how to read. It was also Marguérite who taught Lisette to be herself instead of what she thought other people wanted to see. It was a lesson never learned by Grand-mère.
When her grandmother died in 1935, it was almost a relief. Lisette was no longer subject to her rants and now had free reign over the things inside the apartment. Lisette was not the most worldly when it came to the appraisal of furniture, but she understood the items’ true value, which was freedom.
Within months of Grand-Mère’s passing, Lisette began weeding through the mess, sorting the items by potential value and ease of transport. Marguérite told her of a local auction house: Sotheby’s. This house would take Marthe’s things and sell them on the block for a hefty price. All Lisette had to do was prepare the objects for sale. It sounded easy enough, but Lisette never got quite that far.
She started with the heaviest armoire in the flat. Lisette spent so much time hiding behind it she figured it would be the easiest to let go. That is, until she opened its doors and found her grandmother’s journals inside. There were dozens of diaries, perhaps a hundred or more, all filled front to back, bound with colored ribbons, and completely intact. At least for a while.
The woman who wrote the journals was not the Grand-mère Lisette knew. There was a liveliness to her, especially in the early years, a brightness Lisette had not expected. Marthe was not all outbursts or teary, garbled missives. Grand-mère did know how to love. She loved Boldini. She loved Marguérite. She loved Béatrice. She even loved Lisette.
As she went through the diaries, more than a little teary and garbled herself, Lisette pulled each page from its binding. She kept the entries that made her smile, or made her understand, and threw the rest into the fire, where they sparked and crackled and ultimately turned to ash.
Lisette always intended to get through the remainder of Grand-mère’s things tomorrow. She would auction them tomorrow. It’s funny how quickly tomorrow becomes yesterday and then last week and then you run out of time. Before long tomorrow was 1940 and twenty-one-year-old Lisette was no closer to ridding herself of Marthe’s excess than she had been five years before. Like the rest of the nation, she had bigger things to worry about than Louis XVI armchairs.
In that year the Nazis poured into France. The blitzkrieg began in May, and Paris toppled thereafter. Newspapers soon snapped photographs of Hitler posing jauntily before the Eiffel Tower as if on holiday. On June 14, Lisette stood on a sidewalk with her fellow countrymen and watched as German troops marched into her city. People stood in stunned horror. Others cried. Everyone wondered what would become of their country, what would become of th
eir families.
It was only by chance that Lisette found herself beside an older woman in a long black mink coat. And it was only by chance that she turned toward this woman and recognized her as Jeanne Hugo. The sight of her face jolted Lisette. Grand-mère had no fewer than one hundred pictures of Jeanne in her apartment. What was once flat suddenly came to life.
“Excuse me,” Lisette said to Jeanne Hugo. She was not a forward person but the war, having just started, already began to change her. “I hate to bother you at such a momentous time, but I suppose that is the very best time to say this. You and I, we are related.”
Jeanne turned, eyes large, forehead lined with a million wrinkles.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Yes, well you see, I recently discovered that my great-grandfather was Victor Hugo, your grandfather! Yet, here we stand, side by side.”
Lisette did not mention that her own grandfather was Jeanne’s former husband. She suspected it was a revelation that might not be taken well.
Alas, if Lisette anticipated a smile or a pleasant acknowledgment of any kind, she was gravely mistaken.
“I thought you were dead!” the minked lady screamed. Several people stared, including two German soldiers smoking beside a lamppost.
“What’s that?” Lisette tried to step back, but with the thick crowd there was nowhere to go. “Dead? Whatever do you mean?”
“You are that Folies whore! Marthe de Florian! Sold your soul to the devil for your youth!”
As wild as Grand-mère’s eyes were at times, Jeanne’s made hers look as calm as a pool on a summer’s day. The whites were red, the pupils so large that staring into them was like falling into a dark hole.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lisette said and laughed nervously. “No, I am not Marthe de Florian, I am her granddaughter. Giovanni Boldini was my father.” She’d learned this some three years before but still loved the way the words bounced off her tongue, the whole of it still fresh and new. “I believe he painted you and your son at one time? My grandfather was someone you knew as well—”
“Of course I knew your grandfather!” she screeched. “He was Léon Blum! A Jew! A sour, arrogant, malicious, untidy, unwholesome, blundering Jew!”
While Lisette remained in place, aghast, Jeanne did the unthinkable. She ran over to the two Germans who were standing nearby smoking and enjoying the march.
“This girl over here, she is a Jew! And she’s stolen something from me! I am Victor Hugo’s granddaughter. I demand you incarcerate her immediately!”
Though it’s unlikely the two cared about her relation to Victor Hugo—indeed they’d probably only vaguely heard of him to begin with—they stepped down from their post and approached Lisette cautiously, curiously. Whether they planned to speak with her or incarcerate her or do something else entirely (she’d heard rumors—God, she’d heard rumors), Lisette didn’t wait to find out.
Using a burst of heretofore unknown strength, Lisette pushed and wormed her way amongst the crowd and then darted out into a backstreet not yet jammed by the spectacle. After kicking off her shoes, Lisette sprinted through the alleyways and sneaked between buildings until she made her way home, never once turning back to see if they followed.
Her chest heaving, Lisette stood against her locked apartment door and reminded herself she was safe. When a knock didn’t follow in five minutes, in ten, in twenty, she tried to settle her breath, for a moment anyway, as in the long term the breath would never quiet. Lisette knew that staying there, in Paris, would mean a million long-drawn-out seconds waiting for someone to knock. She would not live like Grand-mère, always fearful, waiting for the worst to come.
Grabbing one small satchel of things, Lisette went first to my home, and together with my mother we went to Marguérite’s. Since my father’s death we were struggling too. Prospects in Paris did not look good. We heard people were fleeing to the countryside and thought perhaps we should do the same.
Marguérite saved us as she saved Marthe so many times. She spirited us away to her family home in the South of France. You see, she was not the urchin Marthe thought she met at Jeanne’s wedding processional. No, she was simply a small girl from a wealthy family who wanted to be her own person.
Less than a week later, France signed an armistice with Germany in the same railway carriage in which Germany had surrendered in 1918. It took only six weeks for the country to collapse. We planned to stay in Marguérite’s home a few months, a year at the most. Yet we stayed forever. Lisette could never bring herself to go back. She never needed Marthe’s things after all.
Did you notice the plaque on the door? The one that said “Quatremer”? That was Marguérite’s family name, and Lisette took it as her own. She told us it was because of her fear that someone might again accuse her of being a Jew. According to pamphlets distributed throughout Paris, Lisette’s features matched the offending ones.
Really, though, we all understood the truth. Lisette took her name because Marguérite was the closest thing to a mother she ever had. But more than that, Lisette took her name because Marguérite was the only other person who knew what it was like to love the barkeep from the Folies, the difficult, the wonderful Grand-mère.
Chapitre LXXVI
Luc and April hadn’t brought sleepwear or toothbrushes. They expressly planned to leave before nightfall but never counted on the sheer emotional weight of Madame Vannier’s story. They did not figure the telling of it would so exhaust the woman she would have to retire to bed before a further question was asked.
So April and her solicitor spent the evening fully clothed, lying side by side on a mattress that felt more like a pallet of bricks. April kept both hands folded on her chest as Luc snored softly beside her. She counted each minute, each hour, constantly checking her phone, desperate for the time they might rejoin Madame Vannier.
The moment the first light of dawn broke across the bed April was up on her feet. She jostled her companion awake. He greeted her groggily and inquired as to the time. April reminded him one of the best features of the elderly was their up-with-the-roosters morning spryness.
Though it was barely six o’clock when April and Luc lumbered out into the kitchen, Madame Vannier already waited for her guests at a round, red table.
“Bonjour,” April said and was surprised to find her voice jagged like glass.
“How are we this morning?” Madame Vannier asked, dipping a tea bag into her cup. “Would you like some tea or coffee?”
“Coffee would be lovely,” April said. “I can make it.”
“I’ve got it,” said a voice from behind her.
April jumped. It was yet another of Madame Vannier’s assistants, standing at the ready beside the coffeepot. April looked over at Luc, who stood in the doorway rubbing his eyes, his hair sticking up in a thousand directions.
“Merci,” April said and sat her nervy self down. She noticed then the box that was at Madame Vannier’s feet the night before was now on the table.
“Are all your questions answered?” Madame Vannier asked with a small chortle. “Now that I’ve told you Lisette’s side?”
“No, I only have more.”
“I thought as much.”
Luc slid a chair between them. He went to light a cigarette. April reached out and wrapped her hand around it.
“You can’t smoke that in here!” she said.
“I’m having flashbacks.”
“It is fine.” Madame Vannier cackled. “Americans, non?”
“Oui. Americans.” Luc shook his head. April nudged him under the table with the top of her foot.
“Do tell me, Madame Vogt, what other questions do you have?” The woman took a sip of her tea. It went down her throat with the sound of water rushing through a pipe.
“Actually, I want to know more about Marthe’s mental state prior to her death.”
April thought of her mother and the ways Sandy Potter might’ve been misunderstood if she’d been in that apartment in that year and n
ot in San Diego at some later time with a husband who supported her.
“I know Lisette had mixed feelings about her,” April continued. “Which is wholly understandable given her tumultuous childhood. But I have to wonder. When I read the journals Marthe seemed so different, especially in the earlier years, from what you’ve described. But some of the later entries—let’s just say I now see things I didn’t before. I guess Boldini was right, her mind was slipping. I was thinking—wondering—do you think it is possible Marthe had Alzheimer’s?”
“‘Alzheimer’s’?” Every feature on Madame Vannier’s face pinched into a tight bunch.
“My mother had it,” April explained. “Actually, when I first saw Marthe’s portrait she reminded me of my mom, and now I’m reminded again. She never experienced any violent mood swings, at least none that I saw, but it can really affect a person’s mental well-being, their sense of orientation. I think it’s probable she had—”
“She did not have Alzheimer’s,” Madame Vannier said as if she was a doctor or had personally performed the autopsy.
“It might be difficult to see that side of it, but it is really quite possible—”
Agnès reached into the box and pulled out a small white canister, the kind that might contain three ounces of two-hundred-dollar face cream. Except this one was old, tinny, and had a thick film of white around the edges, like plaster. Madame Vannier passed it her way.
“What is this?” April asked, turning it over in her hand.
“Marthe’s famous face cream.”
“Ah, the whitening mask.” April smiled. “I would’ve loved to see it in action. It must’ve looked ridiculous, especially as she got older. She spared no caution in lathering it on her skin.”
“Read the back.”
“Excuse me?”
“The ingredients. On the back.”
April turned it over. She read the first one and did not need to go further. De plomb.
“Lead? She put lead cream on her face?”
A Paris Apartment Page 37
