by Phoebe Stone
“No, no, you don’t need this towel. Okay?” says Collette, removing the towel and tossing it aside.
Soon we all walk outside under the wisteria. The perfume of it drifts over me, as if it is some kind of magic potion, making me forget my worries. I hear the nightingale that lives in the wisteria calling now and for the first time I catch a glimpse of it as it rises above the trees.
We walk along the rue Michel-Ange, the street called Michael the angel. The perfume of the wisteria is heady and lush, the sunlight dusky, the afternoon asleep in its shimmering heat.
We cross the street and pass the building just opposite ours, and coming down the steps, I see Marguerite! All this time Marguerite has always been up high in the world of the “first floor,” as the French call it, or the world of the “second floor,” as Americans call it. Marguerite has always been as if floating, never on the ground, always at night when lamps are on. She was like a nighttime mirage until now.
“Marguerite!” I call out and wave. I do not think she can hear me call her name, but she can see me waving, jumping up and down. Perhaps we look funny to her, a troop of clowns dressed in costume headed for a dance. “This is Marguerite!” I say. She smiles and I smile. I try to introduce everyone. I wave and shake my head yes.
Soon Collette looks at me. “Perhaps Marguerite would like to come with us,” she says. Collette then begins to speak with her hands and Marguerite begins to answer with her hands. They talk and talk with their hands in different positions, their fingers leaping and twirling. Marguerite laughs. Collette laughs. Monsieur Le Bon Bon and Jean-Claude and I stand perfectly still waiting.
Finally Jean-Claude breaks down and shoots Marguerite in the arm. “Bam Bam,” he goes. Marguerite pretends to faint and holds her arm as if wounded. She fakes tears and dismay. Everybody laughs and suddenly Jean-Claude has a new friend.
Collette takes from her purse another pair of gloves and a 1950s silk scarf. She gives the scarf and gloves to Marguerite. Then Collette pats her on the back and we all meander along together down the rue Michel-Ange, headed for the Hôtel Magique.
“Marguerite takes care of the birds at the school for the deaf around the corner. I myself worked there as a concierge on weekends years ago,” says Collette.
We walk six blocks, passing flower shops and restaurants with tables on the sidewalk where everyone seems to be eating and celebrating, or preparing to celebrate, emerging from the flower shops carrying bouquets.
The Hôtel Magique (Americans call it the Hotel Magic) is just off Avenue Mozart on a funny little twisted side street. It is not a grand hotel. It is small and neat with another trellis of wisteria climbing up the front. A poster standing in a frame outside announces in French, Dansez le swing ici cet après-midi! I hear jazzy music bubbling from the entrance. Collette puts her arm around Monsieur Le Bon Bon. Then she says, “Bon courage, Le Bon Bon! You know, Petunia, he shines when he dances. You’ll see!”
“You are going to dance with little mice on your toes,” says Jean-Claude.
“I told you, those are poodles, Jean-Claude,” I say.
“I will like to dance with the little mice,” he says. “I am a good dancer.”
“I am not,” I say. “I think I will just watch. Marguerite and I will eat crackers.”
The music when we walk in is dreamy and wraps around everything like moving water. A piano and saxophone are intertwining notes. A man stands near a microphone playing the saxophone, ribbons of sound spilling from its body. The notes of the piano behind tumble down a quick scale, then climb back up in puffs of rhythm. The smell of wisteria, the tiny glowing lights like stars along the ceiling, everybody dancing, even me. Jean-Claude is twirling me around, the room is spinning. I see Collette dancing too with Monsieur Le Bon Bon. He turns like silk, slipping in and out of twirls, winding in and out and around the music. He is the one everyone watches with his dazzling leaps and his clever jumps.
Then I spin around again and more people are dancing. And suddenly I see something wonderful. Collette has brought Marguerite to the floor. Now Monsieur Le Bon Bon and Marguerite are dancing together. They are dancing in perfect unison. Even though she is deaf, she told Collette she likes to feel the floor shake with the rhythm. Marguerite and Le Bon Bon seem suddenly to be wrapping in and out and around each other and smiling.
Collette sees it too from across the room and her face is steeped in a warm beam of extra light. The room is a beautiful wisteria blur, all lit up and joyous, even though I am dancing with the Lone Ranger, who is four years younger and four years shorter than me.
Then the musicians wish to take a break. The saxophone player announces it. “Bonjour,” he says. “Merci!” He makes a few jokes. Collette translates for me. Then he goes on to say in French that he would like to introduce us to the piano player, who happens to be staying here in the hotel. “He’s here by chance, by luck, because he will be playing an important event at the Salle Pleyel coming up. He is very young. Give him a hand! Here’s Windel Watson.”
The crowd cheers and I fall back against the wall, my head spinning. I start choking. There Windel stands on the little stage. He is wearing his grandfather’s tuxedo again and the red high-top sneakers. He gives a tilted smile to the audience. His bow tie is a little crooked, his sleeves a little long. “Merci beaucoup!” he says, looking up at the ceiling. Then his eyes roam around the room and they land on me. He seems to jolt backward, almost knocking over the microphone. He looks at me with his dark, brooding, startled piano eyes. “Windel is not amused!” his mother had shouted at us. “He is very angry!”
Suddenly the beautiful room collapses around me. Everything goes dark and begins to spin, faces fly past me, hands and arms tangle around me and I push them away trying to scramble through the maze, the thicket of legs and feet and darkness and noise. I scramble and squirm and I squeeze my way to the door to the edge of the Hôtel Magique, and I plunge out into the daylight and I start running and running and running.
How long I run I cannot say. Where I end up I do not know. When I finally find a bench, I collapse on it, still crying and sniffling and sneezing. I look down at myself and see I have been through water and greenery because there are wet leaves on my skirt, mud on my knees, and I am missing a shoe. I know Ginger’s mom always says Paris is a spinning vortex, the center of the world where everyone ends up, but I had hoped when I crossed the ocean I could truly close that awful chapter of my so-far-embarrassing life. How could Windel have crept through the cracks in my escape plans? Why did he have to suddenly turn up at the Hotel Magic? Dominoes collapsing, a chain reaction, never ending.
I go back to my tears and let them fall where they will, but when I look up I see Collette in her veiled hat holding the little hand of the Lone Ranger crossing the street, followed by Monsieur Le Bon Bon and Marguerite. They all come up around me and look sadly at me. “Ma chérie,” says Collette, “what is the matter? What has happened and where is your shoe?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Mademoiselle was not having fun?” says Jean-Claude.
“No, no, I was. I was. I was having fun … until … never mind,” I say.
“They will go home now,” says Collette, nodding at Marguerite. “I will sit with you on your bench.” She gestures to Monsieur Le Bon Bon, shooing him away gently.
Soon she waves to Jean-Claude and Le Bon Bon and Marguerite as they walk off down the street. Marguerite holds Jean-Claude’s hand on one side and Monsieur Le Bon Bon holds his other hand on the other side.
“Hmmm,” says Collette as they walk under a shady tree, “they look almost like a little family, do they not?”
“Yes, they do,” I say.
“Now,” she says, “what happened?”
“Windel Watson,” I say.
“Ah, oui, the boy who plays the piano. He is very handsome. He looks like Jim Morrison from the band The Doors except for the glasses.”
“Who is that?” I say.
“Oh, a
band when I was younger, a long, long time ago. The Doors. Très beau,” she says. “Your friend is very handsome. But the glasses do not suit him at all.”
“He wasn’t before. He didn’t used to be,” I say.
“He wasn’t handsome until you loved him?” she says.
“That’s right,” I say.
“Ah, I see, this one does not belong to your older sister?”
“No,” I say.
“Well, that’s good! You should be happy he came to Paris.”
“No, no, he hates me. His mother hates me.”
“I see. But why?”
“Well, because, I am sorry to say, I stalked him. I mean, I lost his overcoat and I ruined a Valentine’s party for his brother, and other things.”
“Other things?”
“Umm, yes.”
“Ah, Petunia, in your America you have created another tangled mess?”
“Yes, I am afraid so,” I say. “And then there is the problem with Logan and the letter and Ava and her other father. And my mom is not happy in France and …”
“Oh, I see. You know, I am thinking that I need to give Le Bon Bon a going-away present.”
“Who is going away?” I ask.
“I don’t know but I think a going-away present would be nice. Don’t you? I need to buy a painting for him. I think a painting of his parrot, Albert, would be perfect in that empty spot, don’t you? I would like to pay your mama to make a painting of Albert. Do you think she would do it?” says Collette.
“If you ask, perhaps. She would like a job, I know,” I say.
“She needs to be happy with herself,” says Collette. “When a mama is happy, everyone is happy. I hope she will do it. Now, do you think you can walk home with only one shoe?”
Collette and I do not get up right away. We just sit there on the bench. Collette reaches in her pocket and scatters bread crumbs on the sidewalk before us. “Oh, the sparrows of Paris so brown and plain, nobody thinks of them. But they are always there when you feel sad. They are always ready to sing a little song to cheer you up, n’est-ce pas? Have you been to the train station they call the Gare du Nord?”
“Yes, when we first came here,” I say. “My dad was so excited to see it.”
“Well, you can’t sit at a table there without a little brown sparrow sitting down with you. They live inside the train station! I always bring some crumbs for the sparrows wherever I go. Paris has not changed so much in all these years. It has been like this since Degas roamed these streets. In Montmartre, Matisse the painter used to try to trade one of his early paintings for a cheese sandwich at a café. But the patron, the owner, turned him down. I knew that owner when I was young. He used to tell me he was still kicking himself about that because the paintings of Matisse now sell for millions of euros. But we all make mistakes.”
“I know,” I say. “But I seem to make more than my share.”
“I too have made my mistakes. I tell myself I must be like silk in the wind, you know, forgiving, accepting, flexible. For me it is harder. My mistake was much graver. More terrible.”
“What was your mistake, Collette?” I ask.
“Ahhh, I have told no one. Not a soul. My mistake lives alone in the darkness within me,” she says.
“Dad says I am a good listener.”
“Your papa is charming! Of course you are a good listener! You are mon petit ange, my little angel.”
“Angels don’t steal letters, Collette,” I say.
“Oh, sometimes they do. Perhaps something good will come of it. You will see!” she says.
“What was your mistake, Collette?” I ask again.
“So easy the question. So hard the answer,” she says.
“Please, Collette, I have told you so much. You can tell me. I will keep it a secret. I promise,” I say.
“Secrets are not good things, my little angel,” she says. “You know that and I know that. Let us walk home together now. But we will be careful of the glass on the sidewalk because you only have one shoe. And such shoes they are! I have never seen a little girl with two mice sitting on the ends of her toes. It is a shame you lost one of them.”
“They are supposed to be poodles,” I say again.
“To own seventeen beautiful dolls,” says Collette, quietly facing forward as if she has finally decided on something. She takes my hand now and squeezes it. “Such joy and such sorrow for little Delphine, because in her heart she felt as if she had been the reason the Jumeau doll company closed its doors. How she agonized and regretted. And so the dolls in their great beauty were covered in shadows.
“Delphine thus grew up in a kind of half-hidden way. Secrets left in the dark, you know, become so very heavy. Imagine how heavy Delphine’s secret must have been all that time.
“Over the years something had changed between Delphine and her sister because of it. Distance had grown between them. Perhaps because they never talked about the things that had happened. Then Sylvie was married and went away with her husband to America. Delphine never saw her sister again.
“It was too bad,” says Collette. “And I know that my grandmother was deeply saddened by the loss.
“And time passed in Paris. It passed with the turning trees and the moving sky just as it does now, and one day Delphine herself was married and finally she had a child. Through all that time in her sadness, Delphine kept the dolls safely. Since she had a complete set of them, a rarity indeed, soon people began to hear of the collection and would ask to see them. After all, Delphine had worked with the famous Madame Jumeau. Still, all through the 1920s and 1930s the dolls sat quietly on shelves. And other people began to collect Jumeau dolls and their prices soared.”
“Like the paintings of Matisse?” I say.
“Yes, a little,” says Collette. “These dolls were part of the history of France and part of her great heritage. This is what these dolls meant to Delphine Rouette. And then came the 1940s and World War II. The Nazis invaded Paris.
“I was a little girl, and I adored my grandmother, Delphine. She was so little and fragile and quick. Elle était toute petite! Toute petite! She never grew very tall. I spent all my time with her and wanted to be like her. She lived upstairs in those days in the apartment where you live now.
“Ah, but we were in the midst of a war and we tried to live quietly, to manage with food shortages and the cold. But sadly the Nazis were here in Paris to take everything they could from France. They planned to take all the art, all the beautiful furniture and objects and send them to Germany for themselves. You see, the Germans and the French have never gotten along.
“The Nazi officers too had heard of my grandmother’s doll collection given to her by Madame Ernestine Jumeau. And they wanted those dolls for Germany, which they called their fatherland. Oh yes, they did.
“One day my grandmother received a letter. I can remember the very morning. Her face was suddenly the color of a changing sky, dark, the way it looks after a bomber has crossed overhead. And we saw plenty of those. Oh yes, we did. In the official letter my grandmother was asked to come to the Nazi Headquarters situated in Paris. Imagine, those headquarters were now in the Luxembourg Palace. Nazi soldiers now stood in the gardens by the pool.
“Of course she did not go. She was her own person, was she not, little Delphine Rouette? Her husband, my grandfather, had died a few years before the war and no one could tell her now what to do or where to go. She simply refused. She had once let down the Jumeau doll company and she had suffered for it for many years. But she was not going to do so now.
“ ‘No,’ she told me, ‘these dolls are a national treasure of France. These dolls are France at her best and most glorious. And this time the Germans will not steal them. This time I will stand firm. I will not relent. They cannot have them.’ My grandmother then proceeded to hide all seventeen dolls. I helped her. We worked together.
“I was a child and anything my grandmother told me I listened to and believed. I obeyed her, of course. It was
the natural thing. I did not even think about disobeying. Another letter arrived from headquarters and again she did not respond.
“One day, I can remember the sunlight through the windows upstairs in the salon falling through net curtains, making starry patterns on the floor. We heard then a loud knocking, a rapping on the door. My grandmother told me to get under the bed in the smaller bedroom. She said, ‘Whatever you do, do not say a word. Do not breathe loudly. And never tell them where the dolls are hidden.’ Then she hugged me and sent me under the bed where there was a dip in the floor and she pulled the rug over me as I lay in the dip.
“I heard more loud rapping. And then it seemed as if they were going to knock the door down and so my grandmother answered the door.
“Alas, the men came in. I saw their boots. They asked to see the dolls. My grandmother told them the dolls had been stolen a while ago. ‘They are gone,’ she said. She didn’t know who took them. They trouped around the apartment. They continued to question and push my grandmother.
“ ‘No,’ she said. ‘The dolls are not here. I do not have them anymore.’
“ ‘Search the apartment,’ shouted the officer.
“And so they did. They opened every cupboard, every closet, every armoire, and they dumped out all the contents everywhere. There were clothes and sheets and pillows strewn all around. They peered under my bed but because of the rug and the dip in the floor they did not see me. They turned over chairs and they knocked down bookshelves. I lay under the rug, under the bed alone and afraid. I knew where the dolls were, but I did not speak. I did as my grandmother told me.”
Collette stops now. She coughs as if she is choking. Then she begins to cry. She cries and cries and we stand on the corner of the rue Michel-Ange and I do not know what to do.
Finally I put my arm around her and we sort of slowly limp along back to the apartment. We go into Collette’s kitchen and she is still crying. I take her hand and hold it.
