It was not uncommon to see sleeves or trouser legs pinned where limbs were missing, and now, veterans were having their pensions cut and unemployment was soaring. Lavinia knew that no one at home wanted to hear about the protests that spilled down the boulevards blocking traffic or that certain government offices were still waiting for telephone service. Not only were those topics outside the purview of her audience’s interest, it felt wrong to expose the underbelly of her new city, like using the host’s stationery to report the house’s failings at the same time she enjoyed its hospitality.
When she could no longer adopt in her correspondence the breezy wonderment of a visitor, Lavinia had a die made with her new address and ordered engraved notepaper for the letters she wrote, filling sheafs of the crème-colored paper with innocuous news. The spring of 1937 was wet and unseasonably cold, she wrote, and everywhere she turned she could hear someone humming “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.” She did not write home about the constant strikes that threatened to delay the opening of the 1937 International Exhibition until 1938.
Lavinia omitted reference to what the newspapers called the “clash at Clichy” where the police shot into a crowd of unruly protesters, though she knew that Grace would have especially liked the theatricality of Prime Minister Léon Blum arriving at the scene in a tuxedo, having been plucked straight from the opera by his deputies. Observations were generally limited to what she could make amusing: the quaint racket of clogs on cobblestone as factory workers filled the streets at dawn, making alleys ring with their footsteps as if they were shod like the cart horses.
Lavinia described how a housekeeper had quit when she found a bottle of champagne chilling in an ice-filled bidet. “From the way she carried on,” Lavinia wrote, “you’d have thought John the Baptist’s head was in there on the ice.” She did not write about the satisfaction she derived from polishing the silver herself or from buffing her leather boots to a high shine when she couldn’t sleep at night, or that she sometimes ate raisins and chocolate for dinner or scrambled eggs with olives and mustard.
Most of the letters she wrote, however, never made it to the small postbox hanging like a metal rucksack from the wall of an adjacent building. Sometimes Lavinia carried them around with her in her handbag for weeks, until the envelopes were dog-eared and bent, soiled by flakes of tobacco that collected at the bottom of the silk lining, and by leaking fountain pens or the occasional skirmish with an uncapped lipstick or eyebrow pencil.
It would be wrong to imagine that the letters that did manage to get mailed went entirely without response. From Eliza, she had gotten a few short notes, filled with exclamation marks and pleasantries about how exciting life on the continent must be. Dora sent a cable inexplicably wishing her a happy birthday months before the event. Her sister Grace had written several letters, but they were mostly concerned with the upcoming auction of Madame de Monmarné jewelry. Grace was particularly agitated about a brooch which was said to have as its center stone a yellow diamond originally owned by Queen Alexandra in a different setting. Could discreet inquiries be made, Grace wanted to know.
There had been an overseas trunk call from Mrs. Gibbs informing Lavinia through an echo chamber that both delayed and multiplied each exchange, that Ambrose had made partner at his firm, Gordon’s wife was recovering from a miscarriage but doing well, and Miss Kaye had succumbed to pneumonia.
“Of course we all miss you dearly,” her mother added, “and I thought you’d want to know: Shelby is engaged to the Wilson girl. The one with the big teeth. Your father said not to tell you but I thought you should know.”
The phone call ended badly. In closing, Mrs. Gibbs had tried to strike a maternal note, advising, “And whatever you do, don’t eat the butter, darling. They don’t wash their hands over there and the milk is not pasteurized.”
“For God’s sake, Mother, Louis Pasteur was French and besides, there is nothing to eat in this country that doesn’t have butter in it,” Lavinia snapped, the breadth of the Atlantic entitling her to express an impatience she wouldn’t have dared at home.
“Oh dear,” Mrs. Gibbs had fluttered on the other side of the ocean, “now I’ve upset you. Your father was right—I shouldn’t have told you about Shelby.”
The call had been upsetting but not for the reasons Mrs. Gibbs supposed. Hearing her mother’s voice for the first time after so many months had unexpectedly brought to the surface emotions Lavinia had not acknowledged since childhood. She remembered how much she had loved watching her mother dress for the opera, being allowed to select her mother’s evening bag or hair ornament. It was a task Lavinia performed with the solemnity of an acolyte. She had known her mother’s closet by heart, not only because she liked to hide there, behind the shimmery satins and the gauzy tulle, amid the coupled shoes and paired boots lining the floor like dancers in a processional, but also because Mrs. Gibbs’s dressmaker showed his appreciation for her large orders by making the leftover scraps of fabric and trim into a wardrobe for Lavinia’s doll, Lilly, with the cracked porcelain face.
When Mrs. Gibbs was in a good humor, she would spray Lavinia’s neck with scent from the Venetian blown-glass atomizer that crowned the collection of jarred unguents on her dressing table. Lavinia remembered how exhilarating it was, cold on her skin, like an icy whisper, its bouquet finding a way into her flannel nightgown, and her pillow, released anew every time she turned her head as she settled into sleep.
This memory recalled the cool of her mother’s hand on Lavinia’s forehead, as if her mother’s touch alone could put out the fever that had sent Miss Kaye and the chauffeur out in the Pierce-Arrow in the middle of the night to fetch the doctor. The whole of that illness, Lavinia had been allowed to wear her mother’s pearl necklace, moving aside its loops of graduated strands for the doctor to place his stethoscope, which had the salutary effect of making Grace peevish with jealousy.
Suddenly, Lavinia understood that her mother too would die one day, and these memories would be all of her Lavinia had. The thought was searing, though not in the same way as the news of Miss Kaye’s death. It had been Lavinia’s plan to visit Miss Kaye in Ireland in the spring, and she had therefore not written to Miss Kaye with the incidentals of her new life because she had wanted to deliver them in person, in the safety of Miss Kaye’s presence, the distinctly unsophisticated blend of baby powder and witch hazel that Miss Kaye exuded surrounding them protectively like a shield.
Although she was loath to acknowledge it, the fact of Shelby Sterling’s impending nuptials stunned Lavinia with a more resounding sense of closure, and therefore loss, than the many difficult and shameful moments she endured in the breaking off of her engagement, precisely because now she was no longer involved. Her absence was complete; she had been replaced. She was fungible. She could return now.
Whatever damage she had done had been erased, whatever embarrassment she had occasioned would be forgotten as Shelby’s life glided triumphantly on. Such was the nature of scandal; it was self-replenishing like the roll of waves along a shore, the next one arcing for its crash even before the last one had swept clear everything in its wake. She could return—but now she had no desire to.
After almost a week in bed, sleeping in her clothes and eating tinned sardines and potted fruit, whatever had accumulated in her kitchen that was not perishable, she arose galvanized by her grief. She thought of the line in Coriolanus, in which he embraces his banishment by pronouncing, “There is a world elsewhere.” She would make of her life in Paris something more magnificent than would have been possible for her in the States. It would not be so hard after all, she realized, for she had never felt at home in the city of her youth. The great virtue of exile, whether imposed or chosen, was that it not only offered the possibility of a new beginning, it required it.
She began to take umbrage at the way the maître d’ at the Crillon nodded his head gravely when he saw her, enunciating the word mademoiselle, so lingeringly that the four syllables sounded like an insult. Lav
inia had previously contemplated buying a gold band to wear on the ring finger of her left hand but had never been able to bring herself to do it. Now she was glad of that. It had been her choice, after all, not to marry when she had the chance, and it now galled her to think that she had almost let a hotel employee intimidate her because she lacked the honorific without which women of her age were rendered inconsequential, particularly, she noted, by the less educated classes.
When Lavinia returned to the world, after a week of weeping in bed, and pacing the perimeter of her flat, it was because she longed for the sky and oysters and fresh bread and she could no longer stand to listen to Madame Luberon fill the courtyard with the reverberating argot she used to berate her husband, Lavinia’s very first errand was to go to a jewelry store on the Avenue Saint-Honoré and make a purchase. Instead of disguising her unmarried state with a faux wedding ring, she flaunted it with the purchase of gold bangles to line her wrist so that every time she moved her left hand she drew attention to it with the brazen clatter of the bracelets.
Lavinia was sitting in one of the last pews at the church of Saint-Germain des Prés, listening to a concert of Bach’s organ music, letting her mind drift when she had her revelation. Because she was not religious, she tended to regard those who were with either pity or disdain. Church had always been for her family more of a social than a spiritual event, and an occasion to sing. Faith, Lavinia felt, was a compensation for those without the intellectual rigor to question it.
A chill rose from the pocked stone floor of the church, and the musty smell of dampness competed with the dry scent of sandalwood and the tang of myrrh still lingering from the morning service. Lavinia had chosen to sit in a pew next to one of the painted columns rising up like the trunk of a tree linking this world with the heavenly realm, holding up the curve of arch where fading gold stars scattered across the indigo background, dulled with soot and age.
Lavinia often found herself staring at the ceiling in church, not only because the architecture was designed to do just that: first lead the eye upward, with the hope that the soul would follow, but also because she felt voyeuristic observing others in their earnest and sometimes urgent communications with their Lord. In Paris, she’d noticed the whole business of religion was taken more seriously than it had been in New York, where she had not known a single person who went to church on any other day than Sunday, and even then, certain times of the year were spotty and only Christmas and Easter were inviolate.
Looking at the scenes of worldly torment tucked into the dimly lit alcoves was also not an appealing option. The organist was heavy-handed, imparting a lugubrious quality even to the up-tempo pieces, and Lavinia was growing restless. When her neck became sore from craning to look up, she cast her eyes downward, and examined the details of the worn velvet prie-dieu, the nap worn away where knees had rested, leaving behind oblong shadows.
On the floor near her left foot she noticed a prayer card that had fallen between the benches. On one side was a familiar psalm and on the other, a detail from a painting of Saint Jerome. It was not the depiction of Saint Jerome, however, that inspired Lavinia. It was the primitive representation of the lion. The beast had been rendered like a cross between a Chinese temple dragon and a lap dog, looking up at the bearded saint lovingly, paw reaching forward as if begging for a treat, black lips grinning clownishly.
There was a pause as the organist concluded the piece, letting the last reverberations fill the church, the echoes fading into the dark niches that eventually swallowed the sound as fully as they had the light. Lavinia looked up at the highest point of the arch where the last note still fluttered. She recalled, from History of Art at Miss Dillwater’s, that Leonardo da Vinci defined the arch as two weaknesses making a strength.
Lavinia looked down at the prayer card, to the little lion at Saint Jerome’s feet, unfurling its thin ribbon of tongue like a banner of devotion. Suddenly she understood, with a clarity that could not have been more pronounced had it been accompanied by trumpets and timpani, what she must do.
What she was lacking, she realized, was a companion and a calling. The solution was simple. She would get a pug and have a profession. Lavinia picked up the prayer card and opened her handbag with a crisp snap, releasing the clasp on her bag so that it swung open like a jaw yawning wide to be fed. She inserted the card and clacked the bag closed again with yet another decisive snap.
A ruddy-faced man sitting next to her, exhaling the heavy licorice breath of an anisette drinker, hissed disapprovingly, “Comme c’est mal élevé.” Lavinia knew that the term in French carried an insult of considerably greater weight than the English equivalent “badly brought up.” It annoyed her out of all proportion, and, withholding the apology she would otherwise have extended, she whispered back, “Blame it on the wolves.”
Then Lavinia drew herself up and made her way awkwardly down the pew to the aisle just before the final fugue began. She was almost home when she realized she had tutoyéd the old man, inadvertently insulting him by addressing him as tu instead of vous, using the form of grammar that conferred intimacy rather than respect.
The idea upset her: she had been rude to someone her father’s age. Once, when she was a child, she had heard a man insult her father in the street and she had never forgotten it.
“You bastards think you own the world,” the man had said. He was disheveled and his lurching gait had frightened Lavinia as he approached them on the sidewalk near their house. He was young, and looked like he had been crying. His green eyes were rimmed in red and his face was unevenly swollen.
“Lavinia, wait inside the lobby for me,” her father commanded, releasing his grip on her hand which was always uncomfortably firm though she never would have dared to complain.
“You wanna know what they call you in the mailroom?” the young man continued, as her father tried to calm him, steering the man away from the entrance to their building, where the uniformed doorman looked on anxiously from behind the glass door, as if calculating the tip he would get if he had to take a swing at an angry drunk. Her father’s lips, when he returned to Lavinia a few minutes later, were pressed tightly into a line as thin as a pencil mark and he seemed somehow smaller.
Lavinia had not heard the rest of the exchange but she could see how upset her father was by the episode; he was flushed and when he spoke his voice was ragged.
“Go upstairs and tell Miss Kaye that you will not be going to the zoo after all.”
“Why not, Papa? You promised.”
Pete, the Irish doorman, had tried to signal to her, shaking his head in warning behind her father’s back, his large body useless to protect her in any other way.
“Don’t talk back,” Mr. Gibbs snapped.
He had taken off his homburg and was fanning himself with it although it was not warm. On her father’s forehead a vein was raised and throbbing. He looked ill, drained of color, glistening with a thin veneer of sweat, as though feverish. Lavinia felt queasy too, seeing him so visibly shaken, as if his authority, which she had never questioned, could be diminished by a handful of words flung at him like pebbles by someone half his age, by someone who should have called him “sir.” She felt his humiliation spread through her as if it were something contagious.
“Tell your mother I have to go to the office. Something has come up.”
“Yes, Papa.”
She stared at his shoes, avoiding his eyes; his right spat was scuffed. She had never seen her father soiled before. In Lavinia’s mind the two things fused in a cautionary tale: This was what could happen if you disrespected your elders. It would leave a mark, a visible reproach, a crack in the foundation.
Lavinia suddenly came to a standstill on the narrow sidewalk of the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. For a long moment she considered going back. The old man in the church had been right. The words he had hissed through his waxed moustache with the harsh impatience of her father had been true. She was mal élevée, after all.
As she
stood on the curb, trying to decide if she should go back and what she might say if she could even find the old man again now that the concert would be letting out, Lavinia sighed and clacked open her handbag again and withdrew the last cigarette from her silver case. She had wanted a smoke throughout the last partitas and now she no longer felt the need to wait until she was home: she would smoke on the street, like workmen and street vendors did.
As she tried to light her cigarette, a gust of wind skittered down the narrow street, carrying with it the smell of sautéed onions from a kitchen vent, and scattering like starlings the leaflets that had collected in the gutter. Some of the sheets of paper had been wadded into tight balls that moved stutteringly over the cobblestones, but the leaflets that were flat skimmed along trying to loft like kites, collecting in doorways and blowing up against Lavinia’s ankles.
After several unsuccessful attempts to get the cigarette lit, she stepped into a doorway and turned her back to the street. In the flare of light from her match she noticed, as she took the first of a series of drags deep enough to make her slightly dizzy, the sign on the door. Help wanted. Part-time assistant. Inquire next door at number 37. Ask for Monsieur Druette.
Lavinia had not bothered to save the mimeographed program from the concert so she picked up one of the least smudged leaflets that had collected at her feet and copied down the name and address on the back side of the sheet and then, folding it several times, until it was no larger than a playing card, she slipped it into her now empty cigarette case, where the germs from the street could be quarantined. She had never before picked up litter or taken the political tracts that callused hands proffered at busy intersections. Now she had done both.
Twilight Page 6
