Twilight

by Katherine Mosby

  Lavinia lifted Gaston’s chin with her hand so that she could see his face, flush and damp, hair plastered against his forehead.

  “How did you tell her, my darling? How did she learn she was married to a Jew?” Lavinia asked. She watched his eyes well up with tears and his chin tremble. Then Gaston started sobbing. He let himself go for only a minute or two before he took out a monogrammed handkerchief and blew his nose, as if to signal the end of his tears. He stood up and began tucking in his shirt.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

  Gaston hadn’t shaved and looked disheveled, even harrowed. Even so, Lavinia marveled at how much her body still inclined to his, how in his presence her fingers and lips needed to find him, despite all doubts and disappointment. She pulled out his shirttails and ran her hand up under the cotton fabric, feeling the rise of his chest, the warmth of his skin and its intoxicating pull.

  “Then explain it to me,” she said, putting her lips to his chin, kissing the stubble on his neck, and pushing him back onto the unmade bed and the musty-smelling pillows.

  “Take all the time in the world,” Lavinia murmured, pulling her dress over her head. An overcast sky had brought the evening early, and with it a damp chill, the hint of winter Miss Kaye always used to say lurked in autumn twilight.

  “Don’t be fooled,” Miss Kaye had warned. “It may seem like summer during the day, but it’s winter at night.” Lavinia shivered closer to Gaston, pulling the covers over both of them. She had been fooled.

  Gaston sang to Lavinia the next morning, making his voice quaver like Edith Piaf and hitting the high notes in an exaggerated falsetto. He was wearing Lavinia’s bathrobe and he waltzed with her in the tiny kitchen. He kissed her earlobe and told her she looked radiant. The sun was striping the walls through the slats of the shutters and Gaston was even dancing with Boswell, twirling with him around the dusty room. He had never been as charming, Lavinia thought, watching Gaston smile his crooked smile as he made her an omelette.

  The eggs were flecked with mushrooms from La Rêveline, and Gaston had offered them to her flamboyantly, doffing an imaginary hat and bowing low. “Nothing too dangerous or difficult,” he said, “for my beloved.” Gaston had brought coffee, too, which had been, with bread, among the first items rationed. “The two necessities of life,” he had complained at the time, “all one really needs, in a pinch.”

  The previous winter the bread rationing had been a subject hard to escape. Mrs. Aiken had remarked, “Hasn’t history shown us what happens when the French don’t have enough bread?” It had been an especially hard privation because the harvest in 1939 had been unusually bounteous, overflowing the granaries, but so little was available to the civilians during the war that boulangeries were required to bake bread from “secondary” grains, and even then, in limited supply. When the Armistice was signed Lavinia’s mailman had remarked dryly, “If they had let us eat the grain, it wouldn’t have been there for the Germans. A happy thought on two counts.”

  “Pétain is feeding the hand that bites us,” Gaston joked. “So we bite back. We will eat these eggs in honor of de Gaulle,” he said, saluting her with his fork. A fleck of egg fell to the ground and Boswell trotted over to the table to scavenge.

  After they finished the first pot of coffee, Lavinia made another, just as strong, using the rest of the week’s supply. There was a feeling of potlatch in the air, and it felt luxurious to see the oil bead on the surface of the coffee, taste the darkness of the soil in the sweat of the bean. Gaston had also brought a bar of Belgian chocolate, which he fed her square by square, dropping them on her tongue like the host.

  “Unholy wafers. Heavenly nonetheless,” he said with a grin. “I know how you love extravagance,” he said, “and chocolate.”

  They stayed in bed for hours, listening to records and holding each other. Lavinia ironed Gaston’s shirt for him and then while he soaked in her bathtub, she read aloud to him from the Cocteau novel she’d recently begun. She was drunk with the pleasure of having him in her home, like playing house. He was leaving, Lavinia knew that, but not for another day.

  It had taken them most of the previous day and half of the night to find an accord between their thoughts that could accommodate the accord between their bodies, and now there was so little time left Lavinia didn’t want to squander any more of it.

  Initially Lavinia had argued. She’d been shocked when Gaston told her of the arrangements he’d made. Her first reaction had been to exclaim, “You can’t leave Céleste now!” but he had looked at her incredulously, as if it were too obvious to state.

  “I can’t stay!”

  “But you can’t just leave her like that.”

  “That’s what you’ve wanted me to do all along,” Gaston laughed but it was forced and laced with a bitterness that stung.

  “This has nothing to do with me,” she replied. “You’re not leaving Céleste because of me. I’m sure you didn’t even mention me.” Lavinia’s voice was sharper than she’d intended, and tinged with contempt. He’d presented her with a fait accompli. He had already paid for his passage.

  “You needed Céleste’s contacts, her money. Of course you couldn’t tell her about your mistress.”

  “I have to leave, Lavinia. Don’t make it any harder. You’ve seen what’s happening. It will only get more difficult and dangerous to get out. This may be my last opportunity.”

  Their exchange had been pocked with silences in which they had listened to the wind and smoked the remainder of Gaston’s tobacco. It was a harsh black flake that scalded the back of the throat but it was all that was available and therefore to be savored, like the wine they drank from the cordial glasses he had brought her as a farewell present.

  They had held hands when they were not speaking. Lavinia was stunned that he had not included her in the decision, and would not be including her in the flight. It made her feel foolish, knowing she would have gone with Gaston without hesitation, no matter where he had chosen to take her. She had once written to him,

  My darling,

  I want to see you shave, sleep, cry, vomit. I want to be the one who wipes fever from your brow. I want to be the only one your heart tutoyers.

  Even now, having seen Gaston degrade himself with lies and deceptions, parlaying selfishness into heroism, even now, she knew if he took her by the hand he could lead her into a burning building. He would send word as soon as he was safe. He would send word from Switzerland. Gaston had repeated it with conviction and kisses. It would be easier to arrange their future from there, he’d said, but Lavinia wondered with a sickening flutter in her stomach if that wasn’t something he’d also told Céleste.

  In the courtyard, Madame Braun’s loose shutter knocked against the wall whenever the wind shifted direction. The hinge had a particularly plaintive song; it reminded Lavinia of the interrogative lilt in a bobwhite’s call, and the disquieting resonance of an unanswered question.

  “I have no choice.”

  “I know.”

  Gaston gave her a silver bracelet and a key, and asked of her one small favor.

  “The silver bracelet was my mother’s. It’s the only thing of hers I have and I want you to have it. The cordial glasses I gave you may be more valuable, but I hope you’ll treasure this as well. I should have given it to you sooner. I should have given you all manner of jewelry. I’m sorry.”

  “Hush,” Lavinia said, kissing him. “It’s very beautiful. Now tell me what favor you intend to exact in exchange. Odds are pretty good you’ll get it, and I don’t even know what it is.”

  Gaston laughed. It was the first deep laugh she’d heard in a while and she watched him surrender to it, letting his head tip back and his shoulders rise as it rolled through his body, like a wave sweeping him up.

  “I’m glad I haven’t turned your head with my baubles,” he said dryly. Gaston took her hand and spread it open. “This key,” he said, placing it in the center of her palm and then cl
osing her hand around it, “was Marcel Feydeau’s.” His tone shifted, and his levity was gone.

  “It opens a storage room at 34, Rue Vaneau, filled with boxes of paperwork from his years in law. I forgot about it. The concierge forgot about it too. I found the key a few months ago in my desk when I was looking for documents having to do with my mother. I want you to go through the files and papers and see if you can find Marcel’s diaries. Feydeau kept them in ledger books. Marcel gave me the key before he died and asked me to promise to destroy them. He was the only one of Céleste’s relatives I genuinely liked. He was good to me and I owe it to him. I feel as if it would be bad luck not to do it.

  “I was planning to do it this week but my departure date changed. I was told I had only this weekend, so I decided to spend the time with you. I didn’t want to waste it in a musty cellar tying up loose ends.”

  Gaston put his arms around her waist and held her, swaying ever so slightly as he tightened his hug.

  “I knew I could count on you,” he said, resting his chin on the top of her head. “And you know, Marcel Feydeau represented some distinguished names in his day. You may find letters from someone famous, or better still, infamous. Something to reward your effort. Take whatever is of interest or value, and burn the diaries.” There was an ominous finality in the gesture, but Lavinia nodded, “Of course.

  Gaston was secretive about his contact, and sketchy about his route, revealing only that he changed “escort” twice along the way and that it was fabulously expensive. As the time of Gaston’s departure drew closer, he became restless, and distracted. It was hard to know what to do with the little time they had left, but any more time than they had would have made it impossible for her to choke back her grief, to remain practical, equal to the moment.

  They played a halfhearted game of cards and Gaston repacked his suitcase twice. The first time he removed an extra bar of soap and a Portuguese dictionary. The second time, he withdrew a volume of Montaigne’s essays and a pair of black leather wing tips.

  “Here,” he said, handing her the book, “take this. I don’t want you to get bored without me.” Then he handed her the shoes: “These are for Boswell, so that he doesn’t get bored without me either.” She laughed and so did Gaston, forgetting momentarily the suffocating circumstances. Lavinia opened the book randomly and read aloud, “One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.”

  “Brilliant,” Lavinia said, closing the book. “I can’t wait to take my boots off and dig in.”

  His optimism seemed to erode as the afternoon lengthened and rain clouds gathered again behind the dome of the Panthéon. Gaston commented irritably on the weather, and the shutter that wouldn’t stop banging in the wind. He tightened the laces of his shoes and asked for a tisane, which he didn’t drink. When Gaston complained about the way Boswell drooled in his sleep, Lavinia stood behind Gaston with her head on his back, her arms tight around his waist. She pressed herself against him like that until she could feel his shoulders begin to relax, and his breath deepen.

  He turned around and held her face, stroking her hair, kissing her forehead. “It will all work out. You’ll see. I’ll be fine.” It seemed to calm him to reassure her, and he sounded convinced again.

  “Céleste will be fine, too. The doctor told me himself. He said she was very lucky with the way the bone broke. So you see,” Gaston concluded, “she’ll mend in no time. It’s just a quesition of bed rest. And I’ve made the necessary arrangements for that.”

  Previously, Céleste had been portrayed as sickly, suffering from a host of ailments both real and imagined. Resilience was not an attribute Lavinia associated with Céleste, who learned nonetheless to wield her frailty like a weapon and would punish Gaston by throwing her back out, or taking to bed, incapacitating herself just enough to command attention and concern. Lavinia understood, however, from Gaston’s anxious rationalizations, that the degree to which he insisted Céleste’s health was not in doubt was the degree to which, this time, it was. “I’ve made arrangements,” he repeated several times, “Céleste will get better care than I could give her.”

  At quarter to five, Gaston stood and smiled. It was a quick, nervous flutter on his lips that resolved into an almost imperceptible sigh. He put on his coat. As he readied himself to leave, adjusting his scarf, Lavinia felt the room become charged with an adrenal energy that was both exhilarating and sickening and bordered on hysteria. She walked with Gaston to the subway, holding his arm tightly, trying to stay in step with him, trying to keep her body as close to his as possible without breaking stride. Gaston had asked her not to enter the station. He was supposed to be alone when the contact approached him.

  It was just as well, Lavinia thought, not to have a tearful farewell on the platform. Instead, Lavinia tried to memorize every detail, as if they were grains of sand slipping away: the pale glow of cobblestones in the sunlight, a doorbell’s nasal buzz, the flap of wings stirring up the air overhead, the peeling red R in a Ricard advertisement painting on the side of a building and the feel of his wool coat against her wrist. It was almost a relief when he finally walked out of view, descending into the Métro station with a quick backward glance, mouthing the words Je t’adore.

  Lavinia listened to the lurch of traffic as the lights changed, the whistle of a man calling his dog back to him. It seemed impossible that everything should go on as normal. Lavinia walked a block and a half before she began to cry. Then, she squatted in the doorway of a shop that had closed, and let herself howl. It didn’t matter that the hem of her coat was getting soiled and that people were staring, or that she didn’t have a handkerchief with her. When she finally got home, her eyes were swollen into slits and her throat was raw.

  “I love you, Lavinia,” Gaston had said at the Métro. “You taught me how.”

  His chin was scraped from shaving with a dull blade, and his hair, just a little too long, was tousled out of place by the wind into a boyish disorder. Something about his posture, the hunch of his shoulders, reminded her of Grisette, the scrappy cat from the Rue Vaneau.

  “Don’t worry, Lavinia. It will work out,” Gaston said one final time, rubbing her cheek with the back of his finger, “for all of us: Céleste will have Delphine and Jean-Marc at La Rêveline, taking care of her, and you and I will have snow, and chocolate, and each other.” He looked back just once, mouthing his last message to her as the crowd from an arriving train pushed past him up the stairs.

  When Lavinia got home, she had not even gotten her coat off, her key was still in her hand when she realized what Gaston had said. He didn’t know. It was a staggering thought: Gaston didn’t know Jean-Marc was dead, that he’d passed out drunk, and choked on his own vomit. Delphine had found him curled up under the kitchen table, wearing a gas mask, clutching a polished pair of shoes. It had happened while Gaston was still out of town, at La Rêveline.

  When Jean-Marc hadn’t shown up at any of his neighborhood spots for several days running, Lavinia had made inquiries.

  “It was too much for the poor woman,” a neighbor said, “after all that she’s endured, finding him like that.” The concierge said Delphine had gone to be with her brother. She’d left no address. “I’ve a bundle of mail I don’t know what to do with, and she still owes last month’s rent. We all have our own sad stories, but one still has to pay the rent,” the concierge complained before closing her window.

  Now that Gaston was gone, Lavinia was the only one who knew that Céleste was alone at La Rêveline, imprisoned in bed by her plaster cast. Lavinia had no idea of how to contact Céleste’s family or even if her mother would be disposed to care for a daughter whose marriage she claimed no longer to recognize, who had been made impure by twenty years of cohabitation with a Jew.

  Lavinia had no other choice but to go to La Rêveline, even though it was the very last place she wished to go. In a vacuum, Céleste became her responsibility. “Knowledge is a burden,” she told Madame Luberon, when she explained why she ne
eded a counterfeit Permis de Circulation Temporaire and a new carte d’identité. She had turned to Madame Luberon because she had not known what else to do, and because, oddly enough, Lavinia trusted her.

  “I know you hate the Jews, and the rich, and Americans, and Bolsheviks, and me,” Lavinia had said to Madame Luberon, “but I am counting on your hating Nazis most of all. If you can’t help me, tell me who can.”

  It was precisely Madame Luberon’s lack of sentiment that enabled Lavinia to read her more accurately than some of their more conflicted neighbors. Madame Luberon regarded Lavinia, considering the question, her arms crossed in front of her heavy bosom.

  “My husband is dead,” she spat out. “His brother is dead. Don’t make trouble for yourself. Myself, I’m staying out of its way. There are bullets in the wall of number 79, down the block, where Pierre Ponceau, the butcher’s son, got in its way. Have a look.”

  “Please,” Lavinia said, “I don’t know what else to do. I wish I didn’t know about her being trapped there, but I do, so it’s up to me. I have to go. There’s no one else to do it. It’s been two days already.” Her heart was beating wildly in her chest, and she wondered if Madame Luberon had in fact been the one who reported Madame Braun’s sister to the authorities.

  “Don’t know what to do? That must be a first for you,” Madame Luberon sneered. She lit the stub of a cigarette that still had a puff or two left in it and shook her head. Boswell yawned, sneezed twice, shook himself, and sneezed again. Lavinia picked him up and held him to her chest like a baby. One of his eyes was getting clouded and he had developed a bald patch on his ear. He licked her chin and sneezed again. Lavinia had already turned and started to walk away when Madame Luberon croaked out, “Come back in five hours. And I’ll need three copies of the same photograph as soon as possible.”