The Marriage of Opposites

by Alice Hoffman

  “I can see why my mother so enjoyed your friendship when you were girls,” Lydia said as the men were looking at the stars. She was wearing blue, her favorite color, a dress fashioned of silk damask. She often dressed her girls in three different shades of blue. Tonight she’d chosen teal for Amelia, indigo for Mirabelle, and soft sky blue for Leah, who was little more than a baby but did her best to keep up with her sisters, toddling after them. They were darling children, adored by Henri’s parents. Lydia wished her mother had lived to see them. Surely she would have delighted in them. Her father had taken little notice of his granddaughters, although he insisted on visiting each one on the day after her birth. Now, Lydia wondered if he was looking for those silver eyes he’d spoken of. He had not a worry. The three girls’ eyes were blue.

  “Elise was a complicated woman,” Sophie said as they had their coffee. “I suppose that’s what interested me. You expected one thing of her and she turned and did something completely out of character. People who thought she was nothing more than a pretty doll had a surprise coming to them. She could be quite vicious if the need arose. But if she was your friend, she was that for all eternity.”

  “Between us things were quite simple,” Lydia said. “I always knew I could depend on her. I suppose that’s why I miss her so. She was the person I could count on no matter what. Now it’s Henri. So I’m fortunate in my choice.” She noticed Sophie staring. “Do my eyes look silver to you?” she blurted.

  Sophie laughed. “Not at all.”

  The men had returned from their stargazing, clapping the frost from their coats. It had been a lovely evening. The guests were getting ready to leave when Sophie suggested she and Lydia have tea together, just the two of them. Lydia agreed, imagining this was an invitation that would occur sometime in the future, but the very next day Sophie arrived at three o’clock. It was inconvenient, really, and unexpected, such things were usually scheduled, but there was nothing Lydia could do but ask the maid to take the children to the park. While the maid readied the girls, Lydia would have to brew the tea herself. She chose jasmine, the scent of which always made her sad, yet she favored it. Sophie sat across from her and apologized for coming unannounced. “If I’ve overstepped, I didn’t mean to. I had no intention to upset you.”

  “It’s fine,” Lydia replied, confused, meaning it was quite all right for her to come without first sending a note. “You don’t upset me in the least.”

  “But perhaps I will in what I say.” Sophie treaded carefully.

  “Oh, say what you will,” Lydia responded, still puzzled by the intensity of this surprise visit. “I can’t imagine I’d be offended.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way. I can’t imagine it would matter now, with Elise gone. And when you asked about the color of your eyes, I felt I might be free to speak to you. Before that, I wasn’t certain you knew.”

  “As I said, between my mother and myself, things were simple. She called me her great and wonderful gift.”

  “So you were aware that she couldn’t have children.” Sophie appeared relieved. “But of course she would have told you.”

  Lydia did not move, for fear she would betray herself. She knew nothing of this. Her heart was twisted inside her chest. The maid, already wearing her cape, brought almond cakes with sugar frosting. She had bundled up the children, who followed at her heels. It was unseasonably cold, but the park awaited. The girls were ushered from the house. The tea was poured. Jasmine tea was from Japan, deliciously fragrant with a woodsy, floral scent and a pale green color in the bone china cups. Lydia felt as though something was stuck in her throat; she found she couldn’t even swallow a sip of tea.

  “She wanted you desperately,” Lydia’s visitor went on, “and was so delighted when you entered her life. You were indeed a treasure and a gift. As long as you know that.”

  “How did that entrance occur?” When Aunt Sophie looked puzzled by the question, posed by one who supposedly knew her own history, Lydia added, “I can never remember the details.”

  She was cold as she poured more tea for her guest, despite the fire in the grate. She heard the nightingale in the yard. It was a large garden, but the bird always perched in the same tree. The one outside her window.

  “Who can remember details?” Sophie shrugged. “Some days I can barely remember my own name!”

  “Was I a foundling?”

  “No. Of course not. You are your father’s child—I believe from a marriage before he wed your mother. It seems your mother kept some details to herself.”

  “She did.” Lydia nodded.

  “I know she wanted to tell you more about the situation. I remember discussing it with her. But when do you tell a daughter that another woman gave birth to her? I suppose you were grown up when she informed you.”

  Lydia tried to straighten out her thoughts, but the fact that her mother, who had been her biggest champion and the person closest to her in the world, was not a blood relation or her birth mother was staggering. “No. It was only recently,” she lied. The lie was like a block of ice, and yet Sophie seemed to believe her.

  “Well, she worried over what to say for years. She never told me the details, or I would tell you now myself. Only that she had given you a far better life than the one you would have had. I assume there was some scandal involved. But scandal is everywhere, isn’t it?”

  The news about her parentage changed things in a way Lydia didn’t understand. She felt angry at herself, for taking everything at face value, and angry with her mother for dying without telling her the truth.

  That night she held her daughters close, and swore she would never betray them. She wanted to ask her father to reveal who her true mother had been, but when she went to visit him, Marie, the nurse, said he was too ill for company and turned her away. She stood outside the house of white stone where she’d grown up, where the vines wound up the walls to the chamber in which she’d slept as a child, and she felt a stranger.

  “Would you ever lie to me?” she asked Henri later on.

  “What would I lie about?” he responded.

  The weather was chill, but they were in the garden, looking at stars. The nightingale fluttered from branch to branch, but didn’t sing a note. Henri was kindhearted, a truly good man, and her mother had been his champion. “I think he’s the one for you,” Lydia recalled her saying. “He won’t break your heart.”

  Henri dreamed of constellations, he’d told her, and of her.

  Her own dreams were unreachable, dissolving into mist before she could reach them in her waking state. I don’t dream, she insisted when he questioned her, yet the statement felt like a lie. There were birds she couldn’t quite see. Voices she couldn’t quite hear. The sound of the sea.

  Henri tried to show her Neptune, but she couldn’t spy it through the telescope. Just a blue whirl beside some hot white specks. She thought about her mother not being her mother, and everything that had happened between them. Now when she looked back, the tiniest nod or glance took on new meaning. I love you anyway. I love you more. You’re mine. I’m yours.

  As she’d aged, her mother’s pale red hair had turned white. She remained stylish, and to some, especially her maids, her cold eye was fearsome. She liked things done with style, her style. She had her own chamber, with red lacquered walls and dove-gray bedcoverings. Lydia’s father’s room was down the hall, and smelled of cigar smoke. Her mother said she could not stand the smoke, or his sputtering snore, but there was more, a distance between them. As for her father, he gave her mother gifts on a regular basis, but managed to stay clear of her and lead his own life. He had an apartment somewhere; it was said to be used for business meetings. Sometimes when her father looked at her mother, Lydia saw a sort of surprise behind his eyes, as if he’d wandered into the wrong house and had come home to the wrong wife.

  Before she died her mother had said, “Always pay heed to the woman who comes before you. If he’s treated her badly, he will treat you much the same.”
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  They’d been alone in her room, with a fire going to take the chill off, though it was May. Lydia, already married and in love, had laughed. “In Henri’s case,” she’d said, “that would be his mother.” But when she’d begun to see Marie in the house so soon after her mother’s death, she believed she understood her mother’s message. Her father had not been faithful. The extravagant gifts he’d given to his wife—a ruby pendant from India, silk dresses, strands of pearls, creamy cameos—he had likely given to other women as well. Looking back, Lydia remembered walking into shops with her mother and having the salesgirl say Monsieur Rodrigues had just been in to buy a present and being confused about why such a statement should bring her mother to tears.

  LYDIA WENT AGAIN TO see her father on a cold November day. The leaves were red and brown. A mist sifted down from the damp sky. Later it would rain, but not now. She wore a heavy black cape—her funeral cape, she realized—bought for her mother’s funeral in the Jewish cemetery in Passy. She knocked formally on the door, her own door, where she’d grown up. Marie answered, surprised to see her. Her father was resting.

  “He’s my father, and I want to see him,” Lydia told the nurse.

  She walked inside and didn’t listen to any protestations. She’d been up the stairs a thousand times before. She passed her mother’s room and continued on. Her father was in bed. The bed had been pulled to the window so he might look outside. He turned to her, thinking she was Marie. The nurse had followed and was right behind her. Lydia thought her father’s eyes brightened when he saw her. Perhaps there was some affection there, after all.

  “He’s very tired,” Marie said.

  There was no refuting this; all the same Lydia told Marie she was the one who must leave. Lydia made certain to close the door after the nurse edged into the hallway, then returned to the bedside, where she sat in a hard-backed chair. Her father’s eyes flitted over to her, then away.

  “I hear a bird,” he said.

  The rain had begun. There were no birds.

  “She wasn’t my mother?”

  There was a white film over his eyes, which were still very blue.

  “You were born in St. Thomas,” he said.

  Her mother had told her this. Lydia had been born there during their travels. Though her mother said they left that far-off island when she was a baby, Lydia had some memory of a long trip, and of her mother singing to her as the waves hit against them, of miles and miles of blue sea. Now she wondered if it was possible for an infant to have such memories, for her girls remembered nothing from their babyhood. She’d gone so far as to question them, and they could not recall the songs she’d sung to them or the days she’d paced the floor with them. Those first memories were fainter than shadows on the wall.

  “To your first wife?” Lydia put forth.

  “Well, I couldn’t marry her,” her father said. “Wasn’t that obvious? We weren’t allowed.”

  “Why not?” Lydia asked, more confused than ever.

  “Do you think I ever loved anyone else?” her father said. His eyes were so pale it seemed possible to look through them into a part of him she’d never seen before. He seemed completely unfamiliar to Lydia, a lost man. He reached for her. In that instant, Lydia felt like pulling away, but she forced herself to grasp his hand. She hadn’t expected his hand to feel so light, as if beneath the skin there were nothing more than the bones of a bird. “Don’t do what they tell you to,” he said.

  Marie came in, with a maid in tow, interrupting, insisting it was time for her father to sleep. Lydia was rushed from the room. She stood in the hall, mortified, while Marie sang to him as she settled him in his bed. When he was dozing, Marie came out to the hallway to escort her from the house.

  “Your father has very little time left,” she said. “I won’t have him bothered.”

  “I wasn’t bothering him.”

  “I think I know when he’s tired.”

  Lydia felt like saying, Heed the woman before you. He’ll treat you as badly as he treated her. In fact her father had disappeared for over a week after her mother’s funeral. People said it was sorrow that had caused his absence, but now Lydia wasn’t so sure. Surely there was another woman, most likely one of his friends’ wives. That was the way such things were done. Affairs were kept quiet, and maintained within a single circle, people of the same standing and faith. The nurse was not of their faith; any relationship with her would not be serious, so it was absurd for her to act as if she were the woman of the house. It was unlikely her father would leave anything to his nurse in his will if that was what this was all about. And then she saw it as she was leaving the room. A flash of red at Marie’s throat. The ruby from India that had belonged to her mother.

  Lydia turned and left, grief-stricken. After a while she saw the boy following her through the streets. She hadn’t thought of him for days. Perhaps she should have been frightened, but it was otherwise. She felt grateful not to be alone. She liked the idea of having a companion. Once she dropped a glove purposely, and when she retrieved it she turned her head in order to see him more clearly. He was no ghost, and was clearly flesh, perhaps sixteen or so, as tall as Henri, quite serious in his demeanor. He looked like a man, but there was something boyish about his posture. He ran a hand through his long, dark hair. He stopped when she did and turned to study a garden, overgrown with lime trees and weeds, then he gazed at her again. She gestured to him, but he looked panicked and backed away.

  Soon after, her father died. His death was a hollow thud. Lydia went to the service and to the burial but remembered little. Only the ice-cold air as the men took turns shoveling dirt over the coffin. The sobs of the nurse. A nightingale in a tree bringing forth a ribbon of song, even though it was daylight, the wrong hour for such a creature to sing. The house was sold quickly. Although the money from the sale came to Lydia and Henri, when they went to close up the house most of the belongings were gone, the walls stripped of their paintings, and all of Lydia’s mother’s jewelry, the cameos and gold necklaces and, of course, the ruby, had disappeared. The rooms echoed.

  “We can go to a solicitor,” Henri said. “Track down this Marie.”

  “No,” Lydia told him. “Let her be.”

  She stood at the glass doors to the garden while Henri went through her father’s desk. Later that evening, when they had gone home, Lydia was awakened by the scent of something burning. She crept down the stairs, on which there was soft red Oriental carpeting. Her husband was burning documents in a large copper pan in the kitchen, the window open to ensure that the smoke would escape. A wind blew through the house. Unless Lydia was mistaken the smoke was tinted blue.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “He wrote poetry,” Henri said. “To some woman. I didn’t think you’d want to see. They’re not particularly good.”

  Some of it was burned, but she told him to stop and took up the sheaves of paper. She went to the pantry, a small wooden corridor where they stored flour and spices, and sat on a stool. She read them all and afterward felt as if she had swallowed stones. He loved someone, that much was clear. He called her a red flower, a star in the sky, a woman who could swim with turtles, who would never let him go, not that he wanted his freedom, not that he had ever wanted anything but her.

  IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS Lydia searched through her memories, but they were hazy, bursts of events she’d experienced as a child and then as a young woman—lessons, parties, dinners, and finally meeting Henri, the moment when everything became brighter. At night, however, stranger images came into her dreams. She managed to catch bits and pieces, and she arose from her bed with peculiar tableaus in her mind: fields of tall yellow grass, a pool of tiny fish, the sound of the sea, red flowers tumbling down a hillside, her little girls with their eyes turned silver, a boy who tracked her in his black coat. She asked the maid if she’d ever been aware of someone following when she took the children to the park.

  “It began two years ago,” the maid confid
ed. “I didn’t wish to upset you. I shooed him away, but twice he had the nerve to come to the door. I told him never to return, but then he came again, to the back door, like a servant. He apologized for using the front door, and for trailing after us.”

  “But for what reason?” Lydia asked. She had grown cold with something that was not quite fear. Perhaps it was an odd excitement.

  The maid shrugged. “I never gave him time to speak his mind. I didn’t think it was proper. He was nervous and shy, yet he continued coming round until one night I greeted him with a hammer in my hands, and he hasn’t come back since.”

  Lydia did not know what to do about her pursuer or even what to think. Evidently he had been searching them out for some time, years in fact. And then as she had dinner with her daughters one night, just the four of them, as Henri would be home late from work what she should do came to her as a dream might, suddenly and fully formed. She would turn the tables and follow the boy. She would become a shadow as he dodged away from spying on her. She felt a thrill inside her, as if she were waking up, taking control of her life. She played for hours with her girls, games of hide-and-seek, which perfectly suited her intention for finding her follower. By the end of the evening there was not a single place in the house—not the cellar, not the kitchen, not the tiniest bureau—where she could not find her daughters if she put her mind to it. She would do the same to catch the boy in the black coat.

  As it turned out, she noticed him in the synagogue on Friday night. This was luck, indeed. Perhaps he had often been there and she’d never noticed, as the men and women were separated. But now that she’d spied him she felt her pulse quicken. She told her mother-in-law she had a headache and needed some air, leaving her children in Madame Cohen’s care. She went outside and headed for home, knowing what would happen, sensing the shadow behind her. She felt her pursuer, his tentative gait, his nervous posture, his youth. There was a comforting familiarity in his presence; it was as if her own past were following her. She entered her house, then watched him from the window. When he turned to leave, thinking she had retired for the evening, she sneaked back out through the garden, ready to turn the tables. She was light on her feet, wearing her woolen cape. The air was cold and smelled sweet, as if the dark was made of molasses. The cobblestones were slippery from an earlier shower. She trudged after him through the dark streets for nearly half an hour. Just when she thought she must turn back, and felt irretrievably lost, he arrived at a tall brick house. They were still in the Jewish quarter. Luckily a neighbor passed by and Lydia asked who lived at this address. The name was Pizzarro.