The Postmistress of Paris(33)
It must be her age—newly thirty-one—or perhaps this moment in time. She’d turned thirty in a world that had declared itself at war without really doing much about it. The Nazis had taken care of that, occupying Paris and half of France and installing their Vichy lapdogs to run the rest of the country. Now, with peace declared, the war seemed so much more real, and only begun. Just that morning they’d woken to shocking newspaper photos of Pétain shaking Hitler’s hand at Montoire. Yet despite her American passport, France had become the only home Nanée knew, the only one she wanted.
“Do let’s have a look,” she insisted. Then more loudly, for the doctor’s hearing, “This reminds me of home, although of course it’s much smaller.”
The doctor took a pack of Gauloises Bleues from his pocket and lit one. He didn’t offer them cigarettes. He was that kind of old-fashioned; he couldn’t imagine any decent woman would smoke.
“There are eighteen bedrooms,” he said. “As I said, it will be very expensive.”
“You’ll negotiate the price before you show us the place?” Nanée asked.
Inside, a black-and-white-marble entry hall opened into the “Grand Salon,” one of three salons on the ground floor. It had a piano, an elaborate candelabra, plenty of Louis XV furniture, a stone fireplace as tall as Nanée, cold now but with brass andirons welcoming new logs, and ugly wires running along the baseboards everywhere. Electricity! Nanée caught her own reflection in an age-spotted mirror over the mantel, the thing huge and gilt and, if she wasn’t careful, revealing her absolute glee in its smoky glass. Beside the mirror, the unmoving hands of a round brass clock read 11:45 although it was midafternoon. Stairs to the second floor opened into a library much like the one back in Evanston, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a ladder to reach the higher books. Doors from the library led to spacious bedrooms, each with a mahogany double bed, a marble fireplace, an armoire, and, Nanée was a bit discouraged to see, a washstand with chamber pot discreetly tucked away. But there was, blessedly, a flush toilet on this floor and one on the third floor too. And everything was in awfully good shape for a house that appeared to be inhabited by nothing but ghosts.
No, there was no telephone. No, no gas either. No central heat.
“And no tub,” Nanée said. It wasn’t a dealbreaker. Call it a hedge against being gouged simply for being American.
“Ah.” Doctor Thumin took them back downstairs, through a breakfast room with a charming marble washbasin, and into a kitchen with a stove three times as long as Nanée was tall, a soapstone sink with running water, and utensils and china. There he threw open a door into a third bathroom—off the kitchen, for heaven’s sake.
“This, it is a wedding present for my grandmère,” the doctor said.
Nanée wasn’t sure if he meant the beautiful zinc tub with a graceful bronze-doré swan’s-neck faucet or the whole bathroom, but was afraid to ask for fear the delight in her voice would give her away.
As they stood again on the terrace looking toward the sea, she breathed in deeply of the country air. No rats here. No bar brawls. No thugs.
She startled at a swoop over the ruined garden—the mottled orange-brown of a beautiful wild creature spreading to white wings streaked with black.
“A booted eagle,” Thumin said. “A Bonelli’s eagle, he’s sometimes called. You can tell he’s young by his coloring. You must come see my collection, to see him up close.”
“Up close?” Nanée said.
“I’m quite a fine taxidermist,” he said. “I can show you as well a golden eagle, among the largest and most elusive of birds. They spend days perched motionless, impossible to spot. And they are among the finest hunters.”
Nanée watched the eagle, trying to hide her disgust. Who would want to see such a wild creature gutted and stuffed, much less do it himself? And yet was any creature more beautiful than a mourning dove? That single, beautiful bird, so small and vulnerable. A true eye, her father always said of Nanée’s ability with a shotgun. A steady hand. He’d showed her how to hold the dying bird’s pale gray body, warm in her fingers, and smack its neck against the gun barrel. How to clean the blood from its pale peach breast and pick the lead shot from its flesh. How to dress the dead bird and cook it. He sat her beside him at one of the dining tables at Marigold Lodge, eating the dove for dinner that night because that’s what hunters did, they ate what they killed. She cut the bird’s flesh into tiny pieces and closed her eyes before each bite, remembering the feel of its heart racing against her fingertips. She swallowed without chewing, washing each devastating bite down with a big gulp of milk.
The doctor named his price, 1,300 francs a month.
A tiny bedroom with shared bath in a dump of a downtown hotel cost 450 francs. Nanée’s room at the Continental cost nearly 1,300.
“You may think it is too much, but I will not be able to convince my sister to accept one franc less,” Thumin said. “This price, we will not negotiate.”
THEY MOVED INTO the villa together that Sunday: Nanée, Danny, and T, with Peterkin to be fetched from his grandmother the next day. Miriam joined them for the last few days before she went to get her fiancé in Yugoslavia. Varian’s consiglieri, Maurice, took one of the rooms. And of course dear Gussie could not be left behind. Everyone else at the CAS was happy where they were living, with the possible exception of Varian; Miriam wanted to invite him, but Nanée found the prospect of living with him too daunting. They put sheets on the hand-carved beds and turned over their ration books to Madame Nouget, the cook T hired along with a maid named Rose, and they set up Nanée’s radio in the Grand Salon, where it fit in nicely with the foggy mirror and the beautifully useless clock.