The Postmistress of Paris(57)

She examined one of the prints more closely. The slightly odd curve of the shoulders. The arms angled toward each other. The legs apart?

She peered more closely. Did she have it all wrong? Was it . . . ? Yes, the photograph was of a woman’s torso, not a man’s. A naked woman bent forward at the waist. The curves at the top that she’d thought were a man’s curled shoulders were a woman’s derrière. What Nanée had thought were the edges of a man’s arms behind his shoulders were a hint of thigh, and at the bottom of the photograph a woman’s spine disappeared into a shadow cast on her shoulders. The shadow of the photographer, of Edouard.

This photograph she’d seen as presenting a man’s strength instead captured the opposite, a woman collapsing forward in grief or shame or loss, supplication. And yet there was her long, straight spine too. There was the sense that she would unbend and rise up again.

Nude, Bending—that’s what Edouard had called that photograph back at her apartment in Paris. Or had that been André?

Ghost Wife. The vulnerability of the pose. The intimacy. Surely this was one lover photographing another? She looked over her shoulder, shivering at the impression she was being watched.

No one was there.

Still, she went out into the main room and looked around. She locked the front door. She retrieved the hat from the closet and fingered the inside leather band, softened by years of hair and skin oils but the tag still clean, the hat well cared for, the initials—ELM—only slightly faded. She took the hat back with her into the bathroom to put it in the bag after all, but already there was no room for it. She set it on her own head. Too big, but easy enough to carry that way. It smelled of Edouard, comforting.

Should she take one of the prints? Nude Bending. Ghost Wife. She peered at the photograph again. So intimate. It had been hanging in the exhibition, but Edouard had made André take it down. And he had been so clear about not needing any of his prints.

She wanted to take one for herself, but she carefully pinned the prints back up where she’d found them, on the line, and hauled the bag, heavy now, out of the little room.

She braced herself and opened the door into the last room, Luki’s room, strewn with clothes and as full of dust and cobwebs as the rest of the cottage. She opened the window to the sound of waves against rocks, and gulls calling. Was that singing? She opened it wider and poked her head out to see a small area enclosed by a fence between the house and the sea. Surely that wasn’t anyone singing, but rather some combination of the water and wind and birds.

She brushed away cobwebs and began sorting through things as she had in Edouard’s bedroom, wanting to bring him something of his daughter. To leave behind all of Luki’s belongings seemed to leave behind hope. She found the beautiful red coat trimmed with black velvet that Luki had worn in Paris, but the child was nearly three years older now; it would no longer fit. There was a cloth doll, clean and unloved. A book too young for Luki now.

They would have packed anything special except perhaps something bulky, like the coat, but how could she give Edouard this red coat his daughter couldn’t wear, even if she could be found?

She tossed the coat back on the bed with the other clothes. A muffled tinkle of music sounded, as if some small musical instrument were in the pocket. But no, when she checked she found only a child-size pair of red gloves, soft leather that suggested the rich life they had left behind when they fled Austria. She started pulling the other clothes from the bed, feeling each carefully before setting it aside. Under a last little-girl white blouse was a tired old coat quite a bit larger than the red one. Bought secondhand, she supposed. Nothing else. She lifted the coat and felt inside its pockets. Pulled out a little wool thing that released another single note.

She held a tiny stuffed animal with a wind-up back.

She turned the key.

As the tinny notes sounded from the creature, Nanée was back in her own childhood, in her bedroom at the Evanston house. She was opening the lid of her music box, an exquisite round porcelain thing painted to look like a merry-go-round and inlaid with gold and pearls. When she lifted the lid, three miniature merry-go-round horses circled inside as this delicate music played. “Waltz of the Flowers,” from The Nutcracker. A piece by Tchaikovsky that had been a failure in his lifetime, that had only succeeded after his death. Nanée couldn’t have been much older than Luki was now when she first heard it, sitting in a dark theater in downtown Chicago. A special outing, just Daddy and her. He’d taken her hand when it looked like the Mouse King would kill the poor wounded Nutcracker, and assured her it was only pretend, and anyway, the Nutcracker would get that Mouse King. Nasty creatures always get their comeuppance in the end.

Nanée stared at the furry creature as its music wound down into the silence of the ocean beyond the open cottage windows, the waves lapping the rocks at the bottom of the palisades. It was a kangaroo, a baby one that must belong in the pouch of Luki’s funny mohair mama that the motherless child had clung to at the gallery in Paris. Nanée tucked it into her pocket and, with Edouard’s gray felt hat still on her head, closed the bag. She closed the window too, and walked out the front door. She locked the cottage and set the key back where she’d found it, under the pot of dead plants.





Wednesday, November 13, 1940





VILLA AIR-BEL


Edouard was sitting on a stone wall in the dark garden when he heard footsteps on the gravel—Nanée, identifiable even as a shadow in the moonlight.