The Postmistress of Paris(6)

Everyone laughed harder and harder as André went on about what appeared to be Nanée’s head and Edouard’s bottom half with his own many arms in between. The noise stirred Luki, who half woke, smiling sleepily.

“Mutti, will you sing to me?” she asked Nanée.

Edouard was glad of the room’s laughter then, glad that no one but Nanée could have heard. He stroked Luki’s hair until she settled back into sleep, this child who was all her mother and nothing of him, all that was left of Elza.

He stood to leave, saying to Nanée, “I’m sorry. You look so very like Elza. It confuses her.” He stared at Nanée, knowing it was rude but unable to look away. It confused him too. “We ought to be going,” he said. “Thank you.”

At the door, Edouard held the sleeping Luki as Nanée helped him bundle her into her favorite red coat, then held his own coat for him. She handed him the hat Elza had so loved, his initials marked in the hatband as if he were the hat and the hat him.

“She doesn’t have a baby,” Nanée said. “The kangaroo. Her pouch is empty.”

Luki’s poor mohair kangaroo was strangled by her arm even in sleep. The joey (which Luki was quick to point out was what a baby kangaroo was called when anyone called it anything else) had disappeared somewhere between Vienna and Paris, and no amount of searching had uncovered it. Luki was distraught at the loss—“Did Joey go to the angels too?”—and Edouard was distraught at the frightening omen of the missing kangaroo child. But Luki’s mother had already been taken from her; what worse fate could it portend?

“Goodbye then,” he said to Nanée.

Nanée considered him, the question in her expression: Would he not speak of the baby kangaroo, or could he not?

“In France, we say au revoir,” she responded in a gentler voice than he would have imagined. Not just quiet, but gentle. “Until we see each other again.”





Tuesday, January 18, 1938, 6:00 a.m.

NANéE’S APARTMENT, PARIS

As the party carried on behind her, Nanée watched Edouard appear on the sidewalk below and set off down avenue Foch, his daughter still in his arms. From up here at her window, what she saw was his back, with the child’s head resting on his shoulder, and the gray felt fedora—a hat her father might have worn, with its matching Petersham ribbon and its fine leather sweatband embossed with his initials, ELM, like the sturdy, beautiful tree she used to climb when she was a child.

T joined her at the window, whispering, “I knew you would like this one.”

“Do be serious,” she said, still watching Edouard. “I may ‘sabotage myself in love,’ as you like to say, but I’m not fool enough to fall for a man who just lost his wife.”

She touched her fingers to the glass, cool where the brush of Edouard’s skin had been warm as he handed her back her fur bracelet after touching it to the child’s vulnerable cheek.

“You’re not humoring me,” T said. “If you don’t much care for a man, you always do humor me.”

“Pffft.”

“You push the good ones away. Men’s egos are more fragile than you allow them to be.”

“I pushed him away how?” Turning to her now that Edouard and his daughter had disappeared around the corner, toward the metro.

T gave her a look.

“How?” Nanée repeated.

T retrieved the Exquisite Corpse drawing abandoned among the champagne bottles and glasses: the head—Nanée’s own head?—in the birdcage; the octopus middle; the fig-leaf groin and knobby knees she’d drawn.

“Edouard drew my head in a birdcage, for heaven’s sake!” Nanée protested, but quietly, lest she draw attention. That was something she’d learned early: when to draw attention to oneself and when to avoid it. Evanston Rules.

EVANSTON RULES WEREN’T restricted to Evanston, of course. They applied at Marigold Lodge, their thirty-four-room Michigan summer home, Prairie style, with red-brick chimneys and dormers, two dining rooms, a library, sun porches. They applied in New York City. And they applied at Miramar, the Newport mansion built by a friend of her mother’s who’d survived the Titanic while her husband and son had not, where Nanée spent her last months in America. The society pages reported her family’s arrival in New York that June of 1927 “on their way to summer in Rhode Island rather than Michigan this year,” but in fact summering at Miramar was the excuse and New York City the purpose of the trip—to consult a specialist about why Nanée’s courses had stopped.

She’d not yet been intimate with a man, and it shocked her that her parents imagined she had been, that they’d committed an entire summer to protecting against the rumor that their only daughter might be pregnant. Yes, she shunned corsets, but corsets belonged to her parents’ generation as much as did the idea that a woman ought not to vote, or if she did, she should vote as her husband did. Daddy had always encouraged her independence, and she’d emulated her big brother, Dickey, in all things, in learning to sail, to ride horses, to shoot. She read the stories of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table because Dickey did, although she was alone in trying to piece together a suit of armor from nothing but cardboard, paste, and an exorbitant volume of silver US Foil Company food wrap that, despite her best efforts, she never could keep from crinkling. She followed Dickey in smoking. In nipping at Daddy’s bourbon (illegal under Prohibition, but what was good for the workers wasn’t necessarily good for the boss). And in sneaking out her window at night. Sure, she knew Mother would disapprove, but the car she drove was a gift from Daddy, and she never did leave it; she just drove the dark roads, sometimes stopping in the parking lot of a jazz joint to listen to the smooth notes of saxophones and clarinets, and women singing. Music that left Nanée breathing nearly as freely as she now did up in the Vega Gull.