The Postmistress of Paris(7)
The discreet doctor in New York City assured Daddy and Mother that she was “still intact.” He couldn’t say why her courses had ceased, or whether she would be able to bear children. She’d sat silently as he answered her parents’ questions, imaging a future in which the most private parts of her body were forever opened up and examined by cold metal and cold hands. And she could still hear Daddy saying to her mother in their private train car from New York to Newport, “What I mean is, if Nanée might not be able to provide a man with an heir . . .” and Mother’s response, too, “A debutante ball is not a business transaction, for heaven’s sake. Your daughter’s inability to have children, if it comes to that, will not ruin your reputation for reliable goods.”
Still, within days, Daddy had made arrangements to send her to the Collegio Gazzolo, a finishing school in Italy run by a contessa they knew. Nanée had a proper brain in her head; she might have gone to Radcliffe or Wellesley or Smith, but she was given no choice. She was shipped off to Europe to master nothing more than good posture, how to wear a ball gown and set a menu, and the fine art of saying absolutely nothing of consequence while making the right kind of man feel important, so that he might marry her. “To work this wildness out of her system in private,” Daddy insisted to Mother, as if Nanée’s exile to a country where the family was less known might save him from shame. “That daughter of yours would rather be wild than broken,” he said. “Don’t you worry she’ll end up alone?”
Nanée was, it turned out, the least wild of the contessa’s girls, the only one who’d never gone the limit except in her imagination. Despite their influence, she behaved well enough that, when the year was over, her father wanted her to return home. She had in mind, though, to move to Paris—simply to defy him, he said. How did she imagine she would support herself?
But he agreed, finally, to a single year at the Sorbonne on the condition that she live with Danny’s family. That’s where she was when Daddy went into the hospital for a minor operation, and never recovered. November 3, 1928.
There was no Pan Am Clipper flying boat yet, no way to get home other than by a long sea journey to New York and a train on to Chicago. Mother told her not to come, that Daddy would be deep in the ground before she was halfway across the Atlantic. Nanée saw now that her mother had felt free for the first time since her wedding day, and didn’t want her daughter to see that truth hidden behind her widow’s veil. Perhaps Mother imagined Nanée would feel the same unseemly sense of freedom. Perhaps that was some part of what she had felt, some part of the reason she didn’t rush home.
Mother instead came to Paris. She took rooms at the H?tel Meurice, and Nanée moved in with her. Nanée liked it at first, dressing up in evening clothes and jewels, going to places like Bricktop’s or Le Boeuf sur le Toit, where the headwaiter always found room for them. But she’d tired of it by the time her brothers joined them to ski that next Christmas. Or perhaps she’d tired of Misha, an ousted White Russian count looking for an American heiress to restore him to wealth, with whom her mother liked to go out clubbing and get drunk and fight.
They skied in St. Moritz, Nanée surprisingly taking to this sport that required her to be out all day in the cold. She stayed until spring, long after Mother returned to the States with her White Russian, who, being a count from a country that no longer allowed royalty, was welcomed into American society with a ball thrown by friends. That was when Nanée had taken her own first lover, after her mother’s second wedding. She didn’t return for that either. She continued skiing in the Swiss Alps while her mother and Misha settled into the comfortable life Daddy had made, and she climbed into bed with a fellow she imagined she loved. Nanée’s taste in men was as bad as her mother’s, though, and she lacked the sense Mother had to settle down with just one lout who, being a count, hadn’t caused a scandal the way Nanée would were she to marry anyone other than a boy from the right kind of family, from Evanston or Newport or New York. But then Evanston Rules were more forgiving of the second love of a wealthy older widow than they were of a daughter with prospects on her first trip down the aisle.
T SET THE Exquisite Corpse sketch on Nanée’s desk, beside the photograph of Nanée in her flight gear that another of her charming louts had sent her. Was it her head Edouard had drawn? The flight goggles and scarf, yes, but an artist as talented as he was could draw a head that was unmistakably Nanée’s if he meant to. Not that she’d known that was what he’d drawn before she, with his part of the creature folded away, unmistakably drew Edouard’s nearly naked lower half.
“He drew my head in a birdcage,” she repeated, hearing his voice again, obsession, anxiety, even fetish. Yet what she’d felt when saw the sketch was, oddly, understood. As if he could see how she so often felt, looking out at the world through a gilded cage in which she’d managed to pry the door open but was somehow unable to leave.
“Anyway,” she said, “you can’t get a man by letting him believe you’re attracted to him.” It was the contessa’s admonition—Non puoi procurarti un uomo facendogli credere che sei attratta da lui—invariably delivered with her insistence that the girls marry in their “own class,” since only wealthy, socially suitable men could be presumed to marry them for love rather than for their fortunes.