The Last Dress from Paris(102)
“Antoine’s baby?” I say it so quietly, giving her the option to pretend she hasn’t heard me if she wants to, but her eyes remain steady at the mention of his name.
“Antoine’s baby. Our baby. The start of something so beautiful, but the end of us, sadly.”
I let the fact sink in. All that romance, all those illicit meetings, so many promises made, secret hours stolen, and after all that, he let her down? I can’t believe it.
“So, he never supported you?”
“I’m afraid not. I wanted him to, but . . .” She’s searching for the words to summarize what must have been a devastating blow at the time. “He wasn’t able to.”
I see the confusion dance across her eyes. The shadow of all that hurt and rejection still there, all these years on, diminished but not erased. So much time lapsed, and with it the passing of a lifetime’s worth of memories. But still, this one makes no sense, and she is left to wonder and imagine what might have happened to him. Why he made a decision that colored her entire future.
“Why? I don’t understand. If you were both so in love, why didn’t he help you, Granny?”
“I have spent a lifetime wondering, Lucille, and I’m afraid I don’t know. We were young, both scared. There was a lot at stake. Albert, my husband, was determined to keep us apart, and so was Antoine’s mother. I’m not sure Antoine was brave enough to take on the two of them. I never doubted my love for him, but I have had to accept that he didn’t feel the same. That it was easier for him to walk away.”
“Oh, Granny. So, the only support you had was from your parents?”
She looks back toward the fire and slowly shakes her head. “No. It was all too much for them. A newly married daughter, pregnant with another man’s child, walking out on her successful husband but abandoned by her lover. I’m not sure I could have brought worse news to them. The day I called my mother asking for her help, she made it clear I wouldn’t be welcome back at the family home. I never saw her again.”
It is almost unimaginable to me that in the depths of her despair, when she had no one else to turn to, when her parents, unlike her, had a choice, they made the worst possible decision. They turned their backs, leaving her with a sadness I suspect has hovered just at the edge of her consciousness every day since.
She stops talking because I’m sobbing, louder than I can ever remember crying before. And, I realize, I’m angry.
“How could they? How could they abandon you like that? All of them. Albert, Antoine, your own parents? It’s beyond cruel.”
“Darling, it’s okay. Please. You have to understand it was a very different time. My parents did what they thought they had to do, what they believed was best for me, and I am reconciled with that, to some degree.” She smiles, and again I marvel at her courage.
“How can you say that?” I can’t help feeling someone needs to be held accountable. That it was fundamentally wrong to leave a woman, seven years younger than I am now, all alone to cope. “You should have been at home with your family—or with Antoine.”
“The fact was that the father of my child was not my husband. The moralists of the time would never accept that, and my parents knew it. I agree they were protecting themselves first and foremost, but they also thought they were protecting me, from a lifetime of judgment and closed doors and rejection. I think my mother truly believed that without their support, I would stay with Albert. She was adamant it was the right thing to do.”
“But you didn’t. Where did you go?”
“A wonderful friend and her husband took me in until the baby was born. It wasn’t easy. Money was incredibly tight, but the three—and then the four—of us muddled through, for a while.”
“The parties, the staff, your wardrobe, your home—it all went? Didn’t you ever doubt that you had made the right decision, that you should have tried to make it work with Albert?”
“Not once. He wanted to. That’s what angered my mother the most. She couldn’t understand why I would give up that life, but it means nothing if you’re forced to share it with someone you have grown to despise. What I chose was more honest than the life I had been living. There was no deceit. I wasn’t trying to fool anyone anymore, least of all myself. I had my freedom, Lucille, don’t you see? As hard as it was, for probably the first time in my life, I wasn’t answerable to anyone. I was truly happy to say goodbye to Alice’s life and almost everything that she had.”
“But still. Couldn’t you have appealed to Albert to send you some money, or at least some of your things to sell so you could set up somewhere on your own?” I stroke the back of her hand, hoping my questions don’t seem foolish or naive.
“No, Lucille. I’d done the difficult thing in leaving him, preventing him from telling the world it was our baby, which was his plan. I couldn’t reverse it all by asking for his help or his money. He wouldn’t have given them anyway. Besides, none of the things at the embassy were mine. They were either owned by the British government or on loan from other countries, or they were his. I never earned my own money, so I had no honest claim to any of it. Albert moved to America, we divorced, and I got nothing apart from some of my beautiful dresses. But I have never been bitter about that. I had already allowed him to take too much of me. I wasn’t going to hand him my future too.”