The Nightingale(181)

I see the tiny white flakes, and I know it’s all fake—nothing—but it makes me remember those terrible winters, when we had holes in our shoes and our bodies were wrapped in newsprint and every scrap of clothing we could find.

“Mom? You’re shaking.”

“We’re late,” I say. Julien puts down the antique snow globe and we are off again, bypassing the crowd waiting to enter Notre Dame.

The hotel is on a side street behind the cathedral. Next to it is the H?tel-Dieu, the oldest hospital in Paris.

“I’m afraid,” I say, surprising myself with the admission. I can’t remember admitting such a thing in years, although it has often been true. Four months ago, when they told me the cancer was back, fear made me cry in the shower until the water ran cold.

“We don’t have to go in,” he says.

“Yes, we do,” I say.

I put one foot in front of the other until I am in the lobby, where a sign directs us to the ballroom on the fourth floor.

When we exit the elevator, I can hear a man speaking through a microphone that amplifies and garbles his voice in equal measure. There is a table out in the hallway, with name tags spread out. It reminds me of that old television show: Concentration. Most of the tags are missing, but mine remains.

And there is another name I recognize; the tag is below mine. At the sight of it, my heart gives a little seize, knots up. I reach for my own name tag and pick it up. I peel off the back and stick the name tag to my sunken chest, but all the while, I am looking at the other name. I take the second tag and stare down at it.

“Madame!” says the woman seated behind the table. She stands, looking flustered. “We’ve been waiting for you. There’s a seat—”

“I’m fine. I’ll stand in the back of the room.”

“Nonsense.” She takes my arm. I consider resisting, but haven’t the will for it just now. She leads me through a large crowd, seated wall to wall in the ballroom, on folding chairs, and toward a dais behind which three old women are seated. A young man in a rumpled blue sport coat and khaki pants—American, obviously—is standing at a podium. At my entrance, he stops speaking.

The room goes quiet. I feel everyone looking at me.

I sidle past the other old women on the dais and take my place at the empty chair next to the speaker.

The man at the microphone looks at me and says, “Someone very special is with us tonight.”

I see Julien at the back of the room, standing against the wall, his arms crossed. He is frowning. No doubt he is wondering why anyone would put me on a dais.

“Would you like to say something?”

I think the man at the podium has asked me this question twice before it registers.

The room is so still I can hear chairs squeaking, feet tapping on carpet, women fanning themselves. I want to say, “no, no, not me,” but how can I be so cowardly?

I get slowly to my feet and walk to the podium. While I’m gathering my thoughts, I glance to my right, at the old women seated at the dais and see their names: Almadora, Eliane, and Anouk.

My fingers clutch the wooden edges of the podium. “My sister, Isabelle, was a woman of great passions,” I say quietly at first. “Everything she did, she did full speed ahead, no brakes. When she was little, we worried about her constantly. She was always running away from boarding schools and convents and finishing school, sneaking out of windows and onto trains. I thought she was reckless and irresponsible and almost too beautiful to look at. And during the war, she used that against me. She told me that she was running off to Paris to have an affair, and I believed her.

“I believed her. All these years later, that still breaks my heart a little. I should have known she wasn’t following a man, but her beliefs, that she was doing something important.” I close my eyes for a moment and remember: Isabelle, standing with Ga?tan, her arms around him, her eyes on me, shining with tears. With love. And then closing her eyes, saying something none of us could hear, taking her last breath in the arms of the man who loved her.

Then, I saw tragedy in it; now I see beauty.

I remember every nuance of that moment in my backyard, with the branches of the yew tree spread out above our heads and the scent of jasmine in the air.

I look down at the second name tag in my hand.

Sophie Mauriac.

My beautiful baby girl, who grew into a solemn, thoughtful woman, who stayed near me for the whole of her life, always worrying, fluttering around me like a mama hen. Afraid. She was always just a little afraid of the world after all that we had lived through, and I hated that. But she knew how to love, my Sophie, and when cancer came for her, she wasn’t afraid. At the end, I was holding her hand, and she closed her eyes and said, “Tante … there you are.”