Paris Never Leaves You

by Ellen Feldman

  The promise had been so terrifying in its appeal that she’d put down the tube of Helena Rubinstein lipstick she’d been about to buy, turned, and walked out of the store. No one but a fool would try to erase the past. The only hope was to stand guard against it.

  Even now, in her dreams, she heard Vivi crying, not the childish whimpers and sobs of temporary discomfort but a shrieking rage born of an empty belly, and chilled-through bones, and the agony of rashes and bites and festering sores. Sometimes the crying in the dream was so loud that it wrenched her awake, and she sprang out of bed before she realized the sound was only in her head. Then, still sweating, she took the few steps down the short hall from her room to her daughter’s and stood beside the bed, listening to Vivi’s breath coming soft and safe in the miraculous New York night that was broken not by boots on the stairs or banging on the door but only by the occasional siren screaming that help rather than trouble was on the way.

  Waking hours brought different nightmares about her daughter. Every cough was the first sign of tuberculosis, every stomach upset the harbinger of a bug that had been lying dormant, every rash the return of disease, and the knowledge that these days there was penicillin to treat it didn’t mitigate the terror. Vivi could not possibly have escaped without consequences. Her slight fourteen-year-old body had to be pregnant with dormant disaster.

  Sitting in the audience at school performances, she measured Vivi against the other girls. Was she the runt of the litter? Were her bones permanently deformed by malnutrition? Had her mother’s fear and remorse scarred her psyche? But standing beside her classmates in her starched white blouse and blue jumper, Vivi bore no evidence of earlier hardships. Her hair gleamed dark and glossy in the glare from the overhead lights. Her legs stretched long and coltish in the navy-blue knee socks. Her wide smile revealed a sunny streak and improbably white teeth. All the hours Charlotte had spent queueing for food, every mouthful she hadn’t eaten so Vivi could, every chance she’d taken, even the compromises she’d made had been worth it. Vivi looked just like her classmates, only better.

  Nonetheless, some differences did set her apart. She was one of twelve students, a single representative in each class, on scholarship. The other girls inhabited sprawling apartments, duplexes, and penthouses on Park and Fifth Avenues filled with parents and siblings, dogs and domestic help. Vivi lived with her mother in four small rooms on the top floor of an old—in America, a seventy-year-old building was considered old—brownstone on East Ninety-First Street. At Christmas, other girls headed to grandparents who inhabited Currier and Ives landscapes, or north or west to ski, or south to the sun. Vivi and her mother carried a small tree home from a stand on Ninety-Sixth Street, put it up in a corner of the living room, and decorated it with ornaments bought at B. Altman the first year they were here, and added to annually. The ornaments were new, but the tree, Charlotte insisted, was a tradition. Her family had always celebrated Christmas. It had taken Hitler, she liked to say, to make her a Jew. That was the other thing that set Vivi apart. There were fewer Jewish girls in the school than scholarship students. Neither condition was ever mentioned, at least in polite company, as the phrase went.

  The point was, despite those deprivations and disadvantages, Vivi was flourishing. Only the other night, sitting in the living room, Charlotte had looked up from the manuscript she was reading and seen Vivi at the dining table doing her homework. There was a desk in her room, but she liked being near her mother. The experts whom Charlotte read said that would soon stop, but she didn’t believe them. Experts dealt in generalizations. She and Vivi were singular. Vivi had been sitting with one foot in her regulation brown oxford tucked under her, a silky curtain of dark hair falling forward as she bent over her book, her mouth pursed in concentration. Looking across the room at her, Charlotte had barely been able to keep from shouting with joy at the sheer miracle of it.

  She put her handbag back in the drawer, left the cubicle, and started down the hall to the conference room.

  Horace Field was already in his place at the head of the long table. He was always the first to arrive at meetings. That was partly the result of his impatience, but only partly. He sat, leaning back in his chair, but the relaxed pose and the loose Harris tweed jacket couldn’t hide the dormant power of his muscled shoulders and arms. Sometimes Charlotte wondered if, in his mind’s eye, he was still the lean loping young man, the former college tennis player, she’d seen in a photograph in an old issue of Publishers Weekly from before the war. In the picture, he sported a trim mustache, and as she’d sat at her desk studying it, she’d been sure he’d grown it to look older. She’d met him once briefly at the time, but she had been too young herself to realize how young he was. He really had been a boy wonder. The mustache was gone now, and his hairline was beginning to recede. She’d noticed that when Carl Covington looked at him, he couldn’t help stroking his own white mane. Horace must have noticed it, too, because once he’d barked at Carl to stop petting himself like a goddamn dog. Horace’s face, beneath the receding hairline, was still boyish, except occasionally, when he didn’t know he was being watched. Then frown lines, no, fury lines settled between his eyes, which were icy blue and watchful. No one was going to blindside him.

  “Nice of you to join us, General,” he said using the French pronunciation of the title as she took a chair. In private, she was Charlie; before others she was Charles or General, both pronounced with French accents. She wished she weren’t. The nicknames, even the formal nicknames, implied an intimacy that didn’t exist. He’d been kind to her, and she was grateful, but generosity and gratitude were not intimacy. As far as she was concerned, they necessitated the opposite relationship. Especially with him. The youthful man in that old photograph had been reputed to be, if not a wolf, then a dangerous heartbreaker, though she was pretty sure those days were behind him.

  The other editors were already seated around the table, restive as racehorses at the starting gate, mentally snorting and pawing the ground in their eagerness to break away from the pack with a surefire bestseller, or at least an enviable quip in their own presentation or a droll jibe at a colleague’s. They got started.

  Carl Covington had a biography of Lincoln by a leading scholar.

  “Not another one,” Bill Quarrels said.

  “One-decade rule,” Carl answered. “If there hasn’t been a biography in ten years, it’s time for a new one. And books about Lincoln sell.”

  Walter Price, the sales manager, nodded. “Books about Lincoln sell. So do books about doctors and books about dogs. So what I don’t understand is why none of you geniuses has managed to find a book about Lincoln’s doctor’s dog that I can sell.”

  The discussion turned to the author’s previous sales figures, the likely sum for paperback rights (a new phenomenon since the war), and how little the agent would take. Horace didn’t say much, but his nod at the end of the discussion was eloquent. Carl said he’d make an offer.

  Bill Quarrels had a novel by a marine who’d fought his way through the Pacific.

  “Wait, let me guess,” Carl said. “The author’s name is James Jones.”

  “The market for war books has peaked,” Walter warned.

  He and Carl had been too old for the war, Bill too young. None of them looked at Horace as they spoke.

  They moved on to Faith. She had a first novel about life in a small New England town. It was quiet, she admitted, but beautifully written, and didn’t they publish moneymaking potboilers precisely so they could afford to publish small literary gems like this? No one bothered to answer that particular question, though Charlotte, who’d read the manuscript, seconded Faith’s literary opinion. Horace gave a nod of approval. No one mentioned money. No one had to. Faith had been in the business long enough to know that an appropriate advance for a book like this would be a few hundred dollars.

  Charlotte presented a book about the interaction of politics, diplomacy, and art in Renaissance Italy. That met with silence, too. She h
ad what amounted to her own little fiefdom at G&F. Only Horace cared about the books she brought in, unless they were foreign novels that might be banned. Then suddenly everyone wanted to take a look. But this one squeaked through with a nod of approval. Again a paltry advance was taken for granted.

  They went on that way for the better part of two hours. Editors presented books, formed alliances, switched sides. The process reminded Charlotte of the papal conclaves she’d read about. Only the white smoke at the end of the meeting was missing.

  She had gathered her papers and was starting for the door when Bill Quarrels caught up with her.

  “Did you have a chance to look at that novel? The one about the American spy dropped behind the lines in France before the Invasion?”

  “Didn’t you get my memo?”

  “All you said was that it was incredibly steamy.”

  “I said it was steamily incredible. Any spy who spent that much time between the sheets would have been dead twenty-four hours after parachuting in. Forty-eight at the outside.”

  He leaned his big body toward her. “Are you speaking from experience?”

  She was debating whether to bother answering when it happened. Standing in the doorway with their backs to the conference room, neither of them saw it coming. Horace Field, his massive arms propelling the wheels of his chair, came barreling between them. He missed her by a hair’s breadth but managed to careen over Bill Quarrels’s cordovan-clad right foot. Horace arrived early at meetings because he didn’t like people watching him maneuver his wheelchair, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t skillful at it.

  “Ouch,” Bill shouted, and jumped out of the way, too late.

  “Sorry, Bill,” Horace called back as he sped down the hallway.

  * * *

  She hadn’t forgotten the letter she’d tossed in the wastebasket. Now and then during the editorial meeting, she’d found herself thinking about it. She didn’t want to read it, but she knew she would. She wasn’t sure why. She couldn’t erase the past, despite what the woman in the Saks makeup department had promised, but she had no intention of wallowing in it. Still, it didn’t seem right not to read it. She’d resolved to fish it out of the wastebasket as soon as she got back to her office, but she hadn’t counted on finding Vincent Aiello, the head of production, waiting in her cubicle.

  “You know that mystery of yours set in Morocco?”

  For a moment she thought he might actually have read one of the books he steered through production and wanted to tell her he liked it.

  “We got bound books,” he said.

  “They’re early. That’s good.”

  “Not so good. They’re missing the last page.”

  “This is a joke, right?”

  He shrugged.

  “It’s a mystery, Vincent. Not that it wouldn’t be a disaster if it weren’t. But readers do tend to want to find out who did it.”

  “Look on the bright side. Now it’s a do-it-yourself whodunit. We could be starting a whole new trend.”

  “The entire print run?”

  “Every last copy.”

  “This is coming out of your budget, not mine.”

  “To hell with budgets. I’m taking out a contract to have the binders’ kneecaps broken.” He smirked, as if daring her to believe the rumors about him.

  * * *

  She was standing on Madison Avenue, waiting for the bus and brooding about the entire print run of the unsolved mystery, when she remembered the letter. For a moment, she thought of going back, then looked at her watch and decided against it. She didn’t mind leaving Vivi alone for a few hours after school, especially if Hannah Field had finished seeing patients for the day and lured Vivi in for her homemade cakes and cookies, but she did like to get home in time to make dinner and sit down to it properly. She’d fetch the letter out first thing in the morning. And if this was one of the nights the cleaning crew came through and emptied the baskets, so much the worse. It wasn’t as if she had any intention of answering it. In fact, so much the better. The matter would be taken out of her hands.

  Two

  She stepped down from the bus and started along Ninety-First Street, careful of her footing in the gathering dusk. The rain had stopped, but a carpet of wet leaves made the sidewalk slippery. Light spilled out of the wide bay windows and intricately worked fanlights of the brownstones and lay shimmering in the puddles. Occasionally she stopped on the street and stood looking into those brilliantly lit rooms. The life going on within them intrigued her. The aura of safety mesmerized her, though she knew that was a mirage. As she stood there now, the faint aroma of a wood fire made her nostalgic, though she couldn’t have said for what. Certainly not for the acrid stench of burning papers. Then it came to her. The scent reminded her of a fire burning in the hearth on a damp night at Grandmère’s house in Concarneau. She and her mother had always wanted to go south for the summer holidays—one of the few issues on which she and her mother were arrayed against her father—but her father had been adamant about visiting his own mother. The older Charlotte had got, the more bored and sullen she’d grown during those weeks in Brittany, but what wouldn’t she give for them now, for herself, and for Vivi. She imagined the two of them walking down the long poplar-lined road and saw Vivi break into a run at her first glimpse of the sea. She straightened her shoulders against the image and started walking again.

  Halfway down the block, she opened the wrought-iron gate and descended three steps. A short cement ramp ran alongside them. Some people said sheer perversity made Horace Field go on living in a brownstone. If he and Hannah had moved to an apartment building, he could have whizzed from street to lobby to elevator with ease. Others insisted his remaining in the house he’d grown up in proved he wasn’t the cynic he pretended to be. Charlotte had a third explanation, though she’d never mentioned it to anyone, not even Horace, especially not Horace. The doorman and elevator operators in those apartment buildings would have fallen over themselves trying to assist a man in a wheelchair, and not merely for Christmas bonuses. They were, by and large, a respectful lot, at least on the surface, and many of them had been in the war. Horace could not have tolerated that. The solicitude would have embarrassed him. The condescension would have infuriated him. So he’d built the ramp for the steps outside the brownstone and installed an elevator inside.

  She closed the gate behind her, crossed the flagstone enclosure blooming with planters of orange and yellow mums that glowed in darkening evening, and pulled open the wrought-iron and glass door to the foyer.

  Later, when she thought about the incident, she’d blame it on the letter she’d thrown in the wastebasket. She wasn’t thinking of it at that moment, but it must have been lurking in her unconscious. There was no other explanation for her hallucination.

  A woman was standing with her hand to her head, her fingers pointing to her temple as if they were the barrel of a gun. Suddenly Charlotte is back in the cold dank hall of the house on the rue Vavin. The concierge’s eyes, hard and black as lumps of coal, follow her and Vivi across the shadowy space. Just as they reach the stairs, the concierge in that old apartment house where her memory has transported her moves her finger at her temple as if she is pulling a trigger. “Après les boches,” she hisses, and the words scald like steam.

  Then another night, and this is shortly before the Liberation, when Charlotte is carrying Vivi in her arms, the concierge steps out from the loge to block her path. Standing only inches away, she raises her cocked-pistol hand not to her own temple but to Vivi’s forehead. “Après les boches,” she croons, as if she is singing a lullaby, and pulls the imaginary trigger.

  Charlotte grabbed hold of the doorknob and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was back in the elegant little foyer with the black-and-white-tiled floor, watching a woman who was not her former concierge but must be one of Hannah Field’s patients tugging her hat into place in front of the gilt-framed mirror. The woman turned from her reflection, nodded to Charlotte, pulled
open the heavy outside door, and disappeared into the night.

  Charlotte went on standing in the foyer, suddenly sweating in her trench coat, though she hadn’t bothered to button in the lining that morning. She hated herself for the fear, but she hated the woman, too, for bringing it back. Après les boches. The phrase was always lying there in the murky polluted depths of her unconscious, just waiting to rise to the surface. That and the other expression that was even more chilling, but she wasn’t going to think of that.

  She started up the stairs. She rarely used the elevator in the house. It always seemed like an invasion of Horace and Hannah’s privacy. Besides, the American habit of descending on anything other than one’s own legs struck her as self-indulgent. And she liked the exercise. She was glad the gauntness was gone. She’d read somewhere that the average Parisian had lost forty pounds during the Occupation. But she didn’t want to put on too much weight.

  When she reached the first landing, it seemed gloomy. She looked up. One of the bulbs in the overhead fixture was out. That was uncharacteristic. Hannah ran a tight ship. She glanced back down at the entrance hall. It was cast in shadows. And the woman had been standing half turned away as she adjusted her hat. Anyone could have mistaken the woman for someone else.

  * * *

  They sat basking in the glow of the white-sprigged yellow wallpaper that Hannah had chosen for them before they’d moved in. Most landlords, Charlotte had since learned, would have slapped a coat of paint on an apartment in preparation for a new tenant and let it go at that, but as Hannah had often said since she’d met Charlotte and Vivi at the ship that morning almost nine years ago, they were more than tenants. Horace had known Charlotte’s father before the war, and Hannah was looking forward to having a child in the house. So she’d wallpapered as well as painted, taken Vivi shopping for curtains and a rug, and even replaced the old dying refrigerator with a new model. Charlotte hadn’t realized it at the time because all she’d seen at first was America’s abundance, but she knew now that Hannah’s managing to get her hands on a new appliance so soon after the war was a testament to her resourcefulness.