Mademoiselle Chanel

by C. W. Gortner

  She sighed. “If only I could.” She paused. “And you? Sister Thérèse is always praising your work. Even Sister Bernadette seems less demanding with you.”

  “Sister Bernadette has given up. She’s resigned to the fact that I’ll never learn proper grammar or penmanship.”

  “You haven’t answered me, Gabrielle.”

  I met her stare. “No,” I finally said. “I don’t have a vocation, either. It’s not for me.” I was about to tell her what Sister Thérèse had said. For a reason I myself had not understood, I hadn’t revealed her assurance that I could make a living. I realized why as Julia said, “They don’t know what to do with me. I’m not good at sewing, so where can I go? If they let me out now . . .” Her voice faded. Like me, she, too, had apparently been worrying about the future. “But you,” she said, with a tremulous smile. “You can do anything. You have a gift.”

  I burst out laughing. The sudden sound of it startled me almost as much as it did her. It made a raucous noise like my father’s, too loud and coarse to have come from my narrow chest. Like the nuns, I didn’t laugh often. “Honestly, Julia, where did you get such an idea? Just because I can turn a hem and embroider a pattern is hardly proof of anything.”

  “But it is.” Her declaration was solemn, as it had been that day in the cemetery when our mother died. “You may not see it yet, or maybe you don’t want to, but Sister Thérèse certainly does, and so does the Reverend Mother.”

  “Hah.” I wiggled my toes; they were starting to freeze but I didn’t want to pull them out. “The Reverend Mother won’t allow me to use the library. She set me to extra hours of prayer and memorizing the Epistles. The last thing she thinks I have is a gift.” Even as I spoke, I found myself waiting with unexpected breathlessness for her reply. Sister Thérèse had said I was more skilled than any other girl she had taught. Was that the same as having a gift?

  Julia said, “The Reverend Mother only tries you because she knows you are different. She knows you question everything. And she knows you still sneak books out of the library.”

  “She does not!”

  My sister arched her brow. “Sister Geneviève isn’t blind. Everyone knows you read every spare minute you can find. That candle under your blankets isn’t invisible, nor is the tent you make of your sheets with your knees to hide what you’re doing.”

  “Well, at least I’m not doing what Marie-Claire does,” I snorted.

  Julia sighed again. “They’ll send you to another convent, and from there you’ll find a position. You won’t end up like Maman. Or me.”

  I seized her hand in mine. “No matter what, I will never leave you or Antoinette. If you don’t have a vocation, then we must find something else for you to do. And you mustn’t let Marie-Claire or her friends push you around. They only do it because they think you are weak.”

  She looked at our entwined hands. “I am not like you, Gabrielle.”

  “Then you must learn to be. Everyone takes advantage of those who are weak.”

  The nuns called for our return. As girls slipped forth with rumpled skirts from climbing over the rocks, Julia and I gathered our shoes and stockings, and trudged down the hill to where the nuns awaited.

  Joining the procession back to the convent, I said to Julia, “I don’t know whether I have a gift or not, but I’ll do whatever I can to see us safe.”

  “Yes,” she said, without turning to me, “I have no doubt you’ll try.”

  MY EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY DAWNED like any other day: the tolling of the bell tower waking us, the somnolent assembly to the chapel, the breaking of our fast and dispersion to lessons and chores. As I sat embroidering a pillowcase, I kept glancing at the doorway, expecting my summons by the abbess. I was so distracted that I hardly paid heed to my work until Sister Thérèse chided, “Gabrielle, what has gotten into you? Look at this mess you’ve made. It’s so unlike you.”

  Glancing at the cloth in my hand, I found a tangle of threads and clumps.

  “Unstitch it all and start again,” Sister Thérèse ordered. “At once.”

  Since my triumph with the handkerchief, I rarely made a mistake. When I did, no one was harder on me than myself, my compulsion for perfection keeping me at my task until I succeeded; but all of a sudden, I couldn’t bear to sew anymore. “I don’t feel well,” I said. “The porridge this morning hasn’t agreed with me. May I be excused to use the privy?”

  “Yes, yes, but do hurry back.” Sister Thérèse waved me out.

  Rushing into the corridor, I pulled at my high collar. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. Taking to the cloisters, I paced. I’d walked these labyrinthine passages countless times, rounding the cloisters that circled the fountain. The scent of white camellias from the gardens suffused the air. Everything was as familiar as my own body, down to the mosaics in the walkway, so trodden upon during hundreds of years they were almost indiscernible.

  For an inexplicable reason, today I paused to stare at the mosaics, trying to make sense of the pattern, as if it might ease the simultaneous relief and disappointment crushing me inside. The abbess had decided I wasn’t ready. As she had done with Julia, she intended to retain me here until I declared a vocation or I was old enough to be evicted.

  “They represent the number five.”

  I spun about, startled to find I was no longer alone.

  “Didn’t you know?” said the abbess, a wry note in her voice. “I thought you’d read everything we had to offer by now and were fully aware of the meaning of those figures.”

  I looked back at the mosaics. “Five?” Now, I saw the repetition, the same five figures or five-pointed stars, duplicated over and over. “Why that number?”

  “Had you been paying as much attention to your catechism as you do to other matters, you would know it is our most holy number, the perfect embodiment of God’s creation: wind, earth, fire, water, and, most important of all, spirit. Everything we see around us contains these five elements. Five is the most sacred number in the firmament.” She motioned. “Come. I sent to the sewing room for you but Sister Thérèse returned word that you were unwell.”

  She didn’t ask the cause of my discomfort. Following her in silence, my heart pounding hard in my ears, I had to stop myself from placing a hand to my chest to subdue it.

  In her chamber, she pointed me to the stool before her desk. Once I sat, she paced to the window. She didn’t speak for such a long moment, I began to fear she was going to confront me with my continued disobedience, ordering that I never set foot in the library again. Then she said abruptly, “I have welcome news. Though you may doubt His compassion, God has seen fit to look upon you and your sisters with favor.”

  She wanted me to take the veil. She had decided my life for me. Suddenly, the walls closed in around me. I was grateful for the care the nuns had given me, the stability and refuge, and the chance to discover myself. I had also accepted that my father was never coming for us, nor had he intended to. But I still had my sisters to support. I couldn’t do it as a nun.

  She turned around. “I wrote to your family. It took me some time to locate them, but they have returned word that they are willing to receive you.”

  “Family?” I echoed. “I have no family, Reverend Mother.”

  I meant it. Though I had long ceased to expect anything of Papa, I had not forgotten how my mother’s sisters had sent us away, out of sight and out of mind, inconveniences for which no one wanted to assume responsibility.

  “Oh, but you do.” She retrieved a paper from her desk. “Your father’s sister Madame Louise Costier has written to say she can place you and Julia with her own younger sister, Adrienne, in the boarding school at our blessed convent of Notre Dame in Moulins, near where the family resides. You can spend holidays with them and, in time, seek an apprenticeship that might lead to a permanent position.”

  Upon this announcement, she waited for my response. My hands clenched in my lap. It was exactly what Sister Thérèse had told me: the news I had bee
n waiting for. But without even glancing at the letter the abbess held like a portent from heaven, I said firmly, “I do not know any Madame Louise Costier. You must have been misinformed, Reverend Mother.”

  Part of me deliberately refuted her, though I knew no one could fool the abbess. Another part of me had to see the evidence with my own eyes, for how could I have family willing to receive me? Where had they been these past seven years?

  “I surely have not. You may not be aware of it, but your father’s parents are alive and reside in a town outside Moulins. Louise is their eldest daughter; she assures me that had she known you and your sisters were here, she’d have come to visit you.”

  My nails dug into my palms. Visit? She would have come to visit but not take us in? I was right; I did not want to see her. As far as I was concerned, Louise Costier must be as bad as my other aunts, another heartless soul cut from the same unyielding cloth.

  My anger must have shown, for the abbess said, “I see you are as contrary as ever. I do fear for you, as your nature is never to be satisfied. Yet Sister Thérèse assures me God sees past my concerns.” She still didn’t offer the letter, though by now I had to hold myself back from lunging up to tear it from her fingers. “You will prepare for your departure. Inform Julia of your good fortune and see that I hear no reports that you fill her head with these unseemly doubts. Am I understood?”

  “Yes, Mother.” I stood, not feeling my legs move. As I turned toward the door, I abruptly went still, overcome by the enormity of what had occurred. Once the convent gates opened to let me out, they would close behind me forever, unless I came back begging to take the veil. When I first arrived, all I had wanted to do was leave. Now that the moment was upon me, I hesitated. What if I failed? What would happen to me, to Julia and Antoinette? A needle was not much of a weapon; it certainly had not saved Maman. How could it save me?

  I braved a look over my shoulder. Perhaps for the first time since I had darkened her threshold, the abbess detected that fear I kept tethered inside.

  “What of Antoinette?” I asked.

  “She, too, will go to Notre Dame in Moulins once her time here is over.” The abbess paused. Her voice softened. “You must remember my warning, Gabrielle: There is no place for aspiration in a humble girl’s heart. Sometimes, it’s the simplest things we should most long for.”

  I left her at her desk, with the letter from an aunt I had never met still in her hand.

  V

  She was my reflection, a mirror image of my own self, if I’d been pampered since birth, enjoying the good fortune of not only two parents but also of a doting older sister with a loving husband—the genteel embodiment of what a girl should be.

  Her name was Adrienne Chanel. I wanted to hate her at first sight.

  She wafted out to welcome us after our three-day journey to Moulins and our new convent boarding school. I might have taken dismal note of another circle of walls, another spindly bell tower and grounds within double gates, had I not been riveted by her slim figure with its cloud of hair as black as my own. She acted as if she had known us our entire lives, greeting us with an embrace and a kiss on both cheeks, so that for hours afterward I smelled her lavender scent on me.

  “How wonderful you’re here at last,” she declared. I watched her face with its thick-lashed eyes and wide mouth for any sign of hesitation. I could hardly blame her for not coming to our rescue, as we were the same age. She had been a girl when our mother died. Yet I found myself longing to find fault with her. “Now, we’re together as a family and need never be apart again.”

  I saw Julia’s entire person lean toward Adrienne’s sun. I should have been relieved—for my sister had done little but utter terrified doubts about our future—but again, that unfathomable coil in the pit of my being, which I didn’t yet recognize as envy, beset me.

  Even if I had, I would have bitten off my own tongue rather than admit it. I’d never envied anyone. How could I now find myself longing to be like my gracious aunt?

  In the weeks that followed, I could not escape her. As we were both eighteen, I had to bed in Adrienne’s dormitory, which I soon learned was the place for “charity girls,” while the exclusive dormitory in the opposite wing housed the daughters of respectable families who paid to have them educated. It was Aubazine all over again, with the same resentments and rivalries. And I knew I’d be a target because I was new, clearly impoverished, angry—in a word, different.

  Adrienne cleared my path of obstacles without any apparent effort. “Pay no mind to them,” she said as we walked to class with Julia at our heels. The rich girls with their preposterous bonnets and plump cheeks turned up their noses and said, “I smell roast chestnuts,” alluding to our peasant blood. At Aubazine, I’d have whirled on them. However, Adrienne merely paused to regard them before she lilted, “Why, Angélique, such a fetching capote you have on.” The recipient of this unexpected compliment flushed, embarrassed by her own cruelty as she muttered, “Thank you, Adrienne. Your sister Madame Costier made it.”

  “Did she really?” Adrienne smiled. “Well, it’s enchanting. It suits you perfectly.”

  “Enchanting?” I said in disbelief as we walked on. “Why would you say such a thing? That bonnet didn’t suit her in the slightest. She looks like a mule with a dead stork on her head.”

  Adrienne laughed. Even her laughter was sublime, its refinement truly differentiating us, despite our uncanny similarity of appearance. “Oh, Gabrielle, you are droll. She does look absurd, doesn’t she? But we cannot always say what we think. What kind of world would it be if we all went around admitting our dislikes?”

  “A better-hatted one?” I grumbled, though I had to admit she made sense. Her ability to win over even the most recalcitrant with her charm was a quality that I found not only maddeningly elusive in myself but also dangerously appealing.

  At night after the doors closed on the dormitory and the girls settled into their various cliques, she glided to my bed to slide between my sheets. “Tell me a story,” she whispered.

  Unsettled by her proximity, I said, “What makes you think I know any stories?”

  “Don’t be coy.” She reached over to pinch my nose. “Julia already told me you read everything you could in the library at Aubazine. You must know many stories.”

  Julia had been confiding in her. Why wasn’t I surprised?

  “All the stories I know are about martyrs or saints,” I said, refusing to surrender to her enticement. “You’ve surely read the same yourself. There is a library here, as well.”

  “Oh, I never read if I can help it,” she said, and I pounced on this admission of her ignorance with sheer delight.

  “You don’t read?”

  “No.” She reclined on our shared pillow, her hair draped about her face. “I don’t care for books. I prefer to listen to stories; it is more exciting that way. I can hear the characters as if they’re right there in front of me, on a stage.”

  My enthusiasm that I had uncovered a fault in her crumbled. “Well, I don’t know any,” I persisted, watching her from the corner of my eye as I’d watched the girls in Aubazine. “Does Aunt Louise actually make hats?” I finally asked.

  “She doesn’t make them,” explained Adrienne. “She helps decorate hats for local mercers and tailors. In the busy season, she gets work from Vichy, because the shops don’t have enough hands to get their orders completed on time. Have you ever been to Vichy?” she asked, and when I glowered at her, she nudged my ribs. “Don’t frown so much. You’ll get lines on your forehead and you really are quite pretty. Besides, you’ll visit Vichy soon enough. Louise goes twice a year to deliver consignments and buy trimmings. I often go with her. You’ll love it.”

  I barely heard her promise of a trip to Vichy. “You—you think I’m pretty?” I detested my own desperate question even as I braced myself for another of her offhand replies.

  Instead, she righted herself on one elbow to stare at me. “I do. You have such fine, distinct featu
res yet you don’t look like anyone else.”

  “Julia says I look like you. She says we are more like sisters than she is.”

  “Does she?” Adrienne seemed genuinely surprised. “Well, there is a certain family resemblance, I suppose. How could there not be? Your father is my oldest brother! Of course we look like sisters. We have the same dark eyes and olive skin, and all this crazy hair.” She gave a chuckle. “But that’s only on the outside. Inside, I think we must be quite different.”

  Again, I was discovering Adrienne had unexpected facets to her personality.

  She settled back against me. “I think you must find all this terribly provincial.”

  I was speechless. Had she forgotten I’d just left a convent in the middle of nowhere?

  “What do you yearn to be when we leave here?” she asked. “We have only two years left. I think you should become an actress. Or perhaps a grande cocotte. Yes, that would suit you! You could go to the Opéra with pearls about your throat, and bring men to their knees with a mere glance of your bold black eyes.”

  I had to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Pressing a hand to my mouth, I rocked the little bed with my stifled guffaws. When my mirth subsided, I found her regarding me patiently.

  “I have no desire to be a—what did you call it?”

  “A grande cocotte,” she said. “A courtesan.”

  “Yes, well, I have no desire to be one or bring men to their knees. That, I should think, is something you could do well enough for both of us.”

  “Oh, no.” She shook her head. “I only wish to marry for love.”

  So, she had a spark of foolishness after all. Marrying for love was a fantasy only the naive would indulge; even I knew that.

  “I’ve always dreamed of meeting a man who will fall deeply in love with me,” she went on, unaware of my scorn. “Someone handsome and gallant, not rich necessarily, or even of exalted birth—although that couldn’t hurt—but kind and considerate, who wants to marry me because he cannot live without me.”