The Missing Italian Girl

by Barbara Corrado Pope

  Quickly, now that she was sure her mother was gone, Maura squatted down and removed a loosened floorboard.

  “What are you doing?” Angela glanced up from the table where she was darning stockings.

  “Getting the money.”

  “You have more?” Angela got up to get a better look. “You must give it to Maman. There’s not much work at the school during the summer. You know how worried she gets.”

  “No,” Maura said as she pulled up Vera’s torn and dirty blue satin sack. “I’m only moving the money because I’ve read in the papers that the police look under the floor for stolen goods.”

  “Do you think they’ll really come back?” Angela whispered, clutching the stockings in her hand.

  Maura shrugged, then went over to the wall, grabbed her best dress, and looped it over her arm. She didn’t want to talk about the police coming again, although she worried about it all the time and had come up with a story that would save her and Angela. She’d tell them that Pyotr killed Barbereau, that they tried to stop him, that they were so afraid of the Russian boy they ran away, that he was the one who took the money so he could use it to— Maura bit down hard on her lip to keep the shameful words from slipping out. She stood for a moment and stared at the sack of coins in her right hand. To blame it all on Pyotr. To become a Judas. But, she rationalized, as she dropped her arm, if she lied, just a little, they’d survive, she and Angela. After all, hadn’t Pyotr struck the fatal blows to save Angela? He’d want her to survive. He would! Relieved to have worked it all out, Maura settled into one of the room’s two rickety chairs and began to tear at the threads that hemmed her cotton floral dress.

  “Maura, you must give the money to Maman,” Angela said, grabbing at Maura’s arm. Maura shook her off and picked up the scissors to hasten her work.

  “Maura!”

  “What if we need to escape? What if we need it later?” She looked up at Angela. “Besides, Maman will ask where we got it. Are you going to tell her, like you almost told that schoolteacher? Are you?” Tears blurred her eyes, making it impossible for her to see what she was doing. Maura thrust the dress down on the rough wooden table, almost toppling the kerosene lamp. This was crazy. Every time she and Angela argued, they both began to cry. They were so scared.

  When she stopped her sniffling, she swiped her sleeve across her eyes and nose, and placed the dress on her lap again. Angela sank into the chair across from her.

  “We can’t tell anyone,” Maura continued quietly. “I am, after all, doing my part, promising to work for that witch Mme Guyot.”

  “She’s not a witch.”

  Maura sighed and picked up the needle. Leave it to Angela to defend the mean, pious laundress. Of course, Maura thought as she stabbed the needle into the hem of her dress, since Angela never snuck away into the local wineshop at night, she didn’t get to hear how hard Fanny Guyot worked her “girls.” So hard that they had to console themselves with drink. Everybody’s favorite, Angela, didn’t have to contemplate slaving under the hissing steam machine in the boiling heat of summer. She didn’t have to worry about skinning her hands on the scrub board, straining her arms to beat the clothes, getting burned by splattered bleach, exhausting herself wringing out sheets, listening to Mme Guyot giving orders all day long. Not Angela. It was bad enough when Maura had helped her mother wash their things. Now to be at the district laundry all day, every day, sweating like a pig. Maura knew how hard it was going to be.

  Angela leaned toward Maura. “I’ll do it, you know. I told Maman I’d do it instead of you.”

  In and out Maura pushed and pulled the thread, fitting the coins in the fold of her dress.

  “I will,” Angela insisted.

  “As you know,” Maura said, punching the needle in again, “Mme Guyot doesn’t want you. She wants me because I am strong.”

  “But you’re too smart to be stuck in the laundry. You should find a job in a shop. Like you wanted.”

  Sometimes it made Maura even angrier at her sister when she said nice things and tried to defend her. Maura made a show of concentrating on her sewing.

  “Maura—”

  “No! You find a job as a seamstress, just as Maman said. I’ll work at the laundry and while I’m there, I’ll look for this Marie Riboyet and her bloody sheets. Maybe I can get out of her what she saw. Maybe I can find out who killed Pyotr. Or maybe you can tell me. Can’t you remember anything else about the man you met near the Basin?”

  Maura had asked that question a hundred times, and gotten the same answer: he was tall; he was in the shadows; he had a raspy voice; there was something scary about him. This time Angela did not even bother to respond. She slumped back in the chair, as if she realized she’d never win an argument with her sister.

  Maura shrugged in frustration and pressed her lips together as she concentrated on her sewing. She did not like having the police after her. She did not want to be a slave forever. She planned to use every minute she was sweating it out at the laundry to work out her escape.

  13

  CLARIE HAD ONE LAST ACADEMIC duty: the fuss and commotion of the Graduation and Prize-Giving Ceremony. That Saturday afternoon was the only time the outward trappings of wealth and status were allowed to breach the walls of the Lycée Lamartine. The colors and shapes of social distinction flowed through the gates in a flood of masculine top hats and bowlers, and gigantic showy feminine chapeaux. Before the ceremony, Clarie stood in the reception line greeting the parents. The fathers doffed their hats, while most of the mothers offered their long-gloved bejeweled hands. The artificial birds and flowers of their monstrously expensive headwear wagged at her approvingly as she spoke to them about their daughters, carefully walking the fine line between being truthful and gratifying parental egos. A tedious but necessary duty, for the new republican schools for girls needed support, and tuition.

  At last, it was time for the ceremony to begin. The teachers, hatless, in the modest high-necked attire appropriate to their calling, ascended to the stage set up in the school’s large cobble-stoned courtyard. They were followed by the two district mayors and an official from the Ministry of Education. Two of the men proudly wore a Legion of Honor medal on their lapels. Fortunately, only one of them was scheduled to speak.

  The sun bore down on the stage as the dignitary from the Ministry began his oration. At first Clarie’s attention was focused on the five rows just below the stage, her Alphonsines in all their black-and-white uniformity. Today was their time to celebrate. Although their youthful high spirits delighted her, Clarie had to hide her amusement at their raised eyebrows, furtive glances, and rolling eyes. By now, any of them could have given the assistant minister’s speech. It was that predictable.

  And, as the words droned into Clarie’s consciousness, that irritating. There was something about pompous men telling women who they are and what they should be that roused the rebel in Clarie. When, for the third and, she hoped, the last time, he praised the Lycée Lamartine for preparing its students to become the “true companions” of republican men, she almost groaned. She lowered her head to hide her frown. If only she could ask him who was training young men to become the true companions of women. She was certain that the Ministry of Education never thought to address that question.

  The tacit message was, of course, “better here than with the nuns,” where aristocrats and other anti-Republicans sent their daughters to learn how to listen to priests instead of husbands. Clarie shifted in her chair ever so slightly. Surely professors at Lamartine were more than an antidote to Catholic sisters who didn’t have nearly their education. She longed to scratch the prickly itch under her collar, anything to rub away her irritation. Instead, she reset her face in an attitude of polite interest, as a woman, the “true companion of a republican husband,” should when a man was holding forth. When he went on to flatter the audience as the backbone of the great Third Republic, she took a closer look at the crowd. While he praised “the honest business and profession
al men united in upholding the traditions of the Great French Revolution,” Clarie saw only snobbishness and division: the bankers and richer merchants sitting apart from the shopkeepers, and Christian parents quite successfully segregating themselves from the Israelites. She could tell by the hats. Birds of a feather, she thought ironically.

  His Republic, his backbone. Clarie examined her fingers, turning her wedding ring, calming herself. Was she any better, any less hypocritical? She knew full well who was not yet part of the Alphonsine republic she was so proud of. Francesca’s words came back to her: Maura was such a good student. I had to take her out of school. Neither the august representative of the nation nor the women sitting under those enormous hats thought about the daughters who spent hours in dank apartments making the artificial flowers that adorned them or stitching their silk and satin dresses together. Or sewing the buttons on Clarie’s own neat, pristine shirtwaist. This last thought humbled and saddened her, evoking Maura’s glowering, skeptical demeanor. As Clarie joined in the polite applause that signaled an end to the dignitary’s speech, she found herself longing for a time when she would be able to offer the mothers and daughters of the poor more than words of advice and sympathy.

  II

  Wednesday, 7 July 1897

  1

  “ENOUGH!” EMILIE ANNOUNCED AS SHE hit the last chord. Clarie laughed and clapped. She had requested Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood because she loved their gay simplicity. Besides, as she’d told Emilie, what could better accompany the scene of their two boys playing together on the floor. For Jean-Luc, still in his toddler gown, Emilie’s five-year-old son, who was decked out in a snow-white sailor shirt and short pants, was a veritable hero. Clarie sighed as she watched little Robert save her son’s tower of wooden blocks from toppling. The afternoon was all too soon coming to its inevitable bitter-sweet end. Emilie’s family was leaving for Normandy the very next morning.

  Clarie had sought out Emilie Franchet her first day at the Lycée Lamartine. When she thought about it later, she had to admit she’d chosen Emilie because she was short and rather plain, and not as stern-looking as the other veteran teachers. When she introduced herself, and Emilie smiled, Clarie immediately recognized she could not possibly be alone in her attraction. One forgot that Emilie’s hair was a straight mousy brown and perpetually coming out of the pins, that she barely reached Clarie’s chin, that her cheeks were covered with the tiny pockmarks of adolescence. The amused glimmer in her brown eyes said it all: life could be fun. Even French grammar, which was Emilie’s own particular burden to teach, could be fun! This is why her students loved her as much as her colleagues.

  As Clarie and Emilie grew closer during the year, they often regretted that they had not been at Sèvres at the same time. How they could have explored Paris together! Studied for their exams, encouraged each other before each nerve-racking oral. But then, they always conceded, they had a lifetime. Just not this summer, Clarie thought ruefully.

  “You must, must come to visit,” Emilie said, as if reading her thoughts.

  “No, not with Bernard’s new position, we can’t really leave.”

  Another crash sounded from the bedroom, where Emilie’s mother and a maid were busily packing up for the journey to Normandy.

  Emilie threw up her hands. “I’d better go see.”

  Jean-Luc ran up to Clarie and pulled on her skirt. He wasn’t used to so much commotion. Emilie’s boy, Robert, continued twirling his top, unperturbed. A modicum of chaos was all part of a life lived with a grandmother, a maid, a nanny, and two exuberant, working parents.

  Clarie picked up her boy and swayed back and forth with him in her arms. “As soon as Madame Franchet is ready, we are going to the park to see if the ice cream cart is there and if the man will play a nice song for us.” This time it was her son’s turn to clap his hands. “Choco, Maman, choco.”

  “Chocolate,” she agreed, putting him back on the floor and watching as he toddled toward his blocks. He was growing so fast.

  “All right,” Emilie continued the conversation as if she had not been interrupted, “you and Jean-Luc will come to visit. Has your little boy ever been to the sea? Has he ever traveled on the train?”

  Before Clarie could demur again, Emilie added, “Jean-Luc and Robert are like cousins. They are each other’s family in Paris.”

  “If I go anywhere this summer—”

  “Oh, that’s right. Arles. Your doting Italian papa. All those half-brothers and their big families. The veritable southern clan,” Emilie exclaimed in mock horror. During their lunch hours and their walks home together, she and Clarie had often marveled at how different their upbringings had been, yet how immediately they had become attached to each other. Emilie’s father had been a rich banker, her mother from an old merchant family. Neither could keep themselves from indulging their only child, even if that meant she would refuse an appropriate marriage and insist on becoming a teacher. Even if, in the last year of her father’s life, she married a teacher, every bit as clever and sardonic as she. But, of course, quite poor. Emilie always insisted she had been thoroughly spoiled, while Clarie countered that the only way to spoil a child, or anyone, for that matter, is not to love them.

  “If you go to Arles I’ll be so jealous, but I’ll just have to accept it,” Emilie conceded, putting on a playful pout.

  “What’s this I hear?” Emilie’s short, plump mother peeked into the parlor. “Arles in the summer, when we have my dear late husband’s huge estate on the coast. Oh no, my dear. Impossible. Look at those little boys.” And, of course, being a grandmother she did pause to admire Robert and Jean-Luc. “You both should have more of them. Forget this teaching. Forget everything except coming,” she said, her voice rising to a crescendo as she threw up her hands echoing Emilie’s exasperated gestures. Then once again she disappeared into the bedroom. Even on a day filled with domestic duties, Emilie’s mother wore a rose and cream silk dress and wound her white hair in a fantastic cluster of curls around her face. Somehow she had raised a daughter who cared not a whit for fashion or show, but one who demonstrably shared her ebullient and generous spirit.

  “Oh, dear Emilie, I’m going to miss you. Can you come to the Square d’Anvers with us?” Anything to prolong this perfect, carefree day.

  Clarie’s invitation brought little Robert to his feet, running to his mother. “They’re getting ice cream. I want some too!”

  “And why not,” she said, lifting her son’s chin with her finger and peering into his eyes. “Besides,” she commented to Clarie, “Mother likes to organize. Let’s play hooky.”

  Emilie lived in one of the elegant new apartments in a quiet, narrow street behind the administration building of the Paris Gas Company. The gas works themselves had been moved to the northern suburbs, much to the relief of the old, and new, inhabitants of the district. Just in time, Emilie would say, to provide her with a bright new home near her school. In the winter, if both of them worked late, Emilie and Clarie often walked part-way home together, separating near the gild-edged, iron-wrought gates of the Company. If they were really late, they’d see lamplighters leaving the building, heading out to illuminate the city.

  This time, reaching the rue Condorcet, they turned away from the Gas Company and in the direction of Clarie’s apartment. Each of them held on to her boy’s hand to keep them away from shoppers, bustling by on sidewalks, and the carriages clomping through the street. Emilie and Robert took the lead, and Jean-Luc proudly followed in the footsteps of his big friend. Over the traffic, Clarie heard the stream of questions that Robert babbled to his mother. Where are we going? What kind of ice cream can I have? Why doesn’t Jean-Luc wear short pants? Are we going to see Papa?

  The little park in Square d’Anvers bordered the College Rollin, one of the biggest boys’ high schools in Paris. And, indeed, Robert’s father, Edgar Franchet, did teach there. As for Jean-Luc, Emilie patiently told her son that by the end of the summer his little friend would be in britche
s. For his part, Jean-Luc, who had to struggle to keep up, was silenced by his friend’s loquacity. When they came to a halt at the rue Turgot, Clarie tousled her boy’s hair, imagining the day he would be able to talk and walk as fast as his friend, and even go to the College Rollin.

  When Robert crossed the street ahead of Clarie and Jean-Luc, he began to swivel his head, searching, and finally pointed his finger toward Montmartre. “Look. Look on top of the hill. There’s the abom … abom … abominer.” Clarie immediately knew what the boy was referring to. The rue Turgot cut through the dense neighborhood at just the right angle to give a spectacular uphill view of the unfinished Sacré-Coeur Basilica.

  “Shhh,” Emilie bent down to shush her boy and took him by the arm. Then she turned back to Clarie. “I believe he is truly his father’s son,” she said, with a resigned shake of her head.

  Amused by little Robert’s attempt to repeat Edgar Franchet’s words, Clarie picked up Jean-Luc to show him what had made his friend so excited. The four of them huddled at the corner of the rues Turgot and Condorcet, waiting for a few matrons, who might well be a shocked by a five-year-old’s loud condemnation of a church, to pass them by.

  “Now, dear,” Emilie said to her son, when they were alone, “we all know that churches should be only about love and charity, not about condemning others. But we needn’t talk so loud about what we believe.” Clarie listened with interest to this lesson of maternal moderation, knowing that at some point she’d probably have to give the same admonition to her own son. Bernard also complained bitterly about having to witness the construction of the gleaming white edifice from his neighborhood. For all left-leaning republicans, all socialists, all anarchists, the rising national basilica was truly an “abomination” because its builders proclaimed its purpose to be retribution for the sins of those who had revolted during the Paris Commune. Men like Bernard Martin and Edgar Franchet thought of it in quite the opposite way: that it was an ugly representation of the sins of the bourgeoisie who had crushed and killed the rebellion of 1871.