Floralie held her breath. “And where was that, Mr. Tullier?”
“Palais Garnier, where she used to perform with Le Ballet Royale, even before she was a principal dancer. She kept it in a secret compartment beneath a drawer in the vanity of her dressing room. She kept it there to hide it.”
“From who?”
“Me. Viscaria thought if I ever found it, I would burn it. But you know what’s funny? I did find it. Viscaria began performing with the ballet when she was a teenager, still working for me. She kept a copy backstage at the theater in Paris. After we lost touch, I gave up on getting it back. Even living in the same village, we never really saw each other. I kept to myself. Seeing her, I knew, would hurt more than most anything.
“Besides, I just couldn’t . . . I couldn’t bring myself to hurt it. Not even to touch it. That one last book. I can hardly imagine it’s still there now, though. That was years ago . . . She must have been no older than fifteen when I found that book. She danced in many theaters after all; it wasn’t as if she owned that dressing room. But my, was it her favorite.”
“So there’s a chance,” said Floralie. “There’s a chance the book is still there.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Tullier. “There is a chance.”
“Then I’m taking it. When do we leave for Paris?”
“Now.”
“Now?” Floralie’s head was spinning.
“Yes, Mr. Tullier’s right,” Miss Clairoux replied. “The sooner we find Viscaria, the better.”
And so Floralie and Miss Clairoux readied themselves to leave. Floralie packed in her bag the flower box, the dreamland book, and the Eglantine page. Miss Clairoux tucked a sleepy Philomenos into her coat pocket. When they returned to the kitchen, they found Mr. Tullier surprisingly dressed in slacks and a button-up vest rather than his usual bathrobe, sipping another mug of coffee.
“You’ve got your things, then?” he said.
Floralie nodded.
“You and Miss Clairoux will need disguises. We’ll stop by the village, then leave from there.” He placed his mug in the sink, licked his lips, and said, “Allons-y.”
And off they went.
The first time Papa took Floralie to watch one of Mama’s ballet shows, Floralie thought the dancers looked like cotton seeds in the wind. They danced with great elegance, but when Mama came onstage, all eyes turned to her. The audience leaned in so close, so quietly, one could almost hear Mama’s breath, soft and gentle. She was grand, she was roses and marigolds and poppies, blooming with every step.
And Papa would lean in close and whisper, “Isn’t she something, Flory?”
After the performance, Papa gave Mama a bouquet of carnations, all different colors. Mama kissed Papa’s forehead, and then kissed Tom’s forehead, and then kissed Floralie’s. They were happy.
As Floralie, Miss Clairoux, and Mr. Tullier sat on the train from Giverny to Paris, Floralie gazed out her window, watching the tulip fields disappear. The green, green grass melded into Mama’s eyes, so bright, so full of life. Excitement and nervousness fluttered in Floralie’s stomach at the thought of maybe finding Mama. She held Philomenos up to the window so he could see the fields disappearing, too. Mr. Tullier sat with a newspaper covering all but his legs, and Miss Clairoux slept, hat over her face.
Floralie pulled the dreamland book from her suitcase and leafed through to the last pages—a section devoted to impressionist artists. Degas’s ballerinas danced across the pages, Van Gogh’s skies swirled and twinkled, even in black and white. And then Monet. The same quote Floralie had read the day Nino first showed her the book stared back at her. The same quote Mama would hum on summer days, sigh on winter ones. I must have flowers, always and always. But what was most peculiar was what was beside it.
Floralie’s own flower drawings bloomed in the margins of Monet’s page. Floralie knew that when she was younger, she drew on just about every surface she could find, but how strange it was that she would draw in this particular book. Someone—Tom, Papa, or Mama—must have checked out the book from the library.
Beside the drawings, a photograph of a Monet painting was circled. Within the frame, a girl, daisy-blond hair and faraway eyes, wandered down a garden path, carrying an armful of flowers. Floralie recognized the path from Monet’s garden. The caption read, Young Girl in the Garden at Giverny, by Claude Monet, at La Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris. Floralie vaguely recalled seeing the painting once when she was younger—she had, after all, visited La Musée de l’Orangerie many times with Mama and Tom. Beneath the caption was a quote:
Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
—Claude Monet
It was a lovely painting and all, and a lovely quote, too, but Floralie wondered why it was circled. And perhaps more important, who had circled it, and why were Floralie’s own drawings beside it?
Floralie closed the book and then her eyes. And though she knew there wouldn’t be flowers, and she knew the grass would be golden, the trees barren, she tried to fly to her enchanted forest. But something held her back, as if simply knowing winter had fallen in the forest anchored her to the ground. So instead, she wrote a poem on her hand.
Flowers
By Floralie Alice Laurel
Preserve my flowers in oil and pigment
And memories in long-winded letters never sent.
I know that fears grow in gardens
And my heart will harden
Yet still, I never want to leave
I am naïve
Because of the wretched season’s turn
I never learn.
And I am to blame
For letting my heart play the garden’s game
Of this cruel vulnerability,
Watching my flowers wilt in the cold reality.
Come back the next day,
And the next day, and the next day
To the frostbitten wasteland of rainbows turned gray.
But despite constant persistence,
All my forget-me-nots keep their distance.
I know that regrets grow in barren land,
And until the day I understand
The importance of caring about things that disappear,
I swallow the fear
And know that there is a reason
For the changing of the season.
Floralie wondered what Nino would think of it. She held A History of Dreamlands to her heart and wondered about Sappho, the great poet catching fireflies and words thousands of years ago. She wondered what her life was like. If she had ever felt vulnerable and alone and scared. If she ever felt like she had a gap in her heart. Certainly, Floralie couldn’t be the only one; but at that moment, she felt like it.
Mama’s measuring tape lay tangled on the living room floor. Its ends were frayed and numbers blurred, but still, it made its daily route around Mama’s waist. Mama sat with Floralie perched on her bony knee, reading aloud Alice in Wonderland, and giving all the characters different voices—some serious, but mostly silly.
“You’re not a paper doll, Floralie,” said Mama when they came to a chapter break. “You’re made of porcelain, glass eyes, hand-painted lips. Never let anyone press you into paper.” She shut her the book on a wild tansy between pages 68 and 69.
Floralie nodded her head, but that was where Mama and Floralie differed. Because Floralie believed she was flesh and bone, not porcelain, not glass, not paper. And that one belief made all the difference.
“Ah, Paris!” swooned Miss Clairoux, taking a gulp of air as they stepped onto the station platform. Floralie gulped in some air, too; it smelled of thick smoke and metallic train engines, but tasted like freshly baking bread and marmalade. It tasted like Mama’s perfume, too; it tasted the way wildflowers smell.
Mr. Tullier strode ahead, and Miss Clairoux and Floralie followed. When they emerged into the streets of Paris, Floralie soaked in the scene of bustling men and women.
Black cars rattled by, voices leaped to and fro, and the buoyant jazz of a street musician’s saxophone galloped down the pavement. The sky was bleak and drizzle spattered her dress, but Floralie was still in awe. She remembered Paris, of course, from years ago when her mother had taken her and Tom to see the shows. Mama had even shown Floralie her dressing room and let Floralie play with the tins of makeup. And when it was time for the show, Tom and Floralie would sit in the far back with Papa and watch Mama fly.
As they strode through the streets, coal-faced boys skittered by, and every time Floralie glimpsed one, for a fleeting moment, she would swear it was Nino. But no, they were just thieves and chimney sweeps, crooked grins and grimy hands . . .
They turned corner after corner, and soon, lights began to ease the evening darkness. One more corner, and the streets swarmed with women in silken dresses and bejeweled cloche hats, draped over the arms of their black-suited escorts. A gigantic banner hung across a tall building. Floralie’s heart fluttered; she had seen a banner like it before. LE BALLET ROYALE DE PARIS, it read, PRÉSENTE LA BELLE COLETTE BEAUCHENE DANS GISELLE.
Floralie tore her eyes from the banner and hurried to keep up with Mr. Tullier and Miss Clairoux. “Mr. Tullier, is that it?” she said, unable to mask the excitement from her voice. “That’s Palais Garnier, isn’t it?”
Mr. Tullier glanced down to her. “Yes. Don’t get too excited, though. You won’t be in the audience.”
“Oh.” Floralie’s shoulders slumped. “Then where will I be?”
“Come with me.” Mr. Tullier led Floralie and Miss Clairoux into a hat shop beside the theater and asked the shopkeeper for the restrooms. The shopkeeper led them to the back and left them be.
“Delphine, you change into the dress from Madame Bonnet’s Boutique,” said Mr. Tullier. “And, Floralie—for now, you’ll need something a little different.” Mr. Tullier unzipped his suitcase, and when he opened the lid, Floralie’s hand shot for her mouth. She stared in awe. The suitcase was stuffed with lace and silk; Floralie knew that silk. Mr. Tullier pulled out the dress and handed it to Floralie, before pulling out a black suit for himself.
The skirt of the dress was made of white tulle dotted with pearls, and it had a veil to match. It was the very same dress Mama had worn in her earlier performances with Le Ballet Royale, only this one was a few years older, as it appeared it might suit a girl hardly older than Floralie.
“This was my mother’s ballet costume,” said Floralie.
Mr. Tullier nodded. “Yes. She left it with me when . . . when she left me. It was for one of her first bigger roles. She was a wili.”
Floralie knew the wilis to be the ghostlike figures that used to haunt Floralie’s dreams after every performance of Giselle, not because she feared them, but because they entranced her. She ran her fingers along the puffy fabric, Philomenos crawling over its ridges as if riding ocean waves. “But I’m not—I’m not a ballerina, Mr. Tullier, what—”
“You have one job, Floralie, one job only, and that is to sneak into the dressing rooms and find the book. The only way in is to be a part of the cast.”
“But all the dancers are older than me, surely—”
“Wear the veil, and no one will notice,” said Mr. Tullier, but then he muttered, “J’espère.”
I hope so too, Mr. Tullier, thought Floralie, for she was starting to feel rather uncertain about Mr. Tullier’s plan.
“Leave your dress in my suitcase by the stairwell to the dressing rooms. When you’ve got the book, change into that dress immediately, so no one sees what you’re up to.”
“Okay,” said Floralie, though warily. “Okay, I’ll try,” and she changed into the costume, Miss Clairoux into her gown, and Mr. Tullier into his suit. On their way out, Floralie draped Miss Clairoux’s emerald coat over herself to hide the costume, trying not to trip on the over-long fabric.
As they entered the theater, Floralie felt as if she were spiraling back in time to when she was small, to when the gold-encrusted ceiling looked farther away than the sky and the chandeliers looked brighter than stars.
“Do you remember the way to the dressing rooms?” whispered Mr. Tullier.
“I think so,” said Floralie.
“Then go now. We will meet you outside at intermission.” He handed Floralie the suitcase with Madame Bonnet’s dress.
Floralie slipped Philomenos into her bag, then handed the bag to Miss Clairoux along with the coat.
“Bonne chance, Floralie,” whispered Miss Clairoux, and Floralie began to weave through the crowd, wili veil crumpled in her free hand like paper stolen by mice.
When the dance master threw Mama out of the theater, Mama simply stood, staring at her name lit up on the banner.
“I danced there first,” said Mama, coltsfoot flower drooping out from her low-slung ballet bag. “It just isn’t fair. I danced there first.”
Floralie had never entered the dressing room alone before; it felt strange, not to have her mother’s fragile hand to hold on to. As she neared the narrow side-staircase leading down to the dressing rooms, Floralie tucked the suitcase behind a banister. She fastened the veil to her hair and draped it over her face, then descended the stairs. The chattering above disintegrated, and Floralie was plunged into memory. She slipped off her shoes and held them in her hands like one might at the beach. Shoes, Mama once told her, are the enemies of dancers.
Floralie counted off the doors: One, two, three, four. Mama’s dressing room had been the fifth, which she shared with seven other ballerinas. Floralie’s fingers met the brass doorknob, and she twisted . . .
Four dancers were there, three of them at their mirrors and one stretched out on the floor in a split. Floralie avoided eye contact with them as she made a beeline for Mama’s corner vanity table, praying the new owner of the vanity was not the dancer on the floor.
Floralie took a breath, pulled back the chair, and sat before the mirror. A small plaque above the mirror read in curly gold letters Colette. Atop the vanity table, among the tins of blush and tubes of lipstick, was a small childish drawing, tiny potatolike figures hugging with stick-arms bigger potato figures. At the top of the page, in wobbly script read, “Ma Tante Colette et Moi.” “My Aunt Colette and Me,” Floralie translated. And she smiled because she remembered leaving drawings like that on this very vanity table for her mother as well, scribbles that evolved into stick figures that evolved into paintings. But oddly, she didn’t feel happy, precisely, at the memory . . . It was strange the way it made her both sad and happy at the same time.
Floralie brushed away the memories. She had to find the book; that was what she came here for. Find the book, decode the flowers, save Mama. Floralie remembered Mr. Tullier’s words: “She kept it in Paris, in the same place she kept her pointe shoes . . . a secret compartment beneath a drawer in the vanity of her dressing room.”
There were two drawers beneath the table. Floralie reached for the topmost one and slid it open carefully, quietly. Inside were two pairs of ratty ballet slippers, a hairbrush, and a sewing kit. She slid the drawer shut, then pulled open the second and peeked inside. There were at least a hundred hairpins, a pair of pearl earrings, a silk flower, and copious amounts of gauze.
The compartment, thought Floralie. It’s got to be here somewhere. As she sifted through the drawer, however, someone shouted, “Colette!” A wili at a vanity table a ways off sprang out of her chair and clasped her hands together.
A tall, slender woman glided in, pointe shoes in hand. She wore the same blue tulle skirt and velvet bodice that Floralie’s mother had worn for the first act of Giselle when she had played the starring role.
“You’re beautiful!” bubbled a wili in French, and the other wilis gathered around Colette as well, saying, “You make a perfect Giselle!” and “Are you nervous? Don’t be nervous.”
Floralie’s heart beat three times faster. She slid shut the drawer and slunk back from the vanity table as Colette brushed off her fellow dancers and ambled over to i
t. Floralie stood in the corner, waiting for one of the dancers to realize she wasn’t one of them, but they were all too preoccupied with Colette.
Colette laced up her pointe shoes, poked a few more hairpins into her bun, and said, “How do I look, my loves?”
The wilis chorused back: “Gorgeous!” “Fantastic!” “Stunning!”
Someone knocked at the door. “Yes, it’s open,” said Colette, and an older man with slicked-back gray hair and a black suit and bow tie stepped in. Floralie recognized him as the ballet master, Edgard Bertrand, from when her mother had danced for him. “Audience is settled, ladies. Are you just about ready?”
Colette and the other dancers nodded, and the man said, “Good, follow me backstage please.”
Floralie froze; she clutched the rim of a vanity table behind her as the dancers filtered out of the dressing room. Mr. Bertrand was about to leave when he caught sight of Floralie. “You too! Come, this is no time for nerves.”
Floralie couldn’t speak. She simply nodded and followed the dancers into the corridor. She watched them from the back as they floated down the hall like snowdrops in a breeze. Floralie tried to match their elegance—their soft footsteps, perfectly turned-out feet—but simply felt like a waddling penguin.
When they arrived backstage, Floralie found herself amidst a crowd of at least fifty dancers, all in dazzling costumes. She sidled to the corner as Mr. Bertrand ushered the first group of dancers into the stage’s wings.
The first scenes dragged on and on. Floralie half wished she could watch in the wings, and half wished she could disappear altogether. She watched the other dancers backstage and tried to mimic some of their stretching as she waited, and with each minute that passed, she felt as if something yanked her stomach even tighter—not to mention her hamstrings. When at last, act 1 neared its end, Mr. Bertrand hurried all the wilis—including Floralie—into the wings.
Floralie knew she should leave, sneak away and find the drawer, but her feet would not listen to her head, and they carried her to the front of the crowd of ballerinas. And as she peeked out to the stage, she felt as if her heart would burst, for it was as if she were five years old again, watching her mother glide across the stage. But though Colette danced with much grace, she could not even come close to Viscaria’s vivacity.
The Flourishing of Floralie Laurel Page 15