In truth, the connection was a glancing one. Monsieur Druette had sold a set of antique tin soldiers to a man who had offered twice the amount Monsieur Druette had hoped to get at the flea market. The scrap of paper with his name and address had been saved in a desk drawer in case Monsieur Druette came across more bric-a-brac he could sell to the man at an unreasonable price, but it had never happened. He’d forgotten it until now.
Nonetheless Martin Druette was pleased to have safe-guarded the address. He was a man who prided himself on his frugality. He saved the tin lids from cans and the paper sleeves in which baguettes were sold. Monsieur Druette had a box in which he saved bits of string and rubber bands, which he cut in two if they were thick enough to allow duplication. His wife had labeled the box “Bits of string too small to use,” but Monsieur Druette believed that sooner or later, everything had its use.
“To assist at what kind of work?” Lavinia asked, as Monsieur Druette hurriedly copied out the address. He sighed with irritation. He couldn’t remember what kind of assistant it was the man had mentioned he was looking for. The remark had been made in passing and hadn’t been of concern until now, when it had suddenly become useful. He handed her the man’s coordinates, written in small tight letters using as little ink as possible, on a scrap of brown paper which, judging from the odor, had recently wrapped a pungent cheese. Lavinia instinctively lifted the torn corner of paper to her nose to have a deeper whiff, but Monsieur Druette interpreted this action as a reproach.
“Oh-la-la,” he countered gutturally, rolling his eyes, and puffing air through his lips, “do you want me to write it on my shirt perhaps? Would that please you, Madame?” he demanded, as he ushered her out of his establishment, opening the door so violently the glass panes rattled. Lavinia would have tried to explain, to say something to mollify him and certainly she would have thanked him had she not been choking back the laughter she knew might erupt if she as much as opened her mouth.
She had never actually heard a Frenchman say “oh la la” before, though its use in caricature just like the beret or baguette, was everywhere in evidence. But the three nonsense syllables, like a magic charm, released an explosive, childish hilarity, as if uncorking the exaggerated passions enacted by the Grand Guignol puppets on Saturday mornings in the Tuilleries. Her mistake had been to let herself imagine Monsieur Druette in the costume of Gendarme, wielding his oversized baton.
When Lavinia got back to her apartment she took the scrap of brown paper out of her handbag, which had begun to smell like cheese, and put it in the icebox, next to a jar of cornichons. It languished there for months, soggy and forgotten. Lavinia distracted herself with Anne Aubretton and Alice Baker and her new circle of friends, allowing them to enlist her for the various causes they championed, all of which were worthy if not compelling. It gave her an immediate sense of community and she noticed with amusement that among the expats, the worse their French, the more fervently they welcomed her to the fold.
When the telegram arrived announcing her mother’s imminent arrival, Lavinia found herself charged with childish glee and nervous energy, the combination of emotions that had dominated the days before Christmas when she was little, infusing her with a buzzing feeling that was both pleasant and unpleasant, like being tickled too long. Mrs. Gibbs was traveling with Gordon and his wife on the S.S. Normandy and would be staying in the Place Vendôme.
“Father can’t come. Next time for sure” was the only reference made to the conspicuous absence of her father. Lavinia had read the telegram over and over, smoking cigarette after cigarette, as if there were still more for the yellow foolscap to reveal. It was not clear to her if her father’s absence indicated censure or circumstance. She could readily imagine that he was still nursing his indignation; her broken engagement had cast in a questionable light business dealings between Shelby and Mr. Gibbs.
In the months following the announcement of the engagement, Mr. Gibbs had taken a significant sum of money from Shelby to invest in the stocks that Mr. Gibbs’s firm represented. When the engagement was broken, the money was not immediately available and the investment began to look suspect. It was repaid, of course, and Shelby had done well when the deal was ultimately concluded. In the intervening months, however, Mr. Gibbs had had to suffer the whispers and rumors that stained the reputation he had so carefully built on the floor of the Exchange.
“If any man had besmirched my reputation to the extent my daughter has, he would have lost his teeth,” was what he had told his sons, and they repeated it to Lavinia.
“Because you are headstrong and selfish you have made what our family did out of generosity look like greed. Father would never have allowed an outside investor to take part in that deal. It was only because your impending marriage gave Shelby the privileges of family. And guess what, Lavinia,” Gordon had added theatrically, “even though he’ll make a bundle, that’s not what gets remembered.”
It was also possible that her father was choosing to take advantage of the opportunity to enjoy the rare pleasure of solitude. Early in his marriage, he had been reluctant to leave his beautiful wife alone for fear he would lose her to a poacher. Later, she was reluctant to leave him alone because she had discovered he had a mistress. Even after the affair had ended, Mrs. Gibbs maintained a scrupulous accounting for her husband’s whereabouts, managing his time like a miser hoarding the final coins of a lost fortune.
“I think at this point, Father’s idea of a holiday is a vacation from Mother,” Grace had once remarked, based only on the fact that at a luncheon party Mr. Gibbs had interrupted his wife in the middle of an anecdote by saying briskly, as he signaled for the soup plates to be cleared, “I’m sure everyone here has heard this story before, Eliza, and we don’t want to tax their goodwill.”
Grace would have been devastated to learn of her father’s infidelity; she had enough trouble sharing his attention with her mother and siblings, and while she might adopt a posture of offended rectitude, the truth was that it would have made her jealous. Lavinia therefore never told Grace about the argument she had heard rise up the chimney flue one night at the summer house, when all the children were supposed to be asleep, the sharp sibilant hisses conveying an anger all the more powerful for having been constrained in whispers.
There were many secrets Lavinia had kept over the years. She’d never told anyone about what she saw Ambrose doing to a chambermaid at the Gritti Palace in Venice the summer they had toured Europe as a family or that it was Gordon who had stolen the envelope with cash for Christmas bonuses her father had brought home to distribute among their own servants and those who worked for the building. It was not a huge sum of money. Mr. Gibbs did not believe in lavish tips: it encouraged indolence and expectation. The housekeeper had been fired and the incident was quickly forgotten. But not by Lavinia. She had known too which servants had taken bottles of wine from the pantry or change from the silver bowl on Ambrose’s dresser, or used her mother’s perfume before heading out on their one day off a week, but she said nothing. Lavinia wondered from time to time what secret things her siblings knew that she didn’t; she imagined them all working on separate jigsaw puzzles that would never be complete.
The prospect of the family visit filled Lavinia with excitement and dread in alternating rushes. Suddenly, there was no time for anything but the preparation for their arrival. Lavinia retreated to the claw-foot bathtub making lists until her fingertips were as dimpled as overcooked peas. She wrote down topics to be avoided, and questions to ask, sights to see, and lists of last-minute improvements to be made to her apartment or herself.
She bought the missing niceties her mother would expect to see if she came to inspect the apartment, such as a bedspread and curtains, and hand towels, although Lavinia knew there was no way to gild the truth; Mrs. Gibbs would be horrified by her bohemian lifestyle even though by Parisian standards it qualified as privileged. A housekeeper and a laundress were features that set her well above the average Parisian in the
1930s but these were details not likely to impress her mother as anything but the most basic necessities.
When the second telegram arrived, this time from the Savoy in London, Lavinia was not entirely surprised to learn that the itinerary had changed and the Paris leg of the trip had been severed. Twice before there had been discussions of a visit that never materialized. Each time she’d get stirred up, her heart answering an ancient call, but by the end of her second year abroad, the pull her family had over her had diminished significantly. She thought of herself as a falconer’s hawk, after the hood has been discarded and it’s been set loose. Often they died in the wild but she hadn’t. She’d learned to hunt for herself and now if she returned to the leather glove it was by choice.
At the Savoy.
Holding a room for you.
Join us here.
Explanation to follow.
The telegram was signed by Gordon and he never bothered to provide much of an explanation, even when questioned in person. He met her at Dover with a car and driver and muttered something about his wife’s sensitive stomach and how taxing it had been for her traveling beyond the realm of the English language. Almost immediately after he had secured Lavinia’s luggage and settled her into the backseat of the car, he nodded off, dozing lightly throughout the rainy drive to London. As the afternoon advanced, the sky became increasingly mottled, darkening unevenly like a bruise, and Lavinia felt an old familiar sadness seeping into her heart.
She watched Gordon sleep, his jaw slack and open, his head hanging to the side at an angle that looked uncomfortable. She resisted the urge to reach over and tilt his head back against the leather upholstery because she thought about how awkward it would be if he awoke. Gordon had never liked certain kinds of physical contact and on the occasions when she had hugged him she could feel him stiffen as if to withstand something painful, though as a boy he and Ambrose and Jasper used to endure tests of manhood that often involved candle flames and penknives.
Lavinia noticed how he had thickened in the time she’d been away and how the corners of his mouth now turned down, even when he was relaxed, giving his face a sterner cast which she imagined he must use to advantage against his legal adversaries. He was still a handsome man but he had become forbidding; now his even features seemed only to further the sense of inaccessibility. Like the cold beauty of a statue, his features commanded admiration but in no way invited approach.
She was glad she had not brought Boswell, much as it had pained her to leave him with Alice for the extended weekend. It was their first separation and he had whimpered piteously at her departure. The sound of his cries haunted her halfway across the Channel, but she could see now how easily Boswell would have become a convenient scapegoat for unspoken resentments. Gordon’s anger, which had always been present as a child, had not been tempered by maturity or success. On the contrary, though he had been among the few who had managed to multiply their fortunes during the years that followed the ’29 crash, he seemed to have acquired with his wealth a bitterness that wearied him and sapped the joy he had previously taken from his professional life.
When they finally arrived at the hotel, Mrs. Gibbs was out with Gordon’s wife, Constance. Gordon went straight up to his room, leaving Lavinia with several hours to fill before dinner. She chose to wander the streets looking in store windows rather than wait alone in her room for the appointed hour at which the Gibbses would gather for a meal in the hotel’s dining room. She was exhausted from her trip; the Channel crossing had not been difficult, but making conversation with Gordon once he awoke had been exceedingly so. Lavinia knew enough about dread to know that sitting still exacerbated it, allowing it to pool in the stomach and pound in the chest; the only cure was movement. Now that she’d arrived, the whole idea of the visit seemed obviously wrong and easily avoided.
During her four days in London, Lavinia saw very little of her sister-in-law, though when she was in evidence, Constance was just as Lavinia remembered: meticulous in dress and distant in her conversation. Gordon’s wife was pretty and poised, but tight, like an overstretched rubber band on the verge of snapping. Lavinia understood Constance had been having health problems, though it was never completely clear if her illness was the result of the miscarriage or the cause of it. In any case, her absence from the outing to the National Gallery and several meals was not felt by Lavinia to be a significant loss.
It was her mother’s change that most affected Lavinia. Mrs. Gibbs seemed to have become old, unaccountably old, in the time Lavinia had been away. Her hands betrayed her the most markedly, now foxed with brown and having acquired a slight tremble. Her body, too, seemed withered and she no longer held herself with the imperious pride that had underscored her looks well past the loss of her youth.
It was not just the physical decline that alarmed Lavinia, the way Mrs. Gibbs slumped in her chair between courses as if too fatigued for good posture or that she was either oblivious or indifferent to the fleck of sauce that decorated her chin until finally Gordon flapped his napkin at her with an impatient remark. It was the way in which her mother had become vague and sweet that caused Lavinia to cry in her hotel room each night. Lavinia no longer recognized in her mother the woman whose love had seemed as impossible to hold, and yet as necessary to have, as air.
The visit could be deemed a success only because Lavinia was determined to make it so and because it was of very short duration. There were several moments that had threatened to erupt into ugliness, but Lavinia had managed to quell them. She had been prepared for an inevitable confrontation with Gordon or his snippy wife, and even had looked forward to it the way a soldier waiting for attack yearns for the release that comes in the discharge of his weapon. However, the confused, panicky look on her mother’s face when tempers flared around her dissuaded Lavinia from pursuing provocations that littered her family’s discourse like shards of glass hidden in a luxurious lawn.
On one occasion when an exchange between Gordon and Lavinia had become fraught, Mrs. Gibbs clutched Gordon’s arm as if for support, but rather than linking herself to him at the elbow, she pushed her head up under his arm as though trying to disappear beneath his wing. “Mother!” he had exclaimed, but the argument had instantly been dropped.
Another time, still more upsetting to Lavinia, Gordon had insulted the present she had brought from Paris for his son, Spencer. It had taken Lavinia a considerable effort to find the harlequin puppet with a hand-painted wooden head. Gordon refused to take it home. “I don’t want you to pollute my son with your moral indolence. He doesn’t need dolls and I won’t let you make him into a fairy.” His voice was sharp and wounding and Lavinia’s mother had lifted her napkin up to cover her face, hiding with the ineptitude of a child much younger than the one under discussion. As Lavinia rose and excused herself from the table, Gordon said, “Don’t be such a spoilsport, Mongo. I’ll give him something else and say that it was from you,” but it was not his rudeness that had moved her to tears.
When Lavinia said good-bye to her family the following day in the hotel lobby, once again she felt herself struggling to reconcile competing and conflicting emotions. She was almost dumbstruck with a sense of impending loss and giddy at the prospect of escape. Though Gordon had tried to persuade her to return home, invoking the political unrest on the continent, Lavinia knew she would not be leaving Paris anytime in the foreseeable future.
By the time the Germans occupied Poland, Alice and her menagerie were long gone from Paris. As soon as Germany annexed Austria, Harold had suggested Alice return to the States, but in November of 1938, when the teletype report of Kristallnacht passed through his hands, he insisted Alice return to the States by the end of the year. “It will only get worse in thirty-nine. Look at the momentum that Hitler’s built just in these last six months.”
In the past, Harold had often seemed embarrassed by his posting, by the fact that some of the ministries and government departments he had occasion to contact still used calligraphers fo
r accreditation and had no dictation machines in their offices. “Paris is pretty, but it’s not London. Paris is a place you go to honeymoon, not to change the world,” he’d complained. But that had been several years ago, when the only thing Americans had to fear in France was the falling exchange rate and indigestion.
Now that Paris was no longer a honeymoon destination and Europe was convulsing with turmoil, Harold no longer wanted to change the world. Vom Rath, secretary of the German Embassy in Paris, had been shot, and in response to the pogroms in Germany, U.S. relations with Germany had been strained. All that year there’d been grousing within the foreign service at the tedious extra work caused by the refugees, not to mention the stolen and forged passports which were being sold on the black market to German and Austrian Jews. Harold had always expected to retire at the end of the decade, but now the prospect of cutting his career short by a matter of months did not seem soon enough. By the time his transfer came through, most Americans had fled the continent. Harold urged Lavinia to leave as well.
He had taken her to a brasserie famous for its choucroute and the smell of vinegar filled the crowded room. In the smoked mirror that lined the walls she could see the back of his head, his gray hair surrounding a small pink bald spot, and it made her feel a rush of tenderness.
“It’s not wise to be abroad now. And for a woman alone I think it’s madness. Once I’m gone you’ll have no one to help you when you need it. Don’t be headstrong, my dear. I can get you passage on a boat now if you let me.”
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