by Maile Meloy
Saffron and Jamie were upstairs in Josephine’s room, M. Fauchet was holed up in her office, and Magdalena was on the back lawn playing with T.J., who didn’t seem to understand what had happened. When a car pulled up on the white gravel driveway, too soon to be the mortician, Abby went outside to meet the visitor.
A girl in cheap sunglasses, with dark blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, stepped out. She was very slight, no more than five feet tall, and it was hard to tell how old she was, with the sunglasses covering her eyes. Her nose and chin were sharp and delicate. She wore a man’s button-down shirt and jeans.
“I am so tired,” the woman said, tilting her head to her shoulder. This last word had two syllables, “tired,” and Abby couldn’t identify her accent. “I am Katya,” she said.
“Are you a friend of Fauchet’s?”
Katya frowned. “Sometimes.”
The driver took a black backpack out of the car and set it down. Without waiting for a tip, he pulled down the drive and disappeared. Abby reached for the backpack, but Katya snatched it away.
“I don’t know which room you’re in,” Abby said, embarrassed. “We can ask Magdalena. Were you a friend of Josephine’s?”
“No,” Katya said sharply.
Abby realized the woman didn’t know Josephine had died. In the dimness inside, still hugging the backpack, she took off her sunglasses, and she looked younger than Abby had guessed. Maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty. Her eyes were pale. Through the glass doors to the back lawn, they could see Magdalena throwing a small inflatable beach ball to T.J., and Katya seemed to stop breathing.
“This is the boy?” she whispered.
Fauchet came into the foyer, his heels sounding on the tiles, and said, “My dear Katarina. Welcome.”
She turned on him. “This is the boy?”
“He is charming, no? See how happy he is.” They heard laughter through the glass as he chased the ball.
“He is mine,” she said.
“Miss Collins, I present Katya,” Fauchet said. “She is a dear friend and a promising blackmailer.”
“I am no blackmailer,” Katya said. “He is my son. That woman knows?”
“She knew,” Fauchet said. “Then she forgot. Now she is dead. You must be hungry. Come.”
Katya followed Fauchet with the obedience of a child.
At the table, she ate as if expecting the food to be taken from her at any moment. She took small, guarded bites, and then glanced around looking for danger. She asked for milk and eyed Hector as he moved in and out of the room.
“Abby,” Fauchet said, “perhaps Katya will like the bedroom near to yours. Will you take her there? I have many things to do.”
Katya seemed about to protest, but she let Fauchet go.
Abby said, “Do you want to see your room?”
“You live here?” Katya wiped the milk from her upper lip with a green linen napkin, then folded the napkin to hide the damp mark.
“I’m just visiting.” She wanted to ask about Romania, but didn’t.
“How is she dead?”
“In her sleep,” Abby said.
Katya looked thoughtful. “So the boy is free.”
“Sort of.”
“Is he rich?”
Abby hesitated. “He might be.”
“Why might ?” the woman asked, suddenly suspicious.
“I don’t know,” Abby said, wishing Fauchet hadn’t left her.
The woman searched Abby’s face, as if for signs of deception, and then sighed wearily. “Okay,” she said. “I will see this room.”
34
KATYA LAY IN THE deep enamel tub, in warm, sudsy water, and felt her body relax. She had not known what to expect from these people, so far from the places she understood. They could have killed her easily for causing them trouble, and driven her body out into the great empty plains she had seen from the airplane. But instead they gave her good food and a vast bed, and this bathroom that was only hers, like in a hotel. The American girl had helped her fill the bath and found a pink liquid that made bubbles. There was a thick white towel. She had taken a little pill to feel better.
In the back of her mind, through the haze of bath and pill, she was still waiting for the trick. She thought about the rats she had watched from the back stoop when she was living with the Russians. There were sometimes rats and sometimes mice, and they were both happy in the garbage, but if you hit the can with your hand, the mice would run out in a panic, not knowing where they should go.
But if it was a rat in the garbage, he went like lightning, straight back to the hole he came out of. No confusion. Rats were smart. They remembered—they were always ready, and thinking. She lay like this in her bath, ready to bolt if a hand came to pound on the door, wanting her out.
But half an hour went by, and the knock didn’t come. She washed her hair, slowly. No one shook the doorknob, or banged on the door, or shouted. The water grew cool. It occurred to her that she could run more hot water into the tub, but they might hear it in the pipes and be angry at her greediness. She turned the hot water on, just a trickle, and listened for the sound in the walls. But this wasn’t a hotel, and it was better to be careful. She turned it back off and climbed out into the enormous towel that swallowed her up. There was nothing extra to her body; it was small and lean, the breasts just enough to have them. She didn’t look in the mirror as she dried herself; she knew it well enough.
She dried her hair with the towel and combed it through with her fingers, then unlocked the bathroom door, cautiously. No one was waiting for her in the bedroom, but her backpack had been opened and her clothes hung in the closet. She felt a rush of rage. The old aspirin bottle with her pills had been with her in the bathroom, but her underclothes were neatly folded on a little shelf. The dirty clothes were missing.
It was her own fault; she hadn’t heard anyone come in, and she reproached herself for that. The doors were heavier than she had thought. A dark blue fig and a bunch of purple grapes had been left on a small plate on the desk, with a linen napkin and a bottle of mineral water.
There had been mineral water in the limousine, too, and the driver had shown her with signs that it was for her. He had been kind. She had almost fallen asleep, moving over the rough road in the big quiet purring machine, thinking about the East German cars in her childhood in Hungary, cars like cardboard boxes, with engines so simple that people fixed them with pieces of string.
She ate four of the grapes quickly, spitting the seeds on the plate, while she inspected her things. They had taken only the laundry.
Then she remembered the child. It was she who wanted something from them. The bath and the pill had made her a little dopey. She was not in her own territory anymore, not playing a game she was used to. The child wasn’t the tiny baby but a running, laughing boy she didn’t know. And then the solitude in her room was so unexpectedly sweet that she couldn’t think of doing anything to interrupt it. After locking the bedroom door, she took off the towel and climbed naked into the bed. She lay back against the piles of pillows, sliding against the soft cotton, and watched the warm afternoon light through the window turn slowly to blue.
35
THE MORTICIAN IN THE van finally arrived with two assistants in dark suits, with solemn apologies to Saffron for his lateness and some talk about God. She found herself hovering near them as they collected her mother, then following them to the van. She thought she might climb in and ride with her mother over the bad roads to Buenos Aires. She was shocked at the force of her own grief. Finally she let the assistants close the heavy doors and watched the van roll down the gravel driveway.
She knew that another guest had arrived and thought it was just like Josephine to invite people without telling anyone. But as soon as she felt the old irritation, she was overcome with guilt because her mother was dead. Standing in the foyer, weak and exhausted, she heard Fauchet asking if she wanted some food. He said it had been many hours since she had eaten.
“Do
n’t you have to read the will now?” she asked him.
“I’ve sent for the lawyer.”
“What’s in it?”
“I think we all should recover from this terrible shock.”
Saffron considered him. He had known her all her life. He had bought her presents, told her secrets. At about ten, disillusioned by her father, she had thought Fauchet was the kind of man a girl ought to marry. Lately, though, he had seemed preoccupied and firmly in her mother’s camp, for which she couldn’t forgive him.
“She cut me out of it, didn’t she?” she asked.
“I think we should wait to have this discussion,” Fauchet said.
“Did you help her do it?”
“Of course not,” he said.
“Why didn’t you stop it?”
“I had no idea.”
Saffron wanted to slap the old man’s face. Instead she climbed the stairs, in a fury, to her mother’s room. She couldn’t believe her mother would actually disinherit her. When she was a little girl she had played with her mother’s jeweled rings, and her mother had told her that someday they would be hers. There were also five or six crucifixes on chains, which Saffron coveted: a turquoise one, a silver one, one with diamonds, one with multicolored stones. When Saffron, at twelve, decided not to have a First Communion, her mother had made a point of telling her she couldn’t have the crucifixes.
“When I die, they’ll go to your cousin Nell,” her mother had said.
“Why to her?” Her cousin was a dull, freckled girl with mouse-colored hair.
“You aren’t Catholic,” her mother had said. “What would you do with them?”
But Josephine wasn’t religious. Catholicism was only one of her pretentious habits. She believed in earthly punishments and earthly rewards.
Now Saffron looked around her mother’s empty bedroom. The whiteness of it had always annoyed her, as a symptom of her mother’s insistence on innocence and purity. She pulled open the drawer in the center of the delicate white desk. Inside was a stack of her mother’s ivory stationery, engraved with Josephine’s initials. Each page had a letter begun on it.
“Esteemed Gautier,” the first one opened, to the chef, in French.
Magdalena has delusions of grandeurs, she is stealing my earrings. This must stop. She wishes to take my place in the house. How can you help me.
Then the letter ended, unfinished.
“My dearest,” the next one began, and Saffron wondered if it was to her, then realized that “my dearest” was Fauchet.
I have had to let the butler go, he tried to stab the chef with a fruit knife. They are both gays you know. I have found a new man named Hector, I believe he is a cousin of your favorite Magdalena, who is too pretty for her own good and can sometimes be quite a little bitch. But I cannot get by alone. This Hector is handsome, like his pretty cousin. When are you coming again? I miss you so.
“Querida Magdalena,”another began.
Creo que Gautier trata que envenenarme. Favor de observarlo con mucho cuidado. No quiero morir. Dependo totalmente de te.
Saffron wasn’t sure what envenenar meant, but she guessed poison. “I believe Gautier is trying to poison me.” There were more, all abandoned after half a page or a few lines, all dated within the last year. Saffron shuffled through them until she found her own name.
My dear Saffron,
Last night the bandits killed one of my cows at the western frontier of the estancia, took the best meat, and left the body to rot. The poor need to eat, I know this, but I begin to be afraid, living here alone.
I believe the servants may conspire against me. They have let the bandits come. They have told them I am a defenceless woman. I’m afraid to write this, so afraid they may find this letter and know that I know. I worry so much.
Saffron tapped the letters until the stack was straight. She could use them to show her mother’s incompetence at the time of the will. She needed to think, before the boy got all the money. They didn’t trust her to take care of him, so they’d given him everything. She didn’t believe that Fauchet wasn’t in on it.
She tucked the letters into the back of her skirt, but her shirt didn’t cover them. So she went to her mother’s vast closet, which was as big as the bedroom itself. The dressing-table drawers were full of costume jewelry and scarves, and some photographs of a young Josephine lounging by swimming pools with handsome Italian counts. Saffron looked around the closet at the rows of gowns, dresses, coats, blouses, trousers, suits.
When she went downstairs in Josephine’s pink housecoat, Fauchet was sitting in a chair by the window, tapping a small, unlit cigar against the chair’s arm. She guessed he was waiting for her, and she felt the stiff paper of the letters against her skin. He didn’t ask what she had been doing.
“I was looking at my mother’s clothes,” she said. She could feel her heart pound.
“The cook left something for you, in the kitchen.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I knew your mother since a very long time,” he said. “I care about you like a daughter.”
She stood glaring at him. If he had cared, he wouldn’t have let this happen. He would have watched out for her. No one had watched out for her in any real way.
“Will you sit?” he asked. “Shall we talk?”
“I don’t feel like talking,” she said.
“I think it’s important.”
“Leave me alone,” she said, and she kept walking to the guest wing and up the stairs to her room.
36
FAUCHET WATCHED SAFFRONgo—she looked a great deal like her mother once had, in the half-light, especially in the old-fashioned housecoat—and then he lit his cigar. Of other people Josephine said it was a filthy habit, the habit of pigs, but to him she gave permission.
When they both were young, the air had always been a haze of smoke. She was so lovely then. She could arrive in a city and be sleeping with the most powerful man in it within a week. With women she was not so popular, but that was never her goal.
And then she had, out of sheer perversity, married a strong-minded Irish banker who was unfaithful but would brook no infidelity from her. Bets had been taken on how long the marriage might last. The winner, many years later, had been a little Spanish diplomat who loved her dearly. He had chosen thirteen years and six months, years longer than anyone else, in bitter hope that he would be wrong. He was right almost to the day. The money was collected, and a ceremony was made of delivering the bundle to the disappointed lover. The Spaniard was married by then, to a sensible woman, the father of two sturdy, intelligent children. He took the money with a rueful smile.
And then came Saffron. Fate, with its sense of humor, had given Josephine a daughter: a son she might have charmed, a daughter never.
Fauchet had, since that time, had two wives, who had become great friends with each other. They had much in common. The first became the godmother to the children of the second. This shocked only Americans; it was a reasonable arrangement. After he married, he had fewer affairs, because it was too difficult to maintain secrecy and discretion—the effort itself was diverting, but you began to have diminishing returns.
In the recent period, when there had been so few women that he could give each one his full attention, Katya, his little Magyar, had come along. She intrigued him because she was unbroken by her life: she had a will of light, flexible steel. She came from the plains of central Hungary, where her grandfather had been shot by the Germans, and her father jailed by the Communists. Her mother had died of pneumonia when Katya was a child. The little girl wound up with a sickly aunt, then with some Russians who used her for profit. The Russians had eventually brought her to Paris.
Fauchet had known other whores: the brusque, businesslike ones and the childlike, drugged, love-hungry ones who vibrated with need and couldn’t be trusted. In both, something seemed to have snapped: some connection severed between the brain and the body. There were other kinds, too—the occasional bitte
r, witty girl—but none he had met was like Katya. She seemed to have retreated into herself and kept the connections intact, so that she might, when times were better, come out again. She had a quick mind and the sly, gypsy look of her people.
She had been the lover of his friend Gilbert, who found her in a Paris brothel and paid some money for her release. At the time, Fauchet thought his friend had lost his mind. Gilbert put the girl in a cheap hotel he paid for by the month, where she grew restless and bored. She walked the city alone, and Gilbert suffered untold agonies, thinking of what she might do.
Then Gilbert’s wife discovered the girl. She must have sensed his level of attachment, because she threatened to take the children and everything he had. Gilbert wept, telling a dry-eyed Katya the choice he had to make. She didn’t want to go back to the brothel, so she appealed to Fauchet, who had met her when Gilbert was showing her off.
Fauchet said she could stay a few weeks in the apartment in the septième that he kept from his bachelor days. There was a café on the corner, and he brought her pastries, which she ate as if someone might steal the crumbs away. They became friends. When they became lovers, she confessed that she carried a baby from Gilbert. Fauchet had noticed the tiny belly but thought she was only growing fat on the croissants and napoleons. He wondered where his old shrewdness had gone.
She would not have an abortion—an earlier one had led to septicemia, and a doctor had warned her there might be damage already from the others. And she didn’t want to tell Gilbert. The question of Fauchet caring for the baby was absurd: an unasked question that he did not have to answer. So the belly grew, and Katya talked to it and sang to it, and moved around the little apartment like a diligent housewife, cleaning and arranging and airing, and waiting for Fauchet to come. She was so cheerful, and so sweet and warm in his old bachelor’s bed, that for a while he didn’t worry.