Crossing on the Paris (17 page)

“Hey, Julie!” Simone caught up to her, panting slightly. “I was just talking to Roger, you know, the sous chef. He said that Pascal and the other cooks are playing cards this evening.” Simone lowered her voice, nearly skipping with excitement. “And guess what? Old Tremblay always joins them!” She shot Julie a mischievous smile. “So, there's nothing to keep us from going to the top decks! What do you say?”

“Well . . . .” Julie strung this word out while she was thinking. Simone's grin was so enthusiastic, it was on the verge of bursting open. Julie nodded with a sigh. It seemed she had no choice but to take her on her rendezvous with Nikolai. “If you're sure that Madame Tremblay will be busy, I guess so.”

“Great!” Simone said. “Let's get ready!”

Back in the dormitory, they decided to leave their uniforms on; in case someone asked, they could say they were out delivering a message. They took off their caps, however, and let their hair down. They brushed it out (“Ah, Julie, what I'd do to have hair like yours!”), then Simone pulled a small, worn makeup bag out of her kit.

“My sister Marguerite gave me her old powders,” she said.

Simone took out a compact, some rouge, and a sticky nub of rose-colored lipstick. She looked into the compact's small mirror,
then vigorously rubbed the remnants of pressed powder with the puff. She dabbed it on the patches of spots on her forehead, cheeks, then her nose. She then applied the rouge and the lipstick.

“How do I look?” She smiled.

“Just fine!” Julie smiled back. Really, with makeup, Simone merely looked more colorful.

“And now you!” She approached Julie with a studious expression. “With that pale skin, you really need some rouge. This one is called ‘fresh peach.' ”

Her brow knotted in concentration as she dusted Julie's cheeks with a few masterly strokes. Simone picked up the lipstick, then paused over the large birthmark above Julie's lip.

“Uh . . . I think your lips are fine as they are,” she said diplomatically.

“This is silly,” Julie said, touching her birthmark lightly with her finger. “In the moonlight up on deck, you can't really make out colors anyway. Everything is gray.”

Looking back in the compact's small mirror, Simone brushed some more rouge on her own cheeks.

“You never know!” she said.

Julie took a quick look around the dormitory. Two or three women were already putting on nightgowns, slippers, and hairnets, others were chatting and relaxing on their bunks. Louise, the washerwoman who slept in the next row, was leafing through the ship's newspaper. She suddenly called out to Julie.

“Hey, you! You got your picture in the paper!”

Simone was hunched over the paper, squealing, before Julie even approached the bed.

“Look, Julie! It
is
you!” she said with a grin.

Julie picked up the paper and looked at it suspiciously. Very few pictures of her existed and none that she liked. When she was twelve, her parents took her to a portrait studio and the photographer insisted on her posing in profile. The photograph was quite
flattering—her elegant brow, straight nose, her hair nestled into a bun at the nape of her neck—but it was not her. Without her birthmark, that face was a lie. Here, not only was her blemish plain (and so dark!) but her face looked cross, and what on earth was that on her hand? The streamer, she sighed. It was her—for better or for worse.

She then glanced at the other women in the photo: one was wearing a serious expression and a big hat, and the other was ghostly white and overly thin. Inspecting the photo more closely, she was surprised to find the two women who had been in the doctor's office the day before. The sickly old lady with her rings, dog, and maid, and the woman awaiting the doctor who, despite being beautiful, seemed so self-conscious.

“Look at this,” Julie said, passing the paper back to Simone. “I've met these two ladies. We were all at the infirmary yesterday at the same time. How strange that, just a few hours before, we'd all been walking together on the dock!”

“Right.” Simone nodded sarcastically. “You three . . . and about five thousand other people! Come on! Let's go!”

Simone tried to hand
L'Atlantique
back to the laundress, but she was now engaged in the rather pointless task of painting her nails.

“No, you keep it, honey,” she said.

Julie looked at the women in the photograph again, wondering how
their
voyage had been so far, traveling in luxury on the upper decks. She carefully tore it out and put it inside her Jules Verne book of keepsakes. They left the room quietly, throwing the rest of the newspaper away on their way out, then began the trek up the stairs. Finally, on the last steps, they felt cool air on their faces and saw a patch of evening sky; Julie began breathing properly again, despite the climb.

Just as Simone and Julie were about to surface on the top deck, they heard a couple talking right outside the stairwell. The man's voice was a long slur, the woman's laughter a cackle. The couple was
dancing around, obviously in their cups, giggling and falling onto the rails. The girls could detect bits of English.

“Americans,” Simone mouthed to Julie, with a little snort.

They waited a moment below the deck for the couple to move on. With a sigh, Julie tried to remember the last time she'd danced, celebrated, or laughed long and hard. Was it the Fête Nationale in 1914? It seemed another life, and she another girl. Perhaps tonight she would be that girl again.

“Well,” said Simone, when they were alone again, “I think it's safe to say that
wasn't
Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford!”

They came out onto the decks and looked around. Couples were tucked into small spaces: between lifeboats, at the rails, on the benches riveted into corners, around the deck-chair storage bins. No one even glanced at the two young women from steerage.

“What do you want to do first? Should we go peek into the ballroom?” Simone asked.

“Oh, Simone, do you really think we'll be able to mix in with the first-class passengers? Like this?” She curtsied, holding out the hems of the unflattering black uniform.

“I guess you're right,” Simone said. “But look! The moon's out. Let's go to the rails and listen to the music. Maybe
they'll
come to
us.
”

The sound of a string quartet floated out of the dining room. After a few minutes, Julie felt a tap on her shoulder.

“May I have this dance, mademoiselle?” Nikolai asked with a smile.

Vera walked into the dining room and was led to her table by the maître d'hôtel. She was glad for his assistance, as she would have never found it on her own. She sat down and saw that, although everyone was there, two additional places were set at their ample table.

A waiter in a black tie and a thin mustache came by to take their orders. Without looking at the menu, Vera said, “
Oui, un croûte au pot pour moi, s'il vous plaît,
” then greeted the others at table.

“Good evening, everyone. I trust you've all enjoyed a pleasant day.” Vera placed her napkin into her lap, feeling she had already made her contribution to the conversation for that meal.

Her dining companions returned to the discussion they'd been having before her arrival. Americans returning home after traveling in the Old World, they were all agreeing on the superiority of their own country.

“Europe . . . quaint, I'd call it. But so dilapidated! Their capitals are nothing but peeling paint and broken plaster!”

“Well, there
was
the war!” conceded one.

“Even so! Compare, if you will, the Brooklyn Bridge and New York's skyscrapers to the dusty—”

Vera sighed at the predictable dullness of their reflections and let her eyes wander around the room.

She noticed that the captain's table was receiving an uncommon amount of attention. Vera looked to the center of the room and saw that famous Hollywood couple (who were they again?) seated regally at the captain's side. Amused, she watched as pompous poseurs around the dining room strained themselves to watch them through their monocles and behind their fans. Indeed, Vera mused, this celebrated couple was the embodiment of American culture (in all its superlative glory!): melodramatic film stars who acted without their voices.

Suddenly, a young couple was standing behind the two empty seats at the table.

“Excuse our tardiness,” said the man, bowing slightly before seating his wife, and then himself. “We boarded last night in Southampton and we've spent a tiring day tracking down a lost trunk.” He smiled around the table. “Now, allow me to introduce myself. I am Mr. Josef Richter and this is my wife, Emma.”

Vera nodded at the couple. There was something familiar about this young man: his high forehead and Roman nose, his straight bearing and graceful gestures. Pity she hadn't caught his surname. She tried to be attentive as the others at her table introduced themselves to this handsome pair; she'd long since forgotten who they were. Finally, the circle came around to her.

“And I am Mrs. Vera Sinclair,” she said politely.

The young man dropped his napkin and stared at her.

“And, where are you from, Mrs. Sinclair?” he asked pointedly, his voice strained.

“I'm originally from New York, but I lived in Paris for ages,” she said, surprised at his curiosity as well as his tone. She would have continued, adding something lighthearted or witty—about homelands or aging—but his expression did not encourage it.

“I believe you knew my father, Mr. Laszlo Richter, from Budapest?” he asked, eyebrows arched.

Ah, thought Vera, this is why I thought I'd seen him before! He looks so like his father! Of course she remembered Laszlo. One of her “Thirteen Lovers” from times past, he had left a mark. In fact, after him, it was a long time before she had another.

They'd met the summer of '99 at the Grand Hotel Bad Ragaz in Switzerland. Vera and her friend Mathilde had gone there to spend a rejuvenating month taking baths in the thermal waters; Laszlo, she understood later, was being treated for melancholia. With thick, dark hair and a perfect profile, he was an extremely attractive forty-odd—even more so than his son was now—and she enjoyed the challenge of making him smile. Vera and Laszlo began spending their days together: taking long strolls through the beautiful Alpine grounds, dining, dancing; the following week, they began sharing a bed.

One morning, toward the end of the month, she woke up in Laszlo's arms to find him crying. “Oh, Vera,” he sobbed, “I don't want to let you go.” After confessing to being married, he began
making promises to leave his family—a wife and son—and come to Paris to be with her. Although during their brief time together, she had reveled in his company (and had even admitted to herself that, for once, one of her affairs seemed to have true potential), she wouldn't allow it—not with a child involved. As a young girl, Vera had suffered her own parents' absence; as a new wife, she'd discovered her inability to bear children. No, she would not destroy a family, one boy's childhood. She asked Laszlo to give her time to think, then began packing her bags.

Without saying good-bye, Vera left Bad Ragaz, entrusting Mathilde to deliver a farewell note. On the train home, she stared blindly out the window, angry with him for keeping the truth to himself but, even more, grieving for their stillborn relationship. For months afterward, at least once a week, she received thick letters from Budapest and dutifully sent them all back, unopened. She was relieved when, the following spring, they'd abruptly stopped coming. She never heard from him again.

“Yes, I remember him!” Vera smiled at the coincidence, wondering whether she was looking now at the same boy his father had mentioned over two decades before, in her bed at a posh Swiss spa. “Such an elegant man. A banker, I believe. How is he now?” she asked pleasantly.

“My father has been dead many years, madame. Didn't you know?”

The young Richter's voice remained steady and sober, but Vera could tell he was on the verge of losing his temper. His wife, Emma, was staring at her in wonder, her mouth ajar, but her eyes riveted.

“When I was a boy, he killed himself.” He paused, clearing his throat but keeping a sharp eye on Vera. “After he was gone, my mother went through his papers and read his letters. There were hundreds of pages addressed to one Madame Vera Sinclair, rue Danton, Paris.” He nearly spit out the name and address; he'd been
carrying them in his mouth for years. “She told me my father died of a broken heart.”

“Darling!” his wife whispered, dragging her eyes away from Vera, grasping his arm. “Please! Now's not the time . . .”

With tenderness, she tried to get her husband's attention, but his gaze remained fixed on Vera. Their fellow diners stared at Vera and Josef Richter in silence, their eyes darting from one face to the other. An older gentleman took a quick gulp of wine, considered intervening, then closed his mouth, dumbfounded. Although their conversation had not been loud or even ill-mannered, a visible change in the table's countenance had taken place; this attracted the attention of people at neighboring tables, who began murmuring unanswered questions.