Chapter Forty-One
Paris
Even with all that I’ve heard, read, and imagined, nothing could have possibly prepared me for Paris. Nothing could have fully painted the picture of what I would find upon my arrival to this jewel on the Seine, which meets my high expectations and then soars even higher.
Oh, but of course that is helped by the fact that Hal has spared no detail or expense in arranging the best of stays in the City of Light, starting with Mamma’s and my massive suite at the Ritz, with its two grand bedrooms, each with a gracious en suite bathroom, and a shared salon in the middle.
Most of our prior apartments could have easily fit in just one of these vast marble and gold bathrooms. But the best part of all is the view, our floor-to-ceiling windows and lovely terrace that look over the historic Place Vend?me.
Hal, who has taken a suite for himself on a different floor, presents a breathtaking new itinerary each day, and I eat it all up with the same delight with which I sample les macarons and chocolate nougats.
Mamma, in spite of the splendor, is out of sorts and less pleasant with each passing day.
“Overseas travel disagrees with me,” she declares over breakfast, a week into our stay in Paris.
She does not like that she cannot read the menus or make herself easily understood by the hotel staff.
The rich foreign food has worsened her digestive complaints, and her body has yet to acclimate to the change in hours, which has caused several weeks of fitful sleep.
“Oh, and the heat! Too blistering to be out there hoofing it in the streets.” She declines most of Hal’s outings, preferring to stay in and rest. By our second week, it has turned into Hal and me exploring Paris as a pair.
I don’t mind, and neither, it seems, does he.
The Monday evening of our third week, Hal has arranged a private after-hours tour of the Louvre museum.
Of course I recall how Stan used to speak about the sculptures from antiquity and the rich oil paintings done by the Renaissance masters.
Recollections that I do not share with Hal, though I do go into our private tour with the highest of hopes for what I shall see. Once again, Paris does not disappoint.
The empty corridors of the erstwhile palace are cool and candlelit as we make our way through the gracious salons, accompanied by a curator who serves as our dedicated guide.
I linger to gape at the winged statue of the goddess Nike, marveling over her dynamic strength, the latent power of her marble muscles and limbs.
David’s massive tableau of Napoleon crowning Joséphine also takes my breath away.
“I hadn’t expected the canvas to be on such a vast scale. ”
But when we arrive to the legendary masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, his Mona Lisa, it is Hal who seems overwhelmed, frozen in place. After a reflective pause, he says, “I can’t figure it out.”
I pull my eyes from da Vinci’s painting and turn toward Hal. “You can’t figure out what she’s thinking?”
“Not that.” Hal shakes his head. “I can’t figure out why she’s stirred up such a frenzy.” Then he meets my gaze, and his expression is open, earnest. “Any one of your images is infinitely more appealing than this.”
A small laugh spills from me, and I throw him a wry smirk. “Only you would compare me to an incomparable piece of art.”
“You have it backwards,” he says, holding me with his intense stare. “You are the incomparable one, my dear.”
—
At the world-famous couturier House of Worth, dressmaker to queens, empresses, and heiresses, I am welcomed as a treasured client.
Hal has arranged a private fitting with Clothilde, whom he assures me is their most sought-after modiste.
“She was the personal favorite of Empress Sisi of Austria,” he declares, and it strikes me as almost comical, how outlandish that sounds.
Me, the hungry girl from Tarentum, dressed like an empress?
Clothilde escorts us into a private room walled in mirrors with a sitting area of plush couches beneath a crystal chandelier.
There Hal takes a seat and an offered flute of champagne as Clothilde sets me up on a raised platform in the salon’s center.
Unspooling her measuring tape, she examines me with military precision, cinching and squeezing until she’s investigated every inch of my figure, muttering in quiet French as she jots down her notes.
She slips me in and out of several styles, a variety of lush fabrics in various states of completion.
Next she brings me to a wide mahogany desk covered in a sprawl of pencil sketches.
I look down on an endless array of chic ensembles—traveling suits, day dresses, evening gowns, skirts, jackets, dressing gowns.
I stare at the designs in wonder, recalling my first day in Wanamaker’s and the ten-dollar dress that stunned me.
Clothilde turns from her sketches back to me. “This shall be your trousseau, mademoiselle?”
I frown, confused by her heavily accented words. “Your bridal wardrobe, oui?” she hastens to clarify. “For the honeymoon travels?”
Before I can say anything, Hal interjects, rising from the sofa and striding toward us. “Clothilde, she has to agree to marry me first,” he says, his tone casual.
Then he throws me a wink, and I offer him a playful smile in return, even as I feel my cheeks flush.
It’s only a quip, his manner tells me. But then my eyes tilt downward, taking in the elegant stitching of the new plum-colored gown that sheathes my figure, its silk shimmering as it drips to the floor.
And for the first time, the topic of marrying Hal strikes me as something I’d like to keep considering.
At Marie Antoinette’s picturesque folly in the Bagatelle gardens, Hal once more approaches the subject that we’ve spent weeks dancing around.
We are walking along the lake, through the dead queen’s former playground, where I pause to admire a colorful cluster of roses.
Hal is not looking at the flowers, however.
He’s looking only at me. “I could give you the life of a queen, you know.”
I step back from the flowers, suddenly a bit dizzy, and I know it’s not from the petals’ perfume. I meet Hal’s direct gaze, and he goes on, “If you would have me, I would see to it that every day felt like a fairy tale for you. Whatever you wanted, I would provide.”
I look down, taking in these words of his.
“I know you could,” I reply, my voice quiet.
“I know you would.” But there are still the hidden parts of me that I’m too ashamed to pull into the light.
The secrets of what Stanley Pierce did to me, made me into.
Aren’t I unworthy to be Hal Thorne’s beloved and coddled bride?
The day is warm, and now my entire body feels unpleasantly flushed. “Hal, I wish to return to the hotel,” I say, turning to tromp up the garden path. “I have a headache.”
We return to the hotel an hour later, after a quiet carriage ride in which I closed my eyes and pretended to rest. All of me feels closed, in fact.
The truth is that my mind is knotted and I need some time alone to sift through my tangled thoughts.
But when Hal escorts me back to the suite and I open the door, stepping into the grand salon, we see Mamma seated on the sofa, a sprawl of money before her.
American money, bills of every denomination.
I halt my steps, and Hal halts his, too. When Mamma looks up, her face goes white, and it’s her expression—as though we’ve just caught her in the act of something most unseemly—that puts me even more on edge.
That, and the simple word she lobs at us both: “What?” She looks down at the money, then back toward us. “You’re hours earlier than…You said…you said evening.”
“Mamma, what are you doing?” I ask. “Where has all of this money come from?”
Mamma stuns me further when she replies, her voice an angry snarl: “It’s none of your concern where I get my money!”
This catches me entirely off guard, the ferocity of her words. What has she done?
Hal strides into the room. “Have you stolen from me, Mrs. Talbot?”
My eyes cut toward him. His tone is icy; there’s an expression on his face that I’ve never seen before.
But Hal seems to remember himself in an instant.
When he speaks next, his voice is calm and measured.
“You know I would have given you whatever you desired. If you needed money, you had only to ask. Have I ever told you no?”
“I didn’t steal it,” Mamma growls, her bearing like that of an animal pinned in a corner.
“Then where did it come from?” I ask, frowning.
“Stanny gave it to me.” Mamma’s voice is petulant. “Before we left. He said you couldn’t be trusted,” she declares, looking directly at Hal. “He wanted me to have my own cash, said it was he who has always been there for us.”
I don’t look toward Hal, but I can sense that he has gone rigid. Keeping my eyes fixed on my mother, holding my voice as steady as I can manage, I say, “Mamma, please. Is this called for?”
“I’m leaving. I want to go home. I don’t like it here.
” Now she flops backward on the couch and crosses her arms before her chest, looking very much like a child who has just told us she no longer wishes to play our game.
But in fact, what she’s just told me is that she wishes to leave me here, in Europe.
Alone and unchaperoned. All because she doesn’t like the food or the foreign language?
We aren’t set to sail back to New York for another month.
We have a trip planned for a week from now to Orléans, a medieval city Hal has told us we will adore.
“Mamma, why would you…? You can’t be serious—”
“I think it’s for the best,” Hal interrupts.
The words land with a thud between us, and then the room falls into a tense silence, the only sound the rhythmic ticktock of the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece.
I don’t know what to say. Mamma looks as though she has nothing more to add.
But it’s Hal’s silence that most troubles me.
I know how he loathes Stanley Pierce, and how he seethes now to hear Mamma refer to the scoundrel as our protector, even while sitting in this sumptuous suite that Hal has so graciously provided for us.
Hal has every right to feel hurt after everything he has done.
But do I wish for Mamma to leave, for us to part ways? Do I wish to remain here, in Paris, with only Hal and his secretary, unchaperoned? It would be a scandal, to be sure, if the papers caught wind.
Suddenly my muddle of an hour earlier feels even more complicated.
But before I can rein all these thoughts into some sensible response, Mamma, without another word, leans forward over the table and pulls the banknotes into a pile.
Flashing me a pouty scowl, she rises from the couch, crosses the salon, and storms out of the suite. I know not where she is going.
But even if I did know, I wouldn’t follow. Walking out on me like this, without a word, is perhaps her greatest act of betrayal. I’m disappointed, but sadly, I’m not surprised. And I do not wish to follow her. No more.
I will not leave—Paris, or this suite, or Hal. Hal, who has never treated me with Mamma’s mercurial moodiness or displayed such a willingness to disregard my well-being. Mamma has abandoned me, I realize, time and again. And it will be the last time I allow her to do so.
—
That night, Hal sleeps in Mamma’s room on the opposite side of the suite.
He tells me he doesn’t feel right leaving me alone.
It might not be entirely conventional, or even proper, to be sharing a suite like this, but there is nothing uncouth about his behavior.
If I’m being truly honest, this is hardly the first unconventional thing I’ve done.
And it’s not as though Mamma’s presence has ever translated to my protection or well-being.
To think of all the things I’ve done, right under her nose.
Sometimes at her urging. Or with her complicit negligence, at the very least.
No, there’s nothing indecent about this at all. After a quiet supper Hal retires into the far bedroom and shuts the door, and I don’t hear another peep all evening.
I lie in my own bed, but sleep evades me.
My thoughts keep me agitated and awake: I don’t know where Mamma is.
I know she has enough money for whatever it is that she decides to do.
My guess is she’ll book passage and return to New York.
Which means she’ll be farther away from me than ever before.
I nestle my head deeper under the pillow, just as I did on so many nights as a girl, when I sought refuge from Mamma’s wailing at my side.
Now I seek refuge from my own thoughts, wishing that sleep would take me, give me a reprieve, even if for only a few hours.
I force myself to exhale. Just knowing that Hal is there, in the room across the way, is a comfort. Hal is the only person I have left in the world. The only person I know who has vowed to care for me and then has not left me. I am with him now.