I couldn’t wait to get away, expecting that now I could put it all to bed and forget again, and I probably would have if it hadn’t been for M. Little did I know that she had been spying on me and knew where I was and what I was doing, but it was Mr. Bob who stuck his neck out. I always knew he had a greater fondness for me than he had for any other Brittany girl. I was his special personal discovery.
I should have expected that Mrs. Brittany would know about my father’s passing. She said nothing. It was, I assumed, another secret test. Since I had no assignments during the funeral or right after, I was fine with being tested. I did well with the first assignment I had afterward, too.
But then Mr. Bob was given a letter M had managed to leave for me at the hotel.
“I thought about just destroying it,” he said. “But I have more faith in you now. Whatever it says, you’ll handle it, I’m sure. However, let’s leave this just between us, okay?”
I knew he meant never to mention it to Mrs. Brittany.
“Yes, of course. Thank you,” I told him.
I didn’t open it in front of him. I waited until he had left, and then I poured myself a glass of white wine and sat at the bar, staring down at the envelope. I couldn’t help but smile at the way M had written my name. She was still doing what she did with the R, giving it a little curving tail. I opened it slowly, took a breath, and then read it.
Dear Roxy,
You and I haven’t seen or spoken to each other for years. You knew Papa knew who and what you are now. There’s no point in pretending anything. I don’t care how angry you were at him and Mama. Papa died, and Mama left you a message with your service and at your hotel, and I know you are there. She tried to reach out to you, thinking you might have an ounce of decency left. I think it’s horrible that you wouldn’t even respond.
All I can say is that even with your rich possessions, you’re someone I pity.
Your sister, Emmie
Inside the envelope was the charm bracelet I had once given her. It had a wonderful variety of charms that included the Eiffel Tower, a fan, a pair of dancing shoes, and a dream catcher. My mother’s brother, my uncle Alain, had given it to me when my parents and I were in France visiting. This was before M was born. I had given it to her just a few weeks before my father ordered me out of the house.
My first reaction was sadness. Tears came to my eyes, but that was quickly followed by the familiar rage that had enabled me to put my family on a shelf. I resented M for pulling it off that shelf. I didn’t want to resent her, but it was the safest reaction I could have. I hated myself for having it, but I needed it.
I left the letter and the charm bracelet on the bar for days and tried not to look at them again. But that didn’t work. Finally, I put them both at the bottom of a drawer. I dived into my work, took on every assignment Mrs. Brittany sent in my direction, and came close to drinking too much with a French cabinet minister one night but managed to get through it. I knew I was off my stride, and those damn nights tossing and turning in my sleep as I agonized over M’s letter and the charm bracelet were tearing me down.
Finally, hoping for some closure, I took the charm bracelet out of the drawer and called for the limousine. I had the driver park across from M’s school just as the school day ended and the students emerged. When the first ones appeared, I got out and stood by the limousine. She appeared and saw me there. I thought she might rush off in the opposite direction, but she came to me. I had worked on hardening my heart, but as she approached and I saw how pretty she was and how much she looked like Mama, I felt myself softening. I did my best to fight it back, but it was like holding back a cascade of memories too heavy to be stopped. She got into the vehicle, and I had the driver take us through the park. I was hoping to turn her out of my life forever.
“You walk and hold yourself just like I do. It’s the damn rod Papa had installed in us when we were born, that perfect military posture. Ironically, for me it’s been an asset. So what are you, in tenth grade?” I asked, trying to sound as indifferent and bitter as I could.
“Yes.”
“And I’m sure a good student,” I said, making that sound bad or stupid.
“Not lately, although I’m doing better than I was.”
I was interested in how she had found out where I was. She told me she had overheard the conversation Papa had with Mama after he saw me with his business associate. I told her I was at the funeral but too far away for her to notice.
“It would have pleased Mama to know,” she said.
She had the same grit I had at her age, I thought, but I wouldn’t tolerate her making me feel bad. “Would it? I doubt she would have shown it. He’s gone, but his influence over her is probably as strong as it ever was.”
“That’s not true,” she fired back at me, her eyes as big and as furious as mine could get.
“Please. There’s so much you don’t know. I suppose I shouldn’t hold her as responsible as I do. She was a European woman from a family where the women were always subservient to their men, and when you were married to a soldier like Papa, you were trained and obedient.”
“Papa wasn’t a soldier, and he was your father, too.”
“Excusez-moi? He didn’t enlist or go to officers’ school, but he was in the army from the day he was born. I remember our grandfather. You don’t. Emotions like love and compassion are signs of weakness to the Wilcox men. I never had any doubt that if your father was in your grandfather’s regiment, he wouldn’t hesitate to send him to the front lines, and if your father was killed in battle, he’d write a letter to his wife and himself with the same official signature and stamp. That’s how our father grew up, and that’s how he wanted us to grow up, or at least me.”
I hated how bitter I sounded, but I thought it was the right medicine to give her. She was speechless for the moment, so I had the driver take us to her home.
“Are you coming in to see Mama?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why did you come to see me, then?” she snapped, whipping her words the way Papa could.
“I wanted to see what you were like, how you were doing. Now that I have, I think you’ll survive,” I said.
“But Mama—”
“Mama let me go, M. I can’t forgive her for that.”
“She loved you, loves you. She takes out your picture often, and she cries,” she said.
“He let her keep a picture of me?”
“She kept it secret, but I think he always knew. If he hadn’t died, maybe . . .”
“Maybe I’d get an honorable discharge?”
“You went to the cemetery service, you said.”
“Not to ask him for his forgiveness but to see if I could forgive him. I couldn’t,” I said, and signaled the driver to open her door.
Then I handed her the charm bracelet.
“You should keep it,” I told her. “It’s better that I don’t have reminders of family.”
“No matter what you do, how far you go, you’ll always have reminders,” she told me. “It’s like trying to get rid of your shadow.”
I couldn’t get away fast enough.
Because I knew she was right.
Epilogue
I didn’t see M again until some time later, when she came to the Beaux-Arts to tell me Mama was very sick. She had gotten a bad result on an annual gynecological exam. In my heart, I knew that M was coming to tell me because she was terrified. My father’s brother and his wife were not people with whom she could be close, and Mama’s family was in France, Uncle Alain the closest to her. I liked him the best of all, too. He lived in Paris with his partner, a well-known chef, but I couldn’t see M getting much help from him, either. Nevertheless, I resented her coming to me with more bad family news. I had hoped to shut it out, and I wasn’t very sisterly or compassionate. I hated myself for it, but I thought I could live with it.
I couldn’t.
Despite the hard surface I put on, I found out about Mama and went to
the hospital to be with M while Mama was undergoing surgery. Unfortunately, I knew exactly what was going to happen. It had happened to one of Mrs. Brittany’s girls, who, like Mama, was ambushed by cervical cancer. I didn’t want my sister to live in a world of fantasy, even though I remembered too well that young people, especially young girls, needed that world of illusion to help insulate them against the harsh realities of the adult world that awaited them.
In this case, the harsh reality was that Mama’s cancer was terminal. I tried to give my sister the truth in little doses, first explaining how extensive and serious Mama’s operation was. I was deliberately cold and demanding when the two of us met with her doctor, forcing him to say the truthful things.
Despite my great effort to remain as aloof and hard as I could, when I went with M to visit Mama afterward, I felt like a little girl again. The tears fell inside me, maybe, but they gushed as all my good childhood memories with her came rushing back. I knew the only thing I could do for her was to look after M the best I could, which wasn’t easy for someone like me.
Mrs. Brittany did not make allowances for family problems. We were never to bring any baggage along with us as long as we were under her employ, and too often, she had reminded me that I had come to her with more baggage than she usually tolerated. Nevertheless, I appealed to her, reminding her about how dear Sheena had been to both of us. I think solely because of that, she relented, giving me some time to look after Mama’s and M’s needs as long as I fulfilled the most important assignments, one of which took me away for nearly a week at just the wrong time. That did little to bond me with my younger sister, who at times reminded me more and more of our father, condemning me with her gaze and her sharp tone when we spoke.
I made arrangements for Mama to have a private-duty nurse when she was home. I had no false hope or any illusions about it and tried to get M to understand, but she resisted right up to the day Mama had to return to the hospital. We were literally in countdown now. I made M go to school, but the hardest thing I had to do since I had left our home was to go there and get her the day Mama died.
Uncle Alain had flown over and was with us. Our aunt Lucy and uncle Orman descended like vultures to scoop M up and bring her back to their home. I could see what that was going to be like for her. She would be in an even worse situation than I had been in, because she had no ally, no one like Mama to be a buffer between her and our military uncle and our insensitive aunt. In the end, I couldn’t let it happen. I went to see Mrs. Brittany. I was ready to quit, and she knew it.
“I want to be my younger sister’s guardian,” I told her. “I want her to move in with me.”
“Do you know what you’re proposing? That’s ridiculous.”
“I do. She’ll live with me either at the Beaux-Arts or someplace else, Mrs. Brittany,” I replied, with my eyes as steely as hers could be.
“It won’t work. Do you actually want to expose a girl that young to our world?”
“I wasn’t much older when Mr. Bob brought me to you,” I said.
She shook her head and looked at Mrs. Pratt, who was in the office, too.
“She’ll have to live by our rules,” Mrs. Brittany said, showing me she was relenting.
“She will.”
“I’ll be there to make that clear myself.”
“Good.”
What I really wanted to say was that I wanted what was left of my family back. I wanted to be the older sister I never could be. Just as she had tried to hold on to some semblance of family through Sheena, I would through Emmie. But I didn’t mention any of that. I knew she would see it only as weakness and another portent of disaster.
In the beginning, I thought I actually would enjoy being M’s older sister, mother, and father wrapped up into one. I went to the school and met with the principal, who clearly wasn’t happy about M coming to live with me at the Beaux-Arts. It was clear that the rumor mill had been running full-time at the school, but I thought we could endure it, or at least she could. I tried to be as stern and unyielding as Papa at times, insisting that M keep up with her schoolwork. On the other hand, I also enjoyed being her older sister, showing her how to look prettier, fixing her hair, teaching her about makeup, and buying her more attractive clothes. Little did I know that everything I did only made things harder for her at school. Dirty rumors were circulated more openly because of the things I had done for her. They were saying that I was turning my sister into another prostitute.
I didn’t understand at first how this happened so quickly, and then M confessed and told me that before Papa’s death, she and one of her girlfriends had been spying on me. Her girlfriend knew too much and, out of jealousy or just plain meanness, began to spread rumors about her after she had moved in with me. It all came to a head when Mrs. Brittany arrived one day to reveal that somehow her telephone service was getting nuisance calls. She was furious about it, and I knew that my days as a Brittany girl were numbered as long as M remained with me.
We might have survived for quite a while, nevertheless, if it weren’t for a nightmare of mine coming to fruition. M was home, had just taken a shower, and, being upset with herself and everything else, poured herself a drink at my bar. She was sitting there in her robe when the door buzzer sounded, and unfortunately, she greeted a first-time client of mine who had arrived quite early. Things got out of hand, and he went after her, thinking she was another Brittany girl. She had locked herself in her bedroom by the time I arrived.
I managed to distract him, but he turned out to be my first and only vicious and despicable man. When I refused to bring my sister out for his sexual fantasy ménage à trois, he hit me. It was the only time any man had ever been violent, but it took only that one time to drive home the reality of what I was, what I was doing with my life, and where I would eventually end up.
Nothing reinforced my understanding more than Mrs. Brittany’s lack of sympathy or compassion. She blamed it all on me, of course, for taking M into my life in the first place, and then had the audacity to suggest that maybe I could turn it into an advantage. Her intentions were clear. She wanted me to develop M as a younger version of myself.
“You’ve exposed her to it. It’s the only way to solve the situation. I know she must look up to you now. She sees how well you live and must realize she could live just as well.”
I pretended to consider it, but I felt as if my father had returned from the dead, gotten into Mrs. Brittany, and wreaked his final revenge. I asked her for a little time off to think things over, and she gave me a few weeks. I told M we were going to have a vacation in Paris and called Uncle Alain immediately. He understood exactly what I was intending and was more than willing to take on the responsibility.
Ironically, M and I had never been closer than we were during those days in Paris. She loved Uncle Alain and his partner, Maurice, and they took to her immediately, too. I saw how comfortable she was with them and felt encouraged. I could leave her there and feel I had done the right thing. I didn’t tell her my plan. I really didn’t know how I would finally arrange it, but thankfully Uncle Alain was way ahead of me about it all, proposing a new school for her.
I had been back to Paris many times since I had begun working for Mrs. Brittany, but it never touched me or opened itself to me as much as it did when M and I toured it together, sat in cafés, listened to music, or just walked along the Seine. She tried many times to get me to give her more details about what my life was like. I held her off with promises to reveal more in time, but my intention was never to tell her any of it if I could help it.
I knew that when it came time for me to reveal what Uncle Alain had agreed to do—become M’s guardian and take her in for her final high school years—she would resist and refuse. I really didn’t know what I was going to do with myself, except that I would not return to Mrs. Brittany.
And then, late one afternoon, when I was alone at a café, musing about my future and all that had happened in my life, I felt his presence before I tu
rned to look up and see him standing there.
“Bonjour,” he said.
I was speechless for a moment. “How did you find me?” I asked him.
“You think your Mrs. Brittany is the only one with powerful friends?”
I kept looking at him, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t dreaming. He laughed and sat next to me, ordering a café au lait and then taking my hand.
“Norbert,” I said, nodding and realizing what had happened. “He must have had something to do with this.”
“Mais oui. What are good friends for?”
“Do you have business here in Paris?” I asked him.
“Always, but that’s not what brought me this time.”
“Ah,” I said. “Another free weekend?”
“All my weekends are free now.”
“What are you saying?”
“The merger has dissolved,” he replied with a smile. “The marriage one, I mean. Do you think there is any chance for us to pick up where we left off, to pretend that only a day or so has passed?”
“But you know it’s been far more than that, Paul, and you know where I’ve been,” I said.
The waiter brought his café au lait. He sipped some and nodded. “And I also know that if I had had any courage back then, you wouldn’t have been where you’ve been and be where you are now. I don’t blame you. I blame myself.”
I smiled. “Okay. Then I’ll blame you, too,” I said, and he laughed before taking on the most serious expression I had seen on his face.
“Good, Roxy. That way, we’ll both be able to live with it and go on.” He reached for my hand, but I held it back.