Luncheon of the Boating Party

  Slumped on the chair before her dressing table, she slathered on cold cream for the nightly ordeal of wiping off her hands, arms, and face. Her calendar stared back at her. Six days late. No. Seven. At this point, she’d welcome a cramp as a blessing. Seeing Charlotte in such pain and hearing every sordid detail of what she’d gone through had sent her into a slough of worry.

  A tap at her door made her jump. It was Émile, the stage door concierge whom she’d brought to Chatou, the one-night lover, the one person she didn’t want to see. In the mirror, she saw her black eyeliner smeared into a gray streak down her cheek. She looked like a ghoul. So what? It was only Émile.

  “Did you go see her?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well? How is she?”

  She kept working on her face. “Feverish.”

  “Will she get better?”

  “If she goes to a doctor.”

  “Will she?”

  It was irritating, how he pressed her about Charlotte every day.

  “Only if I collect enough money and take her. I’ve got to get back to Auguste’s painting, so I’m hoping—”

  “You’re only doing it for that reason.”

  “That’s not true.”

  With a feeling in her chest like she’d swallowed a grape whole, she remembered her promise to Auguste and Monsieur Ephrussi that she would try to bring Émile again to solve the problem of the missing fourteenth person. Seeing him standing there with his mouth hanging open like a hound dog stopped the question in her throat.

  “Will you meet me at Café Tortoni when I get off?” he asked.

  “I’m too tired.”

  “You’ve said that all week.”

  “I’ve got my acting lesson in the mornings, and I’m rehearsing a new pantomime in the afternoons. It’s exhausting. I have to fall flat like a board, and squirm along the ground for cover whenever I hear drums and cymbals imitating the Prussian guns, and that’s supposed to get a laugh. I hate it—the idea of it, and doing it. Do you know how hard it is to do a dead fall a dozen times an hour?”

  Émile came toward her and wiped under her chin with a sponge. She clenched her teeth. He backed her against her Sarah Bernhardt photograph on the wall and pressed himself against her. She pushed him away. “I have some worries, Émile. I need some time. And I’ve got to do more collecting tonight.”

  With a cocky look on his face, he opened the door and swept his hand through the air like an usher. “Then go, Mademoiselle Charité. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

  She brushed past him. If she collected enough to ensure Charlotte good treatment at the charity hospital, it might relieve her enough that her monthly would come.

  She went to the Egyptian’s dressing room. She didn’t know her name. In the cells, no one knew each other’s real names. They existed in a smoky underground barracks where they knew each other’s stage names and cell numbers and costumes and acts—Paradise of Forbidden Pleasure, Famous Courtesans of History, Nine Naughty Nuns. She went to the Spanish Twins, Carmen and Carlotta, with oiled black hair wound into identical knots, and made them swear to secrecy, which they did in unison. She went to Mademoiselle Flambeau, so flamboyant that even the Cossacks made way for her. She found her crying, her Japanese kimono falling open revealing everything.

  “Oh, that Monsieur Sari! I could scream! He changed my act and now I have to wear a sequined dress that covers my breasts. And on top of that, my lover has exhausted me.”

  Ellen gave her a big sigh. “When it’s bad, it’s bad all around.” Then she told her about Charlotte.

  Mademoiselle rummaged in her alabaster jewel box for coins, muttering, “Poor child, poor child.”

  Ellen went to Mademoiselle Zénobie, the lead cancaneuse who currently had the glad eye of Duval, the theater manager. She earned ten times what the chorus girls did, but she only gave three francs, picking them out of her silk purse one at a time and dropping them into her palm as though they were insects. She sprayed absinthe in her mouth from a crystal atomizer and said, “Stupid girl. She should have been more careful.”

  Ellen cringed, feeling as though the comment was aimed at her. She couldn’t do any more tonight. In the corridor on her way out, the mime who played the Distinguished Traveler fell into step with her. At the stage door, Émile gave her a look shot with suspicion.

  “Too tired tonight?” he muttered to her as she passed.

  On the corner of rue Richer, the mime pressed a ten-franc coin into her hand. “For Charlotte,” he said and went off in the opposite direction.

  “Who told you?”

  “I don’t remember,” he said over his shoulder.

  On Saturday morning Ellen had her café au lait and baguette outdoors at Café Saint Jean on place des Abbesses in Montmartre. It was a peaceful haven shaded by chestnut trees near Charlotte’s flat. All week she had been collecting. All week she had been counting—money and days. She’d been sleeping fitfully and had arrived at her acting lessons listless and uninspired. Every day Émile had pestered her about Charlotte. Every day the dresser with sly, creeping hands slipped her another franc, keening in an oily voice, “For Charlotte, my kitten,” or “For my little mouse.” Now it was Saturday, day eleven, and she had no acting class or rehearsal. Across the street in the small triangular park, children were swinging on the swings. Their innocent cries sharpened her worry.

  When she mustered the courage, she took the collection to Charlotte, and found her worsened, her skin yellowish.

  “Look! Look what I have. Voilà!” She poured out the coins onto the quilt.

  “What for?” Dazed, Charlotte scooped them up and let them fall.

  “For you. To go to a hospital.”

  Charlotte raised herself up on her elbow. “From whom?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Émile? Did Émile contribute?”

  The name stung. His interest in Charlotte stung. His badgering insistence stung. Sordid truth slashed through her like Bruno’s sword. What a fool she’d been. What a rat he was.

  For a minute she could only look at Charlotte’s piteous form beneath the quilt, not at her face. She doubted if she could ever look her in the face again.

  “Let’s get you washed up.”

  She supported Charlotte down four flights of stairs and paid a boy with a donkey cart to take them to place Pigalle. Charlotte sat on the edge of the fountain while Ellen hailed several hackneys before one was free to take them to the Hôtel Dieu. It was the charity hospital on the Île de la Cité, caring for the poor since the twelfth century. On Pont Notre Dame, Charlotte looked out the window at the wash barges strung out along the quay. “My mother used to work there,” she said. “Two hundred washers work on that bateau-lavoir, l’Arche Marion. It’s the most prestigious.”

  Ellen took Charlotte’s hand in both of hers. “I’m sure it is.”

  “And my father worked at the bateau-lavoir for the omnibus horses.”

  On the steps to the Hôtel Dieu, a woman more pitiful than Charlotte with a baby wrapped in her shawl held up her callused palm. Seeing the mother not even raising her eyes from the child gave her a stab of cold fear.

  “She sure picked a lousy place to beg,” Ellen muttered. She couldn’t understand why the woman hadn’t stationed herself near the entrance to Notre Dame just adjacent. More likely offerings there.

  “Can we give her something?” Charlotte asked.

  Ellen dropped her a fifty-centime piece and took Charlotte inside to the cloistered garden and had her sit on a bench while she registered her with an elderly nun at the wicket, paid the donation fee, and gave Charlotte the remaining francs.

  “May I go in with her to see that she’s settled well?” Ellen asked the nun.

  “That’s not necessary. We’ll take over from here.” The nun wrapped Charlotte’s hand in the crook of her elbow and led her down a corridor.

  Charlotte looked back, her eyes dark with fear. “Will you come back to see me? The
y’ll make me well and then I’ll do your part and you can go back to that painter.”

  “Yes. I’m sure every day you’ll get a little better.”

  “Come soon.” Her voice quavered against the peal of the cathedral’s chimes.

  “I will.”

  Coming out onto the square, Ellen couldn’t avoid the beggar woman with her gaunt cheeks, the baby with crusty blood under his nose. Maybe a baby was the last thing that woman wanted too, at one time, but the look in the mother’s sunken eyes told her she would never toss that baby. To think she may have something in common with that poor woman was enough to give her the cramps. She hoped.

  She had done what she could for Charlotte, but autumn would be here and gone before that girl could step onto the stage.

  There was only so much summer. The end of August already. She could take a little time. She sauntered along the river, crossed the roadway of Pont Neuf, and descended to the leafy point of the island facing downstream like the prow of a ship. It was pleasant and cool with the river very close on three sides of her. On the left, the dark, gold-ribbed dome of the Institut de France housed, among other academies, the Académie Française, which set the standards for language, and therefore literature and theater. As long as she worked only for the Folies, those gold ribs kept her out of the life she longed to live.

  Two old men on folding stools were fishing with long cane poles. That is, they were in the act of waiting for a fish. “Have you caught anything yet?” she asked.

  One man said, “When I was a boy.”

  The other man chuckled. “Not yet today. We’re waiting.”

  “One can always hope,” she said, turning to gaze at the dome.

  Was it only at the end of life that one had the capacity for patience and peaceful relaxation? She was prepared and waiting too. Leaning against a chestnut tree on the very point of the island, she yawned and felt herself go limp, felt her shoulders drop, her arms hang, her mouth slacken, her eyelids half close. She sensed the movement of the water, silken and cool, on both sides of her, the flow through Paris and around a few bends to Chatou. She felt a tightness in her belly squeeze and let go, then the moist loosening. Grâce à Dieu! She walked briskly back to the bridge, up the stairs quickly, down and up again, to bring it on, to be sure. She crossed the river to the Gothic Church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois and thought about how many women since the Middle Ages had prayed behind that rose window for the very same thing she had been waiting for. Yes. It was unmistakable. Relief flooded her.

  Through blurry eyes, Paris was beautiful. She loved every kiosk, every paving stone, every pigeon she passed. The café terraces on boulevard des Italiens were filling, and at Café Tortoni, a waiter was placing pansies in glass bowls on cream-colored tablecloths. “Charmant, monsieur,” she said as she passed. A little girl trotting alongside her mother bobbed a red balloon bearing the word Louvre, an advertisement for the department store, Le Grand Magasin du Louvre. “Elle est très jolie,” Ellen said to the mother, who responded with a smile. Seeing a little boy playing marbles alone, Ellen crouched, took a marble, and shot it toward another. It went astray. The boy did the same and his tapped hers. “Bravo! Tu es un champion!” She stood up. Words! She could say lovely words to all of them, smooth and melodic.

  Onstage that night, her arms were fluid with feeling, her hands eloquent with love, her fingers alive with new witticisms. She wrenched applause from the grand horseshoe-shaped theater, took a deeper bow than usual, and descended the iron steps breathing hard, loving the Folies after all.

  The stage manager stopped her in the corridor. He’s going to congratulate me, she thought.

  “You owe a fine,” he said.

  Her stomach cramped. “What!”

  “For gathering a welfare collection.”

  “Where is it written? Show me in my contract.”

  “It’s understood as policy. The more people solicited, the larger the fine.”

  “How do you know what I’m doing?”

  “Some people are loyal to Monsieur Sari.”

  “Who snitched? Mademoiselle Zénobie? Mademoiselle Flambeau?”

  “No.”

  “The Distinguished Traveler?”

  “No.”

  “Who, then? Émile?”

  The manager glanced down the corridor. “Someone of impeccable honor.”

  “Émile. He’s lower than an ant. That’s just personal vendetta. You go and call Monsieur Sari. I want to hear it from his own lips.”

  She strode toward her dressing room but stopped at the bulletin board listing fines.

  Balthazar Rasmakov, late for performance, 5 francs.

  Lulu Lagrange, disturbance in the wings, 2 francs.

  Carmen and Carlotta, quarreling during rehearsal, 50 centimes each.

  Hyménée Baudouin, indecency onstage, 8 francs.

  Ellen Andrée, gathering a collection, 20 francs.

  “Twenty francs! That’s extortion!”

  She flung open the door to her cell and stood a moment stunned and staring. Charlotte’s poster of Jeanne Samary, Charlotte’s hairbrush wound with her black hair, her own dear dressing table. She removed her makeup quickly and changed into her street clothes.

  Behind her, a knock on the doorframe. Monsieur Léon Sari loomed in his black evening dress and ruby studs. “Monsieur Duval tells me you have some objection to the company rules?”

  Cold fear shot up from her toes. “I have some objection to a fine imposed for caring about a fellow performer.”

  “There are reasons for rules.”

  “You only make it against the rules because you don’t want people discussing how stingy you are. If you’d given her a paid leave, I wouldn’t have made the collection, and you would have earned some respect around here.”

  “You’re telling me how to run the place? An operation of more than two hundred performers? A little mimeuse is presuming to know what’s best for the Folies-Bergère?”

  If she said one more word, it would send her on a road she might not be ready for. Could she, the daughter of a department store clerk, actually find a place on the legitimate stages of Paris? Her fingernails dug into her palms.

  “I know what’s humane. And I know what’s inhumane. It’s inhumane not to help a hard-working, loyal worker when she’s in trouble and it’s inhumane to prevent people from showing that they care about her and it’s inhumane to demand that the trapézistes throw their baby in order to give the audience a two-franc thrill and I won’t work for such an inhumane man. Not someone who makes a joke of the war either. So that’s it. Drop the fine, drop the rule, and let them throw a rubber baby the way they’ve done before, and I’ll work till my heart bursts and you’ll never hear a peep from me. Otherwise, you’ll have a hole in The Rivers come matinee tomorrow.”

  “Impudent rebel.”

  “Your choice.”

  “What’s come over you, Ellen? You’ve never been a problem before.”

  Hearing him say that threatened to sink her. For five years she had thrived under his guidance.

  “You’ll be nothing without the Folies.”

  “Wait till you see me in the Odéon.”

  Sari grabbed her costume for the Ferryman’s Daughter and backhanded Monsieur Duval in the stomach with it. “Get that Blanche girl, that choice piece who dances in Forbidden Pleasure, get her fitted into this and bring her to the practice room. Immediately.”

  Their patent-leather shoes pounding up the iron stairway rang in her ears.

  Trembling, she looked around her dressing room, her second home. She swept her cake white and grease pencils, her cold cream and sponges, her brushes and lipstick into a hatbox. She wrapped her curling iron and spirit lamp and alcohol in a towel and then in her kimono, and stuffed the bundle into her carpetbag with her stage slippers and her autographed picture of Sarah Bernhardt. She rolled up the posters advertising her in The Rivers of France, took one last look down the corridor to the iron stairway, and went the other wa
y.

  At the stage door, Émile looked smug until he saw all that she was carrying. “What happened?”

  “Weasel.”

  She shouldered the door open herself and stepped out into the dark street.

  In a matter of hours, it would be Sunday.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  In a Closed Field

  Paul buttered his bread and took a thoughtful bite. In an hour, Auguste would be expecting them. He looked around at the Café Nouvelle-Athènes where they always met on Sundays before going out to Chatou. He gripped the cool marble edge of the very table where he’d written the Mardi Gras story. That it should come to this—absurd.

  “When was the last time you handled a pistol?” Pierre asked in a low voice, hunched over a letter on the table.

  “In Algeria, just after the Prussian War.”

  Pierre scoffed. “Nine years ago.”

  “I had a quick hand.”

  “Then. This is now. I tell you, you’re a fool. Can’t you pay him off?”

  “I tried that last year.”

  Pierre gulped his café. “This has been seething that long?” He pushed away from the table. “I won’t have this on my conscience.”

  “I’m not asking for that. I’m just asking you to go with me.”

  “Does Auguste know this?”

  “Not exactly. I was hoping to arrive only an hour late.”

  “A fine fix you’ve gotten yourself into. What’s the man’s issue?”

  It was so petty he hated to recount it. “Her name is Gabrielle,” Paul said quietly. “It started with a satiric piece I wrote for Le Petit Journal about the behavior of some unnamed women at a masked ball at Mardi Gras. I described their costumes and their methods of keeping their lovers’ affections at white heat. One Robert Douvaz took offense, seeing his mistress in my remark, this Gabrielle who wore a costume similar to one I had described. I had known her, indiscreetly, on one occasion. She keeps coming back to me. I beg her not to. She comes anyway, steals some little thing from me and taunts him with false evidence of her infidelity to stir his ardor.”

  “Then you’re a dupe.”