She thought about that name as she found her way home. That night she dreamed of a place where there were huge teal-colored birds trailing through a marsh. They walked as people did, regally, as if they were kings and queens. When she awoke she was steaming with sweat. She was in her chilly bedchamber, her sleeping husband beside her, the stars outside their window, but her skin was flushed with heat. She remembered looking down through the slats of a porch to gaze at the movement of the waves.
SHE WROTE A NOTE introducing herself to the lady of the house, which her maid delivered, and in return she received an invitation to tea. She went alone without mentioning her outing to Henri. She was treated warmly by Madame Pizzarro. Hers was a large family, originally from Spain, with many children in and out of the house. Lydia revealed her reason for coming, which sounded quite logical—now that her children were growing older she wished to expand her circle and become more involved with the synagogue. She said she’d been told Madame Pizzarro might help her meet other women in the congregation. Madame laughed and said her own children were growing older as well, but she had little time to visit with the Sisterhood, for she’d been helping out with a nephew for the past few years, a boy who was a boarding student at a nearby academy but who spent most of his time with his extended family. He sometimes spent weekends with his grandparents, Joseph and Ann-Felicité Pizzarro, whose son, the boy’s father, managed a family business in St. Thomas.
Lydia felt a jolt upon hearing a mention of St. Thomas. It was her birthplace, yet she knew nothing of it.
“How odd,” she said. “I was born there during a visit my parents made.”
As it turned out the nephew had arrived at the age of twelve and would be returning home at the end of the year, having studied at the Savary Academy for several years under the tutelage of Monsieur Savary, an expert in drawing and painting. The boy, whose father was a Pizzarro who lived halfway across the world, had become a good student and an excellent painter. At first his hosts did their best not to encourage their ward in this thankless arena; business was a more appropriate calling, and the one his parents wished him to pursue. But his teacher had applauded his artistry, calling him extraordinary. In fact Madame and her husband were rather proud of a small oil painting on the wall the boy had given them.
“Everyone believes we purchased it from a great artist, and we never say it’s only by our nephew. He takes delight in people’s confusion, and so do we. For all we know he’ll be a great artist someday.”
Lydia went for a closer look. The painting, in a gold-leaf frame, was luminous in tone. She was drawn to the image and could see why people assumed an expert had crafted it. A woman carried a basket of laundry to a house set upon stilts, the turquoise sea behind her, her expression serene.
Lydia sat down, overheated again and agitated in a way she couldn’t understand. She had a flash of something, perhaps a memory, perhaps a fear. She explained that she had headaches. But that was a lie. It was the painting that had affected her. She had the odd sense that she herself had been in that very same place. If you ventured along the road you would see red flowers in the hills, tumbling down like a staircase. They were the ones she dreamed of, and when she woke she still imagined them, as if petals had been set in her path as she walked her girls around the neighborhood.
At last the boy she was waiting for came home from school with Madame’s two sons, their maleness filling up the house with their deep voices and the clatter of their books and belongings and the scent of cold air and sweat. Madame Pizzarro’s sons ambled past, already in boisterous conversation, on their way to have a late tea. Then the nephew came in, reading as he walked.
“Does no one greet a guest?” Madame Pizzarro called. Lydia recognized the tall boy who was so intent on his book. “How about my dear nephew?”
The boy looked up. He seemed a confident fellow, but when he saw Lydia he immediately grew pale. She thought perhaps he stumbled. He was so angular and thin that his trousers seemed too big for him, and his jacket too small for his long arms.
“This is Madame Cohen,” the hostess continued.
Lydia walked to him and offered her hand. “I think we’ve met.”
His hand in hers was rougher than she’d expected, stained with faint blotches of paint.
“We may have,” the boy said cautiously.
“You’re an artist?”
“Yes.” He was a bit defiant in his answer, his hackles raised. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me it’s a waste of my time.”
“Not at all,” she responded.
He almost smiled then. He was no longer a ghost. He looked at her, concerned, more vulnerable than she would have imagined.
“Lyddie,” he said.
“Madame Cohen!” his aunt corrected him. “Where have everyone’s manners gone?”
“Out the window,” the boy said. “Where they belong.”
Lydia thought of what her father had said during their last visit. Don’t do what they tell you to.
“He came to us as Jacobo, a cousin several times removed. But once he arrived in Paris he took his middle name. Camille.”
The boy shrugged. “People change.”
“He’s become French through and through,” his aunt said, pleased.
Because dark was already falling, and Lydia was a woman alone, it made sense when she asked if the boy could accompany her on her way home. His aunt was only too happy for him to be useful. Jacobo Camille Pizzarro held open the double glass doors, and they stepped into the smoky air of November. The streets glittered wet with rain and the air was a mist.
“How long has this been going on?” Lydia asked.
“This?” He was wary; perhaps he thought she meant to catch him in a trap of his own admission and call the authorities.
“Your pursuit.”
“I’ll be going back soon, home, but I’ve been following you ever since I arrived in France.”
“Since you were twelve!” She laughed, then saw his expression. It was true.
“Well, not precisely. It took me the best of a year to locate your father’s address, and then months more before I realized you no longer lived there. And then, of course, I didn’t know you had taken your husband’s name, so I was lost again. It was nearly three years before I found you.”
“Three years!” She was quite amazed.
“Your maid turned me away every time I came to call. I thought if I approached you in a public place you might have me arrested.”
“Arrest a boy?” Lydia laughed.
“I was afraid I would offend you. I suppose, after a while, I lost my courage.”
“But not your resolve! I presume you follow me because you have something to say to me,” Lydia said gently. He was only a boy, and he had an artist’s soul, so perhaps he simply wished to paint her portrait and admired her for the character of her face.
All in all, she only wanted to know the cause of his attraction. Her husband would be getting home soon. He was at this very moment at the family office with his brothers, shrugging on his soft woolen overcoat, thinking about the dinner that awaited, the wife at the door, the stars that would appear in the pale twilight.
“If you had ever stopped and spoken to me, I would have been relieved,” he told her. “For a very long time you failed to notice me. And every time I meant to talk to you, I was uncertain all over again. You seem so happy.”
She smiled. He was so serious and earnest. He did seem older than his age. “And what do you have to tell me that would make me less so?”
“We’re somewhat related,” he told her.
“Are we?”
“We’re both from St. Thomas.”
“Yes. I’ve discovered I was born there.”
“It’s a very small place.” He scowled at the memory. “Too small.”
They walked along as if the rest of Paris did not exist. Perhaps because he admired all things French and would be leaving at the end of the school term, Camille was glum. He said there wa
s little freedom where he came from; his mother watched over him too closely, and he was expected to live a life like that of his father and brothers, a life that he already knew he would reject. “Shopkeepers,” he said of them. “Concerned with ledgers and sales. At least here in Paris the workingman is rising up to claim what he deserves.”
“People must shop,” Lydia reminded him.
“Must they? Perhaps all shops should throw open their doors and let those in need take what they must.” He looked at her for a reaction.
“Perhaps. I don’t know the answer to the world’s woes. I barely know the answer to my own.” The loss of her father had affected her more strongly than she imagined. She sometimes worried about her own children becoming orphaned, her most dire fear.
They passed the park where he had often watched her. Sometimes he’d sat here and sketched. His teacher, Monsieur Savary, had suggested that he carry his artist’s materials with him, for a subject often appeared when one least expected it to do so. A leaf, a woman, a shaded path.
Artists were those with supporters, wealthy families or patrons. They went to the Académie and studied with masters, and few were allowed into such society. He was a Jew, from St. Thomas, seventeen years old, with no financial backing. His lanky form was stooped with regret as they walked on. And he was nervous now that he was in Lyddie’s presence. Time and again he might have spoken to her, but on each of these occasions he didn’t feel up to the task of telling her the truth. She seemed far too content for the message he’d brought. But now she spoke of woes, and he wondered if perhaps he should have told her long ago.
She suggested they sit on a bench in the park, though it was damp. She had a shiver inside of her. When she thought back, there was only so far she could reach. Her father had told her she was very ill as a child. That they’d been traveling and she’d had such a high fever she’d had a loss of memory. He said she had spoken four languages, but when she recovered she’d forgotten all but French. Something haunted her about that time. Occasionally she used a word from some unknown language when speaking to her daughters. Once when they looked at the night sky she said stjerne, and the girls had asked what she meant and she simply had no idea.
“I made a promise to find you; otherwise I would have given up.” Camille took an envelope from the inner lining of his coat. “Your mother wrote this to you on the day you were abducted.”
Lydia laughed, then held a hand over her mouth. A soft sob escaped. It was a ridiculous remark, yet it rang with a certain truth, particularly after her conversation with Madame Sophie.
“My father was my father, was he not?” she said.
The boy nodded. “He was raised by my family. He was orphaned somehow.”
“Abducted is not the right word if I was raised by my own father.”
“But it is. You were stolen.” This was what he’d come to say and couldn’t before. “From your mother.”
Lydia let those words settle inside her.
“They tied her to a tree and had hired men standing guard. She’s been waiting for you all this time. I need to know what I should say to her when I return.”
It was now fully dark. Men in overcoats and hats were walking past, on their way home. The sky was ink, the boy noticed this, ebony at the edges, midnight blue in the center. Only bits of pale light still remained. The city was a miracle, and the idea that he would be leaving it depressed him immensely.
“What was my mother to you?” Lydia asked.
“A friend of our family. And with her mother, for a time, our maid.”
“A maid?” She was puzzled.
“And I must tell you, I suppose, because of the world we live in, she was of African heritage.”
“I see,” Lydia said, although she didn’t quite. She was a Jewish woman and the wife of Henri Cohen and the mother of three daughters and a resident of Paris for so long she could remember nothing of a deeper past. She took the letter the boy offered and opened the envelope. The paper felt like silk, watery; it had been flattened and creased a hundred times over. The print was faded, pale, but she could read it well enough.
My darling, my daughter, my star, my life.
I would not have given you up for anything in the world. Not for any amount of money, not for any promise, not even if they said it was a better future. You were meant to be with me, and no one, not on earth and not in heaven, could have ever loved you more.
You can be whoever you want to be, but you will always be my child, and we will always belong to each other, even if we never speak or see each other again.
She folded the paper back into the envelope, and slid it and her hands inside her cape. They were ice-cold. She was stunned and yet, at the same time, not surprised to discover that someone had loved her beyond measure.
“I need time,” she said when she could speak. “To think about this.”
“Of course.” This boy, Camille, was quite unusual. He seemed an equal. A man from St. Thomas who could understand what a man who had been born and raised in Paris never could. He rose to leave her to her thoughts.
“What will you do when you go home?” she asked.
“I’ll pretend to be who they want me to be.” He grinned then, and she saw his youth. “But it won’t work. In the end I’ll have to disappoint someone. Either them, or myself.”
She herself did not think she could go home yet. She went to a restaurant instead and said she was to meet her husband there, for a woman on her own was not allowed inside. She sat in the lounge and ordered an aperitif and drank it. She shivered, realizing that she was always cold. She had been since the time she’d had that fever. She wondered what had come before and why she could remember only bits and pieces: a red flower, a woman’s voice, a bird that was bright yellow. All at once she knew this was the woman her father had written about and loved. The boy could easily be a liar, the letter forged, the information untrue. But she believed it. He had been following her for so long. He’d known her when she hadn’t known herself, for if this letter was indeed from the woman who had given her life, then Lydia was no longer sure who she was. Certainly not the same woman who had walked into Madame Pizzarro’s house.
When the manager came and asked if she would like him to send a driver and a carriage for her husband, stating that she could not continue to drink on her own, she shook her head and asked that the aperitif be put on her husband’s account. Everything looked new to her, the way things look in dreams. In dreams, the same street one walks along daily becomes a mystery, the stone gray color of the pavement turns to silver and then to gold and then the street disappears completely.
When she at last arrived home, Henri was at the door, worried.
“I couldn’t imagine what had happened.” He embraced her, so grateful for her well-being he didn’t notice that she didn’t respond. The children had been given dinner and had been sent to bed by the maid. Her name was Ava; she originally came from the Loire Valley, not Jewish, a working girl from a farm. Lydia had never asked if she had brothers and sisters. They spoke only of the details of daily life. What the menu would be, what the yardman had failed to do, how the children were growing so quickly, like sprouts. Even when the maid had confided about the boy who’d often come to the back door, Lydia hadn’t thought to ask if she’d been frightened or confused by a stranger. Lydia felt flushed with guilt to think she’d never spoken to this woman about anything deeper than menus and household duties; she’d never asked a question, never had any interest.
While she was preparing for bed in her dressing room, she went to the mirror and studied her reflection. She was the same and yet brand new.
It was true. Her eyes were silver.
SHE REREAD THE LETTER whenever she was alone. And then one day she took up a pen and paper and wrote back. She told her mother everything she remembered. How ill she had become on the ship. How she had refused to eat and they’d made her drink hot lemon juice to break her fever. She admitted that she could now speak only French,
but that her French was flawless, so that everyone assumed she’d been born in Paris. She wrote that she dreamed of teal-colored birds that danced for each other, and that when she had such dreams she awoke crying. She wrote a letter every day for twenty days, and in each she told more of the story of her life. It was as if she was writing her diary all at once, from the time she woke from the fever on the boat to this very day. She was afraid to mail them for some reason. She had a peculiar fear that if she posted them, they would vanish or be stolen and would never reach their intended reader. Instead, she folded them into a small wooden box in which she kept lavender sachets. She didn’t notice how quickly time was passing. Snow fell in early December.
“Will you be going home for Christmas?” she asked the maid, Ava.
They were in the kitchen together, making notes regarding the pantry. Ava seemed shocked to be asked her plans.
“If I can have the time,” she said, wary. “I would like to.”
“Is it a farm?”
“Oh, yes,” Ava said, her cheeks flushed, cheerful to think about her family home. “Mostly chickens and goats.”
“By all means go home. You’ll be paid for your time.”
Snow was falling when Lydia wrote her thirtieth letter. It was Christmas Eve, a time when they always stayed at home. It was not their holiday to celebrate, but there was a peacefulness when the city was deeply quiet, so different than it had been during the riots of the past year. Lydia was in the parlor and the children were asleep. Henri came in from the garden. It was a clear night, and he had been looking at the constellations. He clapped the stray flakes of snow from his coat. There was a fire in the fireplace, an envelope on Lydia’s lap, and the small dog the children had begged for, whom they called Lapin, Bunny, was napping on a small moss-green pillow.