At the Edge of Summer

Thursdays we had afternoons off from classes. With promises to meet Bauer later at the Tennis Club de Paris, I changed into my brown jacket and blue scarf and set off for a stroll along the Seine.

The bouquinistes sat on their stools, smoking, as customers browsed the sagging wooden boxes of secondhand books on the stone quayside. I rarely stopped—I barely had enough left at the end of the week for my train ticket home—but today I did. I had those extra francs from the generous tourists. Across from a café where women in flowered hats ate lemon ices was a stall selling English books. The proprietor was a retired English colonel, or so he always said, and had been there as long as I remembered. He wore a filthy khaki army jacket, smoked Latakia tobacco, and always kept a spyglass in his box for the children to peer out over the river.

Sometimes I picked up something for Maman—Jane Eyre, a translation of Madame Bovary, or whatever new he had by Edith Wharton. Today I idly flipped through the stacks. Some mysteries, a fair copy of The Ghost Pirates, a crumbling book about the Welsh education system.

“Je peux vous aider, young monsieur?” He took the pipe from his mouth and squinted up at me. “I have a copy now of The Last Egyptian. You were looking for it before, non?”

“Maybe.” I jingled the coins in my pocket and wondered about an ice cream later.

The bouquiniste got heavily to his feet. “Your maman, she likes Cassell’s Magazine. And this issue has the newest Father Brown story.”

I tugged on my jacket collar. “Do you have any translations of Perrault?”

“His fairy tales? I think so.” He dug through stacks, sending up a cloud of dust. Finally he held one up. “Tales of Passed Times, yes?” He brushed off the cover before passing it to me.

The volume was small enough to fit in a pocket, but printed with a color frontispiece. The illustrations weren’t Papa’s, of course, but they were nice enough.

“It’s been hiding there for a while. I don’t sell many children’s books.” He wiped off the stem of his pipe. “C’est la vie.”

It was too cold for ice cream anyway. “How much?”

Clare could read it side by side with the French, learn more than the few words she could pick out on her own. The best things began with fairy tales. I paid and tucked it in my jacket pocket.

The day was golden, with meringues of clouds above Notre Dame. I didn’t want to go back to that dark apartment smelling of cabbage and cheap cigarettes. I passed the art students with their pads of paper and their portable easels. One was doing a passable painting of the Louvre buildings across the river. He frowned down at a palette of blues and grays.

I walked past the galleries lining the Quai du Voltaire. Watercolors and ink drawings hung in the windows, above the occasional nude bronze statue. Everyone wanted to be Rodin. I’d never bought anything from the galleries—not on the little I had left at the end of the week—but looking cost nothing. Once, I’d seen one of Papa’s paintings in the window of the Galerie Porte d’Or. It was a portrait of his friend Olivier, one that had sat in the room off Papa’s studio after Olivier went bankrupt and fled to Patagonia. I never told Maman he brought it to sell in the Quai du Voltaire, but I did help him pick out a new hat for her with the proceeds.

Today it wasn’t the portrait of a penniless poet hanging in a window that caught my attention. It was a painting of a red-haired woman in a bottle-green evening dress. I froze before the window.

There were Clare’s gray eyes, her long white fingers, that defiant tilt to her chin. That pile of auburn curls. I pushed open the door. Inside were more paintings of that same woman in other evening dresses. Sapphire blue, purple, rich cabernet red. In some her hair was pinned up in a mass, in others it cascaded over bare shoulders. No painting was the same. They showed different moments of Paris life. She was sometimes on a stage, sometimes on a sofa, sometimes in the center of a glittering party. A dancer, a courtesan, a society lady. In one she stood before a bed with that jewel-colored evening gown in a puddle at her feet.

The gallery owner, Monsieur Santi, came to my side, his nose twitching as he noticed my interest. “Excusez-moi, je peux vous aider?”

I left before asking who the artist was.

I forgot the golden afternoon and stopped in a stationer’s for a paper and envelope. I crossed the Pont Neuf to the Square du Vert-Galant, that little teardrop of green caught in the Seine. Sitting on a bench, I wrote a letter with the drawing pencil in my pocket.

Dear Maman,

Do you remember the Galerie Porte d’Or, that place on the Quai du Voltaire with the shifty-eyed Neapolitan fellow? I was by there today and, Maman, I saw a painting of Madame Ross. I saw a painting of Clare’s mother.

Clare told me she didn’t know where her mother was, but she must be in Paris. One painting shows the stage of the Lapin Agile cabaret. And then for all the paintings to be here, for sale on the Quai du Voltaire.

M. Santi would know the artist, who can tell us where his model lives. I know you’ve been looking for her. Will you write to M. Santi, Maman? All Clare wants, more than anything, is her mother back.

Luc

I stayed in Paris that weekend, too. I walked down again to the Quai du Voltaire and loitered outside of the gallery, but didn’t go in again.

Clare sent me a letter, something light and wistful, recounting a story about how her nanny had bought her a Little Folks’ Painting Book for her birthday, so she could be a “lady artist” like her mother. When Mother comes for me, she wrote, I can show her all I’ve learned since then.

When she comes.

Maman’s letter arrived the next day.

My Luc,

Maud was in France, it’s true. You were away at school in Switzerland, so you weren’t here when she appeared at our front door. She’d only just left Scotland. I was angry that she left, angry that she came here, to Mille Mots. I won’t get into the reasons. Clare was scarcely eleven.

I should have talked to her rather than sending her from my door in a fury. Maybe I could have persuaded her to return to Fairbridge. But she didn’t and I felt responsible. I wrote to Clare often. John did his best with her, but she was lonely up in that big house. Occasionally I heard news of Maud, through friends. She was here and there, never staying very long in one place. After a while, I lost track of her. I wish that M. Santi had better news, but he confirmed what I already knew. Maud isn’t in France any longer.

Luc, please don’t worry about this matter anymore. When Maud wants to be found, she will. Until then, we’ll give Clare all of the friendship we can.

Your Maman

I had met Madame Ross once. I was eight and had been dragged on one of Maman’s flying trips to Perthshire, the one Clare remembered. Scotland was grayer than France, the flowers were smaller, and the food saltier. There wasn’t much for a disgruntled boy to do but wish he was back at home.

Maman adored Madame Ross, that was clear. They called each other “Eena” and “Mudge” when they thought no one was listening. Clare was only four then, with short curls and an enormous hair bow that was forever falling out. She was too little to play with me, but kept trying to escape the nursery to find her mother. She adored her even more than Maman did.

She had that Little Folks’ Painting Book, the one she mentioned to me in the letter. I remembered her running into the room with a colored picture, proud that she’d stayed mostly in the lines. “For you, Mother,” she’d said. But Madame Ross just frowned and sent her away with the instruction to “do something original.”

After Clare had slipped from the room, tears on her cheeks, Madame Ross said, “Really, Eena, maybe that’s the best I can expect from her. After all, not everyone is an artist.”

Ten years later those dismissive words hadn’t left me. I used my tips that week to buy Clare a dozen soft Conté pencils and a wooden box to keep them in. I knew her best was more than anyone could expect.

That weekend, I came home to Mille Mots. I didn’t tell Maman I was coming, so no one was waiting for me at the station in Railleuse. It was the kind of summer day where the trees lazily waved as I passed and the air smelled like fresh grass. I’d brought only my school satchel, weighted down with books, a pair of clean socks, and one dusky gold plum. I tried to put from my mind the paintings in Galerie Porte d’Or and Maman’s letter. I inhaled and thought of home.

The walk was dusty, winding up the ridge that bristled through the countryside like the spine of a dragon, then through the village of Enété, where I used to sneak as a boy to buy sugared almonds and poke the glassy-eyed fish in the market. I ate my plum and tipped my hat to a woman sweeping her step. Past the last house in the village, the one with green shutters and a crooked door, the road wound down towards the Aisne. A sandpiper darted past, chirping enthusiastically. I whistled back at him, smiled, and stretched my arms.

A few kilometers past the village, the road narrowed. Against the summer green of the fields, I saw the lindens lining the drive to Mille Mots. And, behind the green, the château itself.

I slipped around to the back. Maman would be at her battered table in the garden, going over accounts. Papa might be at his easel, near the river, unless the horseflies had driven him inside to the studio. And Clare, maybe stretched under the chestnut tree.

But when I rounded the corner, to where the poppy-dotted lawn stretched along the river’s edge, I saw them. At the old table in the garden, Clare and Papa sat, facing each other across a trimmed sheet of paper. He’d read my letter, it seemed, my plea to fill Clare’s lonely weeks with lessons. Papa sipped from a small cup of coffee, tapping his pipe against the corner of the table but not lighting it, not yet. Clare bent over the paper, pencil flashing, the tip of her tongue escaping as evidence of her concentration. Papa never touched her drawing, but traced shapes in the air. I knew the voice he was using, that slow, patient voice that always made you feel your efforts were golden, even when riddled with errors. He leaned back and tugged his beard, quite obviously content.

Clare was less so. She frowned. She erased. She gnawed at the pencil when she didn’t think Papa was looking. Papa nodded over her sketch, satisfied, but Clare only seemed to grow more and more frustrated. She wanted to be drawing the château, I knew, the landscape around Mille Mots, not the lines and circles Papa was insisting upon.

Finally Yvette came out with the dented coffee pot and Clare took it as an invitation to drop her pencil and push back her chair.

She looked up then and noticed me standing on the lawn. She brought her hand up to the brim of her hat. Scratching her eyebrow? Shading her eyes? Waving, at me? For some reason, my heart beat faster. I waved back.

She jumped to her feet, tipping the chair back. Papa didn’t admonish her. He tugged at his beard and watched her skip off towards me, her braid swinging down her back. Her hat fell off.

“You’re in your ‘students’ uniform’ again.” She bounced to a stop in front of me. “And I have a new dress. See?” It was plain and white, but of a fine fabric. She smoothed the front. “Your mother, she said the queens of France used to wear white for mourning. She saw no reason why a fifteen-year-old girl couldn’t do the same.” The dress came up high on her neck and down to skim the top of her high, buttoned boots. Around her waist she wore a wide sash.

“It’s very nice, mademoiselle.”

Something fell, just a fraction, in her face, but she twirled with a pasted-on smile. I swallowed.

The other times I’d seen her, in the front hallways and out beneath the chestnut tree, she’d been wearing the gauzy dress that was her mother’s. Its raggedness, its repurpose, its oddness, almost made her seem part of Mille Mots. A young bohemian, dressed in the green of the countryside, dressed in a way that made her happiest. But this new dress was unmistakably a girl’s dress—short, flounced, and modest. Reading her letters, I kept forgetting she was exactly that. A girl. I slipped a hand beneath my jacket and pressed it over my heart. It had no business beating the way it was.

“Luc!” Maman came bustling from the kitchen door. “I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.” She set a plate of cakes by Papa and wiped her hands on her skirt.

“I like to surprise you, Maman.”

I was sure she didn’t believe me, but she walked heavily across the lawn, her gold earrings twinkling. “Even a cat is full of more surprises than you, mon poussin.”

“I was eager to be here.” I didn’t meet the demoiselle’s eyes.

I did see the look in Maman’s, though, and it drew hard. “I see.”

“I was bringing Papa a new package of Conté pencils,” I said quickly. “Number threes.” I dug into my satchel for the wooden box. “The last time I was here, I saw he was out of them.”

Maman frowned at the elegant case, but held out a hand for the pencils.

The copy of Tales of Passed Times I left in my satchel, but I touched it once through the canvas.

“I should go to greet Papa,” I said, as though I hadn’t walked from the Railleuse train station only to see Clare Ross again. Maman watched me with eyes inscrutable. I bowed, quickly and stiffly, and walked away.