The Peacock Feast, page 21
They ate at a restaurant overlooking one of the town’s canals. Although Docteur Lemier inquired about the unfortunate American woman, Prudence quickly realized that he’d not invited her to dine for this reason. With another man, she might have frozen in response, but the doctor was so comfortable with his intentions and so respectful and accepting of her reserve that she felt no pressure from him, only his interest in her, leaving her more at ease than she would have imagined had she done so in advance.
A widower with two young daughters—Nicole, nine, and Simone, just seven—Jean-Christophe, Prudence learned, was thirty-eight, three years her junior. Two years before, after his wife had died of a rare blood disorder, he’d returned from Paris, where he’d been a pediatric surgeon, to his parents’ house in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Here, he’d joined his father in a general medical practice conducted from a glove factory that had been converted into a small clinic. Jean-Christophe’s younger sister was the nurse; his older sister, who had three children, handled the books and was the receptionist. His mother watched the five grandchildren after school and with the help of her bonne prepared the midday meal at which the three families ate together every day.
Jean-Christophe was an amateur musician. As a child he’d studied piano and cello with a man who’d once played with the Paris Opera. In Paris, his daughters had been studying violin with a Japanese teacher. When they moved here, Jean-Christophe took over their lessons. On Sundays, he played in a quartet with his younger sister, a childhood classmate, and the music teacher from the local high school.
He inquired about Carlton: which composers he’d liked, the repertoire he’d played. “Musical tastes are so personal,” he said. For him, Bach was too mannered, too cold. He loved Debussy and Gershwin and was working on “Clair de Lune” and Rhapsody in Blue, which he thought of as twin pieces born from a shared womb.
He talked about Anne, his wife: her beauty and intelligence, the exquisitely sensitive mother she’d been. Before she died, she’d made each daughter a photo album with pictures of herself—as a child with her parents, as a teenager skiing with friends, at her wedding—and then with each girl from her birth until Anne’s last month, when she ceased allowing photographs, not wanting her daughters to have images of her with her eyes sunk into their sockets and her hair thinned to straw. She’d recorded birthday messages for both girls until they would be twenty-one, written letters to be read on their wedding days and at the births of their own first children.
At the end of the evening, Jean-Christophe invited Prudence to join his family the following day for their midday meal. The bonne served the four courses—the vegetable tartines prepared by Jean-Christophe’s mother, the fillets, the vinaigrette salad, the platter of cheeses—while the adults discussed the day’s Le Figaro, which the sisters found too conservative, and the children chattered about classmates and soccer matches. Sitting quietly, Prudence marveled at the generosity and acceptance the family seemed to extend to one another. Where were the sibling rivalries, the resentments between parents and children? None of it was evident in the family dining room, in the parlor where the adults sat afterward with their coffee, in the brush of Jean-Christophe’s lips to his mother’s forehead or the arm he draped across his father’s shoulders as they walked back to their clinic.
It was the first time Prudence had ever fallen in love—in love not just with Jean-Christophe, but with his life. His days working side by side with his siblings under the tutelage of their father, who believed it his duty to treat everyone in the prefecture, to take as compensation a few crates of peaches or a butchered pig if that was all that could be afforded. Jean-Christophe’s evenings supervising homework and music practices and baths, reading aloud to his daughters a chapter from Le Comte de Monte-Cristo or some Jacques Prévert poems, and then, before kissing them each good night, telling a story about their mother, the girls talking about her with such ease, it was as though she’d gone early to her bed down the hall.
Falling in love felt to Prudence closer to an illness than a blessing. An infection that left her unable to think of anything other than Jean-Christophe and his family. Save for her concerns about the terrible blushing that had thankfully abated with age, for most of her life she’d been free of the extremes of either vanity or insecurity, her assessment of her physique as good enough having remained unchanged since the first time she’d studied herself in the scratched mirror of the Hell’s Kitchen apartment. Now, though, she worried that Jean-Christophe would find her physically distasteful, slight, insubstantial next to the photos she’d seen of the statuesque Anne with her halo of blonde hair. An old woman in comparison to Anne, who had been at her death eleven years younger than Prudence was now.
“You are so beautiful,” he told her, “like a porcelain doll, but unbreakable.” He’d known he could fall in love with her, he said, when he’d seen her that first night at the hotel: how she’d handled Claire, not shirking from what had to be done, helping to restrain her while he administered the emetic, then gently wiping the weeping Claire’s nose.
He unpinned Prudence’s hair and brushed it out in long strokes. He undressed her in full daylight, kissing her in places where Carlton had never put his mouth, places she’d always assumed would have revolted any man. Jean-Christophe inhaled her. He lavished her with his tongue. He adored her breasts, still firm from never having been suckled by a babe, the deep indent of her waist, the red tufts under her arms, her small buttocks. Carlton had been gentle in bed, but he’d never inquired about her pleasure, never seemed to want her save early mornings when he’d wake with an erection, or on the rare occasion when he’d come home from his club after a night that had entailed substantial spirits. With Jean-Christophe, she could sense his desire always there. Even when they were fully dressed, seated next to each other at his mother’s table, she could feel it in the touch of his fingertips to her shoulder blade, in the pressure of his thigh against hers.
* * *
In the four years since Carlton’s death, she had never inquired. Now, though, with Jean-Christophe a doctor, she asked him to tell her what would have happened to Carlton’s body if, as she believed, it had been left in a ravine in Argentina.
“Do you really want to know?”
She nodded.
“The flesh and organs were probably eaten by vultures.”
They were in her hotel room, his daughters asleep a kilometer away at his parents’ home, where he would return before dawn to help them prepare for their school days.
“The bones decompose and become part of the soil. From the soil, wild grasses and flowers grow, and these are eaten by birds and small animals.” Jean-Christophe studied her face. “Ma belle.”
“Go on.” It was as though he were telling her a fairy tale.
He smiled sadly. Had he thought about all of this with his beloved Anne?
“The birds are perhaps then eaten by larger animals, some of which are then hunted by local peoples.”
“Who eat them?”
“Yes.”
“So Carlton is now part of someone else, someone in Argentina?”
“It is not so linear, so concrete, but, yes, our bodies are matter, and matter does not disappear. It takes new forms.”
“And our souls? Do you believe that they continue too?”
Jean-Christophe’s parents attended mass every Sunday and he usually joined them, bringing his daughters. A wooden cross hung in the family dining room. One of his sisters had considered becoming a nun. But he and his father were doctors, their feet rooted in science. At lunch, the family discussed politics, the writings of Sartre, films.
“Ma chère, this is a longer discussion.” He kissed her. It was late. “This we will talk about at another time.”
* * *
He brought her to a special spot, a sheltered ledge overlooking the river, half an hour outside town. It was mid-February. Harriet had insisted Prudence take some time “to recuperate” after “the incident” with Claire, but it had been a month now and Prudence would need to return soon.
He’d prepared a picnic: cheeses, pâté, bread, canned pears from the tree in his mother’s garden, a bottle of wine, a thermos of hot coffee. He made a fire, spread a blanket atop the ledge, draped another over her shoulders.
He told her that he wanted her to remain. To marry him. He gave her a book his daughters had drawn for her about two sisters who bring their pet chicken when they visit New York.
Her chest tightened when she read the book. She bit her tongue to keep from weeping at the drawings—the little red chicken, the Statue of Liberty holding a bouquet of flowers. She could feel the yearning of Jean-Christophe’s beautiful girls that she allow them to love her.
“I can’t have children. I am too old.”
“You will adopt my girls. You will be a mother to them.”
“And there is my work.”
“You could run an antique store in town. There are so many American and British dealers who come here…”
He stroked her arm. He cupped her elbow, pressed his nose into the hollow between her breasts.
She tried to picture herself living here. Walking Nicole and Simone to school past the waterwheels and the old men having their espressos in the cafés along the river, helping Jean-Christophe’s mother and the bonne with the midday meal, listening to Jean-Christophe play his cello after his daughters were in bed. A galette des rois for Epiphany and ski trips to the Alps during the girls’ winter holidays and for Easter chocolate fish and chocolate rabbits the children believed were brought back from the Vatican by the church’s flying bells, “Tu dois voir,” Simone had enthusiastically explained, pointing to the bell tower in the twelfth-century church where the family had their own pew. Three weeks each summer at a seaside cottage in Corsica, where the girls ran wild like ponies and returned with their skin tawny and their hair streaked with gold. Chestnuts and truffles and La Toussaint in the fall, then réveillon with oysters and a roast goose and a hazelnut bûche, the children with their minds on the gifts to be brought by Père Noël.
And what was there on her balance sheet for New York? The Japanese prints at the Metropolitan Museum? The shoemaker Ella had introduced her to? Harriet, who would be disappointed. Elaine, who would miss her. CCB, now ninety-five? None of it added up to one squeeze of her hand by Nicole or a moment when Simone would rest her head on Prudence’s shoulder.
She stared at the fire, now white embers. It was too fast, she told Jean-Christophe. She needed more time to get used to the idea. She couldn’t, snap, leave New York, her work, reinvent herself as a French matron. As his wife.
He cried. He told her it was not too fast. She could leave New York. For God’s sake, he’d left Paris. He told her it was not her work. He’d given up being a pediatric surgeon to join his father’s practice.
“It is love. You are afraid of love.”
She buried her face in Jean-Christophe’s chest. With Carlton, she’d remained in her own cocoon. With Jean-Christophe, they’d be like the pictures she’d seen of twins before birth, curled together head to foot.
“You can bring the girls to New York for their spring holidays. They will have so much fun. You can stay with me. I have plenty of room. We’ll take them to see the ballet and the Museum of Natural History and the Empire State Building. Then, I will come here for August. After that, we’ll see. We’ll see…”
* * *
At her apartment on Park Avenue, she’d been greeted by a blue aerogram.
Ma chère Prudence,
My heart breaks writing you this, but we must say a permanent adieu. I have thought long and hard and looked into my soul—and I know that you will never move here, never be a mother to my motherless girls. I cannot subject them to the arrangement you have proposed. I am young, I have love in my heart. There is nothing, rien, that I want more than to have you as my wife and the mother of my girls, but if you are not able to do that, then I must have faith that I will find a woman who will.
I ask you, ma chère Prudence, not to write to me. It is too painful to continue this way.
In sadness, devotedly yours,
Jean-Christophe
Prudence climbed into her bed with the letter. She wept. She wept more than she had when she’d realized that Carlton was most certainly dead. At night, she pressed her nose to the window, looked down at the pavement where she’d seen Robert Burlingham in his blood-splotched blue-and-white-striped pajamas. This is where she must stay?
In the morning, she called Harriet. “I seem to have caught something on the airplane coming back.” Harriet sent flowers. Elaine met the first shipment of the Louis Quinze chairs at the dock and arranged for their portage to the car manufacturer’s Detroit château.
After two days of chamomile tea and Mrs. Meechin’s chicken soup, Prudence ventured out. She walked north on Park Avenue. The cold crept in at her neck and wrists. Her eyes watered.
She hailed a taxi, not certain of her destination until she settled into the backseat. “The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine,” she said, surprising herself at the choice. Because it had expunged the Tiffany chapel once installed there as too extravagant for communion with God? Because it was the most Gallic edifice in the city, a structure that might have been built in Rouen or Reims or Rennes? Because it was on the edge of Harlem and she was unlikely to see anyone she knew there?
She sat in the chilly, cavernous nave and listened to the organist practice. In his letter, Jean-Christophe wrote that he’d looked into his soul. He’d used the word faith. He must have faith that he’d find a woman to be the mother of his motherless girls. They’d never had the conversation about what he thought happened to the soul after death.
She had tea at the pastry shop across from the cathedral, ate an apricot hamantasch. A mother held her young son up to the counter so he could tell the waitress which cookie he wanted.
With Carlton, she’d deluded herself that he would change, come around to their having a child. Jean-Christophe loved his daughters too deeply to impose his delusions on them. She’d privately berated Harriet for being cowardly with clients about financial arrangements. But that was simply money. Jean-Christophe had seen that she was a coward of the heart.
* * *
She returned to work the following Monday. Harriet showed Prudence the thank-you letter with a five-thousand-dollar bonus check that had arrived from Claire’s philanderer husband to the staff at Masters Design for “handling what was above and beyond your job.” In particular, Prudence’s virtues were extolled.
Harriet looked beseechingly at Prudence. “I could assign Elaine to complete the project.”
“No, I’ll finish it. But in the future—”
“Of course.” Harriet cut off Prudence before she put into words that never again would she take on something she found so distasteful.
In truth, though, Prudence’s reaction to Claire and the furnishing of her Detroit mansion was larger than the nausea she felt at the tawdriness of it all. The whole enterprise of decorating someone else’s home struck her now as essentially flawed. For a home to have true beauty, it had to reflect the sensibility of its owners, be a repository for their history. It needed to tell the story of its occupants. Otherwise, it was no more than a showroom with perfect surfaces, vacant beneath. She’d heard laughable but it seemed to her actually sad stories about portraits of aristocratic-looking strangers hung in the dining rooms of men whose mothers had never owned more than two dresses to rotate on Sundays. Not that there weren’t circumstances when she felt her work to be valuable: the items she’d selected for the pied-à-terre of a German couple whose philanthropic work for leper colonies had prevented them from yet visiting their New York apartment; the practical rooms she’d assembled for a widowed judge clueless about where to buy a tomato, much less a sofa, and color-blind to boot. With these jobs, Prudence had done her best to ghostwrite a personal expression of her client—but these were exceptional cases: individuals whose inner lives could not find expression inside four walls.
She considered resigning, but she disliked living solely off the income from Carlton’s estate. With her commissions a fraction of what they’d once been now that she left the mansions and country homes to the other decorators, she sold the Park Avenue apartment and bought a smaller one at a third the price and half the size on West End Avenue. It was the smaller apartment that had provided both the excuse and the impetus to give Louise and Mrs. Meechin notice, accompanied by generous severance packages and her help finding new positions, which they both did in short order, leaving Prudence perplexed as to why she’d delayed the change for so long.
She’d moved to West End Avenue, where she’s lived ever since, in March of 1957—the same month, she realized this morning when she took the article about the fire from her brother’s wooden box, that Laurelton Hall had burned to the ground. Holding the newspaper clipping, she’d imagined Randall, scissors in hand, cutting it from the inky pages.
For a brief interlude she had seriously considered searching for Randall. It was 1972, the year she turned sixty, when all around her people were trying on new identities. That year, Elaine took her to a party where a barefoot man who had until recently been a banker played a dulcimer. Harriet’s son, Stewart, Prudence’s own age, extolled the EST seminars run by Werner Erhard, where Stewart claimed his entire personality had been ground to dust and he’d returned free of all hang-ups. Prudence had gone as far as calling a detective agency to make an appointment to discuss locating her brother, but she’d canceled before the meeting date.
Now she feels a moment of confusion. She wonders if perhaps she sent the newspaper clipping to Randall herself. After all, he had been born there too. Is that possible? That she is the one who cut it out? That she’d found his address? Sent Randall the very clipping Grace brought in the wooden box? The one on her library table now?
