Anio Szado (7 page)

Where was Philippe? I said, “I’m Émile Lachapelle’s daughter.”

“Oh. All righty. So Monsieur Lachapelle is a member?” He checked a list on his desk. “Because if he is, it doesn’t look like he’s here yet. You can wait for him on the sofa, if you like. I just can’t let you in without a member.”

I felt ill. I closed my eyes.

I opened them to a touch on my arm. The dark-haired woman was standing next to me. “Darling, don’t mind young Carl. I will vouch for you, daughter of Émile—and are you not the niece of my great friend Yannick Lachapelle?”

“I am.” I smiled politely, a little on guard. Every New Yorker with the means to dine at Le Pavillon seemed to think that its owner was his or her closest friend.

“You know,” said the woman, “I believe you were my husband’s tutor last year. He wrote that he was taking English lessons with the daughter of the founder of the Alliance Française. Of course you remember Tonio.”

I glanced toward the man who remained standing near the entrance door.

She said, “Not him. My husband.”

“Tonio?”

“Yes—de Saint-Exupéry.”

Antoine
? My guard dropped with my stomach. This woman
was his wife? He had told me they were long through living together, that one of the few compensations for being moored in New York was that she was not here. But here she was. And if she was here now, then surely Antoine was in New York, too.

I barely found my voice. “Your husband.”

“I am Countess Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry.” Even drawing herself up in proud posture, she was several inches shorter than me.

“Mignonne Lachapelle.” I swallowed awkwardly. “How is your husband’s English these days?”

“Rotten as ever. Let’s go in, and you can see for yourself.” Consuelo addressed the desk boy. “We’re going to have a drink at the bar in the dining room.”

He stood up. “You can’t!”

“Tell your boss that you tried to turn away the daughter of the man whose blood built this club. And that Jack Binty and I are her guests tonight.” She took my arm with one hand and held out the other for the man with the round glasses and well-fitted suit. “Coming, darling?”

“To spend the night talking about tutoring? Too exciting for me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Consuelo waved goodbye. She turned back to Carl. “Be a little useful. Ring the bartender. Tell him to mix us two very large, very alcoholic Bloody Marys—on the house—and maybe I’ll keep quiet about your boo-boo.” She waggled her hand at him. “Go on.”

I looked about anxiously as we made our way to the bar and settled on our seats, but Consuelo kept up an animated patter, switching capriciously between English and French—the former guttural, the latter speedy and with a grammar that was Consuelo’s alone, both languages raspy with heavily rolled Rs. The Bloody Marys appeared. I drank quickly. Consuelo poked at her
ice cubes with her fingertip and drilled me on my interests and pursuits, barely waiting for a response before moving to another topic.

She spoke so swiftly it was hard to keep up—and I found myself wondering if maybe my ears were drunk. “So you and your brother are native New Yorkers? How funny! Your father such a figure of all things French, and his children and wife as American as can be.”

I tried to explain that my mother was Canadian.

“Then you’re a bit of everything, halfway British, too, yes? Me, I am a pure child of my land. I was born in El Salvador. Prematurely, in an earthquake. Of course, you’ve probably never felt an earthquake. Have you felt an earthquake, Mignonne? This one was like a dervish gone mad! It turned our house on its foundations, spun me into being like a baby genie, and swallowed my mother whole.”

I interrupted. “Do you know what happened to the old doorman?”

“That overstretched gecko! He’s training the new staff to be as despicable as he is.” Consuelo scanned the dining room. Her expression had gone sullen, but now she perked up. “There he is.”

“Philippe?”

“Tonio. Over there, at the corner table, touching his forehead. My God, what is he promising now?”

I put my drink down carefully, as though it were my glass that was in danger of spilling over, and not my heart. There was Antoine, in conversation with another man, sitting as he used to sit with me. I had but a minute to take him in—and to do so with the most reserved of expressions, his wife peering at me from the corner of her eye, measuring my emotions as I looked at him.

He was bent forward, listening closely, elbow on the table, two fingers crooked to his temple with a cigarette burning lazily
between them, his pinky resting near the scar alongside his mouth. His guest must have said something discouraging, for Antoine dropped his hand to take a draw of his cigarette and leaned back. He looked to the ceiling momentarily, then moved forward, his torso rigid and his expression intense as he launched into argument. I couldn’t hear his words, but I recognized the signs: the unblinking gaze, the grip on his cigarette as his hand tapped the table, the lips moving quickly from point to point as though everything he could ever need to express had been laid out in advance in his head.

His mind, like his character, was complex, accomplished, infuriating: it was that of a dedicated storyteller and a natural mathematician, of a highly religious man who didn’t quite believe in God, of an inventor of magical worlds and of patented mechanical gizmos, a war pilot who would never take up arms, that of a man whose greatest pleasure was friendship and whose greatest needs demanded solitude. He was a bear who would sooner charm than roar. He didn’t yell; he never had with me, except in exuberance and delight. He rarely leveled an accusation without a meandering justification that would come in a pages-long letter the next day if not in the heat of the argument. He was too stubborn—too determined—to give in without solid reason, but he constantly induced himself to keep his mind open in order to learn something daily.

I wondered what he was saying so ardently now. He had too much discretion to center his arguments on personal issues and too much self-respect to pander, though by this point even he might be sinking to unaccustomed lows in his bid to return to the war. After all, he was still grounded, still in New York, after a year and a half.

He must be miserable.

Consuelo slipped off the high bar chair, her wooden heels clacking. “Wait here. I’ll say hello from you, if he remembers you.”

I turned away before she reached him. If he remembers me? I had thought about him every day.

It was Yannick who had introduced us in January ’41. He had dropped by to ask me to give a few lessons to a Frenchman who was in town for a few weeks.

“Fair warning, Mignonne: he’s resistant. His publishers want him to learn what he can while he’s here. I said we’d give it a shot.”

“How bad is his English?”

“I’m told it’s better than he lets on. He refuses to use it.”

“Sounds like a tough nut to crack.”

Yannick chuckled. “That’s why I want you for the job. He’ll love you. And I know you’ll like him. He’s older, but it’s good for a young woman to be with someone older.”

“Yannick!”

“It works in France. And Saint-Ex isn’t your typical forty-year-old.”

“Old enough to be my father!”

“Actually, even your father would approve. Take a look.”

Reaching into his inner jacket pocket, he produced a clipping from the society pages. It showed a man tall as a tree, expensively dressed in what appeared to be impeccable bespoke, following on the heels of a polished blond beauty who was entering a theater door.
“The French author, immaculate in a black topcoat and white silk scarf, brandished his ivory cane with characteristic authority and élan.”

Not typical? I could meet fancied-up men like that every day. They were nearly indistinguishable: snooty, smooth, self-absorbed. To the masses, they were caviar; to the Alliance Française, bread and butter. I handed back the clipping. “Not my type. I’m not interested in the least.”

“All right, okay.” He held up his hands in surrender. “Forget
I suggested it. Take the job and I promise I won’t mention it again.”

“He’s a writer?”

“Famous. And a pilot.” Yannick retrieved several books from his bag and stacked them before me on the table. On the cover of the topmost one, an airplane angled through a ruptured indigo sky. “He flew airmail through northern Africa in the ’20s. It’s a miracle he survived—with the primitive planes back then, and almost nothing known of the land. If you went down, the natives were likely to— But he’ll tell you. He has a million stories about the mail routes. And the French Air Force. He flew spy planes until Hitler took France.”

The next night, we were on the grand staircase of the Alliance Française when the front door opened. “That’s him,” whispered Yannick as a tall, amiable-looking man came in from the freezing rain. “Saint-Ex.”

Antoine shrugged off his coat—tawny in the dry uneven strips below the arms, but otherwise darkly wet—and draped it haphazardly over his forearm. His suit would have fit him well enough if he had cared to stand straight and still in it, but as it was, one moment the wool hung too loose from his wide, well-built shoulders, then it strained at his neck and across his chest as he leaned and slouched. It wasn’t that the size of his suit was wrong or the cut sloppy; it was a fine and fitted suit, yet somehow it didn’t fit him at all. He seemed to be poignantly mismatched all over: his feet in their polished leather shoes too big for even his expansive bearing, the hands and long fingers overly broad, the large eyes too youthful and inquisitive for his age.

Antoine removed and shook his hat, spraying droplets that made Philippe jump back in surprise, which made both men laugh. He had a delightful smile, impish, a little shy.

I slipped into the dining room to steady my nerves, leaving Yannick to greet my newest student. A few minutes later, he
delivered Antoine to my table—and “Into your capable hands, Mignonne, courtesy of Reynal & Hitchcock.”

Antoine pulled a face. “My publishers think they know what’s best for me. Sometimes I wonder if they believe I know anything at all.”

I blurted, “What
do
you know?”

“Pardon?”

My cheeks grew warm. “Of English, I mean. What words do you know?”

“I can say …” He switched to English. “Allo-I-want-a-taxi. I like zee orange and I like zee apple. Zee bread, ’e is good.” He rushed through the words with no thought to the correct inflections, pronouncing them as though they were only slight variations of French. His accent was reminiscent of my father’s—but Papa had spoken English at a normal speed and with care.

“That’s a start,” I said. “Let’s review
être
. In English, to be. Please speak much slower this time. I am; you are; he is; they are; we are. I am what? You are what?”

Reverting to French, Antoine brushed away the questions. “This is silly. I have no need of English.”

“It can’t hurt to learn a little of it.”

“I am still trying to master my mother tongue. Why do you laugh? In writing, the syntax must be very precise. It is no different than flying: introduce one word too many, a bit of clumsiness, and one may crash. I have no wish to put my own language at risk by habituating myself to another one.”

“I’m not suggesting you master English, only that you become comfortable carrying on a basic conversation. My French isn’t perfect, but at least I can converse.”

“Like a child,” he said petulantly, then caught himself. “Please forgive me, mademoiselle. I am a cur. Your French is charming. I cannot believe I have insulted you, and hurt you, and all because I am afraid of a few English words.”

I sniffled. “All right. To be. I am what; you are what?”

The extreme effort of dragging English words from the depths showed on his face a little too convincingly; I lifted a hand to conceal my amusement.

He concentrated. “I am ’appy. You are sad. I am a man. I am …’ere. You are zare.”

“ ‘I am
here
. You are
there
.’ ”

“You are zare. You are … beautiful.” His fingertips touched mine.

I moved my hands to my lap.

“It is what I know,” he said with an apologetic shrug.

I tried to glance at him surreptitiously as a waitress filled our wineglasses, but I found him contemplating me. She set down a platter of cheeses and olives, slices of green and red apples and hard pears, hazy purple grapes, and a generous basket of warm, fragrant bread. I busied myself with slicing and arranging cheese. An olive plucked from my plate was rich and sharp in my mouth; it piqued my tongue and made me feel reckless—so I drank deeply and subdued my palette with smoky brie.

I was sitting across from a man who could fly, who had experienced war, whose writing prompted accolades in every country in which it was read, who had lived in barracks and deserts and grand estates. I had spent my entire life on a single path in a single city. My travels had never taken me to another time zone, never mind another continent. And I was supposed to teach him?

The things he could tell me. What was it like to detach oneself from the earth, to know the sky, to approach the sun? My face felt as ruddy as Antoine’s looked—but his had been engraved by the life he led. Scars arced through an eyebrow and near one side of his mouth. The skin of his forehead bore lines drawn through worry and weariness. At the corners of his eyes, pale rays were remnants of laughter and days spent squinting into the sun.

Now he squinted at the inquisitiveness of my expression. “What is it you want to know?”

I had stayed up half the night finishing
Courrier sud
, his story of a mail pilot flying from France to North Africa, the very route my uncle told me Antoine had established and maintained. The pilot had flown through the unforgiving night and through the pain of a broken heart. Had Antoine, too, been suffering the pangs of unreturned love? Why else would he have taken a lonely posting in Morocco, where he had written the book?

Reading, I had thought it impossible that the man of the newspaper clipping, in his elegant silk tie and his expensive suit, his hair combed back, his demeanor so at home in this restless city, had lived as simply as a nomad in the desert. But now I pictured him waking in the morning to feel heat rise through the soles of his feet, opening his eyes to a painful brilliance, opening his door to parched winds that stole the moisture from his mouth. I licked my lips. They tasted of salty heat. What had it been like to pass every day in unrelenting silence and sultriness, encircled by shimmering horizons, directionless without buildings or streets? What a torpor, heavy and sensual, would invade the spirit and weaken the principles. Where could one go for relief?