Luncheon of the Boating Party (44 page)

“She doesn’t have a lover to pay?” Désirée asked.

“Apparently not one who covers his liberties with coin,” Ellen said.

Désirée gave four francs. Clotilde shot her cellmate a scoffi ng look, and dug in her drawstring bag until she found a five franc coin. She dropped it on Désirée’s four francs so that it made a solid clink. Ellen snickered. Competition boiled in the Folies’ corridors.

“This is against the rules,” Clotilde said.

Ellen gave them both a sharp look. “I know. And I know you have no reason to snitch.”

Désirée held up her hands as if to show they were clean.
“D’accord.”

Ellen went on to the dancers representing the Seine, the Rhine, and the Dordogne, saving Charlotte’s reputation by saying she had a mis-carriage. Then she started on the other mimes, Sun, Moon, Star, and La Duchesse d’Amboise, and the Greek Goddesses, Euphorie and Euryth-mie, who gave her five each, but her time ran out. She had to get in costume, a brown rag of the Ferryman’s Daughter. Thirty-six francs. It was a start, but she’d hoped for larger donations. The more people she had to involve, the more chance of some telltale opening her mouth.

She lifted the cracked floor tile, hid the money, and put Charlotte’s chair in front of it draped with Charlotte’s soiled silk wrapper. She applied clown white to her face and overlaid that with pink rouge, exaggerated eyes, and cupid’s bow mouth, then applied the white to her arms and hands, and waited for the caller to come for her.

When she got to the wings, the overture to the mimodrama had already begun and the rivers were dancing. On cue she stepped onto the stage and transformed herself into the poor Ferryman’s Daughter. Her father forced her to be a pickpocket, but she fell in love with the Distinguished Traveler from whom she was supposed to steal, and ran away with him.

He took her on escapades to all the rivers of France. On a Rhine barge, the Prussian Braggart asked for vin d’Alsace. Stealthily, she contrived to serve him vinegar. At the Roman temple at the source of the Seine, a spring called Sequana, she was made to think that her homespun dress had become a golden gown. On the Loire, the Distinguished Traveler

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took her to a ball in the Chateau d’Amboise. At the Rhône delta, the Cowboy of the Camargue carried her off on a wild horseback ride, and the Distinguished Traveler who loved her was left in misery.

She danced and swooned and expressed every emotion of love and

delight with her body and performed witticisms with her hands, but the people in the loges aimed their opera glasses at each other, and the swarms in the
promenoirs
beyond the orchestra seats were too busy fl irting to appreciate her. If only she could spill out words to reach them.

Words that would shine and sparkle. Funny words, brilliant words, immortal words. As a mime, she could act her heart out and it wouldn’t matter. The people of Paris came to the Folies for something else.

“Lousy house tonight,” she muttered to a stagehand in the wings, angry instead at the constraints of mime. Alone for a moment in the dark, she clenched her greasy white fists. Why was it that what we couldn’t have was sweet beyond measure? Words, for example, or Sunday afternoons along the real Seine with friends, or untangled love, or peace of mind. Especially peace of mind.

She descended the narrow iron stairway from stage level to the cells just as the Cossack dancers in red pants and black boots were going up, taking all the room. She bent backward over the railing so they wouldn’t brush against her white arms and swear at her if her greasepaint came off on them. In the corridor, Bruno, the knife thrower, leered at her and backed her against the wall with his sword. He lifted her skirt with its point and barked out a hoarse cackle. What a reptile! She splayed her fingers right in front of his face, mimicked his laugh, ducked under his sword and escaped to her cell.

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 per-

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son 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.”

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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 fi nd 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 fl amboyant 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.

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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 Char-

lotte, 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

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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? They’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,

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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 road-way 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 there-fore 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