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Chapter One
Virgo Terrae
Harlem, New York
October 1945
When I was five years old, I learned how to roll my mother onto her side so that she would not choke on her own vomit. I learned how to press a cool, damp rag against her flushed cheeks and coax her to drink some water. I learned that a little chilled white wine could bring her down gently, not the terrifying crash that would leave her shaking and writhing on the floor. At nine I could make a perfect dry martini, and I was always so pleased to see Maman's eyes light up. If I waited until the right mood struck her, she would let me sit between her legs, and she would braid my hair and sing. If I begged, she would laugh like a little tinkling bell and tell me stories about when she was young and one of the most promising young socialites in all of France. She was friends with anyone important, and she wanted to be a famous poet whose words would make her immortal. Her parents wanted her to marry well, and God knows she could have-her creamy complexion, thick auburn ringlets, trim figure, and luminous blue eyes were a painter's dream-but she had her head turned by an American writer, and he was her savior and her doom.
I know the story by heart, I know it backwards and forwards. I know more about my mother's past than I do about myself.
When Maman met Hemingway, she loved him instantly.
She met him at a bar called the Dingo, where they were introduced by her favorite of the Americans who flocked to Paris twenty years ago, a writer she called "dearest Fitzy." For two years she was Papa's mistress, and he called her his tournesol, his sunflower. He called her poetry trite, and they had terrible rows, but she could refuse him nothing.
He kept his promise to leave his wife, but he did not leave his wife for her.
"I could have almost lived with it had he stayed with the dull one," she'd bemoan, her cheeks flushed, her eyes mournful. "After all, she was there first, and they had that adorable little boy. One could say she had a right to him. But to be abandoned for that awful drowning terrier . . . the shame of it. To have him turn from me and place a ring on the finger of that gaudy slut." She'd brush the invisible tears from her cheeks. "But at least I have you," she'd sigh. "Ma belle Delphine. Mon ange."
I was born on the eleventh of January 1929. By the time I entered my mother's life, he had already left it-retreated back to America with his second wife.
Louise told me that the drinking escalated when he left, and that the persistent melancholia set in after Maman's parents disowned her for falling pregnant. But I didn't need Louise to tell me that.
It was something I've always known but never let myself dwell on. I was never one for self-pity or for wishing things were different. My mother needed me; there was no room for those indulgent feelings.
But now that I am alone, here in this chaotic foreign city, I have all the time in the world for thinking. And I think it is a great shame that by the time I inherited my mother, the best of her had gone.
The scent of chicken frying wafts through the floorboards below me. It's a smell that is new to me, but one that I am finding rapidly addicting.
I live in a little room above a restaurant called Blue's. It's owned by one of Maman's old friends, a colored man named Joseph LaBere, who everyone calls Blue, and his wife Delia.
I had only met him four or five times before coming to stay here, on his infrequent trips back to Paris. I have always thought him very handsome-tall, bronze skinned, with wavy hair that he gels back, and flashing, mischievous dark eyes. He is from Louisiana originally, and speaks quite good French from his time in Paris in the twenties. His wife is fluent. Even though our shared language is the reason I chose to write to him weeks ago, to beg for refuge in America, I also happen to prefer him above the others in Maman's remaining circle of confidants. If I had to grind my pride to dust and throw myself at the feet of any one of them, I am glad that it is him.
I think he and my mother were almost lovers, but she told me that he was chasing after every skirt in the jazz clubs until he met his wife, and she was waiting for an epic love that I'm still not sure she found.
"Delphine!" Delia hollers up the rickety staircase. "Come on and get some dinner."
I almost respond that I need a moment to make myself presentable.
My dress is wrinkled, and my hair is unwashed and uncurled. I've spent the entire day at the desk in front of the lone window, scribbling the nonsense I am trying to forge into a real book.
I think about changing my clothes, but then I remember that I have abandoned vanity, and I settle for washing the ink off my hands and heading down. I take my life into my hands every time I descend this staircase.
The restaurant is closed-it closes early every Thursday night-and the empty dining room looks eerie. It's a crowded, noisy, joyful place that is always full when it's open.
Delia decorated it herself, with clean, simple decor and a white magnolia in a vase on every table. The windows are wide and arching, so the space doesn't feel cramped even though it is tiny. She's put her own sketches up on the wall, landscape scenes from her childhood: willow trees, steamboats, and people picnicking in their Sunday best on the promenade.
Blue and Delia's brownstone is just across the street. They offered me space in it, but I opted to take the small apartment above the restaurant's kitchen that the cook used to occupy. I like my privacy, and more importantly, I don't forget that I am meant to be in exile. How could I? My skin is itchy with shame, and I spend half my time glancing over my shoulder. I don't imagine that the deep waters of the ocean I crossed have washed the blood from my hands.
Delia smiles when she sees me, and I hold out my hands to take the heaping platter of shrimp and grits. She's holding a pot of something green-okra, I think, which tastes quite ghastly-in her blue checkered oven mitts.
"I already took the rest over," she says, in her genteel Southern drawl. "This is the last of it." She's a tall, striking woman with a light complexion; long, loose curls; and hazel eyes. She's something called Creole, and she went to a women's college in Quebec to study art when she was in her twenties. She still looks like she's in her twenties, which I told her when we first met, and she giggled and told me I could have all the dessert I wanted for the duration of my stay.
She's very warm, and it is not easy for me to carefully walk the line of showing my gratitude for her hospitality and keeping my distance. She has the kind of eyes that make you want to tell her the truth.
We walk across the street to their home. Their dog, a Jack Russell called Babette, sniffs my ankles as I walk in.
Blue is sitting at the beautifully set dining room table, reading his newspaper. The crumbs on his plate tell us he didn't wait for us to start eating the biscuits.
"Joseph!" Delia fusses, and at the use of his Christian name he looks up and grins. He is openly vain in a way that is oddly endearing.
"Don't be mad, wife. You're too darn pretty to frown."
"I told you to wait on us!"
I duck my head to hide my smile and slide into my seat. I start to play my game with myself: noting the objects all around the room and trying to make myself think of their names in English, not in French. My English is improving. I can understand some, but I am shy with my speech, which means I don't practice as much as I should.
Maman taught me some of the English she learned from all of her American and British confidants from the old days. One of the few useful things she ever managed. She said it would help me get a good job one day.
"You could be a teacher," she said. "Or a travel agent. You're going to have more opportunities than I did, I'm going to make sure of it. You can't depend on a man, my love. God didn't make them that way."
She told me that Papa never really bothered to learn French beyond a cursory level, he just gestured a lot and expected people to take his meaning. "He figured that people could learn to speak to him if they had something important to say," Maman told me. His first wife was fluent, and he relied on her, and later, on my mother. "I shouldn't have enabled him," she'd sigh.
I can see her rueful smile floating before me, and I blink it away.
Delia is still fussing even as she puts food onto my plate. Last night it was gumbo so spicy it made my throat hurt, and then I had two slices of blackberry cobbler.
My skirts are fitting tighter than they did before. Delia is a masterful cook, and I have never eaten this well. Maman rarely touched our stove unless it was to light her cigarettes-we ate at cafés when she came up with the money, or I'd make stew from whatever I could find-and there wasn't much to be found during the war years. Canned anchovies were common, served with a side of stale bread.
We never once used the fancy dining table Maman inherited from her own mother. She avoided it like it was a relic from a mummy's tomb. Maman didn't like to talk about her parents. Whenever I asked, she would look ashamed.
"I just don't see why you can't wait," Delia goes on, smoothing out the tablecloth before taking her own seat across from her husband. "Did you even say grace?"
He shrugs. "God knows how I feel 'bout Him."
She mumbles something in English that I don't understand. They usually speak French around me so that I don't feel left out.
"If you would fix the stove in our own kitchen, I wouldn't have to cook our meals at the restaurant."
He chuckles. "Next weekend."
I raise my eyebrows. He sounds just like my mother swearing she would do the laundry, or buy me new clothes for school, or take me to Antibes-as if our family's beautiful chateau had not been sold years ago to pay off the debts. I see why they got on so well. Both of them could charm the scales off a snake.
Delia is clearly as unconvinced as am I, but she lets it go. She turns to me and shakes her head, as if lamenting how much she loves him.
I want to tell her that at least he married her, and is here, and did not leave her alone with a disappointing daughter and a broken spirit. He's a man who keeps his promises. He built that restaurant because it was her dream, even if he did name it after himself. I want to tell her she could do worse than his vanity, because he clearly has eyes for no one but her.
But I take a bite of dinner and say nothing.
Blue chats about the happenings in the neighborhood for a while: marriages and scandals, births and deaths. He says that the preacher's daughter was spotted with a white boy, and that she won't be able to sit correctly for a week now that her father is through with her. I know that in America, the races aren't meant to mix-Maman told me they have a special streak of foolishness when it comes to the color of one's skin-and Blue warned me when I got here to keep far away from the boys in the neighborhood unless I wanted trouble.
The old me would have taken it as a challenge. Now I think that I have enough problems without searching for new ones.
His eyes fall on me. "Do you have a sweetheart back in France, my dear?"
I conjure the image of a shy smile in my mind's eye before I can help it, though he was never anything to me but capricious hope.
I pinch the inside of my palm underneath the table to stop myself from sliding into the past. I will get mired in it like quicksand, and I will never get out. My lungs spasm, the air in the room grows thin.
"No."
Delia interjects. "Don't ask a young lady things like that. You'll embarrass her."
He tuts. "I've known her since she was a baby. Her mother is family. There's no shame to be had between us."
My ears burn, but not because I'm ashamed. It's because I know what he's going to ask me, and I am preparing myself to lie. I am an excellent liar, something that used to give me great satisfaction, but now I view it with grim disdain. It is a necessary skill, and one I will use without hesitation or guilt-but I don't take pleasure in it anymore.
"So how is your mother? Have you heard anything lately?"
Amazingly, I smile without any strain at all. I have good teeth, one of my better features, and I let them sparkle.
"She's well. She's in Cannes, I think I mentioned before? She's staying with her cousin. She says she's writing poetry again."
I pull the folded letter from my pocket like a magician brandishing a rabbit from a hat. "I have another letter from her, for you."
It's a forgery, of course.
I have been forging my mother's signature, and later all of her handwriting, for years. How else could I have written that initial letter to Blue, with her name on it, urging him to take good care of her daughter while she recovers from cirrhosis? When I sent a letter in my own hand, it was nothing more than a finishing touch. I knew he wouldn't refuse my mother. My father is the only one I know of who ever has.
