Their clothes were dark, too, shriveled-looking, the women’s skirts not even covering their pale, pointed knees.
She knew they had seen things and done things she could never imagine. She remembered the bullet-pocked walls of the government building that ran along the Boulevard of the Saint in the Fields, and the bunches of flowers, left beneath inscriptions where people had been shot. MORT POUR LA FRANCE. She could almost see the bodies lying along the sidewalk as she skated, but not really. She had never seen a dead body. It seemed a grievous lack.
Lately she’d begun to understand why the girls at the convent school teased her, or simply stared. She was too yellow and gold, and she knew nothing. Sometimes they gathered around her in the muddy courtyard and asked her questions she couldn’t answer, so she said yes, or no, at random; she knew those two words, in French. Usually her answer drew a trail of laughter.
She entered the deep foliage of the park, skating toward the pond. At the school, Mass was said twice a day, morning and evening—a mysterious meal. The students hurried to the chapel across the courtyard in the freezing dawn and dusk. Inside, they were shepherded in waves by a nun to the altar; when she clapped her hands, the wave, briefly, knelt. The girl glared in concentration at the girl nearest her, imitating each move. “You must pretend,” her mother had told her. “You must fit in.”
Next each wave was herded onto benches facing the altar, where a priest intoned. He stood with his back to them; she seldom saw his face. His eyes were fixed on the big gold crucifix with the naked man nailed to it; she tried not to look at the blood, glittering in the light of many candles.
The words were in Latin, a language she understood a little, gratefully, from school at home: Gallic wars. This was of course different. At one point, they all lightly struck their chests. Then the priest raised a disk and a gold cup.
The chapel air was dense, stuffy; a cloud of nuns breathed at the back. Not the scrubbing sisters in their long coarse aprons, but the queen nuns in tall white headdresses and long, rustling skirts. Sometimes the girl felt so faint she thought she was dying—the plumes of incense seemed to smother her—but she never fell down, as some did. Her pride sustained her; she would not be carried out. And the business never lasted very long. Afterward they were herded back into the blue dawn or the gray twilight.
Now she was skating past a great white statue of a naked man. Sooty rain had streaked his shoulders and thighs; he wore a massive grape leaf. His meaty hands, dangling by his sides, reminded her that she was very hungry; the lunch had been even less satisfying than the lunches at school—the only meal she ate there, since she was not a boarder. Her mother had drawn the line at that. How grateful she’d been, after catching a glimpse of the file of beds in the dormitory, the freezing bathrooms with their battery of sinks, and tubs in closets.
But she did eat lunch there during the week, or at least she tried to, at a long table in the refectory while a nun read aloud to the clink of spoons. Lunch was usually soup with things floating in it. Baskets of torn bread were passed savagely up and down; at four o’clock, more bread appeared, layered with slabs of bitter chocolate. While eating, they were not allowed to talk, a great relief.
She saw the pond through a break in the trees. After one look, she turned back. Without the children, she realized, the pond held no attraction. Now she began to skate faster; the light was going down, and she remembered that she was expected to go to the dentist that afternoon. She didn’t remember what time.
Skating back, faster and smoother now, the vibrations from the wheels on the rough sidewalk ran from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. She was flying, faster than she had ever imagined going.
In front of the iron gate, Jean stood waiting, his hands on the top of the big black American car that had come across on a freighter. (French gas was too weak to power it up hills, and when it quaked and wavered, her father cursed under his breath.) She wanted to apologize to Jean for keeping him waiting but had no words. She clattered into the back seat—he’d opened the door without looking at her—then bent down to unfasten the skates with the key she wore on a string around her neck.
The car moved forward.
She liked looking at the streets through the thick glass windows that seemed to strain out detail. Hardly anyone was walking under the empty trees. Buses rolled by lighted up like aquariums, faces floating in the cool, inside glow. And the strange little cars were scurrying along like beetles; she rode high above them.
She heard Jean’s deep sigh as he mashed the brakes at an intersection; then he said something under his breath, probably a curse. She knew what was wrong: the chauffeur, Phillippe, had been given the day off in order to get married. That seemed reasonable; he would be back on duty early the next morning. But Jean was not pleased. He wore Phillippe’s black visored cap at a strange angle, pushed back on his head.
On the big avenue that led to the arch with the flame, they stopped at a red light. A few walkers crossed in front of them. One turned back. A face was pressed to Jean’s window, a thin face, very white. Fingers flailed against the glass and the mouth was shaping words.
Jean snapped his head around, frowning at the face. The light changed and they started forward. The woman dropped away like a rag.
She wanted to ask what the woman had said. This was not the first time a stranger had approached the car, and she knew it had something to do with the license plate and the small, bright American flag planted above it.
She’d overheard her mother complaining, “We saved their necks during the war, but now. . . .”
“It comes at a price,” her father had said. “In the end nobody really wants to be saved.”
Not sure of the link but sensing its relevance, she remembered the conversation at lunch about the American ambassador in Rome, and wondered if she looked as dark and solid as her father’s colleagues, standing shoulder to shoulder, drinks in hand, under the living room chandelier. But that look depended on their suits, the shoulders stiff and long with padding—women didn’t wear such clothes—and on their barking laughter that penetrated to her blue octagonal room on the second floor.
Because it had been a dressing room, the blue room was meant to share her parents’ bathroom, but that would never do. Instead, she hurried across the marble hall, morning and evening, to the loungers’ disorderly bathroom, rushing in and locking the door. Often one of them began to pound before she was finished, and they claimed she left unmentionable things on the floor.
A darker quarter of the city closed around the car after it passed across a bridge guarded by marble horses. Jean stopped before a narrow house in a narrow street. Elaborately, he climbed out and opened her door. She was grateful not to look at him, not to have to see his displeasure.
Her mother always told Jean when he should come back after her fittings. Her French was equal to that. But the girl didn’t know how to say anything. She made a face at Jean, imploringly, hoping he would wait, but he had already turned away and was looking over the top of the car. Then he closed her door with a smart snap, climbed in and sped off.
She searched her pocket for the scrap of paper with the dentist’s name. When she took the scrap out, she felt her five coins, cool and reassuring.
His office was on the second floor of the silent little house. She rode up in an elevator like a cigarette box. It stopped on the second floor, and she waited for the gilt gate to open, finally realizing it was waiting for her to open it herself. It had a powerful spring that pressed against her as she passed. She kneed it aside as she would have kneed an unruly dog.
She rang, and a young
