I’m letting you. Why were we there?”
“You were there because I was,” Lou sighs. “Officially I was studying French painting.”
“We were there because you were. All these years and you never once said.”
“You always storm out before I get to that.” Lou goes to her shelves and takes down books on the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, large heavy tomes of colored plates. “I was twenty-four. When you’re twenty-four, you think living in Paris will be the most glamorous thing you’ll ever do. You think you’ll be in seventh heaven, and in fact you live in some miserable little studio apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement where it’s cheap, and you have to share it with someone you don’t much like, and you’re so lonely you’d take the next plane home except your pride and your scholarship won’t let you.” She stares for a long time at Manet’s White Peonies with Secateurs. “My roommate was a French girl and we didn’t like each other much. She was moody and strange and she despised Americans.”
“Why?”
“She had an American father, she said. I guess she didn’t think much of him, but he wasn’t around, so she took it out on me.”
“And that’s why you were miserable.”
“Françoise didn’t help, but it wasn’t her fault.” Lou traces Manet’s secateurs with a fingertip. Only the black blades are visible; the handles are outside the frame. “I was depressed when I went and I got into one of those—”
“Depressed.”
“—downward spirals …”
“Why were you depressed?”
Lou studies Sam without speaking for some time, and her melancholy eyes irritate her niece. “I’d really gone away to get over someone,” she says.
“Oh. A broken heart.” Sam gives the statement a sardonic edge.
“Yes.”
In the page of text opposite the peonies, Samantha manages to read: Manet’s “Olympia” caused a tremendous scandal in 1865 because of its subversive reinterpretation of the past and its almost satirical echo of Titian’s—Her aunt turns the page. There is a double spread of Olympia, the center fold passing through the creamy thighs of the woman lounging on satin sheets. “When you’re desperate,” Lou says, “you do things that you—”
“I know about desperate.”
“I suppose you do, Sam.” But Lou is lost in the desolation of thirteen years ago in Paris.
“So what did you do?” Sam demands.
Lou turns away and presses her forehead against Manet’s brushstrokes, but Samantha does not relent. “What did you do?” she prods.
“I gave in and called my big sister.”
Big sister. A rush of excitement seizes Samantha: a new angle; another puzzle piece; something that might jar a two-dimensional image into life.
“You were close.” Samantha keeps her voice neutral. “You and my mother.”
“Of course we were. We used to be so close that you couldn’t have put—”
“Used to be.”
“Before you came along. Before she got married.”
“You resented me.” Samantha pounces on an undernote and will not let go. “You resented my father and me.”
“Nothing’s that simple, Sam.” Lou studies her niece, deciding what to tell. “I needed to see you again so badly—”
“Me?” Samantha says, startled.
“All of you, I mean. When your mother had Matthew, I went into a tailspin. I can’t explain. I just had to—Rosalie and you, and the new baby, and Jonathan, before you all dis—” Lou’s hand flies to her mouth. “It had been so long.”
“You were going to say disappeared.” Samantha is watching Lou closely, riveted. She does not believe in chance or coincidence. Every thread, in her experience, leads into the knot.
“I was going to say: disappeared into terminal respectability. You wouldn’t understand.”
A word comes back to Samantha from nowhere. Disreputable. Your sister is so disreputable.
“Were you disreputable, Lou?”
Lou gives her niece a strange look. “What made you say that?”
“My father said it. Grandma and Grandpa used to say it.”
Lou looks as though Samantha has struck her. She stretches her fingers out flat and covers Olympia with them. Her veins crisscross the backs of her hands like string. She picks up the photo album and turns the pages. She stops. She points to a photograph. Sam’s mother and Sam’s aunt, her father between them—a happy threesome—are ankle-deep in white sand. All three are in swimsuits. Sam’s mother wears a one-piece suit, demure; her aunt is in a bikini and has a flower in her hair. Her father, in the middle, has his arms around them both. “The good sister and the disreputable sister on the beach at Isle of Palms, South Carolina,” Sam’s aunt says in a sardonic tone. “The summer after my high school graduation. Rosalie and Jonathan were engaged already. Look, you can see her ring in the photograph. And I was supposed to be getting ready for the College of Charleston in the fall, but I ran away to New York instead.”
She points to another photograph. Lou must be about eighteen, Rosalie twenty. They are standing in front of a church. “Someone else’s wedding,” Lou says. “Later that same summer.” In the photograph, Lou has bright red bad-girl lips and wears an off-the-shoulder dress. Her eyes are outlined in kohl. Sam’s mother looks sweet and shy. “The disreputable one,” Sam’s aunt says, tapping her own image on the head. “And you’re in the photograph too, though nobody knows it yet, not even your mother. Did you know your parents had to get married sooner than planned?”
Samantha closes her eyes for a moment, the better to rehear the pinprick of malice.
“I figured it out,” she says. “So what? Is that a big deal?”
“It was, back then. In Charleston, South Carolina, believe me, that sort of thing was still a very big deal. At least, in the best families it was. When she found out about the pregnancy, your grandmother was distraught. She was actually hospitalized with ‘nervous prostration’.”
“Is that why I was born in New York?”
“Yes. And that’s why your mother had to give up her Charleston wedding, which broke your grandmother’s heart. That’s why your parents were married in a registry office in Manhattan, and why they moved to Atlanta immediately afterwards, and why I stayed in New York.”
“Hurricane Sam, that’s me,” Samantha jokes, to hide her disturbance. “Cause of wholesale evacuation of Charleston”—and perhaps, she has always irrationally feared, of her parents’ deaths.
“That’s pretty
