With two weeks to wander Paris until her booked return, Kay explored the fragrant cheese and flower displays of Les Halles, the city’s central market. The butchers’ shops, where whole pheasants and pigs dangled from overhead ropes. The singsong calls of the vendors.
She climbed the steps to Montmartre, passed painters at their easels, and dined alone in a café of the Place du Tertre listening to a mournful chanteuse bewailing her heartbreak. She sat on a stone bench in the Parc Monceau finishing the novel Pauline Heifetz had given her.
Thus, one entire day.
The next morning she was chewing a crêpe suzette in a sidewalk cafe in the Rue Mouffetard when she realized: it was still last night in New York. Hours ago—probably around two in the morning, Paris time—her Andrea had played Gershwin’s “Liza” in front of a privileged audience.
Kay had come all this way to meet George and had failed to find him. She had missed her daughter’s début, and for what? She washed down her disappointment with cidre breton. She closed her eyes and focused as keenly as she could: Andrea, I’m with you, darling. Mommy is with you. I missed your concert and I love you and I am with you.
That night, with nothing better to do, she visited the Folies-Bergère, a cabaret music hall in the ninth arrondissement where Josephine Baker, a dancer from St. Louis known as La Perle Noire, The Black Pearl, performed a savage burlesque clothed only in a mock-African skirt made of bananas. A place George might well visit.
Beautiful and unchained, she twittered like a vireo. Her disciplined exuberance, the way she simultaneously expressed freedom and professionalism through her swivels, twists, tail-wags, reminded Kay of all she loved about home. Miss Baker’s French audience cheered, whistled, smacked their tables, and reached for her thighs and breasts.
Later, Kay was sitting in a bistro listening to the rain and sipping a glass of raspberry eau-de-vie, wishing George was there, when Miss Baker strolled in with a half-dozen couturiers, poets, and business advisors. No longer wrapped in her banana skirt but in a pale-blue silk evening gown and a big hat adorned with ostrich plumes, she strutted to a table at the center of the front window and ordered une grande assiette de moules à la crème et au Pernod pour tout le monde. Her flatterers and hangers-on talked at the same time, gesticulating and raising their voices.
Kay drained her snifter and rose to leave. As she was about to exit, her eyes caught those of the starlet and she decided to step over to her table. “I enjoyed your show tremendously, Miss Baker.”
“Ah, une américaine!” warbled Josephine Baker. “Thank you, sweetheart. All alone here, in Paris?”
Kay nodded, smiling.
“Where are you from?”
“New York,” said Kay.
“Come, sit here, ma belle, join us for some moules, will you?” With a wave, Josephine ordered another plate for Kay. “I do so miss New York.”
Kay sat down, glancing at Josephine’s devoted followers. “But you’re a star here.”
“Yes, I’m a star! I give them what they want. La Bonne Sauvage, they call me. Do you know what that means?” She punctuated her question with a full-throated laugh. Despite their poor understanding of English, her guests joined her in laughter.
As they dined, Josephine’s friends chattered in French, much of it too fast for Kay to grasp. Occasionally Josephine broke off her conversation to respond to something one of them had said, triggering more laughter, and then resumed with Kay.
“You explain it, Emile,” she ordered a friend who wore a goatee and a monocle. “What does it mean, in France, my being une vedette and all that. Tell her just like you told me, mon chéri.”
“It means,” said Emile in his Gallic accent, “that mademoiselle must behave on stage like a—how do you say?—like a singe.”
Josephine laughed again.
“A monkey?” suggested Kay.
“Yes, a monkey with a playful and innocent disposition. A primitive,” said Emile.
“Always making funny faces, jumping around, all that circus stuff,” added Miss Baker, crossing her eyes. “You got to give your audience what they expect. And what the French want is to feel supérieur. That’s really what this is all about. N’est-ce pas, Emile?”
“Eh, oui,” agreed Emile dourly.
Is that what Chopin was doing, giving his audience what they wanted? wondered Kay. Or Beethoven? And then she thought, maybe that was precisely what they were doing! “But in the States,” she said aloud, “they wouldn’t even let you onstage, would they?”
“Some places would, some wouldn’t,” said Josephine. “But home is home, darling.”
“We do long for home, don’t we,” confirmed Kay with a wistful smile.
“Never forget that,” said Josephine. “Never forget where home is. No matter how far away you get.”
Kay nodded, the words echoing in her mind. Where home is.