Annabel sat on the small sofa in her uncle’s office, awaiting his return from the lobby and his decision about her fate at the Grand Hotel. What new “role” could she possibly play here that might lead to a permanent position?
She suddenly felt just as nervous as when she’d first arrived. Back then, she’d thought of this as a holiday combined with a summer job, a temporary change of scenery to help her get her bearings.
But on that July day when Annabel had first entered the Grand Hotel, Oncle JP sat her down in his office and made it very clear that in Europe, if you were lucky enough to be taken in as an apprentice and have someone invest that time in you, then you were expected to make a serious commitment to what you’d learned. Your reward was that you could count on doing that same job for the rest of your life. Security, he called it.
Yet to Annabel, who was only twenty, it sounded like a life sentence for some crime she hadn’t committed. Still, she’d tried to look enthusiastic. Her uncle saw right through her.
“Ah, I know that expression well,” he’d said drolly. “You made the face of Louis—yes, yes, your father looked just like that at your age.”
Papa was Oncle JP’s younger brother, and although they possessed the same intelligent dark eyes and pale complexion, here the similarities ended. Clearly Oncle JP, a man in his mid-fifties, was cautious and traditional above all.
“What was Papa like—as a boy?” Annabel had asked eagerly.
Oncle JP had sighed but smiled fondly. “He was impulsive and eager for adventure—that’s why he left our Riviera and went to le Nord.” Like a typical Provençal, her uncle referred to the entire rest of France as the dreaded North.
“Paris, you mean,” she’d responded in amusement.
“Yes, he worked as a photographer’s assistant until the Great War. Enfin, when his military service ended with that leg injury, he took the first boat he could get to America. Tell me, what was his life like in New York? His letters sounded happy. Did he achieve his dream?”
So Annabel had told him about her father’s life in New York, and how he’d met her mother, Julia—who’d also run away, from a rich but stodgy family in Boston. Julia became a fashion model for a department store, and that was how she met and fell in love with Louis, the handsome French photographer who took her picture. They’d married and then opened their own portrait studio, developing a reputation for magical lighting that brought out the best in the faces they photographed.
“Opera, theatre, and ballet stars adored them,” Annabel told her uncle, describing how society people who hoped to look as beautiful as celebrities flocked to her parents’ studio.
Annabel had grown up helping out around there, watching her slim, beautiful mother climb up on a stepladder to adjust the lights, while the charming Louis stood below, peering through his camera to get just the right angle that would make a nose less prominent and give tired eyes a glow. Together her parents could turn mildly interesting faces into compelling images of sophistication and dignity.
“But when the Great Depression struck, people stopped spending money, and some of the theatres went dark,” Annabel explained. Her uncle nodded soberly.
At first, things had looked bearable for her parents. Yet throughout the 1930s, the clients kept ebbing away. Annabel, tucked safely away at Vassar, had no idea of how bad things had gotten, because her parents didn’t want her to find out and drop out of school.
Then, one Christmas when she’d come home, she found her exhausted mother ill with la grippe. Mama died shortly after New Year’s Day of 1939.
Annabel was shocked that her mother could die before reaching old age. It wasn’t fair; it felt horribly wrong. And death itself was utterly unfathomable—how could someone you’d known your whole life just one day disappear, forever? Where did they go?
She was simply not prepared to grapple with life’s biggest mystery. She’d gone back to school only because her father insisted. And it did force her to concentrate on her studies ahead of her formidable junior-year exams. Some part of her believed that, somehow, Mama was still back there in New York awaiting Annabel’s return home.
She hadn’t realized that Papa, left completely on his own, never recovered from the loss; this and the strain of trying to hold together his faltering business seemed to age Louis. He was struck with a heart attack just before Easter.
When she arrived home from Vassar for the holiday break, Annabel was met at the door by a doctor, who’d patted her shoulder and said gravely that apparently every man in Papa’s family possessed a delicate heart with a “murmur,” as he called it. It sounded like a scientific name for dying from a broken heart.
Annabel was by her father’s side at the end, holding his hand. He’d whispered, “If I don’t make it, go to my brother, Jean-Pierre. He is not rich, but he’s a good man. His address is in your mama’s book.”
Yet before she could truly cope with this new loss, Annabel was summoned to Boston, to see her mother’s family, whom she hadn’t ever met because they’d never forgiven Mama for “disgracing” them by running away to Manhattan to marry a “foreigner” who was “in trade.”
Nonetheless, Annabel had been eager to finally meet her New England grandmother. It made her think of the Thanksgiving poem about riding a sleigh: Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go . . .
When she’d entered that imposing old house in the most proper section of Boston, a butler showed her into a dark parlor filled with darker furniture. A severe old white-haired woman sat in a high-backed chair near the fireplace, and she was dressed in black, with a gold-trimmed onyx brooch and a lace shawl. Without any demonstration of affection or sympathy, her eyes glittered as she sized up her granddaughter, who took a smaller seat opposite her.
“You look like your father,” Grandmother had said in place of a greeting. It sounded like an insult, delivered as if addressing a scullery maid.
So Annabel replied quietly, “How do you know that? Mama said you refused to meet my father or even look at a photo of him.” For her mother had told her of letters returned, unopened.
Grandmother pursed her lips, then said, “You don’t look like your mother, but you certainly sound just like her.” Another appraising gaze. “Well, young lady. What are your plans?”
“I have only one more year left to go at Vassar. My major is poetry, my minor is French, and I’ve studied a bit of German, too—” Annabel began.
“And how do you plan to pay for another year of school?” her grandmother demanded, leaning on her cane, her bony fingers clasped around its ivory top.
Annabel had fallen silent then. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to sort through her father’s possessions, but of necessity she’d looked at his bank records. He had a modest savings account with smaller and smaller deposits recorded, but there were still unpaid studio bills to contend with. Evidently he’d been living hand to mouth for some time, always miraculously managing, but only that. She knew that he’d have somehow come up with the last of her tuition, even if he had to borrow it from someone. But he was gone now.
“Your father should have provided better for you,” Grandmother said stiffly, and went on to make it quite clear that any money in her family was in trust for her sons, not the child of an ungrateful daughter who’d long ago been disowned for her disobedience.
“I can’t be expected to pay for the unnecessary schooling of a girl,” the old woman continued in a voice as dry as the kindling that crackled in her fireplace. “And where would it get you in the end? Nobody of any quality wants to marry a bluestocking. But you’ll be twenty-one in September. You are old enough to be responsible for yourself now. I must know your plans. I don’t want this family disgraced any further.”
So that’s why you sent for me, Annabel thought. To avoid scandal. She’d thought her mother had exaggerated her family’s stuffiness. Now it was very real.
“A girl like you should enroll in secretarial school,” Grandmother had concluded, after mulling it over. “That I will pay for. Perhaps you could find work with a bachelor doctor or lawyer who might marry you. I suppose you’re pretty enough,” she’d said, for the old lady, who was the daughter of a Scottish noblewoman and a whaling captain from Nantucket, had only the vaguest notion of how the rest of the world married off its girls.
Annabel thought it sounded positively medieval. Perhaps she’d inherited some of her parents’ restlessness; she wanted to do something special with her life before she settled down. Which meant that she did have a plan, of sorts. But it wasn’t coherently formed yet, so she left her grandmother’s house without mentioning that she already had a boyfriend—a Harvard man, in fact.
David was the first boy she’d ever contemplated spending the rest of her life with. Their relationship had grown more passionate, and they’d even spoken about having a “future” together. After graduation, of course. David had one more year of law school left.
So she went straight to David’s apartment in Cambridge. He took her out to a dinner dance, and then they went back to his place and made love. It was only the second time they’d done so. But that night, he seemed like the only loving person left in her universe.
As they lay there in his bed, he’d asked her how it went with her grandmother; he had always been deeply impressed with this pedigreed side of Annabel’s family, who, he’d admitted, made his lineage “look like stowaways” by comparison. Now she told him all about that ghastly interview, and that she was not going back to Vassar.
She’d hoped that he would say, Let’s just get married, then! But Annabel could see that he wasn’t completely listening, as if he had something else on his mind.
Finally he sat up, lit a cigarette, and said regretfully, “Darling, I think you and I should start seeing other people. You need a man with more—resources—than mine.”
She’d felt her heart plummet as if she were in an elevator that had just dropped too fast.
He went on, “You’re a great girl, and we’ve had a lovely time together. But I just don’t think we’re quite right for each other, and it would be selfish for me to keep you all to myself.”
She stammered in disbelief, “But—but—just last month you said you loved me and that if we had children together, our kids would be so beautiful and smart and free.”
It was humiliating to have to remind him of this. But then he admitted that, over the Easter holiday, he’d kept company with a girl he’d known since childhood that his parents had wanted him to marry all along. Apparently, this time they’d convinced him.
“Edna and I just have more in common, you see,” he told Annabel hurriedly. “And when it comes to marriage, that’s what’s most important—being compatible. She and I have always sort of had an ‘understanding’ since we were kids. But when I met you, it was like a thunderbolt. I couldn’t think of anyone but you,” he admitted, as if she were a temptress who’d lured him from the straight and narrow. “But passion isn’t enough to make a marriage. I can see that now. And you’re the kind of girl who likes to think for yourself all the time.”
She’d stared at him blankly, wondering why he was suddenly making this personality trait sound like a defect. Finally he felt obliged to explain that he thought she was becoming “too assertive, even in bed.”
“The man is supposed to be the hunter,” he said in a tone that sounded like a disapproving minister.
This from the man who’d convinced her that sex before marriage was natural for two people in love; a man who’d taught her how to smoke a cigarette—although she thought those things tasted like burnt matches—and how to listen to jazz. He thought himself “modern” and “progressive,” and he professed to support women’s rights. Only in theory, evidently.
“You always said you loved my ‘spirited nature,’” she said softly, still confused. “Was that just a line?”
“No,” he said, looking earnest for the first time. “I do love you. I really do. It’s killing me to let you go. But I guess marriage has to be about more than love. A lawyer needs a certain kind of wife who knows how to be a follower. And besides,” he added solemnly, “I haven’t been fair to Edna, stringing her along. It’s high time I did the honorable thing.”
Finally, Annabel caught on. “How rich is she?” she asked. The guilty look on his face was her answer. So, apparently Annabel’s Boston heritage had been a large share of her attraction for David . . . until it now looked as if it wouldn’t quite pay off.
“See, that’s just what I mean,” David was saying defensively. “You speak your mind and I admire that; I truly do. But you don’t suffer fools, and in certain circles, that would cause offense. I don’t want a constant tug-of-war about who’s in charge. I want my life to be on an even keel.”
He’d held out the flat of his hand and ran it in a straight, level line, to demonstrate.
Annabel said, “If that were a heart monitor, you’d be dead.”
She was already getting dressed now. “But you’re right about one thing,” she added on the way out. “I don’t have time for fools.”
* * *
Feeling utterly stranded, Annabel had gone back to her parents’ apartment in Manhattan, where the landlord then raised the rent. Despite what her father had said, Annabel couldn’t imagine asking a French uncle she’d never met for financial support. Two people had just told her that she couldn’t depend on their support. Wouldn’t the uncle feel the same? So she took up her grandmother’s offer and went to the secretarial school instead of taking her exams at Vassar. She learned so quickly that the head of the school placed her in a job typing for a theatrical agency.
Her plan was to save up enough money to return to Vassar, but on her secretarial pay it would take forever to earn enough. Most of the secretaries she knew were simply marking time until locating a rich boss to marry. Annabel knew that she could no longer bear the mundane existence of a hopeful office girl.
She had never felt so alone in her life. Finally, one Sunday afternoon, she’d worked up the courage to clear out her parents’ belongings. There was a stack of magazines about movie stars that her mother used to scrutinize for lighting and posing ideas. As a child Annabel had found them fascinating, for they seemed to tell tales of a more enchanted life, where everyone was beautiful and happy and never bored.
In her parents’ closet she found the few possessions that were dearest to them. Her mother had been sentimental about only a few items, like Annabel’s baby things.
Her father had a small box of keepsakes. Here Annabel discovered his correspondence with the mysterious Oncle JP. She sat on the floor to sort through the packets of letters and found, to her surprise, that they often discussed the progress of chère Annabel.
As she’d sifted through this warm and affectionate correspondence, she saw that Oncle JP had had his sorrows, too; his wife had died when their son was born. Then, when the son was only a young man, he was hit by a car and killed. The son’s pregnant girlfriend was too immature to raise a child and was relieved to place it in the care of Oncle JP, who officially adopted his little granddaughter.
The child’s name was Delphine, and now eight years old, she was slightly lame from an earlier bout with polio. I wish that Annabel and Delphine could meet, Oncle JP had written to Papa. I think Delphine would like to know an older female cousin, a woman to look up to.
Annabel had put down the letters with a lump in her throat. Perhaps she could do some good for Oncle JP, instead of merely asking for a handout. These people were the only family she had left. She felt as if she were walking on a tightrope across Niagara Falls, surrounded by thick mist shrouding the past behind her and obscuring the future that lay just ahead.
And so, when her money was running out and all she had left in the world was a suitcase of clothes and just enough for a passage to France, she had written to her uncle, who told her to come at once.