A week of cowardice and dread followed. I slept little, ate less, and startled guiltily each time my parents spoke to me. I had gone far beyond the bounds of propriety and—too late—knew it. I still did not understand what amenities the Benefactor offered my parents that they felt so reluctant to trouble him, but I knew that neither of them would have said the things I had said to him. Although it would be better for them to hear it from me, I had been unable to gather the courage to confess my conversation with him to my parents. And then there was the light, familiar footstep on the stairs, and my father's familiar command for me to retreat, and it was too late for courage.
I went, but I did not pretend to be a good girl, or to work on the bread. Heart rattling my chest, I pressed myself into a ball against the kitchen wall and peered through a crack as the Benefactor entered my parents' domain and, as always, dominated it.
For the first time in nearly a year of visits he did not ask Maman to sing. Instead he said, "You have a daughter, do you not? I would like to meet her," and for the first time in my life, I knew my father to tell a lie.
"Amelia," he said easily. "She is not here, monsieur. She rarely is, in the evenings. Friends keep her occupied. They write letters of support to the soldiers at the front, and find it romantic. You understand how young women are."
I blinked against the crack in the wall, as nonplussed as the Benefactor appeared to be. I had friends, some of whom, indeed, wrote romantic letters to boys gone off to war. I was more inclined to pore over the responses, trying to understand the personal toil and cost of the battles they fought. Answers were sometimes found between the lines, in the things not said, and the pain I saw there woke in me an urge to fight and protect, too. It was difficult to bear their sorrow without wanting to alleviate it through sharing it myself. I did not, however, write to those young men, as I was unwilling to form attachments for what were suspiciously voyeuristic reasons on my part.
"Of course I understand," the Benefactor responded. "A pity, though. Some other time, perhaps. Estelle, you will sing later. Now, there are things to discuss with you, first of which is that I would like to trouble you for a glass of wine."
The wine was in the kitchen, with me. If the door opened, my father's lie would be exposed. Breath held, I leapt to my feet and ran on tiptoes to the window, which I threw open silently and escaped through just as my mother opened the door. I glimpsed her upright posture sagging slightly as she saw me gone, and then I scrambled quietly down rough-mortared stone and windowsills until I landed lightly on cobbled streets.
I remained there a moment, looking up at the home I had abandoned and afire with curiosity about what the Benefactor had to say. But I could not stay without risking discovery, and so, reluctantly, I fled.
Montmartre's narrow streets were as well known to me as my mother's smile, and the spring sunshine stretched the length of the days. It would not be dark for another hour, and the Benefactor would be at my home for at least twice that. I stole through the curves and twists, watching old men flirt with younger women at cafes and, as it grew darker, watched those same old men find their way toward the Moulin Rouge and other clubs of its nature. I took refuge a little while in a church, using its welcoming quiet to imagine how I might explain myself to my parents once the Benefactor had gone. I could only conclude that I must offer to find work myself, for I doubted his generosity, limited as it might seem to me, would continue after my ill-conceived behavior. Finally, as the bells struck the penultimate hour of the day, I rose to return home.
I did not at first notice what I should have: that all the city sounds were distant. Music played from the dance halls, vehicles and beasts could be heard downhill nearer the river, but the neighborhood's usual traffic was absent. However, preoccupied with my own thoughts, it was not until someone's running footsteps slapped loudly on the cobbles and echoed from the walls that I realized how quiet it was around me.
Sensible alarm burst in my chest, for although I had laughed away stories of le Monstre, there were footpads and villains enough without fairy tales to fear. I did not quite run, but I walked more quickly, gaze alert to anything moving in the shadows, of which there were many.
Still, I was unprepared when a hand seized my hair and pulled me backward. My scream of surprise was muffled by another hand clamping over my mouth as the first released my hair and instead closed around my throat. An instinct awakened in me and I threw my head back, trying to smash my assailant's nose with my skull. He was too tall: my head met with his collarbone, and my efforts earned nothing more than an ugly laugh from my captor. The hand over my mouth slid to seize my jaw and squeezed my cheeks together in an iron grip. It hurt more than the hand over my mouth had, and was still effective in silencing me: I could scream, but the sound was strangely throttled by the crushing of my face. "Scream all you want," he suggested in a voice like pitted steel. "No one will come."
I believed him. Even if I could cry out loudly enough to garner attention, the silence in Montmartre was a deliberate one: the denizens had known trouble roamed their streets tonight, and had closed their shutters and locked their doors against it. No one would come; they were all too afraid to act on behalf of anyone caught out on the street on such a night. Rage seized me as surely as fear did: I would never turn away from those in need.
Fueled by anger and by the same instinct for self-preservation that had caused me to attack once, I struck at my assailant again, this time driving my elbow backward. It sank into the heaviness of his coat, scratchy wool absorbing the power of my blow. His breath left him in another mocking laugh, but, not yet daunted, I stomped my heel into his instep. The sturdy leather of his boots was nothing to my own light shoes, and he laughed a third time. "You have spirit, if not sense."
His hands were gloved with the roughest leather, too hot for a spring evening but superior for brutal work, and so coarse as to leave an impression of violence by their very texture. His woolen coat scraped my cheek as he held me by the jaw. "Idiot child. Who do you think you are, petitioning every dance hall in Paris on your pathetic mother's behalf? Did you think no one would tell me? Did you think you could challenge my laws in my territory and come out unscathed? I own those miserable souls, every one of them. Your sort, you deplorable romantic artists and revolutionaries, you'll always sell each other out, for fortune or fear, one or the other."
He released my jaw and spun me so quickly that I became dizzy; all that kept me from falling was his grip on the bodice of my dress. He dragged me forward, close enough that had he features to make out, I would have been able to. But all I saw was a hard, expressionless face: a pig-iron mask, its eyes dark slashes across the dull metal. My assailant's eyes showed no hint of color within the mask's depths, and I knew I had been a fool a dozen times over. I did not believe in fairy tales, and yet I had somehow thought that, should he truly exist, this creature would have the eyes he was named for. Le Monstre aux Yeux Verts, the green-eyed monster. But green eyes were only a code, a way of implying jealousy, avarice, haughtiness—all things that le Monstre's role in the fairy tale stood for.
"I am not afraid of you, monstre." Every part of my body cried out that the words were a lie: my quavering voice, my cold hands, my weakened knees, and the twisting sickness in my stomach. But I would not, could not, allow myself to falter before this shadow-clinging monster, even when his grip on my dress's bodice changed. He ripped it open, not salaciously, but so that he could press a small, cold suction cup above my wildly beating heart. The cup was attached to a thin tube that wound toward one of his coat pockets. For a moment my astonishment defeated all other emotion within me. Then, as amazement faded, I realized that my fear, too, was draining away. I thought I saw liquid swirl through the tube between us, and, before the suction cup could prove to have a needle buried within, I ripped it away from my body and cried, "I am not afraid of you!" with greater certainty than before. I was no longer afraid; I felt no depth of emotion at all, and wondered if that was courage.
Le Monstre seized my face again, drawing it closer to his own, and from so near that he might have kissed me, he whispered, "You will be." His hand covered my face and drove my head back to connect brutally with the wall behind me. Light erupted in my vision, edged with red pain, and though I braced my knees, I could not remain on my feet. I slid down the battered wall, hardly feeling the scrape of stone against my spine. When next I became fully aware, my fingers lay against my collarbone, not quite touching my abused throat but lying near it, offering comfort without increasing my distress. Each breath I took was ragged and tasted faintly of iron, as if blood vessels had been bruised or broken inside. My hand drifted a few inches lower, testing the space where the suction cup had attached to me. It felt a little rough and raw, but had none of the sensitivity that suggested I had been pierced with a needle or otherwise violated. I lowered my shaking hands and sat pressed against the wall a while longer, hardly able to think beyond the gratifying fact that I was alive.
The bells tolled midnight and I realized through my discomfort that my parents would be worried. Stiff with uncertainty, I rose and tested my skull for visible injury. My hands came away clean: no blood had been shed, and my throat would not yet show bruising. It was enough that I would have to admit to having met the Benefactor at the Opera House; I did not also have to tell my parents that I had met le Monstre in the Montmartre streets.
Maman took me into her arms with a glad cry when finally I arrived home, mumbling apologies about having fallen asleep in the church. And then, with her forgiveness in hand, I could not help myself, and asked, "What did the Benefactor want to talk about, Maman?"
Hope came into Maman's dark eyes. "He has found somewhere for me to sing, Amelia. Not at the opera house, not yet, but a studio to make records in. To preserve my voice, he said. To share it with the world. If it is well received, ma chérie, I will sing...everywhere, he says. Maybe even travel to America!"
Astonished, I looked to Papa, whose face held wary stillness. "Europe is more friendly, Estelle. Even the most sophisticated cities in America..."
Maman dismissed his concerns with a graceful wave, though I saw hurt flash in her eyes. She did not wish to imagine what Papa said to be true, that her Ethiopian heritage would deny her an honored place in America's entertainment. I shared her wish, but I also read the newspapers and listened to the radio, and feared Papa's judgment was all too correct. But Maman would not let that tamp her excitement, not tonight. "It doesn't matter now. It might never. But I will sing for the studio, Amelia! I will be heard everywhere!"
Her joy was infectious. I captured her in an embrace, then pulled Papa into it as well, and for a moment it seemed all was right with our world.