September 18, 1933
“Where shall I deliver this note?” asked Lanh politely as he took the small white envelope, my initials engraved on the back.
“To the home of the president of the chamber of commerce, Arnaud de Fabry. It’s for his wife, Marcelle. Do you know the address? I’m afraid I haven’t had time to find out.”
“I know it,” said Lanh with a smile. “I will take it there now.”
I looked at the envelope, white against his white gloves, a perfect image of the way two women began a friendship. But that was not the purpose of the letter. “Thank you. Please, if you can, make sure that it is delivered to Madame de Fabry herself, not to a servant.”
“Of course,” said Lanh, turning toward the front door. “Even if she isn’t in, I will wait until she is.”
I had hoped to meet Marcelle at the club, which I had visited every day since she’d called on me, but she was never there, morning or night. Victor had left on his long journey down to the plantations, and I had no one to confer with. See her as soon as possible, Victor had said. Do anything you can. He wanted to help, but he no longer had time. In the south, there was even more for him to worry about. He was finally going to see the plantations, to meet the two men running them and the thousands more working them. I had to deal with the question of Marcelle de Fabry alone.
This was not how I had dreamt about my time in Indochine beginning. It was supposed to be a safe world. A reprieve from Paris. Instead, everything that had gone wrong in Paris seemed like it had followed me across the ocean. Switzerland had finally started to feel far in the past, but here it was again. The memories had stowed away on the ship, refusing to be forgotten.
I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that my face had lost its color. I pulled my hair away from my face. It looked suddenly longer and unstyled. Stringy. I inspected myself from another angle, but I still looked lost and dead behind the eyes. I looked like my mother. If there was anyone on earth whom I could not resemble, it was my mother. And if there was anything I liked to think about less than Switzerland, it was her. Both of my parents.
I ran out of the room and let my shoes clack down the stairs the way Lucie did. It was not ladylike, but there was something rather satisfying about the sound. I was in Indochine, and even if my time here had not started off well, I could change things quickly. I had certainly proven to be the master of my own destiny over the years. I had put myself through school, then found a way to New York, to Paris, into the arms of the right kind of man, and now to the colony. I could start anew yet again. But first I needed Trieu to transform me into a woman who looked nothing like my mother.
I called for her when I was downstairs, but she did not come running as she usually did. I rang the silver bell that had been placed in the living room, but still no one came. I wandered into the kitchen, opened the door with more force than I meant to, and Diep, our cook, jumped from surprise. Standing next to her was a young girl whom I’d never seen before. Trieu was not with them.
“Diep,” I said, surprised to see a stranger in the house. “What is this? Who is this girl? I was ringing the bell,” I said, feeling as surprised as Diep looked.
“I’m very sorry, Madame Lesage,” she said as the girl moved behind her. Diep squawked at her in Annamese, and the girl stepped back to her side. “This girl, she is Lanh’s younger sister.”
“And where is Trieu?” I asked. “I need her to help me…” My voice trailed off as I looked at the girl. I needed Trieu to help me with more than just my appearance. I needed her calming presence to set me right for the day, her knowledge of how French women could thrive in the colony to rub off on me. Instead, I felt shaken by the sight of the girl. Her body, her posture, the tired shine to her eyes—she looked nothing like me, but she reminded me painfully of myself when I was her age.
“Lanh’s sister,” I repeated, taking my eyes off the girl. “Does she come here often?”
“No!” Diep exclaimed. “Never. But she had nowhere to go today, as her older sister moved south to Saigon on Saturday. Lanh is finding a place for her, but she is too young to stay at home by herself today. She won’t be here more than a few hours. Just as long as Lanh is working.”
I looked at her again, huddled behind Diep, her simple cotton dress neat but pulling at the hems, at least two sizes too small.
“He should have informed me,” I replied, irritated that I was out of my depth even among the servants. “I’m to know everything that goes on in this house. Especially when Victor is not here. I’m new here, I know, but it is still my home.”
“Of course, Madame Lesage,” Diep said. “That was very unwise of Lanh not to tell you.” From the way she said it, it was obvious she’d known he hadn’t told me—had perhaps even advised him not to.
“How old are you?” I asked the girl, taking a step toward her.
“J’ai neuf ans,” she replied in unaccented French. I nodded and looked at Diep.
I thought of myself at nine. I had been home without parents daily at that age and had babies to take care of, too. It seemed very overprotective of Lanh to feel his sister couldn’t do the same, but it also felt nice to know that there were people who were protective of children. Especially poor children. “I think it’s best if you escort her home and spend the rest of the day with her,” I said. “You can have the day off.”
“Yes, Madame Lesage, I’m very sorry,” Diep said, bowing her head.
As Diep led her toward the side door, the servants’ door that opened into the small yard, I looked at the girl with her dark hair, her thin form. There was something about the way her knees went in, almost hitting each other as she walked, that made me feel like I was looking at my sisters. Those thin legs. Too thin. Coupled with a timidity, a feeling that you just knew the world wanted you to disappear. Poor people, especially girls, really were the same no matter where they lived.
“Wait, Diep,” I called out. “Doesn’t she attend school?” I asked. “Shouldn’t she be there now? Lucie is at school.”
“She had a place at a school for natives. For girls,” said Diep, as Lanh’s sister leaned against the door looking at the floor. I wasn’t sure exactly how old Lanh was, but he looked to be nearly my age. I wondered if they had the same mother, even with a twenty-year age gap. The girl had the same wide-set eyes as her brother, the same elegant line to her nose, so perhaps they did. “But now she needs a boarding school, since her sister can no longer care for her and Lanh is of course busy here,” Diep continued. “And very thankful to be,” she added, daring a smile.
“Where did you attend school, Diep?” I asked. “Did you go to a school in Hanoi?”
“No, I’m from the countryside,” she said, glancing at the girl behind her. “My cousin went to school for one year, in Hanoi, but it wasn’t a very nice place. It was actually quite awful.”
“Are there nice places in this city?” I asked, gesturing for the girl to come back into the center of the room, away from the door. “What’s the nicest native school where this child could board and allow Lanh to keep working here?”
“Dong Khanh is the best school,” Diep said immediately. “The girls in the royal family go there.”
“That seems a bit out of reach,” I said, thinking of the simple schoolhouse where I had been educated as a child. “Her brother is a chauffeur, her parents are—”
“Dead,” the little girl said in Annamese. “Chet ca hai.”
“I see,” I said, pausing. I should have guessed as much if her sister was taking care of her.
“I’d like some water,” I said to Diep as I thought about what to do. “I imagine she would, too.” The girl nodded, and I instructed her to sit on a simple wooden chair, one of six around the table where the servants ate together. “And perhaps something to eat.”
I gulped down the cool water, watching the girl eat a plate of vegetables and cold fish that Diep had served her.
She barked at the girl, who sat up straighter, placing her napkin in her lap and her hands on the table, then accompanied me out of the kitchen.
We went to the living room, where I sat on a large couch next to the telephone. She watched me as I sat back and placed my forearm on the armrest.
“Call the school, please,” I said, lifting a finger and pointing to the phone. Diep was a short woman and quite stocky, an unsurprising trait for a cook, but she had a pleasing face, which was right now pinched into a look of determination.
“Which school?” she asked.
“Dong Khanh. The one you spoke about. Call that one.”
Diep walked over and picked up the phone without hesitation. She spoke to the operator in French, one of the dames téléphonistes whose pleasant voices were always there to connect you. When she was on the line with the school a few moments later, she introduced herself in French and then switched to Annamese. At a pause in the conversation, I leaned over and said, “Just tell them that her studies will be financed by her brother’s employer, the Michelin family. Say the money is coming from Victor Michelin Lesage. Be sure to say ‘Michelin.’”
She turned back to the receiver and spoke very quickly before covering it with her hand.
“They said before that there was no space for a boarding student available. But now they just said that there is.”
“What a pleasant surprise,” I replied. I left Diep on the phone and walked upstairs. I opened Victor’s top dresser drawer and pulled out half of the pile of piastres that he had left for me in case anything should arise where I needed more than my standard allowance.
When I came back downstairs, Diep had finished speaking but was still gripping the receiver.
“They can take her then?” I asked, just to be sure.
“They can,” she said, an incredulous expression on her face. “They said she could come today. That she could sleep there tonight.”
“Good,” I said. “And how much are they asking for tuition?”
“It is four hundred piastres for the year,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Quite a sum. Perhaps I should have asked before saying that we would bring her today.”
It was far less than what I was holding.
“Take this,” I said, pressing it into her hands. “Enroll her for the rest of her schooldays, then. We will settle the rest of the bill later.”
Diep looked down at the money, then back at me, but did not move.
“Go enroll her,” I said firmly.
“But Madame Lesage, are you sure?” Diep said, gripping the money tightly, as if she was worried that it would fly away.
“Yes, of course,” I said, not meeting her stare.
“But you must want something to eat first? Isn’t that why you ventured into the kitchen? Let me make something for you before I go.”
“I’ll just prepare myself a sandwich,” I said, starting to walk away from her.
“Madame Lesage,” she said, causing me to turn around. “Lanh will be so surprised. So thankful. He will—”
“You may say the money is from me,” I said, interrupting her. “I don’t want him to think that you robbed the Banque de l’Indochine, but I’d rather not discuss it with him. Please ask that he doesn’t mention it or thank me in any way. I think that might make the time that we are in the car together a bit uncomfortable. For both of us.”
“Of course, madame,” she said. “Rest assured that he will never mention it to you or Monsieur Lesage.”
We walked back to the kitchen together, Diep insisting that I let the little girl thank me. She stood up as soon as the door opened. Diep spoke to her in Annamese, her words coming quickly. The girl stared at me, this time square in the face instead of at my midsection.
“Merci, Madame Lesage,” she said softly.
“You’re most welcome,” I replied. I was not going to let the capable mind of another penniless girl go to waste. Indigenous or not.
I went back into the living room, thinking of the nature of women. Of mothers and the motherless. Of young girls navigating the path from infant to mothers themselves. I had walked a very broken path to get to our beautiful house in Indochine. When I was very young, my life was about survival, though I didn’t fully understand it. Now I saw that surviving in the same house as my parents, with so little money, was a feat in itself. When I turned seven or eight, my attention shifted to the survival of others. There were four of us by then, and my parents were certainly losing interest in tending to babies. My mother delivered them and soon went back to trying to feed the mouths instead of kissing the mouths. She was constantly fighting, my mother. Fighting with her husband, fighting with her children, and fighting with herself. And along with this fighting nature came the push to try to fend off the anger and depression that so often comes with poverty. Almost every day, she lost the fight.
When I was a teenager, then the oldest of eight, my childhood was gone. All I focused on was how to keep my siblings alive, how to bring them some joy, and how to get myself out of Virginia so that I could eventually pluck them out, too. I realized that the only thing that made me the least bit special was that I could speak two languages. I took my ability to speak French, the one gift my mother had given me, and did everything I could with it. I became a teacher. I became a working woman with my own humble means. But I wasn’t making enough money to support my siblings—not one had managed to attend college besides me—and as a teacher I never would. I needed more. I needed something outside of the country, the social system I had always known. When I finally got to Paris, I became a woman with only two goals: to stay there indefinitely and to marry a man who could provide very well for me. I found that in Victor, and almost as soon as I did, he provided Lucie, too.
I went back upstairs and thought about the girl in the kitchen. I had hopefully just changed her life for the better. Alone in my bedroom, I looked in the mirror and managed to smile. Maybe I didn’t look that much like my mother, despite my dirty hair. Perhaps I didn’t look that bad at all.