But he agreed, finally, to a single year at the Sorbonne on the condition that she live with Danny’s family. That’s where she was when Daddy went into the hospital for a minor operation, and never recovered. November 3, 1928.
There was no Pan Am Clipper flying boat yet, no way to get home other than by a long sea journey to New York and a train on to Chicago. Mother told her not to come, that Daddy would be deep in the ground before she was halfway across the Atlantic. Nanée saw now that her mother had felt free for the first time since her wedding day, and didn’t want her daughter to see that truth hidden behind her widow’s veil. Perhaps Mother imagined Nanée would feel the same unseemly sense of freedom. Perhaps that was some part of what she had felt, some part of the reason she didn’t rush home.
Mother instead came to Paris. She took rooms at the H?tel Meurice, and Nanée moved in with her. Nanée liked it at first, dressing up in evening clothes and jewels, going to places like Bricktop’s or Le Boeuf sur le Toit, where the headwaiter always found room for them. But she’d tired of it by the time her brothers joined them to ski that next Christmas. Or perhaps she’d tired of Misha, an ousted White Russian count looking for an American heiress to restore him to wealth, with whom her mother liked to go out clubbing and get drunk and fight.
They skied in St. Moritz, Nanée surprisingly taking to this sport that required her to be out all day in the cold. She stayed until spring, long after Mother returned to the States with her White Russian, who, being a count from a country that no longer allowed royalty, was welcomed into American society with a ball thrown by friends. That was when Nanée had taken her own first lover, after her mother’s second wedding. She didn’t return for that either. She continued skiing in the Swiss Alps while her mother and Misha settled into the comfortable life Daddy had made, and she climbed into bed with a fellow she imagined she loved. Nanée’s taste in men was as bad as her mother’s, though, and she lacked the sense Mother had to settle down with just one lout who, being a count, hadn’t caused a scandal the way Nanée would were she to marry anyone other than a boy from the right kind of family, from Evanston or Newport or New York. But then Evanston Rules were more forgiving of the second love of a wealthy older widow than they were of a daughter with prospects on her first trip down the aisle.
T SET THE Exquisite Corpse sketch on Nanée’s desk, beside the photograph of Nanée in her flight gear that another of her charming louts had sent her. Was it her head Edouard had drawn? The flight goggles and scarf, yes, but an artist as talented as he was could draw a head that was unmistakably Nanée’s if he meant to. Not that she’d known that was what he’d drawn before she, with his part of the creature folded away, unmistakably drew Edouard’s nearly naked lower half.
“He drew my head in a birdcage,” she repeated, hearing his voice again, obsession, anxiety, even fetish. Yet what she’d felt when saw the sketch was, oddly, understood. As if he could see how she so often felt, looking out at the world through a gilded cage in which she’d managed to pry the door open but was somehow unable to leave.
“Anyway,” she said, “you can’t get a man by letting him believe you’re attracted to him.” It was the contessa’s admonition—Non puoi procurarti un uomo facendogli credere che sei attratta da lui—invariably delivered with her insistence that the girls marry in their “own class,” since only wealthy, socially suitable men could be presumed to marry them for love rather than for their fortunes.
“I wrote Danny every day from London,” T said.
“But that’s different—an advantage of an overseas love.” Nanée remembered Danny hurrying home each day in hopes that an envelope from England waited on the little blue plate by the door. “He wants to be with you, but he can’t. That’s the ticket. Make him want something he can’t quite reach.”
“And certainly don’t risk living happily ever after when there might be a truly horrible fellow out there whose sole attraction is that he won’t cause a scandal in Evanston.”
“I’m not the snob you imagine me,” Nanée protested.
“Of course you are,” T said, but with affection.
She slid the Exquisite Corpse drawing closer to Nanée as another cork popped behind them, laughter bubbling up with the champagne. The knobby knees might be forgiven, but the baby kangaroo—Nanée could see that through T’s eyes now. She could see it looked carelessly cruel, although that wasn’t how she’d meant it.
“He reminded me of Daddy.” The confession surprised her more, apparently, than it did T. “The way Edouard Moss got down to his daughter’s level. The way he spoke so gently.”
“That’s a gauzier view of your father than even your mother would claim.”
“At Marigold Lodge, though,” Nanée said, remembering the manicured peninsula of lawn and weeping willows stretching down to the waters of Pine Creek Bay and Lake Macatawa. To my brave girl, her father had written in his will, surprising everyone with his bequest of the family summer home to Nanée. “Daddy was a different person in Michigan.”
“Even so, Nan, you need to let go of this quest for a man you imagine would have made him proud.”
“I don’t—”
“You do, though. You’re so anxious not to be taken in by one of your ‘terrific louts’ that you won’t pause to consider what might please you.”
Nanée studied the birdcage head again, the knobby knees and the kangaroo she’d drawn herself, the much-loved creature abandoned on the floor lest her need for love reflect badly on her father. “The push-up man photograph—why do you suppose he made André take it down?” Thinking she might inquire about it at the gallery, she might buy it if she could. It too left her feeling understood in some way she couldn’t begin to describe.
“He’s leaving for Sanary-sur-Mer tomorrow,” T said gently. “Edouard is.”
They both looked out the window, to the broad, empty avenue and the lightening sky.
Nanée folded the Exquisite Corps back into thirds, then into thirds again, and closed it in her palm.
“Later today,” T amended. “Tonight. On the overnight train.”
“Sanary-sur-Mer,” Nanée repeated. It was one of the sunniest places in all of France.
Wednesday, January 19, 1938
SANARY-SUR-MER