* * *
Later, after she had completed Madame Levy’s tour, and the older woman had departed with her mother’s letter to Elise LeClair in hand and a promise to return soon, Lucie detoured south through Times Square before heading home, losing herself in the chaos. On Fifty-Sixth Street, and in the apartment where they lived, it still felt like Paris, but in the center of Manhattan, with car horns honking and Broadway signs flashing and billboards screaming at her to buy Canadian Club whisky and Admiral televisions and Chevrolet cars, Lucie knew she was firmly on this side of the Atlantic, miles away from the past, which always made her feel better.
An hour later, she sat at the window of her room in Arthur’s apartment, looking out across Madison Avenue, just a block from Central Park, a sliver of which she could see between buildings. She still thought of it as Arthur’s apartment rather than her own, even though they’d lived here with him since 1946. In fact, she didn’t really think of anything in this life as her own, except perhaps for her painting, which she did in secret, because her mother would be furious if she found out. Artists, her mother said, were irresponsible, selfish. They were the type of people who abandoned their children and left them to die.
Sometimes Lucie thought about how differently her life would have turned out if the war hadn’t happened. Her father and the boys would still be alive, and her mother would still be whole and happy, not the shattered and bitter woman she’d become. Perhaps Olivier LeClair would have lived, too. Since Lucie was friends with Mathilde, would he have one day spotted her talent and offered to mentor her? Would her mother have let him? Would he have ushered her into his circle of artists, showing her that she could create a life of her own choosing with a paintbrush? She and her mother would still be living in France, the bookstore would still be standing, and most of all, maybe Lucie would feel like she belonged in her own skin.
That’s what she was thinking about when a pebble pinged off her window, followed by another. She grinned, and slid the window up to climb out onto the fire escape. “You’re early!” she called down to the dark-haired, olive-skinned young man with the easy smile on the street below. He’d been born Tommaso Barbieri in Bologna, Italy, and like her, he had moved here with his family after the war. Unlike her mother, though, his parents seemed to want only to forget their past and assimilate to American culture as quickly as possible. They changed their last name to Barber upon arrival, and Tommaso now went by Tommy; but their lingering accents, and the fact that they lived in Lower Manhattan, with its sizable Italian immigrant population, hadn’t helped them to blend in as much as they’d imagined. Lucie found Tommy’s dark-haired mother—who was always at the stove, stirring a pot of pasta sauce—and his father, who chain-smoked while listening to baseball on the radio, charming and warm, even if she couldn’t understand them when they slipped into rapid Italian.
“I couldn’t wait to see you!” he called back, and she reached inside her window for her pocketbook, slid her window shut, then climbed down the fire escape to join him. She had met Tommy last year at Hunter College, and although she had spent many Sundays at his family’s apartment, working on assignments for the art class they shared, he had never been inside Arthur’s place, nor had he met her mother, who would never approve. It wasn’t personal; it was simply that her mother wasn’t ready to admit that Lucie was, in fact, an adult and therefore old enough to have a boyfriend. Her mother would consider the blossoming relationship a personal affront, simply because it was one more piece of evidence that Lucie was thoughtless enough to continue growing up while her siblings lay beneath the cold earth.
He greeted her with a long kiss and then slung his arm around her shoulder. “Where should we continue our secret love affair today?”
She knew the sneaking around behind her mother’s back bothered him, but he understood that family—especially family that had come through an earth-scorching war—could be complicated.
“I want to go to the art gallery on Fifty-Sixth and Lexington,” she said. “The French one.”
He whistled, low and slow. “On the same block as the bookstore? Does this mean you’re ready for me to meet your mother?”
She coughed and looked away. “I was thinking we would just go to the gallery. I—I met someone today from my past, and it made me want to look at the Olivier LeClairs again. They remind me of the things we left behind.”
Tommy shrugged. “Sure. But one of these days, you’re going to have to introduce me to her, you know.”
“I know,” she said, letting an easy silence fall for a couple of blocks. She had never told Tommy the story behind why she and her mother had left France. He didn’t know that her father and siblings had died in a blast, or that her mother had spent years nursing a grudge against the LeClair family, though she’d mentioned that the families had known each other. Aside from that, he only knew that her mother was a widow and that she’d once owned a bookstore in France, which she’d replicated here. It was all he needed to know, for who was to say what would happen if Lucie came clean about everything? Would he, too, blame her for having the gall to live while the others had perished?
They avoided the bookstore entirely, walking down Lexington and turning left at the northeast corner of Fifty-Sixth. It was nearly dark by the time they entered the gallery through the double doors.
Lucie had been inside six times before to gape at the impressive collection of LeClairs. They seemed to be the anchor pieces of the gallery, and they were priced astronomically. Since Lucie had begun venturing in, only one of the dozen LeClairs had sold, and it had been soon replaced by another LeClair, which astonished Lucie. How did the gallery have access to such a large collection of Mathilde’s father’s work when he’d been dead for twenty years? Hadn’t most of his oeuvre sold to collectors by now? Lucie had spent more than an hour in front of the new LeClair when it had gone up a few months earlier, soaking in all the lines and brushstrokes, before the surly French owner had grunted at her that if she wasn’t going to buy a piece, she should move on. He was clearly aware that even the gallery’s lesser pieces, by artists no one had heard of yet, were well out of her price range. Then again, what would he think if she casually mentioned that her stepfather was Arthur Lawrence Wolcott? Not that Arthur would be springing for an Olivier LeClair piece anytime soon, but he could.
The room was painted white, with white marble floors, and each piece sat in the glow of its own small spotlight. The same twelve LeClairs she had seen on her last visit were evenly spaced on three walls, with smaller pieces from other artists hanging between them. In the back room sat several sculptures on pedestals, by artists including Camille Claudel and Anicette Rousselle, though Lucie had never ventured close enough to take a good look at them. She was much more interested in the LeClairs, which held a link to a piece of her past she wanted to hold on to.
Grasping Tommy’s hand, Lucie avoided the narrow-eyed gaze of the owner and drifted to the LeClair just to the right of the entryway, which had always been her favorite. It was a view over the Paris rooftops that had, from the moment she’d first seen it, felt like something she had seen before.
“I wonder,” she said now, squeezing Tommy’s hand, “if I was ever inside their apartment to play with their daughter. It would explain why this piece feels so familiar to me.”
Tommy raised an eyebrow in amusement. “Well sure, that, or the fact that it looks just like the big LeClair that hangs in the Museum of Modern Art.”
Lucie flushed as she heard a low chuckle behind them. She turned to see the gallery’s owner, a plump, immaculately groomed man with silver hair and a matching, neatly trimmed mustache. He smelled of cigarettes, whiskey, and expensive cologne, and his enormous belly strained against the buttons of his shirt like it was trying to make an escape.
“Of course LeClair painted this one at the same time as Night Over Paris,” the man said, his words coated with a slippery French accent. “It is said that this one, in fact, was the model for the one that hangs in MoMA, his first experimentation with that particular landscape, if you will, painted in 1937.”
“Does that explain why the price is so whopping?” Tommy asked cheerfully.
Lucie elbowed him hard in the ribs as the gallery owner’s eyes narrowed to a glare. “Is this the view from Olivier LeClair’s apartment?” she asked.