Walking into the gallery a few minutes later with Mr. Fitzgerald, Lucie felt for the first time as though she really belonged. Although she’d known the LeClairs once, the French gallery owner always made her feel like she was doing something wrong when she dared venture inside to look at the art. It was why she had never even been into the smaller back room, which featured more paintings and several sculptures on white pedestals, illuminated by overhead lights. But now, this place felt like hers in a way it never had before. She’d been invited in. The thought sent a little sizzle of joy through her as Mr. Fitzgerald led her through the back door of the gallery and up a winding staircase to the second floor.
Upstairs, nine doorways flanked a narrow hallway; four on one side, four on the other, and one at the end of the hall. Eight of the doors were labeled with numbers, and Mr. Fitzgerald led her to the one marked with a 6 and withdrew a key from his pocket, unlocking it and pushing it open for her. “Your studio, Lucie,” he said, smiling down at her as he flicked a switch, illuminating the small space.
The walls and ceiling were freshly painted white, and the floor, exposed brick, was splattered with paint. In the corner sat an easel, and there was a tiny window on the far wall that let a bit of light in. To Lucie, it looked like heaven.
“The door at the far end of the hall is a supply closet,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “It’s full of paints and brushes, watercolor paper and canvases. If you need something else—clay, perhaps, or even if you want to try your hand at wood carving—just ask. I can usually get additional supplies with a few days’ notice.”
Lucie looked up at him, her mouth agape. “You even supply the materials?”
Mr. Fitzgerald shrugged. “Most of our artists here need the help, and I’m happy to give it. I tell my business partner that it’s an investment in our future; if we help foster a new generation of artists, and they eventually decide to exhibit their art with us out of loyalty, we keep ourselves in business, don’t we?”
“That’s not all it is to you, though, is it?” Lucie asked.
His smile was sad. “No, Lucie, it’s not. Art should be something we can all enjoy without worrying about the cost. Now, shall we get you settled?”
It felt like she had stepped into some sort of a dream. “What happened to the person who had the studio before me?”
“He was hired to do a restoration project in London.” Mr. Fitzgerald beamed like a proud father. “One of our recent success stories, Lucie. Maybe you’ll be the next.”
“Mr. Fitzgerald,” Lucie said, swallowing back a lump in her throat. “It is already a success to know that there’s room here for me to be… me.”
Mr. Fitzgerald blinked at her a few times, his face registering emotion as if she’d said something profound. Perhaps she had, but to her, it had been simple. It was all she had ever wanted: a place of her own to do what her heart told her to.
“Lucie,” he said after a few seconds, “I think that’s all you ever need to be.”
* * *
By the end of the next week, Lucie was fully ensconced in room six above the gallery. She disappeared for hours at a time, and somehow her mother never seemed to suspect that Lucie was just a hundred yards away from La Librairie des Rêves, doing the very thing she had been forbidden from doing.
Mr. Fitzgerald, it turned out, was a talented painter in his own right, and he’d been part of a wave of artists opening studios downtown on Tenth Street a decade and a half earlier. But he hadn’t been able to keep the doors open, and he’d told Lucie he’d been just about to call it quits when an art dealer from Paris arrived one day with a proposition: he would save the day financially by bringing in a boatload of French art—including dozens of paintings by Olivier LeClair and sculptures by Rousselle and Claudel—and in return, Mr. Fitzgerald would need only to sponsor his visa application and give him an address in the United States so his papers would be approved. Mr. Fitzgerald had told Lucie he’d hesitated at first, because he believed artists should control their own fate and profit from their own work, but then he’d realized he could use the situation to provide studio space to those who were struggling and just needed someone to believe in them. His new partner’s only condition was that they’d need to move uptown, where they could find a wealthier clientele.
“Constant Bouet and I are constantly at odds,” he had added. “We have different ideas about what art should be, and who should have access to it. But that’s what great art is, isn’t it? Light and darkness, color and absence, yin and yang. We balance each other out, I suppose, and maybe that’s why we’re still afloat.”
“That and the Rousselles, the Claudels, and the LeClairs,” Lucie had replied with a smile, and Mr. Fitzgerald had laughed heartily.
“Yes, well, I suppose that hasn’t hurt,” he agreed.
Having the art studio to escape to made Lucie feel like herself for the first time in years, and it changed everything for her. She no longer felt like she was carrying the weight of the world somewhere inside her; having access each day to paints and brushes and space of her own made her feel impossibly light.
Though she hadn’t shown her paintings to anyone yet, she had completed seven works she liked enough that she was considering sharing them. Mr. Fitzgerald, who always greeted her with a friendly smile when she arrived, had said he would love to see whatever she had created whenever she was ready, but he had also told her there was no rush. “The space is yours for as long as you need it, Lucie,” he’d said more than once. “I mean that.”
But it wasn’t just the canvases she had brought to life; it was the studio itself. With Mr. Fitzgerald’s permission, she had begun to paint the walls, grand buildings at first, then rivers, then trees. She painted over her work again and again, starting from scratch every few days, slowly pulling the images from her mind, making the space feel like a secret retreat from the world, a place that lingered between the past and the present. The more she painted, the more her dreams came alive with images, colors, and light, as if those shapes and shades had been there all along, trying to get out. She put them on canvas when she could, but there was also a great sense of relief in creating a world of her own, using the images from her dream.
The more she brought to life, though, the more she began to remember. And the more she remembered, the less she understood about how her life had come to this, locking her in a gilded cage of her mother’s making, with no way out but the secret escape of art.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The wind whipped through Elise’s hair, and she pulled up the hood of her old alpaca-lined wool coat as she shivered on the deck of the SS United States, wondering just what on earth she was doing.
It was the second week of December, and she was on her way back to the States for the first time in more than two decades, aboard the fastest ocean liner ever to make an Atlantic crossing. The speed with which the mammoth boat sliced through the water was dizzying, the temperature outside frigid. She was the only passenger crazy enough to be standing at the forward rail, squinting at the western horizon.
Since Ruth’s visit in October, Elise hadn’t stopped thinking of Juliette, of the coldness of her letter, of the way Ruth had described her. At first, Elise had wrestled with fury; didn’t the other woman care about the pain Elise had been in for the past sixteen years, not knowing what had become of her daughter? Why hadn’t she written earlier? Why had it taken a visit from Ruth to spur her into action, obviously against her will?
But then the anger had melted, and beneath it, there was an ocean of guilt. What right did she have to feel angry with Juliette about anything? Elise had done what she’d thought was best, but the fact was, she’d left her daughter behind. She’d left her, and Juliette had taken her and cared for her and protected her for all those months. It hadn’t been her fault that a bomb had fallen from the blue sky, or that Mathilde had been one of the children fated to be in its path. And the anger that oozed from Juliette’s letter, well, Elise could understand that, too. She felt it herself sometimes, a great rage at the universe for taking so much from her. But then that fire always turned inward, burning her up from the inside out. She was the one who had left her daughter behind. It wasn’t the universe’s fault, nor was it God’s. It was hers.