“It’s Madame.” I set down my pocketbook so she could see the wedding band on my left hand. “I need a few clothes.”
I gave her my budget as she evaluated my size in one sweep of her eyelids, and I tried not to twist the gold ring I’d bought from the pawnshop. It was a little too big, and so was the title Madame. But we were two years from the end of a war, and young widows were a common sight. I might have decided to keep the Little Problem, but I had no intention of being spit on as an unwed mother. I knew how this worked: you got a wedding ring, you made up a story about a boy who died in the war (in my case, after it) and embellished it with a few convincing details. Maybe people looked skeptical but they didn’t say anything because you had the right props: a secondhand wedding ring, and a dead husband.
Donald, I decided as I stepped into a cubicle to change. Donald . . . McGowan was my nonexistent dead husband. Half Scottish and half American, dark haired. Tank corps; served with Patton. The great love of my life, Donald was, dead in a recent car accident. He always drove too fast; I’d warned him and warned him. I’d name my child after him if he was a boy . . .
I imagined Rose wrinkling her nose at me. “You don’t want a son named Donald, Charlie. Really!”
“You’re right,” I told her. “But I think it’s a girl, anyway. So Donald will work just fine.”
“He sounds boring!”
“Don’t you insult my Donald!”
“Madame?” came the saleswoman, sounding dubious, and I tamped down my laughter, trying on one set of secondhand clothes after another. Under all these airy imaginings I was laying plans, however vague. Thinking that if I found Rose, there might be a place for the two of us together. Perhaps here in France, who knew? I had money, savings—why couldn’t we buy ourselves a new beginning, where two false Madames with two false wedding rings could make some kind of honest life? I thought of the Proven?al café where I’d spent the happiest day of my childhood at Rose’s side. Was there a haven like that for us now that we were grown?
A café, I thought, remembering how much I’d enjoyed not just that Proven?al afternoon, but my brief coffee shop job at Bennington. The waiting on customers, the rush of delicious smells, the easy pleasure of juggling orders and making change in my head. A café, somewhere here in France? I imagined a place with postcards for sale and sandwiches of soft goat cheese and marbled ham, where Edith Piaf played in the evenings and the tables were pushed back for dancing. Where two young widows kept the cash till and flirted with Frenchmen, though never without mournful glances at the photographs of our husbands. I’d have to get some good fake photographs . . .
“Bien,” the saleswoman said as I came out, nodding approval at the narrow black trousers and the cropped striped jersey cut high at the collarbone but nearly showing my midriff. “The New Look is not for you,” she instructed me brusquely, sorting through the stack of clothes that had fit me and culling it down to the narrowest skirts, the tightest sweaters, the slimmest trousers. “You dress like Dior, but you were made for Chanel. I know her—she’s little and dark and plain too.”
“Well, thank you.” I looked around the dim shop, nettled. “And I doubt you know Chanel.”
“I worked at her atelier before the war! If she comes back to Paris, I will work for her again, but until then, I get by. We all get by, but not in horrible clothes.” The saleswoman glared, leveling a varnished fingernail at me. “No more ruffles! When you shop, you must think tailored, stripes, flats. Quit torturing that hair into waves, chop it off at the chin—”
I looked at myself in the mirror. The trousers and jersey might be secondhand, but I looked rather smart. A bit boyish. And comfortable, no waist cinchers or crinolines. The saleswoman perched a little straw hat over my eye at a rakish angle, and I grinned. I’d never chosen my own clothes before; Maman always dictated what I wore. But I was a madame now, a grown woman, not a helpless girl, and it was time I looked like it. “How much?”
We haggled. I had limited francs to spare, but I’d seen how covetously the saleswoman eyed my traveling suit even as she turned up her nose at the New Look. “Modeled right off the Dior collection, and I’ve got another at my hotel. I’ll drop it by tomorrow if you give me the trousers, the two skirts, the jerseys, and that black dress.”
“You may only have the black dress if you promise to wear it with pearls and very red lipstick.”
“I haven’t got the pearls right now, but I can do the lipstick.”
“Done.”
I headed back to the hotel with my parcel of clothes and a swing in my hips, and I had the pleasure of seeing Finn’s eyebrows go up as I joined him and Eve where they were having drinks at the hotel café. “Happy to meet you,” I said, and presented my hand with its new wedding ring. “I’m Mrs. Donald McGowan.”
“Bloody hell,” Eve said, and took a gulp of martini that looked like straight gin.
I patted the Little Problem. “A cover identity seemed practical.”
“Donald McGowan?” Finn asked. “Who is he?”
“Dark haired, lantern jawed, Yale law school, served in the tank corps.” I dabbed my eyes with an imaginary black-bordered handkerchief. “The love of my life.”
“Not bad to start,” Eve critiqued. “Did he like his socks folded or r-rolled?”
“Um. Folded.”
“No um. Black coffee or cream? Did he have brothers and sisters? Did he play football at university? Details, Yank.” Eve pointed a stern finger. “It’s the little details that sell a cover story. Make up a biography for your Donald and study it till you can reel it off with no flubs. And wear that ring all the time, till you get that little groove in your finger that long-married w-women have. People look for that groove when they see young girls wheeling baby prams and calling themselves Mrs.”
I grinned. “Yes, ma’am. Shall we go get supper?”
“Yes, and I’ll c-cover this one. You’ve been buying till now.”
A small acknowledgment that she wasn’t here anymore for my money—that touched me, though I knew better than to say so. “As long as you let me check the bill,” I answered instead. “You’d sign your name to any set of numbers they wrote down.”
“Whatever you say.” She took the bill the waiter had just put down for drinks, and pushed it over to me. “You’re the banker.”