Secrets of Paris_ A Novel - Luanne Rice [16]
“And your mother especially liked Grace Kelly?” Lydie asked.
“Well, she liked Myrna Loy better, but she wanted to name me an Irish name, in honor of my saint. I was born on St. Patrick’s Day.”
“How bizarre,” Lydie said, suddenly looking delighted. “I was just thinking of St. Patrick this morning. My family has all sorts of odd connections to him.”
“Oh, I hope this will bring us all luck!” Kelly said, clasping her hands together so hopefully it made Patrice’s heart ache.
I don’t think they take it very seriously in Madame de Montespan’s circle, but it is true that at least they pay great attention to not separating any woman from her husband or her duties; they don’t like scandal unless they cause it themselves.
—TO FRANÇOISE-MARGUERITE, JANUARY 1674
LYDIE SAT IN the breakfast nook trying out ideas for the catalogue of a company that sold only antique linens. This company received the bounty of attics, steamer trunks, and dowry chests from Paris, Vienna, Burano, and Cologne. Napkins, tablecloths, doilies, petticoats, collars starched and lacy, bed ruffles. The advertising agent had instructed only that it be romantic, an instruction that Lydie considered wholly unnecessary.
She sighed, laid down her sketchpad. Ideas were not exactly flowing. When she was young and loved cars, mountains, and teaching kids in Harlem, her father used to call her his “radical tomboy.” Lydie wondered what he would think of her now, messing around with antique linens. A picture of her father’s face came to her, lean and handsome with its crooked smile. How disappointed he had been when she’d given up painting to become a stylist. He had considered it a materialistic business, using her art to sell things.
“I need the money,” she had said. “It’ll just be for a few years.”
“That’s what you think now,” he had said. “But you’ll get used to the money, and you’ll never give it up.”
He was right, Lydie thought, sitting at her table in Paris. She missed her father and she hated him. She felt a rush of hatred so strong it brought tears to her eyes. Yet once she started crying, all she could think of was how much she had loved him. The telephone rang. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and answered it.
“Allo,” she said in her best French accent, made more nasal from crying.
“You sound just like a native,” her mother said.
“Hi, Mom,” Lydie said, thinking, as she often did when she heard her mother’s voice, that it conjured exactly the speaker’s face in a way voices seldom did. Its low, gravelly hint of Ireland was at once promising and mysterious, and it went along with Julia Fallon’s smile, the way she would duck her head and seem to be smiling up at you. As if she had a secret.
“How are you? How’s Paris? Are the roses in bloom?”
“The roses are beautiful,” Lydie said, still sniffling, glad for the opening to talk about something simple. “Last week I walked through the Bagatelle, which is a little garden in the Bois de Boulogne. Sort of a secret garden …” At that second, Lydie had the solution: antique linens draped on rosebushes in the Bagatelle. At dawn, with the mists rising. “There were roses of every color—red, bright pink, yellow. Yellow so pale it’s nearly white.”
“I don’t know why, but when I think of Paris, I think of roses,” Julia said. “Our roses are beautiful right now.”
“I bet,” Lydie said. She envisioned the walled garden behind her parents’ ground-floor apartment. She doubted there was another like it in Manhattan: sun shone into the garden all afternoon long. This was the lucky result of the block of buildings just west, none over four stories high, having been granted landmark status. No high-rise would ever replace them, and sunlight came over their rooftops into the Fallons’ garden.
“I miss you, honey,” Julia said.
“I miss you too.” There was silence on the line. “How are you doing?” Lydie asked after a while.
“Oh, I get along. I had lunch with Aunt Carrie the other day. She sends