May 2015
Inside the Gramercy Park house, the replica of the house she’d just left in Paris, a similarity Estella had always explained away as the folly of relatives long past, Fabienne held out the birth certificate to her grandmother.
“Where did you get that?” Estella asked.
“In Dad’s desk,” Fabienne replied.
“So he knew.” Mamie shrank back into the pillows, eyes closed, as if Fabienne had somehow diminished her. “All this time.”
“Knew what? I don’t understand why your name and Grandpa’s name aren’t on Dad’s birth certificate.”
Her grandmother didn’t reply.
Fabienne’s breath caught as she saw the evidence everywhere of, not just old age, but a body at the end of its time, a body not meant to last for so long, a mind that Fabienne had thought indefatigable, worn out by the loss of her husband, the loss of her son, the loss of her friends, clinging on to life for who knew what purpose?
“I don’t want you to die,” Fabienne said suddenly, picking up Mamie’s hand and holding it to her lips. “You’re too precious to lose.”
“It’s my time,” Estella said. “I can feel it coming for me. I keep trying to ward it off but I know it’s a battle I won’t win. I want to last long enough, you see,” her grandmother opened her eyes and fixed them on Fabienne, “to convince you to take over the company. It wouldn’t suit anyone but you.”
“Oh Mamie,” Fabienne said. “There are so many better qualified people than me. People who wouldn’t make a mess of it.”
“Everyone messes up at least once. I did, when I first started. It was my biggest learning experience.”
“You never told me about that,” Fabienne said.
“Too many stories. Never enough time.” Estella smiled fondly at Fabienne.
“Like this story.” Fabienne pointed to the piece of paper.
“Like that one.” Her grandmother’s eyes closed again, and the silence felt as heavy as velvet, weighing them down, drawing them beneath its thick weave. “I will tell you that story, I promise. I need to work out how to tell it though.” Her grandmother looked up at Fabienne abruptly. “I want to tell it right. To do justice to Lena. And to Alex.”
Fabienne watched in horror as her grandmother’s eyes flooded with tears, as her voice cracked on the name Alex, as a look so stark and sad passed over her face, a shadow of whatever had happened in the past suddenly finding form. “You don’t have to…” she started to say, frightened, knowing that if she’d understood the pain she’d cause, she’d have thrown the birth certificate away.
“It’s best if you start at the beginning,” Estella interrupted. “In the bookcase over there, on the bottom shelf beside Gone with the Wind, there’s a book. Take it and read it and then we’ll talk some more.”
After that, Fabienne had to return to the airport. She slept on the plane so she’d be at her best for her first day at her new job. She also managed a few hours in bed in her apartment but had to drag herself out when the alarm went off. From there, the day passed in a blur of coffee, of smiling determinedly through fatigue, of trying her best to demonstrate to everyone—especially her boss, Unity, who’d been appointed in the month while Fabienne was finishing up her old job and who had not, therefore, chosen Fabienne herself—that she had an expert knowledge of fashion history.
She left work in the evening and fell into bed as soon as she arrived home. All too soon it was two o’clock in the morning and she sighed as she checked the time on her phone again. She’d been lying awake for an hour, clearly still on New York time. She thought about checking her e-mails but knew that would only wake her up more, then realized she’d fallen asleep before calling Will to thank him for the flowers he’d sent to her at work. She propped her head up on her hand, found his name in her contacts list and before she could talk herself out of it, hit the FaceTime call button.
The screen flickered and there he was, in suit and tie and so gorgeous she wanted to rub her eyes to make sure she wasn’t still asleep and dreaming him into being.
“Hey,” he said, phone in hand, “let me shut the door.”
Fabienne’s heart spun a little at the thought that she was the kind of person with whom a closed-door conversation was best.
“That’s better,” he said, sitting down. “How are you? What time is it there?”
“Two in the morning,” Fabienne admitted. “I wanted to thank you for the flowers but by the time I popped in to see my mother, then waited for it not to be too early to call you, I’d fallen asleep. But now I’m wide awake. So thank you. They’re beautiful.”
“Just like their owner then,” he said softly and this time her heart turned a cartwheel. “Are you blushing?” he teased when she didn’t reply.
“Are you flirting?” she replied, smiling.
“Yep,” he said. “Shall I stop?”
“Hmmm,” she said, pretending to think about it. “No, I quite like it.”
“Besides,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “you can hardly accuse me of flirting when you’re calling me from your bed.”
She laughed. “You’re right. I’m too tired to get up and sit on the couch like a normal person to make a phone call but not tired enough to go to sleep.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “Receiving a call from you in your bed is definitely the best thing that’s happened to me all day.”
Now he really was flirting and Fabienne felt her whole body flush, the same way it had done when he’d kissed her and told her he’d like her to stay one more night in Paris.
“How was your first day?” he asked.
“Great,” she said. “I need to plan next year’s major exhibition so I’ve had to dive straight into things, which is the best way to learn. I’m thinking of doing an exhibition on adornment and decoration. Clothes with flowers, feathers, embroidery, lacework, leather work, sequins, and jewels. The old métiers. Estella started work in an atelier that made the flowers for haute-couture dresses and I’ve always loved the way she kept using flower-work on her clothes.”
“You wouldn’t want to be lent a late-nineteenth-century evening gown worn by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt that has Tiffany diamonds sewn onto it would you?”
“Are you kidding?” gasped Fabienne. “There isn’t really such a thing is there?”
“It’s in the archives here,” he said, smiling at her obvious excitement. “I came across it earlier in the year when I was looking at some of Tiffany’s Gilded Age pieces. I’m sure it would like a trip to Australia. I’ll see what I can do.”
“That would be amazing. But only if you’re sure you don’t mind following up on it for me. You probably have better things to do.”
“I don’t.”
A silence followed, a silence in which Fabienne yearned to reach out into the screen and run her hand across his jaw, to kiss him again. A silence in which she could feel his eyes trace her cheekbones, and then her lips.
“I don’t expect anything,” she blurted. “From you I mean.” Oh God, why had she said that? But now that she’d started, she needed to clarify what she meant. “It’s just that I know we’re two people who met one weekend in Paris. That I live here and you live there. I know you’ll want to get on with your life and I think that’s right. That you should. And I’m not saying this because I don’t like you or anything, I do really like you but I know it’s kind of impossible…” Shut up, Fabienne, she told herself. She definitely should not call people at two in the morning. The filter part of her brain that would ordinarily stop her from embarrassing herself like this was obviously the only part of her that was napping.
“I feel like I should say the same. That I don’t expect anything from you.” Will rubbed his jaw and glanced to the side as he spoke, as if he was embarrassed too. “I don’t want to stop you from doing anything you want to do just because of a weekend with me. But all the same I want to see you again, to find out where this might go. If you do.” He looked back at his phone and Fabienne cursed the physical limitations of FaceTime.
“Don’t you have a line of girls in Manhattan who you could actually see every evening rather than a girl who only comes to New York once a year?”
“I checked to see if it was possible to go to Sydney for a weekend. It’s not.”
“You checked?” Fabienne thought that was probably the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for her. “I have no leave owing to me because I’ve just started this job,” she said.
“And I’ve been taking long weekends every month to escort Liss around the world so I haven’t got any leave either.”
“So it really would be once or twice a year.”
“And phone calls in between.”
“Is it enough?”
“No. But I’d rather have that than nothing.”
“Will,” Fabienne said softly. You are the nicest man I’ve ever met, she wanted to say. And what if he really was? What if she said no to him now, told him he should forget about her and she looked back at this moment later with the clear sight of experience and saw that this had been love and she’d been too polite to recognize it? “If you were here right now I’d kiss you,” she ventured.
“If I was there right now I’d like to do more than kiss you.”
Fabienne laughed. “You’re flirting again. Which means I should go.”
He smiled ruefully. “You’re probably right. Sleep tight. And sweet dreams.”
“They will be,” Fabienne said. And they were.
The next day at work, Fabienne found an e-mail from Will when she arrived.
Dear Fabienne, it said. I am pleased to confirm that, should you require a Poiret Gilded Age gown decorated with Tiffany diamonds for your forthcoming exhibition, Tiffany & Co. would be delighted to lend it to you. In order to make the arrangements, please contact our archivist, Tania Fowler, who has been copied into this e-mail. Regards, Will
Immediately after was another e-mail: I really wanted to say it was good to talk to you and that we should make a habit of it. I’ll call you tonight. Will x
Fabienne beamed, too much obviously, because one of her researchers, a young woman named Charlotte, who had a straight fringe, a sharp-cut bob, and intelligent glasses raised an eyebrow at her as she came into the room. “Someone looks happy,” she said.
“I am,” Fabienne said. “I’ve just secured us the loan of the only gown in the world that was made in a collaboration between Poiret and Tiffany and has real Tiffany diamonds on it. It’ll be a fabulous centerpiece for our exhibition.”
“That is a coup. How did you manage that?”
“I met the Tiffany Head of Design while I was in New York. He offered me the dress.”
“Is he as gorgeous as everyone says he is? I saw a profile of him in Vogue a few months ago and almost resorted to being a teenager and pinning his picture on my bedroom wall.”
Fabienne cursed her fair skin, which showed every blush. “I didn’t really notice. I was talking to him about work,” she lied.
Charlotte laughed. “Of course you were! I can tell by how red your cheeks are that you noticed nothing about him besides his professional qualifications.”
Fabienne smiled. “Isn’t it time for our meeting?” she asked. “Get everyone in here. We’ve got an exhibition to plan.”
“Yes ma’am,” Charlotte said teasingly. “And I promise not to ask you any more about it in front of everyone.”
“Thank you.”
The meeting went smoothly. Lots of ideas for the exhibition were put forward, the team went away with phone calls to make, and Fabienne and Charlotte spent the afternoon in the archives looking through some of the pieces they thought would work, imagining how they might fit together as an exhibition.
Later, when she returned to her apartment in Balmoral, which she’d rented in a hurry after she moved out of the place she’d shared with Jasper—but which she fortunately loved—she knew she had to make herself stay awake. Otherwise she’d fall straight to sleep and find herself staring at the ceiling at two in the morning again. So she made herself a coffee and took out the book her grandmother had asked her to read. Its cover was worn with age, the binding splintery, the cardboard swollen, the pages as fragile as a 200-year-old bridal veil. It bore the words: The Memoirs of Evelyn Nesbit: The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing.
Fabienne turned to the first page.
My name is Evelyn Nesbit and more words have been written about me than the Queen of England, such is my notoriety. You think you know me: the girl in the newspaper, the girl whose husband murdered her lover in plain sight at Madison Square Garden, the girl whose virtue was taken from her on the infamous red velvet swing. But you don’t know me, not really. This is who I am.
Evelyn Nesbit was, without question, an ambitious girl. Why shouldn’t she be? She had the kind of looks that would unroll the socks from any man’s legs.
I discovered that when I was just twelve years old and my mother sent me to collect the unpaid rents from the men who took rooms in our boardinghouse. The men would invite me in, ask me to wait while they searched their wallets, and command me to come and take the money from their hands. They all thought they were so clever, toying with a twelve-year-old girl gifted with a face and figure that were too much for anyone to handle.
The artists soon discovered this too as I sat for them for hours and earned one whole dollar for doing nothing more than posing in a chair and having my image preserved in oil or watercolor or charcoal. Of course they soon wanted to know what I looked like unclothed and, as we needed the money, I acquiesced. As much as my mother denied it, the results are there for all to see in Church’s and Beckwith’s portraits of me.
Then there was modeling—is there a product that I haven’t lent my face to? Toothpaste. Cold cream. Even becoming a Gibson Girl was nothing, a way to earn money, a way to grift some more, a way to keep Mama in the manner to which she wanted to be accustomed.
It wasn’t until the theater called that things began to happen. Although I suppose many of you would think I was so corrupted by then that what came after could only be called my just deserts. But I was still an innocent then. Until John. And Stanford. And Harry.
Fabienne looked up from the page more confused than ever. Who was Evelyn Nesbit and what the hell did she have to do with anything? She switched on her iPad and typed the name into Google, where she found a story of, as Evelyn’s memoir suggested, murder, rape, abuse, lunacy—a gothic story that had more in common with a penny dreadful than the questions she had asked of her grandmother. Then she typed in the name Lena Thaw and found only the briefest of mentions in Harry Thaw’s Wikipedia entry.
“Excellent,” Fabienne muttered as she read. “The person named on my father’s birth certificate was the ward of a lunatic murderer.”
Then she tried Alex Montrose. Nothing besides the same description she’d read at the exhibition, which she read properly now, having been too stunned at the time to finish it properly. She gleaned only that Alex Montrose had originally worked for MI6 but had become a liaison between that division and MI9 when the former began to feel that the latter’s activities might encroach on its remit. He’d worked mainly with the escape lines set up across France to spirit Allied forces, especially escaped prisoners of war and airmen who’d crash landed, back to England to reinforce the numbers of the undermanned RAF and army. He’d ensured that the escape lines were staffed with loyal helpers, organized money and supplies for all the passeurs and couriers on the lines, interviewed those who successfully got away and gathered intelligence information from them.
Fabienne’s fingers twitched over the keyboard. Lena Thaw, she typed, and Alex Montrose. Nothing. Then: Estella Bissette and Alex Montrose. Almost nothing. Just a blurred picture at an American Fashion Critics’ Awards night in 1943 showing them standing in a circle of people. That they’d chatted at a party gave her no good reason why his name should be on her father’s birth certificate.
So she rang her mother, despite being almost certain she’d be no help. Her mother lived in a world peopled by her patients, not her family, even though she was seventy and could have given up working a long time ago. Fabienne had been a terrible accident; her parents had decided never to have children because they needed only one another. Her father had long since forgiven Fabienne for her sudden appearance into the world but Fabienne wasn’t sure her mother ever had.
It took some time for the receptionist to locate her mother. Once she was on the line, Fabienne casually mentioned that she’d found some papers when she’d packed up her father’s things, his birth certificate among them.
Her mother didn’t react. She just said, tiredly, “Keep them if you want.”
“Do you want them?” Fabienne asked.
“Your father is in my heart. I don’t need papers to remember him by.”
Which implied that Fabienne shouldn’t either. In the great battle of who Xander loved more, Fabienne’s mother needed always to win. Fabienne was usually happy to let her. “How are you?” Fabienne asked.
“As good as I’ll ever be without your father around. Some days I think I should just take enough morphine to finish me off.”
“Don’t say that,” Fabienne said sharply. “I’ll come and see you tomorrow after work.”
“Not tomorrow. You look too much like him. It hurts to see you.”
Fabienne hung up the phone.
Was that really love, she wondered, not for the first time? The wish only to die when the other did because living became unbearable? Her grandmother had soldiered on for seventeen years after Fabienne’s grandfather died. Did that mean she didn’t love him? Or that she’d found a way to survive without him?
Fabienne sighed. So many questions. More riddles than answers. When she spoke to her grandmother on the weekend, she’d ask for more of the story.
Restless, she stood up and tried to tuck the book onto her shelf. There wasn’t room. She pulled out the nearest stack of books and realized they were her old sketchpads, things she hadn’t looked at for so long.
She sat on the floor, back leaning against the wall, and opened the cover of the first one, cringing when she saw the crude sketch of a dress marked out in pencil, blemished by the heavy-handed mark of an eraser. On the next page was a sketch she’d watercolored like Estella had taught her, more detailed, adequate, she supposed, but lacking any true flair. It was followed by drawings of figures with legs too short and faces too small, the unequal proportions ruining any dress she’d attempted to place on them. Once she’d finished criticizing every sketch in the first book, she opened the second, where the bodies were at last in proportion and she’d done away with heads as being irrelevant to the clothes anyhow. And then the third, where she was surprised by her own evolution as a sketcher, able to see how much she’d changed her ideas, her style, and even her ability, especially by the fourth book. One or two she even liked.
She jumped when her phone rang and snatched it up when she saw Will’s name on the screen. “Hi there,” she said, as the same uninhibited smile spread across her face the way it did every time she even thought of him.
“Hi there yourself,” he said, smiling back.
“Where are you today?” she asked, noting the background wasn’t the same as yesterday.
“Running late for work,” he said. “I’m still at home even though it’s already eight in the morning. Liss had a rough night and I was up with her so I overslept.”
“Is she all right?”
The smile disappeared. “She’s asleep now. Which is good.”
“I didn’t realize you lived with her.”
“She’s always had our parents’ apartment. I have a place down in SoHo but I moved back in here this year to keep an eye on her.”
When Melissa was told she was terminal. Fabienne heard the subtext and wished she could reach out and coax a gentle smile back onto his face, tell him that everything would be all right. But it wouldn’t be. Her mother’s work meant that she knew exactly what would happen to Melissa. That it would be painful and torturous for both the Ogilvies.
“The doctor told her yesterday that the tumor in her brain has grown.” That it’s near the end. Again Fabienne heard the words he couldn’t say.
“Please give her my love,” Fabienne said. “I have nothing else of any use, although that’s probably useless too.”
“She said you’d e-mailed her. It made her happy. So thank you. Anything that makes her happy is great.” His hand rubbed his jaw in a gesture she was beginning to see was characteristic. “I’m being maudlin so let’s talk about something else. What’s all that stuff?” he asked, pointing at the books on Fabienne’s lap.
“My old sketchbooks,” she said, blushing a little at being caught in the past. “I haven’t looked at them in years. They’re as bad as I remember them,” she said, smiling a little, wanting to mock her futile introspection.
“You should see my early sketchbooks. Full of garbage. But I always found that the only way to unearth the good stuff was to get all the garbage out first. I bet they’re better than you think they are.”
“Maybe,” Fabienne shrugged, eager to shift the conversation. “Will you still take Melissa away at the end of the month?”
“If I book it, then there’s hope,” he said simply. “We’re going to Hawaii. She needs sun and fresh air.”
“Hawaii,” Fabienne breathed. “That sounds great. I’ve never been.”
“Melissa caught me checking out how long it takes to fly from Sydney to Hawaii,” he said casually. “Apparently it’s about nine hours. Doable for a weekend if you just take a day off.”
“Are you asking me to come?” Fabienne asked incredulously.
“I am.” He stood up and talked quickly as he paced. “I’ll let you know where Liss and I are staying and you can stay at the same hotel if you want to but if you think you’d like some space, you don’t have to. I always get Liss one of the best rooms because, you know, she might as well take the luxuries while she can and I just make sure I’m nearby on the same floor in case she needs me. But you can be anywhere you like; it’s totally up to you.”
Fabienne laughed. It was the first time she’d ever seen him flustered and God he was gorgeous. “I wonder if Hawaii would be more fun if I shared a room with someone?” she mused. “Since I haven’t been there before, it might be nice to have someone very close by to show me around.” She stopped speaking because he’d stopped walking and the way he was looking at her made her flush again, a flush that spread from the ache in her stomach, right through to her fingertips.
“Are you serious?” he asked quietly.
She nodded. “If you want to.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve dreamed of you every night since Paris. Sharing a room with you in Hawaii would be…” He flashed a grin like the one that had been on her own face when she proposed the idea. “Something I can’t wait for.”
She suppressed an overwhelming urge to squeal. “It’s only a month away. I’m sure it’ll fly by.”
“God I hope it does,” he said.