Immediately after that, Estella fled, pausing only long enough to say to Alex, “I’m going back to the house. For once in your life, please don’t follow me.” She didn’t wait for him to reply, just pushed her way through the cheering club patrons, flinging a hasty good-bye to Huette as she passed. She didn’t slow her pace until she was several blocks from the club.
Why was she imagining kissing a man who was dating a woman who could well be her sister? It was madness, stupidity, the temptations of a Paris night in a jazz club, seduced by the saxophones, working feverishly on her already unsettled mind.
She’d go to her mother’s. She didn’t care what Alex had said about waiting. She’d collect her things from the Rue de Sévigné and be gone before he returned. It would be impossible to even look at him now without betraying everything she’d felt in the moment when he kissed her hand.
She walked on slowly, couldn’t make her legs pick up pace, could only replay the way Alex’s face had looked as he’d sung, could hardly believe how much it had affected her. Could feel the sensation of his lips blazing on the back of her hand.
Eventually she opened the door of the Rue de Sévigné house and jumped, hand on her heart, when she heard Lena’s voice call out. “Alex?”
“No, it’s me,” Estella said.
Lena stood at the top of the stairs, her face troubled, and Estella wanted to tear off her hand. She might not have betrayed Lena in anything she’d done but, in every one of her feelings, she’d betrayed Lena far more deeply than if Alex had kissed her on the lips. She knew that meant it was time to have an honest conversation; she owed Lena at least that much.
She sat down on the stairs, looking up at Lena. “I’ve been holding on to the security of not knowing how we’re related,” Estella said. “Thinking it’s better to be ignorant than face the hurt that knowledge will bring.”
“You’d never have taken the apple if it had been offered to you?” Lena asked softly.
“That’s just it. I probably would have.” Estella studied Lena, this woman who was so much like her physically, but so unlike her in the way she didn’t seem to know how to smile. As if that had been stolen from her a long time ago. “I’m going to see my mother. Before I do, I hoped you might tell me everything about how you came to be with Harry.”
“Come with me,” Lena said.
She stood and followed Lena up the stairs, to the end of the hall and to another hidden flight of stairs that Estella had never noticed, stairs which led past what must once have been the servants’ quarters and out onto the roof.
When Estella’s head emerged into the Paris night, she gasped. “How did you find this?”
“There’s a staircase like it in my house. So I assumed there’d be one here. How was your night?” Lena asked as she sat down on the roof.
Estella sat down beside her and realized Lena had a shoebox under her arm. It was labeled with the name of the shop from which her mother used to buy all her shoes. Estella shivered at the thought of what might be inside. “I went to a jazz club,” Estella said carefully.
“Did Alex go with you?”
“He did,” Estella said.
“Has he told you about his mother? And father?”
“A little.”
“I’m glad.”
Why? Estella wondered. Instead she pointed at the box. “What’s in there?”
“I found it pushed under the piano,” Lena said. She passed it to Estella.
“You didn’t open it?”
“I wanted to do it with you.”
“Thank you,” Estella whispered, catching Lena’s eyes with hers. Lena let her hold her gaze, and gave her a smile in return.
Then Estella placed the box between them and opened it. On top was a dress, the first one Estella had ever made for herself, the stitches uneven, the buttons loose, the fabric worn. Estella hadn’t cared about any of its imperfections and her mother had let her wear it everywhere, even through winter, simply wrapping her daughter up in tights underneath and coats over the top so she’d stay warm, never once telling her to take it off.
As she held the dress, a memory flashed: Estella and her mother walking through the Marais, stopping outside this house. The look on her mother’s face was of such despair—not that Estella had been able to name it at the time, she’d simply known that sad was not an adequate way to describe what her mother was feeling—that Estella had wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist.
Her mother had wept one loud sob and then, somehow, stilled herself, hidden away the agony and picked up her daughter, even though she was probably too big to be carried. “I just hurt my heart, that’s all,” Maman had said.
Estella now knew what she meant. Sitting here beside a woman who was most likely her sister, with a box of secrets and a scrap of dress in her hand, Estella’s heart was hurting too.
She put her hand back into the box and withdrew a rolled canvas, a portrait of two people, a man and a woman. They were looking at one another in a way that suggested they were deeply in love. Estella frowned as she studied the portrait; she recognized the room the couple were arranged in. A window shaped like that in a church, a piano to one side, a view beyond of buildings that Estella had seen through the same window frame, sitting at that piano.
“They’re in this house,” she said slowly. “Who are they?”
“It’s Evelyn Nesbit. And John Barrymore—you might have seen him in one of his movies. He was her lover before Stanford White and Harry.”
Estella turned the canvas over. Written on the back in her mother’s perfect handwriting were the words: Mes parents, 1902.
“Evelyn Nesbit and John Barrymore were my mother’s parents?” Estella said slowly. “That’s why Evelyn sold my mother the house for one franc?”
“And why your mother was brought up in a nunnery. Evelyn wasn’t married. It’s well known she had at least one abortion when she was with John and that she came to Paris ostensibly to recover. She must have decided to give birth though, one time, and your mother was the result.”
My God. It was almost too much to comprehend. But there was more in the box.
This time, Estella pulled out a typewritten manuscript page and a pencil drawing which caught her full attention. It was done in her mother’s hand. Maman had often sketched too, always in pencil, and this drawing was of two babies asleep. Two tiny babies, newborn.
“So there were two babies,” Estella said.
“Do you know who drew it?” Lena asked quietly.
“My mother did,” Estella said. “We are twins then.”
“I never imagined, ever, that I would have a sister,” Lena said so softly Estella almost didn’t hear her.
“You don’t have to call me your sister if you’d rather not,” Estella said hastily. “You can just go on as before, as if I didn’t exist.”
“Why would I do that?” Lena asked.
“Because…” Estella’s voice trailed off. It was some kind of strange gift. In that instant, she felt a new and precious bond. That of a sister. The sister she’d always craved. She put her hand over her mouth, knowing a sob just like the one she’d heard from her mother that day on the Rue de Sévigné was about to escape her and there was nothing she could do to hold it back.
“I know I’m probably a disappointment as a sister,” Lena said and Estella watched two lonely tears drip from the corners of Lena’s eyes.
Estella gave a half-laugh, half-cry. “Well,” she said, “having never had a sister to compare you to, you can’t possibly be a disappointment.”
Lena gave a shaky laugh. “But none of it tells us who our father is.”
“And it doesn’t explain how you came to be with Harry. Even if Evelyn gave birth to my mother, and Evelyn was once married to Harry, how did it come to pass that my mother—who wouldn’t have known Harry at all—left you with him?” It was the biggest and most terrible of all the questions. Because now that Estella had met Harry, she couldn’t imagine anyone leaving a child with him.
“Technically she left me with his mother. I was always told I was the result of a relative getting herself into trouble and who Mrs. Thaw took pity on. But I’ve never known Mrs. Thaw to show pity to anyone. She adopted me and when Harry was let out of the asylum she gave me to him to look after; he was younger and therefore more fit to raise a child, apparently.”
Lena took a long, slow breath. She lay back on the blue-black slate roof and stared up at the sky. “It’s amazing to think that there could be something as beautiful as the night sky and that everyone owns it equally, as much as anyone is ever able to own something like that. Harry’s the kind of man who, if there was a way to bottle the night sky and all the stars and the moon, he would.”
Estella waited, knowing Lena had more, so much more, to say.
But instead of speaking, Lena pulled down her dress at the shoulder and turned away from Estella. She pointed to a mark on her skin, a scar. More than a scar.
Estella realized the thick ridges of white skin were letters: HKT. “Harry Kendall Thaw,” she whispered. “He didn’t do that to you, surely not.”
“He branded me when I got my first period,” Lena said matter-of-factly. “To show me that I would always be his.”
Estella wanted to curl into herself, to make herself smaller than the tiniest star in the sky, to lose the ability to hear, to see, to think of that loathsome man who’d come to her fashion show and behaved worse than a madman because a madman could never be so deliberate. “And there was nobody who cared enough about you to make him stop,” she said slowly. “Nobody to help you.”
“No. His mother was as insane as Harry. By then I’d read Evelyn’s memoir and knew how cruel he could be and why I had to let him do what he wanted. At least then I had a certain degree of freedom. If I refused, I’d lose even that. He threw a party for me the night after he branded me, announced that I should come out into the world, and he bought me a dress appropriate for a courtesan and paraded me in front of a roomful of salivating men.”
I don’t want to hear any more, Estella wanted to say. But all she had to do was listen. Lena had been made to do far worse things and here she was, still alive. The least Estella could do was allow Lena to talk because she suspected that nobody besides Alex knew any of this story. “How did you get the house in Gramercy Park? How did you get away from him?”
Out it all came.
The day of my coming out party, Harry opened the door to my room without knocking, as was his way.
“We’re having a celebration tonight,” he said brusquely, his overfed and over-wined bulk corseted tightly by a silk waistcoat, the buttons of which betrayed the strain. “Dress with care.” He deposited a gown on my bed.
“Certainly,” I said, the pain in my shoulder reminding me how much better it was to acquiesce. I sat down at the dressing table, my elegant room and my blight of an uncle reflected in the glass. So much silk: wallpaper, drapes, silk covers on the bed. An excess of gilding: the posts of the bed, the threads of the wallpaper, the Ormolu clock shining like an impertinent sun on the mantel.
I did everything that was required of me, making up my face and putting on the dress, which had a neckline low enough to show off the tops of my breasts. I strolled into the drawing room about half an hour late and drew the eyes of every man in the room. My “uncle”—Harry—smiled behind his glass of red wine and I knew I’d pleased him and that it might, if I was lucky, buy me a few days free time.
Once dinner had finished, Harry stood. “Gentlemen, let us retire for brandy. Ladies, please make yourselves comfortable in the drawing room.”
The ladies rustled off, ready to make veiled and catty remarks about one another. Especially about me.
“Lena,” Harry said. “You will serve us.”
It was what I expected. In a house full of servants it was so much more extravagant to have the thirteen-year-old dependant do the work.
I followed the men into the smoking room and passed the cigars around. When I held out the box to one man, who I recognized from the newspapers as one of the Thaw family’s biggest business rivals, Frank Williams—Harry always liked to keep his enemies close—he barked, “What’s your name?”
“Lena.”
“Lena? Your parents were not traditionalists.”
“My parents are dead.”
Frank shrugged. And with that gesture of absolute unconcern, I knew what I would do, if I could. The fact that Harry hated him only made it more perfect. I clipped the end of Frank’s cigar.
“Speaking of traditions,” Harry said, smiling magnanimously from his chair by the fire, “I have something for you, my dear.”
“Oh, you’ve given me so much, Uncle,” I said, so sweetly I could feel the honey dripping from my tongue. “I don’t need anything more.”
“What about this?” he offered, holding up a silver locket, intricately engraved and with his picture inside.
I was so familiar with his performance as the benevolent uncle who gave his burden of a ward everything she could wish for that I simply inclined my head so he could place the locket around my neck. It was heavy, like a millstone, but I smiled and drew a couple of tears into my eyes, as if I was overcome. Harry nodded.
“Let me have a look at that,” Frank called from his chair.
I obliged, making sure to bend down close to him. I saw his eyes fix on my cleavage and I knew exactly what he wanted, and that the plan I was just beginning to form might even work. “I do love jewelry,” I whispered. “And men who buy it for me.”
He shifted uncomfortably on the chaise, crossing his legs. “Another brandy.”
“Of course.”
I waited on him expertly and, the next day, a locket larger than the one Harry had given me, edged with diamonds, arrived. It was from Frank. And from that moment on, I cultivated him, encouraging his gifts, the more expensive the better. It excited Frank that, no matter what happened in business, he was having the last laugh with Harry’s prized possession. Occasionally, at parties in darkened rooms, I had to pay Frank for the gifts. But it cost him more than it did me. Every now and then, I showed Harry a ring or a brooch which infuriated him, but would lead to Harry buying me a larger piece and presenting it to me at a party in front of Frank.
It only took me six years to gather a collection of jewelry that, when pawned, amounted to a tidy sum. It wasn’t quite enough to buy a house or to buy my freedom though. So I had Frank help me one last time.
I told him about a house in Gramercy Park that Harry always liked to walk past, covetously, looking at it the same way Harry looked at me. If I had this house, I told Frank, then he could visit me wherever and whenever he liked. And how that would annoy dear Harry.
Frank engaged a lawyer to look into it and found out the house belonged to Harry; he’d had it built when he was in the asylum in 1917 after ruining a poor young boy. It was in his mother’s name though, because he couldn’t transact business if he was mad. He’d obviously knocked down the original house and built his own replica of the Paris house. Back then I wondered why he’d never lived in it but I think it was yet another thing he wanted to own for the simple sake of possession. His dearest wish was always to possess Evelyn and, in imitating her house, he must have felt he’d regained some control over her.
Anyway, once Frank found out it was Harry’s house, he was only too eager to steal it out from under Harry’s nose. He gave me the additional money I needed, thinking he would have uninhibited access to me once I was installed there. The lawyer made Mrs. Thaw an anonymous offer, one too good to refuse, and Mrs. Thaw was happy to be rid of such an extravagant folly. As soon as I had the keys, I changed the locks and forbade Frank from ever crossing the threshold. His revenge was to slander me all over town. I didn’t care.
As for Harry, I knew that, when I told him, there was nothing more he could do to me that he hadn’t already done. It was a symbolic victory rather than a real one. But I took great satisfaction in hearing him throw a vase at the wall when I left.
When Lena had finished, Estella didn’t speak. She realized that somewhere during the terrible story, she’d stretched out her hand and taken Lena’s. They both lay staring up at the night sky and Estella knew that Lena’s life had long existed in a night where nothing came after. Just more night, long empty stretches of darkness pressing in.
She gripped Lena’s palm, offering the only kind of solace she could, knowing now why Lena had always been so reticent to talk about her past and about Harry, besides what was on the public record. She wished she could go back to that night in Café Society and speak to Lena with compassion rather than suspicion.
“I’m going to Maman’s apartment now,” Estella said. “I’ll take you to see her tomorrow, if you still want to, after what she tells me. Putting it off isn’t going to stop or change whatever has already happened in the past.”
“No,” murmured Lena. “The past can be a bastard like that.”
Estella turned her head to see that Lena was smiling a little. “How do you do it?” she asked. “How do you keep yourself alive in spite of everything? How do you…fall in love when you’ve never been given love?”
“As loathsome as it sounds, my secret is a life lived in vengeance. I stayed alive because I wanted the satisfaction of seeing Harry’s face when I walked out. Of meeting him again and having him know he lost. And as for love, well, I don’t think I have any answers for you.”
“But you and Alex…”
“Alex is as much of a mess as I am. Two disasters who clung to each other one night long ago. Since then, it’s been convenient for us to be one another’s date at parties when he’s in town; it keeps the wolves away. But that’s all it is.”
“It must be love,” Estella insisted. “He brought you here so we could find out something that might…”
“Make everything better? Like you said, the past can’t be changed.”
“But the future…”
Lena interrupted her again. “We’re in the middle of a city that’s given in to a bully. That’s the way of life. That’s what the future holds.”
No it doesn’t, Estella wanted to protest. Instead she squeezed Lena’s hand. “I hope you’re wrong.”
Lena was silent for so long that Estella thought the conversation, their first moment of true intimacy, was over. But then Lena said so unexpectedly, “Maybe…maybe I am wrong. Maybe this,” she indicated their joined hands, “is what the future holds.”
To turn that little spark of hope, the first Estella had ever seen in Lena, into optimism, into joy, into belief that all human relations were not selfish and violent was suddenly Estella’s most desperate wish. She reached out and hugged her sister. “I love you, Lena.”
Estella knew as she spoke the words that she’d been wrong. How could she have wanted Alex to kiss her, how could she have reveled in the nearness of him, how could she have found pleasure in that moment of sitting beside him? Lena deserved for Estella not to covet the one good thing she’d found; the comfort Alex gave her.
Estella felt Lena’s body shake. She let Lena go, offering a smile, which Lena returned, the tears in her eyes matching Estella’s. We are the same, Estella thought now. We both want this bond forged by blood to become something more, adamantine, lasting beyond forever, adding an unexpected brilliance to our lives.
It was half an hour until curfew. Plenty of time to get to her mother’s house. Indeed, the streets were still busy with prostitutes, and with German soldiers soliciting. Estella felt ill that Paris, her city, was given over to this kind of filthy commerce but she’d never had to survive on only her wits and who knew what she might do in order to stay alive? What Lena had done? She shivered.
As she walked, the warm air on her skin felt almost scalding. All her senses were heightened, raw, and she didn’t know if it was because of the war, because of Alex or because of Lena. Or if it was because she was about to see her mother for the first time in so long.
At the familiar door, Estella rested her palm on the wood, then jumped back as it opened. Monsieur Montpelier, the slithering concierge, flashed his teeth. “Bonsoir,” he muttered and Estella noted that he hadn’t lost weight, that he didn’t look hungry, that somebody was keeping him well fed and watered.
Collaborator. Huette’s accusation, directed at the similarly well-nourished Parisians they’d seen earlier in the night, sprang to Estella’s mind. She shivered. But who would care about anything Monsieur Montpelier might know?
“You are looking for your mother?” he asked with more solicitude than he’d ever shown her before.
Estella nodded.
“Upstairs,” the concierge smiled, pointing. “You should go upstairs.”
“I know the way,” Estella retorted.
She took the stairs to the top floor, pushed the door open and snapped on the light but there was no power. She picked her way through the dark to the room she’d once shared with her mother. The bed was empty.
“Maman?” Estella called softly. No reply came.
Estella frowned. In the kitchen, there was little food. Dust clothed the table in a thin but noticeable layer, the cup on the table was filled with dried-out chicory. She returned to the room she’d once shared with her mother, lay down on the bed and felt the emptiness around her—the absence of her mother’s scent—as she listened to the sound of her city under the boot of the Germans: unfamiliar, joyless, afraid.
Some time later she heard the front door open and she stiffened.
“Estella?” Lena’s voice, followed by Alex’s, calling more loudly, “Estella?”
She heard the sound of the light switch flicked uselessly, heard them moving through the main room. She heard Alex say to Lena, “Stay here.”
After a moment, he stood in the doorway.
“Was she helping you?” Estella’s words came out dully.
“I asked her to stop.” His voice was wooden too. “But she made it very clear that she’d do it anyway, on her own, without British support, which is the most dangerous way. So I let her. I’m sorry.”
Everyone was sorry. What good was sorry? But Estella knew how stubborn her mother was, refusing Monsieur Aumont’s insistence that they not pay back the money they owed him, pushing Estella to go to New York, working from the time she was fifteen to support Estella. If her mother had insisted, there was no way Alex would have been able to stop her.
Lena joined Alex in the doorway, then moved over to sit beside Estella. And Estella knew that she’d come with Alex to find her because she’d refused to be left behind. That she’d wanted to help. That Lena was as stubborn as Estella and their mother.
Estella slipped her hand into Lena’s.
“Your mother was afraid someone was watching her,” Alex said. “Perhaps she’s moved to a safer place. I’ll do everything I can to find out.”
“If she’s been taken by the Germans, what will they do to her?” Estella asked.
“They might take her to a camp…”
Rather than kill her. “Which is better?” she whispered. “A camp or death?”
Alex swore. But he told her the truth. “Death.”
“Then if you find out she’s been taken, that’s what I’ll pray for,” she said.
“We need to go.” He hooked a finger around the blackout curtain and peered out, hackles obviously raised. Then he cursed worse than Estella had ever heard him swear. “Quick,” he ordered. “Down the stairs, before they come in. To the third floor.”
Estella tried to hurry but it was as if grief had set itself in concrete inside her limbs, robbing her of nimbleness. As she stumbled down the stairs, she thought she understood why Alex had said the third floor, not the ground. One of the apartments there had a room that ran across and above the Passage Saint-Paul. They could get out that way.
“In here,” Alex commanded, pushing open the door of the apartment and ushering both her and Lena inside.
Estella could see that it was yet another abandoned home; the old couple who used to live there had probably left for the Free Zone or to stay with other family in Paris to pool their meager resources.
But Alex didn’t take them across the Passage. Instead he opened the window above the Passage. “Out here. Lower yourself down, keep your hands on the sill and then drop. It’s not far enough to hurt you. Here,” he held out his hand to Lena.
“Let Estella go first,” Lena said.
So Estella found herself being bundled through a window unceremoniously, hands gripping the ledge, body hanging. Before she dropped to the ground, she heard running footsteps. A door crash open. An explosion, like a gunshot. Lena crying out. Terror dampened Estella’s palms and she almost slipped. Then a panicked shot of adrenaline gave her the strength to hoist her head up high enough to see what was happening.
Lena lay on the floor. Alex stood in front, shielding her body. The concierge stood in the doorway, smiling toothily. A man in a German uniform had a gun knocked from his hand by Alex. Then Alex ran a knife viciously through the German’s belly. The concierge fled.
Oh God! Estella remembered how insistent the concierge had been that she go upstairs. That Alex had said her mother thought somebody was watching her. The concierge, who’d always hated both Estella and her mother, was plump, most likely on the rewards paid by the Germans for feeding them information about anyone suspected of working against the Nazis.
“Lena,” she tried to say but her mouth was dry from fear and her arms were shaking, unable to hold her head above the sill anymore. Her last glimpse of the room was of Alex picking up Lena, who was bloodied, insensate.
“Move!” he hissed at Estella as he slid through the window, using one arm to maneuver himself, the other arm wrapped around Lena.
Estella’s feet hit the ground, the shock of landing jolting her out of her uncomprehending state.
Alex followed close behind, landing with a thud. “Dammit, dammit, dammit,” he swore, feeling Lena’s neck, leaning in to listen for breath.
Estella stood frozen, unable to move or to speak, unable to care that the concierge might now be telephoning for more Nazis with more guns.
Alex looked at Estella and shook his head.
“No.” Estella’s mouth made the shape of the word but it was soundless, a protest she could not voice.
Alex closed Lena’s eyes. “I’ll take her with us.”
And he did, as best he could, struggling along the Passage Saint-Paul with Lena in his arms; lifeless Lena, her limbs swaying as they moved. But Estella knew, and she knew that he knew, they would move a lot faster without Lena and she also knew that he was bringing Lena for her. She led the way deep into the Passage, knowing the back door to the Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis lay right at the end and she prayed that whoever might be following them wouldn’t know, would think the Passage a dead end, and would search for them out on the street instead.
They made it to the church. For the first time in her life in that sacred space Estella didn’t turn her eyes to the beautiful altar of Mary and her baby with its columns of rufous marble slashed with white, its statuary, its gilded candelabra, the altar that bore the inscription Regina Sine Labe Concepta—Queen conceived without sin. Nor did she turn her mind to the continuation of the phrase: the exhortation to pray for us. Because who was praying for them? For Paris? For her mother? For Lena?
She wanted to scream at Mary, holding her infant child so serenely. The only people left in the world who still believed in the power of the dome above, in the three-storied transept, the grand organ, the Delacroix painting, the clamshells for holy water that Victor Hugo had gifted to the church, were people who still believed in hope, holding on futilely to ridiculous bibelots.
She could hear the noise of scuffle and shouting outside and she turned to Alex at the same time as he turned to her. She read the question in his eyes and she nodded. Gently, so gently it made Estella’s throat constrict and the tears stream from her eyes, almost made her turn away because bearing witness was an agony beyond pain, Alex lay Lena down and crossed himself.
He kissed Lena’s cheek and whispered to her:
“I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there, I did not die.”
His words fired a sob from Estella’s mouth, too loud.
Then she bent down and kissed Lena’s cheek for the first time, weeping. That flare of hope she’d seen in Lena’s eyes as they sat on the rooftop, hands joined, was forever extinguished, put out just as it had begun. Far from making Lena’s life better, far from bringing her answers, far from showing her that love trumped violence, Estella had only proven the exact opposite. The sister she had always wanted, and that she thought perhaps Lena wanted too, was irrevocably lost.
Alex reached out and took her hand. “We have to go.”
She followed him out onto Rue Saint-Antoine, away from Lena, away from any sense of ever again being the person Estella once was.