Of Irish Blood (13 page)

Well, anyway, now I’m in Paris. Safe, I tell myself … safe. If only I can find somewhere to sleep tonight.

“Pas cher,”
the steward said about the hotel, which is good because though the bank on the ship had magically changed the forty dollars I had left after buying a wardrobe from the pushcart on Delancey Street into two hundred francs, which sounds like a fortune, the steward told me that much money will see me through two months at the most. I’ll get that job with Madame Simone, please God, as Granny Honora would say. Don’t start thinking about the family or home. Get yourself to the Jeanne d’Arc.

“Not ‘Joan of Arc,’” Sister Mary Agnes our French teacher would tell us in class. “Jan Dark.” Rapping the syllables at us. “The Maid, La Pucelle, France’s great heroine and a true saint, no matter what some say.” Very annoyed that nearly five hundred years after her birth, Joan had still not been canonized. “Politics,” Sister said. “The English.”

For all her love of things French, Sister Mary Agnes remained Chicago Irish to her core and was convinced of the perfidiousness of Albion. “Jeanne’s enemies are still powerful,” she’d tell us as we wrote a monthly letter to the Pope urging him to hurry up Joan’s cause.

“It took the Church nearly four hundred years to even start the canonization process and now they drag their feet!” Sister Agnes had said, and explained how the devil’s advocate defamed “Jan,” casting doubt on her voices and demeaning her accomplishments. “A warning, girls. The world uses powerful women and casts them aside.” Joan finally beatified two years ago though not a saint yet.

But Sister had cemented the name in my brain.

“Jan Dark,” I say, speaking louder and louder until the poor woman I’d stopped in front of the train station shakes off my hand from her arm. “Joan of Arc,” I try, enunciating the English words, but she hurries away.

I rummage in my pocket for the small piece of paper where I’d written the hotel’s name and wait. Here’s a younger woman, not in such a hurry—good. I stop her.

“Pardon,”
I start, wishing I’d paid more attention to Sister Mary Agnes when she shouted declensions at us. I have a slew of French words rattling around in my brain but putting one word next to the other with plenty of space between seems exactly the wrong way to get the French to understand me. So I rush a phrase at this girl, hoping I hit a word or two right.
“L’hôtel, s’il vous plaît,”
I say, and point to the paper.

She looks, smiles, and takes me by the elbow. She knows, I think. Her family stays at the Jeanne d’Arc when they come in from the country! It’s only steps away.

“Ici,”
she says, pointing to a line of automobiles.
“Taxi.”

“Taxi,”
I repeat. It becomes my most useful French word.

My bags and I fit ourselves in the back of a taxi and go rushing toward what the taxi man calls “Jan Dark Ma-ray,” adding the location of the hotel to her name.

Midafternoon now, not as cold as a November day in Chicago but brisk enough. Splashes of sun hit the grand buildings I crane my neck to see from the taxi windows. Wow. I open the window. A smell of gasoline exhaust in the air. More cars here than in Chicago. Fewer horse-drawn carriages and no stockyard stench. I inhale.

We follow a twist of streets until we reach a square—“Sainte Kat-er-een,” the driver says, which I assume means St. Catherine. He stops at a white building with “Jan’s” name embellished in golden letters on the front.

“Please, Joan, help me,” I pray to the painting in the lobby. She holds up a sword and wears armor—reassuring. Tim McShane might be an ocean away but the memory of his hands squeezing my throat can surprise me at the odd moment. Nice to have an armed woman guarding me.

The desk clerk speaks a kind of English. He’s young—twenty-five at the most—thin, long hair, very thick eyebrows.

“I am Etienne, Stefan.”

He has a single room
“pas cher.”
Five francs. Thirty if I take it for a week. Geeze Louise that’s six dollars! A one-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s only twenty dollars a month!

“Too much,” I say.

He shrugs.

“Try the other hotels. All cost more.”

He looks at my bags and so do I.

The taxi from the station cost five francs. Do I spend more money going from hotel to hotel?

“For the month—one hundred francs,” Stefan says. With breakfast—
petit déjeuner
—not too petite I hope because to get this
“bon prix”
I have to pay in advance. I only have ninety-five francs—nineteen dollars—left.

The room’s small, good. I can see every corner from the bed. No place for Tim to lurk. I touch the beams that hold up the ceiling, running my hands over their pitted surface. Rough-hewn and sagging but they’ve felt the weight of centuries and held.

The bed’s firm, the sheets clean and smooth, with a big fluffy cover on top. A long sleep, I think, as I pull it up around me. But after a few hours I wake to darkness. Why is the ship so still? Then I remember. I’m here. I’ve arrived. Tim can’t get me.

I get up. Push the windows open. St. Catherine’s Square is below me. Quiet. Hours until dawn.

The sky edges from black to gray. I see humps of chimneys stuck here and there on the Paris roofs. So different from the straight up-and-down of Chicago buildings. Centuries jam together here. Maybe the eight years I lost to Tim McShane aren’t as long in Paris as in Chicago. God, I’d love a cup of coffee—
café
. At least I can say that. Seven, Stefan said is when they start serving breakfast. Soon I’ll be one night closer to getting back to myself, whoever that is. The woman looking out at the rooftops of Paris, is she Honora Bridget Kelly? Nora? Nonie? Mademoiselle?

I’m the first one down when the coffee comes from the kitchen.

“Café au lait?”
Stefan is the waiter now.

“Oui, oui,”
I say. A lovely taste both smooth and bitter, a perfect complement to the warm bread that I slather with sweet butter and raspberry jam. Eat enough bread and I’ll get through the day.

An older couple comes carefully into the small breakfast room. He, tall and lean, nods at me. She, shorter and rounder, smiles.

“Bonjour,”
I say. Might as well try.

And they respond, though their
“Bonjour, mademoiselle”
goes up and down the scale in a way that would be considered showing off in Sister Mary Agnes’s class, who I now realize fit French into her own Chicago speech pattern.

A retired teacher and his wife, I decide.

Stefan brings them their coffee and gives me a new pot.
“Un croissant?”
he asks me, and drops a flaky horn-shaped pastry on my plate. So soft I hardly feel my teeth go through it. I eat a second. A clatter of crumbs falls onto the front of my blouse.

Coming from the station I noticed the Paris women were all turned out in muted colors, well-cut jackets and skirts. I wonder if this yellow and red plaid dress with a sailor collar I got on Delancey Street isn’t a bit loud. Ah well, I’m here to learn from them.

After breakfast I show Stefan the address of Dolly’s seamstress, 374 rue de Rivoli.

He takes out a map.

“We are here,” he says. “Le Marais—it means the marsh. This
quartier
was built on swampy ground.”

“Like Chicago,” I say.

He starts telling me the history of the neighborhood. The Knights Templar were the first to move in when they came back from the Holy Land in twelve something.

“The Crusades,” I say. Lots about the Crusades at St. Xav’s.

Stefan is going on about some king who built a palace somewhere called the place des Vosges, which is around the corner though I don’t find it for days. But that’s Paris for you. Hides its treasures down pokey streets nobody in Chicago would even want to live on.

Stefan’s drawing lines on the map now.
“Rue de Rivoli, à droite.”

A street to love the rue de Rivoli! If it doesn’t go there, neither will I. I see that I can walk the whole Right Bank then over one of the bridges over the Seine and be in la Rive Gauche. Rue de Rivoli doesn’t wiggle or squiggle or change its name—a reliable rue. This first morning it leads me through my own
quartier
past men with long beards and round black hats. Stefan says Le Marais is a Jewish neighborhood, and the Hebrew lettering on some of the stores reminds me of Maxwell Street.

I stop to gawk at the Hôtel de Ville—City Hall from what I can figure out. This close to Christmas our City Hall would have been decorated with pine boughs and tinsel. Not an ornament in sight here. But imagine setting up as mayor in that place! Only for my having seen the White City at the World’s Fair could I take in the scope and scale of the building. Stone recesses are full of statues. And this is a place for city business? What will the churches look like?

The rue de Rivoli and I hit what first seems a massive wall that goes on for blocks and blocks. I pause under the arches that cover the sidewalk. A man walking behind collides with me. A middle-aged fellow, somberly dressed.

I smile, trying to say, “Sorry, all my fault,” in French, then I point.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est ça?
” I ask.

He almost drops the rolled umbrella he carries.

He answers in English, “That, madame, is the Palais du Louvre, the most important museum in the world,” he says, using the tip of his umbrella to underline each word.

I apologize for my ignorance and say, “The
Mona Lisa
,” but he’s on his way.

Of course, Sister Mary Agnes had gone on and on about the Louvre but she hadn’t told us the place sprawled in all directions.

I continue on the rue de Rivoli, and there waiting for me all golden and shining against the gray sky—Jeanne d’Arc herself, mounted on a powerful-looking horse. Her face is young but resolute. She looks straight at me holding high a banner. Unfurled, no matter how strong the wind. A saint, title or no title. And I stand up straighter. You and me, Joan. You’ll help me, I know.

Rue de Rivoli delivers me to the place de la Concorde. I look up at the obelisk Sister Mary Agnes said Napoleon stole from the Egyptians. My Paris life almost ends as I try to cross four lanes of traffic. Automobiles, horse-drawn hacks, and carriages all come at me. Madness. I stand paralyzed until I see an old woman plunge right into the middle of it all. I follow her across, throw a few
“Merci
s
”
in her direction. Then scatter more “Thank you”s into the air.

Number 374 rue de Rivoli doesn’t have a grand façade or a big window displaying the latest fashions as do some of the other shops I passed along rue Saint-Honoré, which I guess is Paris’s State Street. A small card with “Madame Simone, Couturier, 1er Etage” written in flowing handwriting fits into a slot under a brass hand that rests on the black lacquer door. The knocker makes a satisfying bang when I lift it then let it go.

A young girl in a black dress opens the door.

“Vite, vite,”
she says, and practically pulls me into a dark hallway and up a set of winding stairs because the first floor here is actually the second. Strange. The large room we enter is very like my studio at Montgomery Ward: counters covered with fabrics, dress dummies, a mirrored wall, and standing in the center of it on a round platform the client—plumpish, maybe sixty, being fitted by a woman who kneels at her feet with pins in her mouth. Her blond hair’s pulled into a bun. In her fifties I’d say. She wears a black dress with a high gathered waist and gored skirt. No sailor collars here or red plaid either.

“Madame Simone,” the girl says to her.
“Ici. La femme de traducteur.”

“Bon,” Madame Simone says, and tosses a spate of French through the pins at me.

“Please,” I say in English, then try to tell her in French that I can’t understand when she speaks so quickly.

“Too
vite,
” I say.
“Lentment,
slowly,
s’il vous plaît.”

She looks at me and starts muttering in French.

“Please, madame,” I say. “Here.”

I give her Dolly’s letter, but before she can open it the client says, “An American! Oh, thank God! Can you tell this woman she’s got to finish this dress today! We’re going to dinner at Maxim’s tonight and I must wear it.”

“I’ll try,” I say. “My French is not great.”

“But aren’t you the translator? The concierge at the Ritz said he’d send over someone who spoke English and French,” she says.

“Well, I do speak English very well,” I say.

Madame Simone stares at us trying to will herself into comprehension. I sympathize with her. All right, here goes …

“Pardon, madame,” I say.
“Cette femme.”
I point at the client.
“Vouloir le
gown.
”
I touch the skirt which poufs out impressively and is covered with tiny crystals.
“Pour cette nuit. Maintenant.”
Then I throw in,
“Très nécessaire.”

Madame Simone looks puzzled.

“What’s wrong?” the client says. “I understand every word you say.”

“But you don’t speak French,” I say.

I try again, pretend I am putting on the dress, then mime sitting down at table and eating.
“Maintenant,”
I say.

“N’est ce pas un restaurant, mademoiselle,”
the maid says to me.

“Non, non. La femme va à Maxim’s.”
And I twirl around as if delighted with my new gown. “
Ce soir.
Tonight.”

And now Madame Simone nods. She rubs her thumb and two fingers together in a gesture that needs no translating.

“Combien?”
I say.

She holds up ten fingers, five times.

“You have to pay her an extra fifty francs,” I say to the American woman. So much. The client will never …

“Fine,” she says.

“D’accord,”
I say to Madame.

And Madame Simone smiles.

The woman’s name is Mary Zander and she wants to see Paris. Will I be her guide while Madame Simone finishes her gown?