The Ambassador's Daughter (9 page)

I almost told Papa that night that it was my fault. “Quite a shock,” he’d remarked. “Clemenceau will be fine, even joked as they were taking him to the hospital about the madman’s poor marksmanship. But it is a sobering reminder to us all that even while we are here working toward the new world, there are those who would derail it.” His brow furrowed.

“What is it? Is there something more?”

“Not at all.”

“You don’t need to shield me. I’m not a child.”

He smiled. “No, of course not. I never like to trouble you and give pause to your beautiful smile, even for a moment. It’s just that this may cause trouble for me. Cottin—the would-be assassin—was upset about French opposition to the Pan-Slavic state. We had been trying to keep it a secret so the media controversy would not keep us from getting the matter done. The assassination attempt, the timing of it, gives rise to suspicions that someone had leaked information about the vote.”

“But surely no one could think that you had a role.”

Papa, the only German detailed to the conference, not to mention a Jew, feared himself a likely scapegoat. I watched his face, wondering if he suspected me, or was perhaps even hinting. But he could not imagine that I would have betrayed him in such a fashion. “I appreciate your outrage on my behalf. It will be fine.”

Though the accusations had never become overt, there had been a quiet distancing between Papa and some of the other conference advisors that made our sojourn to Versailles almost a relief.

Studying Papa now, my guilt rises anew. Only I know the truth—that it was my careless remark, overheard at the bar, which gave Cottin the information to act. I have never been good at keeping secrets from Papa and I have struggled for months not to blurt out what I had done, to seek his forgiveness. But he has enough to deal with right now and I won’t strain his health further.

Down on the street, the morning air is warming and a bit stale with gutter stench. Across the road the hulking Versailles palace sits with its endless fountains and gardens, swallowing the tiny town below.

I walk around the side of the apartment building to the garden I planted. When we’d arrived, the dirt patch had been overrun by weeds. “I could tend to it,” I suggested. “Make the place come back to life a little.”

“A fine idea,” Papa said quickly. Gardening, if done properly without too much strain, is an acceptable avocation for women. “Though we’re hardly likely to be here long enough to see things grow.”

“Then it will be here for others,” I replied stubbornly. I’d planted flowers, tulips and other perennials that I hoped would blossom for years even after we were gone, something beautiful to leave behind. One of the plants has fallen, I notice. I dig my hands deep into the soil, savoring the buried warmth. Then I stand too quickly, my hands creating a smear of dirt across my dress.

I make my way down the cobblestone lane in the opposite direction from the crowds at the hotel, in case Papa is watching out the window. I head toward the market, skirting the edge of the park that sits at the end of the street. I have come to know the quiet rhythm of this part of the town through my days here—the old woman who sits at the corner with her poodle as if waiting for a bus that will not come, the two men who appear every morning at seven to slip schnapps into their coffees and sit wordlessly for twenty minutes before getting up and going in opposite directions. Are they brothers, cousins, friends? Was their routine always like this or was it disrupted during the war?

Gazing down the path into the park, I am reminded of Krysia. I’ve not seen her since we came out here. Versailles is at least twenty-five kilometers away from Paris, too far for an impromptu excursion into the city.

Stopping short of the market, where most of the stalls are indeed closed, I double back around the block to the hotel. The crowd has thickened now, a low murmur of expectancy crackling through the onlookers. Moments later, three buses appear on the road, old coaches belching smoke and making such noise that it seems questionable whether they will make the last ten meters of the trip. A truck rides ahead of the buses. It lurches to a stop then dumps a bunch of boxes in the hotel courtyard as unceremoniously as though they are garbage. Studying closer, I can see that it is luggage, once-fine suitcases now covered with dust and grime.

The bus doors open and the German delegation begins to emerge. They are bureaucrats, stooped older men, thin and paunched, bald and bearded, indistinguishable from the other nations’ delegates, but for their low shoulders and downcast eyes. They shuffle forward to face the indignity of sorting through the luggage, each to find and carry his own.

A boy lets forth a jeer. I brace myself for the rest of the onlookers to join him. Instead, the crowd is silent, their eyes boring into the Germans with pure hatred. Insults would have almost been better. This is why Papa sits at his desk, why he cannot bear to watch. This is not peace or even armistice, but rather the thinnest of truces, scarcely concealing the hatred of the war still bubbling beneath the surface.

A man steps from the last coach behind the others. He is younger, I can tell, even beneath the cloak of his naval coat and hat. Papa had mentioned someone military. My first impression is of a hawk. Steely blue eyes take in the crowd. I’m reminded of the soldiers I saw so often on the Paris streets. Even out of uniform I can spot it—the anxiousness, searching the corners for a cellar or other hiding place, as though the air before him might at any moment explode with grenades and mustard gas.

He starts forward, walking with his shoulders squared, seeming to clear the path ahead of him as he goes. Then his head lifts slightly and his eyes flick in my direction and I can swear, though I am one in a crowd of hundreds, he is looking directly at me.

My breath catches. I step back and, as I do, my scarf drops. Suddenly the German breaks from the procession. He steps toward the crowd, which parts. Then he bends down and picks up my scarf and holds it out to me.

I recoil. There is something chilling about him, militaristic and terrifying. Stefan is a soldier, too, I remind myself. But that is different—Stefan is an ordinary man, called into war by circumstances and patriotism. This man is a high-ranking officer, a soldier by nature. I look down, suddenly conscious of the garden dirt on the sleeve of my everyday blouse.

The people around me glare with accusing eyes as if my receipt of this act of kindness somehow makes me complicit. I tilt my head upward but the soldier does not meet my eyes. Should I thank him in German or French? I take the scarf but before I can say anything, the man has rejoined the procession and is gone.

* * *

I can hear the party before I can see it, laugher spilling forth down the streets of Neuilly-sur-Seine. We turn the corner and a house in the middle of the street stands as a beacon, light beaming from within. It is not the largest on the block of this affluent Parisian neighborhood, but it gives the impression of being the most grand—flower boxes overflow with blooms too early in the season to be native and great ribbons of silk batting adorn the balconies, as though Armistice Day was last week and not months ago.

I stop midstreet, drawing my flimsy shawl against the evening, which is pleasant but chilly enough to remind me that it is not summer yet. Normally I would have dreaded such an affair. But after weeks locked away in dreary Versailles, I somehow welcome the return to the city and its bustle, even with Tante Celia as my host. There is no room in Versailles for Celia, a woman without official status, so she has remained behind in Paris. Papa is lonely for her, I can tell, by his quieter than usual demeanor, the excuses he has found to stay over in the city after dinners.

Celia touches my elbow as we climb the stairs. “You’ve heard of Elsa Maxwell,
n’est-ce pas?
” She jumps indiscriminately between German and French.

“Of course.” I reply in German, not bothering to lower my voice. It’s not as if anybody will be fooled into believing we are someone else. Elsa Maxwell is ubiquitous. A reporter in the softest sense of the word, she is in fact a social doyenne whose real fame came from hosting soirees such as this. “She threw parties in London during the war.” I neglect to mention that I had not been to any of them.

Inside, the house is hot as August, too many bodies pressed close, trying to move in all directions. The party has been going on for hours, the festive atmosphere a train we had missed. A far cry from the stuffy receptions I had attended with Papa, there is no pretense of restraint. The men have loosened or in some cases removed their ties. The women have kicked off their shoes and those who have not bobbed their hair have let it loose from its pins. The women who had come to Paris were of an unusual sort—would-be writers and entertainers and journalists whose free-spirited nature surely gave consternation to the wives who had been left at home. Their dresses are the latest fashions, Oriental-themed shifts, Bohemian frocks without any pretense of a corset. I feel positively frumpy in my staid rose party dress, though not as much so as Celia, who with her high collar and crinolines stands out like a peacock, or a jester in an Elizabethan play.

Bodies fill the makeshift dance floor in the center of the great room, moving in strange new ways to the lively jazz music that blares from a gramophone. Two women dance as though one was a man, pressed close together. A strange scent, something strong like burning flowers, mixes with the faint odor of sweat in the air. There is a kind of desperation to the revelry, especially among the women. It is more than just the wiping away of cobwebs and sorrow of a world struggling to live again. The chance for a normal life with a husband and children has been denied to so many, a generation of would-be suitors gone to the trenches. The men who were left were the oddities, those who had escaped the military for some sort of infirmity, and those like Stefan who came back broken.

“All of this immorality,” Celia remarks in French, “Everyone’s roles confused, the lines between men and women gone, brought about by women going into work.”

“You really think that’s the cause of all of this?” My voice is incredulous. “There are so many other reasons. What about the desperation of the war, not to mention the influx of large numbers of soldiers now with too much time on their hands, so far from home?” Celia sniffs, unpersuaded.

“It’s a sight, isn’t it?” a woman next to me remarks idly. I nod, my eyes traveling toward the dance floor where the two women are locked together now, nearly kissing. There is something about being in Paris here, away from familial and societal expectations back home, that has given people license to act this way. “Austrians at the party, as if they were our friends,” she adds. I step back, stung. The woman had not been referring to the outlandish behavior at all, but was incensed by our kind being here, the enemy treated as equals.

“Come.” I follow Celia through the packed room. She disappears into the crowd ahead of me and, after searching above the sea of heads in vain, I give up trying to keep up and instead make my way to one of the open windows. The cold, crisp air is a welcome relief against my face, a reprieve from the swaths of perfumed smoke.

Outside a woman in a tattered work dress picks through the rubbish in the alley adjacent to the house. Though the homeless have become an increasingly common sight in Paris, I am taken aback by the woman, not much older than myself, searching the garbage for food. What does she think of us being here with all of our parties and revelry and noise? I imagine a husband taken at the front, hungry children back home. Sensing me, she looks up and her eyes widen with alarm, fearful that I will reproach or report her for being there. Desperately I reach into my purse and fling coins through the window, ashamed by the callousness of the gesture, as well as the inadequacy of my aid.

Celia is at my arm again, this time with our hostess, a buxom woman with short brown hair and a broad smile I recognize from the society pages of the newspaper. “Elsa, you remember...” I hold my breath, waiting for the woman to deny our having met in London.

But Elsa Maxwell, accustomed to traveling in wide circles and knowing people less often than she is known, sweeps me into a firm hug that has none of the airiness of the kisses so often exchanged here. “Darling!” Celia watches, eyes wide, apparently having bought the subterfuge. Elsa releases me. “If you’ll excuse me, I must get everyone started on the game.”

“Game?” But she has already moved on, leaving a burst of Chanel in her wake.

A moment later a bell rings and Elsa appears on the landing of the broad staircase in the middle of the foyer, commanding a presence well beyond what her rather plain appearance suggests. The din in the room instantly dulls, but there is still too much noise for me to hear well. She makes an announcement, holding up papers of some sort. A whisper of excitement blows through the crowd. Then she throws the papers into the air with a flourish and they scatter like confetti.

I turn to Tante Celia, confused. “A scavenger game,” she exclaims excitedly, scrambling to grab one of the sheets. “It’s a treasure hunt,” she explains, placing great importance on each syllable.

She scans the paper, then passes it to me. It is a shopping list of the oddest sort: a pair of opera glasses, a man’s swimming costume. Some of the items are phrased in riddle. “I don’t understand. How are we to buy these things if the shops are closed?”

She titters with superiority, staring toward the door. “We don’t buy them. We find them,” she replies, gaily as a child. Are we seriously to run around the streets hunting in the darkness?

“I don’t...” I start to beg off, following her outside. But Celia has already formed a foursome with two Swedes and together they set off toward the dense trees of the Bois de Boulogne.

As I start toward the massive park, my ankle twists, a sharp but fleeting pain. Celia turns back impatiently. The heel of my shoe, which caught the cobblestone, is cracked and, sensing my moment, I pull intentionally until the heel snaps. “It’s broken,” I lament, trying to fill my voice with disappointment. “You go on.”