The Metropolis (5 page)

“What?” John asked, as he furiously turned the dial.

“That—that singing, that opera—turn it back!” Gina was thrilled to recognize her idol’s expression flash with a vengeance far beyond what she had seen on the LP photographs.

John sagged. “Really?”

Gina looked to her husband with an expression that mirrored the one she had just seen on the television. “Do I look like I’m kidding? I’m tired of baseball.”

“Okay, have fun.” John yawned. “I’m hitting the sack.”

Gina raised her cheek for a quick peck but kept her eyes glued to the unfolding drama. Seeing Callas in action was better than watching any movie, so that, within a few minutes, she felt like she was the one stuck in a small town in Italy, negotiating with the chief of police for her lover’s release from prison. She stared in disbelief as Scarpia dictated the terms of his bargain, and swallowed hard with resolve and disgust as she understood that Tosca would have no choice but to offer up her body to this horrible man. When Tosca drove a knife through his back and watched him collapse to the ground in a pool of blood, Gina had never imagined that revenge could feel so good. And at the end—when she realized that Mario was dead, shot by the executioner’s squad—she felt her own heart break as if it were the first time she had even been in love, so that she understood why Tosca ripped herself away from the guards to jump to her death.

When it was over, Gina saw her reflection in the fading hues of the television screen and knew that she wanted to die, too. The simplicity of this wish was breathtaking and undeniable: she longed to be released from the mundane burdens of Castle Shannon, from working and shopping and cooking and cleaning and everything else that seemed to leave so little time for anything fun or different. She wanted to be young again, but this time confident and talented and pretty, so that like Callas she could travel the world to perform on ornate stages framed by velvet curtains and then go to parties on silver yachts. She wanted to drink champagne, to smoke long cigarettes, and to laugh outrageously with her head back before making love to ten different men, each one more handsome than the last. She wanted a private banker to bring her a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills at the beginning of each month, to spend on white pearls or fur coats or to give to the poor if she were so inclined.

Then she remembered the other Maria
—her
Maria—and
imagined her daughter waking up without her, and knew she was not prepared to leave, not ever, not even in her wildest fantasies. Her cheeks were wet as she walked to the bathroom, where she looked in the mirror and smiled at her folly—Maria would be up in less than five hours—and rapped a knuckle against her head the way her father used to do playfully. She tiptoed into her sleeping daughter’s room and kissed her, vowing that she would help Maria not only to vanquish such feelings of remorse and dissatisfaction—however vague—but also to harness them, to take flight and never look back.

PARIS, 1846. Lucien Marchand, nine years old, was already dizzy with excitement when his father covered his eyes and gently led him down the hallway.

“Can I look yet?” he could not resist asking.

“No—and don’t squirm,” Guillaume said. “Just a few more feet.”

Lucien could not imagine what his father was about to unveil, given what he had already seen in the last hour, their first in a new apartment on the Île St.-Louis. Though he had known about the move for months—ever since Guillaume was awarded a life tenancy for providing the beleaguered emperor with a cure for what in polite society was called
la condition infernale
(or in medical terms,
impotentia coeundi
)—he still couldn’t quite believe he was going to live on the Île. He didn’t doubt his father—who was, after all, a botany professor at the École normale supérieure—but it was the kind of disbelief he associated with certain animals at the zoo (especially zebras
and giraffes), the steaming engine of a train, the glass-covered arcade on the Rue Des Esseintes, or really anything else that was amazing to behold but that it would never occur to him to possess. The way the Île floated in the middle of the Seine, with its stately façades quietly peeking out from behind the trees at the rest of the city, made it seem like more of a magical ship than a place where people actually lived, and one that would surely sail away before he could board.

They were not in the main residence of the Hôtel Georges—which like most mansions on the Île was occupied by high nobility, in this case, Prince and Princess Milhelescou of Romania—but in a previously unused apartment next to the servant quarters. This was still a big improvement over their old lodgings, as Lucien had confirmed a few minutes earlier, running wildly through the space as if to capture it and then giddy and breathless as he turned in circles, trying to count all the doorways. The library was already filled with shelves and shelves of his father’s books and treatises, and a window in his new bedroom looked out onto the courtyard, where he had just seen the gilded carriage of the princess pull out to the street. Downstairs was a basement filled with brick archways—this was where Guillaume planned to set up his laboratory—and a secret passageway that led to a triangular plot of land at the tip of the Île, with enough room for a greenhouse and a garden, and where Lucien—lying on his stomach—had managed to dip his fingers into the frigid March waters of the Seine.

“Now?” Lucien begged as his father steered him around a corner.

“Now.” Guillaume laughed as he removed his fingers.

Opening his eyes, Lucien was knocked a step back by what he saw, so that Guillaume had to prop him up. He was confronted by a massive piano—a true grand, an Érard—which occupied the room with the quiet majesty of a mountain. Stunned, Lucien slowly walked around it once, and then again, tentatively caressing the dark curves of the body and the gigantic wooden legs until he arrived at the front,
where he counted more than seven octaves of keys, or two more than on the piano he regularly played.

He reached out and played a low C that rattled the windows as he turned to his father with wide eyes. “Is this ours?”

“It belongs to the princess,” Guillaume said, “but she already has one, if not more. When I told her you were a young musician, she agreed to let us keep it here.” He helped Lucien pull out the bench. “Go ahead—it’s okay, try it. You only live once.”

Lucien stared for a few more seconds before he decided to start off with a chromatic scale that, while not particularly difficult or useful, was one of his favorite exercises. His fingers nimbly flitted up the keyboard, from the groaning bass to the chirping high keys, a hundred miles away at the other end, and as he listened to the notes reverberate off the walls, he felt like he had wandered into a house full of butterflies. He next played a few thundering chords that made his father cover his ears before he turned to something more delicate, if not quite as pleasing, a popular French piece—“Dans le ciel” by Albert Delève—he had been working on with his music teacher.

He was about to begin another when he glanced up and was surprised to see his father’s eyes red and teary. “Is it Maman?” he asked, referring to his mother, who had died during a cholera epidemic almost seven years earlier. She, too, had been a singer, but because Lucien had been only a toddler at the time, he never remembered her in more than a wisp or a fragment.

“Yes.” Guillaume nodded. “But please, don’t stop—that’s why it’s here.”

“Do I sound like her?” Lucien asked, knowing that his father often described her voice as a beautiful coloratura, capable of projecting ten shades of love or hate in a single note.

“Very much.” Guillaume smiled sadly as Lucien returned his attention to the keyboard and began a new song.

…

T
HIS WAS THE
first of many hours Lucien spent with the piano after they moved in, though as the weather improved and summer beckoned, he also liked to join his father outside. The triangular tip of the Île offered the illusion that the city was flowing by on either side of the river, particularly since the garden possessed an implausible stillness, interrupted only by the birds and the insects, rustling leaves, and lapping water. While it was the best summer Lucien could remember—or imagine—as July gave way to August, he could not ignore a familiar dread as he envisioned the start of school, which led him to dream about stowing away on one of the barges that regularly passed by on the Seine.

He had always hated school, not so much because he was a terrible student but because of an overwhelming tedium he associated with almost every subject. He enjoyed learning things from his father but found his teachers—and the books they relied on—uniformly uninspiring and couldn’t imagine why he should care so much about math or grammar or history, when all he wanted to think about was music and the opera. His incorrigible tendency to daydream and to hum—and to play an imaginary piano on his desk or sometimes on his knees—made him an object of scorn among students and teachers alike, the latter of whom were even more mystified given Guillaume’s affiliation with the country’s most elite university.

Lucien would never forget a horrible day the year before when he had been sitting in the corner of the school yard during morning recess, quietly singing to himself, and a group of his classmates had jumped out from behind a tree with the intent to pin him to the ground and deliver a ferocious series of kicks and punches. Lucien had managed to escape and fight back, and during the ensuing scuffle—because he was lanky and strong—he had succeeded in bloodying the nose of
one of the attackers, which led his teacher to accuse him of instigating the altercation.

“How?” Lucien asked, still defiant as he rubbed the dirt from his elbows and knees and glared at the others, who corroborated the teacher’s misunderstanding of the event.

“Did you play the game with everyone else as I instructed?”

“No,” Lucien admitted.

“What were you doing?”

“If you have to know,” Lucien said as he twisted a lock of black hair around one of his fingers, “I was singing.”

Guillaume was called in to discuss the matter with the flustered teacher and the headmaster. Because such meetings were practically annual events, he was adept at making the case for why Lucien should be permitted to continue in a small academy populated by similarly situated children of professors and government officials, none of whom shared such a distracting desire for the stage. “I understand that—at least for now—he is very much his mother’s son,” he offered before explaining their loss—in case anyone present was not familiar with the course of events, and even if they were—which never failed to make Lucien’s attachment to her more poignant and forgivable. That Guillaume spoke softly and seriously, with a slight accent—he had been raised in Greece—made his words appear somehow more earnest and reasonable than they would have coming from a native speaker, while his striking eyes, which possessed the diffuse quality of celadon—and which Lucien had inherited—also worked to give his audience the impression that his mind was still in the laboratory, uncovering important secrets of the earth, while his heart remained forever buried with his wife.

G
UILLAUME’S
DISCUSSIONS
AT
home with Lucien on the subject were another story. Though he professed no expectation that his son
would follow him into the sciences, he made clear that at a minimum Lucien was expected to complete lycée.

“That’s eight more years!” Lucien objected as his first summer on the Île waned and he confessed to his father his desire to leave school altogether.

“I went to school for more than twenty years,” Guillaume responded. “I’m sure you can manage half of that.”

“But you were good at it.”

“I know you’re as smart as any of them—and I’m sure your life would be that much easier if you applied yourself.”

“I apply myself to music.”

“You’ll have plenty of time for that after you turn seventeen,” Guillaume reasoned, “if that’s what you still want to do.”

“But school is so boring,” Lucien complained.

Guillaume laughed and Lucien sighed, knowing he had little choice but to follow his father’s directive. He allowed himself to be distracted by the reddish hue of his forearm, which he held up against his father’s swarthier skin.

Guillaume, however, was not quite ready to abandon the topic. “You know, Lucien, your mother would have told you the same thing about school,” he said and ran his fingers up to his son’s neck, making him laugh. “As much as she loved the theater, it wasn’t all she was interested in—that’s why she married me.”

L
UCIEN OFTEN DREAMED
about his mother, and she was always singing, but he could never remember what she looked or sounded like once he resurfaced from the depths of his sleep. During the day, he sometimes became convinced that she—or her spirit—was nearby.

“Can’t you feel her?” he cried to his father one afternoon that summer, when they were again in the garden. He pulled at the edges
of his eyes to both sharpen and distort his vision, as if that might help him to see her. “She’s here—I know it!”

“I doubt that,” Guillaume said before he paused and looked around. “But I’m happy to tell you that you’re not completely crazy.” He sat down on a bench and pointed at a row of trees across the river. “You see those?”

“I might,” Lucien responded, not particularly pleased with the direction this exchange was taking.

“Your mother used to wear a perfume made from an extract of tilia, which as you can see are in bloom, and whose scent is being carried here on the breeze.”

Lucien sighed. “Why don’t you ever want to believe in ghosts—or souls?”

“Because I’m a scientist,” Guillaume offered, “and ghosts and souls are the basis of folktales, superstitions, and religion, which as we’ve talked about have been the source of too much needless, irrational harm.”

“And you don’t believe in God either?” Lucien asked glumly, although he already knew the answer.