As she’d aged, her mother’s pale red hair had turned white. She remained stylish, and to some, especially her maids, her cold eye was fearsome. She liked things done with style, her style. She had her own chamber, with red lacquered walls and dove-gray bedcoverings. Lydia’s father’s room was down the hall, and smelled of cigar smoke. Her mother said she could not stand the smoke, or his sputtering snore, but there was more, a distance between them. As for her father, he gave her mother gifts on a regular basis, but managed to stay clear of her and lead his own life. He had an apartment somewhere; it was said to be used for business meetings. Sometimes when her father looked at her mother, Lydia saw a sort of surprise behind his eyes, as if he’d wandered into the wrong house and had come home to the wrong wife.
Before she died her mother had said, “Always pay heed to the woman who comes before you. If he’s treated her badly, he will treat you much the same.”
They’d been alone in her room, with a fire going to take the chill off, though it was May. Lydia, already married and in love, had laughed. “In Henri’s case,” she’d said, “that would be his mother.” But when she’d begun to see Marie in the house so soon after her mother’s death, she believed she understood her mother’s message. Her father had not been faithful. The extravagant gifts he’d given to his wife—a ruby pendant from India, silk dresses, strands of pearls, creamy cameos—he had likely given to other women as well. Looking back, Lydia remembered walking into shops with her mother and having the salesgirl say Monsieur Rodriguez had just been in to buy a present and being confused about why such a statement should bring her mother to tears.
LYDIA WENT AGAIN TO see her father on a cold November day. The leaves were red and brown. A mist sifted down from the damp sky. Later it would rain, but not now. She wore a heavy black cape—her funeral cape, she realized—bought for her mother’s funeral in the Jewish cemetery in Passy. She knocked formally on the door, her own door, where she’d grown up. Marie answered, surprised to see her. Her father was resting.
“He’s my father, and I want to see him,” Lydia told the nurse.
She walked inside and didn’t listen to any protestations. She’d been up the stairs a thousand times before. She passed her mother’s room and continued on. Her father was in bed. The bed had been pulled to the window so he might look outside. He turned to her, thinking she was Marie. The nurse had followed and was right behind her. Lydia thought her father’s eyes brightened when he saw her. Perhaps there was some affection there, after all.
“He’s very tired,” Marie said.
There was no refuting this; all the same Lydia told Marie she was the one who must leave. Lydia made certain to close the door after the nurse edged into the hallway, then returned to the bedside, where she sat in a hard-backed chair. Her father’s eyes flitted over to her, then away.
“I hear a bird,” he said.
The rain had begun. There were no birds.
“She wasn’t my mother?”
There was a white film over his eyes, which were still very blue.
“You were born in St. Thomas,” he said.
Her mother had told her this. Lydia had been born there during their travels. Though her mother said they left that far-off island when she was a baby, Lydia had some memory of a long trip, and of her mother singing to her as the waves hit against them, of miles and miles of blue sea. Now she wondered if it was possible for an infant to have such memories, for her girls remembered nothing from their babyhood. She’d gone so far as to question them, and they could not recall the songs she’d sung to them or the days she’d paced the floor with them. Those first memories were fainter than shadows on the wall.
“To your first wife?” Lydia put forth.
“Well, I couldn’t marry her,” her father said. “Wasn’t that obvious? We weren’t allowed.”
“Why not?” Lydia asked, more confused than ever.
“Do you think I ever loved anyone else?” her father said. His eyes were so pale it seemed possible to look through them into a part of him she’d never seen before. He seemed completely unfamiliar to Lydia, a lost man. He reached for her. In that instant, Lydia felt like pulling away, but she forced herself to grasp his hand. She hadn’t expected his hand to feel so light, as if beneath the skin there were nothing more than the bones of a bird. “Don’t do what they tell you to,” he said.
Marie came in, with a maid in tow, interrupting, insisting it was time for her father to sleep. Lydia was rushed from the room. She stood in the hall, mortified, while Marie sang to him as she settled him in his bed. When he was dozing, Marie came out to the hallway to escort her from the house.