The Story Sisters (40 page)

B
EFORE LONG
C
LAIRE
and Philippe moved in together, to the top floor of Madame Cohen’s house. Their grandmothers did them the service of not saying they had told them so. It was a big apartment and they were slowly painting each room white. The woodwork was gold leaf, very old, chipped at the edges, but beautiful.
They decided to keep it as it was. The bedroom overlooked a small garden, nothing as grand as the cobblestone courtyard of Claire’s grandmother’s building, but still lovely.

When Claire left Monsieur Cohen’s workroom at noon, she stopped by the shop to retrieve Madame Cohen and they went home together for lunch. Natalia often joined them. She was recovering from the loss of Samuel Cohen. She seemed more fragile. Her knees were bothering her, and Claire had to help her up the stairs to the apartment. Eighteen years had passed since the anniversary party at the Plaza Hotel, but Natalia still dreamed of that day. She dreamed of Annie and of Meg and of the Story sisters when they were young, wearing the blue dresses she had made for them. Just the night before, she had fallen asleep on the couch in the parlor and in her dream she went to her own party. Everyone was there: her husband, Martin, and Samuel Cohen, and her nieces Elise and Mary Fox. In the kitchen, the staff was hard at work icing petits fours in hues of pink and green and blue. There was the smell of sugar and vanilla. Waves of heat wafted from the huge restaurant stove and made her flush. “Make me something I’ll never forget,” she told the head chef. “Make sure I remember everything before it gets lost.”

When Claire made lunch for Madame Cohen and her grandmother, she used tomatoes whenever possible. She followed the recipe for her mother’s gazpacho, she re-created the cream of tomato soup she and Pete had made for Annie when she was so ill, she fixed green tomatoes on toast with olives, so simple and pleasurable, and of course, Madame Cohen’s favorite, risotto with yellow tomatoes and thyme. Claire grew her own tomatoes in earthenware containers set on the tiny balcony of their apartment, ordering heirloom seeds from catalogs. In the height of summer, she tossed a net over the plants to keep the birds from pecking at them. When Philippe came home on summer nights, he’d find
Claire on the patio and he’d come to sit beside her, stretching his long legs out beside hers. He had no idea that tomatoes could be green and pink and yellow and gold. He preferred to eat them whole, like apples.

T
HE FOLLOWING SPRING
, the flowers on the chestnut tree were in such abundance that tourists came to take photographs. It was the season the family had always dreaded, but this year was different. When spring arrived, Natalia and Claire welcomed it. They washed the windows in Natalia’s apartment, ordered heirloom tomato seeds, went walking by the river in the glassy afternoons. This year upon her return from visiting Mimi and Elv, Natalia was sewing Claire’s wedding dress. She had gotten special magnifying glasses in order to see the stitches. She had arthritis in her hands, but she had worked all winter and now she was getting close to completion. She would need to persevere in order to finish by the coming summer. Her fingers bled from the delicacy of the stitches, and she had to soak her hands in warm olive oil, but she felt certain this would be the last dress she would ever attempt, so she put everything into it. She had been in love twice and all that she’d felt went into the dress, with stitches set so close together it was nearly impossible to see them with the naked eye. In Natalia’s opinion, that was the way love was, invisible, there whether or not you wanted to see it or admit to it.

On the day the package arrived, Claire was in a hurry to get home. She’d forgotten her umbrella and the rains had begun. She avoided puddles as best she could, leaping across gutters. She had on a raincoat over black jeans and a sweater, but was soon drenched to the skin. She always wore the lapis necklace with the ancient bell, which she half believed had brought Philippe to her. Well, maybe it had and maybe it hadn’t, but she wasn’t taking any
chances. When she got home, she quickly shrugged off her raincoat, then toweled her sopping hair dry. She slipped off her boots and pulled off her jeans. To her surprise, Madame Cohen and her grandmother were in her kitchen, a pot of tea on the table between them. They glanced up at Claire when she walked in.

“Now what?” Claire only had on underwear and a black sweater. She was pale and long-legged and serious. Love had made her more approachable. People often came up to her on the street and asked for directions or begged a few euros to tide them over until their luck changed.

“Is someone dead?”

“Not at all,” her ama assured her.

Though her amulets were more in demand than ever, the only jewelry Claire wore, other than the love talisman, was her engagement ring. Madame Cohen had given Philippe her own ring to present to Claire, the one her grandmother had brought from Russia. Everyone in the family was talking about this. It was something of a scandal. Madame Cohen hadn’t offered it to anyone else, and there had been plenty of engagements throughout the years. She’d been waiting for the right person, and that person was Claire. She’d known it when she caught the first demon on the flypaper. She’d known when Claire had cried in the kitchen during her job interview. Madame Cohen had arranged this marriage when she sent Philippe to bury the dog. In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. All you needed were the right ingredients. Not even her own daughters knew the circumstances of how she’d lost her sisters, that’s how long ago it had been. She knew that sometimes when you were supposed to feel lucky, all you felt was despair. You were guilty just because you had managed to live. For reasons you couldn’t understand, that made no sense whatsoever, you were the one left unscathed.

The package that had arrived by post that day had been
addressed in Mimi’s girlish handwriting. The postmark was North Point Harbor.

“Open it,” Madame Cohen urged.

Inside was a painting in a cheap frame. It was all black. A watercolor. It was a young girl’s painting of the Seine with a starless night sky up above. It was the painting Claire had always wanted. She read her niece’s note. She thought about girls with long black hair, about the bottle-green leaves of the sweet pea vines and the white-throated squash blooms. She thought about a robin in the grass, and the sprinklers being turned on, and about the hot pavement on the corner where she had waited all day. She thought about the tomatoes in the garden. Cherokee chocolates, Golden Jubilees, Green Zebras, Rainbows. She felt a surge of grief, not for everything she’d lost, but for everything that had never been. She hadn’t even known how much she’d missed Elv.

“They want to come to Paris,” she said.

T
HE WEDDING WAS
held in the Bois de Boulogne, at the Chalet des Îles, set in the center of the lake. The family had rented out the restaurant and invited sixty people. The Cohens had such a big family and so many friends that several had to be cut from the invitation list to ensure they didn’t go over the lucky number of sixty. There were some hard feelings, but there had already been a huge engagement party several months before, at Philippe’s brother Émile’s house, with too many guests to keep track of. That evened things out a bit.

Sixty was a lucky number, Madame Cohen had decreed, and she had been right too many times for them to ignore her. It would bring them happiness, they would see. Indeed, the weather was perfect, just as she’d predicted. The hot summer’s day had faded into a warm blue evening. It would stay light until after ten.
No one worried about the silly rumors about creatures that could be found in the Bois after dark, vicious dogs, wolves, lost souls. This was not the weather or the time for such things. Guests were ferried across the water in little boats, disembarking on a dock strung with white lights. A trio played in the garden and music drifted across the island. The bees were moving slowly through the thin blue light, drawn by the sweet glasses of champagne and kir, making themselves drunk with the scent and the taste.

The dress Natalia made was stunning—white tulle and silk. Every seam was perfect. There were sixty pink pearls sewn into the bodice. When she’d presented the dress to her granddaughter, Claire had cried and said it was far too beautiful for her. She was afraid she might ruin it.

“Wear it and be happy,” Natalia told her.

Now Claire was standing near a bank of wild ferns that grew beside the restaurant. Bullfrogs were calling in the reeds. The heat had settled on Claire’s skin and she looked flushed. She was drinking a glass of vodka and soda. She was a nervous wreck. She didn’t know if happiness would suit her. She wasn’t prepared for it. Philippe wasn’t supposed to see her in her wedding dress until the ceremony, but he went right over. He didn’t care about rules. He never had. That was why Madame Cohen had kept him out of the shop when he was a boy. He was nothing but trouble back then. But a boy who is trouble is something entirely different as a man. He was leaning in close, whispering. Claire laughed and let him have a sip of her drink.

Peter Smith had come from New York to give the bride away. They had teased him that hell must have frozen over because here he was back in Paris, staying with Philippe’s parents, who didn’t speak a word of English. Pete was surprised to find that this time around everything was better than he’d remembered,
especially the food. He was becoming an expert on cheese and thought he might open a shop in North Point Harbor, right on Main Street. Elise and Mary Fox were there as well, splurging on the Ritz. Mary was delighted to find that so many of the guests were doctors, even if she couldn’t speak the language. She’d discovered that one of Madame Cohen’s grandson’s friends was working at NYU Medical Center. She and Claire had already discussed catching the bouquet; Claire was to throw toward the right, where Mary would be standing, arms outstretched.

But the wedding gown wasn’t the last dress Natalia had sewn. She had made a pink silk and tulle dress for her great-granddaughter. It arrived in North Point Harbor in a huge white box tied with string. The package was so special that Mimi had to run upstairs and get her mother to come out to the porch and sign for it before the postman would hand it over. They carried it up to Mimi’s room, then sat it on the bed and stared at it, wondering what on earth it might be, before Elv went to get the scissors to cut the string.

“It’s definitely something French,” Mimi said solemnly.

“Definitely,” Elv agreed.

There was a huge amount of tissue paper, and then the dress. Elv looked at it, then turned away, overcome. Mimi was too excited to notice; she grabbed the dress and raced down to her grandpa’s apartment to show it off. It was by far the most beautiful dress in the world. Elv stayed behind and took up the envelope inside the cardboard box that had been addressed to Miss M. Story. It was an invitation to Claire’s wedding. Elv opened it. She shouldn’t have, but she did. She couldn’t believe how much time had passed. It was low tide in the bay. The birds were swooping over lawns and through the tall marsh grass beyond the yard.
Bring your mother
, Claire had written.

N
ATALIA PAID FOR
the tickets, as she’d always said she would. But of course Elv and Mimi were too excited to sleep on the plane. Elv whispered how every year the Story sisters would notice a new shade of light in Paris. The sisters were in love with French milk and French bread; they all practiced tying their scarves the way French women did, but could never get it right. Every spring the chestnut tree in the courtyard bloomed. The river was green in the daytime, and black as evening approached. One night Elv had rescued a cat that had fallen into the water. Their ama had named it Sadie, and it was still alive, only now the cat was very old and cranky.

Mimi did not find Sadie cranky in the least. It sat on her lap and purred and she sneaked it bits of her dinner. She loved being in Paris in her great-grandmother’s house. They stayed in the guest bedroom, the room that had been Claire’s before she’d moved in with Philippe. The parlor was still painted red, lacquered so that it gleamed when the lamps were turned on. The light was still a thousand different colors, changing with the weather and the hour of the day.

“It’s the color of lemons!” Mimi declared when she woke to her first morning in Paris. “Now it’s the color of peaches!” she said as she and her ama later fixed a pot of tea in the kitchen. Mimi had seen photographs of her gigi on the mantel, but Claire still hadn’t been by after two days.

“She doesn’t want to see me,” Elv said to her grandmother while Mimi was doing her best to watch French television.

“She wouldn’t have told Mimi to bring you if she didn’t want you here,” Natalia assured her.

But Elv got herself so worked up the night before the wedding that she came down with a fever. In the morning she dressed, then went to splash water on her face. She was burning up. She
told Natalia she couldn’t possibly go, but then she saw Mimi in her frothy pink dress. She wished Lorry were there to see how beautiful his daughter was.
Oh, baby
, he would have said.
How did you get to be so grown-up?