Till We Meet Again (11 page)

Everyone looked forward to Christmas as if it might bring a change in the meteorological factors that made Paris one of the least endurable cities in the world in bad weather. The fabled but always present sky pressed down on its low gray buildings with an almost personal vindictiveness that made wise Parisians keep their curtains drawn and their lamps lit from morning to nightfall.

Two days before Christmas, Alain caught the head cold that had raged throughout the Riviera troupe for several weeks. He went to the theater as usual that day and got through his
tour de chant
but, after struggling home on foot, he grew much sicker in a frighteningly short space of time. By morning he had such a high fever and was so weak that Eve, who had been up taking care of him all night, went acre the landing in her peignoir to ask Vivianne if she knew a doctor in the neighborhood.

“I swear by old Doctor Jammes. He’ll have him feeling better in no time. I’ll call him right away, little one, don’t worry. And you must telephone the Riviera to tell them that Alain won’t be coming to work for at least a week. These Christmas colds are notorious.”

Doctor Jammes examined Alain thoroughly and shook his head. “Perhaps the rest of the troupe had only head colds, Madame,” he said to Eve, “but I’m afraid that this has all the signs of a case of pneumonia. He must be taken to the hospital at once. You can’t care for him here by yourself.”

At the word pneumonia, Eve was overcome by fear. How often had her father lost patients with mere liver problems to the dreaded pneumonia, for which there was nothing to do but cupping, and then pray that the patient had enough strength to live through the disease?

“Now, now, don’t get upset yourself, that won’t help, you know,” Doctor Jammes said hastily at the sight of her face. “You must be sure to eat properly and keep up your own forces. This young man,” he added, looking at Alain, “has been overdoing it, I’ll wager. He’s too thin by far. Yes, when he’s over this, he must start to take better care of himself. Ah, that’s what I always tell my patients, but do they take my advice? In any case, Madame, I’ll make the necessary arrangements at once.”

Is … is the hospital very expensive, Doctor?” Eve forced herself to ask.

“Everyone complains that it is, Madame, but surely you have savings?”

“Yes, yes, I just asked because, well, any illness …”

“Don’t worry too much, Madame. He’s young and it’s better to be too thin than too fat, I always say. But I must take my leave. I have five more patients to see before lunch … doctors don’t have time to get pneumonia, and a good thing too. Good day, Madame, and call me if you need me for anything else. I’ll see him in the hospital, of course, when I make my rounds.”

“Vivianne, I know this makes me sound like a child, but I have no idea what Alain does with the money he makes. He gives me money for clothes, but he pays the maid himself and we never eat at home except for breakfast. I don’t even know the name of his bank,” Eve confessed to her friend. She had
seen Alain settled in the hospital and there was no more for her to do for him.

“You shall just have to ask him, little one. Don’t worry, he’s been making good money for years and he’s no fool,” Vivianne answered, congratulating herself yet again on her own financial arrangements. She didn’t doubt that the wives of her protectors were just as ignorant of their husbands’ finances as Madeleine was of her lover’s

But for the next month Alain was in no condition to be questioned about the location of his savings, or anything else. He came perilously close to dying three times after he was admitted to the hospital. Vivianne kept Eve’s health up with the nourishing meals she cooked, and if it had not been for the money she forced on Eve, Alain would have had to be transferred to one of the hospitals Paris reserves for the indigent.

Finally, in the last days of January he seemed to be on the road to recovery, and Eve, worn out but determined, asked him how she could obtain some money from his bank.

“Bank!” he laughed feebly. “Bank! There speaks a true daughter of the rich.”

“Alain, I only asked a normal question. What makes you say that?”

“Because if you hadn’t been born a rich girl, you would know that I spend every penny I make, I always have and I always will.… That’s the life I chose for myself long ago. Any little bourgeoise would have realized that long ago. Economies! They’re for the safe little man with a safe little wife and, God help him, a bunch of safe little children. Pah! I’d rather lose it all in a good card game than hoard it in a bank. You can’t complain, can you? When I had it I spent it and I didn’t come complaining to you when I lost it all, either, did I?”

“Lost it all?”

“Just before I got sick. A bad run of cards.” He shrugged his shoulders “There would have been just enough for Christmas, but then I expected to get lucky again or wait till payday, whichever came first. I never worried. I refuse to worry and I’m right, you’ll see. I’ll be back at the Riviera in no time now that this stinking pneumonia is almost over.”

“But, Alain, I asked Doctor Jammes how soon you could come home, and he said maybe in a few weeks but that then
it would be … months,
months
of recovery before you could go back to work!”

“He’s a pompous old fool.” Alain turned away from Eve and looked out the window at the snow which so rarely fell on the city of Paris.

“Pompous, I grant you, but no fool. I think he saved your life,” Eve said indignantly.

“Listen, I have some advice for you,” Alain said bitterly. “Go home. Go back to Dijon.”

“Alain!”

“I mean it. You weren’t meant for this life and you must know it. You’ve had your adventure, but surely you see that it’s over now? Go back to your parents just as fast as the railroad will carry you. You don’t belong here. God knows, I never dreamed of asking you to come with me—that was entirely your idea, remember? My kind of life suits me, but I can’t be responsible for anyone else for long. You invited yourself. Now it’s time to go. Say good-bye, Eve, and get on that train.”

“I’ll leave you alone now. You’re overtired. I’ll be back tomorrow, darling. Try to rest.” Eve fled the hospital ward without looking back, hoping that no one would notice her tears.

“And that’s all he said?” Vivianne asked.

“Wasn’t it enough? More than enough?”

“Perhaps he’s right,” the older woman said slowly.

“Do you really think that? You too?”

“Yes, my little one. Paris is no place for a girl without a solid situation of some sort, and that, Madeleine, is something that Monsieur Alain Marais can never give you. I think the more of him for realizing it. What he said—about returning to Dijon—is it possible?”

“No! Absolutely not! I love him, Vivianne, and no matter what you or even he says, I won’t leave him. If I went back … home … they would expect … God knows what they would expect! It’s unthinkable.”

“Then there is an alternate solution, but only one.”

“Why do you look at me that way?” Eve said, suddenly alert.

“I’m wondering. Are you capable of it?”

“Of
what
, for the love of God?”

“Of getting a job.”

“Of course I could get a job. What do you take me for? I could be a salesgirl, I could learn to operate a typewriter, I could work at the telephone company, I could …”

“Madeleine. Hush. I’m not proposing to put you to work in some store or office for which a million other girls are just as well suited as you. No, little one, I mean a job worthy of your gifts. I am speaking of a job on the stage of the music hall.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“On the contrary, I’ve been thinking about it for months. Since I first heard you sing, as a matter of fact. I wondered why Monsieur Marais never thought of it himself, but then I realized that you never sang when he was home. Does he even know that you sing? No? I suspected as much. You were too much in awe of his … professionalism … to display your own unimportant, miserable squeak of a voice … that was it, wasn’t it?”

“Make fun of me, Vivianne, I don’t care. I didn’t sing for him because I thought that perhaps … oh, I’m not really sure, perhaps he wouldn’t like me to sing too, perhaps he would think I expected to sing duets with him or something stupid like that.”

“Or perhaps you have a better chance to be a success than he does? Eh? Is that what you thought?”

“Never!”

“Why not, since it’s true? Don’t bother to deny it. I know it and I believe that you must know it too.”

A complicated silence fell between the two women. Each one of them knew that they were skirting the boundaries of a subject they had no intention of ever discussing. At the same time, neither of them knew precisely how much the other was aware of. And yet this was no time for discretion. Finally Eve ventured to speak, leaving Vivianne’s last question unanswered.

“Why do you think I could sing on stage? I’ve never performed in public, only for myself and … at home, and for you, once you found me out.”

“There are two reasons. First, there is your voice. It has the strength that’s necessary if you wish to be heard in the balcony of the biggest theater in Paris; it has a tone that conveys emotion as if it were joined by your lips to the heart of the listener; it has a special quality for which I can’t find a name, that makes me listen to you sing over and over without
ever tiring; and, most important of all, when you sing about love, I
believe
every one of the words. And I don’t believe in love, as you well know.

“Second, you have a
genre
. You have a type. Mere talent, the possession of a voice is never enough in the music hall—you must have a type to succeed.”

“What type do I have?” Eve asked with intense curiosity.

“Your own
. The best of all, my little one, the best of all! I remember what Mistinguett said to me once: ‘What is important is not my talent but the fact that I am Mistinguett. Any extra can have mere talent.’ Ah, the Miss, how she likes to talk about herself. Little one, you are greatly talented and on top of that you are unique, you are Madeleine! With those two assets you can conquer the music hall.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Impossible. I am not wrong about such things. But you must dare to try.”

“Dare—of course I dare.
I always dare,”
cried Eve, her eyes alight.

“Then we must find the right songs and arrange for an audition. The sooner the better. Thank God I still have my contacts at the Olympia—Jacques Charles will always listen to you sing if I bring you to him.”

“The Olympia?”

“Of course, where else? We start at the top, as any sensible person would.”

Energetic, ambitious and imaginative, Jacques Charles was a veteran producer of the music hall at only thirty-two. He stood, stroking his neat black mustache, his eyes filled with a curiosity that never failed him, in his customary place for an audition, almost at the back of the second balcony of the Olympia. If a performer couldn’t be heard from that position, so far from the stage, he had no interest in him, no matter how appealing the talent.

“What’s up today,
Patron
?” asked one of his assistants, Maurice Appel, surprised at the morning audition on a day normally devoted to afternoon rehearsals.

“A favor, Maurice. You remember Vivianne de Biron, don’t you, my lead Walking Girl at the Folies Bergère? What a marvel, that Vivianne; never late, never sick, never pregnant, never in love and never tired. What’s more, she was smart enough to retire before her breasts stopped pointing
halfway to the ceiling. Since she left, there hasn’t been one who could touch the way she paraded across the stage wearing nothing warmer than a ton of feathers on her head. She asked me to listen to a friend who sings. How could I refuse?”

“Her guy?”

“No, a girl, it seems. There she is now.”

The two men looked at Eve, who had walked out on the stage wearing a copy of the newest dress in Paris, Jeanne Lanvin’s navy serge chemise. But this history-making dress that had no waistline had been copied by Vivianne’s dressmaker in a perfect red crepe whose singing color was reflected in Eve’s strawberry blond hair, brushed out into two shimmering wings on either side of her face. On the dark stage she seemed like a flash of midsummer sunshine in which the brightness of the footlights had become entangled, a part of her own inner luminosity. Eve stood with composure, her right hand just touching the piano, at which an accompanist was already seated, with her music open in front of him. From her stance, so natural to one who had studied for years with Professor Dutour, it was impossible to tell that she was more nervous than she had ever been in her life.

“At least you can see her,” Jacques Charles said.

“Shall we have a little bet,
Patron?
She’ll have the
genre
Polaire.”

“Why not the genre Mistinguett while we’re at it?”

“Yvonne Printemps?” countered Maurice.

“You forgot Alice de Tender.”

“Not to speak of Eugenie Buffet.”

“That covers most of the possibilities. She can’t intend to waltz in that skimpy dress, so Paulette Darty isn’t in the contest. I’ll go for Alice de Tender, and you, Maurice?”

“Printemps. I have an instinct.”

“Five francs?”

“Done.”

“Mademoiselle, if you please, you may start,” Jacques Charles called.

Eve had prepared two songs. She had been frantic at the problem of finding new songs to sing at a time when every decent songwriter was working night and day for established stars, but Vivianne had proposed a solution to that problem.

“It’s evident to me, little one, that you must
not
sing something original. It must not be the song that they notice, but you. Only you and your
genre
. I propose that you sing
songs that are each famous as belonging, above all, to the women who launched them, songs that people think of as inseparable from Mistinguett and Yvonne Printemps—
Mon Homme
and
Parlez-moi d’Amour
. That way you will challenge them on their own ground and show that it is not the song that counts but the singer.”