Till We Meet Again (21 page)

Surely parents and two little girls, one of twelve and one of ten and a half, weren’t meant by any law of nature to be together for three solid days? No, it was unnatural, a thoroughly impossible situation, although less difficult to endure than the sight of the vast, almost frightening desert through which they had been traveling for endless hours. Was it possible that at their destination there would be anything that
resembled civilization as she knew it? Canberra and Cape Town had not been metropolitan centers, true, but British tradition had been strong in both places, providing a feeling of continuity and establishment.

Eve had loved their big Cape Town home, with a superb view of Table Mountain, and a large, pleasant staff, but a career diplomat could no more refuse a new posting than he could not own a tailcoat, a suit of morning clothes, and three dinner jackets. She supposed she must regard this as a promotion. True, the city toward which they were traveling was only the fifth largest in this new country. True, Paul would still be Consul General, as far from an ambassadorship as ever, but nevertheless, he would be considered the head of the local French community, no matter how small. His philosophical, wry acceptance of his less-than-glorious career never failed him, but she knew, without any discussion of the matter, that he had been deeply disappointed to be posted yet again so far from the seat of any real power. Well, they would make the best of it, as they always had. The gentlemen who made these decisions had long memories and unbending rules … to them she was still that shockingly
déclassé
girl who sang on a music hall stage. But she and Paul had each other and the children, and that was all that really mattered to them.

The rhythm of the train slowed and, looking out of the windows, the four Lancels spied sign after sign that, after all, there was a city at the end of the desert. Shacks, small buildings, larger buildings of great ugliness, a few automobiles on a street, and finally, almost out of nowhere, a surprisingly large station could be seen in the near distance.

Three porters hurried through the corridor, carrying some of their dozens of pieces of baggage, while Freddy jumped up to stand on the seat, craning her neck in her characteristic impatience, so that her hat fell off, while Delphine checked the angle of her own hat, set precisely on her smooth hair, in the mirror that was attached to the flap of her small handbag. Eve felt a sudden apprehension as the train began to travel even more slowly, in the unmistakable cadence of arrival Australia, South East Africa and now, of all places, this—surely as outlandish, as far from reality, as anything Jacques Charles could have imagined for a decor at the Casino de Paris.

“End of the line, folks,” the porter said, coming in. “We’re here.”

“This is it, my love,” Paul said, giving Eve his arm.

“Daddy,” Freddy asked, “could I just ask you one more question before we get there?”

“Is it the same question you’ve been asking me the whole trip?”

“Sort of.”

“Then why don’t you ask the porter? You haven’t asked him yet today.”

“Sir,” said Freddy, “do they really call this the City of the Angels?”

“Yes, miss, they sure do. Welcome to L.A.”

Two months later, although Eve was supposed to be dressing for dinner, she found herself sinking down on the window seat in the bedroom listening to the doves begin to herald the approach of evening. The birds lived in the avenue of orange trees that lined the driveway that led to the entrance of their house, in the Los Feliz district, a gracious suburb northwest of the commercial center of Los Angeles.

The fragrance of the orange blossoms combined with the opening buds of climbing jasmine and the mingled scents of hundreds of rosebushes blooming in her garden. Was there, she asked herself in wonder, any other place on earth in which spring lasted so long or smelled so divine? Was Los Angeles the olfactory capital of the universe? She felt impregnated by the embrace of dusk, when trees and flowers released their drifts of aromas.

It had been spring when they arrived in February, a spring of piercingly sweet-smelling lemon blossoms, huge yellow and purple pansies, tiny violas, English primroses and spreading forget-me-nots; spring again in March, which brought the first irises and tulips, tall calla lilies pushing up even where they weren’t wanted, and great gardenia bushes covered with small white flowers, just one of which could perfume an entire room; now spring had arrived for the third time in three months as the honeysuckle vied with the orange and jasmine for her pleasure; columbines, sweet peas, foxglove and larkspur grew in her garden, precisely as if it were spring in Sussex. Foxglove
and
palm trees? English cottage garden flowers growing in the shade of big-leafed tropical foliage? Blue-purple, otherworldly jacaranda trees—more than she had ever seen in Australia—sharing the same garden with
the typically French hydrangea bushes? A spring with no end in sight?

It was almost too much. There was something that confused Eve’s French soul about a land in which the combinations of flowers and trees were unrelated to any known botanical reality. Eve thought of April in Paris: the rain, the cold, the small, absolutely necessary comfort of a bunch of the first mimosa grown on a hillside near Cannes, bought at a Métro kiosk; rather pathetic and bewildered flowers with a blissful, nostalgic perfume and a powdery yellow bloom that would be gone tomorrow, flowers that were cherished for their bravery in existing at all.
That
was spring as she had known it. That was a familiar spring, miserable and miserly in its pleasures, spring during which only the dream of June kept you going. Was this land too good to be true?

Yet why should she question the gifts of the gods, Eve asked herself. The first Frenchman to come to California in 1786, a visitor by sea, named La Pérouse, certainly hadn’t troubled himself with the question, and when Louis Bouchette had planted his first vineyard on Macy Street in 1831, followed by Jean Louis Vignes a year later, they had not wasted their time in philosophical speculation on the ridiculous bounty of the climate.

By 1836 there had been a grand total of ten Frenchmen in Los Angeles. Now, less than a century later, the French community was two hundred thousand strong. An obvious affinity, she told herself, and stretched wearily, exhausted by her day with ladies possessed of an energy and enthusiasm she had never encountered anywhere in her life.

The two hundred thousand French residents might have been two million as far as Eve was concerned. She had spent a long morning in a meeting in the director’s room of the French Benevolent Society to discuss the administration of the French Hospital, followed by another meeting of the ladies’ branch of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. Her afternoon had been given over to a meeting of the
Société de Charité des Dames Françaises
. The only obligations she had managed to escape were the
Grove Gaulois
, which was the local chapter of Druids, the
Cercle Jeanne d’Arc
and the
Société des Alsaciens-Lorraines
.

If only the Druids, the Jeanne d’Arcians and the natives of Alsace could get together with the dozen or so other French organizations of Los Angeles to form just one huge club, her
life might be less exhausting, Eve thought hazily. The joiner mentality and booster spirit of the American citizen, combined with the lively ability for endless conversation common to all Frenchwomen, made for endless duties for
Madame la Consule Generale
. Canberra and Cape Town had been the tiniest of provincial towns by comparison.

Yet she was as happy as she was weary. Paul was working hard every minute of the day, running the big Consulate on Pershing Square, and the girls, who both went to school at Sacred Heart, seemed to have adapted to the life of California even before they went to sleep the first night in their new home.

Eve suspected that their instantaneous transformation had been caused by the arrival of the Good Humor man, whose tinkling bell had sounded just as they stopped at their new home. He had presented all four of them with free Good Humors, and both Delphine and Freddy had discovered that they had won the coveted “Lucky Sticks” after they had consumed the vanilla ice cream bar covered with a splintery hard chocolate coating.

Lucky Sticks had been an omen of the days to come, a land in which each day that dawned was filled with infinite possibilities, even if they were merely the ripe kumquats on the trees on Franklin Boulevard, which Freddy popped into her mouth as she walked to the school at the corner of Franklin and Western. Delphine, with friends of her own age, sauntered sedately down the street, pretending that they were not sisters, while Freddy frisked and jumped and roamed until she looked as if she had not yet outgrown the long rope which Eve had been obliged to attach to her during her most rambunctious years in Canberra.

No question about it, Eve thought, Freddy was a child who was born to run away from home. Her first word had been “up,” her first activity had been to climb whatever lay in her path and head outside the house. As soon as she could walk, she squirmed her way up and over every enclosure around the house and set forth to conquer the space around her. Only alert neighbors had kept her from trekking to the Outback, Paul said in despair, as he concocted a sort of harness that would allow her to go everywhere except into the street.

She takes after me, Eve told herself at first, secret delight mingled with mild public dismay. But it was soon apparent
that Mademoiselle Eve Coudert had been a model of the most proper ladylike deportment compared to Miss Marie-Frédérique de Lancel. The child wanted to fly.

“She distinctly said, ‘I want to fly,’ ” Paul told Eve, long before Freddy was three years old. “She said it five times and made a noise like those little sports planes from the Aero Club and ran around the room waving her arms.”

“It’s just an idea, darling. Perhaps all children want to fly, like the fairies in those stories you read her,” Eve had answered him.

“She means she wants to fly a plane. You know her as well as I do. If she said it, she meant it,” Paul said ominously.

“How could she have an idea like that, at her age? She probably means that she wants to ride in a plane.”

“How does she even know that people ride in planes?” he demanded.

“Well, I didn’t plant the idea in her mind, I assure you, darling. How does she know that people
fly
them, when it comes to that? It’s nothing to worry about—she probably wants to
be
a plane,” Eve retorted.

She dismissed the notion until, a year later, Freddy, who was supposed to be playing in her room, managed to grasp the four corners of a small quilt and jump out of a second-story window, hoping, apparently, that the quilt would serve as wings. She had been badly bruised, but her fall had been broken by thick bushes. Eve, terrified, rushed out to rescue her daughter, who emerged from the bushes by herself, disappointed but not frightened. “I should have jumped from the roof. Then it would have worked,” Freddy said thoughtfully.

Eve was thirty-four, but she felt at once older and younger as she listened to the doves. Older because of her official day and its official duties; younger because she lived on a hilltop in a house that might have belonged to a Spanish hacienda, with its arches and balconies, courtyards and fountains, and red-tiled roofs on many levels. Older because she had two beautiful, fast-growing daughters who drove her mad, each in her own, utterly different way, and younger because she was going to a ball tonight, in a long, backless black satin gown from Howard Greer, as sensuous and naked as any evening dress that had ever been cut, with only strings of rhinestones to hold it up. Older, because she had to uphold a serious position as the proper wife of the Consul General of France,
and younger because her hair, parted on the side, fell almost to her shoulders in soft, loose mermaid waves; because the style of the time demanded that she wear bright red lipstick and thick layers of mascara, and pencil her eyebrows, and darken her eyelids, and wear as little as possible under her clothes. Younger because she lived in a place—or at least everyone thought of it as a place—a place called Hollywood, where absolutely everyone was absolutely younger than absolutely everyone else in the world. Eve danced around her dressing room, not realizing that she was humming the tune of
Le Dernier Tango
, whose shocking, mocking refrain, “Go, go dance your tango!” had so alarmed her aunt when she had first heard it many years ago.

Greystone had been completed in 1928, a mansion that would never be equaled in Los Angeles. If it had been built centuries before in France or England, it would have been considered more than suitable as a fine residence that had no pretensions to being a castle. Its fifty-five rooms took up no more than 46,000 square feet, and the oil-rich Dohenys made do with a live-in staff of just thirty-six people. It was not a Newport Cottage or a Vanderbilt country house, but it rose less than a hundred yards north of the newly paved, almost unbuilt-upon country road called Sunset Boulevard. There the main structures were gas stations and a sandwich place called Gates’ Nut Kettle. Classic Greystone, with its beautifully laid stone walls covered in thick slabs of Welsh slate, and its hundreds of terraced acres landscaped in grand Renaissance formality, lacking only a moat, loomed large in the respectful attention of the community.

When Mrs. Doheny gave a ball, everyone came.

Eve clung to Paul’s arm, feeling unexpectedly shy. It was the first major party that had taken place since their arrival in Los Angeles, and until now she had been so immersed in meeting the French residents of the city that she had had no chance to make other friends.

They didn’t know the oil people or the newspaper people or the water people or the land developing people or the hotel people or the Hancock Park people or the Pasadena people—they didn’t know the rich and powerful of the town, all of whom seemed to be at the Dohenys’ tonight. The only other guests Eve recognized were the few top movie stars
who had been invited to mingle with the best society, and they, of course, didn’t know her.