The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
A tall blond girl, emphatically French, who spoke Hungarian and might show him another side of Paris: He could hardly say no to that. In the back of his mind he could hear Rosen telling him he couldn't stay a virgin forever. He found himself saying he'd be delighted to accept the invitation to lunch at the home of Marcelle Gerard's friend.
Madame Gerard wrote the name and address on the back of her own calling card.
"Sunday at noon," she said. "I can't be there myself, I'm afraid. I've already accepted another invitation. But I assure you you've got nothing to fear from Elisabet or her mother." She handed him the card. "They live not far from here, in the Marais."
He glanced at the address, wondering if the house were in the part of the Marais he had visited with his history class; then he experienced a sharp mnemonic tug and had to look again. Morgenstern, Madame Gerard had written. 39 rue de Sevigne.
"Morgenstern," he said aloud.
"Yes. The house is at the corner of the rue d'Ormesson." And then she seemed to notice something strange about Andras's expression. "Is there a problem, my dear?"
He had a momentary urge to tell her about his visit to the house on Benczur utca, about the letter he'd carried to Paris, but he remembered Mrs. Hasz's plea for discretion and recovered quickly. "It's nothing," he said. "It's been a while since I've had to appear in polite company, that's all."
"You'll do splendidly," said Madame Gerard. "You're more of a gentleman than most gentlemen I know." She stood and gave him her queenly smile, a kind of private performance of her own authority and elegance; then she drew her Chinese robe around her and retreated behind the gold-painted lindens of her dressing screen.
...
That night he sat on his bed and looked at the card, the address. He knew that the world of Hungarian expatriates in Paris was a finite one, and that Madame Gerard was well connected within it, but he felt nonetheless that this convergence must have some deeper meaning. He was certain his memory was correct; he hadn't forgotten the name Morgenstern, nor the street name rue de Sevigne. It thrilled him to think he would find out if Tibor had been right when he'd guessed that the letter had been addressed to the elder Mrs. Hasz's former lover. When he arrived at the Morgensterns', would he encounter a silver-haired gentleman--the father-in-law, perhaps, of Madame Morgenstern--who might be the mysterious C? How were the Haszes of Budapest connected with a ballet teacher in the Marais? And how would he refrain from mentioning any of this to Jozsef Hasz the next time they met?
But in the days that followed, he found he had little time to think about the approaching visit to the Morgensterns'. Only a month remained before the end of the term, and in three weeks' time there would be a critique of the students' fall projects. His project was a model of the Gare d'Orsay, built from his measured drawing; he'd finished the plans but had yet to begin the model itself. He would have to buy materials, study topographical maps so he could build the base, make templates for the forms of the model, cut out the forms, draw the arched windows and clock faces and all the stone detailing, and assemble them into the finished piece. He spent the week in studio surrounded by his plans. At night, after work, he was consumed with preparations for a statics exam, and in the afternoons he attended a series of lectures by Perret on the illfated Fonthill Abbey, a nineteenth-century faux cathedral whose tower had collapsed three times due to poor design, hasty construction, and the use of shoddy materials.
By Saturday afternoon when he arrived at work, the only mystery in his mind was how he had managed to reach the day before the luncheon without having had his only white shirt laundered, and without having set aside a few francs for a gift for his hostess.
After confessing the problem of his attire to Madame Gerard, he found himself in the workshop of the wardrobe mistress, Madame Courbet, who had constructed all the workers' clothes and military uniforms required for The Mother. While the revolution unfolded onstage, Madame Courbet had turned her attention to a different struggle: She was sewing fifty tutus for a children's dance recital that was take place at the Bernhardt that winter. Andras found her sitting amid a storm of white tulle and tiny silk flowers, her sewing machine beating its mechanical thunder at the center of that snowy cumulus. She was a sparrowlike woman past fifty, always dressed in impeccably tailored clothes; today her green wool dress was frosted with icy-looking fibers, and she held a spool of silver-white thread between her fingers. She removed her rimless spectacles to look at Andras.
"Ah, young Mr. Levi," she said. "And is it another complaint from Monsieur Claudel, or has someone else split a seam?" She twisted her mouth into a wry moue.
"It's something for me, actually," he said. "I'm afraid I need a shirt."
"A shirt? Are you to have a walk-on in the play?"
"No," he said, and blushed. "I need a shirt for a luncheon tomorrow."
"I see." She lay down the thread and crossed her arms. "That's not my usual line."
"I hate to disturb you when you're already so busy."
"Madame Gerard sent you, didn't she."
Andras confessed that she had.
"That woman," said Madame Courbet. But she got up from her little chair and stood in front of Andras, looking him up and down. "I wouldn't do this for just anyone,"
she said. "You're a good young man. They hound you to death here and pay you almost nothing, but you've never been short with me. Which is more than I can say for certain people." She took a tape measure from a table and strapped a pincushion to her wrist.
"Now, a gentleman's shirt, is it? You'll want a plain white oxford, of course. Nothing fancy." With a few deft movements she measured Andras's neck and shoulders and the length of his arm, then went to a wardrobe cabinet marked CHEMISES. From it she extracted a fine white shirt with a crisp collar. She showed Andras how the shirt contained a special pocket inside for a tube of fake blood; in one play, a man had to be stabbed night after night by his wife's jealous lover, and Madame Courbet had had to make an endless supply of shirts. From a drawer marked CRVT she selected a blue silk tie decorated with partridges. "It's an aristocrat's tie," she said, "a rich man's tie done up from a scrap. Look." She turned the tie over to show him how she'd sewn the silk remnant onto a plain cotton backing. Andras put it on along with the shirt, and she pinned the shirt for a swift alteration. At the end of the evening she gave him the finished shirt, wrapped in brown paper. "Don't let anyone else know where you got this," she said. "I wouldn't want the word to get out." But she pinched his ear affectionately as she sent him on his way.
As he was leaving, he had a sudden inspiration. He went to the grand front entrance of the theater, where Pely, the custodian, was sweeping the marble floor with his push broom. As usual, Pely had set the previous week's flower arrangements in a row inside the front doors; in the morning they would be picked up by the florist, vases and all, and replaced with new ones. Andras tipped his cap at Pely.
"If no one's using these flowers," he said, "may I?"
"Of course! Take them all. Take as many as you like."
Andras gathered a staggering armload of roses and lilies and chrysanthemums, branches with red berries, faux bluebirds on green twigs, feathery bunches of fern. He would not arrive empty-handed at the Morgensterns' on the rue de Sevigne; no, not he.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Luncheon
IT HAD BEEN only a few weeks since Andras had studied the architecture of the Marais with Perret's class. They had taken a special trip to see the Hotel de Sens, the fifteenth-century city palace with its turrets and leonine gargoyles, its confusion of rooflines, its cramped and cluttered facade. Andras had expected Perret's lecture to be a stern critique, a disquisition on the virtues of simplicity. But the lesson had been about the strength of the building, the fine craftsmanship that had allowed it to endure. Perret moved his hand along the stonework of the front entrance, showing the students what care the masons had taken in cutting the voussoirs of the Gothic arches. As he spoke, a pair of Orthodox men had appeared on the st
Now Andras passed behind the Hotel de Sens, past the manicured topiary gardens and the raised beds planted with purple kale for winter. Hefting his load of flowers, he sidestepped through the traffic on the rue de Rivoli. In the Marais the streets had an inside feel, almost as if they were part of a movie set. In Cinescope and Le Film Complet, Andras had seen the miniature cities built inside cavernous sound-stages in Los Angeles; here, the pale blue winter sky seemed like the arching roof of a studio, and Andras half expected to see men and women in medieval costume moving between the buildings, trailed by megaphone-wielding directors, by cameramen with their rafts of complicated equipment. There were kosher butchers and Hebrew bookshops and synagogues, all of them with signs written in Yiddish, as though this were a different country within the city. But there was no anti-Semitic graffiti of the kind that regularly appeared in the Jewish Quarter in Budapest. Instead the walls were bare, or plastered with advertisements for soap or chocolate or cigarettes. As Andras entered the tall corridor of the rue de Sevigne, a black taxi roared past, nearly knocking him off his feet. He steadied himself, shifted his vast bouquet from one arm to the other, and checked the address on the card Madame Gerard had given him.
Across the street he could see a windowed shop front with a wooden sign cut into the form of a child ballerina, and beneath it the legend ECOLE DEBALLET--MMEMORGENSTERN, MAITRESSE. He crossed the street. A set of demi-curtained windows ran along both sides of the corner building, and when he stood on his toes he could see an empty room with a floor of yellow wood. One wall was lined from end to end with mirrors; polished wooden practice barres ran along the others. A squat upright piano crouched in one corner, and beside it stood a table with an old-fashioned gramophone, its glossy black morning-glory horn catching the light. A diffuse haze of dust motes hovered in the midday silence. Some remnant of movement, of music, seemed revealed in that tourbillon of dust, as if ballet continued to exist in that room whether a class was being conducted there or not.
The building entrance was a green door set with a leaded glass window. Andras rang the bell and waited. Through the sheer panel that covered the window, he could see a stout woman descending a flight of stairs. She opened the door and put a hand on her hip, giving him an appraising look. She was red-faced, kerchiefed, with a deep smell of paprika about her, like the women who brought vegetables and goat's milk to sell at the market in Debrecen.
"Madame Morgenstern?" he said, with hesitation; she didn't look much like a ballet mistress.
"Hah! No," she said in Hungarian. "Come in and close the door behind you.
You'll let in the cold."
So he must have passed her inspection; he was glad, because the smells coming from inside were making him dizzy with hunger. He stepped into the entry, and the woman continued in a rapid stream of Hungarian as she took his coat and hat. What an enormous lot of flowers. She would see if there was a vase upstairs large enough to hold them. Lunch was nearly ready. She had prepared stuffed cabbage, and she hoped he liked it, because there was nothing else, except for spaetzle and a fruit compote and some sliced cold chicken and a walnut strudel. He should follow her upstairs. Her name was Mrs. Apfel. They climbed to the second floor, where she directed him to a front parlor decorated with worn Turkish rugs and dark furniture; she told him to wait there for Madame Morgenstern.
He sat on a gray velvet settee and took a long breath. Beneath the heady smell of stuffed cabbage there was the dry lemony tang of furniture polish and a faint scent of licorice. On a small carved table before him was a candy dish, a cut-glass nest filled with pink and lilac sugar eggs. He took an egg and ate it: anise. He straightened his tie and made sure the cotton backing wasn't showing. After a moment he heard the click of heels in the hallway. A slim shadow moved across the wall, and a girl entered with a blue glass vase in her hands. The vase bristled with a wild profusion of flowers and branches and fake bluebirds, the daylilies beginning to darken at their edges, the roses hanging heavy on their stems. From behind this mass of fading blooms the girl looked at Andras, her dark hair brushed like a wing across her forehead.
"Thank you for the flowers," she said in French.
As she set the vase on the sideboard, he saw she wasn't a girl at all; her features had the sharper angles of an adult woman's, and she held her back straight as if from decades of ballet training. But she was lithe and small, her hands like a child's on the blue glass vase. Andras drank in a flood of embarrassment as he watched her arrange the bouquet. Why had he brought so many half-dead flowers? Why the bluebirds? Why all those branches? Why hadn't he just bought something simple at the corner market? A dozen daisies? A sheaf of lupines? How much could it have cost? A couple of francs?
The wood nymph smiled back at him over her shoulder, then came to shake his hand.
"Claire Morgenstern," she said. "It's a pleasure to meet you at last, Mr. Levi.
Madame Gerard has had many kind things to say about you."
He took her hand, trying not to stare; she looked decades younger than he'd imagined. He'd envisioned her as a woman of Madame Gerard's age, but this woman couldn't have been more than thirty. She had a quiet, astonishing beauty--fine bones, a mouth like a smooth pink-skinned fruit, large intelligent gray eyes. Claire Morgenstern: So this was the C. of the letter, not some elderly gentleman who had once been Mrs.
Hasz's lover. Her large gray eyes were Mrs. Hasz's eyes, the quiet grief he saw there a mirror of the expression he'd seen in the older woman's eyes. This Claire Morgenstern had to be Mrs. Hasz's daughter. A long moment passed before Andras could speak.
"The pleasure to make your acquaintance," he said in rushed and stilted French, knowing he'd gotten it wrong as soon as he said it. Belatedly he remembered to rise, and though he struggled for the right words, found himself continuing in the same vein.
"Thank you for the invitation of me," he stammered, and sat down again.
Madame Morgenstern took a seat beside him on a low chair. "Would you rather speak Hungarian?" she asked in Hungarian. "We can, if you like."
He looked up at her as if from the bottom of a well. "French is fine," he said, in Hungarian. And then in French, again, "French is fine."
"All right, then," she said. "You'll have to tell me what Hungary is like these days.
It's been years since I was there, and Elisabet has never been."
As if she'd been conjured by the mention of her name, a tall stern-looking girl entered the room, carrying a pitcher of iced tea. She was broad-shouldered like the swimmers Andras had admired at Palatinus Strand in Budapest; she gave him a look of impatient disdain as she filled his glass.
"This is my Elisabet," said Madame Morgenstern. "Elisabet, this is Andras."
Andras couldn't make himself believe that this girl was Madame Morgenstern's daughter. In Elisabet's hands, the tea pitcher looked like a child's toy. He drank his tea and looked from mother to daughter. Madame Morgenstern stirred her tea with a long spoon, while Elisabet, having set the pitcher on a table, threw herself into a wing chair and checked her wristwatch.
"If we don't eat now I'll be late for the movie," she said. "I'm supposed to meet Marthe in an hour."
"What movie?" Andras said, searching for a thread of conversation.
"You wouldn't be interested," Elisabet said. "It's in French."
"But I speak French," Andras said.
Elisabet gave him a dry smile. "May-juh-pargl-Fronsay," she said.
Madame Morgenstern closed her eyes. "Elisabet," she said.
"What?"
"You know what."
"I just want to go to the movies," Elisabet said, and knocked her heels dully against the rug. Then she tilted her chin toward Andra
Andras looked down. His tie had flipped over as he'd leaned forward to take his glass of tea, and now the cotton backing faced the world, while the gold partridges flew unseen against his shirtfront. Hot with shame, he turned it around and stared into his tea.
"Lunch is served!" said the red-faced Mrs. Apfel from the doorway, pushing back her kerchief. "Come now, before the cabbage gets cold."
...
There was a proper dining room, with polished wooden china cabinets and a white cloth on the table: echoes of the house on Benczur utca, Andras thought. But there were no exsanguinated sandwiches here; the table was heavy with platters of stuffed cabbage and chicken and bowls of spaetzle, as though there were eight of them eating instead of three. Madame Morgenstern sat at the head of the table, Andras and Elisabet across from each other. Mrs. Apfel served the stuffed cabbage and spaetzle; Andras, grateful for the distraction, tucked his napkin into his collar and began to eat. Elisabet frowned at her plate. She pushed the cabbage aside and began eating the spaetzle, one tiny dumpling at a time.