around in his seat. “Now we say le Viet Nam. L’Indochine, c’est fini.”
“Yes,” I acknowledged, “I know.” Two years ago, Indochine finally became le Viet Nam, after nearly a decade of war with France. It was still divided between the communist north and anticommunist south, but it was its own now, no longer a French colony. “When I was there,” I said firmly, “it was Indochine.”
I opened the door and ran to the station, feeling like a well-outfitted duck. Inside, I joined hundreds of others who also looked like they’d arrived via bathtub. All around me coats were being removed and shaken out, hair patted dry, laments muttered about ruined shoes and delayed trains.
I took off my own coat and scarf and then joined the line at the ticket counter, requesting a first-class seat for the three p.m. train to Deauville.
“The train is delayed one hour,” the seller said. “And then, it will only leave if the rain lets up. It doesn’t look like it will, but take a chance if you’d like.”
“I will,” I said, handing him the fare. “And you may be surprised. Sometimes the heaviest rains are the shortest.”
He nodded politely and motioned to the man behind me to step forward.
I took my bag and walked to the restaurants near the shopping arcade. The smell of damp clothes permeated the air along with a feeling of agitation, of having to travel with wet stockings. I entered the first café I saw, sat under a large advertisement for Rouyer cognac, and ordered a coffee. In the corner, Charles Aznavour’s “Sur Ma Vie” was playing on a record player, a song that was being hummed in every corner of France. I sipped the coffee and smiled at the waiter. “Do you have anything else?” I asked.
“Besides coffee?”
“No, besides this song,” I said, nodding toward the corner.
“Of course, madame. If you think you’re tired of hearing it, imagine how I feel.” He let the song finish and then changed the record. A few seconds later Jo Stafford’s “You Belong to Me,” an American hit from a few years before, filled the room and I nodded in appreciation.
I ordered a croissant, ate it slowly, and had started to signal to the waiter for another coffee when I glimpsed something through the café’s glass door that made my heart catch. I stood up immediately, nearly knocking over the table with my knees.
“Are you all right, madame?” the waiter asked as he approached.
“I’m fine. I’m sorry,” I said, reaching into my bag. “I must go.” I dropped coins on the table, too many coins, and pushed the chair back in a hurry.
“You saw a ghost?” he asked.
“No,” I said, without looking at him. “I saw a color.”
I rushed back into the humming crowds. Among the dark pantlegs and damp skirts, I was sure I’d seen a flash of green silk covering a woman’s legs. But not any green. Nguyen green. A dress in the most beautiful hue caught between the practical grays and lifeless blues of the other travelers.
I walked out to the Salle des Pas Perdus, the waiting hall, tempted to crouch onto the floor to have a better look. I was quite sure that there was only one woman in the world who would wear green silk of that particular shade in a rainstorm. Marcelle de Fabry.
I darted from corner to corner as quickly as I could despite my traveling bag starting to feel like a sack of cement hanging on my arm. I looked everywhere, but I didn’t see Marcelle, or any woman in green silk.
I had lived in the same city as Marcelle de Fabry for seventeen years, that much I knew, and I had never seen her. Looking for her had become a habit, especially when I was in the Fourth Arrondissement, as I’d heard she lived on the Quai de Bethune, yet until today I hadn’t even glimpsed her shadow.
Marcelle de Fabry. The woman my mother hated. The woman who had tried to poison her, or kill her, depending on who was telling the story. My father leaned toward kill. My mother had settled on poison. Maybe it was because of these stories, or through my understanding of Indochine as I grew up, of the growing number of people, French and Vietnamese, who believed what Marcelle did, but she had become mythical to me.
I had only met her once, but that moment had sewn itself into my memory. We had spoken in Hanoi shortly after my family