schoolmates in Blacksburg. She looked nothing like the girl I had known, always in a dirty dress, shoes a size too small. She had always had a pretty face, though, and I saw that it was even prettier now, especially when set off by an expensive-looking wool hat and broadcloth coat with fox trim. She was with another woman, who was equally well turned out.
“I heard a rumor in Blacksburg that you lived in Paris now, but I never took it to be true,” she said, still looking at me in shock. “But it is. It really is. You’re right here.”
“Yes, it is,” I said, trying not to look as stunned as she did. “This is my daughter, Lucie,” I added before sending Lucie off to play with the railing again. She could have licked it for all I cared at that point. I just wanted her away from the woman and the conversation I was sure we would have. I knew it would be impossible for Dorothy not to mention it. Not to mention them.
“What a beautiful child,” she said, looking at Lucie playing. “She looks like one of you. The Hollands. Especially the eyes.”
“Maybe a bit,” I said. “But she really resembles her father.”
“Does she? Who is her father?” she asked, trying her best to make it sound innocent.
“A Frenchman. Parisian,” I said, smiling tightly.
I could tell she wanted me to elaborate on the man who had plucked me from my hell in Virginia, but I did not go on. Because really, I had plucked myself from all that. We spoke about Paris a few moments, and when her friend walked off to admire the Grand Palais, Dorothy of course brought up our shared hometown.
“After I finished school, I moved to Richmond,” she said. “It felt so cosmopolitan to me, if you can believe it.”
“I can,” I said, smiling, moving a step back to indicate that I was ready to close the conversation, but Dorothy went on. “I first married a veterinarian who had studied at the Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg. He did very well for himself, thankfully.”
“How nice for you,” I said, taking another step back, but she matched me, like we were fencing.
“It was a fine marriage,” she said, warming to her topic, “but, well, it wasn’t a coup de foudre, as the French say. And I’d always dreamt of bigger things than being a veterinarian’s wife. But I got very lucky. Girls like us really do deserve luck sometimes, don’t we?”
“What was this stroke of luck?” I asked, cursing myself for my curiosity.
“When I turned twenty-three, my husband flat out died!” she exclaimed. “He fell off a horse and God just sucked the breath and heartbeat right out of him. Can you believe it? God must be a woman,” she said, looking up at the sky as if she might be struck by lightning there and then for saying such a thing.
“Oh, how dreadful, I’m terribly sorry,” I said, feeling like that was probably a better fate for the veterinarian than to be married to Dorothy for the rest of his life.
“Don’t be. After that I took a page out of your book and left the state entirely. Though I went to California. Los Angeles. I met a wonderful man in the picture industry, Nick Lesser.”
She paused as if the name should mean something to me. It did not.
“Anyway,” she said, gesturing dramatically with her slender, gloved hands. “Nick had a few smashing successes in America, which put him in high demand all over the globe, including here. So now he’s in Paris helping the French make pictures, too. He wasn’t going to leave California, his career was going so well, but with the money the French offered him, and with the economy so dismally bad and so many people barely able to afford a ticket to the pictures at home, how could he turn it down? They assured him that the economy in France was better off than in America, and they were certainly correct. Just look at that bridge,” she said, pointing to the Pont Alexandre III. “At home, people would be chiseling that gold right off.”
“I don’t think it’s real gold. I think it’s just gold paint—”
“All that is to say,” she said, interrupting me with a giddy smile on her face, “that I live here now. In Paris!”
My heart stopped.
“You live in Paris?” I said, nearly choking on the words. “How surprising,” I said, trying to find oxygen again.