Scruples (10 page)

As her fat melted, Billy discovered her bones. They were small bones, like those of her mother’s family, and long bones, like those of her father’s family. “Small, long bones—long, small bones,” she murmured to herself like a mantra, over and over for hours—“small, long bones.” Soon she discovered that she didn’t have any muscles, except in her legs, thanks to years of compulsory field hockey and bike riding up the steep hills of Emery. She joined a daily afternoon modern dance class in the Rue de Lille, several miles from home, and she never missed a class.

Many rituals, all connected with her body, took her over. She must walk at least one way to class, or if she missed a day, both back and forth on the next day. She must never take the third
tartine
at breakfast. She drank her coffee black. She must brush her hair exactly two hundred strokes every day. The new underwear she had bought must be washed every night before she went to sleep no matter how tired she was. Billy wrote down the contents of each meal in a secret notebook and estimated how many ounces of food she had consumed each day. She embraced the religion of thinness as if she had had a spiritual conversion. If a hair shirt had been necessary, Billy would have worn it joyfully.

Her new gray skirt had to be taken in and taken in again by Lilianne’s little dressmaker. Soon Billy’s dark red sweaters hung on her, but she was determined not to buy others until she had finished losing weight. She threw out all her old clothes except for her winter coat, made of dark brown nutria, which Aunt Cornelia had given her as an eighteenth birthday present. While she was still shrinking, Billy and the Comtesse made an expedition to Hermès, where Billy bought a wide belt to hold in the coat and a narrow one to rope in the sweaters. In addition, she bought her first Hermès scarf. Lilianne had taught her that with a well-cut skirt, a good pair of shoes, a decent sweater, and that one indispensable Hermès scarf, any Frenchwoman may consider herself as well dressed as the Queen of England, the Queen of Belgium, or La Comtesse de Paris, the wife of the pretender to the French throne, because it is thus that those royal ladies have always dressed in their private lives.

Billy had a secret. She was beginning to understand almost everything that was said at the table. She did not speak often to the others, for there was all the difference in the world between understanding and actually venturing out into the dangerous high seas of conversation. But every day she was sure, inside, that she was making progress. It filled her with a tremulous, quaking feeling of frightened expectation, which she tried to push away. The rules of grammar and lists of vocabulary words that had once been memorized and consigned to exam notebooks started to spring back into her mind. Now they lived, they jumped, they sang, and even verb endings took on an air of absolute rightness, necessity. It all seemed, suddenly, to make perfect sense. Billy felt that French was her miser’s treasure, the secret hoard that would unlock the entrance to a kingdom. But she wasn’t ready to test herself yet in front of a group.

Danielle was the first to notice.

“Maman?”

“Yes, chêne?”

“I think Billy has the ear.”

“Truly?”

“Yes, I’m certain. We were alone the other day for just a few minutes and I complimented her on her loss of weight and then she answered me and we had a little talk. She has the ear. Her grammar and her vocabulary are not good yet, she does not understand the subjunctive at all, but the ear is there.”

Lilianne felt a spurt of triumph. The ear was everything. A person can live in France for twenty years and speak impeccably correct textbook French, but without an ear for the language, it will never be accepted as French by the French themselves. The French, unlike Americans, do not think it is charming in the slightest to hear someone speaking their beloved language with a delightfully foreign accent, unless that person is obviously noble and English, in which case it is understandable, even forgivable, if not agreeable. If Billy truly had the ear, and Danielle could not possibly be wrong about a thing as important as that, it was because she, Lilianne, had insisted that no one speak English to her. Her own daughters, who were sent to live in the homes of English friends every summer, spoke perfect upper-class English. As everyone knew, a second language was the foundation of any good education. But Billy had never guessed that she could communimicate with them in her own language and be understood. That would have ruined everything. Indeed, things did seem to have an air of arranging themselves.

Toward the end of December, the Comtesse received a gift of four fine, plump rabbits from her nephew, Comte Edouard de la Côte de Grace, who had bagged them in the fields of his Ile-de-France hunting lodge, about forty miles outside of Paris. Louise, who had been famous for her traditional regional cooking in the lavish days before the war, made an especially important trip to the shops one morning and came home with all the ingredients for both a classic
ragoût de lapin
and her specialty, an open-faced apple tart glazed in syrup. The Comtesse invited her distinguished aunt and uncle, the Marquis and the Marquise du Tour la Forêt as well as another middle-aged and amiable couple, the Baron and the Baronne Mallarmé du Novembre, whom Billy had met before at one of the Comtesse’s small, infrequent dinner parties, which had been made possible by the gift of game from one or another of her hunting friends.

Lilianne de Vertdulac was motivated no less by hospitality, for she cherished her circle of old friends, as by the desire to show off her achievement Billy, she judged, would reflect credit on her. True, the girl still had no chic. If all it took was one Hermès scarf, the whole world might be chic. But she had attained something far more important in the Comtesse’s mind. She had
quality
. Her skin was absolutely clear, her teeth, thanks to Aunt Cornelia’s insistence on an orthodontist, were perfect, her long, dark hair, pulled back in a simple ponytail, was thick and well cared for, and her skirt and sweater were of good enough material to suffice, just. Her manner was modest, her posture, since she had been taking dance class, was excellent, and she looked exactly like what she was,
une jeune fille américaine de très bonne famille
. The Comtesse knew her friends well. They judged by the highest and the oldest of patrician standards; they could not be fooled by an imitation, even the cleverest. She would never have invited them to dine, in intimacy, with the girl from Texas or the girl from New York, but the girl from Boston was another matter. She could pass inspection. Her muteness in company would pass for reserve, and, most important of all, she was no longer fat, a thing unheard of in people of quality unless they were very old or very royal.

Sometimes of late. Bill had shown signs of what the Comtesse believed to be true beauty, but she told herself severely that it was too soon to calculate if they were a promise of things to come or simply wishful thinking on her part. It was enough that Billy stay thin, Lilianne cautioned herself.

The Marquis du Tour la Forêt, who admired the courage of his niece in her limited financial circumstances, brought an offering of three bottles of champagne to accompany the dinner, and he gallantly insisted that Billy drink a glass as each bottle was opened, absolutely refusing to pay attention to her protests that she was not used to drinking wine at all. The table was expanded to accommodate the four guests, and while Danielle and Solange served the apple tarts, the Baronne Mallarmé du Novembre tried to engage Lilianne’s shy, young paying guest in conversation by asking her if the old rhyme about Boston was true: If the Lowells still spoke only to the Cabots and the Cabots spoke only to God?

This is not a question that may be lightly put to a Winthrop. Not even in jest. Billy found herself, before she had time to smile yes or smile no or smile in any of the many ways she had developed for answering questions without speaking, launched into complicated and detailed explanations of the relative merits of the Gardners, the Perkinses, the Saltonstalls, the Hallowells, the Hunnenwells, the Minots, the Welds, and the Winthrops, in relation to the Lowells and the Cabots. She touched lightly on the family trees of the Wolcotts, the Birds, the Lymans, and the Codmans before her impassioned, champagned-gilded genealogical flight ended as something in Madame’s incredulous expression caught her attention and made her realize that she was speaking—was it too much?—was it too loudly?—no—
in French!

The barrier was down, never to rise again. One such breakthrough experience in a language is enough. It opened all the doors of Billy’s mind, destroyed all her hesitations, vanquished her timidity.

Speaking French, Billy found herself another person than she had ever been. In French she had never been a freak at school, never been a poor relation, never been the last and the least of her cousins. Never, it seemed, been fat. Or lonely or unloved. She found that the lessons she had learned by rote, and just as quickly forgotten, came flooding back into her mind, filled with such obvious and logical reality that she gasped in distress at the ignorance of their meaning in which she had memorized them only a year or so before. She talked and talked and talked. To bus conductors, to Louise, to Danielle and Solange, to children in the park, to all the girls in her dance class, to ticket sellers in the Métro, and most particularly to Lilianne.

Every day she stretched herself in French as she stretched her body in dance class. She greedily accumulated the minutiae of French life. It was perfectly correct to address a duchess simply as “Madame” after you had met her, but you must take care to address the concierge by her full name, “Madame Blanc,” each and every time you saw her; you could not live happily in France unless you knew how to build an efficient fire because the law required the landlord to heat the building only when the pipes were about to freeze; an unmarried girl must never expect her hand to be kissed, but if it is, she must never indicate that she has noticed the impropriety; at a buffet dinner the women of the household fill the gentlemen’s plates before they take any food of their own—at least
chez
Madame; and, astonishingly, the Comtesse considered herself a good Catholic, although she went to Mass only at Easter. Also, to send a flower arrangement is insulting because it indicates that you do not trust the recipient to be able to arrange cut flowers, but it is not as bad as writing a personal letter on a typewriter.

Now she bought new clothes, with what the Comtesse thought was typical Boston caution. A few sweaters and skirts, several silk blouses, a tailored wool coat, and one simple black dress, which she wore with the exceedingly good pearls Aunt Cornelia had given her for graduation from Emery. Each purchase was made at the shop on the Avenue Victor Hugo with the advice of Lilianne, who initiated Billy once and forever into the small company of women who totally understand the vast gulf between clothes that fit and clothes that do not fit. Slowly she explored the mysteries and significance of cut and quality. Together they went to the collections at Dior, where the directrice, husky voiced, lanky Suzanne Luling, who was a friend of Lilianne’s, gave them excellent second-row seats only five weeks after the collection had opened, as soon as the serious buyers had come and given their orders, so that there was room for mere observers. They went to other collections, chez Saint Laurent and Lanvin and Nina Ricci and Balmain and Givenchy and Chanel, the seats less good, sometimes quite bad, for impecunious comtesses are not treated with much respect in the great couture houses; however, the whispered commentary that Lilianne poured into Billy’s ear was just as canny and sharp-eyed as if they had been looking with every intention of buying.

“That number would never be for you, it is too sophisticated for anyone under thirty; that dress is too extreme—it will be
démodé
by next spring; now, that one will be good for three years; that suit is made of too heavy a tweed—it will bag; that coat makes one awkward; that color would make one look faded; that dress is perfection. If you were to buy only one number, that would be it.” Privately she wondered why Billy did not permit herself at least one Chanel suit. Even the fabled Bostonian practice of living on the income of the income of one’s income could surely, in Billy’s case, accommodate itself to such a small indiscretion during a year in Paris. It was a shame she did not profit by the occasion. However, the expenditure of money was not a subject that Lilianne felt she had the right to discuss with her paying guests, even so dear a one as this.

The woman of infinite sophistication and the nineteen-year-old girl often strolled together along the Rue du Faubourg-St-Honoré, analyzing and judging each object in each shopwindow as if it were one vast art gallery and they were the most discriminating of collectors. Billy absorbed Lilianne’s standards of quality. Since the Comtesse had no means to satisfy her tastes, she could afford to approve of only the very, very best and then, only after the most judicious comparisons.

It had never been a part of the Comtesse’s reception of paying guests to introduce them to suitable young men. In the first place she did not know a great many young Frenchmen and in the second place it would have added an unnecessary complication to her life. As it was, soon there would be her daughters to launch in worldly life, a prospect she dreaded, since she was not of the matchmaking disposition and they would be girls with nothing to offer but themselves and their ancient blood.

However, a temptation entered her mind as she thoughtfully surveyed the young woman who now occupied such a special place under her roof; a tall, slim girl of unmistakable distinction, yes, a girl of beauty, a girl who spoke French no American could be ashamed of, a girl who was connected with all the great fortunes of Boston, a girl who had come to her recommended by the venerable and enormously wealthy Lady Molly Berkeley.