The Shadows of Foxworth Read online

  “But you really think I can get him to like me? You’re not just saying it to shut me up?”

  Honestly, I was hoping to shut her up about the way Louis was looking at me these days, and as far as Louis liking her, definitely not, I thought, but didn’t say it. Regine’s nose was too thin and a bit too long. Her lips were a little crooked, especially when she was thinking hard. She was lean, still more boyish, and she was a good two inches or so taller than any other girl our age. Her legs were so long that it looked like she had to stop them from growing or she would become a circus freak. The rest of her body needed years to catch up, especially her bosom, which was still asleep in her childlike body, despite her introduction to what many of the older women told me was a woman’s curse.

  But she did have thick, butter-smooth black hair and a perennial tan, which gave her a dark-peach complexion, highlighting her eyes. Her biggest fault was that she talked too much, talked as if she was afraid of any silence. Any boy she fancied would have difficulty thinking, much less getting a word in before she had started another sentence, and I knew that boys hated that. They had to be the ones to control the conversations. If we were clever, we would let them believe they were controlling everything, even though they weren’t.

  I grunted rather than say Oui.

  Maybe I was simply too critical of Regine, too critical especially when it came to other girls. I was always envying someone for something, even though I was told I had the best features of my parents and would surely grow to be as beautiful as if not more beautiful than my mother. There was no reason for me to lack any self-confidence, and I didn’t like pretending to be shy, even though my mother favored girls who were.

  Yvon agreed with me, however. He said very shy girls were probably turtles in an earlier life. He told our mother that he didn’t trust girls who were too shy. “They’re laying traps with their blushing,” he said. “Marlena has more intelligent things to say than most of my friends. Why force her to keep quiet just because she is a girl?”

  If Papa heard him, he would start to smile and then quickly look away before Mama saw him. She didn’t disagree with Yvon. She often told me I was bright and beautiful. However, she always pointed out that it was all right for her to say it because she was my mother, and mothers had almost an obligation to praise and brag about their children.

  Mama wouldn’t let Papa paint me, however. There was nothing I dreamed of more, but I wouldn’t say or ask for it.

  “Don’t stroke her ego that much yet, Beau,” she would tell him, with her eyes fixed on me, if he as much as suggested he might. “Humility will save her from making all-too-familiar mistakes.”

  Papa looked at her and nodded in agreement. Whatever she implied kept him from putting up any argument. But what did that mean? What familiar mistakes was she referring to? I wondered. Was she talking about my future ones or mistakes she and Papa had made? Neither Yvon nor I ever heard our parents confess to any serious errors. We overheard other adults, parents of other children, declare they had made this wrong decision or that, most of the time admitting they had not listened to their mothers or fathers and nearly ruined their own lives, but our parents avoided talking about their youth. It was as if they were never children.

  They did have deep secrets, I thought, secrets perhaps Yvon didn’t know, either, but, like me, he felt them hovering around us. Too often, we would see them whispering, and often when something someone in the village said seemed quite insignificant to us, they would look at each other quickly and sharply, as if they could anticipate the questions that would attack us like angry bees. Sometimes they would move us along, as if we could be infected by the memories other people had of them when they first had come to France with little more than hope. They certainly weren’t rich then and weren’t truly rich now, but we were comfortable and never lacked for anything like so many other families. We could have been very poor. Maybe they were ashamed of that. Maybe that gave them their nightmares.

  A number of times, I overheard my mother say that if it weren’t for Jean-Paul and Papa’s inheriting his cousin Beverly Morris’s money, we’d probably never have lasted here. Jean-Paul Vitton had arranged for our parents to come to France. He had found Papa his first art-teacher job tutoring rich children who had “no ounce of talent.” However, it was only that way and other ways that Jean-Paul introduced him to people who would buy his work in France that made our life here possible. He was the closest Yvon and I had to a relative because he was our godfather.

  If anything, Mama frightened me with her vague references to early memories that suggested their struggles and fears. Maybe that was why she didn’t like to talk about them. When she did, she made it sound as though they were washed ashore with nothing but themselves. It made me wonder. What if Jean-Paul had not been able to help them? What if Papa would have failed to become the artist he was and they were here with no friends or relatives? Just thinking about us wandering Europe like gypsies would make me tremble. I had seen enough of them coming along and begging for bread or a little work to earn some bread.

  Yvon had too much self-pride. I was sure that he would have withered away. Mama wouldn’t be as beautiful, and Papa would have become so much older quickly, like most of those men we saw pass through, men with faces so empty of expectations for themselves that they looked more like ghosts to me with their gaunt eyes.

  Why did our parents come here, anyway? America was where everyone wanted to go to get rich. There was something dark, something hidden between sentences or long silences. I can’t remember exactly how young I was when I first felt this sense of mystery about my parents, these clouds of secrets around them, but I did ask Yvon about it more and more as we grew up.

  “Mama and Papa whisper a lot, don’t they? They’re probably thinking about when they were so poor in America. Do you think they were ever as desperate as some of the gypsies? Do they wake up from nightmares about it?”

  I didn’t really believe that was a possible answer, but I wanted to be sure I wasn’t imagining that fearful look on their faces whenever even the slightest reference to their past emerged. Maybe, hopefully, I was making it all seem bigger than it was.

  “We don’t know if they were ever that poor, Marlena. Stop thinking so much about it. What difference does it make to you now? Besides, everyone has nightmares or memories they’d rather keep to themselves or certainly out of the ears of their children,” Yvon said, sounding years older, as he always did. Hearing him, someone would think he was the one who didn’t have a real childhood and not our parents.

  “But we’re older now. They can tell us the truth. We’re no longer children.”

  “Maybe that’s more reason for them to keep whatever it is to themselves.”

  “I don’t understand. How could that be more reason?”

  Yvon often said things that flew above me. I called them bird words.

  “Shadows are best left in the shadows.”

  “What? What shadows?”

  Bird words again, I thought.

  He said nothing more. I was going to pursue it and force him to reveal what he meant, but the look in his eyes told me not to talk about it, to stop asking questions. How did he know that? How did he know it would be better for us not to talk about Mama and Papa’s past, especially in front of them? Did he have so much more wisdom at sixteen than I had at fourteen?

  “Parents have an unfair advantage over us,” he said just last week as a sort of response to my questions about our parents’ whispering and private looks, maybe because I was so much more persistent.

  “What do you mean?” Again, I had no idea what he was saying, but this time I was determined to force him to explain. He took one look at me and knew I’d ask him until his ears were stuffed and had turned red.

  “They know us from the day we are born, know who we are, how we think, what makes us laugh and cry, and when we do something they might not know or understand, they question us like the gendarmerie. Maybe it’s because they worry; maybe it’s because they love us so much; maybe it’s both. We don’t know the same about them. It takes years to, or maybe we never do. That’s why it’s unfair, especially when they interrogate us like the police might.”

  I wasn’t really surprised he thought our parents could be like the police. Most parents were like that. However, to me it seemed that they were questioning him more than they were me all the time. But then again, he was older, with more opportunities to get into trouble. He was on his own more and wandered off with his friends as far as Nice. When he returned, Mama especially might pounce, demanding to know every detail about what he and his friends had done. I thought she was unfair, always assuming something terrible. What made her think so darkly when it came to my brother? He never did anything that would embarrass or trouble her so.

  “Your mother is right to be concerned,” Madame Cosse, the butcher’s wife, told me when I mentioned how intense my mother could be when she questioned my brother. “Boys, because of their nature, have more access to trouble. Never let a boy dare you to do anything, Marlena. It’s built into them to be more distress for their parents and for themselves.”

  “But it wasn’t Adam. It was Eve who brought the world trouble,” I parroted from Monsieur Appert’s lessons. “Monsieur Appert says so.”

  “Of course he does. He’s a man. Just listen to me. Always listen to the wiser, older people around you, especially older women. Women are born with more wisdom,” she insisted, and then muttered, “It’s just wasted because men are deaf. But it’s not wasted on you.”

  It seemed to me that everyone in this village, from the baker to the cabinet maker to the street cleaner, was always looking out for me, looking to protect me, and Yvon as well. They wanted to be sure we shared any worldly knowle
dge that they had acquired. We were like one extended family. Everyone behaved like he or she was an uncle or aunt, maybe more so because they knew Yvon and I had no grandparents. Papa’s mother died of cholera when he was no older than I was. He was always a little unclear about how old he was when his father had heart failure. Papa would only say he was in his teens. Mama had told us that her mother died from consumption and then her father died from heart failure the following year.

  If we, especially I, asked any more questions about our grandparents, they both advised us to leave what was buried, buried. It was all too sad, and why dwell on sadness? Yvon didn’t have to be told twice, but I couldn’t stop being curious.

  Our family was different from other families in the village in that way. Neither of our parents liked to talk about their families very much. Neither mentioned a favorite aunt or uncle. Sometimes I felt we were the first family on earth with no relatives ever.

  Our history seemed to have begun with our parents’ arrival in France, where they were married in St. Michael’s Church in the heart of Villefranche. They said they had gone through a civil service but wanted a religious one. Every time we walked past the church, I imagined them emerging, Mama in a beautiful lily-white wedding dress, holding a bouquet of a variety of flowers, and Papa in his suit and tie looking even more handsome. How silly of me to wish it, but I wished I had been there and stood beside them when they took their vows.

  Despite Regine’s babbling about Louis, I was still thinking about all that as we headed back to my new home on the hill looking over the harbor of La Darse. The sun had broken free from a patch of clouds and dropped its late-June rays in waves of thunderous heat over us. Thankfully, our new home was only two streets up. Regine lived four streets up, and the way rose so steeply it was painful to go quickly. However, my legs were quite strong, as were the legs of most who lived above the village and had to navigate long and steep stone stairways.

  On summer days, especially like this one, I hated doing errands, but as soon as I was old enough to go myself, there was no refusing. Yvon was an apprentice to Monsieur Dufloit, the village cobbler, and had fewer household duties. He did enjoy the work, and thanks to him, I had a fancy pair of Edwardian high-top black leather boots. It was one of his first accomplishments.

  My parents, especially my mother, were proud of him for thinking first of me and not making something for himself. He didn’t actually give them to me, however. He left them outside my bedroom door, and when I thanked him, giving him a quick peck on the cheek, he blushed and said he didn’t know what I was talking about. From what I could see, Yvon was shy only with me. He certainly didn’t hesitate to flirt with other girls, especially Marion Veil, whose father was the village doctor. She was the oldest of three daughters and was certainly one of the prettiest girls in Villefranche, with her strawberry-red hair and blue-green eyes.

  But Yvon was uncomfortable being called her boyfriend, even though he basically was. I think he just didn’t want to commit emotionally to anyone other than his family. It was part of the distrust that ran along with the blood in his veins. When I asked him what if she had told him that she loved him, he grimaced and said he wouldn’t believe her if she had.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “People lie to each other too much, even married people. Maybe especially married people,” he added, with those cerulean-blue eyes of his narrowing over a memory he had stored right behind them.

  My heart skipped beats.

  “Not Mama and Papa.”

  “They’re not people. They’re our parents, and they are really in love with and true to each other.”

  That made me feel better, but whatever it was, whatever unseemly thing he had witnessed, he kept to himself or at least kept it from me. Sometimes he treated me as if I was made of thin china, so fragile that a nasty thought would shatter me. But he truly cherished me, and I was proud to wear the boots he had made, even though he wanted to pretend it was just as much of a surprise to him.

  “The boots just walked up here themselves?” I asked him.

  He shrugged.

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Oh, sure. It’s Eve’s fault,” I said, and he pressed his lips together and twisted his nose. Then he remembered Monsieur Appert and laughed. It was always so good to hear Yvon laugh. He did it so rarely.

  As we approached my house, I could see something unusual was happening. Yvon was home, and there was a crowd of our neighbors circled around something that held their attention on the east side of the house. Their excited voices carried down the hill and were bringing more people out and up.

  Jean-Paul, who was too old and arthritic now to walk up the hill from his seaside cottage, was sitting on the far right. Usually, Papa and Yvon carried him up in what my father had built, a litter they amusingly called the “King’s Chair.” Papa had dressed up the sides by embossing crowns and scepters.

  “What’s going on?” Regine asked.

  I shook my head, and we both started to run up the hill. The wide smile on Yvon’s face put even more strength and speed into my legs. Regine, who had a longer stride, still fell behind. As I drew closer, I saw what everyone was looking at and talking about: some sort of red vehicle.

  “What is it?” I gasped, first reaching Yvon. “Why is everyone here?”

  “Someone very rich wanted Papa’s painting with Mama standing on the wall of the fort and looking out at the harbor, and they traded a brand-new red Alfonso XIII Roadster for it. It’s one of the first made in a French factory in Paris. This model won the Coupe de L’Auto race. It’s named after the Spanish king.”

  I never heard Yvon sound so excited.

  “What exactly is it?” I asked. Regine caught up.

  Yvon laughed at me. “What exactly is it? It’s an automobile, Marlena, one of the fastest made. It was delivered only a little while ago.”

  “So it goes by itself?”

  “Without horses, yes. It has an engine. I have shown you pictures of such vehicles. This one has one of the first electric starters, too.”

  I shrugged. Such machines were never as interesting to me as they were to him.

  I drew closer. Papa was sitting behind the steering wheel, with a man beside him explaining things. I never saw Papa look so happy and proud.

  “Hey,” he called when the man got out of the vehicle. “Come sit beside me.” He patted the seat.

  “Go on,” Yvon urged, but with a sadness in his voice. “Go on,” he repeated, and pushed me forward.

  I walked around the rear of the vehicle slowly. Jean-Paul nodded and smiled. Cautiously, I got in. Mama was standing on the other side with her good friend Madame Blondeau, whose husband was capitaine of the local police. Mama looked so excited, too. Papa turned a key, did something in front, and there was a roar from the vehicle. Everyone cheered. Then he moved something else, and we started forward. I screamed and took hold of the door handle as we began to go faster. Was I the first one to take a ride with him? Why didn’t he ask Yvon? I looked back. He was watching us, but he wasn’t smiling.

  Papa turned the car, and we started down the hill.

  I screamed again, as I would on a circus ride, and he laughed. Dust flew up around us. He made another turn and followed one of the roads that led out of the village. The vehicle bounced over bumps and through shallow ditches, but Papa didn’t slow down. People walking and farmers with horse-drawn carts stopped and moved to the side, watching us go by with amazement.

  “It’s one of the fastest new motor vehicles,” Papa said, as thrilled as a little boy. We bounced so hard once that I rose and fell in the seat, but he went faster and faster, until he slowed down for a sharp turn. Then he brought the vehicle to a stop and sat back. “Wow,” he said. “That was a ride, huh, Marlena?”

  “It’s scary, Papa.”

  “Only until you get used to it,” he said, and started slowly ahead, before turning around and going back almost as fast as we had come. It didn’t go quickly up the hill, but I sat back amazed at how much quicker we returned than we would if we were in a horse and wagon.

  Everyone was waiting where we had started. As soon as we stopped, Papa beckoned to Mama to get in. She approached and leaned over the door.

  “Take Yvon, Beau.”