Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“Was your brother a good skater?” he asked.

Madame Morgenstern laughed and shook her head. “Neither of us was very good, but we had a good time. Sometimes I would invite my friends to come along. We would link hands and my brother would lead us along like a string of wooden ducks. He was ten years older, and far more patient than I would have been.” She pressed her lips together as she skated on, tucking her hands into her sleeves. Andras kept close beside her, catching glimpses of her profile beneath the low brim of her hat.

“I can teach you a waltz, if you’d like,” he said.

“Oh, no. I can’t do anything fancy.”

“It’s not fancy,” he said, and skated ahead to show her the steps. It was a simple waltz he’d learned in Debrecen as a ten-year-old: three strokes forward, a long arc, and a turn; three strokes backward, another arc, another turn. She repeated the steps, following him as he traced them on the ice. Then he turned to face her. Drawing a breath, he put a hand at her waist. Her arm came around him and her gloved hand found his hand. He hummed a few bars of “Brin de Muguet” and led her into the steps. She hesitated at first, particularly at the turns, but soon she was moving as lightly as he might have imagined, her hand firm against his hand. He knew that Rosen and Polaner and Ben Yakov would have laughed to see him dancing like this in front of everyone, but he didn’t care. For a few moments, the length of the song in his head, this light-footed woman in her bell-shaped hat was pressed close against him, her hand closed inside his hand. His mouth brushed the brim of her hat, and he tasted a cold damp veil of snowflakes. He could feel her breath against his neck. She glanced up at him and their eyes caught for an instant before he looked away. He reminded himself that anything he felt for her was hopeless; she was an adult woman with a complicated life, a profession, a daughter in high school. The waltz ended and went silent in his head. He let his arms fall from her body, and she moved away to skate at his side. They skated twice around the island before she spoke again.

“You make me homesick for Hungary,” she said. “It’s more than sixteen years since I was there. Elisabet’s lifetime.” She scanned the ice, and Andras followed her gaze. They could see the green and brown of Elisabet’s and Marthe’s coats far ahead. Elisabet pointed to something on the shore, the black shape of a dog leaping after a smaller, fleeter shape.

“Sometimes I think I might go back,” Madame Morgenstern said in a half whisper. “More often, though, I think I never will.”

“You will,” Andras said, surprised to find his voice steady. He took her arm, and she didn’t pull away. Instead she removed a hand from her coat sleeve and let it rest upon his arm. He shivered, though he could no longer feel the cold. They skated that way in silence for the time it took to circle the islet once more. But then a voice reached them from across the ice, resonant and familiar: It was Madame Gérard, calling his name and Madame Morgenstern’s. Andráska. Klárika. The Hungarian diminutives, as though they were all still in Budapest. Madame Gérard came gliding toward them in a new fur-collared coat and hat, followed by three other actors from the theater. She and Madame Morgenstern embraced, laughed, remarked on the beauty of the snow and the number of people on the frozen lake.

“Klárika, my dear, I’m very glad to see you. And here’s Andráska. And that must be Elisabet up ahead.” She smiled slyly and gave Andras a wink, then called Elisabet and Marthe back to the group. When they complained of the cold, she invited everyone for hot chocolate at the café. They sat together at a long wooden table and drank chocolate from crockery mugs, and it was easy for Andras to let everyone else talk, to let their conversation join the conversations of other skaters in the crowded warming house. The rising feeling he’d had just before Madame Gérard had arrived had already begun to dissipate; Madame Morgenstern seemed once again impossibly far away.

When they were finished with the chocolate, he retrieved their shoes from the rental desk, and afterward they walked together along the path toward the edge of the Bois. He kept looking for his chance to take Madame Morgenstern’s elbow, to let the others go on ahead while the two of them walked behind. Instead it was Marthe who dropped back to walk with Andras. She was purposeful and grim in the deepening cold.

“It’s hopeless, you know,” she said. “She wants nothing to do with you.”

“Who?” Andras said, alarmed to think he’d been so transparent.

“Elisabet! She wants you to stop looking at her all the time. Do you think she likes being looked at by a pathetic Hungarian?”

Andras sighed and glanced up ahead to where Elisabet was now walking with Madame Gérard, her green coat swinging around her legs. She stooped to say something to Madame, who threw her head back and laughed.

“She’s not interested in you,” Marthe said. “She’s already got a boyfriend. So there’s no need to come to the house again. And you don’t have to waste your time trying to charm her mother.”

Andras cleared his throat. “All right,” he said. “Well, thank you for telling me.”

Marthe gave a businesslike nod. “It’s my duty as Elisabet’s friend.”

And then they had reached the edge of the park, and Madame Morgenstern was beside him again, her sleeve brushing his own. They stood at the entrance to the Métro, the rush of trains echoing below. “Won’t you come with us?” she said.

“No, come with us!” Madame Gérard said. “We’re taking a cab. We’ll drop you at home.”

It was cold and growing dark, but Andras couldn’t bear the thought of a ride on the crowded Métro with Elisabet and Marthe and Madame Morgenstern. Nor did he want to crowd into a cab with Madame Gérard and the others. He wanted to be alone, to find his way back to his own neighborhood, to lock himself into his room.

“I think I’ll walk,” he told them.

“But you’ll come again for lunch next Sunday,” Madame Morgenstern said, looking up at him from under the brim of her hat, her skin still illuminated with the rush of skating. “In fact, we’re hoping you’ll make a habit of it.”

How else could he have replied? “Yes, yes, I’ll come,” he said.

AND SO ANDRAS became a fixture at Sunday lunches on the rue de Sévigné. Quickly they established a pattern: Andras would come and exchange pleasantries with Madame Morgenstern; Elisabet would sit and scowl at Andras, or make fun of his clothes or his accent; when she failed to whip him up as she’d done at the first lunch, she’d grow bored and go out with Marthe, who had cultivated her own towering scorn for Andras. Once Elisabet had gone he would sit with Madame Morgenstern and listen to records on the phonograph, or look at art magazines and picture postcards, or read from a book of poetry to practice his French, or talk about his family, his childhood. At times he tried to bring up the subject of her own past-the brother whom she hadn’t seen in years, the shadowy events that had resulted in Elisabet’s birth and had brought Madame Morgenstern to Paris. But she always managed to evade that line of conversation, turning his careful questions aside like the hands of unwelcome dance partners. And if he blushed when she sat close beside him, or stammered as he tried to respond after she’d paid him a compliment, she gave no sign that she’d noticed.

Before long he knew the precise shape of her fingernails, the cut and fabric of every one of her winter dresses, the pattern of lace at the edges of her pocket handkerchiefs. He knew that she liked pepper on her eggs, that she couldn’t tolerate milk, that the heel of the bread was her favorite part. He knew she’d been to Brussels and to Florence (though not with whom); he knew that the bones of her right foot ached when the weather was wet. Her moods were changeable, but she tempered the darker ones by making jokes at her own expense, and playing silly American tunes on the phonograph, and showing Andras droll photos of her youngest students in their dance exhibition costumes. He knew that her favorite ballet was Apollo, and that her least favorite was La Sylphide, because it was over-danced and so rarely done with originality. He considered himself shamefully ignorant on the subject of dance, but Madame Morgenstern seemed not to care; she would play ballets on the phonograph and describe what would be happening onstage as the music crested and ebbed, and sometimes she rolled up the sitting-room rug and reproduced the choreography for him in miniature, her skin flushing with pleasure as she danced. In return he would take her on walks around the Marais, narrating the architectural history of the buildings among which she made her life: the sixteenth-century Hôtel Carnavalet, with its bas-reliefs of the Four Seasons; the Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil, whose great medusa-headed carriage doors had once opened regularly for Beaumarchais; the Guimard Synagogue on the rue Pavée, with its undulating façade like an open Torah scroll. She wondered aloud how she’d never taken note of those things before. He had pulled away a veil for her, she said, revealed a dimension of her quartier that she would never have discovered otherwise.