Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

It had occurred to Andras that Elisabet was most likely with her blond American, and that the reason for her absence was in all probability similar to the reason for Klara’s late return. He’d sworn to keep her secret; he hesitated to speak his suspicions aloud. But he couldn’t watch Klara torture herself. And besides that, it might be dangerous to hesitate. He imagined Elisabet in peril somewhere-drink-poisoned in the aftermath of one of József’s parties, or alone in a distant arrondissement after a dance-hall night gone wrong-and he knew he had to speak.

“Your daughter has a gentleman friend,” he said. “I saw them together one night at a party. We might find out where he lives, and check there.”

Klara’s eyes narrowed. “What gentleman friend? What party?”

“She begged me not to tell you,” Andras said. “I promised her I wouldn’t.”

“When did this happen?”

“Months ago,” Andras said. “January.”

“January!” She put a hand against the sofa as if to keep herself upright. “Andras, you can’t mean that.”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner. I didn’t want to betray Elisabet’s trust.”

The look in her eyes was pure rage. “What is this person’s name?”

“I know his first. I don’t know his last. But your nephew knows him. We can go to his place-I’ll go up, and you can wait in the cab.”

She took up her light coat from the sofa, and a moment later they were running down the stairs. But when they opened the door they found Elisabet on the doorstep, holding a pair of evening shoes in one hand, a cone of spun-sugar candy in the other. Klara, standing in the doorway, took a long look at her, at the shoes, the cone of candy; it was clear she hadn’t come from an innocent evening with Marthe. Elisabet, in turn, cast a long look at Andras. He couldn’t hold her gaze, and in that instant she seemed to understand that he had betrayed her; she turned an expression of startled outrage upon him, then pushed past him and her mother and ran up the stairs. A few moments later they heard her bedroom door slam.

“We’ll talk later,” Klara said, and left him standing in the entryway, having earned the furious contempt of both Morgensterns.

“I think you ought to know what kind of woman my mother is,” Elisabet said.

She sat on a bench in the Tuileries and Andras stood before her; two days had passed since he’d last seen Klara, and no word had come from the rue de Sévigné. Then that afternoon, Elisabet had surprised him in the courtyard of the École Spéciale, causing Rosen and Ben Yakov to think she must be the mysterious woman he’d been seeing all that time-the woman they’d never met, whom he’d mentioned only in the vaguest terms during their conversations at the Blue Dove. When they emerged from studio and saw Elisabet standing in the courtyard, her cold eyes fixed upon Andras, her arms crossed over the bodice of her pale green dress, Rosen gave a whistle and Ben Yakov raised an eyebrow.

“She’s an Amazon,” he whispered. “How do you scale her in bed?”

Only Polaner knew this wasn’t the woman Andras loved-Polaner, who, thanks to Andras’s ministrations, and Klara’s, and the unwavering friendship of Rosen and Ben Yakov, had returned to the École Spéciale and entered his classes again. Only Polaner was privy to the secret of Andras’s relationship; though he had never met Elisabet, he knew as much about Klara’s history and family as Andras did himself. So when this tall, powerful girl had appeared in the courtyard of the École Spéciale, shooting cold electric fire in Andras’s direction, he guessed in an instant who she was. He distracted Rosen and Ben Yakov with a request for tea at the student café, seeing no other alternative but to leave Andras to his fate.

At the gates of the school, Elisabet turned and led Andras down the boulevard Raspail without a word. All the way to the Tuileries she stayed two steps ahead of him. She had drawn her hair into a tight ponytail; it beat a rhythm against her back as she walked. He followed her down Raspail to Saint-Germain, and they crossed over the river and into the Tuileries. She led him down paths awash in gold and lilac and fuchsia, through the too-fragrant profusion of May flora, until they reached what must have been the park’s only dismal corner: a black bench in need of repainting, a deflowered flowerbed. Behind them swept the rush of traffic on the rue de Rivoli. Elisabet sat down, crossed her arms again, and gave Andras a hate-laced stare.

“This won’t take long,” she said. And then she told him he ought to know what kind of woman her mother was.

“I know what kind of woman she is,” Andras said.

“You told her the truth about Paul and me. And now I’m going to tell you the truth about her.”

She was angry, he reminded himself. She would do whatever she could to hurt him, would tell whatever lies it suited her to tell. In a sense, he owed it to her to listen; he had betrayed her, after all.

“All right,” he said. “What do you want to tell me?”

“I suppose you think you’re my mother’s first lover since my father.”

“I know she’s led a complicated life,” he said. “That’s not news.”

Elisabet gave a short, hard laugh. “Complicated! I wouldn’t say so. It’s simple, once you know the pattern. I’ve seen pathetic men fawning over her for as long as I can remember. She’s always known what she wanted from them, and what she was worth. How do you think she got the apartment and the studio? By dancing her heart out?”

It was all he could do not to slap her. He dug his nails into the palms of his hands. “That’s enough,” he said. “I won’t listen to this.”

“Someone has to tell you the truth.”

“Your mother doesn’t take me for a fool, and neither should you.”

“But you are a fool, you stupid fool! She’s playing a game with you, using you to make another man jealous. A real man, an adult, one with a job and money. You can read about it yourself.” She produced a sheaf of envelopes from her leather schoolbag. A masculine hand; Klara’s name. She took out another sheaf, and another. Stacks and stacks of letters. She peeled an envelope from the top of the pile, extracted the letter, and began to read.

“‘My dear Odette.’ That’s what he calls her, his Odette, after the swan-princess in the ballet. ‘Since last night I’ve done nothing but think of you. Your taste is still in my mouth. My hands are full of you. Your scent is everywhere in my house.’”

Andras took the letter from her hand. There were the lines she’d just read, in a familiar script; he turned it over to look for the signature. One initial: Z. The envelope bore a year-old postmark.

“Who do you think it is?” Elisabet said, her eyes fixed on his own. “It’s your Monsieur Novak. Z is for Zoltán. She’s been his mistress for eleven years. And when things go sour, as they do now and then, she takes up with idiots like you to drive him mad. He always comes back. That’s how it works. Now you know.”

A wave of hot needles rolled through him. He felt as though his lungs had been punctured, as though he couldn’t draw a breath. “Are you finished?” he said.

She got up and smoothed the skirt of her pale green dress. “It might seem hard to take,” she said. “But I can assure you it’s no harder than what she’s doing to me, now that she knows about Paul.” And she left him there in the Tuileries with Novak’s letters.

He didn’t go to work. Instead he sat on the bench in that dusty corner of the park and read the letters. The oldest was dated January 1927. He read about Klara’s first meeting with Novak after a dance performance; he read about Novak’s failing struggle to stay faithful to his wife, and then he read Novak’s half-exultant self-castigation after his first tryst with Klara. There were cryptic references to places where they must have made love-an opera box, a friend’s cottage in Montmartre, a bedroom at a party, Novak’s office at the Sarah-Bernhardt; there were notes in which Novak pleaded for a meeting, and notes in which he begged her to refuse to see him the next time he asked. There were references to arguments involving crises of conscience on both sides, and then a six-month break in the regular stream of letters-a time when they must have been apart and she must have begun seeing someone else, because the next letters made angry mention of a young dancer named Marcel. (Was this the Marcel, Andras wondered, who’d written Klara those postcards from Rome?) Novak demanded that she break off the liaison with Marcel; it was absurd, he wrote, to think that that young salamander’s feelings could ever match his own. And she must have done as he wished, because the letters from Novak picked up their steady pace again, and they were once again full of affectionate reference to the time he’d spent with Klara. There were letters in which he wrote about the dance studio and the apartment he’d found for her, dull letters about the technicalities of the real-estate transaction; desperate notes about how he would leave his wife and come to live with her on the rue de Sévigné-marry her and adopt Elisabet-and sober-toned notes about why he couldn’t. Then another break, and more letters referring to another lover of Klara’s, this one a writer whose plays had been performed at the Sarah-Bernhardt; one week Novak swore that this was the final straw, that he was finished with Klara forever, but the next week he begged her to come to him, and the following week it was clear that she had done so-what sweet relief to have you again, what fulfillment of my wildest hopes. Finally, in early 1937, it seemed his wife had learned from their lawyer that they owned a piece of property she hadn’t known about; she’d confronted Novak, and he’d confessed. His wife had told him to make a choice. That was when he’d gone home to Hungary-to take a cure for a mild case of tuberculosis, as he’d told everyone, but also, in fact, to decide between his marriage and his mistress. It must have been on his way back from Hungary that Andras had met him at the train station. He’d come back full of remorse, ashamed at having wronged both Edith and Klara. He’d broken off his relations with Klara, and his wife had become pregnant. That piece of news had come in December. But the most recent letter was from just a few weeks ago, and concerned rumors that Klara had been seeing someone else-and not just anyone, but Andras Lévi, the young Hungarian whom Zoltán had hired at the Sarah-Bernhardt last fall. He demanded that she explain herself, and begged her to do so in person at a certain hotel, on a certain afternoon; he would be waiting for her.