Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

She tried to write to Al several times to apologize, but she could never say what she was apologizing for. She could not admit to him what she had done; she hadn’t done it to him, it wasn’t his to know about. Finally just a note, on the hotel’s stationery, that she had arrived and was waiting, would see him in a week.

She met Rex and Edith at the Gare du Nord on the platform like a heartsick puppy.

“Dote, darling, look at you,” Edith kept saying, though Mary Frances was unsure whether she meant this in a good or a bad way, and Rex never let go of her arm.

They sent the trunks by porter to the hotel, and Mary Frances led them upstairs to the restaurant at the top of the gallery. The grand ceiling arched above, muraled with scenes from any place you might think to travel on a train, and the brass lamps shone, and the floor sparkled. Lifetimes ago, her last trip to Paris, she and Tim and Mrs. Parrish had marked that first solid day together at these tables with champagne. She remembered hoping she would never return to that restaurant and compare that day to another, that there would only ever be the one morning at the Gare du Nord with Tim.

She ordered sweet ham and bread and butter and the cold Pommery as before. She had been so foolish; it was a train station for going to and from everywhere in Europe. Her mother would not stop staring at her.

Finally Edith said, “Dote, what’s wrong?”

She found she could not open her mouth to speak and so only shook her head and raised her glass.

“To us,” Rex said. “May we all be safe and warm.”

Mary Frances burst into tears.

Back at the hotel, Edith put her to bed. She was overworked, overtired, she had been alone in Paris too long; Edith both offered and accepted her own excuses. Across the room, Rex stretched out on the tiny sofa, his big feet hanging from the edge, a small hole in the toe of his black sock Mary Frances would have given anything to mend.

“I have missed you both so much,” she said.

Edith laughed. “You can always come home, darling.”

Mary Frances shook her head. She had made such a mess of things, and it would only get worse when they returned to Vevey and the Kennedys saw for themselves. She could not imagine now the kind of blindness with which she’d been living. She felt as if she were bursting from a dark room into one where every lamp was burning. There seemed nothing to do but close her eyes again.

She woke hours later to Rex and Edith sitting on the edge of the sofa, dressed in their evening clothes. They seemed so much older than she remembered, so much more delicate and frail without their big house around them, the spaces they called their own.

“All right, then,” Rex said, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s get this show on the road. I could eat a horse.”

“Daddy.”

“Freshen up, Dote. We’ll meet you in the bar.”

Downstairs the marble lobby of the hotel sparkled with people. It was well past the hour when everything in Vevey would be closed, but Mary Frances found Rex and Edith finishing their cocktails, and they loaded themselves into a cab. Across the arrondissement to Maison Prunier, because this was Paris for Edith and Rex, as grand as anyone could make it. Inside the brasserie felt like an aquarium, the black marble walls inlaid with bubbles of gilt, the low candles and lush carpets and cut glass. Sweeping her hand along their banquette, Edith found a woman’s earring, skinned over with rubies. Their waiter tucked it into his pocket as though he were embarrassed for them both.

They ordered all the things they’d never eaten before, things from the sea: Venus clams and whelks, potatoes pressed with caviar, champagne and Chambertin, Rex finally pulling the waiter aside and asking for more caviar, making a bowl with his giant hands, the best caviar he’d ever eaten, and by god, he wanted his fill.

They would eat caviar all across the city that week, in fine restaurants and cafés and bistros, mounded in ice bowls, from tiny ivory spoons, spread on toast, on blinis, on eggs and potatoes, but Rex would always return to that first night, his first bite, and how he would never have another as good. He would smile at Mary Frances, and she would feel ridiculously proud and wistful, and they would pay their check, stroll through the park or the Louvre or the gardens by the Palais Royale until they were hungry again.

She felt as if she were bearing something, that her job was to do it quietly. She listened to Edith exclaim over the flowers, to her worry about David, his graduation around the corner, about Norah, her boyfriend of the moment. She listened to Rex’s deep sighs of pleasure, his first vacation from the paper in as long as he could remember. They did not ask about her writing; she had never shown it to them, so it was not a part of how they thought of her. She imagined inscribing a copy of her book to Rex and Edith when it was published, packing it off to California in the mail. What could she say to her parents that might prepare them for the version of herself she’d put in those pages? The version she would be next year, when they read them?

* * *

There was never any news for her at the hotel.

* * *

The Spanish Pavilion was still under construction, the painting temporarily kept in a gallery nearby. Mary Frances led her parents down the Champs de Mars, the lattice of the Eiffel Tower at their backs, the snaps of flags and mist from the fountains in the breeze. Everything about the World’s Fair was still going up, except for the eagle-topped fortress of the German Pavilion, which seemed taller than the Russian hammer and sickle across the mall.

They found the gallery off the Trocadéro and presented their tickets, but the curator acted as if they’d forged the things themselves.

“I am sorry, Madame. It is not possible to see the Guernica today. You will come back in July for the gala opening?”

“We will not be here in July. We will not be in Paris.”

“Regardless, Madame, that is when the painting will be ready. You should be our guest, then, in July.”

Mary Frances looked at the doors to the gallery. Two large men stood ready, North Africans in uniforms she could not place, their hands on the butts of guns, their eyes fixed forward.

“There have been many threats, Madame. I am sure you can understand.”

She felt a kind of panic rising, and she thought of Tim sliding the address across the kitchen table, his face drawn with last resort. She did not like to become upset in French, but here she was, and all she had at her disposal was the declarative command. “We have special permission,” she said. “Do you have a telephone? Call the gallery.”

The little man sighed. He folded her tickets into the pocket of his shirt, made a clicking sound of disdain or concession, she could no longer tell the difference. He stepped between the guards and opened the doors to the space with a kind of flourish. Mary Frances and her parents stepped inside.

The painting was enormous, stretching along the entire wall, and there was no way to step back far enough to take it in at once. She walked alongside its black and white clutter and mass, gaping mouths and trampled figures, beasts and people, the high looming outline of a bull, bleeding newsprint colors into the tangle at his feet.

The first thing she thought of was Al. She looked into the slantwise flattened face of a figure in the painting, arms lifted, supplicant and abject, and she understood what Al was getting at, with all his talk of Spain and war and what was coming. This was the kind of pain we could only bring ourselves.

She turned to find Edith and Rex standing behind her, chins lifted to the painting, now small and shyly holding on to each other, as if they were watching something about to fall atop them. On her mother’s face, a sickened expression was dawning, and Mary Frances knew she would not be able to tell her about what had really happened with Tim and Al. She would not be able to come clean.