“Best behavior,” I said to Lucie as her servant, her thi-ba, bathed her.
Lucie tilted her head back for Cam to rinse it and closed her eyes, bracing herself in the long, claw-foot tub. “You’re not allowed to speak English to me when we are on best behavior,” she rightly pointed out.
“I’m well aware,” I said, rubbing my eyes. I sat on the little pink chaise in the corner and inspected the white dress Cam had pressed for Lucie. When we had first arrived, the servants had consulted me about all of Lucie’s clothes and diversions, but I soon learned that they knew much more about how rich little French girls should dress and act in the colony than I did. Seeing me touching the dress, Cam asked if it was to my liking—a mere formality, we both knew. I smiled and nodded, thinking for a moment about the shapeless, stained clothes I had worn as a girl. They were always too big—dark and practical dresses, pants rolled up at the hem so they would last for years instead of months. I had hated them. I touched Lucie’s traveling dress, fingering the starched cotton skirt and white satin waist bow.
Just an hour later, Lucie was in her dress, trying not to crumple it, as we made our way in the Delahaye to the house of a hundred suns. Her dark hair was brushed and plaited, with white satin ribbons at the end, tied up in stiff bows that stood a chance of surviving the twelve-hour train trip ahead of us.
I told her to stop fussing and she inched closer to me, fanning out her skirt around her. I gazed out the window, pretending to observe the only other car gliding down our street in our quiet neighborhood, but I was mentally going through every ensemble Trieu had packed for me, making sure they were fashionable enough in the face of the Michelin fortune. Victor was a Michelin through his mother, Agathe. We were Michelins, too, he reminded us. But we weren’t those Michelins. We weren’t the ones directly descended from the Michelin et Cie founders, brothers Édouard and André Michelin. The pair had taken over the then fifty-year-old family rubber business in the 1880s and reinvented it. Michelin went from making small rubber items and farm machinery to popularizing the rubber bicycle tire, putting their rubber on the first automobile to run on pneumatic tires, creating the Michelin guides so no one had to eat or sleep badly on their journeys—they even built the first paved runway, and during the Great War helped the government design a plane and assisted in building nearly two thousand Breguet aircrafts in their Clermont-Ferrand plant. But Victor, and I, had been kept at more than arm’s length from these activities for years. Unlike most of the family, we’d never been perched at the seat of company activity in Clermont-Ferrand, where the family and all their employees made the rubber tires spin. We were trying to change that with our efforts in Indochine. Édouard had told Victor that if he succeeded in the colony, then he could succeed anywhere, even in Clermont-Ferrand.
The evening dresses my servant and I had selected could be a problem, I worried. I’d been losing weight the last few months and had been afraid to try them on before packing them, not wanting to know if they were loose in the bust. But now I was angry with myself for such stupidity. The Michelin women were always so beautifully turned out, wearing the latest fashions from Paris, even though Clermont-Ferrand was miles from the capital, and I, with my American sensibility, never seemed to choose the right thing, even with the generous budget Victor provided.
I let my breath out slowly, desperate to calm my nerves, and tried to concentrate on the sensation of little Lucie next to me. She was moving her fingers absentmindedly against my palm, stroking my gold rings, as if she knew I needed to relax.
Lucie had taken to the country upon arrival, having always been too wild for the elegant streets of Paris. A tan thing with ink-black hair, she looked practically native from the back. Like us, she had studied Annamese for six months before leaving, important mostly for Victor, who wanted to have a basic understanding of the language before being surrounded by thousands of native laborers. I had first called the language Indochinese but was swiftly corrected by Victor, who told me that natives of Indochine were referred to as Annamite, their language Annamese. “It comes from the center region of Indochine, which is Annam. Sometimes the residents of Tonkin are called Tonkinese, and the residents of the south Cochinchinese. It’s all terribly confusing but do try to say anything besides ‘Indochinese’ or else you will sound very new.” Victor learned the customs and the language quite quickly, but nowhere near as fast as Lucie. In the two and a half months that we had been in Hanoi, Lucie had started speaking full sentences, even conversing at length with the staff, which made her a curiosity among les indigènes and a cause for concern in the French community, whose children were rarely allowed to learn the local language. The rich Annamites sent their children to France to be educated, not the opposite, the French women I had met reminded me, but I was never one to prevent learning. It was fascinating to watch the speed of the process, the wheels of her curious mind twirling like a pinwheel. One day she had been shyly hiding under the fabric of her servant’s ao trying to string the few phrases she knew together, and a few weeks later she was telling the same servant stories in Annamese. Now all the servants, from the cook to the chauffeur, were teaching her to write Chinese characters and the more modern, simpler script, Quoc Ngu. She only wrote out a word or two a day, but I knew they were building up in her mind like a pyramid.
Lucie’s nose on my wrist, smelling my orange-flower perfume, brought me back to the present, and I peeked over the bench at Victor, who was next to Lanh, fussing with a pile of papers full of figures. They covered his knees, resting precariously on his beige linen travel suit.
It was a familiar sight. I listened to the sounds of Hanoi as my heart beat quickly, my body refusing to calm down, as we waited for the station to come into view. It was Lucie who spotted it first. “Regarde, maman, the house of a hundred suns!” she exclaimed cheerfully. Since Lanh had told her about that name, she hadn’t called it anything else.
“It’s prettier every time I see it,” I said and patted her exposed leg, thin and muscular like a dancer’s. Victor had wanted Lucie to take ballet lessons, to do a few things in Hanoi that little French girls enjoyed in Paris, but she preferred to run wild—riding her bicycle on the wide streets of our neighborhood, buying penny candy in the open-air markets with the servants—and she was still young enough that her father allowed her to.
“Jessie, close the window, please,” Victor said from the front seat, trying to hold his papers still.
I desperately needed the air but rolled it up immediately anyway. I tilted my hat so I could lean against the glass instead. Though it wasn’t quite right for the winter season, the hat still felt like a talisman, something with a hint of magic instead of just a pretty geranium-colored accessory.
“Do you like the house of a hundred suns better than the Gare Saint-Lazare?” I asked Lucie quietly, getting in my last few phrases in English to her before we stepped into a public place and French took over again. Our home in Paris had been just a ten-minute stroll from Saint-Lazare.
“I’m starting to forget Paris,” she replied in a tiny voice, not wanting to disturb her father.
“It has only been a few months, Lucie,” I said, unable to hide my alarm. “And no one can forget Paris. It’s the most wonderful place in the world. Spend just one day there and it finds its way inside you, even someone young like you. The memories you make in Paris are thicker than cartilage.”