Nervously watching my mother’s approach, I was struck by the change in her. She appeared different somehow, though it took me a few moments to decipher it. When I did, I felt even more uneasy. Julie was still beautiful and overdressed as ever, but for the first time in as long as I could recall, she appeared entirely content.
“Sarah.” She sat near me, on the very bench where Marie had first told me what our mothers did for a living. As Julie removed her gloves, I wondered how many smelly old men those well-tended fingers of hers had caressed.
Quand même, I found myself thinking. It could be my mother’s motto, as well.
“Mère Sophie tells me you’re feeling much better,” she finally said, breaking the silence. “You do know everyone thought you were ready for your winding sheet? You terrified everyone. Mère Sophie, in particular, was beside herself.”
“But not you.” I wanted to shatter her impervious façade, though I wasn’t sure what I hoped to hear. She had come to see me twice now. Surely that must mean she too was worried?
Her lips parted into the faintest hint of a smile. “You forget that I know you—more than you know yourself. You did it all for attention.”
“Attention!” I cried out, rousing old César, who whined. “I nearly died!”
“Indeed.” She did not raise her voice. “You thought to defy me, first by that distasteful scene with the archbishop, then by flinging yourself about like Saint Thérèse of Lisieux until I couldn’t bear to read another missive from Mère Sophie extolling your piety. And when you realized you were no longer my only child, you mounted a tragedy worthy of the actress Rachel herself. It was obvious to me. But then, as I said, I know you well.”
I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t comprehend how she could sit there in her fashionable dress and silly bonnet and utter such cruel, such vicious, things to me.
“It isn’t my fault.” My voice trembled. “You lied to me about everything: about what you are, and most of all,” I gasped, breathless now with the need to wound, to inflict the same pain on her that she’d caused me, “you lied about my father.”
She sat very still. “Is that what you think?” she said, after a long moment.
“Rosine told me everything. She said my papa sent you money for my care and insisted I be educated here, but not once did you ever mention him to me.”
“Your papa now, is it?” Her smile turned cruel. “Shall I tell you about him? I did not spare you the truth to keep him from you. I hid it to spare you—”
“Rosine said it was complicated. Is that why you let me think I had no father at all?”
She let out an impatient sigh. “You are as unreasonable as ever.” She came to her feet, tugging on her gloves. “As you apparently know everything, I see no reason to dissuade you. You are out of harm’s way, so now is as appropriate a time as any for me to depart.”
As she turned to walk away, I realized that if I let her go, I might never learn the truth, or at least what she deemed the truth. I might never know who my father was. Yanking my voice out of my throat, I said, “Maman.”
She paused, glancing in annoyance over her shoulder. Then, seeing my expression, she returned to the bench, though this time closer to me. I might have reached out and touched her. “I…I want you to tell me about him,” I said.
Without any further attempt to prepare me, she said, “His name was Édouard Therard. He was a law student at the Université de Paris; he kept a room in the Latin Quarter, not far from where I lodged at the time. I was nineteen, newly arrived in the city, and he was very handsome. He had thick dark hair and a wild temperament—” She paused, with a startling laugh. “Much like yours. You resemble my family in your appearance, but otherwise you are entirely his. He was so thin, he disappeared in the night when he wore black. He drank too much and lived under the burden of his family’s obligations, which included a betrothal to a local merchant’s daughter. Then he met me.”
Hearing her describe my father made me want to plunge inside her, probe the depths of her untouchable heart and experience him as she had, when she still nursed illusions like any other girl.
“Did you love him?” I asked, for it was vital to me to hear that she had, that no matter what she felt about me, I’d been conceived in love, not by callous negotiation.
She understood. Immobilizing me with a glance, she said, “I wasn’t yet a demimondaine, if that’s what you imply. I rented a pit of a room. I was Youle van Hard, a Dutch Jew without a sou to my name. I worked as an assistant to a seamstress, like thousands of other girls. He met me in the shop when he brought in a pair of trousers that required mending.”
“But did you love him?” I repeated, evading this revelation of her penurious past because it might weaken my resentment toward her.
She shrugged. “What did I know of love or young men who declare it? Nothing. Oh, I’d had one or two before him, but none I cared for. He was different. So alive. So full of anger and yearning to change the world. He wanted to see the Republic restored; he talked incessantly of politics, as if I had any concept of such things. He believed all men must be free to seek their destiny, regardless of rank or birth. You might say he was a revolutionary.”
I had to hold back my torrent of questions, passion coursing through me until I longed to throw aside my shawl and dance about the garden. My father was exceptional, a man of ideals! Julie had confirmed I was like him, that I’d inherited his temperament.
Her next words brought me tumbling back to reality. “A revolutionary in speech, perhaps, but not in deed. When I discovered I was with child, I told him at once. What else could I do? I needed his support,” she said, and I found myself holding my breath. “His behavior was commendable, that much I will say in his defense. He did not shirk his responsibility as far as your upkeep was concerned.”
“Rosine said he wanted me raised as a Catholic.” I clung to this paltry certainty, even as I sensed the world starting to shift, about to crumble in shards.
“What he insisted was that you not be raised Jewish. He acknowledged his paternity on your birth certificate, but he refused to allow me to publicly claim his name for you, which is why you were given my father’s surname, Bernhardt, instead. I was never to mention his identity to anyone: that was our agreement, in exchange for his support. Then he went back to Le Havre and his respectable merchant’s daughter. And there he remained.” She glanced down at her folded hands in her lap. “He never asked to see you. He sent me a sum every month, but I never set eyes on him again.”
It couldn’t be. I refused to believe it. Only, I felt her words worm inside me and I knew that for once, she wasn’t lying.