“Vitamin C,” he adds.
She goes on looking at it.
“I am a physician,” he says, as if you had to have a medical degree to know a growing child needs vitamin C.
Still she goes on looking at it but doesn’t reach for it.
He turns away, takes a book off a table, glances at it, returns it, says au revoir, and leaves the shop. He is making it easy for her.
* * *
“How was the movie?” Charlotte asked when Vivi got home that evening.
“Sad. Elizabeth Taylor dies because Van Johnson gets drunk and locks her out in a snowstorm. Then Elizabeth’s sister, Donna Reed, won’t let him have custody of their daughter. She says it’s because he’s a bad father, but really it’s because Donna Reed was in love with him, but he chose Elizabeth Taylor instead.” She stood looking thoughtful for a moment. “But the girl goes to live with her father in the end, so it all works out.”
Charlotte started to say that in the Fitzgerald story the protagonist doesn’t get custody, then changed her mind. It was like the yellow wallpaper. She wanted to preserve the illusion for Vivi as long as possible.
* * *
Charlotte was at the stove sautéing mushrooms when Vivi got home several evenings later. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the jamb, still wearing her camel’s hair coat, hugging her books to her as if they were armor.
“You can return the dress.”
“What?” Charlotte turned off the burner under the skillet and faced her daughter. She really did think she hadn’t heard her correctly above the faint flickering of the gas.
“I said you can return the dress. It’s too expensive anyway.”
“It’s not too expensive. It’s fine.”
“I don’t need it. I’m not going to the dance.”
“Of course you’re going to the dance.”
“I’m not invited.”
“What do you mean you’re not invited? The invitation is on your dresser.”
“It’s been rescinded. That was the word Eleanor used.” Eleanor Hathaway was the classmate whose grandmother was facing her mortality. “She says it’s not her fault.”
“What’s not her fault?”
“That she can’t invite me. She says her grandmother won’t let her.”
Impossible as it would seem to Charlotte later, she still didn’t understand. She racked her brain trying to remember if she’d offended the old woman or Eleanor’s mother in some way. Vivi’s classmates’ mothers were polite, but Charlotte didn’t fool herself into thinking that she was one of them or even that they liked her. They pitied her—poor Charlotte Foret had to go out to work—but mostly they disapproved of her. She managed to dress with twice the style, they told one another, on a quarter of what they spent on clothes. The observation, which Vivi had passed on, was not meant as a compliment, at least not entirely. There was also some speculation about her accent, which seemed to wane and wax. She had to admit they had a point there. In the years she’d been living in America, she’d found that a rolled r or elongated e occasionally came in handy. And once, from the stall in a school ladies’ room on some parents’ night, she’d overheard one mother telling another that Charlotte Foret had a way of lighting a cigarette and throwing away the match that told you to mind your own damn business. It was lucky she wasn’t much of a smoker.
“Her grandmother doesn’t even know you.”
“She knows I’m Jewish. I know what you always say. You weren’t a Jew until Hitler made you one. But that’s not the way other people see it.”
“Even here?”
Vivi lifted her thin shoulders in another shrug. The gesture was meant to be insouciant. It came out as defeated. “I hope the dance is a flop. I hope Eleanor comes down with a bad case of pimples the night before.”
“And I hope her grandmother rots in that special circle of hell reserved for bigots,” Charlotte said.
So this was the way they got to you in America. No roundups, no camps, merely insidious cruelty to your children.
* * *
Vivi came back to the subject over dinner.
“What about my father?”
“What about your father?”
“Did he need Hitler to make him a Jew?”
“He wasn’t any more of a believer than I am.”
Vivi didn’t say anything to that, but her expression gave her away. She was skeptical. She was also desperate to have something to hang on to. That was all right. Charlotte wanted her to have something to hang on to. But not this.
Four
Carl Covington, the would-be grand old man of publishing, prided himself on his publication parties. The guest list was select. No junior editors or advertising assistants getting drunk and making a dinner out of pigs-in-blankets and angels-on-horseback. The setting was dazzling. He and his wife lived in a penthouse on Central Park West with a view of the shimmering reservoir and a book-lined living room that rose two stories. His own little Morgan Library, he liked to say. His toasts to the author of the evening and his or her new book were effusive. The parties were great successes. Some people were said to enjoy them.
The celebration that night was in honor of a writer who every twelve months turned out a thriller that could be relied on to nibble at the lower reaches of the Times bestseller list. Charlotte had congratulated the author, paid her respects to a few reviewers, chatted with a foreign agent, compared notes with an editor from another house, thanked Carl’s wife for a delightful evening, and started down the hall in search of her coat, which a hired man had taken when she’d arrived. As she passed the first door, open to a dimly lit study, she noticed Horace sitting in a circle of light from a floor lamp. He must have sensed her in the doorway, because he looked up from the book he was reading.
“Anything good?” she asked as she stepped into the room.
“Doesn’t get much better.” He held up the book with the spine turned toward her. The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald was imprinted in black on the burgundy binding. “Why didn’t we think of reissuing Gatsby? Viking was damn smart. Have a seat. Unless you’re eager to get back to that.” He gestured toward the living room.
“About as eager as you appear to be.”
She took the chair on the other side of the reading lamp. He squinted at her through the glare, then reached up to pull the chain of one of the bulbs. “The mornin’ light does not become me.” He closed the book and gestured to her empty glass. “You want to freshen that? I’d offer, but it’s easier for you.”
She was surprised. He never referred to his incapacity. At least she’d never heard him do so.
“I’m fine. In fact, I was about to leave.” She leaned forward and put the empty glass on the table just as Bill Quarrels stuck his head in the doorway.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“Yes,” Horace barked.
Bill reared back as if he’d been punched. “Sorree.” He drew out the word as he left.
“You have to watch that surfeit of charm,” she said.