Madame Gérard in particular seemed to have taken a special interest in Andras. She began to call upon him not only to perform her errands, but also for his company. After the show, when the rest of the actors had gone, she liked to have him sit in her dressing room and talk to her while she removed her makeup. Her démaquillage took so long that Andras came to suspect that she dreaded going home. He knew she lived alone, though he didn’t know where; he imagined a rose-colored flat papered with old show posters. She spoke little about her own life, except to tell him that he’d guessed her origins correctly: She had been born in Budapest, and her mother had taught the young Marcelle to speak both French and Hungarian. But she required Andras to speak only French to her; practice was the best way to master the language, she said. She wanted to hear about Budapest, about the job at Past and Future, about his family; he told her about Mátyás’s penchant for dancing, and about Tibor’s impending departure for Modena.
“And does Tibor speak Italian?” she asked as she rubbed cold cream into her forehead. “Has he studied the language?”
“He’ll learn it faster than I learned French. In school he won the Latin prize three years running.”
“And is he eager to leave?”
“Quite eager,” Andras said. “But he can’t go until January.”
“And what else interests him besides medicine?”
“Politics. The state of the world.”
“Well, that’s excusable in a young man. And beyond that? What does he do in his spare time? Does he have a lady friend? Will he have to leave someone behind in Budapest?”
Andras shook his head. “He works night and day. There’s no spare time.”
“Indeed,” said Madame Gérard, swiping at her cheeks with a pink velvet sponge. She turned a look of bemused inquiry upon Andras, her eyebrows raised in their narrow twin arcs. “And what about you?” she said. “You must have a little friend.”
Andras blushed profoundly. He had never discussed the subject with any adult woman, not even his mother. “Not a trace of one,” he said.
“I see,” said Madame Gérard. “Then perhaps you won’t object to a lunch invitation from a friend of mine. A Hungarian woman I know, a talented instructress of ballet, has a daughter a few years younger than you. A very handsome girl by the name of Elisabet. She’s tall, blond, brilliant in school-gets high marks in mathematics. Won some sort of city-wide math competition, poor girl. I’m certain she must speak some Hungarian, though she’s emphatically French. She might introduce you to some of her friends.”
A tall blond girl, emphatically French, who spoke Hungarian and might show him another side of Paris: He could hardly say no to that. In the back of his mind he could hear Rosen telling him he couldn’t stay a virgin forever. He found himself saying he’d be delighted to accept the invitation to lunch at the home of Marcelle Gérard’s friend. Madame Gérard wrote the name and address on the back of her own calling card.
“Sunday at noon,” she said. “I can’t be there myself, I’m afraid. I’ve already accepted another invitation. But I assure you you’ve got nothing to fear from Elisabet or her mother.” She handed him the card. “They live not far from here, in the Marais.”
He glanced at the address, wondering if the house were in the part of the Marais he had visited with his history class; then he experienced a sharp mnemonic tug and had to look again. Morgenstern, Madame Gérard had written. 39 rue de Sévigné.
“Morgenstern,” he said aloud.
“Yes. The house is at the corner of the rue d’Ormesson.” And then she seemed to notice something strange about Andras’s expression. “Is there a problem, my dear?”
He had a momentary urge to tell her about his visit to the house on Benczúr utca, about the letter he’d carried to Paris, but he remembered Mrs. Hász’s plea for discretion and recovered quickly. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s been a while since I’ve had to appear in polite company, that’s all.”
“You’ll do splendidly,” said Madame Gérard. “You’re more of a gentleman than most gentlemen I know.” She stood and gave him her queenly smile, a kind of private performance of her own authority and elegance; then she drew her Chinese robe around her and retreated behind the gold-painted lindens of her dressing screen.
…
That night he sat on his bed and looked at the card, the address. He knew that the world of Hungarian expatriates in Paris was a finite one, and that Madame Gérard was well connected within it, but he felt nonetheless that this convergence must have some deeper meaning. He was certain his memory was correct; he hadn’t forgotten the name Morgenstern, nor the street name rue de Sévigné. It thrilled him to think he would find out if Tibor had been right when he’d guessed that the letter had been addressed to the elder Mrs. Hász’s former lover. When he arrived at the Morgensterns’, would he encounter a silver-haired gentleman-the father-in-law, perhaps, of Madame Morgenstern-who might be the mysterious C? How were the Hászes of Budapest connected with a ballet teacher in the Marais? And how would he refrain from mentioning any of this to József Hász the next time they met?
But in the days that followed, he found he had little time to think about the approaching visit to the Morgensterns’. Only a month remained before the end of the term, and in three weeks’ time there would be a critique of the students’ fall projects. His project was a model of the Gare d’Orsay, built from his measured drawing; he’d finished the plans but had yet to begin the model itself. He would have to buy materials, study topographical maps so he could build the base, make templates for the forms of the model, cut out the forms, draw the arched windows and clock faces and all the stone detailing, and assemble them into the finished piece. He spent the week in studio surrounded by his plans. At night, after work, he was consumed with preparations for a statics exam, and in the afternoons he attended a series of lectures by Perret on the ill-fated Fonthill Abbey, a nineteenth-century faux cathedral whose tower had collapsed three times due to poor design, hasty construction, and the use of shoddy materials.
By Saturday afternoon when he arrived at work, the only mystery in his mind was how he had managed to reach the day before the luncheon without having had his only white shirt laundered, and without having set aside a few francs for a gift for his hostess. After confessing the problem of his attire to Madame Gérard, he found himself in the workshop of the wardrobe mistress, Madame Courbet, who had constructed all the workers’ clothes and military uniforms required for The Mother. While the revolution unfolded onstage, Madame Courbet had turned her attention to a different struggle: She was sewing fifty tutus for a children’s dance recital that was take place at the Bernhardt that winter. Andras found her sitting amid a storm of white tulle and tiny silk flowers, her sewing machine beating its mechanical thunder at the center of that snowy cumulus. She was a sparrowlike woman past fifty, always dressed in impeccably tailored clothes; today her green wool dress was frosted with icy-looking fibers, and she held a spool of silver-white thread between her fingers. She removed her rimless spectacles to look at Andras.
“Ah, young Mr. Lévi,” she said. “And is it another complaint from Monsieur Claudel, or has someone else split a seam?” She twisted her mouth into a wry moue.
“It’s something for me, actually,” he said. “I’m afraid I need a shirt.”
“A shirt? Are you to have a walk-on in the play?”
“No,” he said, and blushed. “I need a shirt for a luncheon tomorrow.”
“I see.” She lay down the thread and crossed her arms. “That’s not my usual line.”
“I hate to disturb you when you’re already so busy.”
“Madame Gérard sent you, didn’t she.”