A shadow came to Madame Morgenstern’s features again, as if she’d experienced an inward twist of pain. “My mother’s getting older, too,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her, a very long time.” She fell silent and glanced away from the table at the tall west-facing windows. The late autumn light fell in a diagonal plane across her face, illuminating the tapered curve of her mouth. “Forgive me,” she said, trying to smile; he offered his handkerchief, and she pressed it to her eyes.

He found himself fighting the impulse to touch her, to trace a line from her nape down the curve of her back. “Perhaps I’ve stayed too long,” he said.

“No, please,” she said. “You haven’t even had dessert.”

As if she’d been listening just beyond the dining-room door, Mrs. Apfel came in at that moment to serve the walnut strudel. Andras found that he had an appetite again. He was ravenous, in fact. He ate three slices of strudel and drank coffee with cream. As he did, he told Madame Morgenstern about his studies, about Professor Vago, about the trip to Boulogne-Billancourt. He found her easier to talk to than Madame Gérard. She had a way of pausing in quiet thought before she responded; she would pull her lips in pensively, and when she spoke, her voice was low and encouraging. After lunch they went back to the parlor and looked through her album of picture postcards. Her dancer friends had traveled as far as Chicago and Cairo. There was even a hand-colored postcard from Africa: three animals that looked like deer, but were slighter and more graceful, with straight upcurved horns and almond-shaped eyes. The French word for them was gazelle.

“Gazelle,” Andras said. “I’ll try to remember.”

“Yes, try,” she said, and smiled. “Next time I’ll test you.”

When the afternoon light had begun to wane, she rose and led Andras to the hallway, where his coat and hat hung on a polished stand. She gave him his things and returned his handkerchief. As she led him down the stairs she pointed out the photographs on the wall, images of students from years past: girls in ethereal clouds of tulle or sylphlike draperies of silk, young dancers under the transient spell of costumes and makeup and stage lights. Their expressions were serious, their arms as pale and nude as the branches of winter trees. He wanted to stay and look. He wondered if any of the photographs were of Madame Morgenstern herself when she was a child.

“Thank you for everything,” he said when they’d reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Please.” She put a slim hand on his arm. “I should thank you. You were very kind to stay.”

Andras flushed so deeply at the pressure of her hand that he could feel the blood beating in his temples. She opened the door and he stepped out into the chill of the afternoon. He found he couldn’t look at her to say goodbye. Next time I’ll test you. But she’d returned his handkerchief as though their paths were unlikely to cross again. He spoke his goodbye to the doorstep, to her feet in their fawn-colored shoes. Then he turned away and she closed the door behind him. Without thinking, he retraced his steps toward the river until he had reached the Pont Marie. There he paused at the edge of the bridge and brought out the handkerchief. It was still damp where she’d used it to dry her eyes. As if in a dream, he put a corner of it into his mouth and tasted the salt she’d left there.

CHAPTER EIGHT. Gare d’Orsay

THAT NIGHT HE found it impossible to sleep. He couldn’t stop reviewing every detail of his afternoon at the Morgensterns’. The shameful bouquet, and how doubly shameful it had looked when she’d carried it into the parlor in the blue glass vase. The moment when he’d realized that she must be the elder Mrs. Hász’s daughter, and how it had flustered him to discover it-how he’d said The pleasure to make your acquaintance and Thank you for the invitation of me. How she’d held her back straight as though she were always dancing, until the moment at the table after Elisabet had gone-the way her back had curved then, showing the linked pearls of her spine, and how he’d wanted to touch her. The way she’d listened as he’d told his father’s story. The close heat of her shoulder as she sat beside him on the sofa in the parlor, paging through the album of picture postcards. The moment at the door when she’d rested her hand on his arm. He tried to re-create an image of her in his mind-the dark sweep of hair across her brow, the gray eyes that seemed too large for her face, the clean line of her jaw, the mouth that drew in upon itself as she considered what he’d said-but he couldn’t make the disparate elements add up to an image of her. He saw her again as she turned to smile at him over her shoulder, girlish and wise at the same time. But what was he thinking, what could he be thinking? What an absurdity for him to think this way about a woman like Claire Morgenstern-he, Andras, a twenty-two-year-old student who lived in an unheated room and drank tea from a jam jar because he couldn’t afford coffee or a coffee cup. And yet she hadn’t sent him away, she’d kept talking to him, he’d made her laugh, she’d accepted his handkerchief, she’d touched his arm in a confiding and intimate manner.

For hours he rolled over and over in bed, trying to put her out of his mind. When the sky outside his window filled with a deep gray-blue light, he wanted to cry. All night he’d lain awake, and soon he would have to get up and go to class and then to work, where Madame Gérard would want to hear about the visit. It was Monday morning, the beginning of a new week. The night was over. The only thing he could do was to get out of bed and write the letter he had to write, the one he had to mail before he went to school that morning. He took an old piece of sketch paper and began a draft:

Dear Mme Morgenstern,

Thank you for the

For the what? For the very pleasant afternoon? How flat it would sound. How much that would make it seem like any ordinary afternoon. Whatever else it had been, it hadn’t been that. What was he supposed to write? He wanted to express his gratitude for Madame Morgenstern’s hospitality; that was certain. But underneath he wanted to send a coded message, to convey what he had felt and what he felt now-that a kind of electrical conduit had opened between them and ran between them still; that he’d taken her at her word when she’d suggested they might see each other again. He scratched out the lines he’d written and started again.

Dear Madame Morgenstern,

As absurd as it sounds, I’ve been thinking of you since we parted. I want to take you into my arms, tell you a million things, ask you a million questions. I want to touch your throat and unbutton the pearl button at your neck.

And then what? What would he do, given the chance? For one brief delirious moment he thought of those old photographs that depicted the elaborate sexual positions, the silver images of entwined couples visible only when the cards were held at an angle to the light. He remembered standing in the changing room near the gymnastics hall with four other boys, each of them hunched over and holding a card, their gym shorts around their ankles, each in solitary agony as the silver couples flashed into and out of view. His card had shown a woman lying on a settee, her legs raised in a sharp V. She wore a Victorian-style gown that revealed her arms and shoulders and had fallen away from her legs entirely, leaving them bare as they strained toward the ceiling. A man bent over her, doing what even the Victorians did.

Flushed with shame and desire, he scratched out the lines again to begin another draft. He dipped his pen and wiped off the excess ink.

Dear Madame Morgenstern,

Thank you for your hospitality and for the pleasure of your company. My own accommodations are too poor to allow me to return your invitation, but if I may be of service to you in some other way, I hope you will not hesitate to call upon me. In the meantime I shall retain the hope that we will meet again.