Devotion by Julia Oliver

Author:Julia Oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4157-6
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2011-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

SEPTEMBER 12

When I am lucid, as now, my memory is on fire. I have re-read what I’ve written here, and it makes sense. I try to edit my work objectively, and I realize that in this story of my life—which now appears to be fiction, since it is all in the past—I must tie up a dangling cord about my friend Claudia.

It had been five years since the Leveques left Paris. She—not Claudia, her mother—recognized me before I did her. “Miss Davis?”

“Yes? Oh, my heavens, is that you, Elaine?” I hugged her, and I felt her tense up, then relax into the embrace. I quickly looked around, expecting her daughter to be in the vicinity.

The woman said so softly I barely caught the words, “Claudia is no longer with us, except in spirit.”

At first, I thought she was implying archly that Claudia had run away. Then I read the real meaning in her sorrowful eyes. “Oh, no. Oh, my dear Elaine.” We were standing beside an outside table of a café near the entrance of Lafayette Park. I put an arm around her waist and said, “Can we sit down here, or should we go somewhere else?”

“Here is fine. I am fine. I can tell you everything now without wailing or making a scene.”

A waiter was hovering. “Shall we have coffee, or tea?” I said. “Are you hungry?”

“No. But yes to coffee.” After it arrived, she poured the steaming liquid inside each of two cups, then did the same with the warmed contents of the cream pitcher, and stirred sugar into hers before she enlightened me further. “Claudia was happy. She loved the house Roger had provided for us. At first, he would come there for dinner, and stay for awhile. Then, after a few weeks, he began spending one night a week there, then two nights, then three. Claudia knew I missed my own cottage and neighborhood, and she insisted I move back there. She said, ‘Roger and I are like a married couple now; we do not require a chaperone.’” Elaine paused and took a few sips of her coffee.

I did not prompt, nor did I try to imagine what she was going to tell me. It occurred to me then that I had been carrying on conversations with Claudia in my imagination whenever I had occasion to visit her city.

As Elaine resumed, her voice hardened. “Roger Fontaine was not as much in love with Claudia as she chose to think. He was enchanted by her youth and beauty and her elegant manners, but he had no intention of having a family with her. He had expected me to enlighten my daughter about contraception, and I had done so. That is, I had tried my best to make her aware of what was available.”

I nodded. I could not murmur politely, “I understand,” although I thought I did: Claudia had wanted the ultimate respectability. She thought the quickest way to get Roger to marry her would be to become pregnant with his child.

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