The mail slot rang out. Heavy paper thunked to the floor.
Léon’s sister, Charlotte, was nearest, seated sideways on the armchair, feet kicked high while she darned stockings. She rolled off the chair to the floor, bounded to her feet, and retrieved the envelope. It was a familiar green blue. “It’s here!” she said. “Léon, it’s here! The announcement thing! From the conservatory!”
She’d already broken the wax seal before Léon fell through the dressing curtain, only half into his shirt. He rolled across the floor to save the time of getting back up, all to get to the letter sooner. He wrapped his arms around his sister’s legs.“That’s mine!”
She waved the letter in the air so the halves of the seal knocked. “Then read it!”
“I’m trying to,” Léon said, lunging for it, in the process losing his shirt entirely.
“You’re so slow getting dressed that you’re actually going backward,” Charlotte said. “Here. I’ll read it to you while you go find your cuff links.”
Léon crawled through the apartment on his hands and knees. “No one back home used cuff links, and of course they didn’t. They’re ridiculous. There’s no way to keep my shirt closed and also fasten them. I just don’t have enough hands. Three, and I could do it.”
“They’re designed for men with valets to help them, stupid,” Charlotte said as she tugged the sharply creased paper from the envelope. “It’s a way to prove that you have someone helping you dress. You have to pretend to be one of those men with valets if you want to even make it inside the doors of this salon tonight. Therefore, cuff links for Léon.”
“I don’t want to go to any salons,” Léon grumbled. “I want to play piano. Why can’t I just do that?”
Charlotte held up a hand to silence him. She’d heard this tack often enough to be bored by it—and was becoming absorbed in the letter.
“What does it say?!”
Charlotte took on her version of a posh Parisian accent, instead of their native country vowels. “Paris Conservatory, it says that at the top. That’s what comes first. ‘Dear sirs and madams. The official patron sorting is complete. There was an extraordinarily strong set of competitors this year. The following is a list of conservatory supporters and the candidates they have chosen, in order of the financial amounts assigned. Only the first, Reynaldo Hahn, was able to secure enough patronage to cover all of his conservatory expenses for next year, but the other offerings are still very generous.’”
“Reynaldo! Oh, that’s great news for him. He could really use it,” Léon exclaimed as he popped around the curtain.“Everyone loves him so much. He could be terrible at piano and still get enough patronage. Lucky for him, he’s also a good pianist.”
Dink, dink, dink, as each of his shirt studs fell through and hit the worn wooden floor. “Shit.” He went back to all fours. “You don’t have to read the rest of the names. I can’t qualify for a patron through the official channels yet. You have to be seventeen, and I just missed it. They expect your parents to pay for your school fees until then. Or, you know, an outside benefactor or something.”
“Oh,” Charlotte said, her voice going quiet. They both knew there was no hope of more financial help from their mother. She’d used up the last of the money left from their father’s bequest to pay for this last semester. With their only income Madame Delafosse’s piano lessons, there was no way they could keep taking on this room in Paris. There was no money for a dowry for Charlotte. There might not be enough for butter and jam.
Léon’s breathing became labored as he crawled around the room, collecting the fasteners. “I think I’ll need you to help me with these,” he said. “But before that, skip to the page where they say who’s won each prize. There’s only one for piano, which is outrageous since there are so many of us competing. There’s also one for oboe, and there are only two oboists in the whole school! How is that fair?”
“Okay,” Charlotte said, papers rustling as she searched. “You won for piano three years ago, and it was a big fuss because you were just thirteen. Can you even win again?”
“Marmontel was going to argue to the other instructors that they should consider me. Since I entered so young and had more years to pay for than anyone else before I turned sixteen. I’m a weird case.”
“That much is certainly true.”
Léon lobbed a cuff link at his sister, pinging her neatly in the middle of her forehead. She rubbed the spot absently while she flipped through the pages. “Okay, here’s piano. Um.”
“Charlotte!”
“It’s not you. They’ve put Hahn.”
Léon went still. “He already got full patronage, and now he gets the prize money too?”
“Léon, I’m sorry.”
Prizes are a social game as much as a musical one, Reynaldo had said, and he’d been right. Léon ripped the dressing curtain to one side. His pants were still on, but his shirt was down to one sleeve, the rest fluttering in the breeze from the window. Charlotte was right; he was not only failing to get properly dressed, he was going backward. “If I can’t even dress myself, if I can’t talk anyone up because I’ll just turn red as a beet and run away before I can say a word, how can I expect anyone to pay for my education? How can I then earn enough to keep you and Maman and me out of the poorhouse? Okay, outside mysterious benefactor it is. Someone who doesn’t mind that I’m a clod who’s only worth a franc when he’s sitting on a piano bench. An outside patron is my only hope. Which means that, Charlotte, I need you to be my valet.”
“Those society snots will hear you play tonight, and it will all be over. Someone will snap you up,” Charlotte said, taking her brother’s sleeves in her hands, a cuff link pinched in her lips. “You’ll be fending them off. And that way I won’t have to become a lady of the night under the Pont Neuf.”
“Someone has to snap me up because there’s no other option now,” Léon said. “Now, help me with these darn cuff links.”
Léon hurried along the streets of the Latin Quarter, dodging omnibuses and donkey carts, doing his best to avoid horseshit.His best was not enough because horseshit was everywhere. Including up the sides of his shoes, now. He looked out for clocks at the intersections he passed, keeping track of how late he was. Pharmacies tended to have them, and train stations. Despite all the recent posters from the French railway, begging people to set their timepieces to the nearest station clock, every business had its own time. Depending on where he looked, he was twenty minutes past when he said he’d arrive or thirty. Either way: late. Definitely late.
Did being late matter? Maybe it was a good thing! Léon had never played at a salon before. He knew from Reynaldo that the Saussine home was a grand, fenced-in manor; Reynaldo had whistled when Léon told him that he’d be playing there. The Saussine “at-homes” on Thursday afternoons were among the most sought-after invitations for Paris’s artistic set. Monsieur Saussine was also a fan of Fauré’s compositions and had been going to a recital at the Paris Conservatory when he walked by the rehearsal room where Léon was receiving his lesson from Marmontel on Fauré’s first nocturne. The invite had arrived the very next morning.
Léon had that handwritten invitation in his jacket pocket. In case . . . they asked for it to enter? That didn’t sound likely. He didn’t know why he’d brought it. He knew how precisely nothing worked in high society. Nothing. Except for the high society pianos. He could work them. He’d just have to get to that piano bench as soon as possible.
It didn’t help that his bow tie had come undone the moment he’d stepped out of their building. He’d been trying to fix it while he sped through the streets of Paris. Over, under, fold, tuck, unfold. The bow tie was worse than the cuff links, truly the ultimate test of whether he had a valet. For a kid unable to afford even a mirror and with just his equally ignorant and only slightly older sister for help (his mother had been off giving piano lessons), it was impossible.
Which was worse: make himself more late or arrive with an undone bow tie? He didn’t know that answer either. The tears that hadn’t come when he found out that Reynaldo Hahn won the piano prize came now. As he always did when feeling overwhelmed, Léon returned to the one thing that was sure to calm him: music. He started playing études in his head as he craned his neck downward, trying to see his own bow tie as he more and more frantically yanked at the fraying silk, his nice leather shoes squishing into ever-higher piles of horseshit. Léon and the red-haired farm boy walked along burnt fields of barley. The clop of Clémentine’s feet was the pace of the music.The silk of the tie rustled to the rhythm of the notes and the imagined walk. This summer, as he did whenever he was back at home in Vernon, he’d walked those same fields with Félix, wordlessly taking the route they always took, visiting the lowing cattle, the Toussaint chicken coops, finally lying beside each other in the tall grass. The yellow stalks had shielded them from the outside world. They’d stared at each other, sometimes speaking and sometimes not, Léon studying the sweat that darkened the shirt that lay over the muscles of Félix’s chest and wondering why he did.
His foot squished into the carcass of a pigeon and Léon cursed, returning his mind to the Paris street. The man at the secondhand shop had tried to show Léon how to tie his bow, but—oh no, the knot had fallen out again. Léon began anew, music and the vision of Félix’s freckles buzzing through his mind as he became aware of the Saussine guests pausing at the house entrance, staring at him. He’d arrived, and his tie was still undone. Over, under, fold, tuck. Why was that so hard?!
The bits he could see of the tie blurred with tears even as an expensive black suit appeared in the background, buttoned down a narrow torso, a pink boutonniere pinned to one breast. Léon released the ends of his bow tie and looked up.
Enormous brown eyes, long lashes, a mustache over a full smile. A boy who was the age others might be called men, maybe a couple of years older than Léon. “That doesn’t seem to be going well,” he remarked.
“No,” Léon said. “It is not.”
“Can I help you with it?”
Léon never knew the rules for how humans were supposed to interact. He never had. Did someone accept help tying a bow tie on the streets of Paris from a handsome stranger with eyes like a deer’s?
As if sensing the doubts going through Léon’s mind, the boy whispered, “It’s better to be late than untidy. Here, let’s duck around the corner.” The young man passed around the Saussines’ wrought-iron fence and stood in front of a picture framer’s shop. Léon tailed after.
“They’re infernal, cursed inventions,” he said as Léon stopped in front of him. He paused, examining the worn fabric of Léon’s bow tie. His fingers slipped between the layers of silk, where the seam had come undone. “May I?”
Léon nodded, watching as the young man took delicate fingers to fabric. To Léon’s fabric. The nails on his silk were buffed and manicured. “It’s a very foolish corner we’ve backed ourselves into, isn’t it?” he said, eyes focused on Léon’s throat.
Léon gulped, his Adam’s apple hard against the collar.
“We’re dressed by professionals every day, and so when a tie comes undone while we’re out, we’re at a loss. Our primitive ancestors would be so embarrassed.” The young man examined his handiwork. “There. I wish there were a puddle, so I could show you your reflection. Or that I had a glass mirror, but only the Saussines themselves can afford to walk around carrying those. Here, this stud in the middle is only halfway in. May I?”
Without waiting for Léon’s permission, the young man slipped his hand beneath the halves of Léon’s shirt, ...
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