Mistral's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

politeness while the
women giggled.
    "That one again!   Just what I needed," Maggy muttered
angrily. "What has Kiki to do with you?" Paula asked.
    "She insulted me this
morning when she passed me in the street."
    "Ah. Did she
indeed?" Paula murmured.
    "I don't find it
amusing," Maggy said, not liking Paula's thoughtful tone.
    "Nor do I, I assure
you.   I find it fascinating...   that bitch is too condescending to bother to
insult just anyone...   so she's noticed
you already...   Well, I have to grant her
an eye."
    "So you know her,
too?"
    "Yes. I know her.   Let's get out of here.   There is a bad odor suddenly in this
cafe.   I'm inviting you to a real
lunch.   Come on — Last night I
won three hundred francs at poker, took them off Zborowski and God knows that
dealer can afford it.   Stop looking at
that slut and her riffraff.   Pretend they
don't exist.   We're going to Dominique's
for a chachlik. Sound good?"
    "Chachlik?   What is it?   Something to eat I hope — I'm starving I'm always
starving." Maggy stood up quickly, desperate to leave, unfolding to her
full five feet nine inches.   Paula's eyes
squinted as she looked up.
    "My God, how much will it
take to fill you up? Never mind, come along, it's crowded there but they'll
find a place for us." Paula herded Maggy out of the Select as briskly as a
terrier, never glancing at the table of Kiki'sfriends who watched them
maliciously untilthey reached the door.
    Around the corner, halfway
down the rue Bréa, the two women turned in at an inconspicu-ous door that
seemed to lead to a charcuterie.   But
beyond the display cases, filled with selections of coldRussian hors
d'oeuvres, was a small, low-ceilinged, red-walled room with marble counters and
high stools.
    Once they were perched before
a counter and Paula had ordered for both of them, she returned to her
questioning of Maggy.   "Tell me all
about yourself.   Mind you.   I'll know if you leave something out."
    Maggy hesitated, not knowing
how to begin.   No one in her seventeen
years had ever asked her this question.   In Tours, where she had lived all of her life, everyone knew everything
there was to know about her.   Should she
gloss over the facts?   Something about
Paula's eyes disposed her to tell the truth.   They were infinitely knowing, yet infinitely kind and Maggy needed
someone to talk to even more than she needed food.   She took a deep breath for courage and
plunged in to get the worst of it said as quickly as possible.
    "The most important
thing about me has always been that my father died a week before he was
supposed to marry my mother — he had smallpox.   If he'd lived, I'd have been just another
premature child — as it was — I'm illegitimate."
    "Evidently — but
these things happen, even in the best of families."
    "But not in respectable
Jewish families.   They just never happen.   I'm the only bastard in the whole Jewish
community of Tours and I've always had my nose rubbed in it."
    "Your mother then, why
didn't she just leave Tours and go to live somewhere else, pretend that she was
a widow like so many other women?"
    "She died when I was
born.   Aunt Esther always blamed her for
dying and escaping the scandal of her conduct."
    "Charming!   Such sympathy!   Did this agreeable aunt bring you up?"
    "No, I lived with my
grandmother until she died four months ago."   Maggy thought wistfully of the gentle old
woman who had raised her so tenderly in her small house, who had been made
happy by Maggy's smiles, whose uncritical love had made Maggy brave, who had
always resisted Aunt Esther's irrational conviction that somehow Maggy had to
pay for the shame of her birth.
    "It was my grandmother
Cecile, my mother's mother, who named me Magali.   She always called me that, even though
everyone else calls me Maggy, because it was one of her family's favorite
names.   The Lunels moved to Tours from
Provence after the Revolution and in Provençal Magali means 'marguerite'