Page 3 of One of Them

D elia knew that girl Anne was watching her.

They all watched her—checking for horns, no doubt.

She was used to it by now. Used to it and didn’t especially care.

But that one, the one with the straight brown hair and alert expression who lived at the end of her hall, seemed different.

Not disdainful or critical like the others.

Just curious. And unsure of herself. Well, Delia knew herself to be something of an outcast here, so Anne’s showing any interest in her wasn’t going to win her any friends. Didn’t she know that?

Midge, Delia’s roommate from freshman year, had been one of the most disdainful ones. When they lived together, she droned on about her horse, Jester. How handsome he was. How fast. How smart.

“It sounds like you want to marry him.” Delia had endured at least ten nonstop minutes of this blather.

“Marry him?” Midge was clearly offended. “Is that supposed to be a joke? Because it’s not funny.”

“Joke? No. I was quite serious,” Delia said. “Given what a remarkable creature he is, you might not do any better.”

After that, Midge shut up, but her prior mild disdain hardened into active dislike. It had been such a trial living with her, but now Delia had a room to herself—what a relief.

Her father hadn’t understood why she even wanted to go to Vassar. “You can go to Barnard,” he said. “Stay in New York.” He thought Poughkeepsie was a backwater, especially after Paris, and of course he was right. But Delia had her reasons for leaving New York; the chief one among them was him.

Simon Goldhush had come from two prosperous families, diamonds and banking respectively, but he had not wanted to be part of family tradition or go into either of those businesses.

Instead he had shocked his parents by going to art school, where, along with studying drawing and painting, he rubbed shoulders with the creative types he met there.

He soon realized his true gift was for finding and nurturing talent, coaxing it out like a delicate bud and allowing it the air, space, and light to thrive.

He traded New York for Paris in the early 1920s and opened an art gallery.

Delia’s mother, Sophie Rossner, a sculptor and fellow expat, was one of his early discoveries.

The Paris gallery became something of a sensation, at least among a certain group of people—artists, intellectuals, culture makers, and taste shapers—and Simon and Sophie were at the center of it.

They were both tall, and almost always towered above everyone else in the room; Simon’s hair was dark, and slicked back with pomade, while Sophie’s hair was a brilliant russet, worn long and loose, though that was not at all the style.

Simon was easygoing and good at charming the clients, while Sophie was more unpredictable, a woman of great enthusiasms but also prone to voluble outbursts and the occasional tirade.

People liked Simon and felt comfortable with him, while they were in awe of Sophie, and even a little bit afraid.

But afraid or not, people were drawn to her sculpture.

She worked in stone—mostly but not exclusively marble—and often on a small, even intimate scale, though every now and then she’d surprise her admirers with a large-scale, even enormous, piece.

The forms were recognizable—figures, animals—but their streamlined simplicity gave them an almost abstract elegance, which made them very modern.

Their apartment in the white-tiled building on the rue Vavin displayed some, though by no means all, of Sophie’s work; it was a home, not a gallery, and was full almost every evening.

There were long, wine-soaked dinners, themed costume parties at which guests sang, danced, and occasionally removed one or more articles of clothing.

There were loud, heated arguments over art or politics, readings of plays, games of charades, and entertainers, such as an amateur magician who filled the room with doves or pulled a dozen brightly colored silk scarves out of his seemingly empty hat.

Delia was mostly a spectator at these gatherings.

She didn’t mind; what she minded was when her father would try to draw her in, trotting her out as if she were a wind-up toy— Delia, sing for us, you have such a beautiful voice , or Dance for us, chérie, you’re a little Pavlova, yes you are .

Delia was neither a gifted singer nor dancer, so why did he keep saying these things?

And when he and her mother had been drinking long enough, they stopped paying any attention to her at all.

She wasn’t given dinner, but went around picking up food left on people’s plates; once she consumed a full glass of abandoned wine and got drunk, which they found hilarious, even when she threw up all over the floor.

There were nights when no one thought to put Delia to bed, and she would fall asleep on the couch or carpet.

Once some late arrival tossed a fur coat over her sleeping form; later Sophie told her that she and Simon had spent twenty frantic minutes searching for her, thinking she had somehow wandered outside on her own.

That story became one they repeated often and with great amusement, though it made Delia feel less like her parents’ child than like their pet.

The Paris of Delia’s childhood was muted and somber, composed of grays that ranged from the palest, coolest tint to the deepest charcoal, and also ocher, mud brown, sable, and oyster white.

Against this subdued background—the grisaille of the stately old buildings, the black ribbon of the Seine that wound through the city—were set occasional bursts of color: the red raw-silk cushions her mother had made for their gray divan, the drapes in the front room, forest green shot through with golden threads, the vivid kilims scattered on the dark wooden floors.

These colors seemed reflective of Sophie’s temperament.

She was an often distracted and even inattentive mother, leaving Delia with a nanny or sometimes her father while she went off to her nearby studio, but every now and then she would surprise Delia with a burst of attention and enthusiasm, bright as the red cushions or gold threads in the drapes.

When Delia was seven, her parents forgot about a school holiday.

Neither Simon nor the nanny was available, so it looked as if Delia would have to go to the studio with her mother.

Sophie was clearly annoyed. “Why can’t you take her?

” she said to Delia’s father. And when he explained why not, she redirected her annoyance toward the nanny.

“Why are we paying her?” she grumbled. But in the end, there was no alternative, and she told Delia to hurry up so they could leave.

Delia wished her mother didn’t see her as such a bother.

Though she didn’t say so, she was eager, even excited, to see this place that had an almost magnetic pull on Sophie, one that even seemed to transform her into a different version of herself—her abundant mane of hair coiled into a loose bun, her usual fitted jackets trimmed in fur or velvet, soigné dresses with full skirts, and silk or ruffled blouses replaced with a dark-blue canvas smock and pants.

On her feet she wore heavy work boots, filmed with a layer of some chalky substance, instead of the elegant high-heeled pumps she usually favored.

She strode so quickly along the street that Delia had trouble keeping up.

Sophie didn’t notice; she was intent on reaching her studio as soon as she could.

When they got to the building, Delia followed her mother up, up, up four—or was it five?

—flights of stairs. At the top, Sophie unlocked the door to let them both inside.

“You can go and play,” she said. Delia didn’t move right away; she was captivated by one of Sophie’s large-scale figures, a woman with a fish’s tail—she was a mermaid, that was it—who was coiled around a large shell-like object.

She was made of some green-and-white stone, and the white veining was made into part of her hair, as if it were illuminated by a light above or behind it.

When Delia could finally turn her gaze elsewhere, she saw that the vast space was punctuated by big windows at the front and rear and a skylight above.

The wide-plank floorboards were so bleached they were almost white, and the walls were blistered with bubbles of paint.

Against one of them stood many slabs or hunks of stone of differing shapes and sizes.

Sophie went over to a pegboard on the wall and took down her tools, her attention directed toward another large, unfinished sculpture in the center of the room.

At first Delia couldn’t quite make out what the thing was supposed to be, but then she saw it was a person—no, two people, entwined in a passionate embrace.

The woman’s long hair—not unlike Sophie’s—streamed down her back, and the man’s arms were wound around her, his hands cupping the cheeks of her derriere.

This seemed naughty to Delia, but also exciting in some way she couldn’t explain.