Sarah would turn to a fabled memory, freeing this Sarah from all responsibility of keeping the candle burning.
They had come a long way from passing their nights in opium dens, where they had tried to hang on long enough for the morning light to splinter, when they would crawl deathly toward their beds with the superiority of battered warriors claiming victory through their wounds. She was old now. Remarkable energy, intrepid spirit, and two layers of pancake could not disguise the fact that she had become an old woman. Her age was perhaps made diminutive by the youthful characters that she portrayed, and her brashness and reckless bullying that had introduced (and maintained) her reputation around the world. But in truth the edginess her life skated upon, the cold steel razor that at once chilled her veins and threatened to sever them, was now dulled and rusted and left out of view. Before, she had burned opium for enlightenment, seeing the present in a way that let it unroll and display itself as an entirely new vision, a new possibility that challenged itself through the ironies. But now when she smoked she was just a pathetic sixty-one-year-old hag, doped-up baggage that only weighted down the earth and slowed its turning. No wonder Max was concerned. She had turned from the rebellious boozer into the alleyway drunk, all because of a matter of thirty years that were nothing more than just the sum cumulative total of days passing.
She hadn’t said so much to Max, but she had intimated that she was feeling wearied by this latest boycott, leaving it vague and open to interpretation. (Shouldn’t it be obvious? Those kinds of melees are only really meant for the battle-excited young. Imagine, being exiled to the carnival!) Max immediately jumped on the opium issue, apparently sensing her openness as an invitation to express his concern, rather than any professionally motivated irritation. “The fact of the matter,” he said, “is that the hop is terrible for you. Never mind your career, but just for your health and sanity. It’s just bad.”
Again, she wanted to tell him to stop saying
“It’s just that it is so dulling.”
She reached over and placed her hand on his forearm. Her sculpted fingers and thumb now bent slightly at the joints with the skin loosened, lines made deeper by the shadows from the dimmed lights. “I am telling you that I understand. It is not addiction, though. Just a way to cope.” And as she said those words she felt an anger seethe through her body. The real Sarah Bernhardt, the younger version who hadn’t been hideously taken over by this battered old-leathered shell, never needed to cope. If some freakish American church group had come after her, well then
Max must have sensed the seriousness, because he quickly relaxed his managerial posture and leaned over more Molly-like, his rigid Saxon features softening, taking on a gentle femininity. He caressed her cheek. His hands, although still masculine, stroked with a comforting mercy that was neither patronizing nor sympathetic, rather one that bespoke honesty in its purest form, as though stoking her with true compassion. “You know that I love you” was all he said. And she understood the depth of those words so much that the literal was stripped of every nuance, the letters and phonetics falling away until they were no longer symbols of expression, but the pure, raw expression itself.
“I am old,” she said.
Max slid his hand down her cheek and took hold of her hand, pressing it into the tabletop. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“You don’t know old, Molly?”
He nodded. Almost convincingly.
“Just look in the mirror if you don’t know old. And if you still don’t get it, then look at me. Old is what it is, Molly…Old. I’m not going to be dancing side by side with Mata Hari, unless it’s billed as a freak show.”
“Sarah, you are not…”
“I’m not the Sarah Bernhardt that you want me to be.” And with that he squeezed her hand, and she pursed her lips so tightly that they hurt, sealing off any other words that might slip out and reveal the brewing of rational and irrational fears that busked throughout her mind. Once exposed they might mutate and take on a life larger than she and Max could possibly imagine.
To the restaurant workers, they must have looked like an aging couple misplaced after the ball, conversations and discourse long ago exchanged, where the sharing of meals and long-gone expressions are ratified by a gentle touch that symbolizes intimacy. Sarah and her confidant Max sat silently in that deserted diner, his hand left gently on her forearm, their stares vacant and lone, while the floors around them were being mopped and the tables sprayed and sponged. And six thousand miles away among the sooty gray Parisian buildings lay a world that would still fawn over every word that their native daughter had to say. They would still line up at the window, crowding one another and pushing and pulling with a near hysterical determination to catch a glimpse of her. But here she sat with Max. An empty cafe in a deserted downtown Los Angeles. No less ordinary than any other couple who may have inadvertently found their way in. They could not have asked for a better moment of peace. And Sarah could only hold one thought. One single thought that swirled her mind like a playful pan that turned malicious and started banging the word against the cavity of her skull. One devious thought in two parts.
Old. And soon to be forgotten.
Even by the time they had flagged a taxi, she couldn’t shake the thought. The suddenness of the restaurant’s ambience had gone with the closing of the door and clacking of the lock. A warm gentle wind brushed up against her face and seductively wrapped her ankles. The dirty downtown smell oddly refreshing and inspiring. Still nothing could knock away the desperate vision of mortality that overcame her (compounded by having to sleep in circus town). She was glad Max was with her, because if ever there was a moment when she might have hooked herself up to a stash of opium and let it run until it whitewashed her existence, this was it.
The cab passed under a last streetlamp, which left Broadway looking unlucky and shadowed. The outlines of the giant palm leaves rose as ancient totem smiles. Sarah thought about closing her eyes, but it seemed like more work than just keeping them open. She watched until the cab quickly turned the corner on Second. The concrete cross from the Cathedral of our Lady of Angels stared down upon her, grainy gray, the edges chipped and rounded, and a footprint over the entrance. The name of the cathedral arced above, the once deep engraving now shallow and weathered. Sarah imagined Mother Superior reciting the creed to help herself find a calming peace, then marching right up to the bishop of this California parish to tell him how wildly mistaken he was, that her young novice was a girl of virtue and honesty, and despite a sometimes independent nature the young Mademoiselle Sarah was indeed a true conscript of the Father. (Although she too might have been tempted to give up on Sarah, finally conceding that the Jew in her could destroy all the potential goodness, unable to see that the same spark, the same gentleness and open heart that Sarah—or was it Henriette-Rosine?—had possessed at nine was still beating inside her chest.) Maybe the way that Sarah had gone about navigating the world was far more different than the sister could ever have imagined, but in the end they had both tried to achieve the same goals: to give up one’s self for the love and salvation of others.
She reached down and took Max’s hand. She looked back one more time at the church. It disappeared in shadows and night, as though it had never existed at all. “Please hold me until we get back to the hotel,” she said.
“Sarah,” he whispered, “we forgot to talk about Marguerite.”
She put her index finger to her lips. “Please just hold me.”
She had gone to sleep rather easily in her room at the King George, the loathing and pity fully exhausting her. It was the morning that thwarted her. The nagging thoughts and blistered questions had sounded an alarm in her
