My Little Blue Dress by Bruno Maddox

foyer.
    Much of the rest of the decade is a blur. For I was having fun, and therefore time flew.

    T HE LAST TIME I saw Eloïse was December 31, 1929. She was heading home to Bavaria to spend the New Year with her father the count. An urchin had just carried her trunk down to the street and she was putting on her cape, getting ready to leave. I was in the armchair with an absinthe.
    â€œI wish I had a dad,” I announced, watching her fiddle with the chin strap of her gray cashmere traveling helmet.
    She snorted. “You do not wish you had my father. We have no relationship. We sit at opposite ends of a very long table. He is a man.”
    â€œStill. You’re lucky to have a dad.”
    â€œLucky?” She pouted. “Oh what a monster you are. You know that I am not lucky, that I inhabit a world constructed entirely of pain. Only very occasionally, on those rare, rare nights when the music races high and fast, when the wild beat of the bongo takes the place of my own heartbeat and I am whirling, whirling  . . . entirely given over to the dance . . . a flame of flesh licking at the twig of life . . . only on those rare, magical nights would I say I was ‘lucky.’ ”
    â€œOh, come now,” I chided her, standing to help with the chin strap. “Are they really so rare, Eloïse? Those nights?”
    She tutted. “Well, then you are lucky to have a mother. Why do you not go home to Muffington and visit her? Do you not think she misses you?”
    A bell clanged down in the snowy boulevard.
    â€œThere’s your cab. And it’s Murbery.”
    â€œYou are scared, I think.” She narrowed her eyes. “For all that you have become, for all the happiness you have found here in Paris . . . some part of you is haunted by the memory of childhood awkwardness. You feel you do not deserve your successes and your joy. You suspect that if you were to return to Mubford they would strip you of your finery, expose you as a fraud and you would once again find yourself to be a lonely little girl who does not belong.”
    â€œEloïse, the place is called Murbery. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
    â€œOh. So you will go?”
    The cabbie’s bell rang again. “That remains your cab and no. I am absolutely one hundred percent not going back to Murbery.” I shoved her out the door, slammed it playfully in her face.
    â€œThat is a large number of percentage points for someone who is not one bit scared,” came her voice through the oaken slab. They were the last words I would hear her speak while “Bye! Safe journey!” were the last she would hear from me.

    E LOÏSE’S PARTING WORDS had certainly had the ring of truth to them, yet at the same time she could not have been more wrong. I wasn’t scared to go back to Murbery. I just didn’t want to. In a few short days I would be thirty years old and I was impatient to move on with my life, in a mood to free myself of old attachments, before I entered my life’s next phase. Youth had not been easy for me was the fact of the matter, and I couldn’t help feeling that the best thing to do was to make a clean break. With a big white piece ofpaper torn from my old student sketchpad I headed downstairs to get a drink and make plans. The restaurant next door was deserted but for the barman polishing glasses.
    â€œHail. Where is everyone?”
    â€œHail. It’s New Year’s Eve. Sometimes we do do something here, but this year the owner’s away on business so . . .”
    â€œLook, is it okay if I just drink? I mean do I have to order an appetizer, or . . . ?”
    â€œNo, no. That’s fine. Have a seat. What’ll it be?”
    â€œMm . . . brandy.”
    At a table by the window I sipped thoughtfully from a tumbler. Snow was still falling in the street outside, the flakes so fat and heavy it