Story Excerpt
Last Train to Gertrude Stein
by Sandra McDonald
After Henri dies in their Versailles cottage—alive and joking on Christmas morning, flown to heaven before noon—Claudine needs a new purpose. She moves back to Paris, pays the movers to hoist her belongings up through the window of a cozy attic in the Latin Quarter, and begins teaching mortal tourists how to make tarte Tatin.
After all, she’s more than a thousand years old, give or take, with no heirs to dote on. Her condition makes childbirth impossible, and Henri sired no children elsewhere. Everything is in order—jewels and gold caches hidden throughout the city, overseas bank accounts in multiple names, legal trusts and contracts updated with a very expensive and long-lived firm of solicitors. Until her demise and next incarnation, then, she can host strangers in her humble accommodations. She can manage tart red apples, organic flour, and sugar caramelized on a hot plate, all served up with folklore and charm.
“They say this recipe was an accident,” she tells her students. “The younger Tatin sister was in such a hurry to bake the apple pie that she entirely forgot to prepare the crust. Quickly she stretched dough on top of the apples, baked a little longer, served it upside down, and voila! Such a success. Then a jealous Michelin cook came and stole her hard work away.”
The story is popular and inaccurate. Upside-down apple pie has existed for centuries, long before any round-faced country girl ever donned an apron. But Ana, the industrious Serbian who handles the bookings, payments, and reviews for a dozen women like Claudine across the city, encourages embellishments. She likes her ladies to be colorful and eccentric with the guests, who arrive seeking advice as much as they do baking tips.
“What’s a good restaurant in Saint Germain?” asked one of today’s women already.
“What’s the best time to visit the Louvre?” the other one asked.
Then it was the third one’s turn: “Where do I take the train to see Gertrude Stein?”
The first two questions are easy. The third is nonsense, but perhaps Clau-dine misconstrued. Her hearing is getting rusty. Things fall apart when you’re ancient; memories get mixed up or fade away. Back in November, Henri joked about her senior moments without knowing how actually senior she was.
“The train to Gertrude what?” Claudine asks.
Three unrelated American women have come today, their dark winter coats hung neatly in the hall, their fingers currently sticky with dough. The one who asked the question is to Claudine’s right, tall and thin with a bob of silver hair. Mary Someone from California Somewhere.
“To Gertrude Stein,” Mary says brightly.
“You can walk to her apartment,” says the second American, a short little redhead. “It’s not too far from here.”
“Who’s Gertrude Stein?” asks the third American, who has awful black bangs and is constantly checking her phone.
Mary Someone’s smile dims slightly. “I read that you can take a train and visit the 1920s and a big party of artists and writers at Gertrude Stein’s house. Virtual reality.”
“This I don’t know,” Claudine replies, relieved. Anything with the word “virtual” in it is bound to be beyond her technological expertise, and thus she is not required to recommend or give any advice at all. She’ll work a smart phone, and she’s figured out how to make the wireless speaker in her apartment play Edith Piaf on demand, but anything else she’s relegated to her next life, if there is one. “Now then, add a pinch of sugar to your dough and mix it until it feels sandy. Like the beach.”
After the tartes go into the oven Claudine moves on to the next part of the class, small buttery madeleines. They are easy to mix and can be customized with raisins or honey coconut or chocolate chips, but the end results are often uneven: some emerge too brown, too flat, or too deflated, or the ridges are not pronounced, or there’s no hump. The hump is crucial. Once the madeleines go off to bake in their special pans, Claudine offers tea or coffee, and everyone relaxes in the living room, and then the tarte and cookies emerge and are consumed, and the leftovers are sent away with their owners in little paper bags decorated with Claudine’s quick sketches of the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame.
Ana approves of the sketches, which she says add a personal touch. She doesn’t know that Claudine once studied and worked intensively with Édouard Manet, the man who once scandalized high society by painting their men in the park with naked prostitutes. Funny that she never told Henri about it. Not that he would have much to say. He was forever mixing up his Manet and Monet and really only liked Picasso.
“Picasso was not a kind man,” she says to Henri’s urn in her bedroom. “But you were.”
Ana sends her more bookings. A Russian lesbian couple, very beautiful and very serious. A young man with a nervous tic from Finland whose madeleines come out marvelously. More Americans. The rainy spring is good for curated experiences catering to homey French baking, but some neighbors complain about the traffic on the stairs. Malik, the handsome young scholar who lives right below Claudine, says she should not mind the complaints.
“I like when you bake,” he says. “The whole building smells divine.”
On her days off, Claudine lets another member of Ana’s crew use her apartment and goes off to practice her flanerie, wandering through neighborhoods and churchyards and gardens she hasn’t seen in years, no destination other than her own memories and the joy of exploration.
“Such delight it is to simply wander,” Manet had said on one of their many excursions.
He would be appalled now, as she is, at the crush of automobiles and mad dash of bicyclists. The days of horses and carriages were awful, the streets clogged with horse piss and manure, but now every crossing brings the possibility of being mowed down by a distracted driver. It’s enough to make her miss the Par-is of her youth: the green marshes and thick forests, her mother’s rosemary coaxed out of soil against the ruins of a Roman wall, the wide open skies ringing with church bells. No one walked around with devices in their ears, talking to invisible people as if conspiring with spirits or ghosts.
But she doesn’t miss the lice and illnesses, and her mother dying in childbirth along with the babe, the icy rains of spring that drenched their little house no matter how hard her father tried to patch the roof, the foul smelling waters of the Seine, the Vikings.
No, she will never miss the Vikings. With warships they came during Holy Week, taking delight in all things unholy. Claudine’s name was Bertrada then, and her lover was a fisherman named Arnulf, and they had plans for marriage and children before both of them ended up dead in the river, their skulls cleaved open.
She hasn’t thought of Arnulf in many years, but his was the first hand to touch her in pleasure, the first man she gave everything to.
She wonders how her many lives would have been different if he had woken up with her in a thicket of mud and grass, wearing a body unfamiliar, like a cloak from God.
Never as devout as she was, he probably would have blamed it on the devil.
Sometimes she does, too.