A Sad Song in Paris
The hotel was called Normandy Etoile dans Paris. There was a group of tennis players staying there, carrying equipment with the name Dunlop plastered all over it, and going off to play their matches in some kind of international tournament.
I was walking past the front desk when the concierge received a call that the car was coming for “the U.S. girl who is playing Mlle. — “ I didn’t catch the name, but the tone implied she was a big deal. I got upstairs to lie down and rest my feet from all the walking and gawking, and I heard a high, clear feminine voice singing from two doors down the hall.
At first I thought it was a French radio station, but soon realized it was a woman in the room singing. I had heard a baby crying behind that door when I left earlier, and now thought this seemed like a strange lullaby. The song, as I struggled to interpret the words, took on a lonesome, despairing tone: “why a man must die alone…” I listened and tried to find the words in English. “Night comes on, wild and…” I missed something there. Then the refrain, melodic and haunting: “My love, my love has died today — and now I weep… Why love, why weep, why die?”
The voice gave me a chill that had nothing to do with the cold spring rain through which I had been ambling. I got up and put on some pants and went out into the hall. I really don’t know why — perhaps to hear better.
She paused in her singing and I had a brief fantasy that she would walk into the hall so that I could put a face and form with that heartbreakingly lovely voice. But she didn’t. Instead she resumed singing, this time in English.
“The song of love is a sad song, hi lilli hi lilli hi lo. The song of love is a song of woe — don’t ask me how I know…”
The chill got loose and ran all down my spine. My Georgia grandmother called that a fox running across your grave. I knew that song. If this had been a movie and I had been a crooner, I could have chimed in with the next stanza, and drawn her out to me that way.
