The Mysteries of Suzanne

I may be one of the only people I know who had a governess. Her name was Suzanne and she came from a small town in Brittany. At the time she came to live with us, I knew nothing about her story -- only that she was there to teach me French. I was five years old. We had just moved into a large and, to me, very ugly house in Sands Point, a peninsula sticking into the Long Island Sound. Suzanne was beautiful, soft, kind, gentle. Her English was good, but heavily accented. She was twenty-nine years old. She would remain in our household for the next twenty-two years until my parents gave her away in marriage to a prominent doctor. When I was sixteen we moved into the city, and I began to learn some of Suzanne's secrets.