The wallpaper pattern Charlotte and Vivi sat basking in was called Innocence. Where but in America, Charlotte thought, would people believe they could shroud a room in naïveté? Nonetheless, she admired Hannah’s taste.
The mirror over the mantel was tilted so she could see the reflection of the two of them sitting at the small table angled between the fireplace and the swinging door to the kitchen, her in the shirt and trousers she’d changed into to cook dinner, Vivi still in her school uniform. The wallpaper was so sunny, the light from the wall sconces and lamps so soft, they really did seem to be basking in radiance. Then Vivi spoke.
“How come you never talk about my father?”
“Why don’t you ever talk about my father?” Charlotte corrected her. She wasn’t stalling for time. At least that wasn’t her only motive.
“Why don’t you ever talk about my father?” Vivi asked.
The question wasn’t new. Vivi occasionally asked about the father she’d never known. But this was the first time she’d framed it as an accusation. Or did Charlotte hear it that way only because of the imaginary encounter with the concierge in the foyer?
“I talk about him. I talk about him all the time. What do you want to know?”
She shrugged. “What was he like?”
Charlotte thought about that for a moment. Now she wasn’t stalling. She was trying to remember. But it was like trying to capture the feeling of a fever dream after your temperature is back to normal. After the whole world’s temperature is back to normal. Sometimes she wondered if they would have married if the war hadn’t come, if he hadn’t been called up, if they hadn’t felt time bearing down on them, if they hadn’t seen themselves as actors in a tragic play or movie. Would her skin have gone so hot at his touch in less heated times? Would they have been able to hold each other with tenderness rather than desperation? She didn’t regret any of it. She was grateful for what they’d had. And without Laurent, she would not have Vivi. But the haunted intensity was not something you could tell a child.
“He had an original mind,” she said finally.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I was never bored with him. More than that, I was dazzled by him. He saw things other people didn’t, made connections others didn’t.” This was better. She was getting the hang of it.
“What else?”
“He had a finely calibrated moral compass.”
“A what?”
“A well-developed sense of right and wrong.”
“Oh.”
This clearly was not what Vivi was looking for.
“He would have been proud of you.” Charlotte tried again.
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re smart. He cared a lot about that. And pretty.” Vivi made a self-deprecating face. “He cared a lot about that, too, at least in women. And you have a moral compass, too.”
“I do?”
“You care about other people. You try to do the right thing.”
Vivi considered that for a moment. “Sometimes I’m not sure what the right thing is.”
“You’re in good company there.”
“Even when you’re a grown-up?”
“Especially when you’re a grown-up.”
“But you said my father knew.”
Charlotte thought about that. Laurent had had principles and scruples, but he hadn’t faced many choices. One of the advantages, perhaps the only advantage, of dying young. She wasn’t about to tell Vivi that. “He did his best,” she said.
Vivi took a bite of her omelet, finally. “Tell me more about him.”
Charlotte sat thinking. She was an editor. She dealt with words and images and stories all day. Surely she could create a father to capture Vivi’s imagination.
“He was over the moon when you were born.”
“I thought he wasn’t there when I was born.”
She is alone in the bare white room, more alone than she has ever been in her easy cossetted life. The nuns come and go at intervals, but the nuns are no help. At least, they are no comfort. She is on her own. We are born alone and we die alone, Laurent used to say. We also give birth alone, she wants to tell someone, but there is no one to tell. Laurent is off at the front, though in this rout no one knows where the front is. The nuns and other patients sob as the radio, taken over by the Germans, blares that the French army is nothing more than a rabble with no idea in which direction to flee. Her mother died three years ago. Charlotte still hasn’t got over the unfairness of the timing. She’d been a rebellious child, closer to her iconoclastic father than her more conventional mother, but just as she’d begun to know the vulnerable woman behind the exquisitely dressed, irreproachably behaved public persona, her mother had succumbed to a rapid and virulent cancer. Her father, a leftist publisher who was a friend of the Jewish socialist prime minister Léon Blum, barely got out before the Germans marched in. He hadn’t had to be told that his name was on their list. Laurent’s elderly parents are safe, she hopes, in the South of France. They’d wanted her to go with them, but she was afraid of delivering the baby on the road. Besides, what if Laurent somehow finds his way home? She has to be there for him. She’d refused to go with Simone for the same reason. “In that case, I’ll stay with you,” Simone said, but Charlotte was adamant, and in the end Simone didn’t put up much of a fight. They’d been friends, almost like sisters, they always said since neither of them had one, from the days when they’d played together as little girls in the Luxembourg Gardens, but now Simone had her own child to worry about. She’d taken three-year-old Sophie and left, too. Even the local tradesmen had fled. She’d seen them as she’d made her way on foot to the hospital, people hijacking taxis, tying their possessions to automobiles, piling wagons with beds and pots and pans, portraits of ancestors and cages full of canaries and parrots. She doesn’t understand that. Dogs and cats, yes, but birds, when the city is hemorrhaging, when the world is coming to an end? Ashes rain down from the sky. Smoke stings her eyes and sears her nose and throat. The government offices and foreign consulates and embassies are burning their records.
Then, she doesn’t know how much later, Paris goes silent. She hears the hush in the intervals when she stops screaming. The lack of sound is thunderous. The city cannot be this still. No automobiles, no horns, no cacophony of human voices. She lies there, thinking she is dreaming. That is the only explanation for the silence. Then she hears the birds. She’s not dreaming. She’s dead. Why else is a nun hovering, her wrinkled gray face smashed out of shape by the tight wimple, telling her it’s all over. So Laurent and she were both wrong. There is an afterlife, and it’s silent, antiseptic smelling, staffed by nuns who appear harried but not unkind.
Only later when they put Vivi in her arms does she realize that she’s not dead, and the city is silent because it’s empty, and she has a daughter. The terror closes in. Before this, she had only her own survival to worry about. Now she looks down at this small purple-faced package and knows the meaning of responsibility. Suddenly she understands her mother’s caution. Her childhood had been lived in a less dangerous time, but there is no such thing as safety. The dread grows worse as the newspapers begin to publish again, and she reads the ads. Mothers looking for babies who have gone missing in the stampede. People searching for someone, anyone, to claim lost infants whose only answer to questions of who they are and where they come from is a single bleating plea. Maman.
She stays in the hospital for how long, a week, ten days? Long enough for the city to start to stir again, but the noises are new and unrecognizable. The first uproar sounds like an avalanche or hurricane, nature wreaking its vengeance. She asks the young nun, the one whose face swims pale and thin inside her wimple, what she is hearing. “Boots,” the nun says. “Every day they stage a parade down the Champs Élysées. Complete with a military band.” Sure enough, Charlotte recognizes the strains of music beneath the roar of the unnatural disaster. “You can hear it everywhere. In case we don’t remem
ber they’re here,” the nun adds.
It’s not only the parade. The boots are all over the city, pounding sidewalks, punishing cobblestones, kicking in doors, stomping through buildings, even here in the hospital. They go from ward to ward, room to room. When they come to the mothers and babies, they are polite, even avuncular. One stands beside her bed. He asks for her papers. She hands them over. His glance is cursory. He hands them back. Then, just as she is about to exhale in relief, he leans over and cups Vivi’s head in his big hand. It’s lucky she’s frozen with terror. Otherwise she would slap his hand away.
Gradually people begin to return. Simone comes back with Sophie in tow. Many other friends do as well, but some cannot or do not. Josephine, who was in Portugal visiting a man she’d fallen in love with when the border was closed, is trapped in safety; Bette is teaching in Grenoble; Laurent’s parents remain in Avignon; her own father keeps moving; or so she has heard about all of them. There is little or no postal service to or from the unoccupied zone.
“How do you know he was over the moon,” Vivi insisted, “if he’d already left for the war?”
Caught in the lie. “Letters, of course. He was the one who named you.” That at least was true. “I wanted to call you Gabrielle, but he wrote saying you had to be Vivienne.” If you were a girl, she didn’t add. “You had to be life.”
Vivi sat with her fork in midair, staring at her mother. “You mean he knew he was going to die?”
“He was in the army. He knew it was a possibility. That’s why you were so important to him. To both of us.”
Vivi didn’t say anything to that, and Charlotte didn’t tell her the rest of the story. It was true that Laurent would have been thrilled and proud and hopeful, but he hadn’t had the opportunity. By the time Vivi was born, he was dead, though she didn’t know it until later. The army, which, like the country, was in disarray and disgrace, had taken almost two months to notify her. These were not details she wanted to pass on to Vivi. The hole left by Laurent’s absence yawned wide enough. The chasm left by his never knowing of her existence would be unbridgeable.
“Do you mind if I ask what brought this on?”
Vivi shrugged. “I was just thinking.”
Charlotte didn’t believe that for a minute. She took a sip of wine and waited.
“We had to go around the class today,” Vivi said finally, “saying what our fathers did.”
Charlotte could kill them, she really could. The insensitivity. The stupidity.
“Barbara Sinclair’s father is something at the UN. Kitty Foster’s is a doctor who invented an operation. I forget what kind. Camilla Brower’s father owns a magazine.”
“Your grandfather owned a publishing house.”
“They didn’t ask about grandfathers.”
“They should have.”
“It’s okay, Mom. I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t answer.” The solicitude in her voice was like a nail going down the blackboard of Charlotte’s heart. She was supposed to take care of her daughter, not the other way around. “Pru McCabe’s father died in the war, too. Only…” Her voice drifted off.
“Only what?”
“She has a picture of him in his uniform on her dresser.”
“You’d have one of your father, too, if both of your grandfathers’ apartments hadn’t been appropriated by the Germans, and ours hadn’t been looted by the French when we were taken away. We never went back after the camp. There was no point. It wasn’t as if we had good memories to return to.”
“I know. I didn’t mean it was your fault I don’t have one. What did he look like?”
Charlotte poured more wine into her glass. Surely she could remember what the man she’d fallen in love with looked like, but no matter how hard she tried, no face came into focus, only fragments. A tanned throat disappearing into the open neck of a shirt as she lay with her head in his lap, looking up at him, on the beach where they’d gone for two days after the wedding. Eyes narrowed against the smoke as he lit a cigarette. A way of holding his head to make him look taller. He was sensitive about his height. Long fingers, moving incessantly, practicing surgical knots when he had thread, imaginary knots when he didn’t, a doctor’s trick. No, those weren’t his hands.
“He was dark. Dark hair. Dark eyes.”
“Do I look like him?”
“You have his eyes. Not just the color, but the shape,” she said, though she couldn’t remember that either. She was ashamed of herself. This really was willful amnesia. “And his long lashes and brows. He had beautifully shaped eyebrows. I used to joke that the lashes and brows were unfair on a man.”
“I wish I had a picture.”
Charlotte sat looking at her daughter. “So do I, sweetheart, so do I.”
She did, she really did. She’d even thought of trying to get her hands on one. How hard would it be? A few letters, some anodyne requests. Not everyone’s apartment had been appropriated or looted. Surely some friend or relative had a photograph of Laurent. All she had to do was write. Sometimes she thought it was the least she could do for Vivi. Sometimes she thought it was the most foolish thing she could do for her.
* * *
It was after ten when Charlotte looked up from the manuscript she’d propped against her knees and found Vivi standing in the doorway to the bedroom, her pink pajamas a pale glow against the background of the shadowy hallway.
“I thought you were asleep.”
Vivi took the few steps into the room and sat on the side of the bed. Charlotte moved over to make room for her. She slept in a single bed. The room wasn’t large, and there was no need for anything more accommodating.
“You know what you said before, about doing the right thing?” Vivi asked.
Charlotte waited.
“And how sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing is?”
“I have a feeling we’re not talking about hypothetical situations anymore. I have a feeling we’re talking about you.”
Vivi nodded.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“I’d be tattling.”
“My lips are sealed.”
“What if you have to choose between what the rules say and something your best friend did?”
Charlotte decided this was not the time to quote E. M. Forster about having the courage to betray his country rather than his friend. “You mean Alice?”
Vivi nodded.
“Which rules did she break?”
“The school honor code.”
“Alice cheated?”
“On a Latin test.”
“Are you sure?”
“She had some declensions written on the inside of her blouse cuffs. She showed them to me before the test.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t have a chance to say anything. The teacher was handing out the questions.”
“Did you say anything to her after class?”
She shook her head. “I can’t tell on her. She’s my best friend. But when you were talking about my dad”—she almost never used the word, and now she pronounced it hesitantly, as if she weren’t quite entitled to it—“being moral, I started thinking maybe I had to do something. I just don’t know what.”
Charlotte put the manuscript aside and reached for her daughter’s hand. It was soft and damp from the cream she’d begun slathering on at night. “It’s a moral conundrum, all right.”
“That makes it sound even worse.”
“Okay, let’s look at the alternatives. You can turn her in.”
“She’ll never speak to me again. No one in the whole class will.”
“Or you can say nothing and just try to forget about it.”
“But what if she does it again? I mean, if she got away with it this time and thinks it’s okay, won’t she do it again?”
“I think you just found your solution.”
“I did?”
“What if you tell her you’re not going to say anything this time, but it’s n
ot right, and if she does it again, you’ll have to report her.”
Vivi thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know. That feels as if I’m trying to get away with something myself. I’m not really following the honor code, but I’m not being such a good friend either.”
“I think you’re being a very good friend. You’re trying to save her from a life of crime. And what you’re getting away with is a compromise. That’s what most of life is, unfortunately. Or perhaps fortunately. The world isn’t black and white. It’s a gray and shadowy landscape out there.”
“I guess,” Vivi said, but she didn’t look persuaded. She stood and started for the door. When she reached it, she turned back. “Technicolor.”
“What?”
“If the world’s not black and white, can’t it at least be Technicolor?”
Charlotte grinned. “I love you, Vivienne Gabrielle Foret, I really do.”
Three
“Please, Mom.” Vivi turned from her image, from the replicas of her image that went on and on into infinity in the three-way mirror of the fitting room, to her mother. “I’ll never ask for anything ever again. I promise.”
“You wouldn’t care to put that in writing, would you?”
“In blood if you want.”
“Let’s not get carried away.”
“Oh, come on, let’s get carried away.” Vivi twirled around the small fitting room, the burgundy velvet skirt swirling about her long legs, until she came to a dizzying stop against a wall. “Pretty please with whipped cream.”
Paris Never Leaves You Page 3