Paris Never Leaves You

by Ellen Feldman

  One day when she is at the cash register she steals a glance at the officer, who is standing with a book in one hand, the fingers of his other hand doing some kind of intricate exercise as, she has noticed, they frequently do, but he is not looking at the book. He is staring at the clock on the back wall. It is set to French time. The Germans have decreed that all of Occupied France must now run on German time. Charlotte keeps setting it to German time. Simone keeps moving it back an hour. Damn Simone and her meaningless bravado. They need no excuse to arrest and appropriate, but still, why give them one to hide behind?

  The officer looks from the clock to his watch, then back up at the clock. She drops her eyes and waits for him to speak. Except for the labored breathing of the old professor, who is not well—how could he be under the circumstances?—the shop remains silent. The officer walks to another shelf and takes down a book. She almost wishes he had said something about the clock. It is harder to hate the polite ones, the ones who seem reasonable, who let you keep time by the sun rather than by force. She does not want to begin to see this officer, any officer, any German as human. It is too dangerous.

  The next time he comes, a week or ten days later—she refuses to keep track of his visits—she is alone in the shop. Simone is queueing for their rations, and there are no other customers. That is unusual these days. Despite the shortage of paper, the Occupation is turning out to be a boon for both publishers and bookshops. Between the curfew and shortages, there is little to do at night other than read or make love, and there isn’t much opportunity for the latter. Too many of the men have disappeared into POW or labor camps, fled to England or North Africa, or been killed in the fighting. She is sitting in the torn leather chair in the corner with Vivi on her lap, paging through a picture book.

  “Bonjour,” he says.

  She doesn’t answer.

  He begins to browse. She drops her voice to a whisper as she reads the nonsensical rhymes to her daughter. When she looks up after a while, she sees he is watching them.

  “How old is she?” he asks in his correct but accented French.

  Charlotte does not mean to answer, but how can she resist talking about Vivi? “Eighteen months.”

  The look of surprise that crosses his face is the confirmation of her worst nightmares. The lack of food is taking its toll. Vivi will be sick and stunted for life.

  The next day, he returns with his wiliest ploy or most generous gesture. Who can tell? He is carrying an orange. “For the child,” he says, and puts it on the counter.

  She stands looking at it. How can she look anywhere else? She doesn’t remember the last time she saw an orange. It glows as if lit from within.

  “Vitamin C,” he adds.

  She goes on looking at it.

  “I am a physician,” he says, as if you had to have a medical degree to know a growing child needs vitamin C.

  Still she goes on looking at it but doesn’t reach for it.

  He turns away, takes a book off a table, glances at it, returns it, says au revoir, and leaves the shop. He is making it easy for her.

  * * *

  “How was the movie?” Charlotte asked when Vivi got home that evening.

  “Sad. Elizabeth Taylor dies because Van Johnson gets drunk and locks her out in a snowstorm. Then Elizabeth’s sister, Donna Reed, won’t let him have custody of their daughter. She says it’s because he’s a bad father, but really it’s because Donna Reed was in love with him, but he chose Elizabeth Taylor instead.” She stood looking thoughtful for a moment. “But the girl goes to live with her father in the end, so it all works out.”

  Charlotte started to say that in the Fitzgerald story the protagonist doesn’t get custody, then changed her mind. It was like the yellow wallpaper. She wanted to preserve the illusion for Vivi as long as possible.

  * * *

  Charlotte was at the stove sautéing mushrooms when Vivi got home several evenings later. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the jamb, still wearing her camel’s hair coat, hugging her books to her as if they were armor.

  “You can return the dress.”

  “What?” Charlotte turned off the burner under the skillet and faced her daughter. She really did think she hadn’t heard her correctly above the faint flickering of the gas.

  “I said you can return the dress. It’s too expensive anyway.”

  “It’s not too expensive. It’s fine.”

  “I don’t need it. I’m not going to the dance.”

  “Of course you’re going to the dance.”

  “I’m not invited.”

  “What do you mean you’re not invited? The invitation is on your dresser.”

  “It’s been rescinded. That was the word Eleanor used.” Eleanor Hathaway was the classmate whose grandmother was facing her mortality. “She says it’s not her fault.”

  “What’s not her fault?”

  “That she can’t invite me. She says her grandmother won’t let her.”

  Impossible as it would seem to Charlotte later, she still didn’t understand. She racked her brain trying to remember if she’d offended the old woman or Eleanor’s mother in some way. Vivi’s classmates’ mothers were polite, but Charlotte didn’t fool herself into thinking that she was one of them or even that they liked her. They pitied her—poor Charlotte Foret had to go out to work—but mostly they disapproved of her. She managed to dress with twice the style, they told one another, on a quarter of what they spent on clothes. The observation, which Vivi had passed on, was not meant as a compliment, at least not entirely. There was also some speculation about her accent, which seemed to wane and wax. She had to admit they had a point there. In the years she’d been living in America, she’d found that a rolled r or elongated e occasionally came in handy. And once, from the stall in a school ladies’ room on some parents’ night, she’d overheard one mother telling another that Charlotte Foret had a way of lighting a cigarette and throwing away the match that told you to mind your own damn business. It was lucky she wasn’t much of a smoker.

  “Her grandmother doesn’t even know you.”

  “She knows I’m Jewish. I know what you always say. You weren’t a Jew until Hitler made you one. But that’s not the way other people see it.”

  “Even here?”

  Vivi lifted her thin shoulders in another shrug. The gesture was meant to be insouciant. It came out as defeated. “I hope the dance is a flop. I hope Eleanor comes down with a bad case of pimples the night before.”

  “And I hope her grandmother rots in that special circle of hell reserved for bigots,” Charlotte said.

  So this was the way they got to you in America. No roundups, no camps, merely insidious cruelty to your children.

  * * *

  Vivi came back to the subject over dinner.

  “What about my father?”

  “What about your father?”

  “Did he need Hitler to make him a Jew?”

  “He wasn’t any more of a believer than I am.”

  Vivi didn’t say anything to that, but her expression gave her away. She was skeptical. She was also desperate to have something to hang on to. That was all right. Charlotte wanted her to have something to hang on to. But not this.

  Four

  Carl Covington, the would-be grand old man of publishing, prided himself on his publication parties. The guest list was select. No junior editors or advertising assistants getting drunk and making a dinner out of pigs-in-blankets and angels-on-horseback. The setting was dazzling. He and his wife lived in a penthouse on Central Park West with a view of the shimmering reservoir and a book-lined living room that rose two stories. His own little Morgan Library, he liked to say. His toasts to the author of the evening and his or her new book were effusive. The parties were great successes. Some people were said to enjoy them.

  The celebration that night was in honor of a writer who every twelve months turned out a thriller that could be relied on to nibble at the lower reaches of the Times bestse
ller list. Charlotte had congratulated the author, paid her respects to a few reviewers, chatted with a foreign agent, compared notes with an editor from another house, thanked Carl’s wife for a delightful evening, and started down the hall in search of her coat, which a hired man had taken when she’d arrived. As she passed the first door, open to a dimly lit study, she noticed Horace sitting in a circle of light from a floor lamp. He must have sensed her in the doorway, because he looked up from the book he was reading.

  “Anything good?” she asked as she stepped into the room.

  “Doesn’t get much better.” He held up the book with the spine turned toward her. The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald was imprinted in black on the burgundy binding. “Why didn’t we think of reissuing Gatsby? Viking was damn smart. Have a seat. Unless you’re eager to get back to that.” He gestured toward the living room.

  “About as eager as you appear to be.”

  She took the chair on the other side of the reading lamp. He squinted at her through the glare, then reached up to pull the chain of one of the bulbs. “The mornin’ light does not become me.” He closed the book and gestured to her empty glass. “You want to freshen that? I’d offer, but it’s easier for you.”

  She was surprised. He never referred to his incapacity. At least she’d never heard him do so.

  “I’m fine. In fact, I was about to leave.” She leaned forward and put the empty glass on the table just as Bill Quarrels stuck his head in the doorway.

  “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Yes,” Horace barked.

  Bill reared back as if he’d been punched. “Sorree.” He drew out the word as he left.

  “You have to watch that surfeit of charm,” she said.

  “And you have to watch him.”

  “He’s harmless.”

  “If you say so.” He sat studying her for a moment. “How are things on the fourth floor?”

  “Fine. Whatever the problem with the water pressure was, Igor fixed it.”

  “My wife and the handyman are a formidable team, but I wasn’t inquiring about the physical plant. I meant on-site morale. How’s Vivi?”

  “Fine,” she said again.

  “That’s not what I hear in my part of the house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I got home last evening, I went into the kitchen to get some ice. Vivi was there with Hannah. Your daughter looked as if she was the one who needed a drink.”

  “I’m sorry. If she gets underfoot, just send her home.”

  He shook his head. “Come on, Charlie, we both know the one thing Vivi is not in our household is underfoot. Hannah would move her in if you’d let her.”

  “I know, and I’m grateful.”

  He raised one eyebrow. The problem with Horace was that he observed people too closely.

  “Hannah said it had something to do with a party at school.”

  “It’s a dance, not a party. And it isn’t at school.” She told him about the grandmother facing her mortality and the rescinded invitation.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?” Her voice was incredulous.

  “Does the name Dreyfus ring any bells? Not to mention more recent events, of which I believe you’ve had some firsthand experience.”

  “That was France. Europe. The Old World.”

  “Oh, I forgot. Human nature changes when it crosses an ocean.”

  “I just didn’t think it would be as virulent here. And I didn’t think they’d visit it on a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  “That’s your problem. You don’t think.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m sorry. What I meant was your lack of antennae.”

  “Now you’re saying I’m insensitive?”

  “Not in the way you mean it.”

  “Then how?”

  “Most Jews, even Jews like me—”

  “You’re Jewish?”

  He sat staring at her for a moment, then threw back his head and started to laugh. “That’s what I mean. You have no antennae.”

  She felt her face getting hot. “I assumed Hannah was. Because of her practice. But I didn’t think you were. You don’t act it. You don’t seem it.”

  “Now you sound like that anti-Semitic latter-day Miss Havisham sitting in her beaux arts mansion, spewing venom. What does a Jew act or seem like, Charlie?”

  He’d caught her out, all right. “All I meant was that you never said anything. You never do anything religious.”

  “As opposed to you, you mean?”

  “I wasn’t brought up as a Jew. I don’t call myself one.”

  “No, you leave that to others. What I’m trying to say is you’re the only Jew I’ve ever known who isn’t aware of it. No, I take that back. Your father wasn’t either, but then all he and I ever talked about was books. He was a helluva publisher. But most Jews, including the ones in publishing that I met abroad, are obsessed with the subject. Even the Jews who are trying to pass, especially the Jews who are trying to pass, which incidentally I’m not accusing you or your father of doing, are always thinking about it. Who is and who isn’t. Who hates us and who pretends not to. Who tries to ignore it, who goes around with a sandwich board advertising it, and who’s looking for a fight about it. It’s a survival tactic. And it’s universal. At least I thought it was until I met you. You’re the only Jew I ever met who’s tone-deaf.”

  “You make paranoia sound like a virtue.”

  “It’s not paranoia when there’s a real threat. I take it you’ve heard of quotas. I came up against them when I was at Harvard. They still exist. Are you familiar with the word ‘restricted’? I have a picture of a hotel in Maine. ‘No dogs or Jews,’ the sign outside says. That was before the war. These days it’s a little more subtle. If you don’t believe me, try renting an apartment in certain buildings in Manhattan or buying a house in parts of Connecticut, not to mention various other states in this great union of ours. I had a friend who pulled it off, but he had to have his lawyer front for him. Still, look on the bright side. That anti-Semitic old bitch is preparing Vivi for the world.”

  “Which you’re suggesting I’m not?”

  His only answer was that cold blue stare.

  * * *

  She hadn’t even had a chance to take off her coat when Horace wheeled into her office the next morning.

  “I’ve come to apologize. Something, incidentally, Hannah says I’m incapable of doing.” He’d dropped his voice for the second sentence, and she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.

  “For what?” She hung her coat on the standing rack in the corner and walked around him to sit behind the desk.

  “That lecture last night. I don’t know where I got off, pontificating to you about being a Jew. It’s as if you decided to enlighten me about the proper way to go through life as a cripple, if you’ll excuse the expression. Don’t look so surprised, Charlie. Did you think I didn’t know I was in a wheelchair?”

  “I just never heard you talk about it.”

  “Any more than you talk about what happened to you in Paris. You and I are two of a kind. The walking wounded. Or in my case, the wheeling wounded. Which also makes us the two great mysteries of this place. Subjects of infinite curiosity and speculation. ‘Is it true he was wounded on some heroic mission?’” He shook his head. “It wasn’t a mission, only a battle, and there was nothing heroic about it, but a heroic mission makes for a better story, and we’re in the business of selling stories. ‘Is it true she was tortured in a Gestapo prison? Or managed to sneak herself and her baby off the last transport that left Drancy for Auschwitz?’” He held up his hand. “I’m not asking. I’m just telling you the kind of gossip that flies around here precisely because we don’t say anything. I’m not suggesting we start undressing in public.” He was silent for a moment, and she wondered if he was thinking of the most intense speculation about him. “But,” he went on, “we don’t have to be quite so squeamish with each other. So
I’m apologizing for that ridiculous lecture last night.”

  “It wasn’t actually a lecture.”

  “Whatever it was, I was out of line, and I’m sorry.”

  He navigated his chair around, started to wheel out of the cubicle, then stopped at the entrance but didn’t turn back to face her, merely sat staring out into the open area of secretaries’ desks. “And while I’m throwing around apologies, I might as well toss one in for that crack about Hannah saying I’m incapable of them. The line smacks of my-wife-doesn’t-understand-me.” He gripped the wheels of the chair with his big hands and gave them a fierce turn to propel himself out of the cubicle. “Hannah does,” he said as he rolled away. At least, that was what it sounded like.

  * * *

  Charlotte sat thinking about the sentence Horace might or might not have spoken. From the moment she’d met Hannah Field in the noisy sprawl of the vast metal customs shed her first morning in America, Hannah had made it clear that she was going to take both Charlotte and Vivi under her wing. Most new arrivals would have been grateful, and Charlotte had been. But she’d also been on her guard. She was reserved by nature. The last few years in Paris had made her more so. And then there was the warning, though that came a year or two later.

  Ruth Miller was an editor at another house with whom Charlotte struck up a friendship. She was also a friend of Hannah’s from college.

  “Be careful of her,” Ruth said one day when she and Charlotte were having a non-expense-account lunch at Mary Elizabeth’s, a tearoom serving crustless sandwiches and mysterious meat and fish swimming in equally mysterious white or brown sauce. The place depressed their spirits and offended their palates, but it was convenient, inexpensive, and a step up from Schrafft’s.