“She’s been extremely generous,” Charlotte said, her voice even.
“Hannah’s nothing if not generous. You know that character in The Forsyte Saga, the one who takes up lame ducks? That’s Hannah. But just let the duck get back on its little webbed feet, and out it goes.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Charlotte said, though she had a feeling she did.
“After the war, I got mixed up with a bad egg. He drank, chased women, and was always in need of money, which I, of course, handed over. What’re a few dollars where love’s concerned? I’m not a very good judge of character. At least I wasn’t in those days. Hannah could not have been more sympathetic. She listened to my laments, did her best to find some redeeming traits in him, and never once urged me to throw the bum out. But when I did throw the bum out, when I got back on my little webbed feet and took up with Nick, she dropped me like the proverbial hot potato. I think Nick’s admirable qualities are what did it. She stopped calling, stopped returning my calls. Once I swear she even crossed the street to avoid me. The funny thing is, if she were a man, I would have caught on immediately. But she was another woman and so sympathetic. It took me longer to realize the friendship with Hannah was over than it did to throw out the bum.”
Charlotte sat in her office remembering the story and thinking about Horace’s comment. Even in a wheelchair, he wasn’t a lame enough duck.
* * *
“I’ve been thinking.” Vivi straightened from her prone position on the living room floor and sat up to face Charlotte, who was on the sofa. They’d been handing sections of the Sunday Times, fat with ads for gloves and ties and other Christmas gifts, back and forth between them. Thin winter sunshine trickled through the two south-facing windows overlooking the street that dozed in Sunday morning tranquility, interrupted only by the occasional pedestrian walking a dog or taxi cruising for a fare.
“Always a good endeavor. About anything in particular?”
“The dance.”
Charlotte put the section she’d been reading down. “The fact that you weren’t invited has nothing to do with you personally,” she said again. “Only with that bigoted old woman.”
“I know that. But it made me think about something else.”
Charlotte waited.
“If I’m Jewish, I ought to be Jewish.”
“Apparently you are,” Charlotte said after a moment.
Vivi thought about that. “I wish I remembered more about being in the camp.”
“I’m glad you don’t.”
“I can’t even picture it.”
“You were too young. And we were only there for a short time before it was liberated.”
“How did we manage before that? I mean, if they were rounding up Jews, how did they miss us all that time?”
“We had forged papers. Sometimes we hid out. The Germans weren’t always as efficient as they thought. And let’s not talk about the French gendarmes. In other words, we were lucky.”
“That’s what Aunt Hannah says her patients who are survivors tell her. They also say they never knew who to trust. An old friend could turn you in or a complete stranger could risk his life to save you.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Charlotte said.
“The people who helped us—”
“Vivi! It’s the past. It’s over.” Charlotte held out the theatrical section she’d been paging through. “I know you think Peter Pan is infantile—”
“I’m too old to sit in the audience screaming ‘I believe’ so some silly light onstage doesn’t go out.”
“Note taken. But is there anything else you’d like to see over the holidays? Fanny might be fun. We could go to a Saturday matinee or even in the evening during school break. Anything you want to see, within reason.”
“A Jewish church.”
“What?”
“I want to go to a Jewish church. Synagogue,” she corrected herself. “See what I mean. If I’m Jewish, I ought to know something about it. Couldn’t we go just once to see what it’s like?”
“I know what it’s like.”
“I thought you didn’t know. I thought it took Hitler to make you a Jew.”
“That’s my point. I think religion is dangerous.”
“But that’s my point. If people are going to treat me a certain way because I’m Jewish, I ought to know why.”
“There’s no logic to intolerance. Any more than there is to the rites and rituals of religion. Any religion. You think if you were Catholic, saying a dozen Hail Marys would cleanse your soul?”
“You always do that.”
“Do what?”
“I ask about being Jewish and you tell me some story about going to confession with your friend Bette or how all the other girls you played with got new white dresses for their first communion.”
“I grew up in a Catholic country. Most of my friends were Catholic, except for one Jewish girl. All I’m trying to say is I don’t trust any religion. Your father agreed with me. We were both atheists. I don’t think we ever talked about religion, except to agree on how much harm it did. He wouldn’t be any happier than I am with this religious awakening you seem to be having.”
She knew she was playing dirty, but it was necessary under the circumstances. And the ploy worked. Vivi took the theater section and began paging through it.
Five
Charlotte wasn’t sure how it had happened. Surely a letter she hadn’t even read couldn’t upend her life so completely. Still, something had breached the barrier she’d erected between then and now.
When she had first arrived in America, she’d found life less the challenge she’d braced herself for but more of a shock to her sensibilities. She couldn’t get used to people hurrying along the sidewalks with long confident strides or sauntering as if they hadn’t a care in the world instead of skulking with shoulders hunched and eyes averted, crossing streets and cowering in doorways to avoid anyone in uniform, and flinching with fear when a soldier stopped to ask directions because he might just as easily be bent on harassment, or worse. She was amazed at the absence of signs forbidding her to cross this thoroughfare or enter that area, and the press of traffic swarming the avenues and jockeying on the cross streets, and the lights that turned night into day. Paris had been so dark for so long. But the greatest surprise was the abundance. She had sailed away from a world still stalked by hunger, stunted by shortages, mired in misery. She’d landed in a country booming with optimism and hell-bent on making up for lost time. People were gorging on steaks and whiskey, butter and sugar. They were building houses, and buying cars and appliances and clothes, and going on holidays. Gradually, as she grew accustomed to this overstocked new world, the astonishment had worn off. Some mornings she’d opened her eyes and felt as if she were waking to a sunny day after a long sheet-twisting nightmare. Now the nightmare was beginning to shadow not her nights but her days again. Now the nightmare was becoming more immediate than her real world.
One day, standing in front of the display case in the butcher shop, she’d grown lightheaded at the profusion of steaks and roasts and chops and offal and ordered a dozen lamb chops. “Having a dinner party, Mrs. Foret?” the butcher asked as he wrapped them in the heavy waxed paper. Too embarrassed to say she’d lost track of where she was, she’d spent a quarter of an hour rearranging the refrigerator’s freezer to fit them in. As she was coming out of the subway on Eighty-Sixth Street, just on the edge of Yorkville, the sound of a German conversation stopped her dead on the steps so a logjam piled up behind her. An anodyne piece in the newspaper about the Coney Island Polar Bear Club that swam every Sunday from November to April yanked her down the rabbit hole.
* * *
At first she and Simone and all the Parisians laugh at them. They need something to laugh at as they pedal their bicycles beneath the huge Nazi banners that snap and shout in the wind, and the signs that tell them they have the English and the Jews to thank for their defeat, and the darkness that hangs o
ver the city on even the sunniest days. Who can help but laugh at these overgrown boys in shorts and underwear, marching in lockstep to pools and playing fields, roughhousing in the open air, splashing and shouting and showing off their raw high spirits and robust health. Their bare chests glisten with sweat in the summer and as fall comes shine hard and white as marble in the cooling air. The muscles in their arms and legs ripple as they move. At rest after their exertions, lounging on lawns and benches and, worst of all, national monuments under the French gaze, they parade their erections with childish pride. Look at us, they seem to say, look at our disciplined, beautiful, brimming-with-life bodies and what they’re capable of. Not like you broken defeated French. And gradually the populace begins to look. Some of the women stare, and others try to turn their eyes away in anger, and in fear, not of those bodies but of themselves. The men watch, too, some in rage, some in envy, and some surreptitiously, longingly, hungrily. And gradually the joke becomes a dread. Even those who are risking their lives to sabotage them aren’t free of the lure of sex and danger and death all mixed up in a murderous erotic cocktail. Once, acting as a courier for an organization she has joined, Simone finds herself in a railroad compartment full of German officers. Instead of changing compartments, she spends the trip flirting with them. That is before the decree about the stars comes down. Wasn’t that clever of me, she asks Charlotte when she returns, hiding in plain sight that way. Clever yes, though something else, too, Charlotte thinks but does not say. She is too busy fighting the fascination herself.
Spring comes again after another unbearably frigid winter without heat. Spring is nature’s thumb in the eye of the German Occupation, now about to begin its third year. In the absence of exhaust fumes, the city reeks of lilacs. In the absence of engines and horns, there is a symphony of birdsong.
One Sunday she puts Vivi in the basket of her bicycle and pedals to the Luxembourg Gardens. She is not worried that the Germans have taken over the Luxembourg Palace and are entrenched around the park. Or rather, the Germans have taken over Paris. She is worried no matter where she goes. But the sun has come out after several days of rain, and the feel of the warmth, spring thin but still tender on her skin, makes her brave, or at least restless.
She leans her bicycle against a tree, and she and Vivi settle on a patch of greening grass. She will not take one of the benches where signs warn Jews it is forbidden to sit. She could get away with it, but the ban is morally repugnant. Though she’s not as brave as Simone, she has her scruples. And she and Vivi are happy on the grass. She is so happy that at first she doesn’t notice them. But little by little, the thump of the ball and the shouts and laughter intrude. She glances up, then away, then at them again. Some are playing in shorts, some in boxy underwear, some in thin briefs that cover little. The Third Reich worships the cult of the body. Nakedness is a sacrament.
The noise and exuberance catch Vivi’s attention, too. She has stopped playing with the handful of blocks Charlotte has brought and stands, her small hand resting on her mother’s shoulder, her eyes wide. She has never seen such uninhibited joy. She is accustomed to whispers and wariness and fear.
Charlotte turns away from the sight, picks up a block, holds it out to her daughter, but Vivi is not interested. Charlotte gives up and leans back on her elbows, lifting her face to the sun. One of the men kicks the ball. It lands a few feet away and rolls over to where they sit. Another player comes running after it and skids to a stop in front of them. His sweat-slicked chest is brown. How did it get so brown so early in the season? The muscles in his thighs strain against the skin. He stands looking down at them. A white smile slices his broad easy face in two. For a moment she wonders if the rumor that Goebbels, the propaganda genius, sent the Wehrmacht’s handsomest soldiers to occupy Paris is true. He bows. “Verzeihung,” he says, and as he reaches for the ball, Vivi reaches for him. Charlotte pulls her back, but Vivi tries to squirm out of her arms. The German laughs, leans toward them, and ruffles Vivi’s thin cap of dark hair. He smells of sweat, not the stale sour stench of the Parisians, of Charlotte herself, who lack adequate water and have no soap, but the smell of recent exertions in the open air. And sitting there, watching him trot back to the game, she feels her own perspiration between her breasts and beneath her arms and in the small of her back, and is ashamed.
She begins gathering Vivi’s blocks, her book, and their hats and sweaters. That is when she hears the familiar voice behind her. She turns and looks up, but the sun is behind him and in her eyes, as it was the first time he walked into the shop.
“Let me help you,” he says, and reaches for her things. She swats his hand away, stands, scoops up Vivi, and, pushing the bicycle with her other hand, walks away from him without a word. Only when she’s at a distance does she stop, strap Vivi into the basket of the bicycle, and climb onto the seat.
As she pedals out of the gardens and through the streets, she tries to avert her eyes, but everywhere she looks, she sees the same sight. It enrages her. Lovers lie entangled on the grass. They embrace on benches. They walk in step, hips grazing, arms entwined, bodies melded. When had so many men returned? She veers toward the Seine and passes the spot where later the dead body, the first dead body, will turn up, but the bodies she is thinking of now are fiercely, offensively to her, alive. The faster her long legs pedal, the angrier she gets. Not at Laurent. How could she be angry at Laurent?
Six
Vivi hadn’t meant to buy it. Actually, she hadn’t bought it, merely taken it, not swiped it as some of the girls did candy bars and packages of gum just to prove they could, but accepted it as a gift.
Her mother had sent her to Goodman’s, the hardware store around the corner on Madison Avenue, to get replacement bulbs for their Christmas lights. They hadn’t even got the lights and ornaments out yet, but her mother liked to be prepared. She was always afraid that stores would run out of things.
Vivi was wandering the aisles, carrying the bulbs, looking at the candles and ornaments and gag gifts. Her favorite, because it was so stupid, was a John Wayne piggy bank that drew a gun from his holster every time you put in a coin. Then she spotted it, a kind of candelabra with eight arms and one taller arm in the middle. She was surprised it caught her attention. It wasn’t silly like the John Wayne piggy bank or shiny or glittering like the Christmas decorations. It had a dull bronze glow. Later, she’d say something about it had called out to her, and her mother would tell her not to be ridiculous. The only thing that had called out to her was Mr. Rosenblum. Her mother didn’t like Mr. Rosenblum. She said he was too friendly. When Vivi asked how anyone could be too friendly, her mother said she meant too familiar. It wasn’t until later that Vivi understood what her mother meant by that.
Mr. Rosenblum was wearing his usual shabby brown sweater with the familiar brown checked shirt and brown woolen tie. The sleeves of the sweater were pulled all the way down. That was usual, too. When the weather got hot and even the fans couldn’t cool the store, he took off the sweater but kept the sleeves of his shirt buttoned around his wrists.
He approached her now as she stood holding the Christmas bulbs in one hand and the candelabra, which was heavier than she’d expected, in the other. He had a long hangdog face, but his smile, when he chose to show it, was big and wide and white. It was so big and wide and white that it didn’t seem to belong to him. It looked like one of those masks held in place by an elastic behind the head.
“So which is it going to be, Miss Vivienne Foret”—he must have known her last name because of the charge account, but she didn’t know how he knew her first name—“the Christmas lights or the Chanukah menorah?”
That was what it was. She must have sensed it. She put it back on the counter. “I was just looking at it,” she said guiltily. “My mother sent me for the lights.”
“So maybe this year a surprise you should give your mother.”
She shook her head. “My mother doesn’t believe in religion.”
He looked at the l
ights she was holding. “So what’s that you got in your hand?”
“She says Christmas is different. It doesn’t have to be religious.”
“But Chanukah does? This is America. The land of the free. The home of the brave. Go ahead, have both. No one’s going to charge extra.”
“Are you Jewish?” she asked.
“Does a bird fly?”
“I am too.”
“News this isn’t.”
“My mother says she didn’t know she was a Jew until Hitler made her one.”
He shrugged. “Some of us knew. Some of us weren’t so smart. In the end a difference it didn’t make.” He went on looking at her. “But a smart girl like you, you’re curious, right?”
“Well…” She hesitated. “I figure if other people know I’m Jewish—”
“That you can count on.”
“Then I ought to know something about being Jewish.”
“Like I said, a smart girl. I tell you what.” He picked up the candelabra. “The menorah you take.”
“I couldn’t. My mother sent me for the lights.”
“So the lights you buy. The menorah you take. A present from me to you.” He smiled that borrowed white smile again. “It’s okay. For working here I get a discount. I’ll even throw in the candles. So now you don’t have to wait for another Hitler to let you in on the secret.”
It had seemed like a good idea when he’d said it, but now, standing in the black-and-white foyer of her own house, holding the bag with the Christmas lights and the candelabra, she wasn’t so sure. No, she was sure. It was a terrible idea. Her mother would be furious. She could take it back to Mr. Rosenblum, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She could ask Aunt Hannah to keep it for her. Aunt Hannah liked Mr. Rosenblum. She was the one who’d told Vivi his teeth were so big and white because they were false. He’d lost all of his in a camp, and the dentists at Montefiore Hospital, where they treated refugees for free, had made him a whole new set. But though Aunt Hannah let her get away with a lot, she wouldn’t help her keep a secret from her mother. And if Uncle Horace got wind of it, neither would he.
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