“Eleanor has a full plate.”
“Tell your father how you feel.”
“He won’t care.”
“Make him care.”
“How?”
“What does he want?” Odile asked.
I considered the question. “To be left in peace.”
“What does he want for you?”
Mom had wanted me to go to college. She almost went, but got married instead. If Dad wanted anything for me, I didn’t know about it. And there was no way I could ask, at least not at home, where Eleanor and the boys ate all his attention. “Maybe… maybe I could go to his office. But he might be mad.”
“He might not. You must try.”
* * *
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I dressed with the same care that I did for church. What would I say to Dad? It was eight blocks to the bank, and I practically ran, hoping no one would report me for skipping school. When Mr. Ivers saw me pacing outside Dad’s office, he guffawed and said it must be urgent if I had to make an appointment to see my own father.
When Dad came out, he was confused. “Why aren’t you in class?” Then scared. “Did something happen to the boys?”
Of course. The boys.
“Lily’s here for a father-daughter chat,” his boss chuckled, but Dad didn’t laugh. Embarrassed, he shoved me into a chair in his office.
“This better be important.” He folded his hands on his immense desk.
“I—I…”
“Well? What is it?”
His anger made it easier. “I miss learning French and seeing Mary Louise and doing homework and reading. I’m sick of dirty diapers.”
“Ellie needs your help.”
“Am I the only one who sees that all she does is cry? She needs more than I can give.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“She might need a psychologist.”
“Psychologists are for crazy people.”
“For depressed people.”
“You need to help out more.”
“What about you? They’re your kids.”
“I work here.”
“And you need to work at home.” I slapped my report card onto the desk. “Even when Mom died, I made the honor roll. You might be fine with me being a nanny, but it’s not what Mom would have wanted.”
His head jerked back as if my truth had walloped him.
“I’m happy to help out. I am. But I want French lessons. I want to go to college.”
He gestured to the door like I was someone who would never qualify for a loan. “I’ll drive you to school.”
We didn’t talk. I stared out the window, wishing it were the window of a plane, that Odile was right and that someday I’d fly away.
Dad always came home at ten to six, just before dinner. For the first time, he was late. Eleanor asked if I wanted to eat, but since she held off, I said I would, too. We kept the roast in the oven. At the dining room table, Joe bounced in my lap, and Eleanor held Benjy, who’d stopped crying, like magic. Usually we bathed the boys at 7:00, but tonight we were still waiting for Dad. In that brief moment of peace, Eleanor asked me the question she always asked him: “How was your day, dear?”
“I went to the bank.”
“The bank?” she said, all confused, like she’d forgotten Froid had one.
“I needed to…” What did I need? Eleanor regarded me intently, listening as never before. “I needed to get through to Dad. About college.”
She let out an odd kind of laugh and said, “At least one of us is brave enough to say what we want.”
I sniffed. “Do you smell smoke?”
She shoved Benjy into my arms and ran to the kitchen. I followed, Benjy balanced on my hip and Joe glued to my leg. Smoke billowed from the oven.
“I give up,” Eleanor wailed, taking out the scorched pan.
Dad walked in, briefcase in hand. It was 8:00 p.m., which was like midnight anywhere else in the world.
“Not even a phone call to say you’d be late?” she yelled, and chucked the charred roast at him. He held his briefcase in front of his face and ducked. The charred hunk hit the wall and fell to the floor, sliding to a stop at his feet.
I was proud of Eleanor.
“You leave me to do everything,” she told Dad.
I carried my brothers to their room.
“You’re never home,” she said. “Are you there with Brenda or here with me?”
Brenda. No one said her name anymore. “Oh, Mom,” I whispered. “I miss you.”
“Why you sad?” Joe asked. I caressed his hair, downy like the feathers of a baby chick.
My father murmured soft words, but Eleanor wasn’t having any of them. “What do you mean, I bite off more than I can chew?” she yelled. “When I bought disposable diapers, you said she used cloth. I never measure up to Saint Brenda!”
“There weren’t other options back then,” he yelled back. “I wasn’t saying you should use cloth. I was remembering things were different. There’s no need to do everything on your own. Folks have reached out. Stop swatting their hands away.”
Silence.
“The person I want help from is you.”
When I told Odile that Dad decided to take Saturdays off to help take care of the boys, and that Eleanor bought a truckload of Pampers, she said, “See how standing up for yourself feels? There’s not always a solution, but if you don’t try, you’ll never know.”
“I’m not sure it was the trip to Dad’s office.” I told her about Eleanor and the flying roast.
Odile clapped her hands together. “It sounds like you inspired Eleanor to speak up, too. Brava!”
Now that Odile and I had uninterrupted time, I got out the book with the photos again. On her couch, we looked at the picture of her family. “How I miss them,” she said as she moved to the next photo, which showed a dark-haired beauty in a polka-dot dress. Odile beamed as if she’d unexpectedly run into a friend. “It’s Miss Reeder. She was my boss at the Library, and the person I admired most.”
The next picture showed a lady in a turban talking to an officer with wire-rimmed glasses who wore a swastika armband.
“No use thinking about the past,” Odile said, her tone as stony as her face. She shoved the photos back into the book.
Why did she have a picture of a Nazi?
“You knew a Nazi?”
“Dr. Fuchs came to the Library.”
When I’d imagined Nazis, they were killing people in concentration camps, not checking out books. It seemed unseemly that she knew his name.
“Paris was occupied,” Odile explained. “We couldn’t avoid them, and not all people wanted to. He was what the Nazis called a ‘library protector.’ ”
“So he saved books?”
“It’s not so simple.”
I thought about what I’d learned at school. “My history teacher said Europeans should have known about the camps. She said it was obvious.”
“I learned about them after the war. At the time, my family merely tried to survive. I worried about Anglophone friends and colleagues, who were arrested as ‘enemy aliens.’ Though Jewish people were barred from libraries, it never occurred to me that they, too, would be arrested and that many would be killed.”
Odile was quiet for a long time.
“Are you mad that I asked?”
“Mais non. Forgive me, I was lost in my memories. During the war, we librarians delivered books to Jewish friends. The Gestapo even shot one of my colleagues.”
Shooting a librarian? Wasn’t that like killing a doctor? “They killed Miss Reeder?”
“She’d left by then. The Nazis arrested several librarians, including the director of the National Library. We feared Miss Reeder might be next. I was brokenhearted when she left. But saying goodbye is a fact of life. Loss is inevitable.”
I was sorry I’d dug out the photos; they’d only made her sad. But then she cupped my cheek gently and said, “Sometimes, though, good things come from change.”
1 December 1941
Monsieur l’Inspecteur:
I am writing to inform you that the American Library houses more enemy aliens than an internment camp. To start with, there’s the arriviste American, Clara de Chambrun. She spends more time at the Library than she does at home like a good wife should. She devotes her days to soliciting funds from fancy socialite friends in order to sustain the Library. I doubt she declares this revenue.
She does not like Germans (or “Huns” as she calls them) and flouts their regulations. Just because she’s a countess doesn’t mean that she needn’t follow the rules. I believe she smuggles books to Jewish readers. Who knows what else she is up to? She’s very evasive.
Pay a visit and see for yourself. You’ll see she thinks she’s above the law.
Signed,
One who knows
CHAPTER 27
Odile
PARIS, DECEMBER 1941
CLARA DE CHAMBRUN, our new directress, had helped found the ALP in 1920. Along with Edith Wharton and Anne Morgan, she’d been one of the original trustees. The Countess not only wrote several works on Shakespeare, she also translated his plays into French. She and Hemingway shared the same publisher. More recently, these past months, she sought donors to cover expenses from coal to payroll, and she wrote letters to prevent Nazi authorities from forcing Boris and the caretaker to work in Germany as a part of the Relève plan. I worried that as a prominent foreigner, she could be arrested.
At the circulation desk, I shared my fear with Boris and Margaret as he stamped Madame Simon’s Harper’s Bazaar. He said that Clara had married Count Aldebert de Chambrun, a French general, in 1901. She had dual citizenship, and would not be considered an enemy alien.
Just then, M. de Nerciat burst in, Mr. Pryce-Jones on his heels.
“Kamikazes hit Pearl Harbor!” Monsieur shouted.
We gathered around him.
“What on earth is a kamikaze?” Margaret asked. “And where’s Pearl Harbor?”
“Japan attacked an American military base,” Mr. Pryce-Jones translated.
“Does this mean the United States will join the war?” I felt a glimmer of hope that soon the Germans would be defeated.
“We believe so,” M. de Nerciat said.
“The Americans will annihilate the Nazis!” I said.
“They can hardly do worse than the French army,” Margaret said.
My head reared back. How dare Margaret criticize soldiers like Rémy, when she’d been one of the first to flee Paris. “British forces were certainly quick to retreat to that puny island.”
We glared at each other, and I waited for her to take back her words.
“We shouldn’t talk politics, should we?” she finally said.
She offered an olive branch, not an apology. I tried not to be angry. She didn’t mean to be tactless. Afraid to say something I’d regret, I hurried to the typewriter in the back room, hoping that working on the newsletter would distract me. Before the Occupation, I’d cranked out five hundred copies on our mimeograph, but with the penury of paper, I now posted one lone copy on the bulletin board.
Mr. Pryce-Jones scooted a chair beside mine. “We can hear you pounding away from the reading room.”
I pointed to the ribbon. “It’s so old, the lettering is fainter and fainter.”
“I thought you might be working out your anger. What Margaret said about the French army wasn’t kind.”
“I know she didn’t mean it, but it hurts.” I covered the r, e, m, y keys with my fingers. “I miss my brother so much, and I know he fought hard.”
“Margaret knows it, too. She sometimes speaks without thinking.”
“We all do.” I needed an interviewee for this month’s newsletter. “What kind of reader are you? What are your prized books?”
“The truth?”
I leaned closer. Would he confess to reading scandalous novels?
“Just last week, I discarded my entire collection.”
“What?” Giving away books was like giving up air.
“I’d had my share of Sophocles and Aristotle, of Melville and Hawthorne, books assigned at university or offered to me by colleagues. I’ve spent enough time in the past. I want today, now. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nancy Mitford, Langston Hughes.”
“What did you do with your books?”
“When I heard Professor Cohen’s collection had been pillaged, I boxed up my books and took them to her. Stealing books is like desecrating graves.”
Though Mr. Pryce-Jones made it seem like he was content to give away a collection built over a lifetime, I sensed the truth. He parted with his books because the professor had been forced to part with hers. I reminded myself there were people with bigger problems, bigger hurts.
But I was still miffed with Margaret.
KRIEGSGEFANGENENPOST
12 December 1941
Dear Odile,
Do you know how I can tell that you are holding back in your letters? You haven’t complained about Papa in ages, and you rarely mention Paul. Perhaps you feel you can’t write about him because I can’t hold Bitsi close. You’re wrong. I want to hear Papa bluster and Maman chin-wag. I want to know you in love. Tell me what you truly feel, not what you feel I can bear to hear—I need your honesty as much as your love. Having only a little of you, sensing you censor each sentence is killing me. We’re not together, but we needn’t be distant. Bitsi hesitates when she writes. I do, too. I want to shield you. I don’t want you to know. I want you to know.
Things are hard here. We’re hungry, we’re tired. Our heads are bowed, our clothing threadbare. We long for home. We worry our fiancées will forget us. We weep when we think no one can hear. What bothers us most is the word “prisoner,” associated with criminals. All we did was fight for our beliefs and our country. Barbed wire is always in our peripheral vision.
Love,
Rémy
20 December 1941
Dear Rémy,
I’ll try not to hold back. Paul and I escaped Maman’s spying. He found us an abandoned apartment for afternoon trysts. We’ve decorated our boudoir with my books and his sketches of Brittany. There’s no heat, and we’ve both come down with colds, but it’s worth it! I never expected to find a pursuit more thrilling than reading.
Now that Germany has declared war on the U.S., and Americans in France are enemy aliens, I fear the Nazis will close the Library for good. Though staff tries to put on a good face, we’re tired and frightened. We move like toys winding down. Sometimes I get angry for no reason. Sometimes I find it hard to think. Sometimes I don’t know what to think.
At any rate, we have the Christmas party to look forward to. The Countess said we may bring family if they are of “superior quality,” so I’ve invited Maman and “Aunt” Eugénie. Papa can’t come, he has meetings. That’s why I don’t complain about him—he’s never home.
Love,
Odile
The scent of Boris’s hot spiced wine wafted through the Library. Chestnuts crackled in the fireplace. Bitsi helped children cut up old catalogs to make ornaments for the fir tree. Margaret and I fetched the festive red ribbons from the closet and decorated the reading room.
“It’s cold in my flat,” she said. “I could use a few of these fusty books as firewood.”
Instinctively, I grabbed a novel and held it to my chest. I’d die of hypothermia before destroying a single one. Many of these books had been sent from America to soldiers of the Great War. Read in trenches and makeshift hospitals, their stories brought comfort and escape.
“I was joking,” Margaret said. “You do know that?”
“Of course…” Still, it was a horrible thing to say. I moved to a secluded corner, cradling The Picture of Dorian Gray. 823. I inhaled the novel’s slightly musty odor, imagining it was a mélange of gunpowder and mud from the trenches. Whenever I opened a worn book, I liked to believe I released a soldier’s spirit. “Here you go, old friend,” I whispered. �
�You’re safe now, you’re home.”
“Talking to yourself?” Bitsi teased, Maman and Eugénie in tow.
“So this is where you work,” Maman said. “It’s not as grim as I expected.”
Eugénie giggled. “Did you think she worked in a coal mine?”
Maman tapped her playfully on the arm.
Each attendee brought a delicacy that was scarce and dreadfully expensive, obtained either from the black market or country cousins. A creamy Camembert. A basket of oranges. Eugénie passed the plate of foie gras she and Maman had prepared with the goose liver that Paul had brought from Brittany.
A hush fell over the room as the Countess, in her ermine wrap, entered the party on the arm of her husband, a white-haired gentleman in a tuxedo. Even without medals on his breast, it was clear from his deportment—chest thrust out, coolly surveying the guests as if they were his troops—that he had been a general.
Near the refreshment table, Madame Simon cornered Clara de Chambrun, giving a long-winded explanation of how she’d fashioned her tatty turban from a bathrobe. The Countess shot her husband a “save me now” look, and, like an obedient lapdog, he scampered over to whisk her away.
“He commanded soldiers on two continents,” Mr. Pryce-Jones said.
“But there’s no mistake about who’s in charge now,” M. de Nerciat observed.
“The general has met his Waterloo.”
“Met his Waterloo? He married her.”
Paul led me to my favorite section of the stacks, to 823, where we joined Cathy and Heathcliff, Jane and Rochester. I gazed at his lips, rosy from the wine. Slowly he knelt before me. “You’re the woman of my life,” he said. “The first face I want to see when I awake, the one I want to kiss at night. Everything you say is so interesting—I love hearing about the autumn leaves that crunch under your feet, the cranky subscriber you set straight, the novel you read in bed. I can tell you my deepest thoughts, my favorite books. The thing I want most is a continuation of our conversations. Will you marry me?”
Paul’s proposal was like a perfect novel, its ending inevitable and yet somehow a surprise.
From the reading room, I could hear my mother ask, “Where did Paul and Odile go?,” could hear Eugénie respond, “Oh, for once, let them be.”
The Paris Library Page 21