The Girl from Vichy

by Andie Newton

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘or we’ll miss the autobus into the city.’ And we hurried on after the girls.

  *

  People poured into the square from all directions waving Vichy flags to stand and wait in front of the Hotel de Ville, under the building’s gold-dipped heralds where a long and narrow stage had been set up, shuffling in, dragging their children by their shirt sleeves. People wearing sandwich boards with posters of Pétain pasted to each side, begged for coins and talked about unity. The sun’s reflection shining off the glass set inside all three storeys of the Hotel de Ville’s barrel-arched windows cooked us all. And for the first time since I had arrived at the convent, I was thankful for the peasant dress the girls and I had to wear, which was made from the thinnest of fabric.

  We weren’t the only congregation in the square. The nuns from the neighbouring Saint-Pierre convent had gathered on a one-step bleacher, each of them squinting in the face of the sun under their wing-tipped headpieces. I looked over the crowd for Mother.

  A squadron of Vichy fighter planes droned overhead, and eyes went to the sky. Mavis covered her ears. I copied. Then the other girls did the same.

  ‘Where’s Mother?’ Mavis said, under the rumbling engines, but I only saw her mouth move.

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  The planes had flown off, and I directed the girls to line up next to the Saint Pierre nuns, mainly because I wasn’t sure where else to go, and inspected them—backs straight and feet together—reminding them that we were leaving as soon as the speech was over, which I thought would keep their whining down. Mavis bobbed on her feet as if she’d forgotten to wear shoes and had just realized the ground was hot. She put a hand to her forehead, as if searching.

  I fanned my neck, waiting. The Saint Pierre Mother Superior stood next to her congregation, arms folded like the rest of them, in front of their bodies, with their hands tucked into their long and heavy sleeves. I turned to Mavis. ‘Mother doesn’t expect us to represent our entire convent, does she?’

  A finger poked my shoulder and I turned around. Claire, a seventeen-year-old girl under my care looked up at me. ‘What are we to do now?’ Her face had flattened, and her eyes looked as tawny as the square’s cobblestones in the morning sunlight.

  Claire was sweet, and I felt sorry for her in a big sister kind of way. Her father was in a German prison, captured on the Maginot Line, and her mother couldn’t afford to keep her around, unmarried. The convent, she had told me, was her only option.

  I shook my head, looking into the crowd once more for Mother Superior or anyone from the convent. ‘Stand here, I suppose. Sister Mary-Francis said all we need to do is make an appearance.’

  Claire pulled a lock of hair away from her bun and twisted it around her finger. ‘But we’re with those nuns from Saint-Pierre.’

  Two sisters turned to Claire, who shrank under their gaze, her eyes growing to the size of saucers under the cast of their shadows.

  The Saint-Pierre nuns were known for their vows of silence. Most hadn’t spoken a word in over a decade, which was intimidating to some of the delinquent girls, whose idea of commitment reset with each new day. I smiled politely at the sisters, apologizing for Claire’s rude remark, and they turned back around, facing the growing crowd.

  Claire sighed with relief. ‘Thank you, mademoiselle,’ she said, giving up her hair to rub her shoulder. ‘Hmm.’ She looked at me as she rubbed. ‘Something isn’t right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘My shoulder hurts,’ she said. ‘It’s a sign.’

  ‘A sign of what?’

  Claire pressed her thumb heavily into her joint. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, mouth drawn up, ‘but something.’

  A laugh puffed from my lips, a laugh I couldn’t control after watching Claire mess with her shoulder as if it were a cable from the sisters. She dropped her hand and stood board straight.

  ‘Mother Superior must be waiting for us at the sewing centre,’ Claire said. ‘It would explain why she’s not here. I’ll run down to the old convent and make sure.’ She turned to leave and Mavis shook her head, but it was me who spoke up.

  ‘She wants us down here, Claire. In the square. Besides, Pétain’s speech will start any moment.’

  Mavis nodded with what I’d said, licking her palm and wiping it over her hair for the second time since we’d arrived. Time dragged on—every minute that passed felt like five in the hot square. Soon enough, people wondered out loud where Pétain was, and why he was late. The crowd swelled, and we found ourselves squishing up against each other shoulder to shoulder with supporters waving hand flags to keep cool. I could barely see the podium that had been set up in the middle of the stage.

  A few thin Armistice Army soldiers walked out with giant Vichy flags on poles and stood on each side of the stage, which made me think the speech was going to start any second, but still we waited. Sweat beads slid down my neck under my dress, soaking my undergarments.

  ‘What time did we get here?’ I asked Mavis.

  ‘Oh… ah…’ Mavis squinted at the clock set in the tower.

  ‘We got here twenty-three minutes ago,’ Claire said. ‘On the dot.’

  I pinched the front of my peasant dress, peeling it from my dampened skin, trying to get some air between the fabric and my body. I couldn’t remember a day as hot as this. At least in Vichy we had the river and the spas to keep us cool. I used my hand as a fan, still looking for Mother Superior, when the French police walked out onto the stage.

  The police! I gasped, looking to the ground.

  I’d thought about all the ways Mama ended up breaking the news I’d left. Each one ended with Gérard vowing to find me, drag me back to his headquarters and punish me for the humiliation I’m sure I’d caused him. Thinking about the police at the convent felt different from seeing them close-up, with their guns. My guttural instinct was to run.

  I slowly glanced up, feet stepping on toes, watching the police as they looked into the crowd, heads and eyes shifting, scanning us like pigs in a pen. It’s all right, I told myself. If they stay on the—

  My heart sank.

  Gendarmes walked off the platform into the crowd, taking positions among the flag-waving people, strategically arranging themselves like pegs on a board. There was nowhere to hide. One of them could easily recognize me at this close distance and report back to Gérard where I’d run off to.

  ‘I’m… I’m going down to the old convent!’ I said to Mavis, who shook her head vigorously.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Claire said, and I looked at her, only a gendarme was now walking toward us, moving girls out of his way, getting closer, close enough to see the dimples in my cheeks.

  ‘No—’

  I bolted before Mavis had a chance to say anything, skirting between supporters and their flags, disappearing into the alley where just a smattering of people were still making their way to the square. I looked back once; glad I had gotten safely away from the police.

  I walked on to the convent, only it was a short walk, shorter than I thought, shorter than I hoped. I turned the final corner, and the buildings looked abandoned with drawn window shades.

  And the streets were quiet.

  Strangely quiet, except for the light din of the busy square lofting above the rooftops.

  I reached for the doorknob, but then reconsidered—not one other soul walked the normally busy street, and the sisters were obviously not here since the door wasn’t propped open. I shivered in the sun, suddenly thinking I shouldn’t have come, and that I should hurry back to the square before anyone noticed that I’d disobeyed a sister’s direct orders. But then I heard a loud thump come from inside the building; then another, followed by something big and heavy being dragged intermittently across the floor. The murmur of voices wisped through a crack in the door.

  Men’s voices.

  I looked over both my shoulders—still nobody was in the street. I stepped up on some wood pallets I found nearby
to reach the one window that hadn’t been blacked out, and peeked inside, my eyes rising above the stone ledge.

  Men dressed in field trousers dragged rolled-up carpets across the floor, in between our bulky stitching machines and down the stairs into the dark crypt. A woman with flowing blonde hair walked into the middle of the room. The men moved out of her way. She had a rifle slung over her shoulder and a revolver gripped in her hand. She motioned to one of the rugs, and guns, loads of them, spilled out onto the floor.

  ‘Mother of Christ,’ I said, immediately clamping a hand over my mouth. Résistance. I should have left—I should have run—but my knees had locked up and so had my arms.

  A woman rushed out of the crypt and motioned for them to hurry up, roll the carpets back up. A shout came from inside—someone noticed me—and the woman turned around, one wide eye focusing on me through a clean spot in the glass. Walking closer, closer, and then running toward me.

  I gasped—letting go of the ledge and falling backward to the ground with a thud and the crash of clanking wood pallets caving around me.

  I lay for a moment, stunned, whimpering, with my back flat against the cobblestones, but then scrambled to get to my feet, only a hand grabbed hold of my arm. ‘Ach!’ I threw my hands over my head, my body curling up on the pavement with my eyes clenched tight as fists. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘There you are!’ My eyes popped open when I heard Claire’s voice, and I lowered my hands, taking stock of the situation I’d found myself in, while Claire rambled on about how I shouldn’t have left.

  ‘Marguerite’s real mad at you.’ She paused, her face scrunched up with questions, glancing at the pallets and then to me. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Trying to see inside,’ I scoffed, doing my best to act normal and unshaken, but my heart beat from my chest and blood glugged in my ears from the fall and what I’d seen.

  ‘Come on, we should hurry,’ I said.

  Claire was still looking at the pallets and trying to figure everything out when I grabbed her hand and took off toward the square. ‘Slow down,’ she said, but my legs moved at an alarming rate, in between a run and a walk. ‘Why so fast?’

  ‘I have to find a toilet, all right?’ I said, and I don’t know where that came from but somehow it fit and she stopped putting up a fuss.

  I rejoined the girls only to find Marguerite standing piously next to Mavis with her chin jutting into the air. She straightened the bodice of her blue postulant’s dress, seemingly unaware I had come back and was standing in line, but then turned her head and looked me up and down with the coldest of cold stares.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Claire said.

  I opened my mouth but no words came out, looking at Claire and then to Marguerite. A man walked out onto the platform and a cheer erupted from the crowd, rescuing me from Marguerite’s horrid look and from answering Claire.

  ‘It’s him!’ Claire shouted. ‘Pétain!’

  He stepped up to the podium and paused briefly before tipping his French kepi. Then he shocked everyone with an announcement.

  ‘My fellow Frenchmen.’ He cleared his throat before continuing, and supporters waved their hand flags. ‘I am Marcel Moreau, a friend of our beloved leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain.’ The excitement building in the crowd fizzled when they realized Pétain had sent his lookalike. ‘He regrets to inform you that he is unable to speak to you fine people today.’ He carefully unfolded a piece of paper and then squinted, tilting the page into the sunlight as if he had trouble reading the words. An aide rushed onto the stage and handed him a pair of wire-framed spectacles. Dogs barked behind the podium. Chatter wondering where Pétain had gone to swept through the crowd, and he seemed nervous, wiping sweat from his forehead, face and neck. ‘That is all.’ He turned on his heel and walked swiftly off the stage.

  The Saint-Pierre nuns stood like statues, looking quite confused. Others lingered as if not sure what to do after all that waiting. A delayed applause crept up from the back of the crowd, but faded away once it reached the front where people had already started making their way to the parade. The gendarmes had left, but to where I didn’t know.

  Mavis tugged on my sleeve, shrugging her shoulders like a little girl. She started to talk, her dove mouth opening and closing, but I couldn’t hear anything that came out of her. When she spoke again, I only caught a few of her words. ‘Quick… speech.’

  A haggard old woman pointed her finger at the empty stage. ‘Coward!’ she shouted. ‘Pétain tucked his tail and ran—the Résistance breathing down his neck.’ A wry, crackled laugh burst from her lips before she started wheezing and holding her chest with her free hand.

  I didn’t want to be caught looking, and turned my back to gather up the girls who had started to wander like cats, but bumped right into Marguerite. She had a scowl on her face that turned so cold I felt a chill brush against my skin.

  ‘Where were you earlier?’ She crossed her arms. ‘I saw you leave when the gendarmes arrived.’

  I looked at her blankly. ‘When the gendarmes arrived?’

  ‘You’re repeating my words.’ She squinted. ‘You defied a sister’s direct orders. You could have ruined things for the convent, leaving the girls unsupervised.’

  ‘I was only gone for a second.’

  ‘You have a habit of ruining things.’

  I looked into her beady eyes, suddenly realizing she was still angry with me for what happened on her arrival day. The girls swarmed around us, asking when we were leaving, dividing my attention between Marguerite’s pointed stare and their whining cries.

  ‘Marguerite… I…’

  Without further comment, Marguerite turned on her heel and walked away, leaving me with a handful of complaining girls in a near-deserted square.

  4

  As instructed, we didn’t go to the sewing centre after the speech, but took reflection in the cloister with our devotional journals near the convent’s nave. I sat on the ground, my journal unopened, staring off in the distance at a stone wall, thinking about what I saw in the crypt, and wondering if they knew who’d seen them. Of all the places I could have picked, a convent with ties to the Résistance? My fingers shook a little from the excitement, remembering the dragging sound of the rugs moving across the floor.

  Mavis touched my shoulder, and I jumped, clutching my chest.

  ‘Oh my,’ she said, sitting on the ground in front of me. ‘Thinking about something important?’

  It took a moment for me to recover. ‘I didn’t hear you walk up,’ I finally said. ‘That’s all.’

  Mavis’s face looked smooth as porcelain, white and matte, and she smelled of menthol. Had I not known the nuns washed only on Sundays, I would have thought she’d just taken a bath. She adjusted her skirt, tucking it under her folded legs. She had a Bible in her hands, which was bound in leather, tiny pieces of paper she used to mark her thoughts dangling from nearly every page. She smiled politely before opening it up, scanning the words with a loosely pointed finger, her eyes wondrously searching for something new and exciting.

  ‘Mavis,’ I said, looking at her curiously. ‘When did you know you wanted to be a nun?’

  Her voice was quiet-soft. ‘Oh, I don’t know… maybe twelve or so.’ She smiled. ‘I’m twenty-two now.’

  I was surprised to hear she’d decided at such young age, and I was sure she could see it on my face. ‘Twelve? You knew… at only twelve? But at that age you—’ I paused, hoping I wasn’t going to sound too disrespectful, but there wasn’t a delicate way to say it. ‘You’ve never been in love. You won’t know what it feels like. Ever.’ I felt sorry for her instantly, but she only laughed.

  ‘Jesus is all I ever needed, or wanted.’

  ‘Certainly, but the touch of a man, a brush of his finger on your bare shoulder, the smell of his cologne on a warm day—’

  ‘My, Adèle!’ Mavis blushed from my words. ‘Sounds like you’re well versed in these things. Have you been in love?’

 
I shrugged. With Gérard I only felt shivers. ‘My sister said being in love first feels like a butterfly’s wings fluttering deep inside, that it pulls from within making you feel wonderful yet vulnerable and fragile as a hollow egg.’

  ‘I feel that with Jesus, Adèle…’ She had sat up and talked about the first time she knew she wanted to be a nun, how she could hear bees buzzing even from kilometres away and that everything seemed crisp and clear as a freshly washed glass. Her voice didn’t squeak like it had earlier, and for the first time since knowing Mavis these past long weeks, I admired her for knowing what she wanted to do with her life, since I was still searching. ‘I knew my love for him before I arrived here. A postulant has to be sure. Temptation for another would get me dismissed, and I’d be ashamed.’

  Mavis held her Bible close to her chest, pausing. ‘What about you? When did you realize you wanted to help the sisters? Something must have inspired you.’

  ‘Me?’ I put my hand to my chest.

  I didn’t want think about the day I decided to leave Vichy, mostly because of how I left things with Charlotte. There were no bees or epiphanies about the world that got me on the train like Mavis, but something rather unexpected and serendipitous.

  Charlotte sat in a cushioned chair with her feet propped up, wrapping a wide yellow ribbon around a bouquet of peonies, talking about how happy she was I had decided to put down some roots.

  ‘Just one more day,’ Charlotte said. ‘Then you’ll be married like me!’ She smiled, tightening the ribbon around the stems. ‘You’ll look lovely with this bouquet in your hands tomorrow.’

  ‘At my funeral,’ I said, but she paid no attention to me as I sat in the windowsill of her boutique, looking out into the street.

  ‘I’m not the only one excited about your union. Henri is very pleased as well.’ She smiled, but then again, she smiled every time she mentioned her husband’s name. ‘He’ll be there, you know, for your wedding.’

  Henri was always working, either in Paris or in the south for the regime. I know his absences pained Charlotte, but she never mentioned it.