by Susan Isaacs
She lectured James about why Ovid was such an abominable poet and demanded an immediate explanation of each amendment to the U.S. Constitution and showed him how to disarm a grenade and convinced him that, with sufficient arms, the underground could rout the Nazis.
That was their first day together. On the second, she made him dinner: stewed rabbit, followed by glasses of homebrewed Calvados. “You never studied Greek?” Denise demanded. James was just sober enough to realize she was not drunk at all.
“No. Just French.” He pronounced each word separately and slowly, examining each to make certain it was the right choice.
“No Latin?”
“No.”
“And you are considered an educated man in the United States?”
“Yes. Be fair. What do you know about common law?”
“A respectable amount, I assure you. Enough so I can realize your system of advocacy is very strange. Presumption of innocence is such an eccentric doctrine. So typically Anglo-Saxon. No. Do not close your eyes. You will fall asleep and I will be lonely. Understand, James? Now, tell me all about New York. I want to hear all about the restaurants.” She stretched her thick legs out on the floor and sighed. “I can’t remember the last time I had a decent piece of bread. And then you must tell me about the theater. Do Americans like Aeschylus? Are his plays performed often? God, I haven’t spoken like this in months. Well, enough of me. Tell me about your life in New York, James. Tell me everything. Are you happy?”
The following night, she told him she knew she would be dead before the war was over. He put his hand over her mouth. “Don’t say that.”
“Oh, James. Don’t be so serious. Wartime lovers are supposed to be doomed. If you thought I’d be waiting for you after the war in a dear little house in Cherbourg with a chocolate soufflé in the oven you’d be swimming back to England before I could put my dress back on. Your life has gone too well, my love. You need a little terror, the shiver of impending doom, to make you happy.”
“That’s not true, Denise. You know it’s not.”
“Come, James. Don’t pout. You are very, very courageous and sincere. I know that. And so handsome—but I shouldn’t tell you that because it must be very boring for you and I don’t want you to be bored. Now, you must do something for me. Give me your big American Douglas Fairbanks smile. Ah, there it is.”
He held her and kissed her, and before he pulled her on top of him again, he confided that he had special American magic. “You see, I just pass my hands over you like this and, presto, nothing in the world can harm you. Do you believe me?” She laughed and shook her head no. “Denise,” he said, pulling her tight against him, “it’s never been like this before. Oh, God, I swear it. I never thought I could feel like this about anyone.”
He went home three weeks later to a pregnant wife and a law practice he no longer cared about and a son who saw his father so infrequently that he didn’t even cry the next month when he saw James’s suitcase standing by the front door. “Say bye-bye to Daddy,” Win said. Her face was a frozen white circle animated only by the red halo of her hair. Nicholas did not look up at his father. He lowered his head so his chin rested on the child-sized football he was hugging. It was not regulation red-brown football color, but a baby blue with uniformed and helmeted teddy-bear quarterbacks and receivers printed on the spongy fabric. “Please, Nicholas. Daddy’s going away again. Be a good boy. Say bye-bye.”
“Bye,” Nicholas said. Then he turned away from his mother, who had begun to sob, and from his father, who was glaring at her. He stood motionless for an instant, a tiny towheaded figure in yellow pajamas. Then he kicked his football down the dark corridor toward his room.
8
Is Nicholas Cobleigh for real? Or is his vigil at Jane’s London bedside a carefully staged media event? There’s whispering here and in L.A. that the Golden Couple haven’t been kissy-kissy for some time (at least not with each other) and in fact…
—New York Post
“All right, damn it.” And then, with a sigh so begrudging it came over the telephone as a groan James Cobleigh promised Winifred he would be home from Washington on Sunday to interview the newest nanny. But that particular Sunday was December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day, so by the time James got back to New York to pack his valise, Nanny Williams and her cod liver oil had been settled in the back bedroom for more than three weeks.
James packed very little. He was commissioned a captain in the army but was attached to the OSS and knew exactly where he was going: on New Year’s Day 1942 he sailed for England, and several weeks later—for the third time—slipped into Nazi-occupied France and into the arms of Denise Levesque.
Nicholas didn’t remember his father’s departure, even though James had spent that final morning in New York on the floor of the nursery with his son, building awesome skyscrapers of wooden blocks and then encouraging Nicholas, flushed and damp with delight, to kick them down. In the entire year and a half of his life, Nicholas had never spent so much concentrated time with his father alone, and it made him giddy.
All during the war his mother would say, “Remember Daddy? Remember the blocks? You kicked over the big pile of blocks and then you said ‘Bye-bye, Daddy’”—Win fluttered her fingers—“and you gave him a kiss. Remember?”
The first time he had words enough to answer her, when he was a little more than two, he said “No.” But his mother had looked so sad, and Nanny Benson—Nanny Williams had been sent away—standing behind Winifred, had nodded her head so violently that he had smiled and said, “I remember.”
James’s photograph stood in a wooden frame on a shelf in the nursery, between a giant glass jar of cotton balls and a music box shaped like a grand piano that played a torpid “Minute Waltz.” The picture had been taken a few days before James left. He was in full uniform and at the height of his handsomeness: his cap angled perfectly over his thick, straight fair hair, his eyes wide, his smile warm, although not obscuring the determination of his jaw; he appeared so blondly virile that with a change of uniform his photo could have been used on an S.S. recruiting poster.
Nicholas passed the picture each day. Sometimes when he noticed it, the man—he knew to call him Daddy—looked familiar and reassuring. The smile was that of a nice man who knew him well, like Pete, the afternoon doorman, or his grandpa, and who wished him only happiness. Sometimes, usually when he was preoccupied, tying his shoes while the new one, Nanny Keyes, timed him on her big watch or playing soldiers with a friend, the picture looked neutral and impersonal, like a magazine advertisement; it could have Gillette razor stuck in a corner. Now and then it seemed malevolent. Nicholas would race through his room on a dark winter afternoon and catch a cold smile that fooled everyone else in the house, the mask of a man who hated him, who wanted to break out of his picture world and do something bad. But by the time he was three, Nicholas forced himself to stare down the sinister smiler, and the demon who had taken over the picture’s spirit was defeated and never returned.
Nicholas’s brother Thomas, who was born soon after James went overseas, had a far less complicated reaction. “Daddy,” Nicholas would prompt, each time Thomas waddled to that corner of the room. “That’s Daddy, Tom.” Nanny Coe would pass it and give the frame a kindly pat. “That’s your daddy, Thomas. A brave officer.” And Win, visiting the nursery, sitting on the old brown rocking chair with Thomas on her lap, clutching the photograph in her hand, would say, “Let’s give Daddy a great big kiss!” She, then Nicholas, would kiss the picture, leaving lip marks on the glass. “Daddy!” Thomas would say. He’d seize the picture from Win and give it a wet, chirping kiss. However, he also shouted “Daddy!” to each soldier, sailor, marine, and policeman he passed on the way to the playground in Central Park.
The photograph, in a monogrammed silver frame, also stood on Win’s night table. The photographer had air-brushed out the crinkles at the edges of James’s eyes, so he looked as he had the night of Win’s debut, handsome and youthful, with th
at small I-have-a-secret smile. For the four war years, the last thing Win saw each night was James’s smile; he was a male Mona Lisa, mysterious and desirable. The smile teased Win—I know something you don’t know—as she pulled the chain to turn out her lamp. Without realizing it, she’d often smile back, the shaky, innocent smile of a homely debutante flustered by the attentions of the sophisticated law student.
But on a few nights, when the bedroom was thick in ink darkness, a hole in space created by a closed door and drawn blackout shades, Win would waken with a shudder, the covers in angry knots, her silk nightgown clinging to her wet body, and she knew exactly what was making him smile. It wasn’t the girl he’d left behind.
James Cobleigh’s papers identified him as Giles Lemonnier, born in Boulogne (parents deceased), a baker’s assistant. Thus the two times he was picked up by German patrols as he rode his bicycle on back roads at three or four in the morning, he was able to explain that oh, my, oh, yes, he was on his way to bake the loaves that Colonel Oskar Baron von Finkhenhausen would find on his tray that morning. They waved him on.
He no longer looked like the man in the photograph in the apartment on Park Avenue. His hair was chopped short and ragged, the sort of crazily uneven haircut the dull-witted give themselves. The slow speech and slight lisp he affected to camouflage whatever was left of his accent, and the lope he learned to cover his American stride added to the image he cultivated—a man not worth thinking about. Even so, he did not seek to test his acting ability but kept out of the way of Germans and ordinary Frenchmen as much as he could. His business was with the Resistance.
James (and the other OSS men in northern France) had two jobs: to report by wireless to the OSS in London the complexion and effectiveness of the various Resistance groups in the department of Pas-de-Calais and, later, to help mount operations that would seduce the Germans into thinking the inevitable Allied invasion would come at Pas-de-Calais instead of the less likely Normandy. His first job was difficult because of the diversity of the Resistance groups; there were Catholics, Communists, Loyalists, Protestants, Gaullists, Jews, Socialists, saints, patriots, psychopaths, and collaborators. His second was painful and dangerous because, for it to succeed, the Germans had to suspect major Resistance activity in Pas-de-Calais, and this could only be accomplished by sacrificing some résistants to the Nazis.
And it was all complicated by Denise Levesque, who had gone from teaching Greek and Latin literature to organizing and leading attacks on German emplacements. James loved her. She was completely different from his wife, neither tenderhearted nor well bred, but she had two qualities Win lacked: a fine mind and self-esteem. For the first time, James had a friend who loved what he loved. Worldly affairs that mystified Win delighted Denise. She argued with his politics, mocked his pretensions, belittled his abilities, and still loved him. And when she made love to him it was not with the closed-eyes abandon of Win, waiting for him to pull her over the edge, but with leisurely sensuality, occasionally following but usually leading him where she wanted to go. He wanted to marry her.
Dear Win. It was April 1944, two months before D-Day. He wrote leaning on a wood chopping block in the cellar of Denise’s small house. (His monthly letters were taken to London by the planes that flew in and out by night, bringing ammunition and supplies. After being routinely read and censored, the letters were routed to New York.) There is no decent way to say what I must say. Certainly no kind way. Therefore—He put the stub of a pencil in his mouth and ran his tongue over its chewed end. Denise frequently gnawed on pencils and pens and occasionally book bindings, as if to regain the taste of her lost academic career. I will be direct and cruel. I am—
“You are writing to Winifred?” Denise asked. James jerked his head up, startled. His face went white. Denise was an experienced enough guerrilla to descend the twelve rickety steps to the cellar unheard.
“Yes.”
“What are you writing?”
“Just that I’m well and—”
“You are lying! Look at you, rubbing your palms together like a nervous schoolgirl. Do you know how long you would last under interrogation? Now tell me, what are you writing to her?”
“What you told me not to write.”
“Oh, James! You must not. You promised.”
“Denise—” She snatched the thin sheet of paper from the wood block and ripped it in half, then in half again. “Denise, I’ll just write the same thing over and over.”
“Enough!” She stuffed the papers into the bodice of her dress and then stood before James, fists on her hips, her heavy legs planted a foot apart on the packed dirt floor. If Win was a tall cypress, Denise was short, tough scrub. “This is stupid melodrama. What will it serve? Tell me. Go ahead, tell me. I’ll tell you what it will serve. It will serve your need for cheap romance. You will be the heel, the rotter, but all for love. Enough, James. You cannot get a divorce now. You cannot marry me now. So why torture her?”
“Because I want nothing, no one, between us.”
“Listen to me. The war is not over. What if I die?”
“You won’t die.”
“And what if you die, James? Have you thought of that? You get caught and some German pig puts a gun to your head and shoots and then what? What do Winifred and your boys have to remember you? A letter saying you love someone else?”
“Denise—”
“When it’s all over we will talk.”
“Don’t you love me?”
“Yes. Oh, yes. You know how much.”
“Then why—”
“Because I want you when life is real.”
“This is real. We’ve been together for more than two years, and it’s still as wonderful and—”
“When there is peace, whom will you want, James? Your good, sweet, rich wife? Your two handsome boys? Your law office? Or a fat teacher of Greek who—”
“I’ll want you. I don’t love Winifred. You know that.”
“Then you have time to tell her that when the war is over.”
So instead James wrote:
Dear Win,
I think you are absolutely right to start Nicky on his riding lessons this spring. As you know from my own humiliating experience, if you wait too long to get on a horse……and kiss Nicky and Tommy for me and tell them their dad loves them very much.
All my love,
James
“But if you were the sort of woman who had to work,” Win said to her mother, “wouldn’t you much, much rather spend your time in a lovely apartment caring for children instead of on some assembly line, packing parachutes or riveting whatever it is they rivet?”
Maisie Tuttle plucked a bright pink crab-apple blossom from a branch overhead and tucked it behind her ear as if it were a hibiscus. They stood in a meadow that rolled from the edge of a pond and spread across several acres of the Tuttles’ Connecticut farm. The trees were in May flower, and beneath the clean blue sky the meadow air was hazy with a pink and lilac mist. “Don’t I look like an island maiden?” Maisie demanded. “Perhaps an island maiden of a certain age, but nevertheless—what is that word?—ah, nubile. I’ve never been quite certain what it means, but I’m sure it’s the sort of thing one ought to be if one can.” She withdrew a tortoise-shell comb from her chignon and tucked in a stray strand of white hair. Her hair and the ropy veins on her hands were the only signs that Maisie was in her middle sixties. She was firm-figured and silky skinned, and her dark eyes were still bright.
“Mama—” Win said.
“Well, you really don’t expect an answer to your question,” Maisie said sharply. Win hung her head. Beside her mother she felt thin and brittle, like an unused piece of leather. She had not been loved or petted since James went off to war, and the lack of pleasure seemed to drain her of her femininity, reducing her to the gawky girlishness of her debutante days. Her kneecaps and elbows seemed to have swelled into bony knobs while her breasts deflated. Despite the moist, sweet spring air, her cheeks felt parched, her ne
ck rough like chicken skin. “If I were a servant in your house, Winifred, I would dash for the nearest factory gate as fast as my little feet could get me there. Or I’d lie on a chaise longue swilling scotch, deciding whether to steal the silver this Tuesday or next. My dear, your life is topsy-turvy. You run out the door and assume everything will be taken care of, that chandeliers will get polished and children will get winter coats. How? Will a host of heavenly angels trumpet your desires to the servants while you’re having lunch with that silly Prissy Ross? No wonder maids come and go and come and go. And nannies! Ninnies. You hire the silliest of them and then worry why Tommy hasn’t made ka-ka for six weeks or why Nicky keeps trying to touch himself down there. Honestly, Winifred, I don’t see how—Now, please. Stop quivering your chin.”
“Mama, I try very hard. Really. But I’m not like you. I can’t tell a maid, ‘Oh, Minnie, the tablecloth is creased’ or tell Nanny the children’s ears aren’t clean.”
“And why can’t you?”
“Because I’m not like you. I’m not sure of myself the way you are.”
“Winifred, the children’s ears are either clean or dirty, and I can’t see why it would take a great surge of self-confidence to say ‘Nanny So-and-so, Thomas’s ears are so loaded with wax we could put wicks in them and set him on the table beside the centerpiece.’”
“But see, Mama, I could never think of something like that. You’re quick and clever, and I always feel at a loss. I sit with all the girls I grew up with and everyone’s saying such smart things and I know they think I’m all right, but only because I’ve been around for ages and because—”