Telegram For Mrs. Mooney

by Cate M. Ruane

  He locates a single key in his overcoat pocket. On the keychain is written an address in the 16th arrondissement: an upscale neighborhood, undoubtedly the apartment of a “relocated” Jewish family. Bile rises up in his throat, but he calms himself and straightens his officer’s cap.

  Taking a wedge out from under the door, he opens it and exits the men’s toilet. Everyone in the smoky bar is quiet and a hush falls over the room. The band, playing Nuit et Jour by Cole Porter, slow the pace and the drummer misses a beat. A couple dancing near his path break apart and move out of his way. The patrons pretend to ignore him, but he feels them watching his every move.

  Walking up to the bar, he asks for a whiskey in broken French—single malt-scotch. The bartender acts quickly, ignoring other patrons—pouring a small amount into a glass and waiting for the Luftwaffe officer’s approval before pouring more.

  Finally, the Luftwaffe officer walks out of the bar and everyone lets out a sigh of relief. One man spits on the floor in the direction the officer has gone. The night proceeds on a merrier note. The drummer finds his beat. The couple resume their dance, holding each other a little more tightly.

  The officer pauses on the sidewalk and removes a pack of cigarettes from his overcoat. A woman—two sheets to the wind—stumbles toward him and strikes a match, offering him a light. He pats his pockets and finds he’s misplaced his match case. The woman makes a suggestion but is waved away dismissively.

  He vanishes into the night, gone to make trouble elsewhere.

  CHAPTER TWENTY- EIGHT

  THE DUNKIRK TRAIN STATION swarmed with Nazis. I exited the station without making eye contact with anyone, looking down at shiny black boots and balloon-thigh trousers. I avoided Germans but bumped into a pillar.

  A café, with a revolving door from the station lobby, had pastries in the glass window. You’d of thought I’d have no appetite after what happened to Paul-Henri. It wasn’t the case: I was hungrier than ever. There was a cinnamon bun in the window that sure looked good, but maybe it was wrong to eat? A fly landed on the bun and even that didn’t squelch my appetite. Then I remembered that after my great-great-aunt Sinéad’s wake, everyone went to her house and ate up a storm.

  A chunky waitress motioned me to a booth with red-leather seats, and I obliged her. She handed me a menu, but I pointed to my cinnamon bun and she took the menu back. “À boire?” she said. I figured she was asking me if I wanted to order a drink.

  “Coca-Cola?” I needed one worse than ever. Everybody knows that soda settles a queasy stomach. I still wasn’t over the recent calamity and wondered how long it would take.

  The waitress laughed. “Café, thé, eau minérale.” I ordered an eau minérale, whatever that was. It turned out to be a soda without the syrup, but the bubblies were pretty nice, and worked like Pepto-Bismol.

  “Oh là là,” said the waitress when I went to pay my bill with Belgian money. Europe was a funny place. It’s like if a New Yorker went on a day trip to Atlantic City to try his luck, and his nickels wouldn’t fit in the slot machines. She took my Belgian money though, giving me in return a few French coins.

  Now I had to find the cemetery and, to be honest, it was something I was dreading. I’d been to a cemetery before, with my ma. Before Jack was born, there was another brother, but he died as a baby. It was a germ that came from Spain and killed millions of other people too. His name was Thomas Robert Mooney, Jr., same as me. That’s what made the whole visit to his grave doubly creepy. See, Da wanted a son to carry on his name, and so I became Junior II.

  One thing I remembered, was when we’d go to Queens to visit my little brother, Ma would pick some flowers and lay them on his grave. She’d also bring a small hand broom and clean up around the tombstone. The whole thought of it, with Ma leaning over the tombstone and running her fingers over the carved letters, made me wish I’d never come to Dunkirk. But what else could I of done? I guess I could’ve returned to Madame DeQuick’s. But then I’d ended up on the train to Dunkirk, so it was fate took me here.

  To begin with, I had to find the place where British airmen were buried. The town center was a mess. If this war didn’t end soon, New York was going to look like this. The Statue of Liberty would look like a lady who’d been in a car crash. Central Park would be a battleground. The Metropolitan Museum of Art would be Gestapo headquarters—Adolf Hitler’s portrait would be hanging in the grand entrance, and everyone would have to salute it before being allowed to view the mummies.

  Dunkirk reminded me of building houses with Lincoln Logs and making the whole thing fall down when I was bored of playing. Only these were real houses that were knocked down.

  Next to an old church I spotted a cemetery and so I entered through an iron gate and studied tombstones. Some of the people buried there died a long time before: one fella named Claude, all the way back in 1620. As far as I seen though, all of the departed were French, many with the same family names and none of them Mooney.

  I spotted a redhead bent over a grave and, just like my ma, she was cleaning leaves and garbage from around a headstone. It made me feel safe to speak to her. I stood behind the lady, not wanting to bother her until she was finished with her task. She must’ve had eyes on the back of her head, because she turned her face in my direction. When she seen I was a boy holding a toy, she smiled large. “Bonjour,” I said. “Parlez-vous anglais?” I hoped she spoke Anglais.

  “Yes, I do,” she said, pulling a gardening glove off her hand and stretching it out for me to shake. She reached into her pocket and took out a cellophane wrapped peppermint—the kind that’s red and white striped. She offered it to me. I peeked out of the side of my eye and seen the grave she’d been attending was for a boy about my age who died two years before. The lady invited me to share a bench and I began pouring out my story.

  When I finished with the long version, she dabbed the corner of her eye with a handkerchief and said, “You poor, poor boy. It must have been terrifying to see a man murdered right in front of you.”

  “Not at all,” I said. A lie.

  She squinted her eyes; she wasn’t buying it. “You’re traveling alone? A boy your age?” She looked up to heaven. “You will stay with my husband and I, and we’ll help find your brother’s grave. That is settled.” She smiled big, and I couldn’t refuse.

  The redhead’s name was Madame Faure, and her and a husband owned a tobacco shop that was near the city center. We walked there on foot. She introduced me to her husband, who was manning the shop, standing behind the counter. When Madame Faure repeated my story to her husband, he reached to a shelf and handed me a penny candy. I’d landed in the sweet spot.

  She escorted me back outside and then up to their flat by way of an entrance on the side of the shop. She showed me to a small bedroom, once her son’s. The room had wallpaper with little tin soldiers, and blue and white striped curtains. As I placed my toy biplane on the bed, she managed to look both sad and happy all at the same time. I wondered how she done that. It was getting dark now, and her husband came upstairs after closing the tobacco shop for the night. We’d stopped along the way home and picked up food for dinner, which Madame Faure cooked up in the tiny green kitchen. Mr. Faure invited me to sit in the parlor while we waited.

  He lit a pipe and choked as he inhaled the first puff. “Don’t ever get started!” he said to me. “Bad habit, even if it is good for business.” He began straight off talking about his lost son. “His name was Jacques-Yves and he was our only child. We might have another, when my wife is ready. I hope so.” He took a long draw from his pipe. “Jacques-Yves was a sweet boy. My son liked to help in the shop on Saturdays and we became inseparable. On Sundays we would all go out to the beach and on nice days have a picnic. We knew the Germans had already reached Brussels but decided to make our picnic anyway, thinking it might be the last.” He rested his pipe in an ashtray. I could tell he was thinking about that day back in May 1940. “Yes—it’s been no picnic since that day,” he said finally.
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  “You don’t have to tell me about your son, if it makes you sad,” I said, half wishing to change the subject.

  “Oh, no. My wife can’t talk about it, but I’m made of stronger stuff.” His whole face changed, like a father watching a telegram boy walk up to his front stoop. “We were sitting out on the sand, beside our car, when a squadron of German fighter planes flew low over us. We heard the drone of their engines. Heading to Paris, I thought, or maybe to attack a nearby factory. They passed over, but then one circled back and fired at us. Why, I will never know. Pure hate, that’s all it could have been. I suppose it’s Hitler’s way of demoralizing us. Kill a few innocent children. It works—I’ll tell you that.”

  Madame Faure came into the room and announced dinner was ready. When Monsieur Faure and me got up, he put his hand on my shoulder and shrugged. “Best to put on a good face for Madame,” he whispered.

  I knew that the Faures were thinking about Jacques-Yves having me there, but they did nothing to make me feel awkward. Dinner was yum. Madame Faure worked a miracle with the piddlings available at the market, and there were peppermints to follow. It was the best meal since Daphne made me a burger back in London.

  Daphne.

  I wondered where she was tonight and if she’d found herself a swell French family like mine. Before I went to sleep, I kneeled by the side of the bed—like my ma would want—and prayed for my best friend Daphne: that she’d stay clear of Nazis, go to bed with a full stomach, and that she’d bump into me before long.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE NEXT DAY WE WOKE EARLY and the lady made me a nice breakfast using an egg from a chicken that lived behind the shop. I helped pick the exact egg I’d be eating. Monsieur Faure promised to ask around about the burial place of British airmen. Everybody smoked in Dunkirk and he was connected.

  “Monsignor André at Église Saint-Éloi officiates burials at the cemetery,” he told us when he returned to the apartment later in the day. “We know the Monsignor. He prefers my special blend. I call it Faure’s Fumer. We can visit him tomorrow.”

  “Does the priest work for the Germans?” I asked.

  “Heavens no,” he said.

  “These poor airmen—no family to see them off. So tragic,” said Madame Faure, shaking her head. “It’s kind of the Monsignor to see that the men are buried properly.”

  “I dare say it puts him in a difficult position having to deal with the Germans,” said her husband.

  Before dinner we left the flat and made our way to a car, parked nearby. We traveled a short distance from the town center and rolled the car to a stop across the street from the graveyard. A German military ambulance pulled up to the curb and we watched as two medics lifted a stretcher from the back and carried a covered body through the gate. Madame Faure took one look at me and said, “Deep breaths, deep breaths.” A man came out of a brick building and signed papers, directing the medics into the building. We figured it served as a makeshift funeral parlor.

  “It’s not safe to be asking around while the Germans are here,” said Monsieur Faure. He put the car into gear and began to pull away from the curb.

  On the drive back to the town center, Monsieur Faure turned the radio to a news channel, but after a few minutes retuned to a music station. “Propaganda. That’s all the news is these days,” he said. “Sometimes we pick up Radio Londres, but if the Germans find you listening, it’s big trouble.”

  That night I tossed and turned and even after counting to a hundred sheep, I was still wide-awake. I kept thinking about my brother and how there’d been no family members to see him off.

  Taking my sneakers in my hand, I tiptoed across the parlor and down the stairs to the street level. Without much thinking, I headed in the direction of the cemetery—an easy enough walk. A chain with an open padlock hung from the iron gates. The metal hinges creaked as I slipped through. I creeped alongside the brick building, all too aware of the sound of gravel crunching beneath my feet. There’s usually nothing more exciting than visiting a haunted graveyard at night. But not tonight. On top of everything, I forgot to bring flowers.

  Then I heard noise coming from the brick building, the one that must’ve served as a funeral parlor. Chills went down my spine when I realized there was somebody on duty. It seemed like an odd hour to be working, though. Pressing my body against the bricks, I inched closer to the door, taking a look inside. The beam of a flashlight bounced around the room and I ducked to the ground to avoid its rays. My nose started bleeding. I fished around in my pocket with a shaky hand, searching for a hankie. In the moonlight, my blood looked black.

  “I spit on you!” came a voice. “Beastly Hitler, I spit on you!”

  Blood stopped dripping from my nose. I should’ve known Daphne would break into the building using her hairpin. When I walked through the door, she leaped back knocking over a trash basket. I heard her let out a gasp.

  “Daphne, it’s me,” I said quietly, not wanting to scare the heebeegeebees out of her. She pointed the flashlight to my face.

  “Thomas Mooney!” she said, in a pitch-perfect imitation of Sister Bridget at St Brendan’s. “What on earth are you doing here? You oughtn’t be in Dunkirk. You should be on your way to Paris.”

  “The plan changed,” I said, promising to explain later. “You shouldn’t be here either.”

  “It’s all right. I’ve been staking out the building for two nights now and no one shows up until morning when the caretaker comes.” She had a large ledger book in her hand, which she waved in front of my face, saying it contained information about every British airman buried in the cemetery. She lit up the pages with the flashlight. I leaned in to look. Daphne’s fingers traced down a list of names. On one line, information had been scribbled over, making it impossible to know what had been written. The entry right above was for a Pilot Officer James A. Noble, who died on June 15. Below was the entry for a Sergeant Stanley Mather, who died on June 17. According to the book, in all of 1942, there was no one by my brother’s name taken to Dunkirk. The crossed out line made me wonder, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “It could be there’s another cemetery in town,” I said. “Or maybe the Resistance people were wrong and he wasn’t taken to Dunkirk. The Germans could’ve taken Jack’s body anywhere.”

  “I think he’s not buried here, simply because he’s alive and well.”

  Here we go again, I thought, but tried hard to hold onto the idea that she might be right. “Listen, there’s a priest in charge of burying RAF airmen. We can pay him a visit tomorrow.” Mostly, I wanted to get out of this building before Stormtroopers stormed in. Daphne sighed but caved. Before we left, we straightened up the room so it didn’t look disturbed. Then we closed the gate, locking the padlock.

  By the time we reached the apartment, birds were beginning to chirp. Madame Faure answered the door in her nightgown, her long hair in two braids making her look like a schoolgirl. She put a teakettle on the stove and brought out a plate of biscuits. Daphne looked like a wreck—like she hadn’t slept in years.

  Monsieur Faure woke and was surprised to find a stranger in his living room, but glad when he heard it was Daphne. “You are very welcomed in our home,” he said, kissing her hand. Right before she used it to stifle a yawn.

  “Oh, my,” said Daphne sleepily, almost in a whisper. Then her eyes riveted on a picture that hanged crooked over a steam radiator. She looked shocked, and no wonder. I’d already spotted the painting. It was like something you find in a girlie magazine; they call it the centerfold. (Not that I’d ever seen one.) Approaching the painting with both hands folded behind her back, Daphne said, “I know the artist!”

  The Faure’s came up behind her shoulders, one on each side. Six eyes looking dead-on at the painting with no shame at all. I figured that Monsieur Faure was violating the fifth deadly sin: lust.

  Out of the side of my eye, I saw that Daphne was now waving her hands wildly. “I’m sure of it,” she was saying, “this is Sophie Doumer�
��s work, one of my dearest friends at art school. I was in the studio when she painted it, standing not three easels to her left, and painting from the exact model—a Russian girl named Katarina. Why, see here—there is the girl’s mole!”

  Madame Faure started laughing. “Sophie is my sister.”

  Daphne spun around so that she was staring Madame Faure in the face. “My goodness, now I see that you are practically her twin.”

  “Hardly,” said Madame Faure. “I’m almost thirteen years older.”

  Daphne reached out for one of Madame Faure’s braids. “Same exact color…I’d say alizarin crimson with a touch of cadmium orange.”

  “And gray.” Madame Faure pointed out a strand twisting through the braid.

  Daphne turned back to the painting. “Sophie was the most gifted of our class. I say, look at those edges—marvelous!” She ran a finger over the Russian girl’s bosom, landing on a—. My cheeks grew warm.

  After that, Madame Faure forced Daphne to take a nap in the spare bedroom. A bunch of French words, all meaning thank you, poured from Daphne’s lips. I showed her the way.

  “Oh, Thomas,” she said, closing her eyes. “I missed you terribly.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  LATER ON THAT DAY—once Daphne was finished with her beauty sleep—we walked to a Gothic Cathedral. Gargoyles glared down at us with their beady eyes as we passed under a stone arch and into a side entrance. The church smelled like wax and furniture polish. The sound of our footsteps ringed on the stone floor, bounced off the vaulted ceiling and disappeared into all the nooks and crannies. Underneath the floor people were actually buried. One plaque was dated 1560—so long ago, the Lenape Indians still owned Manhattan Island, and the Dutch hadn’t come along yet to swindle them with glass beads.