Franklin’s words sounded surreal, and my mouth fell agape. Invisible ink seemed to be the purview of spy movies, or adolescent boys in tree houses, not font designers in Minnesota with affection for old handwriting.
Multiple brushes would be wired together, Franklin explained, which created the parallel stripes. With one dip into separate wells of developers, then with a single rake across the page, inspectors could apply multiple chemicals that would develop different kinds of “ink.”
Red cabbage water revealed messages written in ammonia. Iodine solutions revealed messages written in starch or lemon juice. Ammonium hydroxide revealed messages written in copper sulfate. Plant tannin or potassium ferricyanate revealed messages written in iron sulfate. Other chemicals developed messages written in potato juice, semen, or urine. In addition to liquid chemical censoring, heat and smoke were used to reveal hidden messages, too. Formulas for inks and developers were constantly changing, Franklin explained. Censor offices were essentially small chemical labs. “It was a constant game of cat and mouse.”
I asked Franklin whether he thought messages might have been hidden on Marcel’s letters. He said it was unlikely. If messages had been found, the letters would have been confiscated. Marcel probably would have been killed. He would have been made an example of.
Franklin knew about traditional censor marks, too, so I described other marks that scarred and stained Marcel’s letters. The large red “Ae” stamped on the postcard indicated that mail piece was to be forwarded to the Frankfurt office for review. Other small numbers stamped or scribbled in pencil—785, 4087, 5265—were identification numbers of individual censor clerks. “Clerks were trained to look for very specific things,” he said.
Marcel would have been prohibited from affixing postage onto his own letters “to eliminate the possibility prisoners might hide a message underneath a stamp,” Franklin explained. That was why Marcel had to go to the post office, wait in line, buy postage, and have the clerk affix the stamp. I had a new appreciation for the time and energy required to mail each letter—time that could have been used to procure food, sleep, or mend clothes.
In the days that followed, I learned the US government monitored mail for hidden messages during the war, too. More than fourteen thousand censors reviewed a million pieces of mail each day. More than four thousand suspicious mailpieces received additional testing in government labs. Four hundred contained secret writing and codes.
For the entirety of France, five telephone numbers existed for men named Marcel Heuzé. I know because I looked. I wished each listing included the man’s age, but the information was limited to a city and a phone number. I located each city—Carnoët, Granville, Husson, Mantes-la-Ville, Saint-Georges-de-Reintembault—on a map of France. If one had been near Berchères-la-Maingot, Boissy-le-Châtel, or the Montreuil Marcel mentioned, I would have rooted around for more information. But none of the cities were anywhere near a place connected to Marcel. And deep in my bones, I knew none of the five men were my Marcel.
Writing letters to museums or war organizations was one thing, but it just seemed crazy to write a letter to every man in France named Marcel Heuzé. More accurately, I realized, it might make me look crazy.
Over the years, I have stumbled across information on other women named Carolyn Porter. I do not know any of them. I have never met any of them. I do not believe any other Carolyns exist in my family tree. So if someone wrote a letter asking if I knew or was related to a specific Carolyn Porter, I would be amused, but I probably would not respond in case the inquiry was some scam to acquire personal information.
I filed away the idea of writing to the five Marcels as the one last desperate, potentially humiliating thing I could do before folding my cards and walking away from the table.
Some days, that point did not feel far away.
Chapter Twelve
White Bear Lake, Minnesota
April 2012
I eventually transitioned from searching for Marcel to searching for Suzanne, Denise, and Lily. I was not particularly hopeful I would find answers because I figured any search for daughters would be complicated by the fact that if they married, they might no longer have the Heuzé surname.
As I searched for Lily, an eerie and inexorable thought entered my mind: Lily does not exist. The haunting thought seemed to materialize from nowhere, and it caught me off guard. As I tried to make sense of those four words, the only answer that made sense was that Lily had not survived the war. I did not abandon the search for Lily, but after those words echoed through my brain, I did not search as voraciously for her as I did for Suzanne, Denise, and Jacqueline.
I was almost positive Jacqueline was part of the Gommier family, not one of Marcel’s daughters, but after so many false starts and dead ends, I was not going to eliminate any possibility. So I looked for any Jacqueline with either the Heuzé or Gommier last name.
Within days, I found a Jacqueline Gommier living in a town not far from Berchères-la-Maingot. As I drafted a short letter to her, I felt buoyed with optimism. I translated the letter into French, outlined an array of ways she could contact me, and included the standard apology for errors: “Je m’excuse pour les erreurs dans la traduction; Je ne parle pas Français.”
“Sounds like you’re grasping at straws,” Aaron said when I showed him the letter.
“Yep,” I said defiantly. “Worst case is she’s not the right Jacqueline and she thinks I’m a crazy American.” Aaron’s eyebrows arched in agreement. I stared back with a squint and a mock scowl.
A week later, I located a woman named Denise in northwest France whose maiden name had been Heuzé. I did not know whether Denise was twenty-eight or eighty-eight years old, but I wrote her a letter, too. Similar to the letter to Jacqueline, it did not reveal any secrets. But if she was the right Denise, I felt certain my letter would pique her interest.
Visiting the leading genealogy website would have been the first thing most people would have done. Perhaps it had not occurred to me to visit it earlier because I had scoured so many other World War II records. Or perhaps it was because my mom had already looked for Marcel.
For years, my mom has researched her branch of our family tree. She has special software to organize her records. She attends genealogy conferences and has taught genealogy classes. She has even tracked down distant cousins living in the Netherlands. Several weeks earlier, when I called to ask if she would help me look for Marcel, I waited through a long, bewildered silence. She heard me mention the font before; she knew it was based on old handwriting. But she had never heard Marcel’s name, and she did not know I had had letters translated. My interest in his fate seemed confounding since he was not family, but she agreed to help. She agreed to try, anyway.
Two weeks later, she emailed the results of her search: “I could not find him in French military records. I could not find marriage or birth certificates for the girls. The Heuzé name isn’t common, so I looked under alternate spellings. I mentioned Marcel to a couple of my friends, and they looked for him, too.” Her email then transitioned to more exciting news: she got tickets to a Marie Osmond concert! Then she went on to tell me about my dad’s most recent softball game before providing an update on the weather.
I thanked her for her time and effort—though I was not sure she had expended much of either—and I tried to mask the sting of how easily Marcel had been dismissed.
The leading genealogy website offered a free fourteen-day trial, so I set up an account. In a selfish way, I was relieved nothing came up after I entered Marcel’s name. It would have been embarrassing if, after all this time, an answer appeared immediately. That first evening I searched for hours.
After exhausting ways to search for Marcel, I shifted my focus to Vérane, Suzanne, Denise, and Lily. It was not long before I found a record for a Suzanne Bernadette Heuzé Cléro, born September 22, 1933 in Montreuil. My heart soared. Marcel’s letters mentioned Montreuil! And a 1933 birthdate would have made her about the
right age.
A moment later my heart plummeted: the record showed Suzanne had been dead for more than twenty years.
A digital family tree had been created by Suzanne’s daughter, though all information, including the daughter’s name, was concealed for privacy. The identities of Suzanne’s parents were concealed, too, so I could not confirm whether Marcel was her father. And, despite the connection to Montreuil and the date, there was no way to be certain this was the correct Suzanne.
I should have been elated about finding the record, but it did not feel like a victory. I did not know what I could do with her birthdate other than scour obituary notices with the hope of learning her daughter’s name. I did not know how to search obituary notices in France, and the language barrier made the task feel overwhelming.
During the days that followed, I spent every free moment searching the website’s archives, but each promising lead turned into a dead end. It felt as if I were grabbing sand: every time I thought I had something, I clenched my fist around it only to feel the tiny grains slide between my fingers and drain away.
On the thirteenth day, I attempted to cancel my trial membership. The website froze part-way through the process, so I called customer service to have them close the account for me.
“I can help you,” an operator with a thick southern drawl said. “But can I ask why you want to do that?” She sounded bewildered by my decision.
“I was looking for a specific person, and couldn’t find anything.”
“Well, hon, would you mind if I tried?” she gently asked. “Maybe I can find who you’re looking for. If not, I’ll close your account, but I’d sure love to try to help before we do that.” Perhaps it was the way she effortlessly called me “hon,” or the sincerity in her voice when she said she’d suuuure loooove to help, but I told her if she was willing to try, I was willing to give her the opportunity.
“Okay!” she hooted. “Let me log in to your account,” she said more rapidly than anything she had said so far. “It looks like you searched international records for Marcel Heuzé, Vérane Heuzé, Suzanne Heuzé, Denise Heuzé, and Lily Heuzé. Is that right?”
“Marcel Heuzé is the person I’m searching for. Vérane is his wife. Suzanne, Denise, and Lily are his daughters.”
“Do you have a birthdate?”
“January 26, 1912. I believe he was born in Boissy-la-Châtel. It’s near Paris.”
“Okay, hon, gimme a few minutes. Our tools are good, but if you don’t know the ins and outs, sometimes they aren’t easy to use. Know what I mean?” I envisioned her fingers hovering over her keyboard like a cat ready to pounce.
As synthesized music looped, I opened the font file. It had been nearly three months since I looked at the curves and lines of these letters; these beautiful, heartbreaking curves and lines. It felt selfish to want two things: for Marcel to live, and to someday finish the font. But if only one could be true, I decided, I wanted him to live.
“You still with me, hon?” Ten or more minutes had passed. The woman seemed surprised I was still on the line. “I’m gonna need more time. You okay with that?”
I told her to take all the time she needed.
“Well, I’ll be,” she said when she came back on the line after another fifteen minutes. “Usually I find something right away. Is it possible his name is spelled another way? I’m askin’ because I found a record of a M. Heuse, spelled H-e-u-s-e, who sailed to the US from France in 1952. But that person was born in 1914.”
“I found that record, too,” I said. I found it after a couple of hours that first night.
“Let me look a few more places for you, okay?”
After another ten or so more minutes, she got on the line: “Are you there, Ms. Porter?” The tone of her voice was flat and apologetic. I already knew what she was going to tell me. “It’s unusual not to find anything, especially when you have a birthdate.”
“Marcel has been a bit of a mystery man,” I said.
“I really am sorry. I can’t think of the last time this happened.” What had been a lilting, bubbling voice was as flat as a sheet of paper.
I felt sorry for her. She sounded so easily defeated.
My daily walks with Hoover were good for both of us. The morning walk helped me wake up. The noon walk provided a quick break from client work. The evening walk provided the opportunity to make a mental list of the day’s loose ends. No matter how busy I was, we always went on those walks. Sometimes Aaron came along. Most often, though, it was just Hoover and me.
Those walks also provided the opportunity to make mental lists of new places to search for Marcel: new websites to scour, new organizations or archives to contact. But as the weeks and months progressed, I began returning from our walks without any fresh ideas.
One day, before I realized what happened, I spoke directly to Marcel.
“If you want me to find you, help me find you,” I commanded.
I shook my head and let out a chuckle. Why did I think that would work?
The ridiculousness of it did not seem to be that I had spoken to Marcel—it was that I had spoken to him in English.
Chapter Thirteen
White Bear Lake, Minnesota
April 2012
In 2001, when I first began to freelance, a fellow graphic designer offered this grim warning: “Keep good records and expect a tax audit.” Because of the fear that warning instilled, I made a point of keeping meticulous records. I earnestly tried to follow every tax rule.
So in January 2011, when I received a form letter from the Minnesota Department of Revenue announcing my business had been randomly selected for a sales tax audit, I was not entirely surprised. “I won the you’re fucked lottery,” I said to Aaron as I handed him the just-opened notice, the stark white piece of paper still bent in thirds.
Despite good record keeping, the prospect of the audit rattled me. Sales tax regulations for graphic designers were notoriously ambiguous, and people in my professional network warned that the outcome could vary wildly depending on how my auditor interpreted the rules. On top of that, I had recently heard about a small St. Paul firm whose audit resulted in more than $100,000 in penalties and fines.
The audit took place in our home. For three days, two auditors examined ledger pages, inspected credit card receipts, and scrutinized tax deposits. They flagged invoices with sticky notes, then crossed-referenced expense records filed inside job jackets. The two women were pleasant and professional, though I was acutely aware they were not on my side.
On the third day, as the lead auditor backed her car out of our driveway, I did the Happy Dance behind the closed front door. The amount I owed—$384.25—was the tiniest fraction of the worst-case scenarios that had plagued my sleep since the day the notice arrived.
In April 2012—more than a year after the audit had been completed—while I worked on client paperwork, I thought about the audit. Once the day’s immediate deadlines had been met, I pulled several three-ring binders off the office shelves, sat on the floor, and began leafing through old business receipts. I had looked for the receipt for Marcel’s letters before, but I had only looked in the font’s job jacket. I had not looked in the general business ledger.
I had started tracking time on the font in May 2004, but I knew I had worked on the font before that. I began examining receipts and ledger pages from May 2004, then worked backward. In the years that had elapsed, dye in thermal-paper receipts had almost entirely disappeared, so each strip of paper required careful inspection. At one point, Aaron poked his head into the office. He did not even ask what I was doing, as if sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by piles of feather-like receipts and a flock of black three-ring binders, wings spread wide, was a perfectly normal thing to see.
An hour later, I jumped into the living room, waving a piece of yellow paper in the air. The paper was about the size of a playing card. A smile stretched from ear to ear. “Belle Époque. January 6, 2002!” I repeated the year, emphasizing
the last two: “Two thousand, two!”
“What’s that?” Aaron asked.
“The receipt for the letters!” I smiled even bigger and stretched tall, inflated by the find.
The yellow paper was the bottom layer of a carbon copy receipt, the handwriting no more than a doughy shadow from the sheet above. I read the details aloud: five French letters, on sale for $6.40 each, for a grand total of $34.08. The receipt included a note, in my handwriting, confirming the total included $2.08 in Minnesota sales tax.
If it had not been for the fear of being audited, I never would have kept this receipt. I wanted to throw my arms around the two auditors in gratitude.
“Gimme your laptop,” I said as I plopped into the armchair, motioning for Aaron to slide his laptop across the coffee table.
A listing for Belle Époque appeared immediately. My head snapped back in astonishment. “It’s still in business. It moved!”
I recalled visiting the store at this new location once with Laura, seven or eight years earlier. At the time, though, I had not realized it was the same business as the store in Stillwater. I recalled stately pieces of furniture, antiques, and artfully displayed French décor: pillows, frames, vases. The store might have offered custom upholstery services, too. I thought I recalled books filled with fabric swatches tucked into a case along one wall.
“Unbelievable,” I muttered as I grabbed the phone and dialed. Would the owner recall where they acquired the letters? What if they still had some? My heart soared at the possibility.
“No answer yet,” I said as I tapped my finger against the phone.
I hung up, jumped from the chair, and raced to the kitchen to grab my purse and keys. “I’ll be back in an hour and a half,” I said with a grin. “Two if the owner is there.”
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