Mrs. Saint and the Defectives: A Novel

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  “I want to ask you some questions,” Markie said. “I hope you don’t mind. But your sister was . . . evasive about some things. And instead of finding it easier to forget about, now that she’s gone, I’m . . . struggling with it.”

  “You may ask,” Simone said. “And I will try to answer. But, of course, I did not know everything about my sister.”

  “I saw a photo of the two of you when you were seven,” Markie said. “It was on your birthday. I asked her about it, and about you, and she told me . . .” She paused, wondering if she should go on. But she was tired of secrets. To get real information, you had to give real information. “She told me you had died,” she said. Putting a hand on Simone’s knee, she added, “I’m sorry if that’s a difficult thing to hear.”

  Simone nodded, resigned but not crushed by what Markie had said. “This does not surprise me, I must say. We had not spoken in many years. To her, I might have seemed dead, I suppose.”

  “After Thanksgiving,” Markie said, “when I asked her about it, she said you two had had a falling-out over an old boyfriend, and I’ve been wondering since last night if—”

  “Old boyfriend?” Simone said, laughing. “What a story! Angeline and I have never had an eye for the same man! We have each loved one, and one only, and I can tell you it was not the same person. We are too diff—”

  Markie cut her off with a long, exasperated breath and stood, then stepped to the window overlooking Mrs. Saint’s house. Someone had opened all the blinds, and wincing at the charred remains of the house next door, she crossed the room to the window on the other side of the bungalow.

  “I’m so tired of all the misinformation!” she said, keeping her voice low to prevent the others from hearing. “If you had any idea what it’s been like to live here beside her. To be constantly intruded upon. Milked for information. Asked for favors. While at the same time . . .”

  Markie shook her head, too frustrated to explain further what her neighbor had put her through. “You’d think it would all go away now that she’s gone, but there’s still as much as before! And I just can’t deal with it anymore.” She turned from the window to face Simone. “I wasn’t going to tell you this until after the funeral, but I’m not accepting her gift. Her . . . bequest. I’m going back to the lawyer on Tuesday and . . . disclaiming it.”

  Simone took in a sharp breath but said nothing.

  “She wanted to saddle me with all of her responsibilities,” Markie said, sweeping an arm to encompass the two neighboring properties, “but she didn’t trust me enough to be honest with me! She kept so many things from me while she was alive—about you, Frédéric, her health, and who knows what else. She even lured me into renting this place on pretense and dishonesty!

  “And now, this gift”—Markie made finger quotes around the word—“of the bungalow. She expected me to stay here when she knew damn well I wanted to leave! She decided to surround me with people when she knew all I want is to be alone! She thought I should have to give up what I wanted for my life and take over what she wanted for hers!

  “To devote my life to”—she angled her head toward the family room—“the people she was devoted to. I’m supposed to do all of that for her when she couldn’t even bother to tell me the truth! Well, I’m not going to do it! I’m not going to put up with being lied to, tricked, and played!”

  Markie’s frustration with Mrs. Saint’s bequest—and her guilt about her decision to disclaim it—overcame her, and she felt her eyes burn with coming tears. She took a deep breath and spoke more quietly, trying to keep her emotions in check.

  “If I’d been trusted, then maybe . . . I don’t know. There’s more to my wanting to leave than just my relationship with her, I’ll admit. I’m not putting it all on her. I can’t say I’d be jumping at this even if she had been transparent about everything. But I do know the secrets didn’t help. Other than to make it easier for me to say no.”

  Simone rose and went to Markie, touching her arm briefly before moving her hand to Markie’s head and stroking her hair. It was such an unexpected gesture that it made the tears welling in Markie’s eyes finally spill over and slide down her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” Markie said, sniffing. “She was your sister. I shouldn’t have said those things. And you shouldn’t have to console me. You lost her, too.” She sniffed again and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “It’s been a long day, that’s all. A long weekend. I’m not used to having so many people around all the time, and I . . . acted badly.”

  Simone stroked Markie’s head once more, then patted her shoulder. “You will wait one minute, yes?”

  Markie nodded, and Simone left the room and went upstairs. Markie heard footfalls on the ceiling overhead as Simone moved around the master bedroom. Moments later, Simone returned holding a stack of photographs.

  Nodding to the love seat, she said, “You will sit with me again?”

  Markie nodded again and sat next to Simone, who placed the photographs beside her, away from Markie, and shuffled through them.

  “Ah!” Simone said. “Here.” She held it up: the picture of her and Angeline in their party dresses.

  “That’s the one,” Markie said. She held a hand out, and Simone let her take the picture, which Markie turned over. Angeline et Simone, 7ème anniversaire. “I can’t believe her little case survived the fire and all the smoke.”

  “It did not,” Simone said. “This is my copy. These others, too. Mine and Frédéric’s, actually—he had more than me. Luckily, his things were in that metal box and underground. So we did not lose all of our memories along with our Angeline.”

  She selected another and laid it on Markie’s lap. It was a copy of the first one Jesse had found behind the garage, the infant twins and the two others Markie had thought were their siblings.

  “This is the other one I saw,” Markie said. “I find it impossible that these could be your parents. They look like children.”

  Simone took Markie’s hand in hers and looked at her meaningfully. “Those are not our parents,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully, the way doctors do when they are giving news they don’t want to deliver and no one wants to hear. “They are our brother and sister.”

  Markie slid the picture off her lap and removed her hand from Simone’s. “Of course they are! Of course they’re your brother and sister! Of course she had three siblings when she told me she had none at all! When I shoved the one of your birthday under her nose, she admitted she had a sister—a single sister, that’s all! But of course she had another! And a brother as well!”

  She shook her head. “I suppose they live across town, and that’s where Frédéric disappears to, to report to them on how she is. Or maybe she went to see them herself.” She lifted her hands uselessly and let them fall back into her lap.

  Simone studied the photo. “Sadly, non,” she said quietly. “They were taken about a year after our seventh birthday. And they were sent to a camp.”

  She stared with what Markie interpreted as a message-filled look, but the meaning eluded her.

  “I’m not following,” Markie said. “They went to camp and never came back?”

  “Oui.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Was there an investigation? Was this in Quebec?”

  “Quebec?” Simone asked, as though it were a word she had never heard before.

  Markie looked at the ceiling, then back at Simone. “Quebec. Where you grew up?”

  She could hear Bruce’s voice the day she moved in, saying, “French Canadian,” could see the way Mrs. Saint had smiled proudly at him. And then, only the day before Thanksgiving, Markie had asked Mrs. Saint if Frédéric had followed her and Edouard here from Quebec, and Mrs. Saint had confirmed it.

  Or had she? Markie pressed her eyes closed and tried to remember. “About Canada,” Mrs. Saint had said, “I want to tell you about this, too.” Then Patty had walked in, and Mrs. Saint said they would discuss it another time, and the time had never come. Well, her
e it was. Markie opened her eyes and waited for Simone to explain.

  “Ah yes,” Simone said. “I see what has happened here. What my sister has done. But we did not grow up in Quebec. We are from Germany. Breslau, to be precise. We left in 1938, right after we turned seven. And then we lived for some time in France. Matias and Lea”—she nodded to the two older children in the photo—“made it partway to France with us, but they were detained before we arrived.”

  “Did you say 1938?” Markie asked. “How could you have been seven in 1938 when you’re only seventy-five years old?”

  “We turned eighty-five in June,” Simone said.

  “Of course you did,” Markie said. “Of course you are an entire decade older than she admitted to.”

  But Simone appeared not to have heard. Clutching the photo to her chest, she stood and crossed to the window overlooking her sister’s ruined house. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against the window, and Markie wondered if it were an effort to be closer to her twin.

  Quietly, Simone spoke into the glass. “The camp our brother and sister were taken to was called Drancy. It was a work camp. From there, they were sent to another. Auschwitz-Birkenau. A death camp.”

  “Oh my God!” Markie said.

  She rose, thinking she would rush to Simone, but something in the way the older woman stood, facing her sister’s house while she clutched the photo, made it seem like she wanted to be left alone with her siblings, so Markie lowered herself back to the love seat.

  “We left Breslau as soon as we could,” Simone said, her voice still quiet, as though perhaps she were talking to herself. “On the train. We packed everything we could into a few small packs. But you had to be careful about what you took. You had to make it look like you were going for a day only, a simple, innocent little family outing before you were all to return home again.

  “So you could take some clothes, maybe a few photos. If they looked in your bag and saw a family’s most valuable possessions—the silver candlesticks, say—they would know you were trying to leave, and you would be sent straight home, your tickets confiscated. The candlesticks, too.

  “Of course, this meant we could also not take Matias’s dog, Bella.” Simone held the photo so Markie could see it. “You see how he looks to the side?”

  Markie glanced at the photo and nodded at what she had noticed before, that Matias was looking outside the frame, and his oldest sister was trying to get him to redirect his attention to the photographer.

  “He was always looking at Bella—or playing with her or running after her. He got her when we were born, you see, so they had been together a long time. I think our parents felt he would be outnumbered with three sisters. Funny that they got him a female dog in that case, but it did not matter to Matias. He loved the three of us and our parents, we all knew this, but he adored no other being like he adored Bella.”

  Simone laughed softly, and a furtive smile appeared on her lips for an instant before fading. “To see him have to part with that dog before we left for the station, it was . . .”

  A low moan escaped her, and she covered her mouth with a hand. Markie was wiping her own eyes when Simone spoke again. “None of it mattered anyway,” she said. “The careful packing we did. Matias giving up Bella. None of it got us what we had hoped. We had not acted soon enough. There were Nazis at every station by then, on every train car it seemed, and Matias and Lea were so healthy and strong. And they were old enough, you see.

  “Angeline and I, we were too young, too weak, too useless. Although they would have taken us, too, I think, now that I have read about their . . . interest in twins.” Simone held a hand over her mouth briefly, and Markie, having read the horrifying reports of Dr. Mengele’s experiments, almost gagged.

  “But our mother was sick that day,” Simone went on, “and she could only handle one of us. A woman on the train offered to take the other, and she was sitting many rows back, so when the soldiers came through, they did not realize we were a pair. My mother’s illness probably saved us.

  “If only Matias or Lea had gotten sick as well, if they had caught whatever cold or flu our mother had. I have thought of this so many times. If only they had looked pale, unhealthy. If only they had not dressed so smartly for the train, sat up so straight, so obediently—”

  Simone choked on her words then and covered her face with the photograph, and Markie’s eyes overflowed as she rushed to the window and put her arms around the older woman.

  “I’m sorry,” Markie said. “Oh my God, Simone. I am so, so sorry.”

  They embraced for a time, until Simone withdrew herself from Markie’s arms and drew a fingertip under each eye, wiping her tears.

  “I am okay,” she said. “Thank you. But I am . . . I have made peace about this, as one must, in order to live. If you remain bitter after so many years, you will . . .” She made a circular motion with her hand, the same kind Angeline had made so many times when searching for a word in English. “I can now talk about it without wanting to commit a crime against another person. Many other people. This is progress.”

  “What a dreadful, dreadful thing for you to have gone through,” Markie said. “When you were only children.”

  Simone looked out the window again, at what was left of her sister’s house. “Och,” she whispered to the glass. “We were never children.”

  She stood quietly for some time, and then she gestured to the love seat, and they returned there together, Simone staring at the photograph of the four children, lost in thought, Markie’s mind swirling with questions, guesses, wishes. She hoped the twins and their parents had timed it just right, arriving in the south of France while traffic was still allowed out of the ports. That they had managed to get on a ship and sail to Cuba, then to the United States, like so many she had read about.

  “They hid us,” Simone said. She had been quiet so long that the sound of her voice startled Markie. “There is a town in France, in the Haute-Loire department, in what was the unoccupied region. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, it is called. It was a town full of Protestants who made it their purpose to hide Jews. Quite an extraordinary thing, non?

  “Such a risk to them, and still they did this. And not because we were their neighbors, their friends. The people who came to this town, seeking help—people like Angeline and me and our parents—were strangers, from other parts of France or from Germany. Yet without a question, the townspeople said yes, we will help you.

  “Many, they smuggled into Switzerland, after making false papers for them. What a chance they took, breaking the laws this way, to help those people escape. Others, they hid until the liberation. Five thousand in all, it is thought, were saved by the brave people of this single town. Mostly children. Imagine! Five thousand! C’est incroyable!” Simone clucked in amazement.

  “Incredible,” Markie whispered. She had never heard of Le Chambon or the rescue efforts there.

  “We hid in a barn,” Simone continued. “Angeline and me and our parents. It was owned by Monsieur and Madame Aubert. Lucien and Ginette. We were going to stay for a night. My parents had a plan to take us to a children’s home the next day. They had heard of this place, and they were going to leave us there, where they felt we would be safe. They would come back for us when they could, and take us home.

  “But there were gendarmes all around, and their job was to sniff us out. They got my father when he was filling our water bucket at the well. My mother saw from the entrance of the barn, and she screamed, and so, of course, they got her, too. They searched the barn, and they woke Monsieur and Madame Aubert and their children, and they searched the farmhouse.

  “Monsieur pretended with great shock to have had no clue about the ‘filthy Jews’ who had been squatting in his barn. He stomped and cursed and shook his angry fist at my parents, who were standing at the end of the lane, shivering with fear that the gendarmes would find me and my sister, too.

  “My mother had given us a bath that night, only a sponge bath with a
bucket and old cloths she found in the barn, but it was very cold out, and the water was like ice, and we could not warm up. We were so skinny, you see. She was worried about pneumonia, so she asked Madame if she could leave us inside the house by the fire, only for a little while.

  “When Madame heard the gendarmes banging on the door, she hurried us upstairs into the bedroom of her children, and she told us to crawl down under the covers, one in her son’s bed, the other in her daughter’s. The gendarmes came crashing up, looking in closets and everywhere, and they made the children get out of their beds. But they did not flatten the lumpy blankets at the ends of the beds like Madame feared they might, to see if anyone might be hidden there, even though, as Madame told us many times later, she thought it was very obvious there were bodies underneath the bedding.

  “For this, I believe, we must have had some lucky star above us, Angeline and I.” Simone ran a finger along the outline of the twin girls in the picture and smiled sadly. “They kept us, Madame and Monsieur Aubert. For almost four years! Here they were, with hardly enough to feed their own family’s mouths, and yet they took in two more without a hesitation.

  “They had heard quite quickly that my parents . . . would not be coming back for us . . .” Simone paused briefly and looked down before going on. “So they knew it would not be only a few months that we would need someplace to stay; it could be years. And they acted as though this were no trouble at all! They would simply eat less. They would share their clothes, their blankets, everything. They would not turn us out—or turn us in.

  “When the Germans invaded and things began to look worse for everyone, they decided it would be safest to arrange for their son and daughter to go to America to stay with Monsieur Aubert’s cousin, Girard. And because no relatives had come looking for my sister and me, they decided to send us, too. They had enough money for four tickets, and they used theirs on the two of us. They meant to come later, after they could save more.

  “They did not make it. He was killed fighting for the Resistance and she must have died shortly after. From what, we never knew.” Simone set the picture aside with the others, bent her head, and folded her hands in her lap, as though in prayer. “Lucien and Ginette. I named my first son after him, and after our brother, too: Matias Lucien. If we had had a girl, she would have been Lea Ginette. But we had another boy.”