I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

  “Did you think it would matter to me?” Josée asked. “As long as she appreciates you and makes you happy. That’s all I care about.”

  —

  WHEN JOSÉE FIRST TOLD Paul she had applied to be an airline stewardess, he laughed and brushed her off. It was an impossibly glamorous job in 1951.

  Many gorgeous young women responded to the open call. Josée bit her tongue and waited. In March, the women who had applied were called all at once to the TWA offices on the Champs-Élysées. A man read off the names of the accepted in ranked order. Josée was called first.

  “I was called first,” she told me often, with a very rare flash of pride. Not only was she called first, but because there was still a month to go before her twenty-first birthday (and therefore a month before she could be legally hired), they made an exception for her. They let her fly on test flights. They flew her to New York.

  For Josée, Americans were the ones who had covered her city with bombs, saying they were aiming for the Germans and instead spraying all of Paris. The Americans had liberated France, they had died for France in Normandy. And yet for Americans, Europe didn’t count. They had come only for the Germans. Americans weren’t people “like us.” They were big brawny superheroes; they were rotten with cash.

  Josée saw New York. It fell on her face in all its excess and grandeur. The South Street Seaport bustled with boats, the Empire State Building towered above her. But it only fit with what she had imagined: a scene straight from the movies. Americans were from another planet. They were beings of constant excess, with their loud voices, their hugs, their too-tall buildings. The whole city lit up at night. What degeneracy! Josée thought. Even after the war, she carefully extinguished and saved her candles.

  Josée could no longer remember a specific moment of that time in New York. She was there for ten days, she saw what she expected to see, and she left with no wish to return. She would see many things as a hostess: the electricity in Egypt was unreliable, Greece was lovely, all of Italy was in flower. Wherever they traveled, the crew were received like movie stars. Bottles of champagne were sent to their hotel rooms and their pictures appeared in the papers. Josée was paid incredibly well. Her already high salary was in strong American dollars. She gave Mina part of the money, saying that it was for rent on her childhood bedroom. She rarely brought back souvenirs for her mother or her brother, but for Mélanie she stole whole bags of the mints she passed out to passengers.

  Paul chased her from city to city, driving hours in his Citroën, Paris to Rome, Rome to Milan, only to discover that she had already taken to the air again by the time he arrived. Fed up, he used the only means he had to force Josée to quit. The stewardesses were contractually obligated to be single. He proposed. “Who would give up a job like this one?” the other flight attendants said. “You’re crazy!” But Josée was in love. She wanted nothing more than the stability of a family. A year after she had been hired, she quit.

  Paul assured her that he had told his parents her secret. Josée thought them very polite for not mentioning it. Paul came to visit Eugène, entering through the office window, and asked for Josée’s hand in marriage. Eugène, delighted, slapped Paul on the back and promised a generous dowry. By the seventeenth of June, they were officially engaged. By the thirteenth of July, the engagement was off.

  Paul broke it off by telephone. His parents had hired an investigator to compile information on their future daughter-in-law, he told her, and it seemed he had not told them her secret after all. They had discovered that she was a bastard. Paul couldn’t marry so far beneath himself, his mother insisted. No matter that Paul’s father was only a veterinarian from a small town. No matter that several farm girls in neighboring villages had children who looked suspiciously related to Paul’s father.

  As soon as she hung up the phone, Josée took off her engagement ring and mailed it back. No note. She didn’t even send it by registered mail. Then she collapsed into sobs.

  Paul’s parents, Josée discovered later, tried to match him instead with a former president’s daughter. But whatever existed between him and Josée was passionate. He soon realized his mistake. He spent the summer ringing Josée’s doorbell, extravagant bouquets of flowers in hand. Mina answered the door and told him her daughter was out. Josée entered and exited through the servants’ entrance in the back. Paul took up vigil in his car across the street. He slept there for ten days and ten nights. He threatened to kill himself. He swore he wouldn’t eat until she spoke to him. Mina watched from the window and brought updates to her daughter. “Let him die then,” Josée said.

  And then she forgave him. When I asked her why she changed her mind, she shrugged her shoulders and said simply: “I loved him.”

  —

  IN THE BEGINNING, they were happy together. But Josée alluded to those happy times only vaguely, always followed by a “but then . . .” The happiness had been so often overwritten with anger that I caught only glimpses of it.

  Not even a year into their marriage, Josée began to discover Paul’s constant lies. She was pregnant with Sylvie when she cut her hand and rushed to Paul’s hospital, believing he was working an overnight shift, only to be told he was not there. Soon after, there were other women’s belongings in his car. Soon after, she called home and he, mistaking her for one of his mistresses, answered in an angry hiss, “I told you never to call me here.” Although these were not the real problems, she told me. A woman you could fight against. A gambling addiction you could not.

  On the morning of their first Christmas together, she and Paul had an argument. Mina rang the doorbell, Josée’s young brother in tow, both dressed in their holiday best. Paul screamed, “Your whore of a mother is here!” He opened the door, told Mina that she was never to set foot in their home, and slammed it in her face. Josée was furious. But from then on, she saw her mother very little. There was no room for her past in this new world.

  Meanwhile, Mina held three secretarial jobs simultaneously, often working through the weekends. She struggled to make the rent on her apartment, but still refused to give it up. She sent Josée’s brother to the best schools and cut corners everywhere else. She worked until she was well into her seventies, but her taste for finery never faded.

  In one of our more intimate conversations, Josée told me that one of her few regrets was not helping her mother more in those years. On Josée’s brief visits, Mina would occasionally intimate that she needed certain things, that, for example, her washing machine was broken and she couldn’t afford to have it fixed. “It would have been very easy for me to help,” Josée said. “We had piles of cash stashed all around the house. I helped myself to it when I liked. Paul would never have noticed. But I didn’t.” Though when I asked why, she said, “It didn’t occur to me. I was far too busy being a wife and a mother.”

  One of those Sundays when Mina babysat while Josée and Paul went to the track, Josée bet on a horse named Mélanie. The horse was not favored, and it was a sentimental whim. But the horse won, the bet was multiplied fourteen times, and the winnings were huge. Josée giddily gave all of it to Mélanie that evening. It was money that Mina, who ran the household, could have put to good use. But it was also enough to emancipate the aging Mélanie from her dependence on her daughter. And yet, upon Mélanie’s death in 1961, they found the bills, untouched, tucked away in the back of Mélanie’s sock drawer.

  “Why do you think she didn’t spend it?” I asked.

  “Because we found it in her sock drawer,” Josée repeated testily.

  “No, I mean why, in your opinion, didn’t she spend the money?” I said.

  “Oh!” Josée said. “You mean, if I were to put myself in Mélanie’s place and try to imagine?” She hesitated, the exercise unfamiliar.

  “I don’t know,” she huffed eventually. “You know, people who have known the war . . .”

  I tried to reconstruct a scene of o
ne of the Sundays when Josée dropped Françoise off for babysitting. In both Josée’s and Françoise’s tellings, those afternoons had gone the way of all things routine, a blur of collapsed time. But now I pictured it as a frozen instant. I saw Josée sitting in the driver’s seat of a fancy new car, one hand raised in a distracted salutation. She would have been on her way to the horse track, effortlessly elegant in the latest sixties style. I pictured Mina in the doorway in a dress she had sewn herself, perfectly coiffed in anticipation of this moment when she would step outside. And I imagined Françoise running from car to doorway, all scraped knees and short hair, suspended in motion.

  And I saw now what my mother had not, at the time: that Mina must have felt a stab of jealousy to see her daughter awash in the wealth she had only so tenuously known herself. That Josée must have sensed her mother’s envy, and felt a certain inevitable pleasure.

  And then my frozen moment sprang back into motion. Josée’s car pulled off into the road, Françoise fell into Mina’s arms. Mina took Françoise, Josée’s least favorite daughter, and loved her ferociously. I saw a pattern forming, like a series of skipping stones that sent ripples through the generations: all the granddaughters and grandmothers who loved each other, all the mothers left stranded in between.

  chapter eleven

  I called Josée from the train.

  “Oui, mon chat!” she said as she picked up the phone.

  “Just letting you know I’m on my way,” I said.

  “Train six one five five, car six, upstairs, seat one fifteen, arrives at three oh five p.m.,” she said, apparently from memory.

  “Yes,” I said, laughing, “I’ll see you very soon.”

  The TGV bisected the countryside, speeding south. Vineyards whipped past the windows. As the train pulled into the Hyères station, I scanned the platform. I didn’t recognize Josée right away. She was wearing a pale yellow headband that held wisps of blond hair away from her eyes, and a soft yellow shirt that came down to the top of her thighs. She looked soft where I was expecting sharp.

  She was gazing the other way down the platform. I tapped her on the shoulder. “Ahh!” she said with delight, turning toward me, her face lighting up. Her blue eyes appraised me quickly. I felt the charge of her energy on me. Up close, she became young again. And I became younger, too. My voice went high, my steps turned into a shuffle. Glancing at my reflection in a train window, I half expected to see a little girl in her best red velour dress.

  As we got into the car, she outlined all the outings she had planned for us: friends we would visit, beaches we would see. She had told me that we would drive back to Paris together on July 7, but now she told me that she’d decided that we ought to stay down south until the thirteenth. I felt kidnapped, but aloud I agreed happily. I had no good excuse to go back earlier. I went heavy with the deep discomfort of being a guest, of being on somebody else’s schedule. As she spoke, laying out a verbal calendar and shuffling it around, I noted the urgency in her planning. When it looked as if there weren’t time for something, she didn’t say we would do it next year, and that broke my heart. Josée’s health had gone through many dips these past few years, but each time she’d recuperated. I refused to believe she wouldn’t live at least another decade.

  We sped down the highway. In the opposite direction, cars were stalled in traffic that moved at a crawl.

  “I hope you didn’t have to sit through all that on your way to pick me up,” I said.

  “No, that wasn’t there. And anyway, nothing could have put me in a bad mood this morning. I was so excited you were coming, je trépignais.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Trépigner? It means jumping from foot to foot like a child.”

  “Oh, that’s very sweet,” I said. It sounded like what I had felt that morning, trepidation.

  “Do you want to go straight to the sea for a swim? Or go home and settle in? If we go home, I’m just warning you, we won’t leave again this evening. My friends are coming over for dinner.”

  I hesitated, trying to guess what the right answer was. I would have preferred to go settle in—I am the kind of person who takes twenty-four hours to travel, no matter how short the trip—but I had a feeling it was the other one.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” I said.

  “That’s what I thought!” she said. “I always want to jump in the water as soon as I get here.”

  She went on to tell me a story about driving down here to the South of France with Sylvie, taking turns at the wheel. Josée had the final stretch, and Sylvie fell asleep. She drove the car straight to the beach, parked, and went swimming. When Sylvie woke up, it was getting dark, and she was annoyed. She insisted on having milk for breakfast the next morning, and the store in the village was about to close. “I told her to relax and enjoy the ocean but she refused to get out of the car, she just went on: the milk, the milk. So I struck up a conversation with the owners of this little cabana on the beach. I told them, ‘My daughter is acting out an operatic tragedy about milk. Do you have any to spare?’ The woman went into the back and miraculously produced this little carton of milk, which I, soaking wet and triumphant, brought to Sylvie. ‘Voilà! Voilà your milk,’ I said, ‘Now will you just relax?’ And immediately, she started in about how we needed to get home before the milk spoiled. Ha! That girl.”

  Josée had told me a story about Sylvie, but all I could hear was how much this story was about her. Impulsive, free-spirited—this was the self that appeared in many of her stories, especially those where her daughters played the straight man. We got out of the car, and she helped me change into my bathing suit in the parking lot. “You have fifteen minutes to swim,” she told me. She sat on a bench to wait. The sun was setting and the air was cool. The cold water tickled as it climbed my body. My stomach pulled into my spine. I took a deep breath and plunged, happy as soon as the water hit my temples. I swam quickly, straight out into the ocean, my thoughts smoothed out by the rhythmic strokes. I had this tugging feeling, a half-formed thought. It was the feeling that I’d met someone my mother would like. A memory rose without breaking the surface, just suffusing me with the emotion it contained, like a dream. It was of that time in Brazil, when my mother had pulled over so that she and my brother and I could go swimming during the thunderstorm, while my father waited anxiously in the car. Yes, I thought to myself dreamily as I swam, it’s a shame. My mother would have really liked Josée if she’d known her.

  —

  JOSÉE HAD ANOTHER BEACH, a secret beach. You could rent a chaise longue and they’d bring you food and drink from the snack bar, which was true of many of the beaches along that small stretch of coastline. But this one had the clearest blue water and was neither too crowded nor too expensive. She wouldn’t tell her friends where it was. “Oh no, I can’t meet you at the beach tomorrow,” she’d say. “We’re going to my beach. Nadja can tell you, it’s the best one around.” Then she’d insist that she’d be unable to give them directions, although each time she unerringly found her way there.

  She presented me to the women who ran the beach, les plagistes, and they kissed us on each cheek. “They lick your peach,” my grandmother said of their matronly embrace. The young man who waited on the lounge chairs would probably tend to us with renewed fervor now that she was accompanied by the most beautiful girl on the beach, she continued. I blushed, not feeling beautiful in my too-soft body. I looked around and noticed that I was the youngest woman there. And when he placed two espressos by our feet, Josée said loudly, “Look, Nadja—you have coffee and a handsome French man kneeling in front of you. What more could you want?”

  “Nothing,” I said with a lascivious laugh and a completely uncharacteristic wink. He stiffened and walked off quickly.

  The next day, Josée’s friend Julien invited us to lunch at his beach.

  I liked Julien. He was seventy-eight and madly in love with my gra
ndmother. He walked with a silver-tipped cane and wore smart tan linen suits and made grand pronouncements about ennui. He read history books about strong women. Josée said he tired her because he didn’t enunciate his words. She had very little patience for those who’d grown frail.

  “You’ll need to dress up,” said my grandmother. “His beach is very chic.”

  I showed her two different outfits, because I thought she would be prouder of my appearance if she’d vetoed one. I wound up in high-waisted printed silk pants, my bikini top, and a see-through silk blouse open to the waist and tied.

  She told me that the restaurateur was extremely handsome, and sometimes she brought her friends to this beach just so they could throw themselves at him. “He used to play on the French national rugby team,” she said meaningfully, and I made a sound like I was impressed. “He’ll surely find you very attractive.”

  “Oh,” I said. I sank into worry. I knew she would be disappointed if he didn’t.

  As we walked down the boardwalk she said, “There he is! That big broad back, I’d recognize it anywhere.”

  Facing away from us, at the entrance to the restaurant, a middle-aged man with a physique like an upside-down triangle was talking to a tall tan blonde in her sixties. Josée walked purposefully toward them. Just before she tapped him on the back, she turned and whispered to me, “Be beautiful!”

  I didn’t even have time to flip my hair back. But I thought to myself, Okay. Okay. Be beautiful. My shoulders pushed back and my chin leveled up and I tightened myself deep in my stomach.

  “Ma beauté!” he exclaimed over Josée, bending to grab her shoulders and kiss her.

  “Je te presente ma petite-fille.” Josée gestured to me with a sweep of her hand.

  Be beautiful, I commanded myself.

  He kissed my cheeks, then leaned back and looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on my chest.