The Balcony

by Jane Delury

  * * *

  The phone rang while Charlotte was cranking open the windows to let air into the bedroom. It was their daughter, calling from Tours.

  “Comment vont les petits?” Charlotte asked­—How are the little ones?—before her daughter could say, “Comment va Papa?”

  When she’d first explained Herman’s course of treatment, the children, too, seemed resolved. Then they came to visit Belle-Île. Dad looked awful, they said. Was this really what he wanted? And was it reasonable to go back and forth to the hospital in Quiberon?

  “Bien sûr,” Charlotte whispered to them in the kitchen. “And it’s our job to help him.”

  He might make it to Christmas. He might make it to the birth of a grandson expected that spring. He might be well enough again to take a painting lesson at the Pointe des Poulains, which he was planning to do when he found the lump in his neck. As for leaving the island, “Non,” Charlotte said. This was their home now. Herman had already said many times that no matter what, he wanted to stay. And it was only a matter of catching a ferry. “It isn’t your decision to make,” she’d finally told them.

  The receiver tucked against her chin, she opened another set of shutters. The baby, their daughter said, had finally cut its first tooth.

  “Envoie-nous des photos,” Charlotte said. She mouthed their daughter’s name to Herman, who held out his hand.

  “He’s ready for you,” she said into the phone, meaning that their daughter was ready for Herman. She was the opening act that smoothed the hitch out of the children’s voices and moved them away from questions about cell counts and scans. She gave Herman the phone and went to the kitchen to make him his breakfast as he laughed at something their daughter had said.

  * * *

  Not long after the manor was sold, the black cars of the Germans swarmed into Benneville. Charlotte’s mother told Charlotte to stay in the cottage when she went to find kindling, because the forest was no longer safe. Now they took the main road when they walked to the village, and sometimes there were two Gestapo in uniforms near the old mill, and Charlotte’s mother had to show her papers. After mass, standing with her mother on the steps of the church, Charlotte caught snatches of the whispers over her head. The nuns at the convent up the main road had been expelled for hiding refugees from Paris. The épicier had been arrested for hiding explosives in sacks of flour. The electrical lines had been cut, again. Men were running messages and hiding in the forest. Then, one Sunday, the church doors were locked—the priest had been arrested for hiding the épicier’s wife in the sanctuary. A few weeks later, the schoolteacher, Monsieur Havre, was arrested, and the boys’ and girls’ schools closed.

  “Don’t worry,” her mother said. “You’re smart enough to teach yourself.”

  A morning soon after, when Charlotte woke up and went to the kitchen, a shiny green chair sat by the fire. “It’s made of silk,” her mother said, but Charlotte already knew what the material was, and finally, she was touching it, running her hand over the softness as she’d once wanted to run her hand over the walls of the manor.

  “You won’t believe what happened,” her mother said. “The couple in the manor ran off during the night and they left the doors open.”

  “Partis avec des gitans?” Charlotte said, and her mother said, “Yes, with the gypsies.”

  Over the next month, objects came and went from the cottage—a grandfather clock, a rug patterned with diamonds, sets of china plates. Nights, Charlotte would wake up to the sound of the front door closing. Voices murmured from downstairs. In the morning, the rug or the clock or the set of plates would be gone, and another item had taken its place. In exchange, she and her mother ate bread again, with butter, and washed their faces with soap. There were books with leather covers for Charlotte to practice reading. Paper and an inkwell and pens so she could practice her letters. Her mother wore stockings instead of drawing on the seams. She smoked cigarettes, and Charlotte drank a morning chocolate instead of chicory flavored with birch syrup.

  “You mustn’t mention it to anyone.” Her mother made a sewing motion over her lips. “It is only borrowing.”

  “What about when they come back?” Charlotte asked.

  “People who run away with the gypsies don’t come back,” her mother said. “And, anyway, comme j’ai dit, it is only borrowing.”

  For Christmas that year, along with roast beef and tinned peas, there was an almond cake made with real sugar, a tin of pâté for their bread, and a package next to Charlotte’s plate when they sat down to eat.

  “Ouvre-le,” her mother said. “It’s from the manor, but this you may keep.”

  When she unwrapped the present, Charlotte found a wooden doll painted with the face of an old woman in a colorful shawl. “Keep opening,” her mother said. Charlotte twisted the halves of the doll open.

  Inside was the same woman with fewer lines on her face, inside that doll was a doll with black hair instead of gray, then another, younger one with pink circles for cheeks, then another, even younger, until Charlotte twisted open the last doll to find a baby, the face so tiny that its eyes and mouth blended together, floating in the palm of her hand.

  * * *

  In the kitchen, Charlotte tuned the small radio to the local station to check that the ferry was running on time. The wind was only ten knots and no rain in the forecast. A tanker had sunk the night before in the Bay of Biscay in the storm, but the authorities were confident that there wouldn’t be a spill. She opened the valve on the propane tank under the sink and filled the kettle with water. The sand from her walk on the beach crunched under her feet against the slate tile. At first, when she and Herman moved into the house, they swept and vacuumed regularly, but the sand got everywhere—in the bed, in the carpet—and they’d decided on arrête. They were going to stop so many unnecessary things: ironing, sitting in traffic, worrying about money. The smell of seaweed and salt instead of gasoline fumes, crushed oyster shells instead of the asphalt of Nantes.

  She put a slice of brioche in the toaster. Tea and toast was all Herman could eat. The nausea would have started by the time they got home tonight. Then sores would open on his tongue, and his fingernails would darken. His hands would swell and his legs would shake. Within a few weeks, his eyelashes and eyebrows would have fallen out, and he’d need to wear a wool cap to keep his head warm as he slept.

  She waited for the tea to steep. Their first year on the island, they couldn’t stop eating. They built seafood towers out of oysters and clams and shrimp, and the difficult-to-pick spiders of the sea. They learned to make far breton—creamy prune flan—and crêpes with black flour. They packed picnics of bread and charcuterie, and explored the island on bikes and on foot, visiting the lighthouses, the chapels, the views Monet painted, the Fort Sarah Bernhardt, the menhirs Jeanne and Jean: two clandestine lovers from Druid times, turned into stone. Evenings, they’d drive to Le Palais or Locmaria and sit on a terrace by the ports, drinking chouchen, watching the fishermen haul baskets of oysters and sardines into their boats.

  She set the tea and toast on a tray. Out the window, on the field behind the house, the cow had wandered into sight and was chewing on a hedge.

  * * *

  Charlotte met Herman in 1959, at a café in Nantes where the girls went to find soldiers from the American military base. She was twenty-one years old, a university student in English, and she had learned not to think about the past. She wrote her mother spottily about her life in Brittany, and she didn’t read her mother’s replies, simply taking the envelopes from Benneville out of the letterbox in her apartment building and dropping them down the trash chute on her way upstairs. Only in the occasional stubborn dream in which she yanked up floorboards, pulled off stones, smashed holes in the peacock blue walls of the manor, did she return home.

  For weeks, she sat at a corner table of the café in a pencil skirt and cardigan, reading Moby-Dick. She had an idea of the soldier who would approach her: he would be tall and lanky, as all
the Americans seemed to be. He would offer her a cigarette, which she would decline, and then, looking down at her book, he’d say something about Melville. She didn’t fully understand the book in her hands, but a man who had read Moby-Dick, who was drawn to her because of it, would be someone whom she might like.

  Instead, she met Herman, who was shorter than she was and balding on his crown. He didn’t even notice her book. After apologizing in surprisingly good French for bumping into her table, he said, “It’s better with ice” and pointed to her Coke.

  The one doubt that Charlotte had about Herman was that he was too kind, and therefore too simple. He was an air traffic controller on the military base, and when he could get time off, he took her to a patisserie and ordered enough tartes au citron, mille-feuilles, and éclairs for four people. His grandmother had been from Marseilles—she had taught him her language—and he seemed to ascribe to the French a goodness that made Charlotte nervous. She told him about growing up in Benneville with her mother and leaving for school on the other side of the country as soon as she could. She told him about trying and failing to find her lost sister, Madeleine.

  “My mother says she ran away with the gypsies,” she explained, “although you can’t believe anything my mother says.” This was as close as she got to telling Herman about the manor. But when, a few months after they met, he asked her to marry him, she said, “I need you to see something first.”

  A week later, her mother ran out of the cottage at the sound of Herman’s car.

  “Ma petite est revenue,” she said. She threw her arms around Charlotte, and left lipstick on Herman’s cheeks when she kissed him. “An American soldier,” she said to Charlotte. “Now I understand why you studied English.”

  Inside, the cottage still smelled like smoke from the fireplace and from the cigarettes Charlotte’s mother kept lighting. She talked quickly and constantly, laying out plates of sliced ham and crab salad in iceberg lettuce boats and rice salad she’d made from a box. She had bought herself a small TV, and, as she poured more wine into Herman’s glass, she asked him what he thought of this American movie star or that one. Rock Hudson, in particular, she found magnifique.

  Charlotte listened as her mother chatted on and on with Herman, pretending not to notice that she was flirting with him, and giving them the occasional translation.

  “I warned you,” she said, after lunch, as she and Herman walked up the drive. “She can’t hold her wine.”

  “She seems happy you’re here.”

  “That wasn’t happiness,” she said, “that was nervousness. She knows I can’t stand her. I try not to be cruel.” She took his hand as they passed under the plane trees. “Anyway, she isn’t why I brought you here. She’s not what I wanted you to see.”

  Ivy had swallowed all three stories of the manor. The shutters, which had still hung straight when she left for school in Nantes, tipped from their hinges. On the door, a No Trespassing sign hung in place of the lion head knocker.

  She led Herman around the side, wading through the knee-high grass to the courtyard and to the set of French doors under the balcony, which had bled trails of rust down the façade.

  “Look inside,” she said, and she told him what her mother and the other villagers had done during the war.

  “They wrecked it,” Herman said.

  “J’en ai profité,” she said, and then to make sure he understood, she repeated it in English. “I profited from it.”

  Herman looked away from the window. “But you were just a kid.”

  In English, but meant an objection. Kid meant “child” and “baby goat.” Just meant it didn’t matter. Charlotte saw that Herman understood enough and couldn’t understand completely, and that in that space, she could make a life with him. She knew, too, that he would never make her talk about the manor again, in either language.

  * * *

  Herman was off the phone with their daughter and had started to shave with the bowl of water in his lap and the hand mirror. Charlotte set the tray of tea and toast on the nightstand.

  “Did you tell her what the doctor said?” she asked.

  “She has enough to worry about. What if the baby’s other teeth never come in?”

  Charlotte smiled. “We worried about those things too when they were little.” She wiped a clot of shaving cream from his chin. “Once you eat, we should go.”

  He drank a few sips of tea and ate a bite of brioche while she laid out his clothes. She guided his T-shirt over his head, avoiding the chemo port under his collarbone. His jaw had tightened. When they had first made love, he kept asking her if she was all right until she put her hand over his mouth. She had always been harder than he was, she thought, as she helped him out of the bed.

  * * *

  The day the Americans bombed Benneville, the air frizzled with smoke and the crack of gunfire echoed from the forest. Charlotte’s mother locked the shutters and bolted the door of the cottage. Charlotte curled up on the floor next to the fireplace with her hands over her ears. Once things quieted, her mother went outside with a shovel and dug a hole in the garden by the well.

  “Get the cigarettes,” she told Charlotte when she came back inside, “and the stockings.”

  “Why?” Charlotte said.

  “There’s no time for questions,” her mother said.

  They went to and from the house to the hole with the tins of pâté, the stockings and soap, the boxes of cigarettes, the books and the pens, the bottles of champagne and perfume. Her mother got the set of nesting dolls from Charlotte’s room. Charlotte looked away as her mother shoveled dirt into the hole. “You’ll have other dolls,” her mother said.

  A few days later, at dawn, the butcher came to the door of the cottage with another man and with Madame Havre, the schoolmaster’s wife. “Ma fille. Ma fille,” Charlotte’s mother sobbed, as the men put her in the back of the butcher’s car. Madame Havre gave Charlotte the biscuit that she had brought, wrapped in a napkin, and she brushed and braided Charlotte’s hair. She helped her to pack a sack of clothes, then they walked through the forest to Benneville. She told Charlotte not to cry.

  “What if Maman doesn’t come back?” Charlotte said, and Madame Havre said, “Non, non.” Her mother would return. It would not be as it had been with Charlotte’s father and her sister, “or those poor souls who lived in the manor.”

  “I thought they ran away with the gypsies,” Charlotte said.

  Madame Havre shook her head. The couple, she said, had been taken away by the Germans. They had stopped in the clearing where Charlotte and her mother used to pick dandelion greens, and Charlotte felt as if the world were tilting—the trees against the sky, the ground under her feet—as Madame Havre told her what had really happened. Her mother had done something wrong, and so had many people. They had taken all of the furniture and objets d’art out of the manor and traded them on the black market. Then they smashed open the walls and pulled up the floorboards, looking for money.

  “And there was none to find,” Madame Havre said.

  Charlotte spent two nights in the schoolmaster’s house, helping Madame Havre with her twin sons, Jacques and Guy. Outside, Benneville was broken and smoldering. Monsieur Havre lay in bed with bandages on his head and splints on his legs. Madame Havre fed him tisane from a spoon, and at night she brushed Charlotte’s hair and gave her a bowl of warm goat’s milk with honey. She said that it was nice to have a girl around, and Charlotte wondered, guiltily, if the Havres would let her stay if indeed her mother didn’t come back.

  But her mother did return, a week later. She knocked softly on the door and said, “Où est ma fille?” Where is my daughter? Charlotte was holding baby Guy on her lap at the table, and when her mother stepped into the kitchen, Charlotte saw that her head was shaved so it looked like an onion bulb, and her dress was ripped at the shoulder. “I’m here, Maman,” she said. On their way out of Benneville, people Charlotte knew and didn’t know shouted and hissed at Charlotte’s mother. From
the terrasse of the café, the garçon growled up a mass of phlegm that quivered like jelly on her mother’s eyelid. Her mother blinked it away. She squeezed Charlotte’s hand.

  “Everyone will forget,” she said. “And what choice did we have? We were starving.”

  As the train station fell behind them and the forest rose ahead, Charlotte tried to remember that feeling of hunger deep in her belly, that feeling that, she knew, was not the feeling of starving.

  Later, as her mother slept, she went out the back door of the cottage. She found the place near the well where her mother had made the hole, and she dug out the dirt with her fingers. She cleaned the old-woman doll with the hem of her nightgown and pushed back the dirt. She walked up the drive to the manor and squeezed through a glass door with a broken pane. Shards of tile glowed on the floor. The walls and ceiling had been knocked clean away, leaving only beams and furring. She continued on down the hacked-up hallway, around chunks of plaster, an island of bricks. The chandelier, stripped of its crystals, hung like a plucked vine over the gap-toothed staircase. Everywhere, holes riddled the floors. The air swarmed with dust. In the parlor, a heap of baseboards lay where the piano had stood. Charlotte went to the window and put the nesting dolls on the sill, facing the drive.

  * * *

  She pulled over twice on the drive to Le Palais because Herman felt sick, once at the edge of a moor, and once in the parking lot of an abandoned sardine cannery, where she helped him out of the car to throw up the tea and toast.

  “It’s the twists in the road,” she said, her hand on his back as he retched.

  “And later on the ferry, it will be the waves.” He stayed crouched with his hands on his knees. “What will it be tonight? And tomorrow?”