by Robin Wells
“Oh, yes. America’s Independence Day.” She shifts in her chair in that annoyingly graceful way and gives an amused smile. “I suppose there were fireworks.”
Is she trying to be funny?
“Actually, there were. Of more than one kind.”
“Of course.” There is that little wry smile again. “With Jack, how could there not be?”
1937
It so happened that the Fourth fell on a Sunday. Instead of the usual parade, the town elders decided to have the celebration at the town square that evening. Jack came to the house Sunday afternoon and spent a couple of hours with my father. We followed the usual routine, only instead of going to the supper table, Jack and I headed to the town park. He carried the heavy wicker basket Mother had helped me pack with cold fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, and brownies, along with mason jars filled with iced tea. I carried a blanket along with a tote bag filled with real plates, silverware, and cloth napkins.
We spread our blanket in the shade of the park lawn, in view of the cupola-covered stage where local musicians took turns playing guitar, banjo, and fiddle. After staking our space, we sauntered around, talking to friends. I was fairly bursting with pride at being with handsome Jack. We watched the kids’ three-legged race, looked at the Ladies Guild’s patriotic-themed quilt display, and cast votes for the best patriotic bike decorations. The high school band performed patriotic songs, and all of the town’s veterans, including my father, marched across the stage as the rest of us applauded.
As the sun sank over the treetops, we settled back and ate our dinner. (Back in those days, people figured you could safely leave food out for three hours before it went bad. So funny how I remember that detail!)
The junior high music teacher, who could reach very high notes but sang a little off-key, belted out an odd selection of songs—hymns, show tunes, love ballads, and patriotic songs. In the distance, we saw my parents standing and talking with a group of adults. Daddy’s arm looped around Mother’s waist.
“Your parents have a good life,” Jack observed.
I nodded.
“Your father asked me what kind of practice I have in mind. I told him I’d like to be a small-town doctor, like him.”
“I’d love to be a small-town doctor’s wife, like my mother.” The moment I said it, I realized how it sounded. I hadn’t meant to be so bold; I was just stating fact. “I—I didn’t mean . . . that is to say, I wasn’t implying . . . I didn’t mean you and I should . . .” I felt my cheeks burn.
He glanced at me, his eyes twinkling. “Well, sounds like we have our futures all planned out.”
The heat in my cheeks spread from my head to my toes. I tried to imagine what Barbara Stanwyck would do in a movie. I longed to say something flip and breezy, but nothing came to mind. “You weren’t even sure you wanted to take me on a date,” I finally said.
“Oh, I was sure, all right. I was just trying to figure out how to pace things.”
“Pace things?”
“Well, I have about eight years’ worth of college to get through before I’ll be able to support a wife, so it seems wise to take things slow.” He lifted a ringlet of my hair. “You’re not the kind of girl a guy just dallies with.”
My chest felt as if someone were standing on it. I couldn’t breathe. “What about Beth Ann?”
“Oh, she wasn’t, either. She was a fine girl—really fine. I didn’t mean to imply that.”
“So what did you mean?”
“Well, dating her taught me that I don’t want to date someone just as a lark. It’s time consuming and if things don’t pan out, people get hurt.”
“How romantic.”
He laughed. “That’s my point. It’s not.”
“So your point is, romance is not romantic?”
“It’s not like in the movies, that’s for sure. My parents had a big dramatic movie-style romance, where everything was fast-paced and passionate, and in the end, they were miserable together.”
“But couples need some romance. There has to be a spark.”
“Oh, yes. I agree,” Jack said.
“So . . .”
He looked at me. “Are you asking if I feel a spark with you?”
I nodded. Overhead, the fireworks were starting.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “You make me feel like the sky looks right now.”
I looked up and saw an explosion of red lights. Satisfaction spread through my chest. “Good.”
“And you?” He leaned in close. “Do you reciprocate the feeling?”
I batted my eyes at him. “I won’t know until I kiss you.”
He smiled. “Well, then, we’ll have something to look forward to.”
—
“So he didn’t kiss you?”
Amélie’s words pull me back to the present. “Not that night. Not until the homecoming dance. He respected me too much, he said.”
As he must never have respected you. She looks so somber that I think, for half a moment, I had said the cruel words aloud.
“It is true. He did respect you, Kat,” Amélie says at length. “He always talked of you and your family with the highest esteem.”
“He talked of me?” My heart dances.
“Oh, yes. He was quite devastated over what he did to you. And your family.”
So why did he do it? That is the reason I am here, to finally learn the truth. “So how did things start between the two of you?”
“I’m getting to that, Kat. I’m getting to that. But first you have to hear all the background information for it to make sense.”
I sink back on the sofa and sigh. It is going to be a long afternoon.
16
AMÉLIE
1941–1942
Over most of the next year, I kept my head down and focused on whatever task was directly in front of me. It seemed as though the news went from bad to worse. The British could not conquer the Wehrmacht, the Germans were getting the upper hand, and the Americans still would not enter the war. Shortages worsened. There were long lines for everything. We suffered power outages caused by ice and floods. In the summer, the city sweltered and stewed. It seemed as though God himself had set his face against France.
A few bright spots were scattered throughout that hard year. In January, I heard from Joshua. We began meeting once a month at a cobbler’s shop that belonged to one of his friends. The shop owner would step out when I entered, and Joshua would enfold me in a hug. I wished he would never let me go, but he soon pulled back. He refused to let our romance escalate.
“If the Boches come in, pretend that I work here and I am helping you with a shoe,” he said. We only had a few moments each month to hold hands and talk, but I lived for those minutes, when I was close to him.
Joshua told me of the increasing hostilities of the Nazis against the Jews. In May, four thousand Jewish men were called to the police prefecture to check on their “civilian status”; they were all arrested and shipped off to German camps. Jews in Paris were now forbidden to own bicycles, radios, or telephones. They could not go to restaurants, clubs, movies, or concerts, and they were forbidden to use public telephones.
“Are you sure you want to keep seeing me?” he asked. “I can offer you nothing.”
“You offer me a reason to keep going,” I said, and meant it with all my heart.
—
In October, I finally got a letter from Yvette! One of the many letters I had sent to her had made it through the egregiously bad postal system. She had my address, and now, one of her letters had made it through to me—and she had the most wonderful news! She had heard from my brother Pierre.
I jumped with joy as I read the news. He had made it through the war, and he was, in fact, in Paris! He had gotten at job with the police at a prefecture in the eleventh arrondissement.
My
heart stuttered at that news. Pierre was working for the police? The French police served under the Nazis!
But then, what job could a young, able-bodied Frenchman possibly hold in Paris during the occupation? All of the young men who didn’t work under the Germans in some sort of civil service job had been sent to work camps. Pierre was lucky to have a job at all. Perhaps he, too, was working subversively to help France’s cause.
At the first opportunity, I went to his prefecture and asked for Pierre. He was out, but I left a note with my address.
The next day, my worried supervisor told me a policeman was asking for me in the lobby.
It was Pierre! I ran into his arms, and he swung me around. He was thinner and older. He looked like he’d aged ten years in two.
We kept hugging each other. The front desk supervisor came up, tapped me on the shoulder, and chastised me; it was unseemly for a chambermaid to have any personal interaction in public. I explained that it was my brother, that I hadn’t seen him since before the war. He relented and offered to let me talk with Pierre in his office. Neither of us sat.
“Where have you been?”
“In a work camp in Germany.” He and several other former French soldiers had escaped while working on road repairs. “How are you? Where are Maman and Papa? I went to the house and learned that a German officer had requisitioned it. What happened?”
I told him, first, that Maman was living with Hildie—and then I explained what had happened to Papa. He turned away, his face to the wall. His shoulders shook, and I knew he was sobbing.
“I cannot believe Papa is gone,” he said at length. “Our family is falling like dominoes.”
My heart stuttered. I feared I had become all too adept at reading between the lines. “Do you mean . . . Thomas?”
He nodded. I sank into his arms, and we both wept. At length, he told me what had happened. They had served together. During the Battle of Dunkirk, Thomas had been directly ahead of him during an advance. Thomas had taken a bullet to the face during a barrage of German fire. Pierre had tried to carry him to safety, but Thomas died in his arms. Pierre had been forced to leave him beneath an oak tree.
“Oh, Pierre! This will devastate Maman. She will be so happy to see you, and then . . .”
We both cried some more.
The next day, I went with him to see her. Maman opened the door. Her hands flew over her mouth as if she were seeing a ghost—then she crossed herself and drew Pierre into a fierce hug. “Mon fils,” she murmured, over and over. She pulled back to look him in the face. Her knuckles caressed his cheek, her eyes filled with tears. “Mon fils!”
Her joy soon turned to wails of deepest grief, however, when, seated at Hildie’s kitchen table, he gave her the news about Thomas. At first, Maman refused to believe it. “It might have been someone else. All soldiers wear helmets and the same uniform, so they all look alike. You said his face was hit. He might still be alive.”
“Maman, it was Thomas. I took his wallet from his pocket.”
“Somebody could have stolen it.”
“No, Maman. It was he. He was right in front of me.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I would know if my son were dead.”
When I went back to see her three days later, Hildie tipped me off that Maman had quit buying groceries. Up until now, Maman had borne the burden of spending hours in line to buy rations for them both.
“Is she eating your rations?” I asked.
I wouldn’t have put it past Hildie to lie so that I would give her money, but she shook her head. “I don’t think she’s eating at all.”
I found Maman hunched in the bedroom, repairing a seam on a white shirt. “What’s going on, Maman?”
I finally pried it out of her. She’d gone back to that unscrupulous priest. She’d spent all of her money on an indulgence to get Thomas out of purgatory, even as she continued to believe he might still be alive.
And she was fasting. She thought that fasting might bring about a miracle. At the very least, she believed it would be good for Thomas’s soul.
I told Pierre. He muttered a foul curse, then took Maman to a restaurant and insisted she eat. She complied so that Pierre did not waste his money.
I am sure she went on other fasts, however, because over the course of the next few months, she continued to lose weight at an alarming pace.
—
The holiday season of 1941 was bleak. The only good news was that the Americans were joining the Allies, because, tragically, Japan had bombed them. This left many of us baffled. Japan? What did Japan have to do with Hitler? Apparently the Japanese and Germans had formed an unholy alliance. The world had, indeed, gone crazy.
Many Parisians were encouraged. “The Americans made short work of the Germans in the Great War,” said a middle-aged doorman in the employee lunchroom. “I’m sure they’ll do the same this time.”
If only it were that simple. The winter, again, was unusually harsh. Maman developed a bad cough. Hildie complained that she couldn’t sleep with Maman’s constant hacking. She muttered vague threats about evicting her; Pierre responded by sending by a uniformed friend who knocked on the door, and told her that they’d had a report she lived alone. All women living alone were subject to housing and serving a Nazi officer. That quickly put an end to Hildie’s complaints about Maman.
Pierre took Maman to a doctor. He gave her cough medicine, but he said her heart was bad.
Maman took to her bed. I went every day to see her. She quit coughing, but she weakened at an alarming rate. Ten days after she took to bed, she lapsed into unconsciousness. She roused one evening and feebly grasped my hand. “I need a priest.”
I didn’t want to call one. I knew Maman would fight death if she knew she had not been given last rites.
Hildie sent for a priest anyway, then went and fetched Pierre. It shocked me, how quickly Maman’s condition deteriorated. We stood on either side of her, each holding a hand, both of us crying, as Maman’s chest rattled with every labored breath.
And then, exactly six months to the day after she’d learned she’d lost her youngest son, Maman breathed her last.
We buried her in a plain pine box. Buying it took the last of the cash Maman and I had gotten from the bank. Pierre, Hildie, and I were the only ones who attended her funeral mass. Maman was laid to rest in the family plot of the church cemetery, without her husband or son beside her.
Six months, I thought. That is how long it takes for a person to die of grief.
In another six months, would it be my turn? How could anyone hurt this badly and not die?
—
I was wrong. I did not die. I worked, I ate, I fell into bed and into exhausted slumber.
I would awaken in the night. In that darkened room, amid the snoring of eleven other women, I would see images of Papa being shot, and of my mother breathing her last. I pictured Thomas without a face. I wished I could remember them in happier times, but my mind seemed stuck in a ditch.
I was constantly exhausted. It was hard to say if it was because I was working two jobs—cleaning the rooms and copying everything I could find, my chest tight with fear, my fingers aching from writing—or because I was carrying around a millstone of grief.
The grayness of those days was lightened by my meetings with Joshua. We would cling to each other. He would tell me I was precious and beautiful and that he dreamed of me at night. I would tell him he was brave and handsome and that when the war was over, we would go dancing together and stay out until dawn.
“Staying out until dawn is overrated,” he said with a smile.
“I would not know, since the curfew for French citizens is nine,” I said dryly.
“I have a special permit, since I serve the Boches at the nightclub.”
“Surely you don’t work until dawn!”
“Not at the
club. But I often see dawn in Neuilly.”
I frowned. “Neuilly? That’s miles away—at the very end of the Métro line. What are you doing there?”
His eyes grew somber. “I cannot tell you, just as you cannot tell me what you do at the hotel.”
I nodded slowly, disliking the distance our secrets created between us.
He turned my hand over and embraced it with both of his. “I will say this—I believe I am doing what I was sent to earth to do.”
“How lucky you are to feel that! I sometimes wonder if I’m serving any purpose at all.”
“You are. You are helping to save lives and shorten the war,” Joshua said. “Information is crucial, and it is becoming more crucial all the time.”
“I don’t think I’m supplying good information.”
“That is not for you to know. Believe you are helping and just keep going.”
“Even if I feel like I’m stumbling around in the dark?”
“Especially then. Keep going forward and look for the light.”
“What if I see no light?”
“Keep going anyway, and trust it will appear.”
“What if it does not?”
“Do not ask that question. Ask only, ‘What do I need to do today to move forward?’”
—
His words replayed often in my mind. I trudged through my days, and finally received another letter from Yvette. She wanted to come to Paris, but her mother forbade it. She wrote me of life on the farm, of chores, and of things she could not wait to tell me in person. Her letters, I suspected, were deliberately vague and upbeat so they wouldn’t be intercepted. The Nazis were overseeing everything, and only a fraction of the mail—Joshua estimated twenty percent or less—was getting through.
And then, early one evening in April, one of my roommates—an older woman named Rose—tracked me down as I finished cleaning the last of my rooms for the day. “Someone is waiting for you by the back service door.”