The French War Bride

by Robin Wells

  “Oh, a maid, eh?” The tall one leered. “So you make all the beds? Want to straighten my sheets?”

  The other soldiers laughed and elbowed each other.

  “Please—I just want to go home,” I said.

  “Well, then, you need to be very nice to us.”

  My mouth went dry. “I—I am being nice.”

  “No, you’re aloof. What are you carrying in the basket?”

  “I took a poultice to my great aunt for her arthritis.”

  “Arthritis?”

  Apparently he didn’t understand the French word for it. “She has aches and pains.”

  “I have an ache you can treat,” said one of the other soldiers in German.

  They all laughed. I edged away.

  “Hey, hey, hey—come back here,” said the tall soldier. “No need to be so standoffish.” He pulled me roughly toward him. “Let us see what you’re wearing under that coat.” He pried at my top button. His finger touched my neck.

  I don’t know what came over me. I didn’t think; I just acted. I jerked up my leg and kneed him in the groin.

  “Ow!” He released me to grab his crotch. As the other two soldiers laughed, I turned and started to run, but I wasn’t quick enough. The soldier I’d hurt snatched my arm and spun me around. The next thing I knew, I felt cold metal on the back of my head.

  “You little whore,” he snarled.

  The gun cocked. I closed my eyes and thought of Maman.

  “Wait, Kyler,” said one of the other soldiers in German. “If you kill her, we’ll have to file a report. We don’t want to mess with that this late.”

  “Yeah.” The second soldier lurched on the pavement. “Let’s just go have another drink.”

  For a long moment, my life hung in the balance, as Kyler weighed the merits of revenge for his sore crotch versus the inconvenience of paperwork. Apparently I wasn’t worth killing, because at length he hurled me from him.

  I fell to the pavement, breaking my pot and skinning my knee.

  “This is your lucky night, you French slut,” he growled. “But I’ll be watching for you, and you won’t get off so lightly next time.”

  I scurried down the dark street toward the hotel, holding my breath that I wouldn’t encounter any more soldiers. I let myself into the side door, then stood in the hallway, catching my breath.

  Isolde came by, carrying her soap and shampoo out of the bathroom.

  “There you are! I was beginning to wonder if something had happened to you.”

  “No,” I replied. “Just a long train ride.”

  “How was your aunt?”

  “A little under the weather. The poultice seemed to help a bit.”

  “Good. Well, nothing much happened here, either.”

  “Just another boring day for both of us,” I said.

  The irony, of course, was lost on her. I followed her to our dormitory, feeling very much alone in the crowded room of women.

  25

  AMÉLIE

  1943

  My God, Amélie—you could have been raped or killed!” Yvette said a week later when I told her my tale of the encounter with the German soldiers.

  I was lounging in a chaise in the hotel suite where Yvette now lived, drinking real coffee. I don’t know when I’d last had real coffee. Her hotel was very swank and served only the extremely wealthy or extremely high-ranking Wehrmacht officers.

  Yvette’s German protecteur was both. She routinely gave me food left over from her sumptuous meals with him, food that she rolled into napkins and stuffed in her handbag.

  “Have another cookie, ma petite. You are so very skinny!”

  “I know, I know.” I looked down at my rail-thin frame. “At least it’s not much of a change for me. But you—you looked ill when you lost so much weight.”

  “It is good to not be hungry. But sometimes I think I’d rather chew off my arm than spend another night doing some of the things that Gerhard . . .” She broke off her words and lit a cigarette.

  “Tell me,” I urged.

  “I find it hard not to recoil when he touches me,” she confided. “And when he kisses me or asks me to do certain things, I fight the urge to retch. And sometimes, he ties me to the bed, and . . .” She inhaled a puff of smoke, then waved her hand. “But it does not matter. I am providing the Résistance with important information. I remind myself of that every day. And the war is turning in our favor.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. The Boches won’t admit it, of course, but the battle of Stalingrad was a major defeat. And the Allies are bombing the hell out of Germany.”

  “France, too.”

  “Oui.” We sat there, somber. The hard truth was that the British and the Americans—the very armies trying to save us—were bombing German targets in France, but there was often collateral damage. It was a horrible fact of war. Paris itself was spared, but nighttime strikes sometimes hit the suburbs.

  “So.” Yvette tapped her cigarette on the side of an ashtray. “How is work at Hotel Palais?”

  “Much the same as ever, except the soup is even thinner. And one of my roommates disappeared.”

  “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “Just that. She went out on her day off, and she did not come back.”

  “Was she working for the Resistance?”

  “No. At least, I can’t imagine that she was.”

  “Was she Jewish?”

  “Again, I think not, but who can be sure of anything these days? She was supposedly from Lyon. I have wondered if she ran into the same soldiers I ran into, with a different result.”

  “There are many things that could have happened to her.”

  “All of them bad.”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps she escaped to America.”

  “Ha!”

  Yvette took a drag from her cigarette. “That is what we should do when the war ends.”

  “Go to America?”

  “Yes! It is the land of opportunity. France will be poor for a long time to come.”

  “Oh, don’t say that! When we are liberated . . .”

  “We will still be poor and hungry. All of France will be poor and hungry for many years. That is what happened after the Great War. Besides, where are we to live after the war?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I have been thinking about it a great deal.” Yvette exhaled a puff of smoke. “You and I need to go to America and make a fresh start.”

  “How will we get there?”

  “We will save our money and buy tickets. Or we will fall in love with American soldiers and marry them.”

  “My heart will always belong Joshua.”

  “That is what you think now. Once I thought that of Pierre.”

  “And now?”

  “He is dead to me.” She took a long pull from her cigarette. “He came to see me last week.”

  “And?”

  “I told him if he didn’t leave, I would tell Gerhard and have him arrested.” She flicked her cigarette over an ashtray. “He asked about you, Amélie. He still loves you.”

  “He loves no one but himself.”

  “Perhaps. But, still, Amélie . . . he is your only family.”

  “No.” I reached and out gripped her hand. “I have you.”

  “Yes.” She smiled as she squeezed my fingers. “We are sisters—and we have the papers to prove it. But you must go. Gerhard will be here soon.”

  “And he won’t like to find me here?”

  “Au contraire. He would like it too much. He wants you to join us in a ménage à trois.”

  “Very funny!” I stopped short at the look on her face. “Mon Dieu. You aren’t kidding!”

  She tilted her head. “He has some very odd ideas about lovemaking.”
>
  My chest tightened. “Oh, Yvette! Does he—does he hurt you?”

  “Not too much.” She looked away. “Not too often, anyway. And I have learned much valuable information.”

  My expression must have conveyed my alarm, because she smiled. “It is okay. He is leaving next week. He does not know I know, but of course, I do.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I have met another officer who can greatly help our cause. He and I have already talked.”

  “Is this someone you could love?”

  She gave a wry grin. “I hope not; he is already married. Besides, love has nothing to do with it. He holds a very strategic position. It will be a bonus if he is kind.” She ground out her cigarette and rose. “But enough. You must leave.”

  She wrapped the extra cookies in a handkerchief, tucked them in my purse, and walked me to the door. “Take care, ma soeur.”

  We exchanged la bise. I walked away, my eyes strangely wet. Regardless of outside appearances, Yvette was sacrificing as much for France as the men fighting in the trenches. The difference was, they were lauded, while she was scorned.

  26

  AMÉLIE

  1943–mid-1944

  Over the next year and a half, life in Paris became grimmer, harder, hungrier. The people of Paris were gaunt, beaten down, fatigued, and ill. Resentment bubbled up in small ways that the increasingly harsh occupiers crushed with unreasonable cruelty. Not only were Jews, Gypsies, and other “undesirables” rounded up and carted away; so were ordinary French citizens, often for acts of rebellion as benign as singing “La Marseillaise.”

  The winter was, again, desperately cold. Coal and wood were next to impossible to find. At my hotel, the servant quarters of the hotel were no longer heated. All warmth was saved for the paying guests.

  It seemed as though there were two Parises: the gray, miserable, oppressed one of the ordinary citizen, and the beautiful bright one filled with gaiety and music and delicious food, the Paris now almost exclusively inhabited by German officers and their collaborateurs. It was a cruel trick of fate that those living in the first Paris had to catch frequent glimpses of those in the second. Anger seethed—especially when they saw the enemy eating more food in one meal than their entire family had for a week—building like black jealousy in a lover’s heart.

  Yvette, alas, inhabited the Paris of plenty—and even I, who knew her motivations and how she hated it, at times found myself resentful. On the surface, it seemed a world of privilege, but I knew that she, too, had problems, problems too dark and tormenting for her to fully tell me.

  She did, indeed, seem much happier with her new “beau”—although she found it difficult to hold her tongue.

  “I swear, Amélie, sometimes I just want to scream when his officer buddies are gabbing away. I hate the way they talk about us, as if the French are inferior to the almighty German, as if our only purpose is to serve them. As a Frenchwoman, they think I should just look nice and give them compliments and be sexy in bed.” She waved her cigarette. “I remind myself often that my real role is to gather information about their plans and movements. But I have nearly given myself away half a dozen times just because they make me so angry.”

  I’d had another close call, myself. I’d been photographing a map when I heard the key fit into the door. I managed—just barely!—to put the map away before the door opened, but all I could do with the camera was tuck it under the bed. To my dismay, the officer was drunk and very amorous. I pretended to go along—I actually let him kiss me!—then told him I needed to use the restroom before we made love. I retrieved the camera from under the bed and carried in my palm as if it were a little clutch, mimicking the way I’d see Yvette coyly leave a table to go touch up her lipstick. The officer was too inebriated to realize that a maid wouldn’t carry a purse—or to realize that the door I exited led not to the bathroom, but to my escape down the hall.

  27

  KAT

  2016

  All of your adventures were very exciting, I’m sure, but when will we get to the part where you met Jack?” The day is wearing on. So is my patience.

  “Adventures? You think I’m relating adventures?” Amélie leans forward, her eyes sharp and flashing. “You think that starving, freezing, working my fingers to the bone, always in danger, sleeping in a room like a cell, trying to just stay alive, for God’s sake—was an adventure? You think that living under the thumb of les Boches, seeing people treated with unbelievable cruelty, mourning my loved ones, and standing in endless lines for everything was an adventure?”

  There she goes again, with her Gallic overexaggeration. I sigh and put down my coffee cup. “Well, you certainly make it all sound very . . . dramatic.”

  “Really? You think scrubbing toilets is dramatic?”

  I shrug. “I would like for you to get to the point.”

  “We will get there at my speed, in my way. Since you again interrupted, it is your turn to talk. So tell me . . . what were you doing in 1943?”

  Nineteen forty-three, nineteen forty-three . . . that was the year after the U.S. entered the war. I search through the archives of my memory. “I was in college.”

  “College! Oh, you were very fortunate. Where did you go?”

  “To LSU in Baton Rouge. Daddy insisted I go to his alma mater, although I wanted to go to Newcomb, because by then, Jack was in medical school in New Orleans.” The wheels of time seem to be spinning backward.

  “Were you in a sorority?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t all fun and games as you probably suppose. We did a lot of work for the war effort. We raised money and collected rubber and tin, and we tended a victory garden.”

  “That was very noble of you.”

  I am not certain if she is sneering at me, or if noble is just the odd word choice of a foreigner. I suspect the former. “My war experience was very different than yours,” I concede. “America wasn’t invaded or occupied, but we were fighting the Japanese as well as the Germans, and we were very worried about the future. Our men were on both sides of the globe, and we had shortages and rationing, too.”

  “Yes, but your rationing still allowed a family to be fed. There was milk for the children.”

  “We were in better shape than you, but we were still sacrificing.”

  “You know nothing about sacrifice.”

  “Oh, no?” Anger flashes through me, hot and fast as lightning. “We sacrificed our sweethearts and husbands and sons to save your sorry French asses.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Oh, dear, I shouldn’t have said that. Sometimes words come out that I only mean to think. And yet I am furious. “It makes me angry to think of red-blooded Americans dying to help you people with your slatternly morals.”

  “What?”

  “Well, let’s face it. There was a lot of loose living in France.”

  “Why on earth would you think that?”

  “From what you’ve told me. And from what everyone knows about life in Paris. And from what happened with you and Jack.”

  She sits up as if the back of her chair has sprouted spikes. “I’ll have you know I was a virgin when I met Jack.”

  I flick my wrist dismissively. “Oh, maybe you convinced him you were.”

  “He was a doctor! He knew about these things.”

  “Oh, please. I’ve heard of the tricks you continental women used—tightening powders and chicken blood and such.”

  “What?” Her eyes are round with incredulity, her face so surprised, it surprises me. And then she tosses back her head and laughs. “Good heavens! Is that what you think?”

  Yes, it is exactly what I think—what I’ve always thought. I am certain Amélie was an experienced seductress who lured Jack into her bed. But I am angry, and I am saying things best kept to myself. I force myself to take a deep breath. “I am sor
ry. I am probably speaking out of turn.”

  “I would say so!”

  “I find . . . I don’t always think before I speak these days.”

  “Yes, well, that can be understood.”

  We sit there for a moment, silently acknowledging the indignities of advanced age. It is a strangely unifying common denominator between us.

  “Let’s begin again,” she says. “You were telling me about 1943.”

  “Yes.” I draw another calming breath, and just as quickly as it hit, the fury leaves. “I was in college, and Jack was in a special expedited education program sponsored by the army. The military was desperate for doctors. They paid for all his schooling and sped everything up. Jack finished his undergraduate degree in two and half years, going year-round with hardly any breaks, and medical school in about the same. It was very difficult, very intense.” I could see him in his uniform, so tall, so handsome.

  “He was due to graduate May 1944. He proposed the Christmas of 1943.”

  Amélie’s poised expression seems to crumble a little bit. “How did he propose?”

  I have always wondered the same thing about Jack with her. If I tell her what she wants to know, hopefully she will tell me. If, that is, she ever gets around to talking about Jack.

  “He wrote to my father and asked for my hand.” I have sometimes wondered if he and my father weren’t closer than he and I. Jack would often write one letter to the two of us, and most of the information would be aimed at my father. But that is not the story I am telling.

  Daddy kept it secret, of course, but I had an inkling. My mother couldn’t help from dropping little hints. It was on Christmas Eve. We had been to a party at the mayor’s house, and Jack had accompanied us back to my parents’ home. He told my parents he wanted to give me my Christmas present early. My parents left us alone in the parlor.

  “‘Let me get your gift,’ I said to Jack, thinking this was to be our gift exchange.

  “‘That can wait.’ He took my hand and pulled me to the settee. I sat down. And he got down on one knee and asked if I would do him the favor of becoming his wife.” I giggle at the memory. The favor! As if he were asking to borrow a cup of sugar. I had thought it was so funny.