The French War Bride

by Robin Wells

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “She was a spy!”

  “The Résistance did not need information on German dicks,” said a man.

  The crowd roared.

  “And you . . .” The man holding me twisted me around to face him. He was older than I supposed, with weather-beaten skin and yellowed whites in his eyes. His breath was foul, scented with garlic, stale cigarettes, and rotten teeth. “I suppose you were a spy as well?”

  “I—”

  “She’s one of them,” said the woman who had torn off Yvette’s dress. “I’ve seen her often at the hotel.”

  I felt the rip of fabric. The next thing I knew, my dress was gone. I stood there in my brassiere and panties. I had dressed quickly and had not put on a slip. I tried to cover myself, but my arms were quickly yanked behind my back. Terror and mortification waged a battle for the upper hand. I feared my pubic hair showed through the front of my panties.

  “Please—leave her be!” Yvette pleaded. She was on the stage, being forced to sit in a chair. “She is a good girl. She had nothing to do with the Boches.”

  “Oh, you call them that, now, eh?” said the woman. “Before you simply called them chéris.”

  The crowd roared again.

  “Do what you will with me, but leave her alone,” Yvette begged.

  She might as well have saved her breath. Rough hands guided me up bricks to the platform and shoved me into a chair. Sweat covered me like a film.

  “Open your legs,” yelled a man. “Show us what you showed the Krauts.”

  Oh, mon Dieu. I could not believe this was happening.

  Yvette shot me an anguished look as she was forced into the chair beside me. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  “Such beautiful hair,” said the man with the razor, lifting Yvette’s blond mane. “Such a shame!”

  “S’il vous plaît.” Yvette turned and looked at him, her eyes imploring. “Ayez pitié de nous.” Have mercy on us.

  “Why should he?” called out someone from the crowd.

  “Slut. Whore. Collaborateur,” hissed the woman who stood behind me, razor in hand. She roughly yanked my hair from my neck. “You are a disgrace to France.”

  The razor nicked my scalp. I jumped. “The more you move, the more you bleed,” the woman said.

  I wished that one of the men were shaving me. My tondeuse seemed filled with a vitriolic hatred.

  “Sit still,” Yvette murmured. “It will soon be over.”

  I folded my hands in my lap and bent my head. As my hair fell in my lap, I grabbed a fistful of it, and clutched it as if it were a magic talisman.

  —

  But it was not over after the shearing. The men piled les femmes tondues, about ten in all, into the back of an open-back lorry and trucked us slowly through Paris. Our tormenters insisted that we face outward, the women at the front of the truck bed seated, the rest of us standing, so we could all be seen by the crowds. We hung our heads and refused to meet the gaze of the onlookers—all of us except for one big-boned girl, who stared back with blazing hatred and hurled epithets right back at her mockers.

  “Shut up,” yelled the woman who had shaved me, who was in the back of the truck, holding a rifle. A man with a gun stood with her, as well.

  “You are only mad because your husband slept with me,” the large-boned woman said.

  “You are a liar,” the tondeuse said.

  “You are angry because it is the truth.”

  The woman hit her with the butt of the rifle. She collapsed on the bed of the truck, knocking another femme tondue into me, causing both of us to fall.

  Yvette helped us to our feet. The man guarding us rapped on the roof of cab, and the driver stopped. He came around to the back, and the two men pulled the unconscious, big-boned woman out of the truck and tossed her onto the pavement like a sack of potatoes. Her head hit with a nauseating thud.

  “Is she dead?” asked a tondue, who had buried her face against my shoulder.

  “If she was not before, she probably is now,” Yvette said grimly.

  It was hard, but I stood still. Years of watching the unthinkable had schooled me to follow the Resistance’s advice: do not risk your life to save a comrade if he or she is already dead.

  The truck resumed moving. The coiffed brunette prodded me to face the public, along with the trembling girl beside me. I could not believe the anger hurled at us. We were spat upon, hit with garbage, and doused with dishwater from balconies above. The hatred came from men, from women, and even from children—but the women were the worst.

  Later that day, Yvette and I talked about it. “They are angry because they are jealous,” she said.

  “Non!”

  “Yes. They were not attractive enough to be chosen by a German. They are furious we had an option that was closed to them.”

  I was not sure that I agreed with her, but I stayed silent. Perhaps it was Yvette’s truth, something she needed to believe in order to deal with being bald. “Our hair will grow back and we will be pretty once again,” she said. “They can have hair down to their waists, and it will not make them desirable.”

  When at last the horrible, nightmarish ride was over—I overheard a conversation among our captors about the scarcity of gasoline, their need for a bathroom, and a desire to eat—they stopped the lorry and just walked away, leaving us standing in the back.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “We run,” Yvette said.

  We leapt down from the back of the truck and hurried through the streets. We must have made quite a sight. We were practically naked—me in my bra and panties, Yvette in her slip—and our heads were bald and bleeding. People pointed and laughed. American and British soldiers made rude propositions.

  After hours of being jeered at from the back of the truck, you would think we would be inured to insults and threats, but that walk, with just the two of us, was worse. A path cleared and people lined up to gawk and stare and catcall and comment.

  After what seemed like an eternity, we arrived back at Yvette’s hotel.

  The doorman stood unmoving in front of the entrance. “You cannot come in here.”

  “It is I, Jean-Paul,” Yvette said. “I have a room!”

  “I am sorry.” His gaze was cold and distant. “You cannot be in the lobby in that state of . . . deshabille.”

  “Let’s go around back,” I urged. Every hotel, I had learned, had a staff entrance. We marched in, pretending not to see or hear the gasps, guffaws, snickers, and pointing fingers. I held my breath as we made our way to the service elevator.

  The elevator operator, a small man with wire-rim glasses blinked at us. “You can’t . . .”

  “Fifth floor, please,” Yvette said imperiously.

  “But you’re not . . . you shouldn’t . . . you can’t . . .”

  “For God’s sake, close the door and take us up,” Yvette hissed, “or I will tell your management about the silver you helped the Nazis steal.”

  The slight man slid the metal wire gate shut, then the door to the elevator. We slowly ascended, the air so thick and hot with acrimony it stung the back of my throat to breathe.

  “Thank you,” Yvette said when we’d stopped in front of the numeral five and he’d slid the cage, and then the door, open. She stepped out as if she were a queen, her bald head held high.

  I followed her down the hall, my hands folded in front of my crotch, and waited until she pulled a key out of her brassiere. She held the door and let me go in ahead of her, then she quickly entered and latched the chain.

  “Oh, mon Dieu!” She froze in front of the bureau mirror. Her hands went to her head. “Mon Dieu! Look at me!”

  Fresh tears formed in my eyes. “I know, Vettie. I know.”

  “And look at you!”

  I didn’t want to see
, but she grabbed my hand and pulled me in front of the mirror with her. I stared at a girl I did not know—a girl with sad eyes and black stubble all over her scalp.

  “I have a five-o’clock shadow on my head,” I murmured.

  “And I am bald as an egg.” We regarded ourselves in the mirror. “We are ridiculous.”

  “Yes.”

  “All those times we fussed over our hair, thinking it didn’t look good enough. Whoever would have thought we would be bald?”

  “Not I.”

  “Moi non plus. But look at us. We are as bald as eagles.”

  She started to laugh. I worried for a moment that her sanity had left her.

  “Oh, it is so funny!” she said, pointing at the mirror. “Just look at us!”

  I looked, but I did not see anything remotely amusing.

  She took both my hands. “Come on, chérie. We can laugh or we can cry; neither will make our hair grow faster. So let us laugh, because laughter feels so much better.” She waved her arms like a bird. “Look at us—we are as bald as baby birds!”

  She was acting so ridiculous that I grinned. I, too, flapped my arms. We swooped around the room, cawing, then ended up back in front of the mirror, laughing.

  “Oh, just look at us!”

  “All of Paris has been looking at us,” I told her. “We have been paraded all over town, practically naked.”

  “Yes, but you know what, my little bald birdie? We are alive, and Paris is free.”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking somberly of the belligerent tondue who had been hit with a rifle, then tossed into the street to die.

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  I had no watch. I shook my head.

  “It is time to take a picture!”

  “Oh, non! Non, non, non.”

  “Yes! Our hair will grow quickly. We will never be bald little chickadees again.”

  “You still have a camera?” I had returned mine to M. Henri when the Germans had left my hotel. There was still a war going on in the rest of France, and the Resistance—now called FiFi; I had trouble remembering that—would need the equipment elsewhere.

  “I have one Dierk gave me—and it still has a roll of film in it.” She reached under the bed and drew out a little camera, then pointed it at me. “Smile!”

  “Oh, Yvette, no!”

  “Smile! We will laugh at this one day.”

  “At least let me put on clothes.”

  “No.”

  I covered my crotch. She snapped a photo.

  “Now your turn. Take one of me.”

  She thrust the camera toward me, then put her hands on her hips like Betty Grable and gave a big cheesecake smile. I snapped the button.

  “Good! And now do you know what time it is?”

  Her enthusiasm and energy was wearing me out.

  “Non.”

  “It is time to try on des chapeaux!”

  “Hats!” This, I realized, could be our saving grace.

  “Yes. Gerhard and Dierk bought me several.”

  “But I cannot work in a hat,” I said somberly, realizing the gravity of my situation. The hotel was not likely to take kindly to a maid being une femme tondue.

  “No, but you can wear a kerchief under your maid’s cap.”

  “I don’t know why, but I saved some of my hair,” I confessed.

  “What? Where?”

  “In my brassiere.” I reached in and pulled out a wad of hair.

  Yvette looked at the hair in my palm, her eyes thoughtful. With her hair gone, her eyes looked larger than ever. “We will cut it and glue it to ribbons. It will look like wisps around your temple and neck, and with a hat or kerchief, no one will know the difference.”

  “Oh, I think they will,” I said dryly. “I live in a dormitory. I cannot wear the same kerchief night and day.”

  “As long as you can look respectable in public, Ammie, I am sure they will let you keep your job.”

  “I am not so sure.”

  “They will need you. But just in case: what do you know about the supervisor that could get her into trouble?”

  “I know that she likes to tipple whiskey all day.”

  “That is good, but not enough. What else?”

  “I believe that she and a night guard are having an affair in vacant rooms.”

  “Non! Really?”

  I nodded. “I saw them come out of an unoccupied room a few weeks ago, and she gave me an overly elaborate explanation.”

  “Perfect! If she threatens to fire you, you get her alone and tell her that you would discourage her from that course of action, unless she wants her supervisor to learn about her tippling and twiddling.”

  “I couldn’t!”

  “You could, and you will.” Her voice held a stern note of resolve. “You will do what you need to do. Isn’t that how we have survived so far?”

  She was right. I could—and I would—do whatever needed to be done.

  34

  KAT

  2016

  I frown at Amélie in the fading afternoon light. “So . . . your head was shaved when you met Jack?”

  “It had grown back quite a bit by then.”

  “But how?” By my calculations, she must have conceived the baby by August or September. “When did you meet him?”

  “It was in June 1945.”

  “No. That cannot be right.” I have done the math, over and over. All the same, I recheck my calculations in my head, then lean forward. “So . . . you’re admitting the baby wasn’t his?”

  “I admit nothing. To admit is to acknowledge some kind of wrongdoing, is it not?”

  “But you lied about the baby!”

  “To you? Non. I did not lie.”

  Anger flows through me like hot lava. “You most certainly did! You sashayed into Wedding Tree, claiming that you and Jack were married and had a baby.”

  “I said no such thing. I said nothing.”

  Oh, my stars—it had been Jack. Of course it was. He was the one who’d told me, who’d told my parents—who’d told everyone that the baby was his. “But why? Why would Jack lie?”

  “You have interrupted before I could get to that part.”

  “But the baby . . . if it was not Jack’s, whose was it?”

  “Whose do you think?”

  “Joshua’s?”

  “Alas, no.” Amélie sinks back into the chair, as if her spine has shrunk. She suddenly seems small and weary and old. “I went to the Red Cross and asked, many times, if they had news of him. Years later, after I came to America, I learned that his name was among those of the many Jews exterminated at Auschwitz.”

  “I am sorry.” And I am. If Joshua had lived, she would have left Jack alone. “But . . . if it wasn’t Joshua, and it wasn’t Jack, who was the baby’s father? Were you carrying on with someone you haven’t told me about?”

  “No. I was carrying on, as you call it, with no one. But I’ve told you about the father.” She straightens and gives me a little smile. She is enjoying this! I want to jump up and throttle her.

  “One of the head shavers?”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” She shakes her head.

  “Then who?”

  She pauses a long moment, so long I fear I am going to have to endure a lengthy guessing game. “Dierk.”

  “Dierk?” I scrunch my forehead in a frown. “You had an affair with . . .” It dawns on me as I am saying it. “Wait. You are not the mother?”

  “Not the birth mother, no. Elise was Yvette’s child.”

  “Oh, my God in heaven!” My head reels. I have never been struck across the face, but I imagine this is how it must feel. I am stunned. It was right there in Amélie’s story, but I’d believed something else to be true for so many decades that my mind refused to bend ar
ound this new information. “So Jack . . .” My thoughts swirl like water in a flushing toilet. “He knew all along that the baby was not his?”

  “Of course.”

  “But he said it was his! Was that because he thought the baby was yours?”

  “At first. But not when he told you.” She glances at her watch, then slowly stands. “It is getting late. I think you should come back tomorrow.”

  She is going to end our conversation now—when we are finally getting to the part I care about? “No! I’ve waited my whole life for this information.”

  “That is not my problem.” Amélie is now on her feet, looking down at me. “We will talk more tomorrow. I am very tired.”

  I can’t believe she will just stop her story now. I am so angry and frustrated I want to stamp my foot. I stand and reach for my cane. “This is an outrage.”

  “I said I would talk to you on my terms. And my terms are that we are calling it a day.”

  Why does she get to make the rules? It is patently unfair. “I will be back in the morning.”

  “I am sure you will.”

  I reluctantly make my way to the door. “Don’t you dare die in the night,” I say, giving her my most authoritative glare.

  Amélie gives me a weary smile. “I lived through the war, did I not?” She opens the door and holds it for me. “Good evening.”

  The door closes behind me the very moment I cross the threshold, so quickly it is almost rude. I hobble down the hallway, fumbling in my purse for my cell phone. I finally find it and punch in the number one, the number my great-granddaughter programmed that would signal her to come pick me up.

  35

  AMÉLIE

  2016

  I open the door at eight o’clock the next morning and there is Kat. I have not slept well. The old days have been piling on me like hay bales in a barn. “Back again, I see.”

  She gives me her wide-eyed beauty queen look. “You never doubted I would come, did you?”

  I had not—not for a second. But for some reason, I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of saying so. I lift my shoulders. “You could have changed your mind.”