The French War Bride

by Robin Wells

  He sat still for a moment. He no longer seemed angry. “You said something to me in France about going through Nazis’ coat pockets and suitcases. This is what you did at the hotel?”

  I nodded. “I went through their belongings and I listened to their conversations. None of them imagined a maid could understand their language.”

  A train roared into the station on the far track, heading the opposite way. It slowed and squealed to a halt. That’s what I needed to do with this conversation, I thought—get it on another track, going in a different direction.

  “I had to work because I was destitute and homeless. But I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that. You said you learned French from a nanny, so I assume your family is very wealthy. I suppose you look down on me because I’m poor.”

  “Oh, no! No, I don’t blame anyone for being poor. And you’re wrong; my family wasn’t wealthy. We fell on extremely hard times after my father died.”

  The rumble of another approaching train made it impossible to talk. Elise fussed as the train grew closer and louder and the air grew heavy with the scent of diesel. The brakes squealed, and the engine slowed as it passed by us. At length it stopped, the passenger cars in front of us.

  “This is our train to Chicago,” Jack said.

  —

  We ended up in a private alcove with seats facing each other that would fold down into a bed, with a bunk bed on top. Heavy green curtains, which would give privacy at night, were tied back at the sides on brass hooks.

  Boarding the train and getting settled provided a much-needed distraction. Elise was in a playful mood, which helped dispel the tension between us. I didn’t give Jack a chance to start questioning me again; as soon as the train began moving, I posed questions of my own. “You said your family fell on hard times when your father died. Does that mean you once were wealthy?”

  “No. Well, my mother . . . she came from a family of means in Charleston, and she was accustomed to the finer things. She was a debutante, and my father was a strawberry farmer in Louisiana.”

  “How did they end up together?”

  “They met during the Great War and fell madly in love. Her parents objected to him, but she ran away and married him anyway.”

  “Goodness!”

  “She should have listened to her parents. Their differences . . . well, you can hardly imagine a more unlikely pair. Lots of turmoil, lots of arguments, lots of shouting matches.” He shook his head. “One thing about growing up in a household like that—it teaches you what you don’t want your life to be like.”

  “I would imagine so.”

  “That’s one reason I’m marrying my fiancée. I want a home life that will be calm and peaceful.”

  It struck me as an odd thing to say. “And how do you know your fiancée will be provide such a thing?”

  “Well, she’s just like her mother, and I’m very much like her father. He’s very rational and logically minded, and she’s home-oriented and sociable. I feel like I’ve seen a prototype of what our lives will be like.”

  “So that’s the reason you’re engaged?”

  “I think it’s a very good reason.”

  “What about love?”

  “Well, that, too, of course.”

  “You didn’t mention it.”

  “I didn’t think I had to. I’m marrying her, aren’t I?”

  “I see.” I was not sure that I did. “What is her name?”

  “Kat.”

  “Like the animal?”

  “It’s short for Katherine. But she has big green eyes like a cat.”

  “She sounds beautiful.”

  “Oh, she is.”

  “Do you have a picture?”

  “Yes.”

  He pulled a professional photo out of his wallet. I felt a stab of jealousy; the woman looked like an actress or a model. “She’s gorgeous.”

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  “What has Kat been doing while you’ve been away?”

  “Going to college.”

  I felt another stab of envy. “What is she studying?”

  “Home economics. She wants to be the best wife and mother possible.”

  “I see.” I didn’t understand how college could help with that, but then, there was a lot I didn’t know.

  “So . . . how did you two meet?”

  “Through church. I suppose I’d known her all my life, but we connected because her father was a doctor and I wished to talk to him about the profession.”

  “Did you date all through school?”

  “No. She is two years behind me in school, so I didn’t start dating her until a few months before I graduated high school.”

  “Was she your first girlfriend?”

  He shook his head. “There was another girl, Beth Ann, when I was younger. She moved away.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Well, I thought I did, but when you are so young . . . well, it’s easy for emotions to overtake you.”

  “And did your emotions overtake you?”

  He cut a look at me. “You mean the way yours did with Doug?”

  I felt a blush along the roots of my hair. “I suppose that’s what I’m asking.”

  “I don’t think that’s an appropriate question, do you?”

  “I think you just answered it.”

  He looked away, but a nerve twitched in his jaw. He was pretty good at keeping a poker face, but he had little tells.

  “So you are concerned about what Kat will say about our . . . arrangement?”

  “Yes. She won’t like it.”

  “How do you intend to tell her?”

  “Well, first, I thought I would tell her father. He’ll understand that this was the right thing to do. His opinion is very important.”

  “To her, or to you?”

  He looked surprised at the question. “To both of us, I suppose. Then I’ll take Kat aside and I’ll assure her, first, that there is nothing romantic between you and me.”

  The words stung a little bit.

  “And then I’ll tell her about Doug,” Jack continued.

  “You haven’t told her?”

  He shifted on the seat. “She knows a medic died saving my life, but I haven’t told her how it affected me.”

  “It can be hard to put emotions on paper.” I put my hand on his arm, a spontaneous gesture of sympathy. The moment I did, I was keenly aware of the muscles of his arm, of the heat radiating through his jacket. I pulled my hand away. “It will be much easier to talk when you are face-to-face.”

  “I hope so.” He looked away. “Sometimes I find it hard to talk to people.”

  “You seem to have no problem with me.”

  “That’s true.” He smiled. “Maybe it’s because we both experienced the war.”

  “Yes.” My thoughts flickered back and forth between his comment “there is nothing romantic between you and me” and the way his arm had felt under my palm. I forced myself to carry on the conversation. “Do you think Kat’s feelings will be hurt?”

  He tilted his head, considering the question. “No, not really. As long as word of our marriage doesn’t get out in Wedding Tree, I think she’ll mainly just be inconvenienced.”

  “Inconvenienced?”

  “Yes. That I’ll have to spend six weeks in Reno in order to get our annulment, and that we’ll have to postpone the wedding.”

  “I’m so sorry I put you in a bind.” I was genuinely chagrined. “If you want, you can head back to Louisiana from Chicago, and I’ll go on to Montana by myself. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier.” In fact, traveling alone would give me the option of going somewhere other than Montana.

  “No. It would be too difficult for you to manage with the baby—and Kat and I can’t marry until the annulmen
t is finalized, anyway. Besides, I told Doug’s parents I was coming, and I always try to keep my word.”

  “That’s very admirable.”

  “Yes, well, I believe in being trustworthy. Too many people aren’t.”

  I suppressed a shiver. Dear God, I hope he never learned the truth about me! “I sense some interesting stories behind that statement.”

  “I don’t know how interesting they are, but yes, I’ve had some experiences.”

  “Tell me about one.”

  He gazed out the window at the passing cityscape. “When I was a boy, my friend Tim lived at the horse ranch next to our farm. Tim had asthma. It wasn’t a well-understood condition at the time; people called it ‘weak lungs.’ His father had taken him to see the local doctor—that would be Kat’s father, Dr. Thompson—several times. The best that he could offer was a shot of epinephrine for an acute attack. They didn’t have inhalers then—at least, not in rural Louisiana.

  “Dr. Thompson thought that Tim had allergies, probably to hay, dust, and horses, and suggested that he stay away from them. Well, this didn’t sit well with his father, who expected Tim to help out and eventually take over the business, so Tim continued doing all the things that could make his condition worse.”

  “Oh, la,” I murmured.

  “At the height of the Depression, a shyster came by Tim’s home claiming he had a cure. He had a special tonic and a harness-like device. He said that if asthma sufferers wore it at night, it would pull back the shoulders and open up the lungs. Tim’s parents couldn’t afford it—like everyone, they were barely scraping by—but they bought the contraption and a year’s supply of the medicine anyway.

  “Tim told me that the harness hurt so bad that sometimes he’d just lie in bed and cry like a baby. When he’d take the medicine, his heart raced and his face sweated and he lost his appetite. But he was determined to stick with it, both because he wanted to be cured and because his parents had invested so much in it.

  “Over a few months’ time, Tim lost a lot of weight and looked awful. And then, on the way home from school one day—we used to walk together to and from school, which was a couple of miles from our farm—he had a horrible asthma attack.” Jack closed his eyes for a moment.

  “I tried to help him, but he couldn’t breathe. Finally someone came along in a car and picked us up and took us to town to Dr. Thompson’s office. By the time we got there, Tim was dead.

  “Dr. Thompson was mad as hell when I told him about the device and the medicine. He said it sounded as if the medicine had cocaine or amphetamine in it, which would only exacerbate the condition, and that the salesman’s lies had killed Tim just as sure as if he’d shot him. He said Tim’s parents were fools for falling for a snake-oil pitch. He calmed down by the time the parents got there—he didn’t want to make them feel any worse than they did—but he did tell them that the treatment had been worthless.

  “Tim’s mother died of a stroke within the year. Everyone said it was the stress and grief, and I don’t doubt it. Tim’s father took to the bottle, and he ended up losing the farm. The other kids went off to live with relatives in other towns.” Jack stared out the window. “And meanwhile, that self-serving, lying quack was still out there, deceiving other people desperate for a miracle.”

  “How terrible!”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “Was that what made you want to become a doctor?”

  “That was part of it. I’d already been thinking in that direction, and having Tim die like that—well, it made me want to learn how to help people, instead of just being a bystander.”

  I thought of how I’d felt when the Nazis had firebombed the farmhouse and I’d sat in the cart, not knowing what to do. My heart went out to him.

  “Tim was the first person to die in my arms,” Jack said. “Two years later, my father was the second.”

  “Oh, Jack!” I breathed.

  He stared out the window, but I don’t think he was seeing the outskirts of the city. “We were fishing on a lake—I was rowing the boat, and he was casting a line. All of a sudden, his fishing pole clattered to the bottom of the boat, and he grabbed his chest and keeled over. I scrambled over to him—I nearly tipped over the boat, trying to get to him—and he was unconscious. I yelled to some other men fishing from the shore, then rowed over to them as fast as I could. They helped me take Dad home and put him to bed. Dr. Thompson came, and, well, Dad never woke up.”

  “I’m so sorry! How old were you?”

  “Fourteen. I felt terribly guilty, thinking I should have been able to save him. I asked Dr. Thompson what I should have done differently. He said there was nothing. He said it was a heart attack, and that I had done all anyone could.”

  “Oh, Jack.”

  “Dr. Thompson said I’d probably make a good doctor myself someday, but I felt discouraged. A few weeks after the funeral, I went by his office and had a conversation with him. I asked, ‘How can you stand having patients die of things that you can’t help?’ And I’ll never forget what he told me.”

  I leaned toward him as the train swayed. “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘A doctor isn’t God. I don’t care how well trained you are, you can’t always keep someone from dying. But very few people make it from birth to death without having a sore throat or breaking a leg or having some other health problem. So whenever a patient dies, I try to remember that during his or her life, I or another doctor probably helped them. We can’t fix everything, but we help where we can.’”

  “He sounds like a very wise man.”

  “Oh, he is. I admire him more than anyone in the world. I really look forward to going into practice with him.”

  I studied him from the corner of my eye while pretending to smooth Elise’s hair. “It’s convenient that you fell in love with his daughter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just . . . you’re fortunate he’ll get to be your father-in-law.” And he had spoken more passionately about Dr. Thompson than I’d ever heard him speak about the fiancée. But perhaps this was just his way. “Is his daughter interested in medicine also?”

  “Oh, no. The sight of blood makes Kat queasy. But she’s like her mother, so she’ll make a very good doctor’s wife.”

  At the time, I thought il l’assomme avec des fleurs—he’s knocking her with flowers. I’ve since learned the English phrase: damning her with faint praise.

  50

  AMÉLIE

  1946

  We went to the dining car for lunch, and when we came back to our alcove, Elise fell asleep in Jack’s arms. I leaned back my head and closed my eyes for a moment, my purse in my lap. The motion of the train and the rhythm of the track lulled me to sleep. A clatter suddenly jolted me awake. I opened my eyes to discover that my purse had fallen open on the floor. To my horror, photos were spilled all over our feet.

  “I’ll get them,” Jack said. He passed Elise to me before I could form a protest, then dropped to his knees and began picking up pictures. “I was wondering when you were going to look at these.” He picked up a picture of us at the restaurant, and then of us at our wedding. He suddenly froze, staring down at a photo in his hand.

  I leaned forward to see the picture, and felt my blood turned to ice. It was a photo of Yvette and me—together, smiling, our arms out like birds, our heads shorn. The shadow of swastikas were faintly visible on our scalps.

  He held the photo in front of me, his face red, his mouth a hard line. “What is this?”

  “Oh, that—that’s nothing.” I tried to take the photo from him. My first instinct was to make it disappear, to downplay it, to act as if it were not important.

  He twisted away and continued holding it. “This is not nothing.” He picked the other pictures off the floor, then riffled through them.

  My stomach turned. I thought I would be sick.

/>   “You were a femme tondue.”

  “It’s—it’s not what you think. I wasn’t . . . I never . . .”

  He held up another photo—and then another. Oh, mon Dieu—they showed Dierk, shirtless in bed, leering at the camera. Dierk in his uniform at a restaurant table. Dierk by the Seine.

  “Don’t lie to me. I know all about it, how the French turned on the women who had slept with the enemy. I was there. I saw it in rural France.”

  “It is not what it seems. It is not! I never slept or made love or even kissed a Boche. I was simply trying to help my friend—to keep her from being stripped and shaved and I didn’t know what else. In the chaos of the moment, the mob grabbed me, as well.”

  The next photo—oh, how horrible!—was of Dierk and me at a table at a sidewalk café, the one day I had joined Yvette and him for Sunday lunch. Dierk’s hand rested on the back of my chair.

  Jack’s eyes narrowed as he waved the photo in my face. “You expect me to believe you?”

  A sense of despair engulfed me. “That was not my camera. My friend—she took the photos.”

  “The very best conclusion I can draw is that you were bosom buddies with a woman who slept with German soldiers.”

  “It wasn’t like that. Well, it became that way, at the end . . . but she only did it to gather information for the Resistance.”

  “An undercover agent, I suppose.”

  I wasn’t familiar with the term, but I recognized the sarcasm in his voice. “It so happens she provided some very important information.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Why should you not?”

  He flipped to another picture and held it out. I wanted to slide under the seat. There I was, my arms out like a swan’s wings, my head bald as an egg and marked with a swastika, gallivanting around a luxurious room.

  “This is not the grim time in Paris you described.” His voice was low and controlled. It was scarier than if he had shouted. “Look here. That is your dress in the armoire. That is your hat on the rack. You obviously lived there.”