I stopped at her table, resting one hand on the back of the chair across from her. Gossie stared at me as if she didn’t know me. After a good minute, she said, “Sweet mother of pearl, Mary Lou. What have you done to yourself?” Then she hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe or move. She pulled away and sat down, the chair creaking under her weight. She said, “What the hell happened to your hair? And your clothes? Where’s your WASP uniform? You look so goddamn French.”
I felt my ears go pink with pleasure, and I couldn’t help it—I smiled. I said, “Merci.”
A waiter swept in then, black hair dripping with pomade, a mustache so neat and trim it looked painted on. In French, he asked what we wanted, and in French I told him that I would like to see a menu and have a glass of water. He said, “No need for the menu. Mademoiselle has already ordered.” When he walked away, I looked across the table at Gossie. She said, “Start talking.”
And so I told her all I could, sitting at a table surrounded by people who might overhear me and learn too much. I was careful to leave out the part about the team of agents and the Resistance and Delphine and Coleman’s capture. I didn’t mention kissing Émile, or Perry lying dead in a field or anything about a man named Swan who had to be rescued. Which meant the only thing I’d really told her was that I’d crash-landed and had somehow found my way to Paris in the back of a pig truck. I could tell her the rest later when we were alone, or not.
Even though I’d left almost everything out, she sat back, smoking a cigarette, eyes wide. When the food came—pâté de foie gras, boeuf à la mode, salad, wild strawberries, and a bottle of Nuits-Saint-Georges 1934, according to the waiter—I folded my hands in my lap and thought, I don’t know how I’m going to eat that. I’d been eating nothing but boiled rutabagas and bread and cider and watered-down tea for weeks. The sight of all that fancy food, all those fancy people, turned my stomach inside out.
Gossie said, “Aren’t you hungry?” She was eating with her right hand, just like an American, her fork spearing strawberries and salad and beef all at once. She took a large sip of wine and, when I asked her about her work, she started talking instead about a play she’d seen and a concert she’d been to and a dress she was able to buy on the black market in spite of the shortage of good cloth.
While we sat there, people kept stopping by the table to say hello to her—a fat man with a cane made of ivory and a stomach that spilled over his pants like a sack of potatoes; a tall gray man with a scarf tucked into his collar and a dry, polite cough; a man and woman, bright-eyed as cockatoos, their arms linked together, drinking champagne and swaying in place, just like they were dancing. Gossie seemed to know everyone. She chatted with them about the weather, the theater, the pâte de foie gras, their voices rising and falling like chickens in a yard. After the last one was gone, she said, “They’re going to wonder who my French friend is.”
I picked up my fork then, careful to hold it with my left hand, and I reached for a strawberry. It was ripe and red and plump. I popped it into my mouth without saying a word and held it there, letting the sweetness of it sink in.
Two young men stopped at the table and chatted with Gossie about the war in North Africa, how they were able to get out of serving and had spent most of the war at a friend’s house in Barcelona where they had nothing but laughs all day long. A group of Germans walked into the salon then, eight of them, and the young men stopped talking. They watched as the Germans took two tables nearby, making the French men and women that sat at them move somewhere else, pushing the tables together, pulling off their gloves and examining the room and the people.
I finished my strawberry and took another. The young men went off on their own, prattling and laughing and slapping the backs of people they met on their way across the room. Gossie frowned at the Germans, then she looked at me, her face settling back in from somewhere away. She said, “You’re awfully quiet, Mary Lou.”
“Am I?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.” Everything. I knew I sounded short and cross, but how could I say to her: Everyone is letting me down and now you’re doing it too. How can you sit here eating this fine food and talking to these fine, terrible people while our men are being captured or shot dead in fields?
I said, “How is Clinton Farnham?” Clinton Farnham was Gossie’s fiancé, who was serving in the navy.
“That rat. He’s fine, as far as I know. I send him letters but I don’t know that he gets them. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anything.” She lit a cigarette.
“How long?”
“Four weeks and two days and, oh”—she checked her wristwatch, a slim gold band—“four hours and twenty-three minutes.”
I said, “You’ll hear from him. He’s probably fighting or out of reach.” Or off doing a mission without you, when all you wanted was to come along and help, and now he’s just gone and left you on your own in a strange city where you don’t even speak the language.
“Or dead.” She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. “What about you, Mary Lou? Have you heard from your Indian? Do you know where they shipped him off to?”
“No.”
She leaned forward. “Listen. When real love comes, you’ll know it and it’ll happen when you least expect it. It may be Butch Dawkins or it may be someone else. But it will happen. There’s no way it won’t happen for you.”
“Why do you say that?” My mind went to Émile and this made me mad. It was a week now since I’d seen him and the others.
“Because you’re the sort that was born for true love and storybooks.” She sat back. “In the meantime, here we are. Not exactly a time for storybooks. Maybe I’ll see Clint again, maybe I won’t. But for now I’m alive and I’m here and I intend to make the most of it, every goddamn moment.”
Before I could ask her what she meant by this she said, “Christ. I can’t get over how bloody French you look.” She tapped her lips with her little finger, the one on the hand holding the cigarette. She said, “Have you taken up smoking?”
“Of course not.” I’d only smoked once in my life, back when Johnny Clay and I were little, just after Mama died, and had gotten hold of some rabbit tobacco. It made me sicker than a dog.
She blew a perfect ring of smoke. “It’s awfully French.” She smiled at me, stubbed the cigarette out, and said, “Do you want any more to eat? You barely had a thing.”
I said, “I’m good.”
“Dessert?”
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” Gossie craned her head around, looking for the waiter. One of the Germans nodded at her and she nodded back as if she knew him. When the waiter walked over, she asked for the check. Then we sat and smiled at each other, but it was the kind of smile you give a stranger or someone you’re only being nice to until you can make your excuses and get away.
The waiter with the mustache brought the check, and from a red change purse, Gossie counted out coins and two paper bills and handed these to him. “I’d like to take the rest of this home with me.” She nodded at the table, at all the food that still sat there. As the waiter took the plates away, I held out money to her and she waved it aside. She said, “Your money’s no good here, Mary Lou.”
In the street outside, Gossie said, “Come back to my aunt’s flat with me and have some tea or worse. We can really talk there.” She laughed. “Tell me you’re still not drinking.”
I said, “Not really.” All I wanted was to go back to Monsieur Brunet’s and wait for Émile and the others. What if they came while I was away? Would they leave a message? Would they come to find me? Would they wait for me there?
Three young women tripped out onto the sidewalk in front of us, laughing. One of them said, “Beryl Goss. Look at you in that sweet little uniform. Aren’t you the cutest thing?” They were American. They air-kissed her on each cheek, first one girl then the next and then the next. They chattered on about Gossie’s daddy and brothers, their daddies, Paris, M
axim’s, and then they glided down the sidewalk like a parade of geese.
Gossie said to me, “Reporters. Coming over here to find an adventure, to see Paris, and to hell with the battlefield or anyone who might actually be doing something to win this war.” She glared after them and suddenly she looked and sounded like her old self.
She turned back to me. “Are you coming?”
“Yes,” I said.
NINETEEN
Gossie’s aunt lived across the River Seine in Montparnasse, which Gossie said was also known as the Latin Quarter, or just the Quarter. She said this was where the writers Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald had spent their time in the 1920s, back when they were living and writing in Paris. I thought this made sense because the air was different in the Quarter, rich and colorful like it had spices in it, and it was the first time since leaving the States that I’d felt the old itch to write a song. Except for the Palais du Luxembourg, which rose up in the midst of it, a kind of elegant mountain, the buildings were smaller and not as grand, and the streets were narrow and twisting instead of broad. The people seemed less grand too.
Gossie’s aunt owned a shop that was part bookstore, part bakery, part tavern. The building came racing to a point, just four feet wide, at the corner of two streets, so that it looked like a giant wedge of cheese, and the door to Breedlove’s was cut into that same point. Up above it were three stories of windows and black iron balconies. Two little tables and two sets of chairs sat out front, and these were filled with German officers, eating and drinking. They raised their cups to us as we walked past.
Inside, the shop was open and bright, with two more tables and four more chairs, a counter with stools, and, in back of the counter, another counter lined with bottles. Bookcases pressed up against the walls, floor to ceiling, and stacks of books sat on the floor. A young boy sat on one of them, reading a book in French.
A woman worked behind the counter, cutting a loaf of bread for a customer, another boy, who looked French and not German. The woman had dark hair and fat red cheeks like apples. She said, “Bonjour.”
Gossie said, “Bonjour, Sylvie, is my aunt home?” Her eyes flickered to the window, where we could see the Germans drinking their wine. They flickered over to the boy, who didn’t look up. “Bonjour, Philippe,” she said to him. He nodded his head.
Sylvie said, “She’s upstairs.”
Beyond the glass case was a door, and Gossie opened this and I followed her inside. Bookcases stood on three walls. She shut the door tight behind us and plucked a book out of the middle shelf. I watched as she pressed a button in the wood. Another door swung open, which led into a small room. Rising up out of the middle of it, like a ship’s hatch, was a narrow set of stairs with no railing. We climbed up these until we were standing in a bright and airy room, which led to another room, and another. Tall windows, shaped like rectangles, let the light in. The air smelled like bread baking, wafting up from down below.
Gossie called out, “Cleo!” She said to me, “She usually spends the summer in the country or by the sea, but with the trains and roads out of the city cut or blocked, she’s staying here.” She stood in the middle of the room—a kind of entryway with a window seat stuffed with pillows and more bookcases and a giant painting of a naked man with legs like a goat.
“How was lunch?” A woman’s voice came singing through the rooms, even before she got to us.
“Awful. Maxim’s is overpriced and overstuffed, and so are the folks who eat there.” Gossie unpinned her hat and slid off her shoes, kicking them into a corner by the window seat. She waved at me to do the same. “Cleo’s nutty when it comes to her floors.”
I looked at the floors, which were a beautiful, shiny wood, the color of cherries. And then I looked at Gossie and raised one eyebrow, which was a look I always gave Johnny Clay. She let out a bark of a laugh and said, “You should see your face. Oh, Mary Lou. Did you believe that act?”
She shook her cigarettes and lighter out of her purse and threw the purse onto the window seat. She inhaled, closing her eyes, and then held her hand out to me. It was shaking. “Do you see how that got to me? Sitting there like that, listening to those wags carry on as if they aren’t afraid, as if they don’t go home and lie awake at night, scared to death but too proud to show it?” She took another drag on the cigarette and blew out the smoke, making rings. “Why do you think they go to Maxim’s during the day and get so stinking drunk? Because they can’t bear to live with themselves.”
I said, “But why...?”
“Because if I don’t go and carouse and make a show of it, they’ll say something’s wrong, that fun-loving old Beryl Goss, rich girl, isn’t herself these days, that, mark my words, she’s up to something.”
A woman marched into the room with all the sureness of a bull. She was tall and redheaded and had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and bosoms as big as Sweet Fern’s. She was the kind of woman Johnny Clay and the Gordon boys back home would have whistled at, even if she was old enough to be their mother, maybe even older than that. She wore a long sweater that looked more like a robe, with all the colors of a peacock, and gold slippers that showed her toenails, which were painted red. The sweater swirled around her ankles as she walked past us to the window seat and glanced outside, her entire face—eyebrows, mouth, eyes—seeming to gather together like a bouquet as she drew it all in and sighed. “They’ve been sitting out there for two hours.” Then she looked me up and down, from top to bottom, and held out her hand. She said, “Cleopatra Mayhew Breedlove. For God’s sake call me Cleo.”
I shook her hand, which was firm and strong as a man’s even if it wasn’t any bigger than mine. I almost said: My name is Clementine Roux. I was married to a Frenchman who was killed in the war, and now I live here.
But before I could speak a word, Gossie said, “This is Mary Lou from Nashville, the pilot I told you about, the one I found on the street way back when, looking like an urchin. My very best friend.”
In that moment, with those words, everything I’d lived through since I last saw her in Prestwick, Scotland, came rushing up at me. I said, “I think I need to sit down.”
Gossie said to her aunt, “I told her to eat, but she didn’t touch her lunch.” She handed Cleo the food box.
Cleo said, “Come with me.”
I sat on a pillow as big as a chair, my hat on my lap, and ate an entire plate of strawberries and a slice of thick bread covered in butter. While I ate, I didn’t say one word because I was too busy staring at the framed pictures on the walls—twenty or so on the wall across from me, thirty on the wall behind. They were mostly paintings of landscapes and people. A piano, its top covered in a bright orange-and-green cloth, sat in one corner. A potted palm in another. On the narrowest wall, the one above the street corner, there was a single window and the head of a stuffed buffalo.
While I ate and looked around, Gossie and her aunt made small talk about the menu at Maxim’s and who we’d seen, and Gossie told me about her work. She said the office was inside a former German blockhouse, with concrete walls ten feet thick. There were eighty-two teletype machines and thirteen radio circuits, and she sat at the cable desk and also answered the telephones, and between them all, the WAC traded about a thousand messages a day with the War Department. She said some fifty thousand messages were handled each week, and that around ten to fifteen photographs were radioed to the War Department every twenty-four hours.
Fifteen minutes later, the Germans left, sauntering off down the street, still wiping their mouths from their meal. We watched them from the window, and then Gossie said to her aunt, “All clear.” When Cleo frowned at me, Gossie said, “You can trust Mary Lou.”
Cleo stood up from her seat across from me and said, “Fine. Leave the curtains, though. We don’t want anyone to look up and wonder why we’ve shut them before dark.” She walked off, shoulders and back straight as a general’s, hips swaying like a metronome, peacock robe swirling around her an
kles.
I set my plate down and said, “Your aunt is wonderful.”
“She’s the only one of my family I can stand. My mother’s aunt, so more of a great-aunt, actually. She’s the black sheep, like me.”
I heard footsteps, more than one set, and Cleo returned with three young men. They stood like deer, shy and awkward, until Gossie said, “For heaven’s sake, sit down right now. Wait till you see what I brought you.”
They moved together in a bunch to the settee and sat, all at the same time. I would have thought they were triplets except that they didn’t look one bit alike. One had curly black hair and a big, looping smile, another was fair and balding and serious, and the other was tall and brown-headed and wore glasses.
Gossie waded off toward the kitchen, bare feet slapping on the wood floors. Cleo said, “Mary Lou, meet George, Nathan, and Daniel.” I didn’t bother telling her or them that my name wasn’t Mary Lou.
“Bone joor,” George said. He grinned his looping grin.
I sat up. “You’re American.”
Cleo said, “They all are.”
“What are they doing here?” I asked this as if they weren’t even sitting there, as if they couldn’t answer for themselves.
Cleo said, “We’re getting them home.” And then she told me about her work with the Freedom Line, which was the escape line that started in Brussels and ran all the way through Paris to San Sebastián in Spain to Gibraltar. She said the trick was to reach the downed fliers before the Germans did, that the Germans sent out patrols of men and dogs to search for any Allied airman who was shot down. Food was already hard to find, and they had to rely on the black market and forged ration tickets to feed the men. The airmen stayed with them for two or three days, which was how much time was needed to arrange for train tickets and guides to take them to the Spanish border, where native mountain guides would lead them over the Pyrenees and into Spain.
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