A Provençal Mystery (18 page)

Not all the nuns were keen on me being in the convent. I didn’t know why. They were arguing. Henriette said, “She’ll be gone by tonight.” I remember that because I thought it meant I would not exist any more. Just disappear. Like my mother.

I asked for a kitten, but Henriette said they were too young to be taken from their mother. She had tears in her eyes, turned away so I wouldn’t see. I knew why she was crying. I knew I was too young to be taken away from my mother, too -- though I guess I couldn’t have expressed it.

They hid me in the cellar of the convent. Cold. Dark. Stinking of something that scared me -- it was probably just earth and damp. I know the stories about nuns burying babies in cellars. I don’t believe them, though.

Listen, here’s why I’m telling you this. You know the bag I gave you? With the embroidery on it? It had something in it when Henriette took me to the convent. My mother told me never to let it go. The nuns took it away from me. For safe-keeping, they said. What nuns? Not the nuns that were on Henriette’s side, let me tell you. The bag held something that belonged to us. To our family. It was my inheritance. And now it’s yours. The something? I just remember it scared me. It looked like the head of a person. But it was metal. Like a metal cookie jar. Maybe it was a coin bank. A very big one. My mother gave me the key to it. I didn’t get it. Understand it. How could a head have a key? I was glad they took the head away. I wondered where was the rest of the person. It made me think of the time I got too rough with one of my dolls and yanked its head off. My father put the head back on. But I never liked the doll after that. In some way, I guess I thought the doll was dead. I kept the key. I’m giving it to you. You go find the thing. It’s important. I’m asking you -- my last wish. Put it that way.

My mother, your grandmother, died at Drancy. The French camp. Flu, my aunt told me.

The nuns sent me away, to a little village near Oppède. With some peasants named Perron. The Nazis never knew I wasn’t one of that brood. The Perrons had nine kids -- and me. Put me in that smock, some dirt on my face, and I looked just like them. We slept like little animals in two beds. I liked it, with all the bodies. Warm. Sometimes I cried about my mother. In secret. They were kind to me. Treated me like one of their own. I went to school with their kids. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much of a risk they took. Just to save me -- a little Jewish kid. I think it gave them pleasure to thumb their noses at the Nazis and the bourgeois French. Anyhow, they didn’t have to use my identity card to get food for me -- they grew their food. That card -- it identified me as Jewish -- would have been my death warrant.

After the war -- it wasn’t long because this all happened in 1944 -- my uncle, who had escaped to Switzerland, came back and found me. He told me my mother and father were both dead. In the camps. Grandpa -- your grandpa -- died at Auschwitz.

My uncle and I went to America, where we had relatives. And that’s how come you’re an American. Yeah, it’s an awful story, but it turned out better than it started. Listen, though, you must get that head back. It has something important in it, and it belongs to you.

My uncle -- the only one who survived -- he was the black sheep. My father’s brother. His name was Grandier. My mother’s family was named Vallebois. They went way back in France. My mother thought that since we had a long French ancestry, we’d be all right. In the beginning of the war, the French -- the French non-Jews, that is -- tried to keep the Nazis from taking people like us. You know, people they considered French like them. Until push came to shove. Then they shoved.

The Vallebois were printers. They’d been printers since the seventeenth century. In the Place Crillon, you know it? You went to Avignon, before I told you all this. Right? My father was quite successful. Took over my mother’s family’s business. I remember the smell of ink in the shop and how the men who worked there would make over me. The noise - the beat of the machines—de-thump, de-thump -- as the big sheets of paper were printed. I can remember a winter coat I had -- it was fur. A big dining table and a maid serving us dinner. A painting on the wall. Valuable. I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe the Nazis took it.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if the Nazis had never come to France. But then you wouldn’t exist, would you, my little Rachel? My darling. I wouldn’t have grown up in America, married an American. You know, though, I still dream of that day -- when my mother turned away from me and went around a corner. And sometimes in my dream she comes back, picks me up, and tells me it was all a joke.

* * * * *

Rachel pulled the chain from around her neck over her head and took the key in her hand. “This is the key she gave me. It’s for the reliquary—I know that that is what it was. I was going to try to find out who denounced my family to the Nazis first—that’s why I wanted the documents. Obviously they’re not forthcoming. I had thought I had time to try to find my way into the convent to find the reliquary. But if Chateaublanc is trying to buy the reliquary, I don’t have time.”

“Madeleine said the reliquary wasn’t there,” I said. “I believe her, though I don’t believe everything she says.” As I spoke, I wondered if the reliquary Rachel was looking for was the one in the diary.

“But she doesn’t necessarily know everything about what goes on in the convent,” Rachel said as she took her needlepoint from its bag and handed it to me. A complicated tableau—a woman's head seen from the front, with curly hair, all copper-colored tinged with verdigris, on a stark field of black, the black only three-quarters finished. “I made this from her description.”

Now I understood the intensity with which she plied her needle. It was not anger, but a desire to replicate a memory and, in some way, to incorporate the embroidered bag that had held it. To bring it back and turn it real.

I said, “You were going to ask me for something.”

“I have to get into the convent. I think the reliquary is there, in spite of what Madeleine said. And I can’t let Chateaublanc get hold of it. My inheritance is inside it. Please. Take me with you when you go.”

I didn’t hesitate. I am not sure why. Perhaps it came from a sense I had that Rachel was telling the truth and needed help. Or it could have been curiosity. What would happen if Rachel came with me to the convent? What might be revealed? Or maybe I just wanted company. “Of course. I’ll arrange it,” I said. “It's next Thursday.” Then I thought of Rachel's needle stabbing and of what Rachel might not be telling me—that Agatha had been one of the nuns who didn't want to shelter her mother, for instance. But my instincts told me to trust her.

Foxy was whining at the door. “Come with me while I walk him,” I said, and Rachel settled her shoulders into her heavy coat and picked up her briefcase, while I attached Foxy’s leash to his collar and threw on my lined jacket.

As we walked down the stairs I said, “Roger is interested in the reliquary, too.”

“I noticed that. I also noticed that he’s interested in you,” Rachel replied.

By then we were out on the narrow sidewalk. I felt heat rise into my face—both because I felt caught out and because I was surprised that Rachel would comment like that. She had dropped a facade. “Do you think?” was all I could say. I stopped to let Foxy sniff at a lamppost on which another dog had left an interesting message. Then it burst out of me: “You must find him attractive, too!"

"Get outa here!" Rachel replied. It was the first time she had used a slang expression with me. She gave me a little poke. "It's not Roger who appeals to me.” She gave me a considering look, then added, “How well do you know Martin Fitzroy?”

“Well enough to say that you should watch out for him. Has he made a pass at you?”

“He’s just a friend. We went out for drinks and dinner a couple of nights ago." It was her turn to blush.

"I don’t think he’s ‘just a friend,’ as you put it, to any woman. But if you say so," I replied. “He looks like a movie star playing an aristocrat in an old movie. He’s so stagy.”

“That’s just a pose, I think.”

We had reached the ramparts. “And he has that leech Leach at his heels all the time,” I said, feeling a little mean.

“Not all the time.”

“No, that's true. I'm being nasty. I know what grad school is like. And Jack gave up a good salary to go back to school for his PhD. Of course, he toadies to those he thinks are important. Like you.”

I noticed that our steps were matching, so unlike walking with Madeleine.

“You’re imagining it,” Rachel said.

“Give me a break. I’ve seen him lick your boots.”

“Do you want him to lick yours?”

I considered that only for a second and started laughing. “No, nor anything else, either.”

“Dory! You shock me,” Rachel said, her face blank. She was not much of an actress. I stared at her, until the effort became too much for her and she broke into a grin. “How old is he, do you think?”

“Fitzroy? Late forties. Forget him, Rachel. You know his reputation. A ladies’ man.”

“It could be undeserved.” She looked down at her feet.

“In your dreams. Fitzroy is known as something of a lech. I've heard that he hits on his students."

"It could be just gossip," replied Rachel, "and I'm not a cute graduate student. We’re going to play pétanque this afternoon. That's quite innocent, isn't it?”

"Fitzroy plays tennis, too. He does keep in shape," I said. I knew vaguely what pétanque was—a kind of lawn bowling that occupies a good deal of the free time of the men of Southern France, especially the retired ones. "But I've always thought that pétanque was an old man's game, something like shuffleboard."

As we strode along, thinking about games, I noticed something about Rachel that had escaped me before—she had an athlete's ease in her body. It did not surprise me when she said, "Not really. It takes a good deal of skill and strategy to play well, even though a complete novice can pick up a ball and participate. And the metal balls are heavy."

"You do know how to play it then. I've never tried it. I have watched a few times, but I could never figure out the scoring. How easy it would be to bean somebody with one of those balls! They look heavier than the bocce balls used by the Italians.”

Rachel, who could discern a line of thought in my sometimes rambling monologues, answered my unasked question, "A French boyfriend taught me when I was here doing my graduate research."

"So you had a French boyfriend!"

Rachel smiled. "His name was Guy, and he was a locksmith's son studying chemistry at the Sorbonne. I met him in Paris when I was working at National Archives. His family lived in Besançon, and we would visit them sometimes on weekends. He taught me to play the game, and on Saturday afternoons, his whole family would meet for a tournament."

"What else did you do?" I was watching—and had been watching—Rachel transform from an august historian to a woman like me, who had a romantic past.

"We used to walk along the Doubs River and look up at the fort that Vauban built in the seventeenth century and wonder what it was like when the Nazis occupied it early in the War. Guy’s uncle was in the Resistance and was caught and shot. His last letter, which the Nazis allowed him to write before his execution, is in the museum there."

"What happened to Guy? Have you seen him since?" I turned toward her eagerly.

"Easy, Dory. It was just a little romance. I went back to the United States, and he met a German girl and married her. He liked foreigners. I was just one of many."

"Did he break your heart?"

"Not really. The romance never had long-term possibilities because my greatest passion was my research, and my goal was to get my PhD. I had to go back home. He was a typical Frenchman, who would languish away from his native land. I always knew those things, so I didn't let it get out of hand, nor did he."

I was puzzled. "You're kidding. Just like that? I know that there is a point early in a love affair when it's possible to stop. But it's over in a flash. And I can't imagine carrying on a relationship at a kind of pre-set heat. Or having much fun doing it."

"You're so much more a traditional American than I am. Americans like progress in everything. You can't imagine anything interesting going on that could be plotted on a horizontal line. Europeans, and I am only one generation away from being one, are adept at sustaining a chord."

Even though I wasn't sure her theory would prove to be true or if some method could be used to prove it at all, I liked it and said so.

“It’s just a theory,” she replied.

“I like your theories. I wish I had some of my own.”

“Oh, come on. You do. After all, you’re working on a book, aren’t you?”

“No, an article. An article that will decide whether or not I get tenure.”

“Tenure?”

“I know. I should have been tenured long ago, if you judge by my age. But I went to grad school late. Before that, I wandered around, wasted time. Not like you. You followed the right path.”

"But I envy you your footloose life. I was working away at school and you were out in the world. I’ve been such a grind, and I am getting tired of it." Rachel sighed, and I heard regret in it. “I’m such a good girl.”

“Are you trying to say that I’m not good?”

I watched her face fill with dismay as she realized she might have hurt my feelings. “Oh, no, of course not!” she said.