And Both Were Young (23 page)

Flip followed Miss Redford into the hall, and the teacher smiled at her disarmingly. “Madame Perceval wrote me that you were the best art student in the school and that you’d show me around the studio and give me a helping hand till I get settled. I feel terribly new and strange coming into the middle of things like this and this is my first job. I’m just out of the College of London and I’m afraid I shall make a terrible muddle of things.”

She laughed, and Flip thought, Well, if someone
had
to take Madame’s place, this one couldn’t be nicer.

“Would you like to see the studio now?” she suggested. “I have about half an hour before the bell.”

“I’d love to,” Miss Redford said. “I’ve been up there poking around. It’s really a wonderful studio for a school. I
looked at some of your things and I see that Madame Perceval was right.” She paused and panted, “I wonder if I shall ever get used to all these stairs!”

Flip was so used to the five flights of stairs that she never thought of them, but Miss Redford was quite winded by the time they reached the top.

“Of course my room is on the second floor, so I shall always be trotting up and down!” she gasped.

Much as Flip liked Miss Redford, she was glad the new art teacher was not to have Madame Perceval’s rooms.

“Now, Philippa,” Miss Redford said, “if you’ll just show me where things are kept in the cupboards, I’ll be tremendously grateful. I thought we might do some modeling this term, and maybe if any of the things are good enough, we’ll have them fired. I found the clay, but I would like to know where everything else is kept.”

Flip opened the cupboard doors and showed Miss Redford Madame Perceval’s places for everything. She had just finished when the bell rang, and she said, “There’s my bell, so I’ll have to go downstairs or Miss Tulip will give me a tardy mark. I’m glad Madame Perceval thought I could help.”

“You’ve been a great help,” Miss Redford said warmly, “and if you don’t mind, I’ll probably call on you again. Good night, and thanks awfully.”

The others were in the room when Flip got downstairs. “Was I embarrassed!” Gloria exclaimed. “What did she want?”

“Oh, just to have me show her where Madame kept the things in the studio. Golly, I’m hungry. We always had something to eat before we went to bed during the hols.”

“Honestly,” Gloria said, “I think she might have let us know she was a teacher and not just come in like a new girl.”

“She didn’t have a uniform on,” Jackie said reasonably.

“Well, lots of girls don’t when they come. I think teachers should look like teachers.” Gloria was not ready to be pacified.

“Percy didn’t look like a teacher.”

“Yes, but she didn’t look like a girl either. What’s she like, Pill, this Redburn or whatever her name is?”

“Redford,” Flip said. “And she seemed awfully nice.”

“If you think she’s nice, she must be, you were so crazy about Percy.”

“She said we were going to do things in clay,” Flip said. “Aren’t you going to go brush your teeth, Gloria?”

“I’ve brushed them.”

“You have not,” Erna cried. “You just this minute finished getting undressed.”

“I brushed them before I got undressed.”

“Oh, Glo, you fibber!” Jackie jumped up and down on her bed.

“You’re just plain dirty,” Erna said rudely but without malice.

“I am not!” Gloria started to get excited. “I did brush my teeth before I got undressed. So there!”

“All right, all right!” Jackie said hastily. “Don’t get in a fuss. I’m going to go brush
my
teeth, though,” and she looked meaningfully at Erna and Flip, who echoed her and followed her out into the corridor.

“I bet she hasn’t brushed her teeth,” Erna whispered. “She just knows I have something to tell you that I’m not going
to tell her. My father said I wasn’t to go around telling people, but you’re so crazy about Percy, both of you, I thought it would be all right.”

Miss Tulip bore down on them. “Girls! No talking in the corridors! What are you doing?”

“We’re just going to brush our teeth, please, Miss Tulip.”

“Go and brush them, then. I don’t want to have to give you another deportment mark. Step, now.”

“Yes, Miss Tulip.”

“We’ll meet in the classroom before breakfast,” Erna whispered.

As she lay in bed that night, propped up on one elbow so that she could look down the mountainside to the lake, Flip had a surprising sense of homecoming. She had missed, without realizing that she had missed it, being able to see the lake and the mountains of France from her bed, and they seemed to welcome her back. And when she lay down, the familiar pattern of light on the ceiling was a reassuring sight. As she began to get sleepy she sang in her mind, “On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree,” and reached up to feel the silver pear on its slender chain around her neck.

“At last!” Erna said the next morning as the three of them slipped into the classroom.

“Go on, quick, before someone comes in.” Jackie stepped onto the teacher’s platform and climbed up onto the table, sitting on it cross-legged.

“Yes, do hurry,” Flip begged, sitting on her desk.

“Well, I have to begin at the beginning and tell you how I found out.”

“Is it tragic?” Jackie asked.

“Yes, it is, and Percy was a heroine.”

“What did she do?”

“Stop asking questions and I’ll tell you!” Erna exclaimed in exasperation. “First of all, I had perfectly wonderful holidays. I stayed most of the time with a nurse from the hospital. My mother and father are getting a divorce and I’m glad.” And she stared at Flip and Jackie defiantly.

“Oh, Erna,” Jackie cried.

“Well, Mutti’s not a bit like your mother,” Erna said, “and she’s never liked me. But my father was just wonderful and Marianne, she’s the nurse, was awfully nice, too, and took me to the movies when she was off duty. And she told me my father was a great surgeon and a wonderful man and I saw an operation and I didn’t faint or anything and my father told me he was very happy I was going to be a doctor and he’d help me all he could. And he talked to me lots and lots and said he was sorry he never had time to write me or anything but he loved me just the same and he’d try to write me more. And then he told me he and Mutti disagreed about many things and they disagreed about the world and Germany and people and things in general. They’d disagreed about the war and the Nazis, only Father couldn’t say anything because of my brothers and Mutti and me and everything. He said all the injured and wounded people needed to be taken care of and it wasn’t their fault, mostly, not the fault of—what did he call them? the—the little people. So he felt all right taking care of them and he was glad I was here at school because he thought it was the best place in the world for me right now. And it was really wonderful, kids, because he’d always been kind of stern and everything and I’d never really known him before or felt
that I had a father the way you two do, and now I have, even if Mutti still doesn’t love me.”

Flip and Jackie listened, neither of them looking at the other or at Erna because there was too much emotion in the room and they both felt full of too much pity for Erna even while she was telling them how happy she was. But they caught the sorrow in her voice when she spoke of her mother, and Flip felt that having your mother not love you would be the bitterest way of all to lose her.

“Well, I expect you’re wondering what all this has to do with Percy,” Erna continued, her voice suddenly brisk. “My father’s brother, my Uncle Guenther, is a doctor, too, and he used to know Percy’s sister, the singer, and he knew about this school and that’s how I happened to come here. He was a Nazi for a while and then he wanted to stop being one and they put him in a prison, but they needed surgeons and so they let him out and he had to pretend he was a Nazi but all the time he was trying to work against them. Really he was. I know lots of them say that now because it’s—what’s the word Father used—expedient—but Uncle Guenther really did try, and then he just took care of the hurt people like my father did because hurt people should be taken care of no matter who they are.”

“It’s all right,” Jackie said. “We believe you. Do go on about Percy.”

“Well, Percy’s sister sang in Berlin for the Americans and Uncle Guenther came to see her and they got to talking about old times and everything and then they talked about the war and how it was awful that friends should be enemies and they each said they’d wanted to be on—on the side of life and not on the side of death. And Percy’s sister said she hadn’t been
able to do anything but sing. Madame and her husband had been living in Paris where he taught history at the Sorbonne and Percy taught art at one of the
lycées
. They were both wonderful skiers and they left and came to Switzerland, to the border between Switzerland and Germany, and they became guides who helped people escape into Switzerland. Their daughter had died of pneumonia just at the beginning of the war and it made Percy very serious. Uncle Guenther said that before that she had been very gay and used to love to go to parties and things. Anyhow, they became these guides, I mean Madame and her husband did, and once when they were bringing a party over the border they were discovered and Percy’s husband was shot just before they got into Switzerland.”

Jackie’s dark eyes were enormous, and Flip felt that it was difficult to breathe.

Erna continued. “Madame managed to pick him up and sling him over her shoulder and get him over the border, with shots ringing out all around them. When they were safe she set him down to see if he was still alive, and he was, but one of his arteries had been severed by a bullet, and he died, right there, while she was holding him.”

“Oh, God,” Jackie breathed.

“Uncle Guenther said they were really in love. He said he wouldn’t mind dying that way, being held by the woman he loved, but it must have been hell for Percy.”

“Oh, God,” Jackie said again. “Her daughter and her husband . . .”

“No wonder we all felt something special about her,” Erna said. “Uncle Guenther said she was a real heroine, and kept right on helping people get over the border. And she was shot
once, but not badly, a bullet just grazed her thigh. Well, I just thought you’d want to know, and you were the only two people in school I could tell it to.”

“We’ll never say a word,” Flip promised.

“Oh, Erna!” Jackie cried. “It’s so awful! And it’s like a movie, Percy going on helping people to escape and everything.”

“It’s going to be awful without her the rest of the year,” Erna said. “I’m glad this Miss Redford seems nice.”

“Thank you for telling me, too, Erna.” Flip slid down from her desk as the breakfast gong began to ring.

“Oh, well, I knew you were crazy about Percy. Come on, time for food.” And Erna hurried them out of the classroom.

The days really began to go by as Flip had never thought days at school could go. She remembered in the movies how the passage of time was often shown by the pages of a calendar being turned in rapid succession, and it seemed now that the days at school were being flipped by in just such a way. She would get up in the cold dark of early morning, dress, shivering, make her bed, and rush out to practice skiing.

“Where
do
you go every morning, Flip?” her roommates asked her.

“It’s a secret,” she finally had to tell them, “but I’ll tell you as soon as I possibly can.”

“What kind of a secret?”

“Well, I
think
it’s going to be a nice secret,” Flip said.

She spent Sundays skiing with Paul and usually stayed at the gate house for the evening meal.

“Flip, have you ever seen the others ski?” Paul asked her.

“No. Sometimes on walks we pass the beginners and you can see them from the windows of the gym. But the others usually take the train up to Saint Loup and I haven’t seen them.”

“Then you don’t really know what you’re up against?”

“No.”

“So you can’t really tell how you’ll stand the day of the ski meet.”

“No.”

“Well—” Paul threw out his arms and pushed back his chair. “There’s no use worrying about it. Aunt Colette said you should definitely sign up with the intermediates and she certainly ought to know.”

There was a letter one day from her father. “I’m sketching at the hostel where your Madame Perceval is teaching,” he wrote. “She’s doing amazing work with the children here and they all adore her. She speaks affectionately of you and sends you her regards.”

And Paul told her, “My father had a letter from Aunt Colette. She’s met your father. What do you think about that?”

“It’d be nice if they could be friends,” Flip said.

“Better than lustful Eunice?”

Flip shuddered. “I wish lustful Eunice would get out of the picture. Anyhow, Paul, they’ve just met, Father and Madame Perceval. It doesn’t mean anything. I wish it did.”

One Sunday while they were at the table Flip said to Paul, “Why don’t you ski back down to school with me if your father will let us, and then I could sort of show you around and he could come and get you.”

“No,” Paul said.

“Why not?”

“I just don’t want to.”

“Why don’t you go, Paul?” Georges Laurens put in. “It would do you good.”

“Please, Paul,” Flip begged. “School’s been lots of fun since Christmas.”

“You’ve certainly changed,” Paul said, looking down at his plate.

“Yes, I have. And it’s lots nicer. I’m not the most popular girl in school or anything, but they don’t hate me anymore, and Erna and Jackie and Solvei and Maggie are nice to me and everybody likes it because I draw pictures of them. Anyhow, you don’t have to come in or say a word to anybody if you don’t want to, and you can go on avoiding institutions. But I want to ski back to school and I can’t unless you go with me because I’m not allowed to be out alone.”

“There you are,” Paul said. “Rules again.”

“Honestly!” Flip cried, and for the first time in speaking to Paul her voice held anger. “Prisons and concentration camps and things aren’t the only place where you have rules! You have to have rules! Look at international law.”