Lilac Girls (32 page)

M
other, waylaid with the grippe, sent me off to Paris alone. She was terribly worried, of course, since the Allies may have helped liberate France, but the war was far from over. How many rogue U-boats were still out there in the Atlantic? I would not be deterred, however, on the eve of seeing Paul again after five long years. I'd taken a bit more silver to Mr. Snyder in order to make the trip. The petit four tongs. Butter knives. A few dinner forks.

I docked at La Rochelle, north of Bordeaux, on April 12, 1945. When we disembarked, the first mate announced that President Roosevelt had died at his home in Warm Springs, Georgia, and a collective groan went up from all of us gathered there. The president died before he got to see the Germans surrender in France. He never knew Hitler took his own life.

Roger had arranged for a car and driver to get me up to Paris, and I took in devastated France from the backseat. It's one thing to read of war in newspapers and chart the action with pins, but it was quite another to see France ripped asunder. It had been more than seven months since the Allied forces helped liberate Paris, but the destruction was still fresh. Entire blocks were decimated, buildings imploded, and the walls of many apartment buildings had been sheared off, showing a cross section of still-furnished rooms. Our drive was repeatedly detoured since black craters and tank-sized sections of macadam blown off the roads were still not repaired. South of Paris, not a bridge over the Seine was left standing. Yet even with all the devastation, it was spring, and the city was still lovely rising from the ruins, the Arc de Triomphe untouched, five flags draped under the arch.

Once in Paris, I borrowed our caretakers' old Peugeot, which was powered by an improvised wood-burning stove fixed to the back. A wartime lack of gasoline had led to widespread use of these homemade gasogenes, wood gasification units mounted on the backs of buses, taxicabs, and private cars. It was quite a sight to see these vehicles on the streets, each with its own combustion tank fixed to the rear. Drivers stopped at filling stations to stoke the stove with firewood, not to get gasoline. Driving such a car in Paris was challenging, for the streets were choked with bicycles, and they owned the roads. As a result, the Métro was more popular than ever. Even the wealthiest counts were seen in its depths.

I arrived at the crossroads of the boulevard Raspail and rue de Sèvres that night and choked back a sob at the sight of the Hôtel Lutetia, still there. Freed from her Nazi occupiers, the towering Belle Epoque hotel stood fearless, her name in lights above, the tricolor flying again.

I pushed through the hotel entrance, past a tangle of the mothers, husbands, wives, and girlfriends of deportees, and who waved pictures of the missing and called out their names, hoping for news. The lobby, its black and white tiled floor strewn with trampled notices and lilac sprigs, was packed with journalists, Red Cross workers, and government officials, all jockeying for position at the front desk.

A frail woman in black, her back hunched, seized my arm as I squeezed through the crowd.

“Have you seen this man?” she said, as she thrust a photograph of a white-haired man in my face.

“No, I'm so sorry,” I said.

In the dining room, groups of dazed survivors, still in their striped camp uniforms, sat at tables under the crystal chandeliers as waitresses brought them the best of everything. Veal, champagne, cheese, and fresh bread, from the provisions the Nazis left behind. Many deportees sat and stared at the food, unable to eat. Some who ate more than a few bites headed for the lavatory.

Searchers elbowed their way into the Great Gallery, to walls plastered with notices and photos of missing loved ones, many inked with black
X
's, meaning those deportees would never return. That is where I found it.

Paul Rodierre. Suite 515.

I sprinted to the elevator but found it so choked with people the door would not close and ran on to the stairs. On the way, I passed men, skin stretched taut over their skulls, wandering the back halls, their camp uniforms hanging from them. What would Paul look like? I prepared myself to find him in that state or worse. I didn't care as long as I could be with him every day. I'd pay whatever it took to get him well.

I passed guest rooms turned hospital wards, fitted with extra cots, the doors propped open. 511…513…In the hallway, two gendarmes chatted with a pretty nurse. Love was back, now that the war was over.

I found the spacious fifth floor suite, tall windows open to the city below, the Eiffel Tower in the distance, a lovely French Louis Seize Beauvier cane bed against one wall. The royal treatment for the famous M. Rodierre.

From the doorway I watched Paul as he sat in an overstuffed chair playing cards with three other men, the curtains on the windows stirring in the gentle breeze.

Paul was dressed in a plain button-front shirt, and a nurse sat behind him, one arm across the back of his chair, the other hand on his pulse. It was so strange to see him in that lovely suite with the damask drapes and fine wool carpets. I stepped closer and looked over Paul's shoulder at his cards.

“I wouldn't bet the farm on that hand,” I said.

Paul turned his head and smiled. To my relief, he looked fine. Gaunt, and his head was newly shaved, but he was
alive,
awash in that white cotton shirt. I couldn't wait to get him home to his own bed. I would spend every penny I had on doctors if I had to.

“Have you brought no money for me to bet with?” Paul asked. “No Russian cigarettes? Come here and kiss me.”

I stepped around the chair and saw, with a jolt, Paul's legs extended out from the bottom of his shirt, long and thin, knobbed at the joints, like the legs of a cricket.

“I won't break, you know. And don't believe a word the doctor says. If my winnings are any indication, I'm fine.”

“I don't know where to start,” I said as I knelt by the side of his chair, afraid to touch him. Was it painful to be so thin?

A young doctor approached us, his orange hair piled atop his head like frizzled saffron.

“You are a relative?” the doctor asked.

“She's a friend,” Paul said. “Miss Ferriday from New York.”

The doctor looked me over, his eyes red rimmed. Had it been days since he'd slept?

“Can you walk with me, please?” the doctor said.

I sensed a tenuous criticism, as if he disapproved of me somehow.

“I am Dr. Philippe Bedreaux,” he said once we stood in the hallway. “I have been treating Paul for a few weeks now. He made an excellent recovery from typhus, due in part to chloramphenicol, a new drug. Then he took an inexplicable turn for the worse. Pneumonia.”

“Pneumonia?” My breath caught in my throat. Like father.
Pneumonie.
So much prettier in French, but just as deadly. Something Mother still referred to as “lung fever.”

“He recovered but is by no means out of the woods. Are you staying in the city?”

“At my mother's apartment close by. Does Paul know about his wife's death?”

“Yes
.
It was a great shock, and he refuses to speak of it. Right now he needs to sleep. At some point, he'll need aggressive physical therapy due to muscular atrophy.”

“Will he recover completely?” I asked.

“Too early to tell, Mademoiselle. We are dealing with a ruined body here. He has lost almost half his overall body weight.”

“Mentally, he seems fine,” I said. “Playing
poker
—”

“He is an actor. Of course he puts up a good front, but we must be very careful. His heart and lungs have been through a great trauma.”

“So are you guessing two weeks? Three?”

“He may not wake up tomorrow as it
is.
You must let him
recover.
”

“I am sorry, Doctor—”

“A young man was set to go home last week—vital signs good—and he died of cardiac failure the morning he was to leave. Who knows when we can consider these patients cured?”

“I'm just eager to—”

“He must not exert himself in any way—no cooking, extended walks, and certainly no, well—”

“What, Doctor?”

“Certainly no extracurricular activities…”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Complete bed rest.”

With Paul
alone
in the bed, he wanted to say.

After the doctor left, I sat at Paul's bedside, watching his chest rise and fall under the blanket.

“Don't leave,” Paul said.

I smoothed the back of my hand across his cheek.

“Never,” I said.

I
SAW
P
AUL EVERY DAY
and decamped to Mother's apartment each night. I was relieved the old place had survived the war relatively unscathed thanks to our caretaker's wife, Mme Solange. The apartment was surprisingly untouched, not a crack in the floor-to-ceiling casement windows or the hornbeam parquet floors, though fine white powder covered every surface, the silver-topped jars on my mahogany vanity table now two inches deep in silty dust. The carriage clock in Father's study had stopped at 9:25, and there'd been a leak in Mother's bedroom. A section of damask wallpaper curled down off the wall there like a stained sow's ear.

Paul slept for much of those first two weeks, but soon asked to go home to the house he and Rena had shared in Rouen. Dr. Bedreaux reluctantly agreed, with additional vague references to a ban on lovemaking that made Paul smile. Dr. Bedreaux insisted a doctor had to visit Paul every day, for Rena's house was several miles outside of Paris, with limited access to hospital care. I agreed, happy to pay whatever it took to make Paul happy, and with the help of three strong nurses, we managed to get him into the front seat of the Peugeot.

On the road to Rouen, fresh evidence of combat was everywhere, and many buildings were nothing more than façades. The imposing Rouen Cathedral, made famous by Monet's paintings, was one of the few buildings left intact. Paul directed me to a bunker-like house on a side street in Rouen, not at all what I'd expected.

I helped Paul up the front walk and considered the house, which resembled a military pillbox, cold and standoffish. It was designed in the Bauhaus style, another abhorrent thing Germany had foisted on France.

Would the neighbors come out to greet him? Would they think me an interloper? After all, Rena had grown up in the house and she and Paul had lived there together. Did they have friends, couples on the street who missed her?

Paul and I walked into the front hallway and inched our way across the living room. It was a dark house, but the rooms were done in the bright prints of Provence. I considered asking Paul if we could live at Mother's apartment with its lovely morning light and pastel boiseried walls, filled with the pieces Mother and I had found at the Marché aux Puces and other
antiquaires.
My Louis Seize commode. The fin de siècle metal garden table in the kitchen. Mother had gone a bit toile crazy, but it was nicely done. All it needed was a good dusting.

I helped Paul up the stairs and past a snug little room with yellow, fabric-upholstered walls and on to the master bedroom, where Paul and Rena once slept. The bed was small for a man as tall as Paul and wore a white matelassé bedcover and blue-and-white ticking pillows.

I pulled a chair next to Paul's bed and watched him sleep well into the night. Eventually I moved to the padded window seat and slept for a bit. Before dawn, Paul spoke.

“Rena?”

“No, Paul, it's Caroline.”

“Caroline? I am so cold.”

I brought my blanket to the bed and smoothed it over him.

“I thought I was in the hospital,” he said.

“No, you're home, dear.”

He was back asleep before I finished the sentence.

It was strange to cook in Rena's kitchen, the copper pots still burnished bright, her drawers filled with pressed cotton napkins folded in neat stacks. There was little food to cook, for all over France, meat and vegetables were hard to come by. At first, I improvised. With a ration card, a lucky sort could hunt down some potatoes and bread, perhaps some anemic carrots, but most of the country existed on thin soups and toast. Then I raided Mother's pantry at her apartment and struck gold: molasses, oatmeal, and tea bags. Eventually I found one could buy anything for a price on the black market.