Lilac Girls (34 page)

I
followed the nurse into the house and saw an ambulance attendant in the kitchen at the end of the hall. Even from the front door, I could see the potatoes scattered on the floor, the shine of olive oil on tile. How could I have left Paul alone after Dr. Bedreaux's warnings?

As we neared the kitchen, I saw Paul seated at the table, a nurse taking his pulse. A gush of warmth rushed through my arms.

“You're okay, Paul. Thank God.”

Paul looked at me. Had he been crying? “We tried to phone you. Can you believe it, Caroline? It's almost like a dream.”

I shook my head. “I don't understand.”

“They rang the doorbell,” he said. “It's all so…surreal.”

“
Who
rang the doorbell, Paul?”

“Rena.”

“Rena rang the doorbell? You're not making sense.”

“They just took her upstairs.”

“She's back?”

My voice sounded distant, foreign.

Paul rubbed a spot on the tablecloth. “She has been at the American Hospital.”

Did he seem happy? Not really. It was all so confusing.

“She hasn't been able to talk much. Seems a German family took her in.”

I slumped against the doorjamb.

“How wonderful,” was the only thing I could think to say. “I'd better go now.”

I turned to leave.

“Caroline, wait,” Paul said. “Where are you going?”

“This is all so overwhelming.”

“I know. I am sorry, Caroline. Rena has been in the hospital for weeks, too ill to speak.”

I am sorry.
I hated those three words. How many times had people said that when Father died?
Je suis désolé
sounds beautiful in French, but it only made things worse.

“Well, I have to go home,” I said.

I needed time to think and didn't want to break down in front of him. After all, a woman was alive and had not died a tragic death in a concentration camp. She was no doubt tucked into Paul's bed upstairs as we spoke.

Paul stared at the potatoes on the floor. “Yes. We'll talk tomorrow.”

“I mean home to Connecticut,” I said.

“You can't go home now. This is a shock for all of us.”

“I can't think straight. I have to go.”

Why didn't he throw his arms around me and beg me to stay?

“We'll talk tomorrow and figure all of this out,” Paul said, still rooted in his chair.

Somehow I made it out to the car and back to Mother's apartment, where I committed myself to voluntary confinement, mostly in bed, dressed in pajama bottoms and Paul's shirt I'd worn home from his house. The kitchen phone rang a few times until I took the receiver off the hook and left it dangling.
“Si vous souhaitez faire un appel, s'il vous plaît raccrochez et réessayez,”
said the recording over and over again until there was a series of short beeps and then nothing.

The door buzzer rang several times a day, but I didn't answer it.

I self-flagellated by day—allowed my hot tea to cool and then drank it tepid and overmilked—and steeped myself in could-have-beens. Could have been lasting love. Could have been a wedding. A baby. Had I really hocked half of Mother's silver to nurse another woman's husband back to health? Betty was right. I had wasted my time.

One morning Mother let herself into the apartment and planted herself in my bedroom doorway, her umbrella dripping on the carpet.

Mother.
I'd forgotten she was due to arrive.

“It's pouring out there,” she said.

Good, I thought. At least others were inside and as miserable as I.

“Heavenly day, Caroline, what is wrong? Are you ill? Why don't you answer the phone?”

I may not have been French, but was I not allowed to take to my bed and marinate in my own despair?

“Paul's wife came back,” I said.

“What? From the dead? How is this possible? Where was she all this time?”

“I don't know. Some hospital.”

“That is incredible,” Mother said. “Well, you have to pull yourself together.”

“I can't,” I said and pulled the duvet up over my shoulders.

“You are taking a bath, and I'm making you tea. A bath makes everything better.”

There was no fighting Mother. And she was right about the bath. I emerged in fresh pajamas and sat at the metal garden table in the kitchen.

“I knew this would never work,” I said. “I'm not meant to be happy.”

Mother brought me a Mariage Frères Earl Grey tea bag in a cup and a pot of hot water.

“Sorrow is knowledge—”

“Please, Mother. No Byron just now. This whole thing has been a ridiculous fantasy. How did I let myself get so carried away? I should have known. I had to try so hard to make it work.”

“Just because he has a wife doesn't mean you can't be with him,” Mother said. A few hours in France had thrown her moral compass for a loop.

“I suppose. But why is it always so hard, Mother? There's always some catch.”

The doorbell buzzed.

I reached for Mother's wrist. “Don't answer it.”

Mother went to the door anyway, an action that made me regret inviting her to France.

“Whoever it is, I'm not here,” I called after her.

Mother answered the door. I heard a woman introduce herself as Rena.

Oh God, Rena. Anyone but her.

Mother came back to the kitchen with Rena in tow and then left us alone. Rena stood in the doorway in a cotton dress that clung to her like wet laundry, showing the ridge of her collarbone and a hollow the size of a soup bowl below.

“Sorry to interrupt your tea, Caroline,” she said, a tired schoolgirl, all eyes and sunken cheeks. “I tried to call.” Her gaze drifted to the dangling receiver.

“Oh,” I said.

Rena shifted in her shoes. “Paul is sorry as well. Tried to call you too…”

“Please sit,” I said.

Rena ran one finger behind her ear, as if to tuck a piece of hair there—an old habit, it seemed, for there was no hair there to tuck.

“I will not take up too much of your time. Just wanted to say how sorry I am.”

“Sorry?” I poured hot water over the muslin bag. The scent of bergamot orange triggered a violent craving for one of Serge's violet scones.

“For how this all turned out,” she said.

“No need to apologize, Rena.”

“Maybe I will sit. I won't be long.”

“Of course,” I said. “Tea?”

“No thank you. I still can't keep much down. I told Paul he should come over soon and visit. Explain it all…”

I tried to sip my tea but could not see the cup because my head throbbed so, my vision blurred.

“I am afraid Paul is not happy to see me,” she said.

Somewhere out on the street children laughed, their voices echoing off the buildings as they splashed in the rain.

“You probably wish I were dead after all,” Rena said. “Believe me, I wished that myself so often. I would have sent word if I could have. It was just luck that kept me alive.”

“I understand.”

“No, I don't think you do. How could you? It was just luck they broke with the usual procedure. They had taken our shoes, so we knew.”

“Rena, you don't have to—”

“We were on the train from Majdanek, to a subcamp, we thought. The train slowed somewhere in Poland, and they made us get out.”

Rena paused and looked out the window.

“I was sick. Typhus, I think. So I barely made it when they marched us through the woods. Paper money lay scattered on the ground along the path. People before us had thrown it away. Lest the Germans got it, I suppose. Someone whispered we were going to work, but I knew. We came to a shed, and they told us to strip.”

“Please, Rena. You don't have to tell me—”

“I am sorry. Is all of this too hard for you to listen to?”

I shook my head no.

“It happened so quickly. They lined us up along the edge of a great pit…”

Rena lost her thread and drifted away somewhere. After a moment, she began again.

“When the girl beside me saw what was below, she cried out. Her mother took her in her arms, and they shot them first. The blasts threw them against me, and all three of us slid down the dirt sides…”

Rena paused, and I barely blinked, afraid to interrupt.

“I lay still as more bodies fell atop me. Soon the shots stopped, and I could tell it was close to night, since the light through the spaces around the bodies above me grew dim. I crawled out of the pit in the dark and rooted around in the shed for some clothes.”

She looked at the ceiling. “You should have seen the stars that night, thrown across the sky in great bunches. It was as if they were watching, looking down on all that, sad they could do nothing. I walked through the woods to a house, and a farmer and his wife took me in. A German couple. Their son had been killed at the Russian front. At first, the wife was afraid I would steal her wristwatch, a nice one, a gift from her son, for the wristwatch is valuable currency. But the couple ended up being very kind. They put me in their boy's old bed and nursed me through my sickness as if I were their own. Fed me warm bread with strawberry jam. I returned their hospitality by passing on my disease.”

I handed Rena a napkin, and she held it to one eye for a moment, then the other.

“The old man died first. When the Russians came, I told them we all had typhus, but they laid a rug over my face and raped me anyway. Then they raped the farmer's wife and took her wristwatch. She died sometime that night. I don't remember much else, just bits and pieces, until the hospital here. So, you see, I would have come home earlier, but it was—”

“I'm sorry that happened to you, Rena. Why are you telling me all this?”

“I know what Paul means to you—”

“He told you?”

“When he first returned from New York. I didn't care at the time, but things are different now.”

Of course things were different. In ways none of us could undo.

“I wish I could make you happy, Caroline. But I can't give Paul up. Maybe once, but not now.”

Rena held the edge of the table. She needed to rest.

“I think you should go home to him, Rena.”

“Yes, but I need to tell you something.”

There was
more
? “I don't think—”

“I haven't told Paul yet.” She drew herself up with a deep breath.

“Rena, it's not really—”

“They took Paul before any of us. I was very sick, could eat nothing. Thought it was the flu, but then I found…I was, well…waiting for a child.”

The world stopped for a moment, suspended in air. Waiting for a child? That lovely French phrase.

“Pregnant?”

Rena held my gaze and barely nodded.

“Was it—” I began before I could stop myself.

“His?” Rena looked at her hands for a long time. “War does funny things to people, I am afraid. In our case, it drew us closer. The child must have known what was happening. She arrived the day the Gestapo came for me. Easter morning.”

She? Paul had a daughter. I pressed cold fingers to my lips.

“We were tipped off that a raid was coming. My father took the child, said he would go to a convent he knew. He took her in a shoe box, she was so small.”

“Where?”

“I don't know. They came for me that night. My father had not returned.”

“I'm terribly sorry for your loss, but I—”

“The convent was abandoned during the war, so I am writing to orphanages, but Paul told me—”

“I'm really not in a position to help if that's what you're asking.”

I stood and carried my teacup to the sink.

“I understand your reluctance, Caroline. I wouldn't want to be involved if I myself were in your place. But if you reconsider—”

“I'm leaving for New York soon,” I said, one hand on the cool porcelain of the sink.