The French War Bride (19 page)

1943

T
he train ride home seemed extra long. I leaned against the window, my head bouncing against the glass. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw fire rain down from heaven. I thought of Mme Molin's words, of how we should count any escape a victory, but the math didn't work. Two lives had been lost in the saving of two. And we were by no means certain that the two we'd tried to save were still alive—or, if alive, would make it through the following day.

My heart was heavy. The train was delayed at two stops along the way, and it was very late—well after the nine o'clock civilian curfew—when I arrived in Paris. I stepped out of the train station onto a dark street and headed down the rue Aignon toward the hotel. Three drunk German soldiers staggered out of a tavern.

I tried to walk around them, but they deliberately blocked my path. “Oho! What have we here?” asked one in slurred German.

“Let's see if we can get an evening's pleasure without having to pay anything,” said a second. They all laughed raucously, insolently certain I couldn't understand their language.

My heart pattered hard in my chest. The first soldier grabbed my sleeve and leered, his beer breath steaming in the cold night. “Want to have a little fun, mademoiselle?” he asked in heavily accented French.

“No, thank you,” I responded.

“That is not how you get cooperation,” the tallest soldier said in
German to his peers. “I'll show you how it's done.” He turned to me, straightened his cap, and addressed me in bad French. “You are out after curfew, mademoiselle. You are breaking the law.”

“I—I just got off the train. Would you like to see my travel papers?”

“No, we want to see your cootch,” said the second soldier in German.

They all laughed uproariously.

Fear welled up in my chest. I pretended not to understand. “I am heading back to my residence.”

“And where is that?”

“The Hotel Palais.”

“Oh, you live at a hotel?” Their eyebrows shot up. They looked at each other and laughed.

“I work as a maid there,” I said, wanting to shoot down any ideas that I was a hooker or kept woman.

“Oh, a maid, eh?” The tall one leered. “So you make all the beds? Want to straighten my sheets?”

The other soldiers laughed and elbowed each other.

“Please—I just want to go home,” I said.

“Well, then, you need to be very nice to us.”

My mouth went dry. “I—I am being nice.”

“No, you're aloof. What are you carrying in the basket?”

“I took a poultice to my great aunt for her arthritis.”

“Arthritis?”

Apparently he didn't understand the French word for it. “She has aches and pains.”

“I have an ache you can treat,” said one of the other soldiers in German.

They all laughed. I edged away.

“Hey, hey, hey—come back here,” said the tall soldier. “No need to be so standoffish.” He pulled me roughly toward him. “Let us see what you're wearing under that coat.” He pried at my top button. His finger touched my neck.

I don't know what came over me. I didn't think; I just acted. I jerked up my leg and kneed him in the groin.

“Ow!” He released me to grab his crotch. As the other two soldiers laughed, I turned and started to run, but I wasn't quick enough. The soldier I'd hurt snatched my arm and spun me around. The next thing I knew, I felt cold metal on the back of my head.

“You little whore,” he snarled.

The gun cocked. I closed my eyes and thought of Maman.

“Wait, Kyler,” said one of the other soldiers in German. “If you kill her, we'll have to file a report. We don't want to mess with that this late.”

“Yeah.” The second soldier lurched on the pavement. “Let's just go have another drink.”

For a long moment, my life hung in the balance, as Kyler weighed the merits of revenge for his sore crotch versus the inconvenience of paperwork. Apparently I wasn't worth killing, because at length he hurled me from him.

I fell to the pavement, breaking my pot and skinning my knee.

“This is your lucky night, you French slut,” he growled. “But I'll be watching for you, and you won't get off so lightly next time.”

I scurried down the dark street toward the hotel, holding my breath that I wouldn't encounter any more soldiers. I let myself into the side door, then stood in the hallway, catching my breath.

Isolde came by, carrying her soap and shampoo out of the bathroom.

“There you are! I was beginning to wonder if something had happened to you.”

“No,” I replied. “Just a long train ride.”

“How was your aunt?”

“A little under the weather. The poultice seemed to help a bit.”

“Good. Well, nothing much happened here, either.”

“Just another boring day for both of us,” I said.

The irony, of course, was lost on her. I followed her to our dormitory, feeling very much alone in the crowded room of women.

1943

M
y God, Amélie—you could have been raped or killed!” Yvette said a week later when I told her my tale of the encounter with the German soldiers.

I was lounging in a chaise in the hotel suite where Yvette now lived, drinking real coffee. I don't know when I'd last had real coffee. Her hotel was very swank and served only the extremely wealthy or extremely high-ranking Wehrmacht officers.

Yvette's German
protecteur
was both. She routinely gave me food left over from her sumptuous meals with him, food that she rolled into napkins and stuffed in her handbag.

“Have another cookie, ma petite. You are so very skinny!”

“I know, I know.” I looked down at my rail-thin frame. “At least it's not much of a change for me. But you—you looked ill when you lost so much weight.”

“It is good to not be hungry. But sometimes I think I'd rather chew off my arm than spend another night doing some of the things that Gerhard . . .” She broke off her words and lit a cigarette.

“Tell me,” I urged.

“I find it hard not to recoil when he touches me,” she confided. “And when he kisses me or asks me to do certain things, I fight the urge to retch. And sometimes, he ties me to the bed, and . . .” She inhaled a puff of smoke, then waved her hand. “But it does not matter. I am providing
the Résistance with important information. I remind myself of that every day. And the war is turning in our favor.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The Boches won't admit it, of course, but the battle of Stalingrad was a major defeat. And the Allies are bombing the hell out of Germany.”

“France, too.”

“
Oui
.” We sat there, somber. The hard truth was that the British and the Americans—the very armies trying to save us—were bombing German targets in France, but there was often collateral damage. It was a horrible fact of war. Paris itself was spared, but nighttime strikes sometimes hit the suburbs.

“So.” Yvette tapped her cigarette on the side of an ashtray. “How is work at Hotel Palais?”

“Much the same as ever, except the soup is even thinner. And one of my roommates disappeared.”

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

“Just that. She went out on her day off, and she did not come back.”

“Was she working for the Resistance?”

“No. At least, I can't imagine that she was.”

“Was she Jewish?”

“Again, I think not, but who can be sure of anything these days? She was supposedly from Lyon. I have wondered if she ran into the same soldiers I ran into, with a different result.”

“There are many things that could have happened to her.”

“All of them bad.”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps she escaped to America.”

“Ha!”

Yvette took a drag from her cigarette. “That is what we should do when the war ends.”

“Go to America?”

“Yes! It is the land of opportunity. France will be poor for a long time to come.”

“Oh, don't say that! When we are liberated . . .”

“We will still be poor and hungry. All of France will be poor and hungry for many years. That is what happened after the Great War. Besides, where are we to live after the war?”

“I have no idea.”

“I have been thinking about it a great deal.” Yvette exhaled a puff of smoke. “You and I need to go to America and make a fresh start.”

“How will we get there?”

“We will save our money and buy tickets. Or we will fall in love with American soldiers and marry them.”

“My heart will always belong Joshua.”

“That is what you think now. Once I thought that of Pierre.”

“And now?”

“He is dead to me.” She took a long pull from her cigarette. “He came to see me last week.”

“And?”

“I told him if he didn't leave, I would tell Gerhard and have him arrested.” She flicked her cigarette over an ashtray. “He asked about you, Amélie. He still loves you.”

“He loves no one but himself.”

“Perhaps. But, still, Amélie . . . he is your only family.”

“No.” I reached and out gripped her hand. “I have you.”

“Yes.” She smiled as she squeezed my fingers. “We are sisters—and we have the papers to prove it. But you must go. Gerhard will be here soon.”

“And he won't like to find me here?”

“
Au contraire
. He would like it too much. He wants you to join us in a ménage à trois.”

“Very funny!” I stopped short at the look on her face. “Mon Dieu. You aren't kidding!”

She tilted her head. “He has some very odd ideas about lovemaking.”

My chest tightened. “Oh, Yvette! Does he—does he hurt you?”

“Not too much.” She looked away. “Not too often, anyway. And I have learned much valuable information.”

My expression must have conveyed my alarm, because she smiled.
“It is okay. He is leaving next week. He does not know I know, but of course, I do.”

“What will you do?”

“I have met another officer who can greatly help our cause. He and I have already talked.”

“Is this someone you could love?”

She gave a wry grin. “I hope not; he is already married. Besides, love has nothing to do with it. He holds a very strategic position. It will be a bonus if he is kind.” She ground out her cigarette and rose. “But enough. You must leave.”

She wrapped the extra cookies in a handkerchief, tucked them in my purse, and walked me to the door. “Take care,
ma soeur
.”

We exchanged la bise. I walked away, my eyes strangely wet. Regardless of outside appearances, Yvette was sacrificing as much for France as the men fighting in the trenches. The difference was, they were lauded, while she was scorned.

1943–mid-1944

O
ver the next year and a half, life in Paris became grimmer, harder, hungrier. The people of Paris were gaunt, beaten down, fatigued, and ill. Resentment bubbled up in small ways that the increasingly harsh occupiers crushed with unreasonable cruelty. Not only were Jews, Gypsies, and other “undesirables” rounded up and carted away; so were ordinary French citizens, often for acts of rebellion as benign as singing “La Marseillaise.”

The winter was, again, desperately cold. Coal and wood were next to impossible to find. At my hotel, the servant quarters of the hotel were no longer heated. All warmth was saved for the paying guests.

It seemed as though there were two Parises: the gray, miserable, oppressed one of the ordinary citizen, and the beautiful bright one filled with gaiety and music and delicious food, the Paris now almost exclusively inhabited by German officers and their collaborateurs. It was a cruel trick of fate that those living in the first Paris had to catch frequent glimpses of those in the second. Anger seethed—especially when they saw the enemy eating more food in one meal than their entire family had for a week—building like black jealousy in a lover's heart.

Yvette, alas, inhabited the Paris of plenty—and even I, who knew her motivations and how she hated it, at times found myself resentful. On the surface, it seemed a world of privilege, but I knew that she, too, had problems, problems too dark and tormenting for her to fully tell me.

She did, indeed, seem much happier with her new “beau”—although she found it difficult to hold her tongue.

“I swear, Amélie, sometimes I just want to scream when his officer buddies are gabbing away. I hate the way they talk about us, as if the French are inferior to the almighty German, as if our only purpose is to serve them. As a Frenchwoman, they think I should just look nice and give them compliments and be sexy in bed.” She waved her cigarette. “I remind myself often that my real role is to gather information about their plans and movements. But I have nearly given myself away half a dozen times just because they make me so angry.”

I'd had another close call, myself. I'd been photographing a map when I heard the key fit into the door. I managed—just barely!—to put the map away before the door opened, but all I could do with the camera was tuck it under the bed. To my dismay, the officer was drunk and very amorous. I pretended to go along—I actually let him kiss me!—then told him I needed to use the restroom before we made love. I retrieved the camera from under the bed and carried in my palm as if it were a little clutch, mimicking the way I'd see Yvette coyly leave a table to go touch up her lipstick. The officer was too inebriated to realize that a maid wouldn't carry a purse—or to realize that the door I exited led not to the bathroom, but to my escape down the hall.

2016

A
ll of your adventures were very exciting, I'm sure, but when will we get to the part where you met Jack?” The day is wearing on. So is my patience.

“Adventures? You think I'm relating adventures?” Amélie leans forward, her eyes sharp and flashing. “You think that starving, freezing, working my fingers to the bone, always in danger, sleeping in a room like a cell, trying to just stay
alive
, for God's sake—was an
adventure
? You think that living under the thumb of
les Boches
, seeing people treated with unbelievable cruelty, mourning my loved ones, and standing in endless lines for everything was an
adventure
?”

There she goes again, with her Gallic overexaggeration. I sigh and put down my coffee cup. “Well, you certainly make it all sound very . . . dramatic.”

“Really? You think scrubbing toilets is dramatic?”

I shrug. “I would like for you to get to the point.”

“We will get there at my speed, in my way. Since you again interrupted, it is your turn to talk. So tell me . . . what were you doing in 1943?”

Nineteen forty-three, nineteen forty-three . . . that was the year after the U.S. entered the war. I search through the archives of my memory. “I was in college.”

“College! Oh, you were very fortunate. Where did you go?”

“To LSU in Baton Rouge. Daddy insisted I go to his alma mater,
although I wanted to go to Newcomb, because by then, Jack was in medical school in New Orleans.” The wheels of time seem to be spinning backward.

“Were you in a sorority?”

“Yes, but it wasn't all fun and games as you probably suppose. We did a lot of work for the war effort. We raised money and collected rubber and tin, and we tended a victory garden.”

“That was very noble of you.”

I am not certain if she is sneering at me, or if
noble
is just the odd word choice of a foreigner. I suspect the former. “My war experience was very different than yours,” I concede. “America wasn't invaded or occupied, but we were fighting the Japanese as well as the Germans, and we were very worried about the future. Our men were on both sides of the globe, and we had shortages and rationing, too.”

“Yes, but your rationing still allowed a family to be fed. There was milk for the children.”

“We were in better shape than you, but we were still sacrificing.”

“You know nothing about sacrifice.”

“Oh, no?” Anger flashes through me, hot and fast as lightning. “We sacrificed our sweethearts and husbands and sons to save your sorry French asses.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Oh, dear, I shouldn't have said that. Sometimes words come out that I only mean to think. And yet I am furious. “It makes me angry to think of red-blooded Americans dying to help you people with your slatternly morals.”

“What?”

“Well, let's face it. There was a lot of loose living in France.”

“Why on earth would you think that?”

“From what you've told me. And from what everyone knows about life in Paris. And from what happened with you and Jack.”

She sits up as if the back of her chair has sprouted spikes. “I'll have you know I was a virgin when I met Jack.”

I flick my wrist dismissively. “Oh, maybe you convinced him you were.”

“He was a doctor! He knew about these things.”

“Oh, please. I've heard of the tricks you continental women used—tightening powders and chicken blood and such.”

“What?” Her eyes are round with incredulity, her face so surprised, it surprises me. And then she tosses back her head and laughs. “Good heavens! Is that what you think?”

Yes, it is exactly what I think—what I've always thought. I am certain Amélie was an experienced seductress who lured Jack into her bed. But I am angry, and I am saying things best kept to myself. I force myself to take a deep breath. “I am sorry. I am probably speaking out of turn.”

“I would say so!”

“I find . . . I don't always think before I speak these days.”

“Yes, well, that can be understood.”

We sit there for a moment, silently acknowledging the indignities of advanced age. It is a strangely unifying common denominator between us.

“Let's begin again,” she says. “You were telling me about 1943.”

“Yes.” I draw another calming breath, and just as quickly as it hit, the fury leaves. “I was in college, and Jack was in a special expedited education program sponsored by the army. The military was desperate for doctors. They paid for all his schooling and sped everything up. Jack finished his undergraduate degree in two and half years, going year-round with hardly any breaks, and medical school in about the same. It was very difficult, very intense.” I could see him in his uniform, so tall, so handsome.

“He was due to graduate May 1944. He proposed the Christmas of 1943.”

Amélie's poised expression seems to crumble a little bit. “How did he propose?”

I have always wondered the same thing about Jack with her. If I tell her what she wants to know, hopefully she will tell me. If, that is, she ever gets around to talking about Jack.

“He wrote to my father and asked for my hand.” I have sometimes
wondered if he and my father weren't closer than he and I. Jack would often write one letter to the two of us, and most of the information would be aimed at my father. But that is not the story I am telling.

Daddy kept it secret, of course, but I had an inkling. My mother couldn't help from dropping little hints. It was on Christmas Eve. We had been to a party at the mayor's house, and Jack had accompanied us back to my parents' home. He told my parents he wanted to give me my Christmas present early. My parents left us alone in the parlor.

“‘Let me get your gift,' I said to Jack, thinking this was to be our gift exchange.

“‘That can wait.' He took my hand and pulled me to the settee. I sat down. And he got down on one knee and asked if I would do him the favor of becoming his wife.” I giggle at the memory. The favor! As if he were asking to borrow a cup of sugar. I had thought it was so funny.

“Well of course, I was so happy, I couldn't speak. I just nodded with a big lump in my throat. And then I threw my arms around his neck and he kissed me, and then I dashed out of the parlor, nearly banging into Mother and Daddy—I think they'd been listening at the door. ‘Guess what?' I told them. ‘I'm engaged!'”

“I assume that meant Jack was, as well,” Amélie interrupts.

“What? Of course.”

“You said
you
were engaged.”

“Well, they were
my
parents.”

“I see.” She gives a dry smile that can't mean anything good.

I feel the bile of resentment and dislike flood my mouth. She is trying to imply that I made it all about me. Oh, dear—had I? The question briefly flickers in my mind before I dismiss it.

“They were very happy about it, I am sure,” she says.

“They were thrilled. Daddy already had champagne chilling—as Baptists, we hardly ever drank, but this was a very special occasion. Daddy popped the cork, and it flew across the room. And Daddy toasted to our wonderful lives together, and Jack toasted me, saying he was the luckiest man ever, to be getting such a beautiful bride and marrying into such a wonderful family.”

I sigh, remembering. I had felt as if I were dancing on clouds. It had been the happiest night of my life.

“Why didn't you marry right away?” Amélie asks.

“Well, we needed time to plan the wedding, of course.”

“Of course,” she repeats in that dry way of hers.

“Plus Jack was still in school until May. He was at the teaching hospital around the clock—they worked the interns and residents to death. They slept on cots in closets and were constantly on call. And Jack's salary as an army major wasn't enough to really establish a household.”

“I see,” says Amélie, in that quiet, shrewish way that seems like an insult.

“And we already knew he was shipping out as soon as he graduated. Daddy thought it best I stay in college, and married women couldn't live in the dorms.

“And my mother . . . well, she had another reason she wanted me to wait. I was her only child, and she wanted only the best for me. ‘What if he's terribly wounded?' she said. ‘You might not want to be saddled for life to a man who is disfigured or loses a leg or is an invalid.'

“I was horrified. He was to tend the wounded, not get wounded himself! What was she thinking, to suggest such a thing could happen? I told her in no uncertain terms that I would always love Jack regardless of what condition he returned in.

“Of course, at that point, I never dreamed that he might return already married.” I give Amélie a pointed look. “With a baby.”

Amélie has the grace to look down.

“That's the part of the story I really want to know about,” I press. “How did he come to marry you?”

“I am almost there. If you would like for me to continue . . .” Her eyebrows lift to an empirious high.

Oh, she is so aggravating! The words are bitter on my tongue. “Yes. Please.”

“Very well.” She rises from her chair in a fluid movement. “Would you like coffee or tea?”

“I—” I start to say I don't need a drink; I need her to get to the point. But my hospice counselor's words echo in my ear as I watch her walk to
the kitchenette:
Patience and kindness, Miss Kat. Patience and kindness are the golden tickets.
“Tea, please.”

She nods and settles the kettle on the stove. “I was about to tell you about the Normandy landing.”

Finally, we are getting somewhere. “Jack shipped over to arrive just after D-day.”

“Yes.” She opens a cabinet and lifts out two china cups and saucers. She places them on a tray, along with cream and sugar, two spoons, and cloth napkins. She carries them over and sets them on the coffee table.

“He left just after his graduation,” I say. “I was there, of course—at his graduation. My parents and I went to New Orleans and stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel. I was so terribly, terribly proud of him. He shipped out two days later with a Medical Corps unit. We learned later that it reached France right behind the Normandy landing.”

“You did not make love with Jack before you sent him off to war?”

“Why—no!” The question stuns me. “No, of course not! I was not that kind of girl. Jack didn't ask . . . he didn't expect . . .” What did she think I was? In her world, I was probably a prude.

“Why, we hardly had any time alone together!” I sputter. “Besides, I was saving myself for marriage. That was the way it was done. That was what was expected.”

“By Jack?” She looks at me intently. “You discussed this?”

“No. It needed no discussion. It was just how things were.”

“Ah.” She gives that small smile I find so annoying, then heads back to the kitchen, lifts the kettle from the stove, and pours boiling water into a little teapot with a single tea bag in it. I sigh; I should have known better than to let a Frenchwoman make me tea.

“You told him not to send you a breakup letter,” Amélie says as she pours boiling water into a coffee carafe with a complicated press.

“It was a joke. I was teasing him, reversing the cliché.” I sit and tap my toe, waiting for her to carry the carafe and teapot over to the table. She finally does. She leans forward and carefully pours me the weakest tea I have ever been served, outside of a Chinese restaurant. The cup, however,
is thin as an eggshell, rimmed in gold with blue and purple flowers. It is absolutely stunning. So is the elaborate, heavy sterling teaspoon.

“You were about to tell me about the Normandy landing,” I prompt.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I am about to get to that part of the story.”

God help me
, I think, helping myself to a large spoonful of sugar. This story might take longer than the time I have left on earth.