The French War Bride (23 page)

“I have a five-o'clock shadow on my head,” I murmured.

“And I am bald as an egg.” We regarded ourselves in the mirror. “We are ridiculous.”

“Yes.”

“All those times we fussed over our hair, thinking it didn't look good enough. Whoever would have thought we would be bald?”

“Not I.”

“
Moi non plus
. But look at us. We are as bald as eagles.”

She started to laugh. I worried for a moment that her sanity had left her.

“Oh, it is so funny!” she said, pointing at the mirror. “Just look at us!”

I looked, but I did not see anything remotely amusing.

She took both my hands. “Come on, chérie. We can laugh or we can cry; neither will make our hair grow faster. So let us laugh, because laughter feels so much better.” She waved her arms like a bird. “Look at us—we are as bald as baby birds!”

She was acting so ridiculous that I grinned. I, too, flapped my arms. We swooped around the room, cawing, then ended up back in front of the mirror, laughing.

“Oh, just look at us!”

“All of Paris has been looking at us,” I told her. “We have been paraded all over town, practically naked.”

“Yes, but you know what, my little bald birdie? We are alive, and Paris is free.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking somberly of the belligerent tondue who had been hit with a rifle, then tossed into the street to die.

“Do you know what time it is?”

I had no watch. I shook my head.

“It is time to take a picture!”

“Oh, non! Non, non, non.”

“Yes! Our hair will grow quickly. We will never be bald little chickadees again.”

“You still have a camera?” I had returned mine to M. Henri when the Germans had left my hotel. There was still a war going on in the rest of France, and the Resistance—now called FiFi; I had trouble remembering that—would need the equipment elsewhere.

“I have one Dierk gave me—and it still has a roll of film in it.” She reached under the bed and drew out a little camera, then pointed it at me. “Smile!”

“Oh, Yvette, no!”

“Smile! We will laugh at this one day.”

“At least let me put on clothes.”

“No.”

I covered my crotch. She snapped a photo.

“Now your turn. Take one of me.”

She thrust the camera toward me, then put her hands on her hips like Betty Grable and gave a big cheesecake smile. I snapped the button.

“Good! And now do you know what time it is?”

Her enthusiasm and energy was wearing me out.

“Non.”

“It is time to try on
des chapeaux
!”

“Hats!” This, I realized, could be our saving grace.

“Yes. Gerhard and Dierk bought me several.”

“But I cannot work in a hat,” I said somberly, realizing the gravity of my situation. The hotel was not likely to take kindly to a maid being
une femme tondue
.

“No, but you can wear a kerchief under your maid's cap.”

“I don't know why, but I saved some of my hair,” I confessed.

“What? Where?”

“In my brassiere.” I reached in and pulled out a wad of hair.

Yvette looked at the hair in my palm, her eyes thoughtful. With her hair gone, her eyes looked larger than ever. “We will cut it and glue it to ribbons. It will look like wisps around your temple and neck, and with a hat or kerchief, no one will know the difference.”

“Oh, I think they will,” I said dryly. “I live in a dormitory. I cannot wear the same kerchief night and day.”

“As long as you can look respectable in public, Ammie, I am sure they will let you keep your job.”

“I am not so sure.”

“They will need you. But just in case: what do you know about the supervisor that could get her into trouble?”

“I know that she likes to tipple whiskey all day.”

“That is good, but not enough. What else?”

“I believe that she and a night guard are having an affair in vacant rooms.”

“Non! Really?”

I nodded. “I saw them come out of an unoccupied room a few weeks ago, and she gave me an overly elaborate explanation.”

“Perfect! If she threatens to fire you, you get her alone and tell her that you would discourage her from that course of action, unless she wants her supervisor to learn about her tippling and twiddling.”

“I couldn't!”

“You could, and you will.” Her voice held a stern note of resolve. “You will do what you need to do. Isn't that how we have survived so far?”

She was right. I could—and I would—do whatever needed to be done.

2016

I
frown at Amélie in the fading afternoon light. “So . . . your head was shaved when you met Jack?”

“It had grown back quite a bit by then.”

“But how?” By my calculations, she must have conceived the baby by August or September. “When did you meet him?”

“It was in June 1945.”

“No. That cannot be right.” I have done the math, over and over. All the same, I recheck my calculations in my head, then lean forward. “So . . . you're admitting the baby wasn't his?”

“I admit nothing. To admit is to acknowledge some kind of wrongdoing, is it not?”

“But you lied about the baby!”

“To you? Non. I did not lie.”

Anger flows through me like hot lava. “You most certainly did! You sashayed into Wedding Tree, claiming that you and Jack were married and had a baby.”

“I said no such thing. I said nothing.”

Oh, my stars—it had been
Jack.
Of course it was. He was the one who'd told me, who'd told my parents—who'd told everyone that the baby was his. “But why? Why would Jack lie?”

“You have interrupted before I could get to that part.”

“But the baby . . . if it was not Jack's, whose was it?”

“Whose do you think?”

“Joshua's?”

“Alas, no.” Amélie sinks back into the chair, as if her spine has shrunk. She suddenly seems small and weary and old. “I went to the Red Cross and asked, many times, if they had news of him. Years later, after I came to America, I learned that his name was among those of the many Jews exterminated at Auschwitz.”

“I am sorry.” And I am. If Joshua had lived, she would have left Jack alone. “But . . . if it wasn't Joshua, and it wasn't Jack, who was the baby's father? Were you carrying on with someone you haven't told me about?”

“No. I was carrying on, as you call it, with no one. But I've told you about the father.” She straightens and gives me a little smile. She is enjoying this! I want to jump up and throttle her.

“One of the head shavers?”

“Oh, no, no, no.” She shakes her head.

“Then who?”

She pauses a long moment, so long I fear I am going to have to endure a lengthy guessing game. “Dierk.”

“Dierk?” I scrunch my forehead in a frown. “You had an affair with . . .” It dawns on me as I am saying it. “Wait.
You are not the mother?
”

“Not the birth mother, no. Elise was Yvette's child.”

“Oh, my God in heaven!” My head reels. I have never been struck across the face, but I imagine this is how it must feel. I am stunned. It was right there in Amélie's story, but I'd believed something else to be true for so many decades that my mind refused to bend around this new information. “So Jack . . .” My thoughts swirl like water in a flushing toilet. “He knew all along that the baby was not his?”

“Of course.”

“But he said it was his! Was that because he thought the baby was yours?”

“At first. But not when he told you.” She glances at her watch, then slowly stands. “It is getting late. I think you should come back tomorrow.”

She is going to end our conversation
now
—when we are finally getting to the part I care about? “No! I've waited my whole life for this information.”

“That is not my problem.” Amélie is now on her feet, looking down at me. “We will talk more tomorrow. I am very tired.”

I can't believe she will just stop her story now. I am so angry and frustrated I want to stamp my foot. I stand and reach for my cane. “This is an outrage.”

“I said I would talk to you on my terms. And my terms are that we are calling it a day.”

Why does
she
get to make the rules? It is patently unfair. “I will be back in the morning.”

“I am sure you will.”

I reluctantly make my way to the door. “Don't you dare die in the night,” I say, giving her my most authoritative glare.

Amélie gives me a weary smile. “I lived through the war, did I not?” She opens the door and holds it for me. “Good evening.”

The door closes behind me the very moment I cross the threshold, so quickly it is almost rude. I hobble down the hallway, fumbling in my purse for my cell phone. I finally find it and punch in the number one, the number my great-granddaughter programmed that would signal her to come pick me up.

2016

I
open the door at eight o'clock the next morning and there is Kat. I have not slept well. The old days have been piling on me like hay bales in a barn. “Back again, I see.”

She gives me her wide-eyed beauty queen look. “You never doubted I would come, did you?”

I had not—not for a second. But for some reason, I don't want to give her the satisfaction of saying so. I lift my shoulders. “You could have changed your mind.”

“Why? Because I don't want my ears worn out before you tell me what I want to know?”

Mon Dieu, but she is hard to be nice to! And here I have made up my mind to be kinder. I lay awake last night berating myself for not being more empathetic, more understanding.

“Actually, I thought that perhaps you wouldn't want to spend a second day in my company.” It is hard to admit it—I have trouble with admissions, it seems—but I knew I was being difficult yesterday. I was not getting what I wanted from her, and that made me resentful. It also made me furious with myself; why am I seeking anything from this woman?

And what is it that I want from her? Understanding, I suppose. Understanding and forgiveness. Haven't I learned, in my ninety-three years on earth, to depend on no one's opinion but my own? Apparently not. Alas,
we are all doomed to want the validation of others, up until we draw our very last breath.

“I came because I need to know what happened,” she says stiffly.

“I know. And you deserve the truth.”

She looks at me as if it is a trick. Being nice to her is a strategy that throws her for a loop, I see. Perhaps I should have tried it sooner.

“Come in, come in.” I step back and hold the door wide. “Would you like a coffee? Or a tea?”

“Some water would be nice.”

I go to the kitchen and pull a glass from the cabinet.

“Don't you have bottled water?” she asks.

Bottled water? When fresh clean water flows from a tap? How silly. Besides, she has cancer anyway. “No. Sorry.”

All the same, I put ice in her glass—Americans always like their ice—and I use the filtered water from the refrigerator door, although the tap is faster. As I turn to head back to the living room, I see that she has settled in my chair.

I swallow back a burst of resentment. I offered her the chair to start with yesterday, had I not?

“I hope you don't mind,” she says. “My back is a bit sore from the couch.”

Of course I mind, when she puts it as a criticism of my sofa's comfort. Who on earth wouldn't? I blow out a little sigh. “Not at all,” I lie, and move my coffee cup from the side table by the chair to the coffee table in front of the sofa.

“I could not sleep last night, thinking of how you deceived us about that baby.”

Now that I look at her closely, I realize that she is fairly bristling with outrage. There is no use in pointing out that I had not deceived her; Jack had. “If you are angry now, you are only going to get angrier,” I say. “Perhaps you should just go.”

“No. Please.” For a moment, she looks sincere—like a real person, with real emotions, not an image she is carefully curating for consumption. “I am just shocked that things are so different from how I always thought they were.”

“I understand.” I take a sip of my coffee. “Shall I continue?”

“Yes. Please do.”

I settle on the sofa in the place I used to sit with Jack. I always sat on the right-hand side; Jack used to sit in the middle, beside me, with his arm slung across the back, his hand on my shoulder. Oh, how I miss the weight of his hand!

I close my eyes, letting the memories come. Time seems a thing that goes in circles instead of steadily moving forward. I let it pull me around and back, and then I start talking.

1945

The days after the liberation were, for me, worse than the war. As a shorn woman, I constantly kept my head covered and lived in fear of humiliation.

I believe that actual prostitutes had it better than I, because they had each other for support. The SS and Wermacht had commandeered twenty-two well-known brothels, such as Le Chabanais—it was a favorite of Goering during the war, and before that, King Edward VII had been a regular customer. The Germans would pay a sum equal to a senior officer's weekly pay for just one visit, plus they brought chocolates and champagne and cigarettes to their favorite girl, to maintain the illusion of decorum.

When I went back to the dormitory at my hotel the day of our shaving, I wore one of Yvette's dresses with a belt tightly cinched around my waist—she was taller and bigger in every way than me—and a little cloche on my head. I did not look too bad in street clothes. We had taken the hair I had saved, cut it into short strands, and glued it to two ribbons—one for me, one for Yvette. We had then carefully glued extra ribbons over them, and stitched them into place—then tied the ribbons around our head, letting little tendrils be exposed at our temples and the backs of our necks. It looked as if our hair was simply hidden under our hats.

We laughed at how Yvette looked as a brunette. It was a dramatic change for her.

The effect of the faux tendrils was not as convincing in the maid's cap I had to wear with my uniform. Also, since I had never before worn a kerchief over my dark curls, it was only natural that the other girls wanted to know why I was suddenly sporting one under my cap. I told the story Yvette and I had concocted; we had gone to a hair salon to celebrate the liberation with a new hairstyle, and we had tried one of the new permanent waves. The results, alas, had been disastrous, so awful that for the next few months, I would be wearing hats and kerchiefs.

I had to tell my story over and over. I could tell that people didn't believe me. For one thing, my hair had already been curly. Why would I want a permanent wave? I could tell that the hotel workers were all whispering about me behind my back.

Sure enough, as I had feared, my supervisor called me aside about a week later. One of my roommates, it seems, had peeked under my kerchief while I slept, and the report of my bald pate had made the rounds of the hotel staff and reached her ears. She insisted I remove my kerchief and let her see my head. I protested, but exposed my shorn scalp—by now covered with about a quarter-inch of dark stubble—all the same.

“I am sorry, Amélie, but I will have to let you go for moral turpitude.”

“I have not been immoral!” Tears filled my eyes. Now that the war was over, it seemed I cried at the least little thing. It humiliated me that I was so unexpectedly at the mercy of my emotions. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that's all, and I was mistaken for someone I am not.”

She waved her hand. “It does not matter whether I believe you or not. We cannot have une femme tondue working at this hotel.”

I took my lead from Yvette's handling of the employee elevator operator.

“Mme Hortense, if you find it necessary to fire me for moral reasons, I am afraid I will find it necessary to report to the hotel manager that I saw you and the night watchman leaving an unoccupied room together, looking quite disheveled, in the middle of your shift.”

She gasped. “There—there is no way he would believe you.”

“I would also find it necessary to report that your breath smells of whiskey first thing in the morning and all throughout the day, getting
stronger as the afternoon progresses. All he would have to do is check for himself.”

“I—I do not know what you are talking about.”

“I think you do. And I also think that it would be in the best interests of both of us to each keep our own counsel. I will look for another position and leave this hotel as soon as I can. I expect an impeccable recommendation from you.” I abruptly turned and went back to work.

Yvette's hotel evicted her the very next day.

“But my room is paid for through the end of the month!” she argued with the manager, a short, balding man who wore a gold chain prominently stretched across his vested suits.

“We do not rent to Germans or collaborateurs,” was the reply.

“That's easy to say now, when you have Americans and British soldiers to fill the rooms. You had no trouble serving Germans and their women for the last four years.”

He lifted his double chins. “You must move out by noon tomorrow.”

“Then give me a refund.”

“There is no record of any money ever being paid.”

Yvette was certain that Dierk had not lied to her, but there was nothing to be done. She used the last of the money from Dierk to rent a little dump of an apartment and to buy us two black-market wigs, which, while not especially natural looking—the hair was very black and very straight, as if it had come from Asians—at least allowed us to be seen in public and find employment.

With the dark, straight, identical hair—it refused to hold a curl, although we tried and tried—we did look more like sisters. A Mutt and Jeff pair of sisters, perhaps, but sisters all the same.

I helped her lug all of her belongings—including the enormous boxes of baby formula—to the apartment. She had been clever in getting Gerhard and Dierk to buy things for her, so she had plenty of shoes and clothing, and even some jewelry that she could sell. I found a job at another hotel the following week, so I left the dormitory and moved in with her. Yvette got a job in a milliner's shop. She wrote her aunt again with our new address, asking for passage to America and promising prompt repayment.

She checked the mail every day. We knew that the mail was not reliable; Paris was still in shambles and France was still at war. But we did not lose hope. We talked often about what we would do in America.

Yvette planned to fashion herself as a young widow. No one need ever know that the father of her child had not been her husband—indeed, had not been French. In America, her child would have the best of opportunities.

Food was still rationed—everything was scarce in those days. The Red Cross provided some much-needed food for French civilians. The war raged on in eastern France as the Allies fought their way toward Germany. Yvette and I alternated our work schedules so that we could take turns standing in line for groceries. In the evenings we cooked in our single pot and hand-sewed baby clothes and maternity clothes. Yvette insisted on cutting down some of her dresses to fit me.

She repeatedly urged me to go out in the evenings. “You might meet a nice American,” she told me.

Indeed, that seemed to be the hope of most single Frenchwomen in those days—to meet an American who would whisk her away to the land of plenty. Due to the wig and my slow-growing hair, I had no desire to meet a man. I was ashamed of the way I looked, afraid of having my wig discovered. What if a man put his fingers in my hair? I wanted to hide away and be invisible. I was quite content to stay home in the evenings with Yvette.

For her part, Yvette managed to hide her pregnancy for many months. Both of us were clever with a needle, and together we found ways to drape and layer her clothes to disguise her burgeoning belly.

All the same, near the end of her seventh month, her boss took her aside.

“Yvette, the time has come for you to stay in the back room. Your condition is inappropriate for a shopgirl.”

Yvette did not even try to dissemble. “How long have you known?”

“About as long as I've known that you wear a wig,” she said, not unkindly. “Surely your own hair is getting long enough now to reveal?”

I didn't think it was yet time to toss the wig—my hair still looked
awfully short and boyish—but Yvette insisted we go to a salon near one of the expensive brothels. We were afraid to trust our obviously shorn hair to anyone who might want to take further vengeance against us, and we hoped that a hairstylist who catered to high-level prostitutes would not be shocked by a femme tondue patron.

We emerged with short, sassy hair such as that worn by movie star Jane Wyman. “The trick is to wear bright lipstick and fashionable clothes, and look as if we are the cutting edge of fashion,” Yvette said. Indeed, if it weren't for her enormously pregnant belly, Yvette would have resembled Marilyn Monroe with her shorter hairdo.

“How does it feel to be blond again?” I asked her.

She tossed her head. “
Merveilleuse!
”

I, too, felt much lighter and freer. But I felt so much trepidation about going to work the first time without my wig that I continued to wear it for several weeks. I need not have worried; when I finally went to work sporting my real hair, my coworkers simply exclaimed over how much more attractive I looked.

Yvette grew larger and larger, and more and more uncomfortable. The only medical care we could afford was a midwife, a large woman with leathery skin who was not what I would call sympathetic.

“Who is the father?” she'd asked, when she'd come to see Yvette a month before she was due.

“A soldier.”

She'd palpated Yvette's stomach so roughly Yvette had winced. “Was he a large man?”

“Yes.”

“I figured as much,” she muttered. “No doubt a Boche.”

“I don't see why that matters,” Yvette said.

“The Boches have huge babies. It is hard for Frenchwomen to bear them. Take off your underwear and lie down.” Yvette meekly did as she said. The woman yanked up Yvette's skirt and roughly stuck three fingers inside her. I was appalled that she didn't bother to wash her hands first.

“Ow!” Yvette yelped.

“Oh, so you're a whiner, hmm?”

“No, I—I just . . . You didn't tell me what to expect.”

“I bet you always knew what to expect from the Boches.” She pulled out her fingers, her lips curled in a smirk.

I disliked the woman immensely. “There was no need to hurt her,” I said.

“Hurt her? Ha! Wait until labor begins. This was nothing.” She wiped her fingers on her skirt and turned to Yvette. “Your womb, it is still closed up tight. No baby for a while. Another month.”