The French War Bride (27 page)

2016

S
o marrying you—it bothered Jack's conscience?”

“Yes. He was very conflicted.”

“Good.” My spirits soar—until a detail of her story reins them in. “You said he kissed you like a man kisses a woman he desires.”

“Yes.”

“But you forced the kiss.”

“I leaned in, that is all.”

“Yes, well, Jack would have felt pressure to act appropriately. And he hadn't kissed a woman in over a year, so of course he was going to be receptive. He was only human, after all. Man is first and foremost an animal.”

Amélie's expressive eyebrows rise. “Is that what you think?”

I smooth my hair. “Well, my father was a doctor, and he always said that man's basic instincts are the same as those of any mammal.”

“Is that so?” She gives a small smile. “You never told me about when Jack first kissed you.”

“Ah. It was after the high school homecoming dance. Jack bought me a corsage—six hothouse roses.”
Unlike the single rose in your wedding nosegay
, I think with an edge of triumph. “It was my first formal dance. I wore a blue dress with a full tulle skirt and a sweetheart neckline, and Jack said I looked like a princess.” I had felt like a princess that night. I had spent the whole day getting ready.

“On the way to the dance, Jack told me that he was going to graduate from high school that December—that he'd been accepted into the army's accelerated training program for college, and that he would have completed all the required high school courses at the end of the semester. It almost ruined things for me, knowing he would be leaving sooner than I had thought. I was irritated that he had chosen what should have been a perfect night to give me bad news.

“The dance was wonderful, though. I felt so beautiful in my dress, so proud to be on Jack's arm.

“When the dance ended, he walked me to my front door. I looked up at him expectantly. Sure enough, he leaned down and pulled me close, and then, well—it was wonderful. The fact we'd waited so long made the kiss all the sweeter. I could have kissed him all night long, but he ended it all too soon.

“I floated up to my bed and replayed it in my head, dreaming of the next time we would kiss, deliberately avoiding thinking about the fact he would be leaving in less than three months' time.”

Amélie tilts her head. “Sounds like a scene from a teenaged movie.”

I am afraid that there is some hidden snideness in her remark, but I can't find it. “Yes, it was.” I need to get her talking again. “I am sorry I interrupted. Did you see Jack again before he left?”

“No. The next time we met was in New York.”

“Tell me about it.”

“In due course. First I must tell you about the trip over.”

I do not care about that, but Amélie is determined to tell this in her own way. I squash my impatience and settle back for another long story.

1946

N
ora had tears in her eyes as she stood with me at the train station two weeks later. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“I'm worried that you never heard from Yvette's aunt and uncle.”

I was, too, but I wouldn't admit it. The mail was still unpredictable. “I will send you back your ring. I will send it through more reliable means than the mail, however.”

“I want you to keep it. Sell it, if you need to. It is yours. I give it to you with no strings attached.”

My eyes filled with tears. I grasped her hands. “Will you be all right?”

“Yes. I am thinking that I might apply for a job at the milliner's shop where Yvette worked.”

“Oh, you would be very good at that!”

“I think I would enjoy it.”

“You have been like a mother to me—and to Yvette, and Elise. I don't know what any of us would have done without you.”

“It was my pleasure.”

“You must to come visit me, once I get settled.”

“Yes. Or perhaps you will bring Elise back for a visit.”

“Oh, I most definitely want to do that.”

We hugged. We were both crying. Elise started to cry, too, and that was the thing that pulled us through—tending to her.

A lady with a Red Cross armband raised her hand.

“That is our escort,” I told Nora. “She's signaling that it's time to go.”

Nora smiled bravely. “Off with you, then. You and Elise will have a wonderful new life. God bless and bon voyage!”

“Merci. Au revoir!” With a final hug, I took Elise from her arms, gathered up my purse and diaper bag, and boarded the train.

I was traveling with a group of other officers' wives to Le Havre, where we would board the ship. The Red Cross had organized the entire trip. The representative helped me with my luggage and showed me to the assigned railcar.

I sank into a seat beside a young woman with blond hair. “Oh, what a beautiful baby,” she said, holding out her finger to Elise.

“Thank you.” I had gotten better at claiming credit for Elise's beauty, because that was what people seemed to want from me.

“How long has it been since you've seen your husband?” she asked.

“Two weeks.”

“Oh, you're so lucky! I haven't seen mine in seven months.”

“Seven months!”

“Yes. And he hasn't seen me like this.” She cast a rueful look at her pregnant belly. “Was that your mother?”

It took me a moment to realize she meant Nora. “No. She was a neighbor. My mother died during the war.”

“I'm so sorry to hear it.”

“Yes.”

You must live in Paris, since a neighbor came to see you off.”

“Yes. And you?”

“Near Marseilles. My name is Heloise Bradley.”

I introduced myself, as well.

“I came to Paris yesterday,” Heloise said. “The Red Cross put me up in a hotel.” She smiled. “I'd never been to Paris before. I wish I'd had more time here to see the sights. I was glad the Eiffel Tower was not bombed.”

“We were mostly spared the bombs,” I said.

“Did you meet your husband in Paris?” she asked. “How long have you been married?”

I couldn't very well say just a few weeks—not with Elise. I decided to tell the Doug story, substituting Jack for Doug. “We met in Normandy, where I was staying with my aunt and uncle at their farm.”

“Oh, our ship sails from Normandy!” the girl said. “You'll have to tell me all about the area. Will you see your aunt and uncle?”

Oh, la! Right off the bat, I was about to be caught in a lie. “Non. They did not make it through the war.”

“I'm so sorry. Were they far from Le Havre?”

“Yes. They were out in the country.” I turned to the window and dabbed my eyes, hoping to discourage further conversation.

Heloise held her tongue for not quite a minute. “How did you meet your husband?”

I would need to remember whatever I told her, because I would probably have to repeat the story to many other brides on the ship. I decided to give few details and to stick close to Doug's story. “Jack became separated from his unit. My family hid him for ten days. We fell in love and became engaged, and later married in Paris.”

“Oh, how marvelous! A Paris wedding! Was it a big celebration?”

“No, very small. And you?”

“Oh, I met my Ronnie in November of '44, when the Americans landed in Marseilles. My friends and I were greeting the soldiers—giving them flowers, just letting them know how very happy we were to see them. I also handed out little thank-you notes with my name and address with my flowers. He was one of five soldiers who wrote me, and we started a correspondence. He got leave seven months ago, right after the war ended, and he came to meet my family—and, well, sparks just flew. He asked my father asked if he could marry me—it was funny, because his French is terrible, and my father didn't understand English; he thought Ronnie wanted to work for him!

“Anyway, we were married at the local courthouse. My mother cried that we didn't get married in a church, but she understood. I wore her
wedding dress. We honeymooned at a hotel in Nice—oh, it was so lovely! But it was only three days. That was all the leave extension we could get, and then he went back to the U.S. He's at Fort Benning. That's in Georgia. I can't wait to see him again!”

“How wonderful,” I said. “So you will live in Georgia?”

“Yes, until he musters out of the army. Do you know where you are going to live?”

“Yes. In New York City.”

“Oh, so you'll be home as soon as we disembark.”

“Yes.” Dear God, I hoped so. I would not admit, even to myself, how concerned I was about not hearing from Yvette's aunt. I feared we would not be welcome—or that they would welcome Elise, but not me.

I shoved the worries into a closet in my mind and locked the door. I would find a way to stay near to Elise, or I would die trying. In the meantime, I would deal with what must be done today to move forward.

—

It took more than three hours by train to get to Le Havre. Once there, the trip was not over. We were herded onto buses for transport to the Philip Morris camp near Gainneville, France. Built after the Normandy invasion as a staging areas for troops arriving in Europe, Philip Morris was one of several “Cigarette Camps” named after brands of American cigarettes. Now, it was used to process troops—and their brides—on the way back to the U.S. We were to be there a week, during which we would be given physicals and vaccinations, exchange our francs for U.S. dollars, and receive instructions about life in America.

It was an austere, treeless camp of Quonset huts and long, low buildings with pitched roofs. After standing in line and filling out even more paperwork for what seemed like forever, we were assigned to barracks. We slept in a Quonset hut lined with bunk beds, with a big coal stove in the middle. The women close to it were uncomfortably hot and the ones at the ends were freezing. Heloise and I managed to find bunks about halfway down—as close to ideal as possible. Our belongings were stashed at the end of our bunks.

The bathrooms were in a separate building. It was cold and damp and windy to get to it, and I pitied the pregnant women—who, if they were anything like Yvette, would need to make multiple nighttime trips.

We were told our bunkhouse was scheduled for the first seating for dinner, so we cleaned up and went to the dining hall.

There we found a pleasant surprise—delicious food. Lots and lots of it, too—more food than I had seen in ages. We were served meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy, along with green beans and bread and pudding. Our plates were served by stout Germans—apparently prisoners of war.

“Look how fat they are,” said a woman with curly red hair. “They've been eating American food while we've been barely surviving on rations. Hardly seems fair.”

It was hard not to feel bitter, especially after having seen the French prisoners of war returning from the German prison camps. I had seen some in Paris, getting off a train; they'd looked like walking skeletons, their arms the size of twigs, their cheeks so sunken their faces looked like skulls.

The Quonset hut mess hall was filled to capacity, and there were two other seatings. Six hundred brides, we learned, from all over France as well as Italy, Germany, Belgium, and who knows where else, were to sail on January 18.

“I've heard they're using luxury liners to transport some brides,” my new friend, who never seemed to shut up for a second, nattered on the next morning at breakfast. “But apparently we're not going to get one of those. We're sailing on a Liberty ship.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“A cargo ship. One built on an assembly line in the U.S., churned out in a matter of weeks during the war.”

“Well, as long as it stays afloat and crosses the Atlantic, it'll be good enough for me,” I said.

—

A week later, I was ready to eat those words. Eight women, plus Elise and two other babies, were crammed into a tiny cabin aboard the SS
Zebulon
B. Vance
. The room was built for no more than four, and most probably two. Heloise had arranged things so that she was rooming with me—I don't know why she gravitated to me, but she had, and as annoying as her constant chatter could be, it was good to have a familiar face.

There were four two-decker bunk beds in each cabin, so those of us with babies had to share our narrow mattress with our child. I was accustomed to sleeping with Elise, and she was now eight months old—but one of the women with a young infant was terrified of rolling over onto her child or having the baby fall out the bed. I took an upper berth—Elise would sleep against the wall, so I could make sure she did not fall—so that Heloise could have a lower bunk. The other two women with babies also took lower bunks: Lucia, an Italian from Naples who hardly spoke any French and only a little English, and Stephanie, a rail-thin brunette from Normandy, who seemed very shy and seldom said anything. A woman from Cannes, an extremely well dressed and pretty woman who radiated an aura of entitlement, claimed the last lower bunk without even questioning if one of the other women needed it.

The bathroom situation was nightmarish at the beginning, and that was when things were still clean. Instead of a bathroom for each room, which we heard the ocean liners provided, we made do with rows of toilets lined up in the hull of the ship—side by side, back-to-back, with no privacy whatsoever. The showers also had no privacy.

I double-diapered Elise at night, and yet we both still sometimes woke up soaked.

Food on the ship, like at the camp, was excellent and plentiful, but seasickness was so rampant that hardly anyone could eat it. We were all ill in varying degrees. As a cargo ship, the
Vance
did not have the ballast that passenger vessels had; consequently we were tossed and sloshed by every wave.

I was nauseous, but not as bad as poor Heloise. At first, she couldn't keep anything down. We went to see the Red Cross, and they told us we had to take care of each other in our room, that the infirmary was full.

I talked to a bride in another cabin who had worked as a nurse's aide during the war. “Tell her to go back to the infirmary again. She needs to
insist on getting an IV. It's very easy for pregnant women and babies to get dehydrated, which makes the vomiting worse. An IV is the only thing that will help.”

I escorted her back to the infirmary and insisted that she be treated. A nurse, somewhat reluctantly, gave her an IV, and Heloise perked up immediately.

The trip, which took only six to eight days on an ocean liner, was supposed to take twelve on a cargo ship like the
Zebulon B. Vance.
It ended up taking sixteen due to bad weather. The toilets stopped working about halfway across. The smell was beyond atrocious. By the end of the trip, we were wading through excrement to go to the bathroom.

Worst off were the small babies. Soon after we boarded, the Red Cross asked all the mothers to surrender their formula, so that they could handle mixing and heating the bottles.

“Don't do it,” I whispered to the two young mothers in my cabin. “You don't know how well they will sterilize things.” Stephanie heeded my warning, but Lucia either didn't understand me or was afraid to not follow orders.

As it turned out, I was right. Stephanie used her tea water to mix her baby's formula, as I did for Elise, since the tea water was boiled. Many of the other babies grew very ill.

Toward the end of the trip, Lucia's baby reached the point where she was practically unconscious. Her crying produced no tears. Lucia took her to the infirmary, and was sent away.

I insisted on accompanying them back there again while Stephanie watched Elise.

“I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do,” said the nurse in the small reception room.

“Yes, there is. This child is dehydrated and needs an IV immediately.” I headed for the door behind her.

“You can't go in there,” the nurse said, but I had already guided Lucia and her frail infant into the treatment room. It was crammed with women laying on cots or in chairs, many holding babies. “Where is the doctor?”

“He is busy.”

I saw a door marked “Doctor's Office
.
” Below it was a sign: “Do Not Enter.” I pushed it open anyway.

“Stop! You can't . . .”

But it was too late. I saw the doctor, his eyes closed, leaning back in his desk chair behind a desk littered with paperwork—but what drew my eye were three large ice coolers lined up against the wall, with six little lumps covered with pillowcases. One of them was not entirely covered; I stared at the little baby toes sticking out beneath it.

“Mon Dieu!” My hands flew over my mouth in horror.

Lucia, behind me, let out a sound that was half whimper, half cry.