The French War Bride (38 page)

1946

B
y the time we arrived in Baton Rouge, we were both as frayed as worn washcloths. It took us nearly three days to get there. We slept in a regular public Pullman car with bunk beds. Jack was pale and had dark circles under his eyes. Elise was still ill, but better, better enough to squirm and whine and generally be difficult. I was so tired that I felt as though I were sleepwalking when I was awake, and when I was asleep, I still felt half awake.

Jack's demeanor toward me was cold verging on icy. He was distant but polite except when dealing with Elise. When it came to her, he was caring and tender and warm. He barely talked to me, except when conversation was essential. At dinner, he might say, “pass the salt, please,” but my attempts at conversation—including benign comments about the scenery—went largely unanswered. He had little appetite. I was worried that perhaps he was coming down with Elise's illness.

As Baton Rouge neared, I sensed a growing nervousness about him. “What do you want Elise and me to do when we disembark?” I asked. “Should we pretend we don't know you?”

His look cut me to the quick. “Is your first reaction always one of deception?”

My face heated. “You know that is not true.”

“Do I?”

I bristled. “Yes, but it makes you feel better to think the worst of me. I was simply thinking of Kat's feelings. It might be a worse shock for her to see us together before you have a chance to explain things to her.”

“She won't think we're together. She'll think you're simply a fellow traveler I'm helping off the train.”

“And once we're off the train? Should Elise and I just stand beside you?”

I think he finally saw my point. “No. Just . . . just step aside or have a seat on a bench or something and let me talk to her.”

The porter called out the approaching stop. We gathered our suitcases and belongings. My heart roared in my ears like the train wheels on the tracks.

The brakes screeched as the train ground to a halt. I peered out the window, looking for a young woman. I didn't see her until I actually stepped off the train, Jack right behind me.

When I did, my stomach felt as if I'd swallowed a cannon ball. She was a beautiful blonde with perfectly coiffed shoulder-length hair, wearing an immaculate white wool coat. I couldn't imagine the luxury of a white coat! She looked like a movie star or beauty queen as she raced toward Jack.

So this was Kat. Oh, mon Dieu, what an exquisite creature! I caught a smile as wide and bright as sunshine and a whiff of soft perfume. Jack set down the suitcases—mine and his—as she hurled herself at him. He caught her, and she clung to him so tightly—or perhaps the clinging was mutual, it was hard for me to tell—that her feet left the ground. He set her down quickly, then averted his face as she aimed her lips at his.

“Oh, Jack, don't be so shy!” she said, laughing.

I was suddenly, acutely aware of my rumpled clothes, my unstyled hair, the general griminess of having spent three days on a train. Next to Kat, I felt like a hobo.

Elise squirmed and whimpered. I needed her bag, which Jack had carried off the train. As surreptitiously as possible, I edged close and picked it up. Kat's gaze flew to me, her eyes widened with alarm.

“Thank you,” I murmured in Jack's general direction, and walked away, as if he were a polite stranger who had aided me because I was traveling with an infant.

I sat on a bench on the far side of the depot, my heart pounding, my breath hard to catch. I tried not to watch them, but my eyes were drawn to them like a sore tooth draws the tongue.

2016

I
set down my teacup and lean forward on the sofa. After all these years, you'd think my insides wouldn't boil like reheated coffee whenever I think of that day, but there it is again—that hot, acidic churning.

“When you took the bag from Jack,” I say, “I thought you were a Gypsy. I'd never seen one, but I'd heard of them—dark-haired, foreign-looking thieves who frequented crowds and used babies and strange clothing as distractions.”

Amélie gives me an indulgent smile—the kind you might give a small child or a mentally impaired person who has committed a faux pas, but can't be held accountable. “I realized you thought I was stealing.”

“I did. But then you said ‘Thank you' and Jack kind of nodded, so I figured he'd helped you off the train and the bag was yours.”

“Yes.”

“After you walked away, it was as if no one else was in the train station except for me and Jack. I had waited so long for him to come home, and finally, there he was.”

I close my eyes and remember.

1946

He stepped back and I just gazed at him, my heart unfurling and billowing like the sail of a boat. He was still so handsome—so incredibly
handsome!—but he was different than I remembered. His body was harder and leaner, his face more somber. His cheeks had hollows I didn't recall, and lines radiated out from around his eyes. I thought,
He looks like a man who has been through a war
, and of course that was exactly right.

I tried to kiss him again—or, more accurately, get him to kiss me—but he averted his face. That was the moment I knew for certain that something was horribly, terribly wrong. He wasn't avoiding kissing me just because we were in public. There was another reason—something serious, something sinister. The sense of dread I'd had from the phone call coiled like a snake in my stomach. “What is it, Jack?”

“We need to talk.”

Oh, my Lord. Are there any four more terrifying words in the English language?

I grabbed his arm. “Is it Daddy? Is he gone?”

Even as I said it, I realized the question made no sense. Jack had been on a train; how could he have received word before me? And yet it was the only thing I could think of that could have caused that expression on his face. Then I remembered his own mother was ill. That was of far less priority to me than the health of my father—and in my mind, I'd assumed it would be less important in Jack's mind, too—but maybe I had misjudged. “Is it your mother?” Again, as I spoke, I realized it made no more sense than the question about Daddy.

“You would have more current information about both of them than I. How were they when you left this morning?”

“Fine. I mean, unchanged, as far as I know. So what's wrong? Why do you look so grim?”

“Come and sit down, Kat.”

The fact he said my name . . . So funny that it only now occurred to me that Jack seldom used my name when talking to me. My insides turned to ice. “I don't want to sit down.” All the same, I was clinging to his arm and my knees were shaking. I let him lead me to an empty bench and I perched on the edge of it. He sank down heavily beside me.

“You're scaring me, Jack. What's this about?”

“It's about us.”

My stomach just plummeted. My mouth went dry.

“I have to tell you something very difficult.”

“No.” I shook my head. I was vaguely, ridiculously aware that it made my curls bounce on my shoulders in a way I had practiced in front of the mirror. I wasn't doing it now to be fetching; I simply wanted him to stop talking.

“I've been hiding something.” The words were heavy, as if they were made of lead. “I should have told you this when it first happened, but I didn't know how. I didn't want to just write or call—I wanted to tell you in person—but, well, I shouldn't have waited.”

He'd been unfaithful—that's what this was about. I knew it, knew it in my soul. Inexplicably, a wave of relief rolled over me. I could deal with this. If I didn't have details, if it happened overseas and in the past, I could pretend it never happened at all. I put my hand on his arm. “It's okay, Jack. Whatever you did during the war—you don't need to confess. I don't want to know. I forgive you, whatever it is. Let's just put it behind us and move on as if it never happened. Please don't tell me.”

“I have to.”

“No, Jack. I'm fine with whatever you did.”

“I married someone else.”

The words did not make sense. They were foreign, alien, unlike anything I expected to hear. He might as well have been speaking Swahili. “What?”

“I'm married. And . . . and I have a child.”

I have never been so shocked, so stunned, so utterly unsure I could trust my own hearing in all my life. “Is this a joke? Because it's not funny.”

“It's not a joke, Kat.”

I swatted at his arm, trying but failing to be playful. “Stop this nonsense, and stop it right now.” I sounded like my mother. It was what she used to say when I persisted in mischief as a child.

“I'm telling you the truth.”

I suddenly felt as if I might lose my lunch. And yet, I still didn't entirely believe him. “If you're married and have a child, where are they? Back in France?” My mouth was a Teletype machine, spewing words as soon as they hit my mind. “That's very far away. And when you were
there—it was like another lifetime. No one here need know. You can just leave them behind and we'll go on with the wedding as planned, and later you can hire an attorney or someone in France, and if we need to, we'll remarry privately somewhere to make it all perfectly legal, and . . .”

“They're not in France,” Jack cut in. “They're here.”

“Here?” I pointed down to the floor. “
Here
here? Here in the station?”

He nodded. I stood and whirled around, looking, I suppose, for someone who resembled me. I rotated in a complete 360-degree circle. After a process of elimination, my gaze landed on the little Gypsy with the sick-looking baby.

I stared—bug-eyed, no doubt, like a cartoon character. Her gaze met mine, then she quickly looked down at the baby. “Her?” I pointed, although Mother had taught me that pointing is rude. “You jilted me for
her
?”

“I didn't mean to hurt you, Kat.” Jack was on his feet beside me. “It just happened.”

“It just
happened
?” Rainstorms happen. Car accidents, coffee spills, broken fingernails happen. Sexual attraction, even affairs can happen. But marriage? It requires a proposal, a decision, some kind of wedding.

I stared at the Gypsy. She looked so rumpled, so drab, so incredibly plain. She rose from the bench and carried the baby some distance away. She was tiny. Maybe not even five feet tall.

“Why, Jack?”

“I'm sorry, Kat.” His face was the very picture of misery. “I hate that I've hurt you.”

The full implications of this situation started to sink in. Hurt? I would be more than hurt; I would be humiliated. I would have to call off the elaborate wedding I'd been crowing about for a year and a half—and everyone in town would know why. “Oh, my God. How will I hold my head up? What will I tell people? I'll be a laughingstock. People will feel
sorry
for me!” I, who had always been admired and envied, would be
pitied
! It was an unbearable thought. “I can't believe this.”

“I know it must be a shock.”

Shock didn't begin to describe it. Another reaction was edging in as
the dominant emotion—something darker and heavier and more dangerous. Anger. Outrage. Fury. “Why? Why the hell did you marry her? Why couldn't you just fuck her like every other man probably has?”

I'd never heard his voice so steely. “That's enough, Kat.”

I realized I was practically yelling, that I was creating a spectacle. People were staring. I didn't care.

“It's not enough. You jilted me for a French whore and expect me to just be quiet about it?”

He grabbed my arm. “I will not stand for you talking about her that way.”

“You can't stop me. How do you know the child is even yours?”

“It's mine.”

“How do you know?”

He stepped close. His voice was low, as ominous as thunder. “Amélie was untouched when I married her.”

Amélie. Hearing her name was a knife to my gut. “Untouched, my ass!”

He grabbed my wrist and pulled me close, his mouth next to my ear. “I am a doctor. I know these things. And if you spread lies about her virtue, well, I can do the same about yours.”

I gasped. Was he threatening me? Yes, he was! He was threatening to say he didn't marry me because I was impure.

“You wouldn't!”

“I wouldn't want to.”

“It would be a lie!”

“So would anything you have to say about Amélie.”

I felt as if I'd been slapped. “My God, Jack, you've changed. You're not the man I thought I was going to marry.”

“That's true,” he said. “You should be glad you dodged that bullet.”

I started to cry. He took my arm and urged me to sit back down. “Look, Kat—it was never my intention to hurt you or your family. I have behaved in a manner unbecoming a gentleman, and you have my deepest apologies. I bear all blame and responsibility.”

“You damn sure do!”

“I wronged you. You have every right to be angry. But be angry at me, not at Amélie. Do not take it out on her or my child.”

“Your child!” A sob left my throat. “Do you have any idea how it pains me to hear you say that?”

“I wish to God I'd handled this differently.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it into my palm. “I asked you to meet me here so I could tell you before we arrive in Wedding Tree. I wanted to give you advance warning.”

“Wow, isn't that just swell of you!”

“I hope to spare you all the embarrassment I can. I'm the one who bears all the blame. I know that, and I accept it.”

A train rolled in just then on the opposite track, loud and clanging, the brakes hissing. “That is our train to Wedding Tree. Amélie and I must get on it.”

“You and your little family are just going to roll into Wedding Tree and act as if I don't exist?”

“I will never forget that you exist, Kat. I will never get over the shame and regret of treating you this way. Believe me, this is not easy for me, either.”

I stared at him. “I hate you.”

“I understand.”

“I loathe you, I detest you. I wish I'd never set eyes on you.”

“I understand.” He gathered the bags and started across the station toward her.

I didn't mean to, but I found myself running after him. I put my hand on his arm. “Just tell me this—did you ever love me?”

His blue eyes were dark as troubled water. “No matter what I say, the opposite answer is likely to make this easier for you. And so, Kat, I will simply say good-bye.”

And with that, he headed toward the little Gypsy and the baby. She rose and walked with him to a train car. The porter took his luggage, then Jack took her elbow and helped her up the steps onto the train.