The Paris Orphan

by Natasha Lester

  When he reached his room, he found Victorine in his bed, soundly sleeping, beside the newspaper, opened to the page with Jess’s latest report. He lay on top of the blankets, hands clasped behind his head, smiling up at the ceiling. He would send a telegram to I. Durant—to Jess—urging her to come to New York for the awards; she had to. And then he would tell her that he was free at last to do what he’d asked in Germany: to marry her.

  Thirty-three

  Dan went to the gathering of journalists at the Onyx Club on the Upper West Side feeling much less certain. He hadn’t heard a thing from Jess. Everybody at the club, awaiting the announcement of the award winners to come through while listening to Dizzy Gillespie sing a much-too-breezy song, asked him if his brilliant correspondent was there and he had to shake his head. Surely she would come? Surely she’d received his telegram? But why would she travel all that way for a rumor?

  The only thing he knew for sure was that he’d barely eaten all day, had consumed nothing other than coffee and whiskey and he felt himself to be a little unsteady on his feet as he made his way over to the bar with his father and Jennings, and several of his top reporters.

  They stood chatting for a while but Dan couldn’t concentrate. His gaze raked the room, landing only on familiar faces, his wife thankfully absent due to an illness that had left her with little appetite for the past couple of weeks.

  “So, you and Durant.” The Times editor slapped Dan on the back. “The odds are so slim in each of your categories that I’m not even betting.”

  “Excuse me,” Dan said, turning away too abruptly to be polite but needing to leave before he snapped. Who really knew which reporters the Pulitzer board was considering in any of the categories? Which is why it was ridiculous of him to imagine that Jess would come.

  He stepped outside onto 52nd Street and breathed in deeply. He should eat something. He should definitely not have anything more to drink. The thought evaporated as a scent reached his nose. His head spun from side to side and then, there she was, more breathtaking than ever in a long, full-skirted gown that reminded him of the dress she’d worn the night they’d danced at the chateau. But it was blue, the color of skies and oceans and impossible dreams, not the khaki color of war and death and their love.

  He couldn’t speak. He didn’t need to; everything he felt and thought was written plainly on his face.

  Jess slipped in beside him. “I don’t need to ask how you are,” she said softly.

  She’d obviously noticed that he was halfway to drunk and nervous as hell. He turned his body toward her so that he could see her face and discovered it was guarded in a way he’d never seen it before. What had happened over the past year?

  “I’ve never seen you in anything other than a uniform,” she said, a small smile touching her mouth. “The tuxedo suits you.”

  The reference to their past gave him hope. “I’ve been driving myself crazy with wondering if you’d come,” he said. “I’m not staying married to Amelia. She’s agreed to a divorce, after tonight. I don’t know what kind of man that makes me—someone who’d put his life on the line for any man in his battalion but someone who can’t stomach staying with a woman he’s injured—so perhaps you don’t want me anymore. But I love you, Jess. Those last days of the war messed with my head and made me think I had to save my men and that the only way to do that was to marry her. But I can only save myself. I want to be with you.”

  As he spoke, her eyes filled with tears which then trailed over her cheeks in delicate streams that he wanted to kiss away, to let her know that, from now on, there’d be nothing to cry about. He saw her guard crack and then fall, exposing what he knew to be true: that she hadn’t stopped loving him either. That the past year had been hell for her too.

  He reached for her hand but she wouldn’t let him have it. Instead she drew it up to her chest, her other hand clutching it, as if all she had to hold on to was herself.

  “I went to see Victorine this afternoon,” she said, her voice low. “I gather you haven’t been home or you’d have heard. She’s a wonderful child. I miss her so.” He heard her voice break on the last words and he again reached out for her, needing to draw her in to take away every hurt he’d inflicted on her but she refused to come any closer.

  His heart began to pound, and his whiskey-addled stomach to churn.

  “Amelia showed me out after I’d spent some time with Victorine. She said she’d been unwell. But it was an illness she was happy to celebrate. Morning sickness. You’re going to be a father. Congratulations.”

  The last word was desolate and this time she came into his arms gladly. He wrapped them around her and felt her cling to his back.

  “Once.” His voice was a kind of animal moan. “I slept with Amelia once. I didn’t think I would ever see you again. Victorine was unhappy and I wanted her, more than anything, to know what it was like to have a loving family. So I thought I’d try…” He couldn’t speak for a moment but made himself go on. He’d hurt Jess yet again so the least he could do was be man enough to confess. “It was awful. How could anything have come of it?”

  He felt her hold him more tightly, felt her forgiveness for him open up around him as she spoke into his chest. “But it did.”

  “It doesn’t change anything,” he insisted. But he knew it did. How could he give another child the instability of beginning its life without a family, like Victorine had had to endure? Amelia would never let him have their child if they divorced.

  “But this will.” He felt the effort it took for her to pull away, for her to speak while the tears were still wet on her cheeks.

  “You haven’t ever told Victorine about her parents, have you?” she asked.

  Dan shook his head emphatically. “I don’t plan to tell her. Perhaps when she’s grown up. But the last thing she needs right now is to know that she isn’t even related to me. That she’s the offspring of two French people whose names nobody knows.”

  “I thought Amelia knew about Victorine. She’s your wife so I just assumed…”

  Dan reached out and stroked Jess’s face. “I have had possibly a dozen conversations with Amelia. I’m married to her yes, but she’s not really my wife. She knows that. She knows we don’t have anything.”

  Jess drew in a sharp breath. “I think she would disagree with you. You see, I was watching Victorine skip away to have her bath and she looked so clean and grown up and different to the girl in Italy and in France that it just came out. I said, I wonder if her parents would recognize her if they were ever able to trace her? Amelia said that was obviously impossible because they were dead. And I said, unthinkingly, that I meant her real parents, not your brother and his wife. Her birth parents.”

  Dan’s stomach twisted brutally. “She said she’d tell Victorine, didn’t she?”

  Jess nodded. “Only if you divorce her.”

  He felt the locks snap shut. Amelia was carrying his child. Amelia would ruin Victorine if she told her that Dan wasn’t even her uncle, let alone her father.

  “Goddammit!” He swore loudly and pressed his fingers against his temples.

  Rather than talking about it more, rather than trying to help him work out a way to stop Amelia—as if she’d already given up—Jess stepped back and fumbled in her purse. “I have a favor to ask you.” She passed him a folded sheaf of typewritten papers.

  He read over her words about all the things she’d wanted to write about in Europe but that Warren Stone would have obliterated with blue censors’ ink. She’d even spoken to women in East Germany, some of the estimated three hundred thousand, she said, raped by packs of Russian soldiers, most women by more than one man.

  It was the best thing she’d ever written. Despite the fact that she wasn’t just singling out the U.S. Army, she’d be hated for writing it. He didn’t want anyone to hate her. He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t publish it. He shook his head.

  She gave a little shrug as if she’d expected him to refuse. Then she reached up and k
issed him gently, far too gently, on the lips. It was the lightest of touches, brushing against him the same way his thumb had swept over her back the night they’d danced at the chateau, but its effect was such that it almost brought him to his knees.

  When she drew away, she gave him the smile he remembered as being particularly and especially Jessica May’s. “One day, when your heart is mended, and you think of me, raise a glass for me, won’t you?” she said. “We’re worth remembering.”

  He stepped forward then, both hands on her tear-soaked cheeks, and his lips met hers far from gently. He felt her whole body sigh into him as she opened her mouth and kissed him the way she’d always done. As if she trusted him. As if she loved him. As if she was him. “This is not the end,” he whispered against her lips.

  She gave him a sad smile that seemed to say, Yes it is. Then she said, “Congratulations. You deserved to win,” before she disappeared.

  * * *

  He had no idea for how long he stood outside after Jess had gone. His father eventually found him and dragged him inside. The awards had been announced. His secretary was on the telephone at the club right now taking down the names of the winners of each category. And he vaguely heard, through the clamor in his head, his father say, “The right man won,” as Dan’s name was read out from the list. But not Monsieur Durant’s.

  Dan’s eyes focused then, taking in his father before him, taking in that especial emphasis on the word man. And Jess’s words. Congratulations. You deserved to win. Not you deserve to win as if it was something still in the future that hadn’t yet been decided. But as if it had already happened, or as if she knew the outcome.

  “You found out she was a woman,” he said to his father, his voice barely controlled, aware that all eyes were on him, wondering why he wasn’t smiling.

  “Your wife pointed out that Durant was not who he seemed. It’s preposterous, posing as a man,” Walter sniffed. “I informed some people of the deception.”

  “She didn’t pose. We all just assumed, because that’s what we do. Assume that anyone who does anything that makes a difference is a man.”

  “Pulitzers only go to men.”

  Dan looked at the papers in his hand, Jess’s story, the one he’d thought he wouldn’t publish for her sake, but now he knew that he would. He heard his name called again; he had to say something even though all he wanted to do was howl, loud enough that the windows might shatter, a loud and brutal noise that probably wouldn’t make him feel any better.

  Instead he pulled himself together, drew in a breath and, as the club quieted, began to speak. “Thank you. But I’m not accepting the prize money in my own name.”

  Dan felt his father’s glare on him as he continued. “I’m giving it to the people I’ve been writing about. I’m starting two endowment funds, one for the wounded and the damaged, for those who aren’t the same anymore. It will be called the Sparrow fund, in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow and their son. The money will be used for the men you’ll see on the streets tonight and who you might cross the road to avoid, and for the families of the men you won’t see because they are no longer with us. The second fund is for the women who fought in their own way, as bravely as any man, and who now make chicken dinners. It will be called the Jessica May Foundation, in honor of a woman I met in Europe who was lion-hearted.” He paused for a long moment, almost undone by his own words. But he owed it to Jess to keep going.

  “Jess wrote those stories, the ones you all admired,” he continued at last. “She is Monsieur I. Durant. She should be writing for any of us, under her own name. So this fund is for women artists and writers and photographers and its purpose is to enable them to do the work that we all do unthinkingly, that we’ve never had to fight or struggle to be allowed to do.”

  As he spoke, he heard the whispers. Of course most people suspected that he and Jess had done more than share a jeep in Europe. Journalists were the worst gossips and he was standing in a room full of them, naming a foundation after her.

  But he didn’t care. He had plenty of money and it was about time he did some good with it. About time he honored Jess the way she should be honored.

  As he spoke, he caught a glimpse of blue silk swirling like a furious ocean right down the back of the club, almost hidden from view. Shoulders emerging from the blue, shoulders he’d kissed and caressed and held and loved. Jess’s face. She smiled at him, raised her glass and mouthed the words I love you—three words she’d never said to him before, three words he’d only said to her once—before disappearing.

  * * *

  He left the club as soon as he could and was unsurprised to find Amelia waiting for him in his study at home.

  “I hear congratulations are in order,” he said stiffly.

  Amelia stroked her stomach, expertly robed and decorated, the facade of the poor maimed wife still holding. “I hoped you’d be glad.”

  He laughed mirthlessly and his hand stretched out for the whiskey decanter but he caught himself just in time and lit a cigarette instead. “Glad about your threat to tell Victorine about her parents or glad about the fact that I’ve realized my wife is such an expert in blackmail she should probably be a politician?”

  “The world is different now, Dan. You shot men in order to survive. At least my bullets aren’t deadly.”

  Oh, but they are, he wanted to say. Except that would make him vulnerable, would show Amelia that his heart was so raw right now it was a wonder it was still keeping him alive.

  “So there won’t be a divorce?” she asked and in her voice he heard the slightest quiver, as if she wasn’t sure, as if she was worried that, despite everything he’d done for Victorine, he would do no more.

  “There won’t be,” he said shortly, looking out the window, blowing smoke in a long, thin stream, knowing he couldn’t blame Amelia for becoming pregnant—he was certainly as much to blame for that as she was—but he could blame her for dragging Victorine into the whole damn mess and for making sure Jess didn’t get anything she deserved.

  He waited until he heard her leave. Then he sat down and poured himself a large whiskey. He remembered that last terrible question Jess had asked of him outside the club: One day, when your heart is mended, and you think of me, raise a glass for me, won’t you? We’re worth remembering.

  And his reply: This is not the end.

  “It’s not,” he repeated now, stubbornly. How could it be? How could what they had ever be finished, ever be over? It was a denouement, that was all. And he would wait all the rest of his life for the resolution.

  PART TWELVE

  Victorine

  Thirty-four

  The minute the artworks were handed over to the gallery, D’Arcy went straight to Victorine’s apartment. And as soon as she saw her mother, eyes the same sad, luminous blue they’d always been, face fearful, D’Arcy sank onto the sofa and swept Victorine into her arms. There was no question about whether Victorine was her mother; in every way that was important, she absolutely was, no matter if they shared no blood tie.

  “Will you tell me?” D’Arcy asked when she thought she could speak.

  “I think I’m overdue to tell you.” Victorine kissed D’Arcy’s cheek, folded her hands in her lap, hesitated, and then began to speak.

  * * *

  In October 1973, Victorine stepped off the train at the station in Reims and ran like a three-year-old—even though she was more than thirty years old—to Dan, flinging herself into his arms. They embraced for a long, long moment. When at last they drew away, Victorine openly wiping her eyes, Dan surreptitiously doing the same, Victorine laughed.

  “Needless to say, I missed you,” she said.

  “And I missed you.” He kissed her forehead. “I’m glad you could get away.”

  They’d been planning this for a year so that everyone’s busy schedules could align—Victorine was publishing director of a French magazine conglomerate and James, Dan’s son, was working at World Media learning the business from Dan—an
d now at last they were to spend two weeks traveling around France. Dan had insisted on them all getting together; family should know one another, he said, and they didn’t, not anymore. Victorine, knowing that Dan would declare all of Normandy off-limits because of wartime memories and wanting to begin the holiday not too far from Paris to minimize travel after his plane journey, had suggested they begin in the Champagne region. After what she’d thought was a momentary hesitation in Dan, he’d agreed that it might be nice to look at champagne caves and castles and forests and gardens.

  “Here’s James. You probably don’t recognize him.” Dan gestured to the man beside him, blond and therefore unlike his father.

  “James!” Victorine exclaimed. “It can’t possibly be.”

  “I promise it is,” he said teasingly, just like the child he’d always been, able to find the funny side in any situation.

  The two of them had always played together as young siblings, but had not known each other as adults. Victorine had insisted to Dan that she be sent to boarding school in France when she was ten years old—James had been four at the time—in order to maintain her French identity; she missed the country of her birth, she’d said. She’d really wanted to escape Amelia, although she hadn’t put it like that and she knew Dan understood.

  After she’d finished at school, Victorine began working in France, refusing Dan’s offer of a place in the business in New York because she felt that it wasn’t rightfully hers, although she hadn’t said that to Dan; he’d told her about her true parentage when she was eighteen and while she still loved him as much as ever, she’d wanted to make her own way in the world and had done so. He visited her every year, including one trip to accompany her on an exhaustive and fruitless search to try to find out anything she could about her parents, but there had been so many lost children and lost families in the exodus from Paris, so many records destroyed in the war, that the mystery of Victorine’s parentage would remain forever unsolved.