The Winemaker's Wife

by Kristin Harmel

  “I’m so sorry, Edouard. For everything.” Inès wiped her tears away. “But what now? What do I do if everyone thinks I’m dead?”

  He smiled slightly. “You become Edith. I quietly divorce you. And you go away and never come back.”

  “But—”

  “Everyone here thought you were on the side of the Nazis,” he went on without looking at her. “It was no secret here in Reims that you were the lover of Antoine Picard for a time. Just after the liberation, you know, he was executed for treason, based on a tip from a high-ranking maquisard.”

  Inès nodded, surprised to realize that she felt no pain, no regret, no guilt—only gratitude to Captain Tardivat for keeping his word. “I see.”

  “At best, Inès, you were thought to be a collaboratrice horizontale. At worst, an ally of the Nazis yourself, a traitor to France.”

  “But I never—”

  Edouard held up a hand. “It doesn’t matter, Inès. You are beyond redemption in this town.”

  “But you could tell people—”

  “Don’t you understand?” Edouard interrupted. “I was suspected for a long time of collaborating, too. People had seen the brasserie filled with Germans. I narrowly escaped execution myself, and only then because the Brits sent someone to vouch for me, to explain that Edith and I had been instrumental in delivering German secrets directly to the Allies, that we had risked our lives for France. I have no energy left, Inès, to prove myself again, or to go out on a limb for you. What have you done, anyhow, to deserve my help?”

  Inès wanted to tell him about her months in the forests with the Maquis, the dozens of times she’d nearly lost her life, the German soldier she had been forced to kill with a pocketknife before he could arrest one of the leaders of the group. But what right did she have to compare her sacrifices to Edouard’s? He had lost everything, while Inès had been responsible for every loss that had befallen her. Besides, to bring up her work with the Maquis would be to suggest that it had washed away her sins, and she knew it had not. So she bowed her head and let his anger and blame wash over her, because she deserved it, all of it. “You’re right.”

  “So go, Inès.” Edouard sounded exhausted. “Take Edith’s identity papers. The two of you always looked like sisters anyhow. Become her. Honor her name. Try to make something of yourself. And whatever you do, take care of the boy.”

  Inès glanced at David, who was playing with her hair now, babbling to himself and paying them no mind. “I will,” she whispered.

  “Good.” Edouard seemed as if he wanted to say something else, but after studying Inès intently, he simply shook his head and walked away, the apartment door slamming behind him. Inès knew she would never see him again.

  • • •

  A few weeks later, Inès had moved to Paris, taking David with her. She had chosen the city because it was the returning point for those who had been deported to concentration camps, and she was confident she would find Céline among the ghosts who were trickling back into the capital. It was her only hope of absolution.

  For two and a half months, she went every day to the Hôtel Lutetia on the boulevard Raspail, searching for some sign that Céline had found a way to survive. But day after day, Inès walked home empty-handed to her small apartment on the rue Amélie. Some days she went east instead and strolled David through the flowers and greenery in the Luxembourg gardens; other days, she walked him past the gold-domed building that housed Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides. But always, always, she told the little boy stories of his mother and his father, brave heroes of France. His father, she said, had left on a journey and would not be coming back, but they were still waiting for his mother, who would surely return.

  But the months passed, and in the third week of August, Inès finally found a hollow-eyed woman who said she had known Céline at Auschwitz. “Do you know if she has returned yet?” Inès asked, shifting David to the opposite hip and leaning forward eagerly. “We haven’t been able to find her, though we’ve come here every day.” The woman was emaciated, her fuzzy gray hair clinging to her head in patches, her body covered in rags.

  “Madame,” the woman croaked, “I’m afraid your friend is not coming back.”

  Inès had stopped breathing. She put David down, held his hand, and moved in front of him so that her body was blocking his. He understood nearly everything the adults around him were talking about these days. “What do you mean?” Inès whispered as David giggled and squirmed behind her legs.

  The woman’s eyes pooled with tears and she shook her head. “We were together in the barracks for a time. She came from a village near Reims, yes? Ville-something?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Ville-Dommange.”

  “My dear, she died in the winter, just before the camp was liberated. It was January, the second week, I think.”

  “Are you certain?” Inès swallowed hard, trying to fight the wave of guilt crashing over her. “Wh-what happened?”

  “Tuberculosis,” the woman said. “At least I believe so. It’s not as if we could simply walk into a clinic to be diagnosed, you know.” She laughed hoarsely and then sobered. “It was snowing outside the night she died, and she was coughing up blood. We all knew it was the end for her, and in the morning, she was gone.”

  “But she hasn’t been on any of the lists of the deceased.”

  “The weeks just before liberation were chaos. I’m quite certain the Nazis were more concerned with covering their tracks than updating their records. Besides, to them, she was just a number, never a person. None of us were.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I envy her, going before they marched us out into the wilderness. Besides, my whole family is dead. There’s no one. Sometimes at night I ask God why he did not take me, too.”

  “I’m very sorry for you,” Inès said. “But Céline wasn’t alone. She had a child.”

  The woman’s eyes flicked behind Inès and widened. “He is Céline’s? Well, that is a tragedy indeed. She spoke of a son, but I never believed he had lived.”

  Inès glanced back at David, who was now pretending his hand was a truck and zooming it up and down her calf, making engine noises. He was completely oblivious to the woman’s words, to the way they forever changed his world. “You’re absolutely sure it was Céline? Céline Laurent from Ville-Dommange? There’s not a chance you are wrong?”

  “None,” the woman said without hesitation. “She spoke sometimes of the champagne house she left behind, the man she had loved there.”

  Inès’s heart lurched. “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “But now it is time to rebuild, is it not? To try to make a future? You must make sure her child finds a good home, parents who love him.”

  Inès turned and bent to David, kissing him tenderly on the forehead before lifting him into her arms. “Maman!” he said excitedly, and the term of endearment made Inès begin to cry, for though she had tried to make him call her Tante Inès instead, to explain that his real mother was coming back for him, he still slipped from time to time.

  “His home,” Inès said, turning back to the woman, “is with me. And I’ll love him with all my heart for the rest of my life.”

  “Well, then,” the woman said. “I suppose you are his mother now.” And then she was gone, vanished back into the crowd before Inès could even ask her name.

  Inès continued to take David back to the Hôtel Lutetia each day until the center for returning deportees finally closed, just in case the woman had been wrong, just in case there was a chance. But Inès knew she was living in denial. Finally, when Céline’s picture was taken down from the board of the missing, Inès left the Lutetia with David for the last time, determined to begin a new life, a life in which the mother in the boy’s fairy tales wasn’t coming back, a life in which the woman left behind—a woman who didn’t deserve to be the only one who lived—was all he had.

  • • •

  Inès returned to Reims just once, in 1946, and then only to ensure that the M
aison Chauveau was not sold out from under her. She had intended to visit Monsieur Godard, the attorney who had initially presented her with the paperwork after Michel’s death, but on her way from the train station, as a three-year-old David hurried behind her, clinging to her hand, she happened to see a plaque affixed to an unassuming door on the rue du Trésor. Samuel Cohn Société d’Avocats, it read. There was almost no chance it was the young lawyer she and Edith had helped shelter in 1943, was there? But what if fate had spared him the way it had spared her?

  She picked David up and went inside. Just beyond the entrance sat a young secretary, who looked up expectantly. “May I help you, madame?”

  “I am here to see Samuel Cohn,” she said confidently.

  “Whom should I tell him is here?”

  Inès’s heart fluttered. “An old friend,” she said, and though the secretary pursed her lips at the vague response, she still slipped into the office behind a closed door, emerging a moment later to tell Inès that she could come in.

  Inès didn’t believe in miracles until she rounded the corner and saw a familiar figure—looking just as he had the last time she’d seen him—standing behind a grand desk. His eyes widened in recognition, and he hastily told his secretary that she could go.

  “Inès Chauveau?” he asked, crossing from behind his desk to kiss her cheeks. He examined her in disbelief. “It can’t be! I was told that you had died!”

  “Well, I did, in a way. I am Edith Thierry now.”

  “But the real Madame Thierry—”

  “—is dead,” Inès finished softly, and then as Samuel’s brow creased with confusion, she added, “And this is my son, David.”

  “Pleased to meet you, monsieur,” David said politely, just as she had taught him to do, and then he tugged on her dress. “Maman, may I have my airplane now?”

  “Of course, my dear.” Inès handed David his toy, and he sat down on Samuel Cohn’s floor and began to swoop it through the air, making engine sounds under his breath, while Inès told an astonished Samuel the whole story—from what had happened to Michel and Céline, to her adoption of Edith’s name. He in turn told her about how he and his sister had been smuggled across the Swiss border with the help of a Dutch couple and had spent the remainder of the war safely in Geneva.

  “You saved my life,” Samuel concluded. “And my sister’s. I owe you everything.”

  “You owe me nothing,” Inès said quickly. “But I was hoping that nonetheless, you might be willing to help me with a situation that might prove a bit complicated.”

  “I am at your service, whatever you need.”

  And so Inès explained about how the Maison Chauveau had passed to her, and that she wanted to leave it to David, for it was his by right. “Perhaps it has been taken and sold already,” she said. “Maybe I am too late. But if there’s a chance of saving it, is there anything you can do so that ownership rests with me with David as my heir? It is, after all, his rightful inheritance.”

  “It will indeed be complicated,” Samuel said with a sigh, “but I will do absolutely everything I can. Of course we’ll need to establish a proper trail of paperwork officially making David your son, too. But considering the way so many records were lost or destroyed in the war, it shouldn’t be difficult to plant a few pieux mensonges, white lies. So you plan to return to Ville-Dommange, then?”

  “No. I cannot. I need to start over somewhere new. Maybe Paris, maybe even America. But there are too many memories for me here, and who knows what would happen if people realize that Inès Chauveau is alive? I cannot risk it, for I am all David has.”

  “I’m sorry,” Samuel said, “that it has come to this.”

  Inès looked away. “It is my fault.”

  Samuel smiled sadly. “We all make mistakes. It is the war that turned those mistakes into losses that will last a lifetime. So we must keep moving forward, mustn’t we? It is the only way.”

  • • •

  Inès always intended to tell David about his past, but as the years went by, she lost the courage again and again. By the time they had relocated to New York, she had so fully become someone else—a French divorcée named Edith Thierry—that time only made the truth more difficult, more elusive. What would her son say when he learned that she was not really his mother? That she had indeed been responsible for his real parents’ deaths? That she had taken him away from his ancestral home simply because she could not live with herself anymore?

  Still, she knew she owed him honesty. Once, when he was seventeen, a senior in high school, she’d found a bottle of 1940 Champagne Chauveau in a specialty wine store on West Seventy-Second Street and bought it, though it had cost a small fortune. But it had been a sign; it had been the last vintage Michel and Theo had finished together before the world fell apart. All of them—Inès and Céline, too—had played a part in making the wine that year, and as Inès popped the cork in the living room with shaky hands, she felt as if she were holding something that belonged to another age, another reality.

  She drank as she practiced telling David everything. Even though the 1940 harvest had been so terrible, the bubbles were fine and elegant, the wine itself buttery as brioche, with a crisp, lemony edge and just the faintest traces of caramel and chalk. It was perfect, a masterpiece, an ode to the land, to the cellars, to the winemakers. Céline had been right about this vintage; they had managed to make something beautiful from the chaos. Michel would have been so proud, and as she drank sip after perfect sip, she closed her eyes and imagined returning to Ville-Dommange, finding Michel there tending the cellars. His hair would be gray by now, his face lined, and he would embrace her and tell her that he knew it had all been a mistake, and that he forgave her.

  By the time David came home from school, Inès was drunk, but still she had tried to tell him. “This is who you are,” she had slurred, holding up the empty bottle, and he had stared at her, his expression somewhere in that soft place between concern and disdain. “Stop looking at me like that. I’m trying to tell you something important. Your father made this wine.”

  His eyes narrowed. “My father was a hero in the French Resistance in Paris.” It was the story she’d told him a thousand times, exaggerating Michel’s heroics and moving him to Paris, for she couldn’t bear to tell David stories of Champagne. Of course it would have been easier to tell him about Edouard Thierry and pretend that Edith’s real husband was his father, but she’d already told enough lies. “Now, all of a sudden, he’s a winemaker, Mom?”

  “But he was,” Inès insisted, her words tangling together. “He always was, mon ange! He is your father, and your real mother was a woman named—”

  “You’re drunk, Mom.”

  She tried to stand and found she could not, so she sank back into the couch cushions. Her head hurt. “I’m just trying to tell you the truth.”

  “Just stop it,” he snapped. Even in her drunken state, she could see the fury in his expression. “If you’re not my mother, I don’t have anyone, do I? So don’t down a bottle of wine and try to change the whole story of who I am. If you have something to say to me, say it when you’re sober.”

  “But—” Inès began, but David was already stomping away toward his room.

  She hadn’t had the nerve to try again, though she now realized how much easier it was to live with herself when she had a bit of alcohol in her system.

  She told herself she’d tell him when he turned eighteen, for that’s when he would officially come of age to inherit the champagne house according to the complex documents Samuel had drawn up after wresting control of the business from the attorney named Godard. He’d had a talented friend forge and backdate some documents establishing that Inès Chauveau had legally passed ownership of Champagne Chauveau to Edith Thierry before her tragic death. I should feel guilty for committing a bit of fraud, Samuel once told Inès with a shrug, but for a long time, the legal system wasn’t on my side or yours, was it? There should be no shame in reclaiming what is ours.

&
nbsp; Samuel had set up a trust to run the champagne house until Inès could bring herself to tell David the truth. But his eighteenth birthday came and went without her mustering the courage. Maybe she would tell him when he was twenty-one. Or thirty. Or thirty-five. Time and again, she tried and failed to bring herself to utter the words, and with each passing year, it became more difficult.

  Samuel called her quarterly to check in, to see if there had been a change, to see if Inès was ready to bring David back to Ville-Dommange. But each time, she explained that she could not, and he told her he understood and would continue to run the champagne house’s business operations for her, would continue to ensure the house employed one of Champagne’s best winemakers, would continue to confirm that they were buying only the best grapes from the best vignerons. And, as he had done since 1946, Samuel would continue to put half of the profits in an account for David, and he would continue to send Inès the rest to make sure she and her son had everything they needed in the meantime.

  It felt to Inès that she still had all the time in the world to come clean. But then, on February 13, 1980, a month and a half before David would have turned thirty-seven, his wife, Jeanne, called Inès in the middle of the night and told her the news: there had been a terrible car accident. David had not survived.

  Inès knew she had lost her last chance at redemption, her final opportunity to try to make things right. She moved back to Paris soon after, for New York now held only the painful memories of raising a child whom she had somehow managed to outlive, just as she had outlived nearly everyone else who mattered in her life.

  She would always regret failing to tell him, but one day, when the time was right, she would tell his daughter, Olivia. The Maison Chauveau belonged to her now, after all, and all Inès had to do was find the courage to speak the truth one last time. But how could she, after a lifetime of lies?