The Winemaker's Wife

by Kristin Harmel

  And then she was above the clouds, and Michel was there, looking just as he had on the day she married him all those years ago, when they still loved each other with innocent and open hearts, before the war and the world and the choices they made changed everything. “You’re here at last,” he said, coming toward her, washed in white light.

  She was weightless, floating, but still, her heart was heavy with the guilt she had carried with her for decades. “Michel, I’m so sorry. For everything.”

  “Oh, Inès, we were young and foolish, all of us. I forgave you long ago.”

  Inès looked around for Céline, the woman who had replaced her, the woman who had always deserved the heart of Inès’s husband. Inès had imagined they were spending eternity together, but it was only Michel here waiting for her. She felt a surge of grief, a knot twisting inside her. “Michel, where is Céline?”

  But he only shook his head in silence as he took her hand. As they walked together toward the rising sun, toward the light that welcomed them home, Inès wept, for Céline’s absence—the fact that she, too, wasn’t waiting to greet Inès—could only mean that Inès would never be forgiven.

  But then, in the center of the welcoming light, she saw David, and he was somehow both the child she had raised and the adult he had become all at the same time. “Mom!” he cried, and she forgot everything else—her sins, her guilt, the world she’d finally left behind—and ran to him. He had been reunited with his father, waiting for her all this time.

  thirty-five

  JUNE 2019

  LIV

  It took Julien and Liv twenty minutes to get to Ville-Dommange, and when they finally pulled the car up outside the main building of the Maison Chauveau, an hour before the place would open to visitors, Liv spotted her grandmother sitting on a bench overlooking the rolling vineyards to the right of the main house. She was leaning into an old man with wispy white hair, who must have been Julien’s grandfather.

  Liv and Julien jumped from the car at the same time and ran to the bench. Grandma Edith’s eyes were closed, and when Julien’s grandfather looked up, his eyes were red, his cheeks wet.

  “She was a good woman,” he said to Liv. “She never believed it, but she really was.”

  Liv looked from him to her grandmother, who was unnaturally still, a faint smile on her lips, and suddenly she understood what he was saying.

  “No,” Liv whispered, kneeling beside her grandmother and grasping her hands, which were still so warm. “Grandma Edith, come back.” She could feel tears rolling down her face, and she choked on the sob in her throat. “Oh God, no.”

  “My dear,” Samuel said, reaching for Liv, his touch gentle and soothing. “Do not cry for her. After all these years, she has finally found her peace.”

  • • •

  The following weeks went by in a blur. Grandma Edith was buried at a small cemetery on the south side of Ville-Dommange, just on the edge of the vineyards, with the name Edith Thierry engraved on her tombstone, the name Inès Chauveau beneath it just as prominently. Surely it would confuse a passerby or two, but after reading Grandma Edith’s notebook of stories—confessions, really—Liv understood that her grandmother had never really stopped being the naive girl from Lille who had married a man she hoped would give her the world. For all her years of trying, she hadn’t fully buried the ghost of Inès in the disguise of Edith.

  Samuel spoke at her small memorial service, and in his words, Liv met a grandmother she had never known, a brave and sad woman who had sheltered refugees and fought Nazis in the forests of France, a woman who had found her way to America all alone to give her son a better life, a woman who had been nearly toppled by the force of her grief after her son’s death.

  “She was a hero, though she never saw herself that way,” Samuel said to the crowd of a dozen mourners, most of them strangers to Liv. “But it is how I will always remember her, and I hope that all of you do, too. Especially you, her dear granddaughter, Olivia.” He smiled at Liv, and she covered her face with her hands. “She loved you so very much, even if she sometimes had a rather difficult way of showing it.”

  A day after the funeral, Liv met with Samuel and Julien in their office and spent a day going over all the legal documents assigning ownership of the Maison Chauveau to her. There were accounts and investments she’d never known about that totaled more than twenty million dollars, and that was in addition to the millions tied up in the day-to-day operations of champagne production.

  “You can do whatever you’d like, Liv,” Julien said, handing her a batch of papers to sign. “You can stay here and have a hand in the business, or you can go home to New York, and the Maison Chauveau will continue to be run by a trust controlled by this law firm, which is what has happened for the past seventy years. Either way, it is yours.”

  “What do you think I should do?” she asked.

  Julien held her gaze. “It is not my decision to make, Liv. But if you go, I hope you will allow me to visit you. I think I would miss you very much.”

  “And if I stay?”

  His expression softened. “If you stay, I think you would make me the happiest man in France.”

  She smiled. “I’ll take that under advisement, Counselor.”

  But she already knew she would remain in Champagne, at least for a while. It was as if it was what the universe had intended all along. Just when she had lost all sense of belonging in the city that had been hers, a new place had come along, a place that was always meant to be her home. It was like a gift from heaven—and perhaps it really was. Liv tried to imagine Michel, the grandfather she had never known, and Céline, the grandmother whose tiny infant had been ripped from her arms as she was carted off to an unspeakable fate. Were they looking down on her now? Did her return to the Maison Chauveau bring them some peace? What about her own father, who had never known this place at all?

  The first thing Liv did when she came on board was to ask the Maison Chauveau’s webmaster to update the champagne house’s site with a short history of what had happened on this property, the abbreviated story of three lives—those of Michel, Céline, and a young woman named Inès who had lived to become an old woman named Edith. Liv hoped to one day honor all three of them in a much larger way, but beginning to speak the truth about the past felt like a start.

  In the next few weeks, Liv met with the chef de cave, Jacques Cazal, and the director of business operations, Sylvie Vaillant, and she decided to come on as a sort of apprentice to both of them so she could begin to learn the business. “I’m not sure I’ll be any good at this,” Liv said to Jacques, a sixty-something man with sparkling brown eyes who had been running the winemaking operations for more than thirty years. “Maybe I’m fooling myself.”

  “You know,” said Jacques with a smile, “two hundred years ago, there was another woman not far from here by the name of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin who was faced with a similar situation. Her husband had died, and suddenly, at the age of twenty-seven, she was faced with the question of whether she could follow in his footsteps and keep his champagne house alive.”

  “And did she?”

  “Well, her husband was a man named François Clicquot. And when he died, she became known as the Widow Clicquot, or the Veuve Clicquot. She pioneered new practices in the champagne-making process, became one of the richest women of her time, and grew her company into one of the most well-known champagne brands in the world. You may have heard of it.”

  Liv laughed. “So she did all right for herself.”

  “I would say so. It took her many years, and there were ups and downs, but this land was in her blood, and she had the passion for it. There’s no doubt that you, too, have the magic of this place coursing through your veins. I think that if you work hard and truly commit yourself to learning your heritage, perhaps you will be surprised at what you can accomplish here. And as long as you’ll have us stay on, Sylvie and I will be happy to teach you everything we can. We love this place, too, and we all want it to co
ntinue being successful.”

  After Liv had gone to New York to pack up her apartment and returned to Champagne to move into the small caretaker’s cottage on the Maison Chauveau property—which had been boarded up so long that it still contained some of Céline Laurent’s belongings—there was a call one day to Julien’s office, from a reporter at the French newspaper Le Monde, saying that a reader had tipped her off to the brief historical paragraph that had recently appeared on the Maison Chauveau’s website and asking if she might come out for an interview. With the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Reims looming, she thought it would be the perfect time for a story about how the American grandchild of three heroes of the Resistance—Michel Chauveau, Céline Laurent, and Inès Chauveau—had come home to France to honor her family history.

  Liv agreed, and when the piece was published a week later in the Sunday paper, it not only brought a rush of new business to the Maison Chauveau, it answered questions Liv hadn’t even known she had. The reporter had dug deeper into the pasts of Michel, Céline, and Inès, and Liv learned that Michel had always lived on this land but had briefly considered leaving to become a scientist before his own father died. Inès had come from Lille with her best friend, Edith Thierry, who had married restaurateur Edouard Thierry, and they, in turn, had introduced her to Michel.

  The reporter had tracked down details of Michel’s death; he had been executed by a German firing squad in March 1943 without a trial after becoming a suspect in the murder of a German officer named Karl Richter. After the war, there had been rumors that Michel had been betrayed by a French collaborator named Antoine Picard, who was known to frequent the restaurant of Edith and Edouard Thierry. Picard had been tried and found guilty of collaboration and sentenced to death in the days after the liberation of Reims. He had died not far from where Michel’s body had fallen.

  Céline had been shipped to Auschwitz, where, probably unbeknownst to her, her father and grandparents had been sent, too. All of them perished there. Céline’s husband, Theo, had gone south, ultimately settling in Burgundy, where he remarried soon after he learned that his first wife had died. He had one son and died in 1960 of cancer. The reporter found his son, who said that in his final days, all his father talked about was the Maison Chauveau.

  But, the newspaper article had concluded, though their lives were lost, those who once walked the caves of the Maison Chauveau had been heroes whose sacrifices forever shaped the region, and, indeed, France. The story included the tale of Samuel’s rescue, and recently declassified details about the way the Thierrys, Céline Laurent, and Michel Chauveau had helped the Allies, from hiding munitions in the cellars to passing information along to British spies. And Inès Chauveau, who eventually took on the name of Edith Thierry, had been a member of an armed group in central France that had helped liberate the country. She had, astonishingly, become a munitions expert, and a woman whose nickname in the forest was La Beauté Intrépide, the Intrepid Beauty, for her fearless, almost reckless pursuit of all Nazis. Even though she had lived to the age of ninety-nine, the reporter wrote, a piece of her had died with the others during the war, and in that way, she was a martyr of the Resistance, too.

  Liv read and reread the article, her vision blurred by tears. How had she never known any of this? Her family’s history was so tragically bittersweet, perhaps Grandma Edith’s life most of all. Liv could hardly imagine the guilt and pain that had driven her into the woods of France in pursuit of redemption.

  And though Liv had never wanted for anything, and though she had always understood that Grandma Edith loved her deeply, she couldn’t help but wonder how different her life would be if Céline Laurent and Michel Chauveau had survived. But Liv couldn’t imagine a life without her extraordinary grandmother, the woman who had given up everything—even her own name—to protect a little boy who wasn’t hers. After all, if Grandma Edith hadn’t brought David to America, he never would have met Liv’s mother, and Liv herself would never have existed. And if Grandma Edith hadn’t risked her life saving Samuel Cohn all those years before, there would be no Julien, either. It was incredible to think how deeply the decisions of the past had shaped the future.

  That’s what Liv was thinking about on the fourth Wednesday evening in August as she made her way up Julien’s front walk. If Grandma Edith hadn’t made the sacrifices she had, Liv wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be standing on the doorstep of the man she had fallen in love with, waiting to meet his daughter for the first time. And so she looked heavenward to where the sunset was just beginning to streak the sky, and smiled. “Thank you, Grandma Edith,” she said. “For everything.”

  Then, straightening the vintage Chanel scarf Grandma Edith had given her just before boarding the train that had brought Liv to Reims for the first time, she took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

  epilogue

  SEPTEMBER 2019

  LIV

  A month later, with the harvest about to begin, Liv sat in the main building of the Maison Chauveau going over some paperwork with Julien, Jacques, and Sylvie. She was trying to understand how they sourced the grapes from so many vineyards and managed to keep all the batches separate before blending. Jacques patiently explained the difference between the limestone-rich soil in the Aube and the chalkier earth in the Marne. Liv eventually signed off on the agreements with each individual vigneron, a formality that Samuel Cohn, and then Julien, had once been responsible for on behalf of the trust.

  “I promise,” Jacques said as he and Sylvie gathered their things and prepared to head out for one last meeting with the Comité Interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne before the workers descended on the vineyards. “Once this harvest is over, I’ll start taking you to meet the vignerons. The grapes are as much a product of their expertise as they are a product of the land itself. You will find that when you come to know and trust the growers, you will usually trust their fruit, too.”

  After Jacques and Sylvie had gone, Julien helped Liv gather up all the papers. “You’re really getting the hang of this,” he said.

  She groaned. “How is it that you understand it all so easily?”

  He laughed. “Don’t forget, I have a twenty-year jump on you. Since I joined my grandfather’s firm, one of our main accounts has been the Maison Chauveau. I could probably tell you the soil composition of every single vineyard the champagne house works with.”

  “Vineyard soil, huh?” Liv asked, nudging him. “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

  He stared at her for a long beat before he blinked in recognition of her joke and burst out laughing.

  “I guess I’ll have to work on my French flirtation.” Liv grinned, loving the way her stomach still fluttered around him, even months after they had started dating.

  “Oh, I think you’re doing just fine.” He leaned down to kiss her, and the butterflies in her belly beat faster now. She was in love with him, and she had fallen in love with his daughter, too. In a strange way, Julien and Mathilde already felt like her family, like perhaps they had been meant to be just that all along. And she knew all too well now that family was about more than just blood. She didn’t know where this would lead, but as Julien had reminded her not so long ago, the future was wide open.

  He took her hand and they strolled out into the main room where tourists circulated, picking up bottles and souvenirs to take home, reading the plaques on the wall, doing guided tastings at the bar. Since the article had appeared in Le Monde, they had been packed every day. Liv smiled across the room at René, the young tour guide who had shown her and Grandma Edith into the cellars just a few months earlier, and then her eyes roamed the crowd until they settled on an old woman who had just walked through the tasting room’s front door with the help of a silver cane.

  She was tall and white-haired, at least in her eighties or nineties, and she was leaning on the arm of a tall, broad-shouldered man in his sixties. There was something vaguely familiar about the man, but it was the woman Liv couldn’t look
away from. It wasn’t the jagged scar running the length of her right cheek that captured Liv’s attention, though; it was something about her eyes, something Liv recognized, though she was certain she had never seen her before. The woman’s gaze locked on Liv from across the room, and it didn’t waver as she and the man slowly approached.

  “May I help you?” Liv asked when they reached her.

  “You are Olivia?” She spoke English with a slight accent that wasn’t entirely French.

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s Liv. I go by Liv.”

  “Liv. How fitting, for here you are, alive, which should be impossible. But God works in mysterious ways.” The woman’s eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t blink. “Well, it is very nice to meet you, Liv. My name is—was—Céline Laurent. And I . . . I am your father’s mother.”

  • • •

  Later, with the sun casting a golden glow over the plump black grapes, Liv went for a walk with Céline through the vineyards while her son, Joël—who looked so much like Liv’s father would have if he’d had the chance to grow older—stayed behind to talk with Julien.

  “You see, my dear,” said Céline, leaning into Liv for support as she used her cane to help her navigate the uneven ground, “I read Le Monde every morning online from my house outside Tel Aviv. The Internet is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? Six weeks ago, I read the story about you and the Maison Chauveau, and at first, I could not believe it. But then Joël helped me to print out the photograph of you that accompanied the article, and when I saw your face, I knew. You look so much like your grandfather, Liv. It’s your eyes. They’re the same ones your father had, too.