The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  ‘Where is she?’ Dr Gorton fretted. The expected train from New York, already announced, was failing to appear. He hadn’t seen her since the summer of 1939, her last trip home for the publication of one of those books of hers. He was proud of her success – less of the books themselves, which didn’t appeal to him at all, than of the money she made. Why, she was rolling in it – thank God, given she had no husband to support her. He merely repeated what Constance and Muriel said about the books, which, coming from a man sounded hilarious and exposed the extent of his reading. He was a practical man – history, facts, that sort of thing. Eleanor knew that.

  He turned back to see his wife with their daughters. ‘Don’t you excite yourself, Mother,’ he cautioned.

  Then the locomotive appeared, slowly drew in and stopped at the buffer, where it expelled clouds of steam and smoke, obscuring the cars behind. Passengers began to alight. He jumped up and down.

  ‘Where is she?’ he cried, unable to see through the crowds, mostly servicemen, racing for the exit. ‘Is she coming?’

  ‘Your father’s behaving like a child,’ Mrs Gorton observed severely.

  Eleanor walked along the platform. She was about to reach her goal, except now it seemed a thoroughly bad idea. What on earth was she doing? She couldn’t see her mother yet, but knew she was waiting on the concourse, doubtless her lips thinning. They would thin even more in a moment. She quailed. Worse would be the pained silence. Really, she could turn around now and get back on the train before they saw her. But since it had taken her sixteen long months to get from Paris to Providence, and she had only just managed to beg, borrow and steal a passage from Lisbon at the last moment, the thought of a return to Europe was more daunting than facing the disapproval of her mother. What she’d gone through to get here! After her escape from France, she’d languished for two weeks in a Spanish jail, from which she’d been freed only by her remaining stash of dollars. Penniless and over one hundred miles from Madrid, she expended her remaining Chesterfields to reach there. Then she’d been stranded a further fourteen months in Lisbon.

  So she had told her mother and father. The Spanish part of her story was true. Over the Portuguese chapter, she’d dropped a veil of mystery, as she had done over the details of her escape from France. Now she had to face the music.

  Eleanor and her family appeared to one another through the thinning crowds and the vanishing steam from the locomotive.

  ‘What’s that Eleanor’s carrying?’ her mother said instantly.

  ‘Calm yourself, Mother,’ said Muriel.

  ‘Father,’ said Eleanor as she came past the ticket barrier. She kissed him, and to save herself from falling into an unseemly heap of tears on his shoulder, she gently removed the shawl that was shielding her baby’s face from the cold.

  ‘What do you think of your new grandson?’ she said.

  ‘Why, Eleanor!’ her father exclaimed in genuine but delighted astonishment. ‘Oh my goodness,’ he kept saying, darting his eyes from his favourite daughter to this startling revelation.

  Mrs Gorton saw quite plainly what was in the bundle in Eleanor’s arms.

  ‘Calm yourself, Mother,’ Constance echoed her sister.

  ‘Stop saying that,’ she said curtly. ‘I am calm. Very calm.’

  Eleanor’s sisters and brothers enveloped her. Constance lifted the baby from Eleanor’s arms with gushes and kisses. What her brothers were thinking, Eleanor had no idea. She had to confront her mother.

  ‘Well, Mother,’ she said, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek, ‘it took a little while longer to get here than I expected.’ Barely holding up, she dabbed tears from her eyes.

  ‘Does the child’s father come attached to you as a husband, by chance?’ Mrs Gorton asked, pained.

  ‘No, Mother,’ Eleanor replied, starting to laugh. Her mother was so her mother. This started off her sisters. ‘Oh, come on, Mother, you can’t say you’re entirely surprised,’ she said at the thin lips pursing in front of her. ‘Aren’t you happy? I am.’

  ‘But what are we going to say?’ Mrs Gorton said.

  ‘Whatever you want to say, dear,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘Yes, Eleanor, but what’s the truth?’ Mrs Gorton asked. ‘Surely we’re entitled to that?’

  Her mother was quite right. ‘Yes, Mother, you are.’ The advent of this baby had lifted her from a dark place in her heart, restoring her will to live and her joy. She’d tell them the truth, but not right now.

  Mrs Gorton’s travails about social death vanished as the absence of Will was suddenly so painful that they all cried in an atypical public display of grief.

  ‘I thought it was going to be another one of those novels of yours,’ said Mrs Gorton eventually, trying without much success to be stern again. She was still wiping her eyes. A new novel, something to be borne rather than enjoyed, would have been a relief compared to this.

  Eleanor didn’t have the heart to confess she had the manuscript of Three Women with her, the novel she’d written in Lisbon during her confinement and her baby’s first months. At last she had found a way to write about Claude by writing about the women in his life. That and the baby, and the job she’d held until the week before the child came, had occupied all those Lisbon months.

  Soon after her arrival in Lisbon, even though she was pregnant, her fluency in French and things Parisian and the experience of her recent escape had opened doors to a job with a shady crew of young men, rather like her brothers, who worked out of the American embassy. ‘I was a spy,’ she’d tell her family later, somewhat embroidering her role, though the same crew were keen to see her in Washington as soon as she was able.

  As a civilian, she really was at the bottom of the list for a seat on one of the Pan Am Clipper flying boats that took off daily from the Tagus river in Lisbon for the United States on a long and dangerous trek via South America. Motherhood hadn’t offered any advantage either. She’d have to be Eleanor Roosevelt and not Eleanor Gorton-Clarke to get a seat. She’d had the added difficulty of her new baby’s nationality. Yes, he was eligible for American citizenship, thanks to her, but they could apply only after returning to the US. What he was in the meantime, and what papers he could travel on, seemed a lawyers’ picnic. Was he stateless or Portuguese or, grimly, a subject of the Deutsches Reich? And did having an alien as a father matter if father and mother were not married – or, worse, that the father was a subject of the Third Reich? Or, more likely, thanks to Hitler, stateless?

  Her colleagues with their influence, plus the whoppers she had unashamedly spun got the baby a US passport. It had been only slightly unorthodox. They’d known she was telling fibs, but they were gentlemen and they were gallants. With the last impediment to her return removed, save getting an actual seat on the Clipper, she waited. That had taken a month and another whopper from her gallants about her importance to the war effort back home.

  ‘What’s his name?’ She heard a sudden demand. It was her father, bringing them back to present joy.

  ‘William-Henry,’ she replied, ‘for Will and for – ’ She stopped.

  ‘His father?’ Dr Gorton asked, coming to her aid without the slightest guile.

  ‘I call him Henk,’ she said, holding up.

  ‘Well,’ said her mother as she joined her husband to gaze at the child, ‘he is certainly a pretty fellow. What gorgeous blue eyes he has, Father.’

  Eleanor exchanged a look with Constance and Muriel. This, indeed, was a welcome if surprising turn.

  Her brothers began to shepherd the family towards the exit. They could do the rest of their talking at home. Eleanor turned to see her father gazing down at the baby in his arms, love at first sight.

  ‘Oh,’ said Muriel, as they started walking to the cars, ‘I nearly forgot. This arrived for you from your publisher. About four months ago. We thought of sending it to Lisbon, but it seemed safer to keep it here until you arrived.’ She handed over a parcel in brown paper tied up securely with string.

  Curious
, Eleanor loosened the paper and what if Finnegans Wake didn’t slip out. She had to grab it to stop it falling to the concourse floor. She gave a startled cry, more like a shriek, loud enough to attract attention. How, dear God, had this curse of a book followed her? The last she’d seen it, it was in the left breast pocket of the coat she’d handed over to Henk’s lover. Was this some last cruel thrust into her heart?

  She was so confused she didn’t at first see what had happened to the book’s cover. Was that a great hole in it? She looked closer. It was a gaping hole, and in the middle, something metallic. She tried opening the book but could not. It smelt of something familiar. Lancôme but wasn’t that a top note of Schiaparelli as well?

  ‘Oh my God,’ she exclaimed.

  These were the precious dregs of the perfume in her travelling cosmetics case fatefully pocketed with Mr Joyce in Claude’s coat and the crème she’d bought in Pau in the other. How and why did the book smell better than she did?

  Her brothers were hurrying her, but she was not for hurrying.

  She turned to the back cover, which was undamaged. She opened it. On the inside was a message, printed in blue ink in spidery letters, rather like a child’s.

  We are sorry your book is wounded by a German bullet but if this book and your cosmetics are not in the pockets of your coat, Hugo would be dead so they save his life high in the Pyrénées. So, one more thing I thank you from my heart. We are come in Brasil and try one day to go in Palestine if they do not intern us, with love from Henk and Hugo and Kätzchen.

  Only her brother’s arms stopped Eleanor falling to the pavement. Doctors though they all were, her brothers and her father squabbled about what to do. Her sisters pushed them away.

  ‘She’s fainted, you idiots,’ said Muriel, who ordered them to carry her to the nearby bench, where she revived Eleanor with a draught of whisky from a flask she carried in her purse for just such an occasion.

  Eleanor slugged back more whisky, then grabbed the brown paper wrapping she’d absently let drop in her confusion and shock, and which Muriel had picked up. Her eyes scoured it urgently for a sender’s address but there was none. She flipped the back pages to see if Henk had written more, but no, that was it, the past, the present and the future in one pithy message. She gazed at the damaged front cover of Finnegans Wake, at the flattened German bullet lodged through page after page. This surely was an act worthy of God’s cry at the fall of man on page one of Mr Joyce’s delirious prose, which only Sylvia, the agnostic, could pronounce. There was no retrieving it now. All Eleanor could remember was the beginning. Baba- something or other.

  She hugged the book and she started to laugh and she couldn’t stop laughing. She couldn’t explain why she was laughing, except to say she was so happy, then she burst into tears. If the gift of William-Henry was the unexpected blessing and joy of life from a journey of death and loss and love, here, she realised, was the alpha and the omega of that journey, this ridiculous book that at last in its turbulent life had done something practical. Rescued from the grasping hands of the Gestapo, it had saved the life of one of the Gestapo’s enemies. It was glorious proof that Henk was alive and had escaped Europe. Until her Muses got to work again, it was a perfect family tree for their tiny son. It was certainly more truthful than the story she’d concocted back in Lisbon.

  Sylvia would understand her keeping it.

  Eleanor knew that her war was over, at least for the time being. She knew also that she had a bit of making-up to do with God. He, whom she had turned on, had certainly not turned on her. The dust and ashes she’d tasted on the border with Spain were now those of repentance.

  She heard the little boy cry. ‘Hurry up, Elly,’ her father called. ‘He needs you.’

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of the imagination but grounded in a real world of time and place as much as I have been able. One starting point was the predicament of a young man like Henk. Another was literary Paris and Shakespeare & Company. Eventually, they joined up.

  Immediate questions were: I already knew a bit about Henk’s particular situation, but what happened to the 50% Mischling German-Jewish men in the Wehrmacht in 1940? If you were so categorised, was there any way to avoid being dismissed? If not, then what? Hide? Some did. Escape? Yes, but where and how? Through Vichy France to Spain was possible. How then did one find a passage across the demarcation line into Vichy France in late 1941? Where did one cross, and how?

  Most illegal journeys followed a similar course; a rendezvous in a café with a local passeur, joining a disparate collection of people, locals merely avoiding the delays at the legal crossing points and black marketeers as well as the desperate fleeing the Nazis. Then followed an often perilous river crossing at night under the noses of German patrols. For those bent on escape, Lyon was then the most important way station in Vichy France between the demarcation line and the Spanish frontier. Until November 1942 when the Germans occupied all of France, the next hazard was the hardest of all if you didn’t have a Spanish visa – which most did not – actually crossing the Spanish frontier.

  What if you were Henk, bent on the same journey? I knew others fleeing Germany and Austria had done it but finding the location of the German Armistice Commission in Pau really fired my imagination.

  All writers know half the fun of research comes from such serendipitous discoveries, as long as research is not an end in itself. In these days when the internet is under attack and subject to widespread misuse, I want to make special acknowledgement of Wikipedia, which is always my first port of call and always delivers me something and somewhere useful on my writer’s journey. The State Library of Queensland is another; it still amazes me that I can access books and articles from home via the SLQ. These are just two examples of the fulfilment of the internet’s early promise.

  On Wehrmacht deserters, academic history journals in English and German were useful sources, as much indirectly as directly – the small detail hidden away in a footnote, for example. Also useful were the many websites dedicated to the armies of the Second World War run by enthusiastic amateur historians, who deserve special tribute. YouTube was also a source of obscure and not-so-obscure documentaries and interviews, mostly in German.

  Books and memoirs and documentaries about escaping Nazi-occupied Europe are legion, including many about the freedom trails, which later in the conflict rescued so many downed Allied airmen. People like the American diplomat Varian Fry loom large in many of the stories from the early years of the war. Fritz Werfel and Alma Mahler are but two of the more famous refugees who succeeded in escaping. Many did not. The books Love and War in the Pyrenees by Rosemary Bailey, Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death by Gerda Bikales and Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees by Edward Stourton were useful to me.

  Janet Flanner’s wartime reports from Europe in the New Yorker are compelling reading. Most useful for my story was ‘The Escape of Mrs. Jeffries’, Flanner’s report about an American woman who remains in Paris until 1942 before escaping via Pau over the Pyrénées and on to Madrid and Lisbon in 1943. From such precise reporting, one gains priceless detail and flavour, for example, how bookshops played a vital role for people seeking passages to safety.

  The subject of Americans in Paris is an industry in itself. Charles Glass’s book Americans in Paris was a good source. The website of the American Cathedral in Paris offered up gems from its past through its magazine, available online, which I was able to use for flavour. Very useful for life in Paris under the occupation were the books When Paris Went Dark by Ronald Rosbottom and Paris in the Third Reich by David Pryce-Jones, the latter in particular for its evocative photographs.

  Photographs from that time and place, now easily accessible on the net, are a source of wonder and inspiration. To see these faces looking out at you from this other country called the past is quite moving. Who are they? What are they telling us? Again, they fire up one’s imagination.

  I want to single out The Germa
n War by Nicholas Stargardt for helping me understand the motives, thoughts and actions of Bauer, the German detective.

  Lastly, this story owes much to the remarkable Sylvia Beach, whose memoir Shakespeare and Company gave me the Finnegans Wake event, out of which I admit I have made a meal and for which I may not be thanked by Joyce purists. In a way, she stands as the story’s Ur-Mutter and of the main character, Eleanor.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks go to my dear partner, Alex, for his love and support; to my dear pal Blanche for the same, and for reading the MS and offering suggestions; to my film and TV colleague Catherine Millar also for reading and commenting; to my Sydney pals Paul and Chee Wee, who read the MS and told me they loved it – sweet words to a writer who at that point had heard only silence – and who helped Alex and me explore Pau and the Pyrénées; to my agents at Cameron’s, Anthony Blair, who has stuck with me through more thin than thick, and Jeanne Ryckmans, who got the MS over the final hurdle. I am grateful to Fiona Henderson and all at Simon & Schuster for their great enthusiasm and efforts, and to editor Vanessa Mickan for her generous support and wonderful attention to detail. Finally, to the tiny abandoned cat that Vanessa found on one of her walks while editing the MS and which she took in and of course called ‘Henk’s Cat’. A photograph of it sat before me as I went through all the corrections.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  J. R. LONIE is otherwise known as John Lonie, a screenwriter, playwright and script editor whose credits include some of Australia’s top TV dramas and films. He was head of screenwriting at the Australian Film Television and Radio School for seven years, during which he also co-wrote the feature film Kokoda. He is one of the writers on the popular television series A Place to Call Home. He is presently working on his next novel. He lives in Brisbane.