Together for Christmas

by Debbie Macomber

  “Why?” Ruth asked, although she didn’t really expect a response.

  “I think every generation has asked that same question,” Barbara said thoughtfully, putting the salad aside. She began to prepare a dressing, pouring olive oil and balsamic vinegar into a small bowl. “Paul told me you have a problem with his unwillingness to leave the marines at the end of his commitment. Is that right?”

  A little embarrassed by the question, Ruth nodded. “I do.”

  “The truth is, as his mother, I want Paul out of the marines, too, but that isn’t a decision you or I can make for him. My son has always been his own person. That’s how his father and I raised him.”

  Ruth’s gaze followed Paul as he stood with his father by the barbecue. He looked up and saw her, frowning as if he knew exactly what she and his mother were talking about. Ruth gave him a reassuring wave.

  “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?” his mother asked, watching her closely.

  The question took Ruth by surprise. “I’m afraid I am.” Ruth didn’t want to be—something she hadn’t acknowledged openly until this moment. He’d described his reluctance to hand her his heart to break. She felt the same way and feared he’d end up breaking hers.

  There seemed to be a tacit agreement not to broach these difficult subjects during dinner.

  The four of them sat on the patio around a big table, shaded by a large umbrella. His mother had made corn bread as well as the salad, and the steaks were grilled to perfection. After dinner, Ruth helped with the cleanup and then Paul made their excuses.

  “We’re going to a movie?” she whispered on their way out the door, figuring he’d used that as a convenient pretext for leaving.

  “I had to get you out of there before my mother started showing you my baby pictures.”

  “I’ll bet you were a real cutie.”

  “You should see my brother and sister, especially the nude photos.”

  Ruth giggled.

  Instead of the theater, they headed for Lake Washington and walked through the park, licking ice-cream cones, talking and laughing. Ruth couldn’t remember laughing with anyone as much as she did with Paul.

  He dropped her off after ten, walked her up to the front porch and kissed her good-night.

  “I’ll pick you up at noon,” he said. “After your morning class.”

  “Noon,” she repeated, her arms linked around his neck. That seemed too long. Despite her fears, despite the looming doubts, she was in love with him.

  “You’re sure your grandmother’s up to having company so soon?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Ruth pressed her forehead against his shoulder. “I think the real question’s whether we’re ready for the next installment. I don’t know if I can bear to hear exactly what happened to Jean-Claude.”

  “Perhaps not, but she needs to tell us.”

  “Yes,” Ruth said. “She couldn’t talk about it before.”

  “I know.” Paul kissed her again.

  Ruth felt at peace in his arms. Only when she stopped to think about the future, their future, did she become uncertain and confused.

  Seven

  RUTH AND PAUL sat with Helen at the kitchen table in her Cedar Cove house as rain dripped rhythmically against the windowpane. The day was overcast and dreary, as it frequently was during spring in the Pacific Northwest.

  Helen reached for the teapot in the middle of the table and filled each of their cups, then offered them freshly baked peanut-butter cookies arranged on a small dessert plate. Ruth recognized the plate from her childhood. She and her grandmother had often had tea together when she was a youngster. Her visits to Cedar Cove were special; her grandmother had listened while Ruth chattered endlessly, sharing girlish confidences. It was during those private little tea parties that they’d bonded, grandmother and granddaughter.

  Today the slow ritual of pouring tea and passing around cookies demanded patience. Ruth badly wanted to throw questions at Helen, but she could see that her grandmother would resume her story only when she was ready. Helen seemed to be bracing herself for this next installment.

  “I’ve been thinking about the things I mentioned on your last visit,” Helen finally said, sipping her tea. Steam rose from the delicate bone-china cup. “It was a lot for you to absorb at one time.”

  “I didn’t know anything about your adventures, Grandma.” And they truly were adventures, of a kind few people experienced these days. Real adventures, with real and usually involuntary risks.

  Helen grimaced. “My children didn’t, either. But as I said before, it’s time.” Helen set the fragile cup back in its saucer. “Your father phoned and asked me about all of this.” She paused, a look of distress on her face. “I hope he’ll forgive me for keeping it from him all these years.”

  “I’m sure he will,” Ruth told her.

  Helen obviously wanted to believe that. “He asked me to tell him more, but I couldn’t,” she said sadly.

  “I’m sure Dad understood.”

  “I couldn’t relive those memories again so soon.”

  Ruth laid a comforting hand on her grandmother’s arm. This information of Helen’s was an important part of her family history. Today, with Helen’s agreement, she’d come prepared with a small tape recorder. Now nothing would be lost.

  “Jean-Claude had a wonderful gift,” her grandmother said, breaking into the story without preamble. “He was a big man who made friends easily—a natural leader. Our small group trusted him with our lives.”

  Paul smiled encouragingly.

  “Within a few minutes of meeting someone, he could figure out if he should trust that person,” Helen continued. “More and more people wanted to join us. We started with a few students like ourselves, who were determined to resist the Nazis. Soon, others found us and we connected with groups across France. We all worked together as we lit fires of hope.”

  “Tell me about the wanted poster with your picture and Jean-Claude’s,” Ruth said.

  Her grandmother smiled ruefully, as if that small piece of notoriety embarrassed her. “I’m afraid Jean-Claude and I acquired a somewhat exaggerated reputation. Soon almost everything that happened in Paris as part of the Resistance movement was attributed to us, whether we were involved or not.”

  “Such as?”

  “There was a fire in a supply depot. Jean-Claude and I wished we’d been responsible, but we weren’t. Yet that was what prompted the Germans to post our pictures.” A smile brightened her eyes. “It was a rather unflattering sketch of Jean-Claude, he told me, although I disagreed.”

  “Can you tell me some of the anti-Nazi activities you were able to undertake?” Ruth asked, knowing her father would want to hear as much of this as his mother could recall.

  Helen considered the question. “Perhaps the most daring adventure was one of Jean-Claude’s. There was an SS officer, a horrible man, a pig.” This word was spit out, as if even the memory of him disgusted her. “Jean-Claude discovered that this officer had obtained information through torturing a fellow Resistance member, information that put us all at risk. Jean-Claude decided the man had to die and that he would be the one to do it.”

  Paul glanced at Ruth, and he seemed to tell her that killing an SS officer would be no easy task.

  Helen sipped her tea once more. “I feared for Jean-Claude.”

  “Is this when he...died?” Ruth asked.

  “No.” For emphasis, her grandmother shook her head. “That came later.”

  “Go on,” Paul urged.

  “One night Jean-Claude left me and another woman in a garden in the suburbs, at the home of a sympathetic schoolteacher who’d made contact with our group. He and his wife went out for the evening. Jean-Claude instructed us to dig a grave and fill it with quicklime. We were to wait there for his return. He left with two other men and I was convinced I’d never
see him again.”

  “But you did,” Ruth said.

  The old woman nodded. “According to Jean-Claude, it was either kill the SS officer or he would take us all down. He simply knew too much.”

  “What did Jean-Claude do?”

  “That is a story unto itself.” Helen sat even straighter in her chair. “This happened close to the final time he was captured. He knew, I believe, that he would die soon, and it made him fearless. He took more and more risks. And he valued his own life less and less.” Her eyes shone with tears as she gazed out the rain-blurred window, lost in a world long since past.

  “The SS officer had taken a room in a luxury hotel on the outskirts of Paris,” Helen went on a minute later. “He was in the habit of sipping a cognac before retiring for the evening. When he called for his drink, it was Jean-Claude who brought it to him wearing a waiter’s jacket. I don’t know how he killed the SS man, but he did it without alerting anyone. He made sure there was no blood. The problem was getting the body out of the hotel without anyone seeing.”

  “Why? Couldn’t he just leave it there?”

  “Why?” Helen repeated, shaking her head. “If the man’s body had been discovered, the entire staff would have been tortured as punishment. Eventually someone would have broken. In any event, Jean-Claude smuggled the body out.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “Jean-Claude was clever. His friends hauled him and the body of the SS officer up the chimney. First the dead man and then the live one. That was necessary, you see, because there was a guard at the end of the hallway.”

  “But once they got to the rooftop, how did he manage?”

  “It was an effort,” Helen said. “Jean-Claude told me they tossed the body from that rooftop to the roof of another building and then another—an office building. They lowered him down in the elevator. When the men arrived with the body, we all worked together and buried him quickly.”

  “The SS officer’s disappearance must have caused trouble for the Resistance,” Paul said.

  Helen nodded ardently. “Oh, yes.”

  “When was Jean-Claude captured the second time?” Ruth asked. She was intensely curious and yet she dreaded hearing about the death of this brave man her grandmother had loved.

  Helen’s eyes glistened and she lifted her teacup with an unsteady hand. “It isn’t what you think,” she prefaced, and the cup made a slight clinking sound as it rattled against the saucer. Helen placed both hands in her lap and took a moment to compose herself. “We were headed for the Metro—the subway. By then I’d bleached my hair and we’d both changed our appearances as much as possible. I don’t think my own mother would have recognized me. Jean-Claude’s, either,” she added softly, her voice a mere whisper.

  Paul reached for Ruth’s hand, as if sensing that she needed his support.

  When her grandmother began to speak again, it was in French. She switched languages naturally, apparently without realizing she’d done so. All at once, she covered her face and broke into sobs.

  Although Ruth hadn’t understood a word, she started crying, too, and gently wrapped her arms around her grandmother’s thin shoulders. Hugging her was the only thing she could do to ease this remembered pain.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Ruth cooed over and over. “You don’t need to tell us any more.”

  Paul agreed. “This is too hard on her—and you,” he said.

  They stayed for another hour, but it was clear that reliving the past had exhausted her grandmother. She seemed so frail now, even more than during the previous visit.

  While her grandmother rested in her room, Ruth cleared the table. As she took care of the few dishes, her eyes brimmed with tears again. It was agonizing to think about the horrors her grandmother had endured.

  “When she was speaking French, she must’ve been reliving the day Jean-Claude died,” Ruth said, turning so her back was pressed against the kitchen counter.

  Paul nodded. “She was,” he answered somberly.

  Ruth studied him as she returned to the kitchen table, where he sat. “You said you speak French. Could you understand what she was saying?”

  He nodded again. “At the Metro that day, Jean-Claude was picked up in a routine identity check by the French police. Through pure luck, Helen was able to get on the train without being stopped. She had to stand helplessly inside the subway car and watch as the police hauled him to Gestapo headquarters.” Paul paused long enough to give her an odd smile. “The next part was a tirade against the police, whom she hated. Remember last week when she explained that some of the French police were trying to prove their worth to the Germans? Well, apparently Jean-Claude was one of their most wanted criminals.”

  “They tortured him, didn’t they?” she asked, although she already knew the answer.

  “Yes.” Paul met her eyes. “Unmercifully.”

  Ruth swallowed hard.

  “Helen tried to save him. Disregarding her own safety, she went in after him, only this time she went alone. No sympathetic priest.” Paul’s face hardened. “They dragged her into the basement, where Jean-Claude was being tortured. They had him strung up by his arms. He was bloody and his face was unrecognizable.”

  “No!” Ruth hid her eyes with both hands.

  “They taunted him. Said they had his accomplice and now he would see her die.”

  Ruth could barely talk. “They...were going to...kill Helen—in front of Jean-Claude?”

  “From what she said, it wouldn’t have been an easy death. The point was for Jean-Claude to watch her suffer—to watch her die a slow, agonizing death.”

  “Dear God in heaven.”

  “She didn’t actually say it,” Paul continued. “She didn’t have to spell it out, but Jean-Claude obviously hadn’t been broken. Seeing her suffer would have done it, though, and your grandmother knew that. She also knew that if he talked, it would mean the torture and death of others in the Resistance.” Paul looked away for a moment. “Apparently he and his friends had helped a number of British pilots escape German detection. At risk was the entire underground effort. Jean-Claude knew more than anyone suspected.”

  “Helen couldn’t let that happen,” Ruth said.

  “No, and Jean-Claude understood that, too.”

  “Remember when she said she was the one who killed him? She didn’t mean that literally, did she?”

  “She did.”

  This was beginning not to make sense. “But...how?”

  Paul braced his elbows on the table. “Her voice started to break at that point and I didn’t catch everything. She talked about a cyanide tablet. I’m not sure how she got hold of it. But I know she kissed him.... A final kiss goodbye. By this stage she was too emotional to understand clearly.”

  The pieces started to fall together for Ruth. “She gave him the pill—you mean instead of taking it herself?”

  “That’s what it sounded like to me,” he said hoarsely.

  “Was this when he asked her to kill him? And then she kissed him and transferred the pill?”

  “I think so.” Paul cleared his throat, but his voice was still rough. “She said Jean-Claude had begged her to kill him. He spoke to her in English, which the Germans couldn’t understand.”

  Ruth pictured the terrible scene. Helen and Jean-Claude arguing. If Helen swallowed the pill, she’d be dead and the Gestapo would lose their bargaining chip. Even knowing that, Jean-Claude couldn’t bear to see his wife die. It truly would have broken him.

  “Speaking in another language added enough confusion that she had the opportunity to do what he asked,” Ruth speculated.

  “Last time she told us about being driven by fear instead of courage,” Paul reminded her. “I’m sure she didn’t stop to think about what she was doing—she couldn’t. Nor could she refuse Jean-Claude.”

  Ruth wanted to
bury her face in her hands and weep.

  “Jean-Claude thanked her,” Paul said.

  “She would have refused.” Ruth could see it all in her mind, the argument between them.

  “I’m convinced she did refuse at first. She loved Jean-Claude—he was her husband.”

  Ruth couldn’t imagine a worse scenario.

  Paul’s voice dropped slightly. “She said Jean-Claude had never begged for mercy, never pleaded for anything, but he told her he couldn’t bear any more pain. Above all, he couldn’t bear it if they killed her. He begged her to let him die.”

  “He loved her that much,” Ruth said in a hushed whisper.

  “And she loved him that much, enough to spare him any more torture, even at the risk of her own death.”

  “They didn’t kill her, though,” Ruth said, stating the obvious. “Even though they must have figured out that she was responsible for his death?”

  Paul’s eyes widened as if he couldn’t explain that any more than she could. “She didn’t say what happened next.”

  Ruth stood, anxious now to see her grandmother before they left. “I’m going to check on her.”

  Ruth went to her grandmother’s room to find her resting fitfully. Helen’s eyes fluttered open when Ruth stepped quietly past the threshold.

  “Have I shocked you?” Helen asked, holding out her hand to Ruth.

  “No,” Ruth told her grandmother, who had to be the bravest woman she’d ever know. She sat on the edge of the bed and whispered, “Thank you, Grandma—for everything you did. And for doing Paul and me the honor of sharing it with us.”

  Helen smiled and touched her cheek. “You’ve been crying.”

  Taking her grandmother’s hand between her own, she kissed the old woman’s knuckles. A lump filled her throat and she couldn’t find the words to express her love.

  “When did you meet Grandpa?” she finally asked.

  Helen smiled again and her eyes drifted shut. “Two years later. He was one of the American soldiers who came with Patton’s army to free us from the concentration camp.”