All the Ways We Said Goodbye

by Beatriz Williams

  “Mademoiselle?”

  She looked up. The face startled her. Not because it was so typically German, or rather Prussian—those blue eyes, that straw-colored hair, that rigid something about the jaw and cheekbones could be seen everywhere in Paris now, most especially in the lobby of the Ritz—but because he was startled, too. His eyebrows slanted into an expression of stern surprise. She glanced at the stripes on his shoulder.

  “Yes, lieutenant colonel?” she said to his nose, which was sharp like the beak of a predatory bird of some kind, she wasn’t sure which one. A large, mottled scar disfigured the skin on the left side of his face, or else he might have been handsome.

  “Your name, please.”

  He spoke sharply, and Daisy’s palms, turning damp, began to slip against the bindings of the books. Still, she lifted her chin and edged her gaze upward a few centimeters to the space between his eyes. Not for nothing was she a Frenchwoman.

  “I am Madame Villon,” she replied, just as sharp. He seemed to be staring at her eyebrows. Daisy hated her eyebrows, which were straight and thick and several shades darker than her blond hair, like a pair of accent marks, grave on the right and aigu on the left. The eyebrows were a gift from her mother, who had died when Daisy was three years old, and there were many times Daisy angrily wondered why her mother couldn’t have left her something useful and beautiful instead, not these two fierce, mannish eyebrows. Anyway, she disliked this German even more for noticing them, and he must have seen the dislike on her face, because his own expression softened a little, insomuch as it was possible for a scarred Prussian mask like that to soften at all.

  “Your papers, please,” he said.

  “My papers?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Daisy heaved a little sigh, just to show him how unreasonable he was. “You must wait a moment, lieutenant colonel, while I set down these books.”

  “I will hold the books.”

  She ignored that and bent to set the books on the floor. She had the feeling that Bernard was staring at them worriedly, that Bernard was in an agony, wondering whether he should sweep in to hold the books—service at the Ritz was a sacred thing, a holy calling, even in war—or whether he could better serve her by staying the hell away from this encounter. She prayed he’d stick to the latter resolution. The less attention, the better. She burrowed inside her pocketbook and produced her identity card and handed it to the German officer with a tiny snap of her wrist, the nearest Daisy had possibly ever come to defiance. As he held the official paper straight before him, squinting a little—he was at that age when a man has begun to require reading glasses and will not admit this truth to himself—Daisy noticed that his fingers shook a little.

  “Marguerite,” he said. “This is your given name, Marguerite?”

  “Yes.”

  “D’Aubigny. This was your family name, before you married?”

  Daisy aimed for a note of bored irony. “So it says on my papers, as you see.”

  “But is it true?” he demanded.

  “True? I don’t understand.”

  “Your father’s name was d’Aubigny?”

  “Yes, of course.” She opened her mouth to babble out all the details, that her father was a soldier of the Great War who had died at Verdun before she was born, so she had never known him, had spent her entire childhood here at the Ritz with her grandmother, because this German was staring at poor Daisy like she had failed a critical examination at school and must be demoted to the year below, which made her panic. She stopped herself in time. It was Grandmère’s voice in her head—Don’t babble, child!—that saved her. (Also in obedience to Grandmère’s voice, she straightened up, child.)

  He spent a moment considering this. His lips were sealed tight, and his nostrils flared a little as he breathed. Finally he nodded. “I see.”

  He returned the identity card and she stuffed it back in her pocketbook. He was staring at the parting of her hair, she knew. As she fumbled with the old, worn clasp that wouldn’t properly shut, he spoke again, and this time she noticed that his French was actually excellent, that he didn’t have that usual awkward, guttural way with the delicate vowels. He caressed them almost as a Frenchman would, with reverence. Of course, this only made Daisy dislike him still more, if that were possible. How dare he lay some kind of ownership on her beloved native tongue! At last she forced the clasp shut and went to retrieve her books, but the German had already bent his long body and retrieved them for her, the final straw. She hated him. She snatched the books back and pressed them against her chest.

  “If that’s all, lieutenant colonel—”

  “One more question, if you please, madame. What is your business here?”

  “My business?”

  “If you please, madame.”

  She wanted to say that she lived here, you German turd, this was her home, that was her business here! But that wasn’t quite true anymore, and besides it would make him suspicious. So she said the truth. “I’m delivering some books to my grandmother.”

  “Your grandmother stays here?”

  “Yes.” Again, she bit herself off before she could babble out her grandmother’s name and history and state of health.

  Against odds, he smiled a little. “Your grandmother likes to read?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let us carry the books up to her together.”

  “No! That isn’t necessary. I’m perfectly capable of carrying a few books up a few stairs.”

  “No doubt, but German chivalry demands that I don’t allow you to.”

  Well! Her hatred was now so strong, it gave her actual courage, imagine that. Like a glass of good champagne, swiftly drunk. She gave this obnoxious fellow a look of French defiance such as even her grandmother would approve, one that must communicate through even the thickest German skull what Daisy d’Aubigny Villon thought of German chivalry.

  She spoke in a voice that measured about zero degrees centigrade, although her insides shook a little. “I assure you, lieutenant colonel, I don’t need any help.”

  “Madame, please. You must allow me—”

  “You have far more important matters to attend to, I’m sure.”

  At that instant, there was a roar of laughter from the Little Bar, and Bernard appeared at her elbow.

  “Herr Lieutenant Colonel,” he said hurriedly, “there is a telephone call for you at the bar.”

  The German answered without taking his gaze from Daisy’s face. “A telephone call? That’s odd. From whom?”

  “The party wouldn’t say, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes. Very well.”

  Then the German did something strange. He lifted Daisy’s right hand away from the books, so that she had to shift her weight to keep her grip on them, and he kissed the tips of her fingers with his thin, soft lips.

  “Madame,” he said, “you will please excuse me.”

  Daisy tore her fingers away and darted past him to the stairs. On the fourth step, she turned to thank Bernard with her eyes, but it was not the doorman who remained there in the hall with the chandelier glittering on his pale hair. It was the German officer, who had taken a gold watch from some inner pocket of his uniform and now stared at the open case, inspecting the hour.

  Now, Daisy might have spent her childhood inside the walls of the Ritz Paris, but that was the Place Vendôme side, in Grandmère’s permanent suite that was like an apartment lifted straight from the Palace of Versailles, except more homelike. (The Ritz liked to think of itself as a kind of grand country residence rather than a hotel.) This building, the rue Cambon side, connected to the main building by a long gallery that traversed the garden courtyard, wasn’t nearly as familiar to her. In fact, so flustered was Daisy by the encounter with the German, she turned down the wrong corridor and spent an awful, dizzy moment in total discombobulation, imagining the entire hotel had turned on some new and previously unknown axis. Then recognition came to her in a flash—oddly enough, the memory of some chil
dhood game of hide and seek—and she turned back and went down the correct corridor this time, humbled, heart still pounding against her ribs, mouth dry, fingertips itching where the German officer had kissed them. She found Grandmère’s door and knocked on the louvered panel.

  “Come in,” came her grandmother’s voice, almost inaudible because the doors at the Ritz were made of solid, heavy wood that actually hurt your knuckles a little when you knocked on them.

  Daisy shifted the books to her left arm and used her right hand to turn the handle. Grandmère’s apartment faced northwest, overlooking rue Cambon from the third floor. You could see Mademoiselle Chanel’s atelier at number 31, now closed for the duration of the war. Only the perfume business remained open. Mademoiselle Chanel was too canny a businesswoman not to clear herself a fortune selling bottles of Chanel No. 5 to all the German wives. The afternoon light was just beginning to make itself known through the windows, illuminating the gilded Louis Quinze furniture—reproduction, but well-made reproduction, elegantly upholstered—and the two people who sat on the pair of sofas that flanked the fireplace, Grandmère and a man Daisy didn’t recognize, wearing a dark, rather shabby suit. They both looked at her in the doorway. The man stood. Daisy had a fleeting impression of glossy brown hair—a little too much of it, really—and a dry smile as she passed her gaze over him to find Grandmère.

  “Why, what’s the matter?” asked Grandmère.

  Daisy opened her mouth and glanced at the stranger. “Nothing.”

  “You look like you’ve had a fright.”

  “It’s just the stairs. And I took a wrong turn.”

  “A wrong turn?”

  “I keep thinking you’re in the old apartment.” Daisy stepped closer and set the volumes down on the sofa table. They made a soft, leathery thump on the wood, which was overpolished in the Ritz tradition. “Here are your books.”

  “Thank you, my dear. Give your grandmother a kiss, now.”

  Daisy smiled and bent to place a kiss on Grandmère’s cheek. She smelled of powder and perfume and something else, a new and pungent scent, not native to her grandmother at all. “You’re well?” she asked quietly.

  “Quite well. Daisy, my darling, this is Monsieur Legrand, a friend of mine just arrived in Paris.”

  Daisy straightened and turned. The man still stood politely in place before the opposite sofa with his smile and his glossy hair. The light picked out some gold among the brown. His eyes, however, regarded her with gravity. She pulled the sides of her cardigan closer together. “Monsieur,” she said, by way of greeting.

  She gave him no hand to clasp, no cheek to kiss, so he just ducked his head briefly and widened his smile. His jacket was unbuttoned to reveal a knitted vest, as if he expected the weather to turn. “Madame Villon. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  His French was exquisite, absolutely without flaw, but Daisy had some idea nonetheless that this Monsieur Legrand was not a Frenchman. It wasn’t his voice but his bearing, his stance. Also the pipe, which she now noticed dangling from his right hand and recognized as the source of the unusual spicy odor, so out of place in her grandmother’s apartment.

  “A friend of my grandmother’s? I don’t recall her mentioning the name before.”

  “Ah. I suppose you might say I’m more of an acquaintance.”

  “A new and trusted acquaintance,” said Grandmère. “Monsieur Legrand is a poet, darling. He’s begun working at the bookshop to support his literary ambitions.”

  “A poet,” Daisy said dubiously. “Is this really a proper time for poetry?”

  “For poetry above all, Madame Villon. It’s how we make sense of the world around us, isn’t it?”

  “Good poetry, perhaps.”

  He put his hand—the hand with the pipe—to his heart. “You wound me.”

  “I beg your pardon. I’m sure your work is wonderful.”

  “His work is tremendously important,” said Grandmère, “which is why I’m afraid it’s time for you to leave, monsieur, so you may return to it.”

  Monsieur Legrand spread out his arms and bowed extravagantly. “As you wish, madame.”

  “And you may return these books to the shop as well.” Grandmére reached forward and picked up a pair of slim volumes that rested on the edge of the sofa table, next to the fireplace. “I’ve finished them both. Quite good. Tell Monsieur Lapin that I approve of his selections.”

  “I shall with pleasure, madame.” Legrand lifted a glass from the table—cognac, Daisy thought—and finished it off in a flick of his wrist. For an instant, his eyes closed, bringing all his concentration to bear on this mouthful of spirits, and no wonder. Grandmère kept only the best cognac, and God help the Nazi who tried to confiscate her private store in the name of the Reich. Daisy found herself staring at the intersection of frayed white cuff and bare wrist. His skin was tanned, and it was only May. He set the glass down, and the wrist disappeared once more beneath the cuff.

  “Don’t forget your hat,” said Grandmère.

  “Of course. Good day, madame.” He turned to Daisy and fetched up another smile. “Good day, madame. Until we meet again.”

  He stuck his pipe in his mouth and made his way to the door, hardly pausing to snatch his hat from the commode as he went. He closed the door with just enough force to make a decisive click of the latch, and at that exact instant the room dimmed a degree or two, like the sun had gone behind some cloud in the western sky.

  “Glass of cognac, my dear?” said Grandmère. “You look as if you need one.”

  “No, thank you.” Daisy lowered herself on the sofa, taking care to avoid the small, warm hollow left there by Monsieur Legrand. “I can only stay a moment. The children will be home from school.”

  “Yes, the children. And there is this dinner party to prepare for, no?”

  “That too.”

  Grandmère pressed her lips together. She was a slight woman, shorter than Daisy by several centimeters, topped by a mass of fluffy hair that had recently—and rather abruptly—turned from its original ash blond, without a strand of gray, to a luminescent white. That was Grandmère for you, all or nothing. As always, she was a little overdressed for the occasion, in a long dress of emerald silk topped by a short quilted jacket of aquamarine satin, a combination of colors that could never have worked on any woman except Grandmère, who had been born Minnie Gold of New York City and wore whatever the devil she liked. Now she stood in a rustle of silk and went to the liquor cabinet. “Cognac you must have, my dear, whether you want it or not. Actually, I suspect you do want it, only you don’t think it’s ladylike to ask.”

  “Oh, Grandmère . . .”

  “Here. I’ve saved you the trouble.” Grandmère returned with a snifter, which she handed to Daisy. The lamp made her rings glitter. The jewels used to be real, but Grandmère had sold them off, one by one, and replaced them with paste, which everybody pretended not to notice. Anyway, you couldn’t tell unless you were up close and happened to know a great deal about gems. They were excellent fakes, the best. Grandmère would accept nothing less.

  Daisy stared down for a moment or two at the amber circle between her thumb and forefinger. Grandmère resumed her seat on the opposite sofa. Daisy sipped. A very small sip, and then a larger one. Oh, the burn! But it was a nice burn, a good, expensive burn, a familiar burn that tasted of home. From the sofa cushions came a whiff of pipe tobacco.

  “I need your help,” said Grandmère.

  Daisy glanced at the books on the sofa table. “I’m already helping you, aren’t I?”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “You know I can’t. It’s risky enough, what I’m doing. Carrying your stupid books back and forth.”

  “There’s no risk at all. Nobody knows what you’re really carrying. Nobody would notice if they looked.”

  “They might. Germans are like bloodhounds. Have your new fellow do it. That’s his job, isn’t it?”

  “My new fellow?”

  Daisy nodde
d at the door. “Monsieur Legrand. He’s one of your little army, I can smell it on him.”

  “That? That’s just his pipe, my darling. He’s a poet, as I told you.”

  “Oh, of course. A poet. Who just happens to have found work at your favorite bookshop.”

  “Well, Jacques needed someone to replace dear Émile, who—as you know—had to leave so abruptly because of his poor mother in Brittany. Someone with enough skill and knowledge to—”

  Daisy held up her hand. “I don’t want to know what he does. I don’t care. I don’t want to get mixed up in your crazy plots. I have a husband and children to think of. I’m just delivering books to my grandmother, that’s all.”

  “Your mother would have—”

  “My mother is dead.”

  She said this a little more sharply than she meant to, and Grandmère winced at the noise, or the sentence, or both. Daisy looked away, to the fireplace, where the familiar Rodin twisted its black, sinuous limbs on the left-hand side, just as it had in the old apartment. She set the empty glass on the sofa table and rose. The cognac was already making her dizzy.

  “Stop,” said Grandmère. “Please.”

  “I can’t help you, Grandmère. I’m sorry, but I really can’t. You’re right, I’m not like Maman, I’m not brave or defiant or cunning. I can’t do what she did. I’m just Daisy. And my children will be home soon, and my husband, and we’re having some important people to dinner tonight, people who can help Pierre in his work—”

  “Exactly, and—”

  “And that’s all I can do. I can’t risk getting into trouble, helping somebody else’s family. I’m sorry, but I can’t. To protect my children, to keep my children safe, that’s all I care about.”

  “Well,” said her grandmother. “Well.”

  Daisy couldn’t bring herself to look at Grandmère. That look of pity and frustration, she couldn’t stand it this time. Instead she dragged her gaze along the wall until she found the curio case in the corner, old-fashioned not in the elegant way of the rest of Grandmère’s furniture, but brown-legged and lined in faded burgundy velvet. She stared for a moment at the little halo of light on the glass cover. “I know I’m disappointing you. I know you wish I were like her.”