by Andie Newton
I wondered what mysterious past Mother Superior shared with Mama. Something dangerous perhaps, something meaningful and profound I was sure. I couldn’t keep the lighter after knowing how important it was. ‘Maybe you can tell me some other time?’
Mama’s gaze trailed off.
‘I think the lighter belongs with you, Mama.’
She rubbed her head with one hand and grabbed the lighter with the other, slipping it into her pocket. ‘If that’s what you want.’
I picked up the note Papa had left for her on the table. Below an old message he had crossed out were the words to ‘À la Claire Fontaine’. I remembered Mama singing the song when I was a child, walking through Papa’s vines with Charlotte and me tagging along on her heels. When I realized what Papa had said with the lyrics, I offered her the note. ‘You should read this.’
Mama hit her forehead with the fleshy part of her palm. ‘No,’ she groaned. ‘I haven’t the strength for any more words.’ She tightened the tie on her crème peignoir and trudged upstairs to her bedroom. ‘Get rid of it, Adèle. I don’t want to see it when I come back down.’
I read the lines quietly to myself.
‘Long have I loved you. Never will I forget you.’
11
I sat at the kitchen table, eating the few pears Mama had left in the fruit bowl and what little bread she had on the table, taking drinks from an opened bottle of Papa’s wine.
In the silence of the quiet room and with the equally silent vineyard out the window, the absence of Papa felt very real. Before the war the fields would have been busy with field hands rotating barrels of wine in the barrel cellar before the autumn harvest. And Mama, she’d be singing, hanging up laundry on the line, waving to Papa in the field. Charlotte would be talking about her next art exhibit and the paintings she had completed on the promenade overlooking the Allier River.
Seemed like an eternity ago.
Mama stumbled down the stairs to tell me she was going to bed for the rest of the day and not to expect supper. Her eyes were puffier than they were earlier, and her nose was raw and red as if she had been wiping it with coarse linen rather than a hanky. ‘And I don’t want to talk about your father. Not today, and not tomorrow either.’ She rewrapped her peignoir and went back upstairs to her bedroom. ‘You should get some rest, too. You’re going to need it.’
I took a second bottle of wine with me down the corridor, heading to my room, drinking as I went. I tried not to think of Gérard, but he was like a hook stuck in my mouth, tugging at the corners of my thoughts, every one of them ending with his hands on my body.
I threw open my bedroom door and stood in the doorway, waiting for my eyes to adjust, gazing upon my room for the first time in so very long.
The silver-plated hairbrush I got the summer before was on my commode. Dried flowers hung from my wall near the window, white ones I had picked from the garden last May. Even the stockings I had soaked and rinsed months ago were still strung up, waiting for me to fold and put away—as if I hadn’t left, and as if nothing had changed.
I crawled under my sheets and got into bed, thinking of Mama upstairs by herself and Papa in the city, and me all alone in my room, which brought on an unexpected gush of tears before I finally fell asleep. I woke up to Mama sitting on the edge of my bed, telling me it was morning and I had to get up.
‘It’s nearly seven o’clock.’ Mama threw her silky peignoir over her legs. ‘You’ll have to take your bicycle since your father took the car.’
All I could do was groan, feeling every drop of wine I had drunk.
‘You know what you have to do today. Don’t you, Adèle?’
‘Gérard Baudoin.’ His name felt like sandpaper in my mouth. ‘I’ll have to take whatever shame he throws my way if I plan on getting a foot in the door of the Hotel du Parc.’
‘And Charlotte,’ Mama said. ‘You need to see her first thing. She’ll be expecting it.’
‘I know.’ I sat up to rub a dull pain in my back.
‘Not used to sleeping in a real bed, are you?’
‘I suppose not.’ My eyes closed again, and I felt myself nod off while I was sitting up, only to jerk suddenly awake with Mama watching.
‘You have to get up,’ she said.
‘I know.’ I rubbed my ears and was able to throw off the covers.
‘Oh, Adèle…’ she breathed. ‘Much has changed since you’ve left. The vineyard, our family… and Vichy. If it weren’t for the French uniforms you couldn’t tell the difference between them and a German.’
‘The police?’
She nodded. ‘Gérard. Even more than before.’
‘In what ways?’
‘Isa Brochard from the farm behind—he arrested her personally, sent her to the big prison in Drancy. Someone said she was born in Warsaw, but I’ve never heard a foreign word come out of her mouth.’ Mama pulled a cigarette from her case and the cloisonné from her pocket. ‘I’ve been bringing her husband meat pies when I can—when the rabbits are around. My heart pains for their little ones. I don’t think they know.’
‘What do you mean they don’t know?’
Mama struck her lighter several times and then paused to give it a shake. ‘He still sets the table for four. I can only imagine what he’s told them.’ She struck the lighter again, but much harder and a low-burning flame ignited from a spark.
‘I thought she grew up in the Dordogne.’
Mama took a long drag from her cigarette. ‘Like I said, I never heard a foreign word come out of her mouth. Madame Brochard was, however, of Jewish decent.’ She stared at a spot in the wall, and her voice turned faint. ‘She left so dignified, too…’
She shook her head after a long pause. ‘You have a tough job ahead of you, Adèle. Gérard is a very difficult man. I have complete faith in you, but it doesn’t mean I won’t worry. How are you going to do it? Do you have a plan?’
‘I’m going to be myself,’ I said. ‘He’s attracted to the way I am. He’ll be suspicious if I’m any different.’ I looked at my hands, rolling them around. ‘Mama, how did you tell him? Gérard, I mean. How did he find out? The day of the wedding? At the altar?' I didn’t put it past Mama to wait until the very last minute.
‘That was my intention,’ she said. ‘Only Gérard sent a note that afternoon asking you to meet him for dinner. I wanted him to wait all night for you, but after I told your father where you’d gone, Charlotte went in your place. I heard he was waiting outside the restaurant, pacing, getting very upset. It’s because of her he didn’t go out after you. Charlotte never told me what she said, but whatever it was, it was enough to get him to calm down.’
I sighed, relieved, thankful Charlotte was successful. I knew that if Mama had waited for the ceremony I was doomed, and I’d never get a chance to read the numbers on the back of that cigar box.
She got up from my bed and walked to the door. ‘He was such a different boy before the war. His family… simple spa owners with a service to sell.’
‘Do you think so, Mama? Or did the armistice just give people an opportunity to expose their true selves?’
Mama stopped, both hands bracing the doorframe. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, looking over her shoulder. ‘I really don’t.’
*
After a light breakfast of eggs with jam, I slipped on a clean dress and got ready to go to Papa’s wine store near the Gare de Vichy. Two sweeps of rouge across my cheeks and a dab of smooth red on my lips—half the makeup I used to wear, but after being at the convent for so many weeks it felt a little heavy.
Mama gave me a pair of her thickest pumps to hide the blisters I got from walking all night. ‘Set your hair,’ she said. ‘It will make you look more like a woman who went to find herself rather than a child who ran away.’
I agreed and smoothed my hair into barrel curls.
I rode up to Papa’s store and found him sweeping RAF leaflets from his pavement with a wiry broom, working his way from Charlotte’s storefront to his. Old men with tales fr
om the 1914 war ripe in their heads chatted over dingy bistro tables sipping Papa’s wine. Their eyes followed me as I walked up to the front door, then one of them rode off on his bicycle after he saw my face. ‘Nunnery,’ I heard in whispers. ‘Humiliated.’
Vichy police patrolled the street, looking in shop windows and studying the people in the cafés. I held my head up.
‘Adèle!’ Papa propped his broom up on the side of the store. ‘Bienvenue, ma chérie! Bienvenue!’ He kissed both my cheeks, and the police walked by, pushing us out of their way.
‘Come in.’ He held his door open, smiling. I was surprised to find Papa’s store was actually a wine bar, with tables for people to sit and drink. The space smelled like tangy grapes, not the aged wine he was known to produce at the vineyard, but he seemed happy with it, pointing to the diverse blends of wine he had from the Auvergne region. I couldn’t help but notice the empty wine crates from Germany stacked against the wall. Papa watched me as I read the labels stamped on the front.
‘To keep certain people content,’ he said. ‘Customers can sit and have a glass or buy a crate. Mostly the regime and the police, and…’
I looked up.
Papa was made from the stain of French grapes—I would have never thought he’d sell German wine over his own. ‘Papa,’ I said. ‘Wine from Germany…’
‘We do what we have to, Adèle,’ he said while moving the crates, turning the stamps toward the wall. ‘When we have to.’
‘What did you say?’ I regretted the cynical tone in my voice.
‘We do what we have to…’
‘You sound like Mama.’
‘Sometimes we have to pick our battles. Wine from Germany is no battle of mine.’
I stared at him, wondering where my father had gone. It was more than just the day suit he was wearing, which months ago would have been field clothes soiled from having his hands in a grape barrel. My father would have called the German wine vin de merde. Shit wine, just like Beaujolais made from the Gamay grapes he had warned Charlotte and me to stay away from as children.
Papa took a deep breath. ‘I’m glad you’re home, ma chérie.’
‘You don’t blame me?’
He scoffed. ‘I cannot lie… you did delay my plans to secure our family with the government, with Pétain. But like every good Frenchman I have refocused. Do not fear. I knew you couldn’t think of something like that on your own.’
I shook my head. ‘But I could, Papa. And I did think of it.’ As much as I didn’t want him to be angry with me for what I had done and where I had gone, I couldn’t let Mama take the blame. Though I had a feeling no matter what I said to try and convince him otherwise, he wouldn’t believe me.
‘What is done is done,’ he said. ‘You’re home now.’
I glanced over his things, the bar, and the bottles and bottles of wine meant to be sold, but why, and who was minding the vineyard?
‘Papa,’ I said. ‘Why are you here? Why aren’t you tending the estate?’
He rubbed his forehead, stalling. The vineyard had been in our family for generations, passed down from his father, whose father had passed it to him.
‘What’s going on?’
Papa placed some cheeses on a board for us to share, motioning for me to take a seat at one of his small tasting tables while adding some walnuts and dried apples from the canisters on the bar. The Fourme d’Ambert looked very blue as he cut into it, offering me a sliver straight from the knife.
‘There’s no water in the hills,’ he said. ‘The aquifer… it’s all dried up.’
‘Dig some more, Papa. It’s your wine.’
‘I wish I could, ma chérie,’ he said, cutting himself a bit of the Fourme d’Ambert. ‘The water is being used for other things.’
‘But the vineyard… all the field hands are gone,’ I said. ‘The vines will die.’
‘Pétain wouldn’t put the vineyards of Creuzier-le-Vieux at risk if he didn’t have to—we all have to sacrifice something for peace; this is mine.’ He patted my hand when I shook my head. ‘Do not worry. I’m making a good profit off what I have bottled. The regime comes only to me for their needs. I have no competition. You will see. Soon enough everything will be back to normal. Pétain has our best interests on his mind.’ Papa smiled. ‘I’m confident. He’s our hero.’
I put the sliver of cheese on the board uneaten. ‘But he handed over our soldiers, accepted defeat.’
‘Don’t believe everything your mother tells you, Adèle.’ He swallowed. ‘Nothing in war is easy. She tended the wounded, but I lived with them in the trenches, and with the dead buried in the cliffs of Gallipoli. Pétain gave us peace. Now we have to do our part.’ He glanced around his wine bar and over the Pétain posters pasted to his walls. ‘This is my part.’
‘Did you hear about Madame Brochard?’
‘The farmer’s wife?’ Papa grabbed an opened bottle he had under the front counter and poured some wine into the one clean glass he had on hand. He sipped the wine, rolling it in his mouth. When he noticed I was watching him, he turned the label around to show me the bottle was one of his. ‘Do you want some?’
‘Papa, she was arrested and sent to Drancy.’
‘Yes, yes, I heard… illegal immigration,’ he said, taking another drink of wine.
‘No, Papa. She’s not a foreigner. They arrested her because she is Jewish.’
‘Impossible.’ He set down his glass. ‘That is not a law. Did you hear this from your mother?’
The door flew open and hit the wall with a clatter, wine bottles clinking and clanging in their racks. Charlotte stood in the doorway, first looking happy to see me, and then not. It was the same look she’d give me when we were young, after she caught me using her paints without asking. ‘Back from the nunnery?’
‘Charlotte.’ I stood up, smiling cautiously, remembering that the last time she saw me I was running away from her.
Papa took his wine glass and headed upstairs to the flat he’d made above his wine bar. ‘I’ll find you a clean glass.’
She waltzed in, arms crossed, waiting until Papa was out of sight. ‘I was so angry with you, Adèle.’ She walked closer until she stood a breath away from my face. ‘You always do what you want when you want—never think about anyone else. I was tying up your bouquet the morning you left and you said nothing. Your own sister!’
I shook my head. ‘I know, and I’m sorry.’
‘People are calling you a runaway bride. It’s humiliating for all of us! But, I knew you’d be back. You never last more than a few weeks doing any one thing.’
She paused for a reaction. Charlotte wouldn’t understand—she was incapable of understanding—I couldn’t have told her I wanted to leave.
‘And what do you think about this?’ Charlotte said, whirling her finger around the room.
‘The wine bar?’
‘It’s because of you.’
I poked my thumb into my chest. ‘I’m responsible?’
‘You cast a rock into a calm lake and then you turned your back.’ Charlotte’s brow furrowed, and the light brown curls she usually kept pinned behind her ears sprung from her head. ‘Papa left Mama when he realized she helped you, that she planned your escape to the nunnery. She told Papa she was a Gaullist. Now they must lie to everyone, pretend he’s only in the city because of the wine bar, when we know they are separated. Our parents, separated!’
‘And being a Gaullist is bad?’
She gasped, putting a hand to her chest. ‘Whose side are you on, Adèle? Charles de Gaulle is diverting all the progress Pétain has made. We stay the course, like Papa says, follow Pétain, and we will be back to normal sooner than later.’
‘Normal?’ I was surprised how everyone in my family used the same words to prove their point of view. ‘Is it normal for your father to betroth you against your wishes?’
‘Papa did you a favour! Couldn’t get a proposal on your own—you’re the most erratic person I swear—so Papa got a man for you.
A good one, too. French police, stable pay, calling the shots.’ She looked at a split in her fingernail before folding her arms tightly across her body. That’s when I noticed how thin she was, her body back to the shape she always had been. She wasn’t pregnant anymore: she must have had her baby.
‘Charlotte!’ I smiled. ‘You’ve had your baby! Was it a girl like you hoped?’ I remembered the pink and blue blankets she needled months ago, wondering which one she ended up keeping. The pink one had lace sewn around the edges, whereas the blue one had ribbon. ‘Or a baby boy?’ I moved to kiss her, but she pushed me back.
‘You would have known had you been here.’ Charlotte paused, looking down at the ground before standing very straight. ‘The baby was stillborn.’
‘Stillborn? As in…’ I couldn’t say the word aloud even if I wanted to. Dead. ‘My God, Charlotte.’ I closed my eyes briefly. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…’
Charlotte shrugged, trying to look unaffected by the tragedy, but her eyes swelled with tears, and I could tell she was absolutely devastated. ‘A girl.’
‘You already buried her?’
She nodded. ‘Claudeen’s hill.’
Claudeen’s hill had been around for a century. It was a mountainous pile of dirt and rock with thick green grass growing at the top. If the grass was hair, then the white fence that bordered it was the crown. Only the rich or the lucky had family tombs at that cemetery.
‘I’d like to go,’ I said, ‘to where she’s buried and pay my respects—’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘But why?’
Charlotte looked to the ground again, unable to answer. That’s when I saw Gérard standing on the corner waiting for a car to pass. I felt woozy and sick from Charlotte’s news. Now I felt something else. She went to leave, but I stopped her by the elbow. ‘Don’t leave just yet…’ I said to her, with my eyes set on Gérard as he crossed the street.
Charlotte shook her head. ‘No, sister. This is your hole. Not mine.’ She kissed my cheek and then whispered in my ear. ‘Insufferable as you are, I missed you terribly.’
My knees shook watching Gérard take his last few steps across the street; I was sad then frightened and at a loss for words. All I could do was reach for Charlotte, and we threw our arms around each other, squeezing lovingly and hard. Then she was gone, and I found myself standing alone among the tables, wishing Papa would stop looking for that damn glass and get back downstairs.
