Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  He pointed to the northeast, toward a castle in ruins at the top of Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt, a medieval village nestled against the forested Plateau de Vaucluse. He explained that Résistance workers had hidden their armaments and explosives there and in Gordes, and he recounted the atrocity when a German soldier was killed by a maquisard. “In retaliation,” he said, “a German platoon, maybe the same one that had come through Roussillon, rounded up villagers and massacred them in the central square.”

  “Yes, you told me.”

  He peered down at me as if to assess my reaction. There was something hinging on my knowing that, but I couldn’t determine what it was. “Imagine how that maquisard must have felt” was all I thought it safe to say.

  He ended that topic of conversation by remarking that the oak-covered hills were a prime truffle-hunting region.

  After we’d circled his property, he noticed the blood still trickling down my leg. “S’il vous plaît,” he said politely. With that, I allowed him to lead me along the pathway to the back door of his house. We entered the large kitchen, where he turned on a faucet in the sink and out came water.

  “Running water! How is it that you have running water?”

  “A water tank on the roof. A flush toilet too.”

  “You must be the only one in town.”

  “Oh, no. Several homes on the hill have plumbing. Mayor Pinatel’s, Monsieur Voisin’s home behind the café, the Hôtel de la Poste, and the bastides, the large estates in the valley.”

  He held a cloth under the faucet and crouched down to wipe my leg with it.

  “I can do it myself!”

  “Where would the pleasure be in that?”

  Following Maxime’s advice not to offend Bernard, I yielded to his attentions. He had a light touch and took great care to clean off all the blood. Then he ripped a strip off a dish towel and began to wrap it around my shin.

  “There. Come into the dining room and sit until we’re sure it has stopped bleeding.”

  A separate dining room! I was too inquisitive not to follow, and I felt safe enough. He had been nothing but a gentleman today.

  The walls were bare. Shafts of pale sunlight poured in from four tall windows on the south side and fell across an oak table nearly four meters long. In the center was a white compotier of the style Cézanne painted, filled with beautiful ceramic fruit.

  “These must be from Marseille,” I said. Surely the hand of a wife had selected them. “Is there a Madame Blanc?”

  He sat down opposite me at the table. “There was once. She died giving birth to our son. He only lived a matter of hours.” He looked away, out the window and across the valley. “This would have been his tenth Christmas.”

  I glimpsed his double grief of losing two, just at his moment of high anticipation.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  How strange to find myself feeling empathy toward this man. He brought his gaze back to me, which made me think he could see that the mention of his loss would naturally make me think of André. Sharing each other’s pain, if only for a moment, suddenly felt like a mark of friendship.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, leaning his forearms on the table. “I’ve been thinking that maybe we could declare a truce.”

  This was not the constable I knew. I had to be wary. However, the mystery of the olive wreath was suddenly plain. The olive trees in his orchard had the same leaves as those in the wreath.

  “You made that wreath, didn’t you?”

  “If you would ever come to the cemetery, I thought it might say what I’ve been unable to.” He chewed on his lip. “I’ve decided to forgive you. In the spirit of the season.”

  “You? Forgive me?”

  “For your act of retaliation with the shovel. I admit to goading you.”

  Remembering the splash, the desecration of his boots, the astonished fury on his face, I couldn’t help but smile.

  “I like a passionate woman,” he said.

  “The sausages made a graceful arc.”

  “Did you find them?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get them?”

  “I didn’t. I left them for the foxes.”

  “Ah, of course. No upright woman would consider going after those sausages.”

  He chuckled, and maybe I did too. How curious and unexpected, our mutual amusement, but it felt right, and good.

  “I admire you. For adapting to the rough life here.”

  That Bernard, that someone, had noticed gave me some dignity. He reached behind himself to a cabinet and unfolded a street plan of Paris on the table between us. How foolish I was that a piece of paper could excite me.

  “Oh, the Seine,” I sighed. “And Île de la Cité.”

  “Show me where you lived.”

  I leaned over the map, running my finger from the point of the island downstream along the Left Bank of the Seine as if I were walking the distance, then turning in from the quay at rue du Bac and walking away from the river five blocks to boulevard Saint-Germain.

  “Here! Just past the antiques shops. La Maison des Filles de la Charité Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.”

  “An orphanage?”

  “Oh, it was beautiful there. Sister Marie Pierre was so kind to me and taught me hundreds of words. When I was too old for the orphanage, I lived in the workers’ chambers. She found a good position for me at Maison Gérard Mulot, a pâtisserie and confiserie on rue de Seine. Here it is! And I met André here, on the corner of rue de Seine and boulevard Saint-Germain.

  “Later, when painters moved to Montparnasse, we moved there for the sake of André’s frame-making business. We used to go to the Dingo Bar and Closerie des Lilas and La Rotonde. We often went here”—I pointed—“to the Bobino or the Jockey Club to hear Kiki sing bawdy canaille songs full of double entendres. André liked them, but I preferred to hear Edith Piaf at Cabaret Gerny. Oh, how I love ‘La Vie en Rose.’ I admit, sometimes I do see things through rose-colored glasses. That was something about me that amused André. At the Folies Bergère we watched Josephine Baker perform in La Revue Nègre, wearing her skimpy skirt made of real bananas. And we danced the Charleston in the basement of La Coupole on boulevard Montparnasse. We felt cosmopolitan, bohemian, modern, and chic all at once.”

  My memories had tumbled out in a flood, and Bernard hadn’t said a word. I sat back in my chair.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve said too much.”

  “No, no. It’s been a long time since there was any excitement in this house. Any feminine voice at all.”

  An awkward pause settled over the map between us.

  “You look like Kiki with your short haircut.”

  “You know who she is?”

  “You love Paris, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Better than Roussillon?”

  After a moment’s reflection, being careful not to disrespect Bernard, in accordance with Maxime’s instruction, I asked, “Do you know Josephine Baker’s song ‘J’ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris’? Her country was America. She loved them both. My countryside is Provence. I could sing, ‘I have two loves too, my village and Paris.’ Don’t make me choose.”

  “I’m going there this spring, or maybe summer,” he said.

  Aha! Just the information we needed. But how could I make him be more specific?

  “You? To Paris?”

  “Why is that so surprising?”

  “In April? Or May or June?”

  He lifted his shoulders noncommittally. His chest rose and fell with his pronounced breathing, and he reached across the table and grabbed my upper arm with some force.

  “I want you to come with me.”

  I choked in surprise. I had been naked in my longing. The moment suspended possibility between us like a gaudy ornament. No. I would be trapped in a Paris hotel room with the wrong man. And yet I could keep him occupied while Maurice and Maxime searched his house. Would our plan require me to do that?

  “I …
No. I couldn’t. I can’t.” I peeled his fingers off my arm and pushed my chair back.

  “Don’t be so quick to reject a gift.”

  My list. Vow number two. Go to Paris, find Cezanne’s Card Players. I had to ignore the tantalizing tension that sped like a filament of light from his too-penetrating eyes to mine.

  “Thank you. It’s generous of you. You’ve always been generous to me, but I can’t.”

  “Think about it, Lisette. We could see all the places you love. You don’t have to tell me today.”

  How could I go with Bernard when it was with Maxime that I wanted to see Paris again? I stood up. “I have to leave.” I headed for the kitchen door and stopped just outside. How to get down the cliff? I turned back to him, momentarily confused. He directed me around the outside of the house to the front, and a road.

  “Think about it,” he repeated. An uneven smile streaked across his face. “In between crawling into strange places.”

  I hurried down the road. Passing the cemetery, I looked back. He was standing at the edge of the cliff watching me as I ran away from the Paris I wanted with all my being, clomping my wooden-soled shoes noisily on the pavement, grabbing for the flapping bandage, looking like a fool.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  PREPARATIONS

  1947

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, GENEVIÈVE BUTTED ME FROM THE rear and knocked me down. I landed in a pile of her poop. “Geneviève!” I shouted. “What’s gotten into you? You’ve become a cranky old woman.”

  She baaed at my anger and shrank away from me. Even though I had bred her twice, she refused to yield a drop.

  What a way to start the new year. Picking myself up from her smelly mess, I couldn’t help but smile, remembering the look on Bernard’s face. Regardless, I felt myself becoming resigned to Louise’s advice, but with this consolation—Geneviève, patron saint of Paris, in a supreme sacrifice, would help to pay my way to her city.

  Perhaps for her sake, I put it off. Paris was too cold in January anyway.

  THE EFFECT OF SEEING Bernard’s map lasted for weeks, making me restless, making me dreamy, making me wary. In the city that inspired romance, where lovers embraced on bridges and in small squares, where the rippling river sang quiet love songs, the very things I adored there might set me off balance, like a spinning top, tipping me toward Maxime and then tilting me away, toward the memory of André.

  But when Maxime wrote to me saying he couldn’t come to Roussillon because he was hot on the trail of recovering one of Monsieur Laforgue’s paintings, he asked me again to come to Paris and offered to pay for my ticket. I wouldn’t hear of it, but I was torn. Stay here and look for my own missing paintings before the “someone else” found them, or go to Paris and be with Maxime?

  Did I need to go? Yes. Someday. On my list, my hunger to go to Paris was accompanied by my vow to see Cézanne’s Card Players. But was it right to go when I knew Maxime was waiting there to give me happiness, maybe even love? That I didn’t know. With my yearnings in a tangle, the recurring question of my loyalty to André surfaced again.

  Could a lost love endure when it wasn’t fed with new intimacies, new causes for laughter, new secrets shared? Could it remain strong when all one had was memories and the places associated with them? I would not be able to be in Paris without the bittersweet draw toward those spots.

  Despite my reservations, I said yes, yes I will, and it felt like the yes I had said spontaneously in the rowboat to André. The distinction between faithfulness and dogged stubbornness was not solid but porous. I would have to go in order to see where I stood.

  I THREW MYSELF INTO a flurry of preparations. I had bought no new clothes since I had come to Roussillon, ten years earlier, and the maroon suit I’d worn on my way south had already been from a secondhand shop. Though it had once been selected by some woman in a Parisian boutique, it had not been quite au courant when I’d bought it. Nothing I owned was the least bit similar to anything in Louise’s fashion magazines.

  Christian Dior’s New Look featured curvaceous lines accentuating very thin waists, as well as full skirts, a luxury only for the rich.

  Dior had removed shoulder pads from jackets, considering them too reminiscent of military wear. My maroon suit jacket was prewar, so it didn’t have the brand of militarism, but it wasn’t tight-fitting at the waist. I took it to Odette to see if she could refashion it.

  “Yes,” she said, “but I need to look at designs.”

  We went together to Louise’s salon and pored over her magazines. In Marie Claire, published in Vichy during the Occupation, Louise found what the fashion editors openly called “widows’ patterns”—skirt pieces laid out on deconstructed men’s trouser pieces.

  “It wouldn’t give you the new full look, but at least it would be something fresh,” Odette said. “Did you put all of André’s trousers in the giveaway box?”

  “No. I have two—one for gardening, and one good pair in gray gabardine that he wore when we were married. I couldn’t bear …” I hesitated. “How would I feel wearing that cloth to go and see Maxime?”

  Odette laid her hand on my wrist. “It’s been seven years, Lisette.”

  “What’s the difference between using André’s trousers and unraveling his sweater for Maxime’s socks?” Louise asked.

  “That was need. This is—well, vanity.”

  “You’re wrong,” Louise said. “This is need too. You need a gray gabardine skirt to make double use of your maroon jacket.”

  In the end, I agreed, and I spent the next day taking apart André’s wedding trousers and trying to salvage the thread, while salvaging the thread of memory as well—that first kiss as a married couple, and those moments of oneness when we said the same thing at the same time and then laughed. One night we had even had the same dream—that we were painters painting each other’s portraits. What had prompted those dreams was gone forever, but the delight and closeness we had shared when we’d told each other remained.

  As long as I could recall those moments, he was not totally lost to me. Wearing the fabric of his trousers would make it seem as though he were with me, a secret I would have to keep from Maxime.

  HOW WONDERFUL IT WOULD be if I had some good news to tell Maxime after the sad news in my last letter. I went to the mairie to ask Aimé Bonhomme for permission to look in abandoned houses.

  “I was wondering when you would ask,” Aimé said from his desk. He stacked up the papers he had been working on, grabbed his vest, and said, “Let’s go right now.”

  There were two abandoned homes on rue des Bourgades, and another empty house below them in an untended olive orchard. He knocked on the door of the first one, which seemed an unnecessary precaution.

  “Gypsies sometimes stay in them when they are moving through the countryside,” he explained.

  We entered cautiously, but we didn’t find anything. That is to say, there wasn’t a stick of furniture. Everything had been taken or burned for firewood; the house had been picked clean as the chicken bones scattered on the hearth. Aimé went up the creaking stairs alone, testing each step. Nothing.

  The second house contained only a broken bed frame and glass from broken windows on the north side, where the shutters hadn’t been fastened closed against mistrals. The house in the orchard was the most derelict. Mistrals had blown off some roof tiles, and rainwater had puddled in the upper story. The floorboards were rotten and groaned warnings when we stepped on them.

  We spent the rest of the day looking in one sad, tumbledown house after another.

  “Why are there so many empty houses?” I asked as we stepped across yet another rotten threshold.

  “People get discouraged here. A winter too cold, a spring without rain, two bad harvests in a row, severe storms that beat down crops, vine-destroying insects, silkworm diseases, and they move to Apt or Avignon or Aix to try some other work. Or they leave because they want modern conveniences. Or perhaps miners without children died either as old bachelors
or in the war.”

  “Would Pascal’s house become dilapidated if I weren’t here?”

  “Most likely, unless you sell it. But nobody can buy now. Maybe in a decade. Roussillon could be a beautiful vacation spot if we bring indoor plumbing to the village and re-stucco the houses in all the warm colors of ochre, and make safe pathways and steps with railings in the ochre canyons, and enlarge the Hôtel de la Poste, and open a couple of good restaurants.”

  “Is that your dream?”

  “Yes. And my son’s. The houses too derelict to save could be razed, and small inns could be built.”

  “It would be a perfect setting.”

  “We think so. Artists and photographers would find plenty of subjects here. We could have concerts in the salle des fêtes or in the basin of the Sentier des Ocres and expand our Thursday market to include more crafts—pottery and wooden items and santons all year long.”

  We finished off the day by getting permission from Father Marc to search the church. All I noticed was those splintered kneelers.

  Tired and dispirited, I said, “My paintings could be anywhere now if a Gypsy found them in one of those houses.”

  “If it was a Roussillonnais who hid them with the intention of retrieving them, he would know not to put them in an abandoned house that the Gypsies might use.”

  “But a Gypsy might have found one elsewhere and brought it to the house where he was staying,” I said. “Do you think the person who found the painting in Monsieur Saulnier’s windmill was a Gypsy?”

  “Most likely. But he wouldn’t keep it. He would sell it to some farmwife down the road, or in Avignon or Aix. I suggest you look just outside the village in cabanons and smaller buildings. Even in unused pigeonniers. If anyone challenges you, tell him you have my permission. Circle close to the village. Anything farther, you would have to notify Constable Blanc. Ask Maurice to lend you his bicycle.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  “COME TOMORROW,” MAURICE SAID when I asked him. “She will be ready for you tomorrow.”