Days of Winter

by Cynthia Freeman

  “Never more than at this moment,” she said.

  Kessler got up, put the documents into his briefcase, then motioned to the guards. They were taken out of the room, then down three wooden steps. Etienne held Jeanette’s hand tightly. When they left the building the guards pulled them apart, and transferred Henri from his father’s to his mother’s arms. Jeanette, breaking down finally at being separated, screamed as she and Henri were being led to one waiting car and Etienne to another. Suddenly Etienne tore loose from the guards holding his arms and began to flail at them with his cane. … “You can’t, goddamn you, you can’t separate us, you can’t—”

  But he didn’t get the last words out as the butt of a rifle swung by one of the guards grazed his head, momentarily dazing him. Shaking his head, he had put up his hands to ward off the next blow that was being aimed at him when a confusion of yelling and shooting broke out all around them, and from behind the hedges surrounding the station house appeared nearly a dozen ragtag men with guns, men who minutes before might have been mistaken for ordinary local citizens, but who were actually partisans, alerted by the network that had begun with Magda’s word to Pierre, passed on to Anjou, and from him eventually to these skilled men who knew their job and proceeded to do it with fine and deadly skill. Within moments Kessler, riddled by a spray of bullets, was on the ground, his briefcase landing beside him, and six guards, taken completely by surprise, quickly fell around him. Immediately one of the partisans instructed Etienne and Jeanette to get into their car and crash the barrier gate, which was all that was left between them and Switzerland, and then he and his small group dispersed, leaving seven still bodies behind them.

  Jeanette, with Henri in her arms, ran to the car, and Etienne, still slightly dazed from the head blow, hobbled after them. Once they were all in the car, Jeanette put Henri between them, got behind the wheel, started the engine, and drove off. A few yards ahead was Switzerland. She pressed her foot down hard on the accelerator. As the car crashed through the gates, one guard, fatally wounded but still able to watch their progress, managed to lift his body just enough to prop his rifle up and fire after them.

  The bullet went through the back window, splintering it, and from the corner of her eye Jeanette saw Etienne slump forward, heard a curious, hissing sound, and his almost gentle intake of breath. She didn’t dare stop driving until she was across the border and then somehow she slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a screeching halt as the Swiss border guards came running up.

  By the time she got out of the car Jeanette was hysterical, telling the guards that her husband had been shot, that she was afraid he was dead, please for God’s sake somebody help … and they tried to calm her as one of them quickly took Etienne’s pulse and assured her he was alive, and the other called for an ambulance that arrived within minutes. Etienne, unconscious, was lifted onto the stretcher and placed inside, an intravenous needle was inserted, and blood given while he also received an injection to help stop the bleeding. Finally, a dazed, weeping Jeanette and a thoroughly bewildered and terrified Henri were helped into the front of the ambulance, and it sped away.

  Etienne was taken to the operating room immediately. Jeanette stood outside, praying. There was nothing else left. Henri clung to her hand, and she tried to reassure him that papa would be fine, the doctors would make him well, just as they had mama when she’d been sick … when she’d been so sick she would have died if Etienne hadn’t given her his kidney, his life. God … he mustn’t die … he, more than all the rest of them, had earned the right to live, not just because of what he had done for her, but for what he was … the kind of man he was. …

  When a doctor finally came out of the operating room, his mask pulled down from his face but still tied around his neck, she quickly went up to him and asked …

  “It’s too soon to know, I’m afraid, madame,” and the doctor quickly walked away. Soon after a nurse came and took her and Henri for a snack in a place downstairs. Henri ate, but Jeanette sat like a statue, unable to eat or speak.

  Two hours later Etienne was being wheeled down the hall to his room. From the glimpse she was able to manage, it seemed to Jeanette that he was barely alive, his face a ghastly gray, contrasting with the sterile hospital white of the sheet tucked all around him. Jeanette followed down the hall until they reached his room. She was asked to remain outside. She refused a seat, choosing to stand, leaning against the wall.

  “I’m Dr. Engelmann.”

  The voice startled her. She had allowed her eyes to close, in spite of herself. Now she looked at him uneasily. “My husband … how is he?”

  “He’s sustained considerable chest damage, the repairs were extensive …”

  “Will he … live?”

  “There’s no way to make a good prediction now … in forty-eight hours …”

  For two days Etienne lay in a coma. …Jeanette could do nothing but sit by and wait.

  Meanwhile, the nurses had fallen in love with Henri. They allowed him to play in the children’s ward, where some of the young patients, recovering from ski injuries, were done up fearsomely in elaborate assortments of splints and casts, which fascinated Henri. He particularly liked one little girl. She had, in fact, become his best friend, the first one he’d ever had. “When my papa gets better,” he told her, “we’re going on a holiday, and I’m going to make a snow man that looks just like him. Would you like to come and visit us?”

  “If my mother says I can.”

  “We could have fun. I have three cousins.”

  “I have six.”

  He was even more impressed with her now.

  At dawn on the third morning Jeanette awakened after an almost sleepless night and lay looking out her window toward the snowcapped mountains. Today they would know, and she told herself that if anything happened to Etienne, if he did not recover … well, she would live for Henri, but it would be winter for all the seasons of the rest of her life without Etienne. …And then there was a gentle knock on the door, and she was too frightened to move, even to speak out. She was trying to prepare herself for the worst. …

  Now the door was opening, and the doctor’s voice was saying, “Madame, you are very lazy this morning. Your husband is waiting for you—”

  She was out of bed, running without her robe or any other thought to Etienne’s room, which was next door. His eyes were open, a weak smile was on his face. He slowly held out his hand to her, and in a voice barely above a whisper, said, “Good morning, darling. It seems we’ve managed to survive, after all.”

  In answer, she bent down and kissed him, over and over, smiling and laughing and letting her tears of gratitude fall freely onto that precious face.

  Survive, indeed. Could the daughter of Magda Charascu have done otherwise?

  Turn the page to read an excerpt from Cynthia Freeman’s The Last Princess

  Chapter 1

  NOT SINCE GLORIA MORGAN’S engagement to Reginald Vanderbilt had New York society seen such a frenzy of excitement as was aroused by the announcement of the impending nuptials of Lily Goodhue and Roger Humphreys. Although few events elicited more than a yawn from New York society, as soon as the embossed, cream-colored invitations were received, the ladies of the Four Hundred promptly beat a path to their favorite couturiers. It was to be the marriage of the decade, a match—if one were inclined to embrace God—made in heaven; the coming together of two distinguished families who came as close to being aristocracy as was possible in America.

  On the evening of the engagement party, the limousines lined the sweeping, tree-lined driveway to the Goodhues’ Long Island mansion. Lily stood alongside Roger and her parents in the vast marble-floored hall, greeting their guests. Even among that galaxy of bejeweled society, her beauty was dazzling. It went beyond the fact that her hair was the burnished red of an autumn sunset, or that her eyes were the color of the huge emerald she wore on her ring finger, or that the features of her heart-shaped face were sheer perfection. She had an air,
an inner radiance that few who saw her that evening would ever forget. It even outshone the expensive pink Chanel dress her mother had ordered from Paris.

  As they stood posing for pictures which would appear in the next day’s New York Times and Herald Tribune, there could have been no doubt as to her parents’ joy. Diminutive, southern-born Violet looked as youthful and lovely as the day when she had burst onto the New York social scene as the bride of the tall, handsome rubber magnate Charles Goodhue.

  The guests moved into the house, which was decorated with extravagant urns of azaleas, roses, and lilacs arranged to exquisite perfection. Beyond the open French doors of the ballroom the terrace and grounds were softly lighted, and the fountains at the far end of the pavilion played under dim yellow lights. Blood-red rhododendrons lined the path down to Long Island Sound.

  Just then the band struck up “Lily of the Valley” and Lily circled the room in Roger’s arms. There seemed no question that she was in love. It was evidenced by the smile on her face and the lyrical note in her voice as she greeted her friends. Roger, too, appeared delighted. Despite his unmistakably Brahmin reserve, he seemed unable to take his eyes off Lily. Yet as the evening wore on, Lily knew she had to get away for a few minutes, to escape the hundreds of eyes, so many of which were jealously hoping to find some flaw in this perfect evening. As Roger turned to ask a cousin to dance, Lily slipped quietly from the room, ran across the terrace, down the broad stone stairs, and along the path toward the conservatory. The glass doors closed behind her, leaving her in a silent world of exotic blooms.

  Idly she let her gaze wander to the glass ceiling. The dazzling sight of a million stars in the midnight-blue vastness suddenly made her wonder how she had come to this moment. If she was shocked to find herself the focus of this evening’s party, she supposed, she would—literally—have to go back to the cradle to trace the roots of her sense of un-worth….

  Chapter 2

  LILY HAD ALWAYS FELT herself to be an outsider in her own home. She had never really belonged and it seemed that she had been paying for the sin of her birth from the moment she had first seen the light of day. Was any of it her fault? That was something she had been trying to decide for almost twenty-one years.

  Violet and Charles Goodhue had been childless for ten years of their marriage and had almost abandoned hope that they would have a child, an heir to the Goodhue fortune. It had been a dynasty hard won, a dynasty which had been established three generations before by ignorant Dutch immigrants, and by dint of fraud and corruption and ruthlessness it had flourished.

  With the first generation’s ill-gotten wealth, the second generation of Goodhues had bought respectability. At the same time, they saw that wealth quadrupled. Charles’s grandfather, riding the crest of the new age of industry, had transformed a modest fortune into a staggering one in the rubber trade in the Amazon. The slaves who worked those South American fields were too far removed from the States to taint the Goodhues’ ever luminous reputation.

  So, by his day, Charles Goodhue felt confident that when the biographies were written, his antecedents would appear merely as swashbuckling cavaliers.

  The roots of Violet’s wealth were strikingly similar. She had come from a long line of rumrunners and slave owners. Her grandfather had made a small fortune into a great one during the War Between the States selling bootleg liquor to both sides. Afterward, when other former slave owners found themselves dispossessed, Henri DuPres had emerged on the scene the triumphant master of the greatest and richest plantation in Louisiana.

  Despite their combined inherited fortunes, and Charles’s sharp business acumen which continued to make those fortunes more vast, he and Violet seemed denied by heaven the very thing they so desired—a child.

  The sore lack was unmitigated by any wealth or possession he could ever hope to attain. Adoption was socially unacceptable for their set, and the idea of having a child not of his blood was abhorrent to a man like Charles Goodhue. What he longed for most was his own heir. Violet had less desire than he, but she was chagrined to disappoint Charles in an area that mattered to him so. Yet her barrenness appeared to be fait accompli.

  Then one morning in Baden-Baden, where they had gone to take the baths, Violet awoke with a strange nausea. Never having been ill, for all her diminutive, fragile build, Violet immediately sought the counsel of Herr Doktor Steinmetz, the resident physician at the watering place.

  So when Dr. Steinmetz congratulated her with the news that she was to be a mother, she greeted it with speechless shock. Then, as the reality of it set in, she all but flew from the room. “Charles! Charles!” she cried out, entering their room. “We’re going to have a son! The gift I’ve wanted to give you for so long.”

  Neither of them doubted for a moment that she would bear the son they so wanted. In early celebration, Charles treated her to a new ruby necklace and matching earrings which might have turned her neighbor, Alice Vanderbilt, ever so slightly green with envy if she had seen them.

  From that moment on, Charles treated Violet with even more than his usual adoration. He catered to her every whim. She was, after all, thirty years old—well past the usual childbearing years.

  He had the nursery remodeled in blue and had the vast dressing room adjacent to Violet’s boudoir equipped for her confinement.

  Faster than they had anticipated, that final day of miracles was upon them. The house was still but for the frantic efforts going on in Violet’s transformed boudoir. The only sounds that could be heard were the excruciating screams emanating from Violet herself. She had never known pain before and she could scarcely tolerate it. There was nothing fragile about the sounds coming out of her just then.

  When at last the baby came, she cried out with relieved joy: “I gave you your son, Charles”—all the while thinking, I will never, never, never go through this again.

  Motherhood was a joy she could easily have dispensed with. If it had not been for her strongly felt obligation to provide Charles with an heir, she would have taken every precaution against becoming pregnant. Now that her duty was done, she’d have no more of it.

  Never again would she endure the nausea, the ungainly bulk, and worst of all, the isolation. In her day it was not fitting for an expectant mother to show herself in public. Violet and her lovely gowns remained closeted for two full social seasons.

  The past nine months had proved sheer agony. Violet had spent most of that time in bed, out of sheer spite, and now she vowed that she would never, never subject herself to this again.

  The infant was taken from her immediately following the birth. Violet was only too glad to have the child removed from her. She lay among her satin and lace pillows waiting for Charles’s delighted praise. But it was grave eyes he turned upon her.

  “What’s wrong, dear? Is the child all right?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “What then?” she asked, extending her hand for him to come closer.

  He could hardly form the words. “We do not have a son.”

  “What do you mean?” she cried.

  “I mean, Violet, that you have given birth to a girl.”

  Impossible—impossible! How could that have happened? It had to be a son. A son was all Charles wanted.

  “I can’t believe it!” she whispered.

  Coldly he answered, “Believe it. It is a girl.”

  For the first time since their marriage, she heard censure in his voice, and she suddenly experienced an emotion quite foreign to her: overwhelming remorse.

  Charles merely shook his head. “Yes, indeed, we have a girl and not even beautiful, like you, Violet. We have a redheaded, skinny little monster. I don’t know where that flaming red hair could have come from. Not from my side of the family, certainly.”

  When the baby was placed in Violet’s arms, she looked down at the child and began to weep. This was not the chubby precious son she had expected. The baby was scrawny and unattractive, and if Violet had dared, she would have given h
er away and forgotten the whole thing. Her capacity to love was very limited. Charles received what little affection she had to give and there was none left over for an infant of the wrong sex.

  Both parents had been so unprepared for a girl that they had never considered any name but Charles Goodhue II. It wasn’t until the day before the baptism that Violet was willing to make a decision. Having come from a long line of southern beauties, whose names had been inspired by the beauty of roses, pansies, and violets, she was hard-pressed to come up with one for this ugly baby girl.

  Lily? She thought bitterly of the Biblical verse: “Remember the lilies of the field—they toil not, neither do they spin.” Useless—like this child. So just before the infant lay in Violet’s arms at the baptismal font to be anointed in the faith of that famous lineage of blooms, Lily Marie Goodhue was grudgingly given an identity in the world.

  Watching from his pew, Charles could not refrain from staring enviously at his friend Henry Ford, as he stood with his young son at his side. How had he, Charles, offended God so much so as not to be allowed a son of his own? He felt his ancestors looking down at him with contempt. Without an heir, the fortune they had amassed had no meaning. Violet was so frail, he dared not let her risk another pregnancy; she had barely survived the trauma of this delivery. Much as he longed for a son, he couldn’t face life without Violet. His love for her was the only thing on earth that exceeded his obsession for an heir.

  Over the next few years, as Lily turned from infant to toddler to schoolgirl, she seldom saw her parents. She was enchanted by their elegance and glamour, but whenever she reached out to embrace them, they quickly withdrew, becoming remote, cold figures who never seemed to notice her existence. They spent their winters in the house on Fifth Avenue and traveled extensively through the continent while Lily was left on Long Island in the care of nursemaids and governesses, almost forgotten. In time she gave up her efforts to reach out to her parents, knowing from a very early age that any such attempts would be spurned. In spite of the incredible luxury of her Long Island home, she grew up with an overwhelming sense of deprivation.