Twilight Whispers

by Barbara Delinsky

  Cassie Jondine was perceptive when it came to emotions. In nineteen short years she had lived a lifetime of them. Born to a schoolteacher and his wife in a small town in northwest France, Cassie—Carmela, then—had been raised in a home where education was the highest priority. That, and love. She had known happiness as a child, coddled not only by her parents but by the older brother she worshipped. Material possessions had meant nothing to her; her father’s modest income provided for the family’s meager physical needs. And they were rich in the intellectual and emotional commodities that they considered far more precious.

  Even as young as she was, Carmela would have had to have been deaf and dumb not to have picked up on the threads of rumor and fear that shimmered through her family’s section of town in the late nineteen-thirties. Nonetheless, she had lived under a child’s illusion of safety and freedom. She had aspirations of going to the university as her brother had done, then possibly teaching as her father did, or raising a family as her mother did. She loved children and would have been happy to work with them in any manner.

  When Hitler took France in June, 1940, her world fell apart. One day her father didn’t return home from school and she cried herself to sleep after spending long hours watching her mother wring her hands. The next day her mother was gone from the house for such a long time that Carmela had begun to quake in fear that she, too, had been taken away by the soldiers who goose stepped in small groups through the streets. But her mother did return, pale, drawn and nervous, and quickly set to work packing a small satchel of Carmela’s things which she set by the back door. Then she sat with her daughter, retelling her favorite stories, cooking her favorite dinner and watching her eat. Only when the sun had set did she draw Carmela to her.

  “A kind, kind woman named Madame Laville will be coming here tonight. She’ll be taking you with her, Carmela. You’ll be safe as long as you do everything she says.”

  Carmela began to tremble. She was astute enough at the age of eleven to hear the finality of her mother’s words. “You won’t be coming?”

  “No, love. Only children are allowed on this trip.”

  “But why?”

  “Because only children will be safe.”

  “I’d rather be with you. I don’t care about—”

  “You’ll go with her, and you won’t question her. She’s risking a lot by doing this.”

  Carmela would have argued further had it not been for the obvious agony on her mother’s face. “Where will she take me?” she asked in a tiny voice.

  “East. You’ll be put on a boat with lots of other children. In time you’ll arrive in America.”

  “But I don’t know anyone in America!”

  “You will. There will be people waiting for you, looking out for you all the way.”

  “And will you follow me there?”

  Her mother had looked at her then, smiling through her tears as, with fingers bent on memorizing every nuance of her daughter’s fine features, she stroked Carmela’s cheeks, her nose and mouth, the pale strands of her hair. “I’d follow you anywhere, Carmela. Don’t you know that?”

  It hadn’t been quite the definitive answer Carmela had been seeking, but before she could voice her fears, her mother had crushed her to her breast, where she had continued to hold her and rock her until a quiet knock came on the back door. Carmela had been taken into the dark of night then, with the memory of her mother’s softly sobbed, “Bye-bye, baby,” wrenching at her, even as a firm hand drew her farther and farther from home.

  Nights of stealthy travel had followed that first, breathless movement from one stop to the next, hours of sitting in cold, cramped railway cars, even longer days of hiding in damp church basements or darkened huts. The trip to a safe exit port on the northeast coast of France was prolonged by the necessity for constant vigilance and concealment, and Madame Laville was only the first of many watchful guardians who shepherded the children.

  Carmela was numb, both physically and emotionally, desperately wanting to ask questions but not daring to. The presence of the other children was a help in that she didn’t feel quite so alone. But there was a negative side to their company too, for fragments of stories of the disappearances of relatives began to emerge, which, with the stretch of the imagination that Carmela was more than intelligent enough to make, coalesced into a terrifying picture of what had been left behind.

  Carmela missed her mother, father and brother, and when she wasn’t preoccupied comforting and helping subdue the whimpers of the smaller children, she worried about where her family was and how they fared. As for herself, she was old enough to know that her life had taken an irrevocable turn, but she schooled herself not to look farther into the future than what was to come at the end of the particular leg of the journey she was on.

  As her mother had told her would happen, Carmela eventually reached the coast and was herded with the others onto a boat for passage across the Atlantic. Though the tension of the preceding days and nights seemed to fade with the shoreline of France, it was replaced by a new one. The unknown lay ahead. Carmela was one of the few children old enough to understand and fear it.

  Also, as her mother had told her would happen, there were people awaiting her arrival in New York. They were representatives of agencies geared to placing the young refugees in homes. A travel worn and frightened Carmela, hugging to her chest the small satchel containing the few clothes, books and pictures that comprised her worldly possessions, was transported to western Massachusetts where she met her foster parents, Herman and Leona Marsh.

  They were an older couple and they welcomed her with a touch of unsureness. Language was the most obvious barrier; Carmela arrived in America knowing only the sparse English that the chaperone on the boat had tried to teach the children. Neither of the Marshes spoke French, and if they understood it they never let on; from the start they insisted that English would be the only tongue spoken in their home.

  Beyond the language barrier, however, was an emotional one. Childless over many years of marriage, Herman and Leona Marsh were inexperienced in the workings of any youngster’s mind, much less one who had experienced such intense turmoil in such a short length of time. They accepted Carmela into their home as though she were the daughter of a friend of a relative from the Midwest, choosing to suppress any awareness of the circumstances that had been responsible for her delivery into their care.

  They weren’t unkind. Carmela had her own room, and, despite the severe rationing imposed by a wartime economy, she had adequate food and clothing. She attended a local school where her struggles to learn English eventually paid off and was given light chores to do around the house. From all outward appearances she settled in well.

  But outward appearances didn’t reveal the inner trial Carmela suffered.

  Everything about the Marsh home was foreign to her. While her own parents had been outwardly affectionate, the Marshes were far more formal. They rarely touched each other, much less Carmela, and for a young girl who had been raised amid hugs and kisses, the difference was stark.

  While the Jondine house had always born a pleasantly messed, wonderfully lived-in look, the Marsh house was invariably neat and proper. Never was a lace doily out of place, or a painted china vase dusty, or a newspaper or magazine left lying on a chair. There was a chill to the house that could in no way be remedied by the dull gray radiators that sizzled and sputtered in every room.

  While Carmela remembered dinners with her family where each member shared his or her experiences of the day, dinners with the Marshes offered either superficial conversation or silence. At first Carmela assumed that the language difference was responsible, then she realized that Herman and Leona could easily chat with each other but chose not to. Anxious to please, she went along with what was apparently their style; on the few occasions when she forgot herself and burst into an account of something that had happened in school, the mechanical smiles and nods with which her attempt at conversation was met dampened
her desire to try it again.

  Whereas learning had been as natural as breathing in the Jondine home, in the Marsh home it was considered a chore to be performed, much as one made one’s bed or cleaned the house. Carmela’s father had only to ask what Carmela was studying in history to spark a discussion that, in turn, fed her enthusiasm for the class. The extent of Herman Marsh’s interest in Carmela’s classes was encapsulated in his nightly question, “Have you finished all your homework for tomorrow, Carmela?”

  Even religion, which had been a low-keyed but steady presence in the Jondine home, was approached more rigidly here, a matter of forced ritual that Carmela came to detest. When she was homesick, lonely and frightened, she had nothing to blame but that religion, which in her mind was solely responsible for denying her her parents, her brother, her home and the happy life she had once known.

  Worst, perhaps, in Carmela’s mind, was the worry. When she asked about her parents, which she did frequently, the Marshes dismissed the question with shrugs of their shoulders—another thing that Carmela came to detest, since she believed that her family deserved more than mere shrugs. Her only hope of news from France came from the local social worker at the placement agency who visited from time to time.

  “Have you heard anything?” Carmela would whisper as soon as the Marshes had left the room. She knew that her eagerness would sound like ingratitude to the Marshes.

  “No, Carmela. Nothing yet. I promised you that I would tell you if I did hear anything, but it’s very difficult getting word from so far.”

  “What if they’ve already come and haven’t been able to find me?”

  It was one of the most common fears the social worker had encountered in children like Carmela. “They’ll be able to find you,” she said with a smile of confidence. “They’ll know to start with the agencies, and we work closely with one another. Don’t worry,” she repeated, patting Carmela’s knee, “we’ll make sure they find you if they step foot in this country, and in the meantime we’ll continue to try to get whatever news we can.” It was a promise that Carmela had to be content with, since it was the only one she had.

  In the seven years that Carmela spent with the Marshes, she never quite became one of them. At the start she remained slightly aloof, telling herself that her mother would soon be joining her, even with her father and brother, and that they would find a house like the one they had had in France, and that her father would teach, and her brother would finish his education, and that they would be safe together in America.

  As time went on and no member of her family appeared on the scene to claim her, Carmela came to accept that she would be alone awhile longer. She determined to do what she thought would make her parents proud—to study and do well in school, to help out the Marshes in return for her keep, to cause as little trouble as possible.

  Then, shortly after the end of the war, the woman from the placement agency came to tell sixteen-year-old Carmela, as gently as was humanly possible, that her parents had died in separate concentration camps and that, though there was no word on her brother’s fate, it was to be presumed that he, too, had perished.

  For days Carmela went through life in a stupor. Though she had often feared the worst, the confirmation of those fears seemed to kill her spirit in a way that even the Marshes’ perfunctory surrogate parenthood hadn’t been able to do. She felt more alone than she ever had in her life, and more grief stricken. Hour upon hour she sat looking at the family pictures she had brought with her across the Atlantic; then she would hug them to her chest and recall the last time she had seen her father and her brother. And her mother.

  Bye-bye, baby.

  Her sorrow was soul-rending and made all the worse by the pictures and stories that had begun to appear in the newspapers, reporting the atrocities committed in one concentration camp after another. She realized then that her mother had known that last night that they would never see each other again. Her torment over what her mother had to have gone through before her death knew no bounds.

  Carmela went through periods of intense anger during which she railed against a God who could permit the annihilation of her family. Herman Marsh’s often repeated, “It was God’s will. We have to trust that He had a higher purpose in mind,” made her wild with rage. She had lost everything she held dear. She was starting with nothing.

  It was that very knowledge that finally pulled her through the worst of her depression, or rather the realization that she wasn’t starting with nothing. She had memories of happiness, and they were something to think about, something to dream about recreating. She decided that one day she would have a family of her own and that she would give her children the same kind of love she had received, only this time there would be real security. After all, Hitler was dead. And she was in America.

  Carmela spent her last years in high school nurturing those dreams, to the extent that she was often distracted, both in school and out. Life with the Marshes grew more and more uncomfortable for her. Not only were they the antithesis of what she wanted, but they had little patience for her distraction and seemed to grow more strict by the day. Leona harped on her appearance and the way she did her chores while Herman was never satisfied with her performance in school. He had made it clear that he didn’t have the money to send her to college, but he was convinced that without top grades she would never find a good job out of high school.

  Carmela learned to tune out their complaints. The focus of her concentration was on graduating from high school, and then freedom. She didn’t care what kind of job she took as long as it enabled her to move out of the Marsh house. Only then, she believed, would she be able to clearly plot her future.

  Several months before graduation she began to study the help wanted ads in the newspaper. She pondered the range of job opportunities, quickly eliminating those that would be isolating and boring. She didn’t want to work in a manufacturing plant or a factory, and though she took secretarial courses in high school, she wasn’t sure she would be happy in an office either. She loved children, but she couldn’t qualify to teach them without further education, and since Herman had made his feelings on that matter clear and she had little money of her own, teaching seemed beyond her reach.

  Then she overheard several girls at school discussing an agency that specialized in the placement of housekeepers. She didn’t see herself as a maid, but if a particular home had children in it, it was a place to start. Except that she had no intention of remaining in western Massachusetts. She wanted the big city. She wanted Boston.

  The reference librarian at the public library helped her find the name of a reputable agency in Boston, and without breathing so much as a hint of her intentions to the Marshes, she wrote a letter and sent it out. The result was promising enough to merit a train ride into the city for an interview, which she skipped school one day to do so the Marshes would never know. She sensed that they would be opposed to her plans, could envision the discussion.

  “You can do better than that,” Herman would say.

  Leona would support him all the way. “Our kind don’t hire themselves out as housekeepers, Carmela. Haven’t you any sense of social standing?”

  The thing was that Carmela no longer identified with the Marshes or their kind. She was one girl, very much on her own in the world, and she intended to do things her way for a change. Moreover, it occurred to her that there was little difference between doing the dirty work for some higher-up in an office and doing that for a family who might, just might, have a lovely home and children to care for.

  The image she presented to the agency was one of soft-spoken confidence. She had dressed with care, and despite years of enduring Leona’s nit-picking, knew that her appearance would work in her favor, as would the fact that she spoke intelligently and with only the slightest hint of an accent. Ironically, in her own quiet way, she was nearly as much of an interveiwer as she was an interviewee. She was concerned about the types of families the agency dealt with because she w
anted to work in a home that was warm and happy. And she wanted to work with children. She was well trained to do any manner of household work, she informed the woman with whom she spoke, but her forte was in dealing with children.

  Though she had no way of knowing it, her own concerns proved to be as much a recommendation as anything else. The woman interviewing her was impressed, seeing Carmela Jondine as a cut above the usual applicant, and took great care sorting through her cards until she finally selected one, studied it, then smiled.

  Two weeks later, a mere three days after her graduation, Carmela began a new life as Cassie by packing up her belongings, taking the train out of Worcester, then a cab from Boston to Brookline, and moving into a small room on the third floor of Gilbert and Lenore Warren’s home. The Marshes had been predictably angry, and, Cassie sensed, a bit hurt, but by the time she had informed them of her plans the commitment had already been made.

  Cassie Americanized her name when she started her new job to symbolically thrust aside the past and delve into the present. She was hired, first and foremost, as a housekeeper, but she had been so taken by the Warrens when she had gone for an interview that she didn’t mind the title. Lenore Warren had never had household help before, which was a plus in Cassie’s mind because she wouldn’t be following in anyone else’s footsteps. Moreover, Lenore made no effort to hide her relief that someone had come to take charge.

  Then there were the three Warren children, one more beautiful than the next. Cassie thought they were wonderful, even the two boys with their mischievous ways. She had a gentle way of talking with them, of teaching them that mischief was fine in their bedroom or the playroom or the backyard, but that they had to respect the care their mother had taken with the other rooms in the house. They responded to her soft, coaxing tones and took as much delight in playing with her as she did in playing with them. Even Laura, who was in so many other ways a miniature of her mother, responded to the hugs Cassie bestowed so freely.