The Little Burgundy: A Jeanne Dark Adventure

by Bill Jones Jr.

  I walked up to her and kissed both cheeks.

  “You missed,” she said, winking again.

  Before I could unravel that mystery, Dark emerged, dressed in an identical tank top but with looser jeans, as if guided by some hidden sister clothing language. I knew that Dark’s previous description of her older sibling wasn’t painted by some unspoken sibling rivalry when she screamed and said, “Jette! Look at you!”

  The beautiful Juliette did a pirouette, tossed aside her floppy hat, and ran into her sister’s arms. Dark’s greeting was as far as I could understand, as the two kissing, weeping women began speaking at once in a fluid, furious version of French I couldn’t have kept apace with were I raised in Marseille. Dark looked at me with a knowing smile I could discern even through her sunglasses. She tugged on her sister, meaning to drag her into a sisterly web of catching up and familial gossip. Before I lost the two of them for the afternoon, however, Jette pulled away, looking at me and not her sister.

  “May I kiss your fiancé? ” she asked.

  My partner gave me a look that I knew meant, Why did you tell her? I wanted to tell her.

  I threw out my hands in an exaggerated shrug. Jette bailed me out. “It was all over his face. He didn’t have to say. May I kiss or not?”

  “Didn’t you two say hello?” Dark poked her lower lip at me.

  “We did, but he wouldn’t kiss me.”

  Dark smiled. “Good. I hate to share.”

  “You hated it when we were children too. May I?” She stepped toward me and I stepped backward a matching step, looking at my partner.

  “Don’t be rude,” Dark said, looking at me. “We’re French.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said, “but I’m not that French.”

  She picked up a clump of dirt and threw it at me, laughing. “You better not be after last night.”

  Jette looked from one of us to the other, winked a third time, and then ordered her children to grab their bags and go in the house. Dark joined them. My hostess returned her attention to me. “Welcome to the family,” she said. She gave me a sweet kiss with some swirling tongue action that left me a little dazed, though I wasn’t sure if it was from arousal or guilt. “Merci,” she said, with unmistakable sadness in her voice. That was not the emotional response one wants to see from a kiss.

  “Did I do it wrong?”

  “No, no, cher. It is just …” She stopped for a long time before speaking again. “We have left my husband. Or rather, I have left since he refuses to give up his mistress. I thought if I changed then everything else would change.” She reached into her trunk to pull out a suitcase, which I took from her. “As you can see, it didn’t work.”

  “Then your husband is a fool.”

  “Thank you, and thank you for making me feel beautiful if only for a minute.”

  I took her hand. “Juliette, you are beautiful.” She smiled. “But please, don’t ever kiss me like that again. What your husband took from you a kiss won’t return.”

  “My husband’s affair is not why I kissed you. He is a shit. I shouldn’t need kisses from beautiful men to make me feel like a woman.” I agreed with her, except for the beautiful man part. She placed her small hand on my arm. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see Jeanne so happy.”

  “I’m happy too. But since I find you very attractive, I’ll be even happier if that’s the only time our lips ever meet.”

  Jette flung her head back, her golden locks bouncing past her shoulders while she laughed. “Don’t worry, Jeannie was telling the truth. We really don’t share very well.” She turned and I reminded myself that future brothers-in-law keep their eyes in appropriate places.

  “Hey, can you teach Jeanne that swirly tongue thing?” I asked.

  Jette grinned at me, her slight overbite prominent. “Who do you think taught me?” Just before she disappeared through the door, she added, “Jeannie was right. You do have sexy lips. I told her I would kiss you when we met as punishment for bragging.” She smiled, blew me a kiss, and went to join her sister.

  My partner was still full of surprises. Some, apparently, were good ones.

  ***

  We’d been at Jette’s for about a week before we all began to get a little stir crazy. I spent most of the time crawling through interview files and avoiding Hardesty’s calls, while doing minor repair work around the house and grounds. Jeanne spent her time with her home-schooled niece and nephew, who at ten and twelve were every bit as bright as their mom and aunt. Of course nights were reserved for Jeanne’s sneaking into my room for some advanced French lessons. I was becoming quite fluent. During the daytime hours, I spent a lot of time with Jette who seemed to enjoy occupying her time with mindless chores as much as I. Ironically, even though I’d decided I no longer cared about Dark’s background and didn’t give a damn what the government thought of her, Jette filled me in with enough detail that I was able to piece the story together. I learned their secrets on an impromptu picnic, as Jette called it, which she’d spent the previous evening preparing for. We were lying in the sun on rolling hills, watching Jeanne teach the kids how to fly a kite that the three of them had designed and built themselves. It looked more dragon than kite, an homage to my tattoo, according to my partner. Jette was on her back, spread-eagle like an ivory solar panel. Without warning, she sat bolt upright and looked at me.

  “Jeannie isn’t crazy, you know.”

  “I never thought she was,” I said.

  “Of course you did. Everyone does at first. Her mind doesn’t work like ours, but it works fine.”

  “It works a lot better than fine.” Dark’s kite had almost disappeared into some low-flying clouds.

  “Yes, she is something,” Jette said. “But I’m sure your government doesn’t approve.” She removed her sunglasses, which startled me since she looked like a more-robust version of her sister, and I was so used to Dark’s needing to hide from bright sunlight I’d come to think of it as a family trait. “Is that why they hired you to babysit her?”

  I opened and closed my mouth several times before speaking. “Yeah. I didn’t know it at first—well I did, but then thought … it’s complicated.”

  “Most things with Jeannie are.” We both smiled. “When did you decide she wasn’t crazy?”

  “Not sure I ever did. Mostly, I just fell in love to the point where I didn’t care anymore.”

  Jette fell over backwards, laughing and clapping. “Bravo!” Jeanne and the kids gave us bemused looks and returned their attention to the kite. Jette sat back up, scooted next to me on the blanket, and lay her head on my shoulder. “I think you are the first man to ever understand her. I was so happy when she told me she’d met her future husband.”

  “When was that?”

  “The day you met.” She sat erect again and took a sip from her water bottle, having revealed that bit of news with no more fanfare than if she’d told me Dark’s favorite color was blue.

  “She knew right away?”

  Jette’s face registered surprise. “Didn’t you?”

  “I was attracted right away, but I was involved with someone.” Jette frowned at me. “It took me a little longer.” Truthfully, it had taken me six weeks to realize I’d fallen right away. It took until our first day in France to realize I didn’t care about anything except being with her.

  “That explains it then,” she said.

  “Explains what?”

  “Why you didn’t make love to her the first day you met. She wanted you to, but she said you gave up too easily and left her on the metro. She was hoping you’d say something clever and American like, ‘Now that I have you, I’ll never let you go,’ and take her to your home.”

  “I-I … she wanted to make love to me the first day?”

  “The first hour, most likely. She’s very French.” I started giggling but stifled it when I realized that Jette had no idea what was funny. “Jeannie never had many boyfriends, but she always knew right away. First date, poom, move in. How d
o you say? That’s how she rolls.” She exhaled a gush of deep laughter that got me laughing again. I was beginning to like Jette so much I could’ve spread her on my morning toast. “We French don’t like wasting time on dates with people we may not like, so it’s best to make love right away and find out, oui? How many dinners does it take you Americans to figure out that the woman you are with is a pig?”

  “Um …”

  “Jeannie told me she took forever to walk to your table when you met, because she wanted to remember every detail from when she met you—her husband.” She gave me a devilish grin with her straw still in her mouth. “You should ask her about it.” She continued talking, but I didn’t hear. My attention was focused on the ruby lip prints on her straw as I wondered how long Dark would have waited for me to catch up. Husband. I was stuck in client evaluations at the time. Jette waved her hand in front of my face. “Bonjour.”

  I smiled back. “Sorry. You were saying?”

  “I said, my great-grandmother was a traitor and her husband was one of Josef Mengele’s trusted associates.”

  I looked at her for quite some time as she sat watching her sister and her children. “That’s a damned lie,” I finally said.

  “Of course it’s a lie, but it’s what people say, what they want to believe. Those lies have followed my family for generations.”

  “Then you tell me, what is the truth?”

  “Why don’t you ask Jeannie?”

  “Because she’s my fiancée and my partner. I don’t ever need to know, but if I ask her, she’ll never believe I trust her.”

  Jette nodded. “You are right. Too many people have questioned her integrity and her gifts already. She would walk away and never say a word.” She took my hand. “You can never tell her we had this talk, promise?”

  “No one will ever know about our conversation.” I kissed her hand. “Least of all my government.”

  Jette smiled, caressed my cheek, and began her story. Dark’s family history, the part that mattered, began late in the summer of 1940 in a portion of eastern France near the French Alps. Their great-grandmother, Béatrice Arnaud, was a nurse working, mostly against her will, for a hospital the German military had commandeered for their officers. The workload was light, by all accounts, as the Germans had faced no real opposition there since the fall of France three years earlier when the Vichy government cooperated with Nazi Germany in a last-ditch effort to keep their country from being divided among the Axis powers. Given how the rest of Europe had been carved up in the years before and since, that seemed a legitimate concern. The truth was, however, the Vichy government was led by the last vestiges of the French elite that had been overturned during the Revolution. What they truly wanted, and gleefully cooperated with the Nazis to get, was a return to the grand old days of authoritarian rule instead of democracy, a single, dominant religion instead of religious freedom, and traditional culture wherein a small group was filthy rich while the huddled masses tried to eke out a living among disease and squalor. It wasn’t so much they agreed with the Nazis as they perceived they had a mutual enemy—the common people, which included the poor, the Jews, communists, social outcasts, and all those damned Protestants, of which Béatrice was one.

  Not surprisingly, this push toward the right included praise for old-fashioned values, which meant women belonged in the home and not on the job. Béatrice fled Paris for the relative safety of the Alps, not in order to embrace the enemy, but simply to avoid the discrimination that the Vichy had made official policy. In a movie version of the then-Arnaud family, Béatrice would have joined the Free French Forces and fought, Joan of Arc style, alongside Charles de Gaulle in liberating her homeland. She, however, was no Jeanne d’Arc. Rather, she was a lonely twenty-three year old suffering from what is now known as acute bipolar disorder.

  At the hospital, she met a young German doctor, fell in love, and had a child, a baby boy, out of wedlock. According to family histories, she was able to hide her shame by telling others that her husband was one of the tens of thousands of soldiers being used by the Germans as slave labor throughout France. After the war, however, she’d had the audacity to marry her German doctor, a timid little man who not only didn’t work with Mengele in the death camps, but never so much as experimented on a common housefly. The post-war backlash against the Vichy collaborators was equal to French Revolutionaries in fervor, if not murderous creativity. The young doctor was among those killed, not via execution, but by a mob who dragged him from his flat once they discovered he was not the Swiss immigrant he claimed to be.

  Horror-struck Béatrice, who’d watched her husband beaten and set alight within a ring of burning tires, crossed the line from manic depression to a what was diagnosed as a complete psychotic fugue. She would remain in and out of her psychotic state, which psychiatrists of the day characterized as seeing colors, hearing sounds that weren’t there, and smelling letters in contravention to reality. In truth, she was mostly a fragile, heartbroken, young widow with synesthesia and an emotional disorder they didn’t know how to treat. Like thousands of others and as many as one in ten wives of imprisoned soldiers during the war, the post-war widow had to turn to prostitution to earn a living, since no hospital would hire the supposed Vichy traitor, especially after having been labeled insane.

  Quite obviously, such tragedy has ripples, and like rocks tossed over a cliff, they rolled from one generation to the next. Jette inherited her great-grandparents’ love of medicine, as had her grandfather before her. Jeanne had inherited Béatrice’s synesthesia and an undeserved reputation for being crazy.

  “What people do not remember,” Jette said, concluding her sad tale, “is that my grandfather rose from being the son of a madwoman and a prostitute to having a successful medical practice in Marseille. They only remember the lies, that we are crazy, traitors, not to be trusted.”

  “People obviously respect you both. Look how successful you are.”

  Jette looked at me through teary eyes. “Lies can break you or make you strong. When grand-père died, he left me his medical practice.” She pointed her chin at her sister. “Jeanne is strong because my mother’s brutality forced her to be.”

  “Jeanne’s told me a little of her childhood, that is, when I can get her to talk about it. I—I won’t lie, I don’t understand how a mother could be so hard on her own child.”

  “Some lies are true, Foss. My mother was—how do you Americans say—crazy as fuck.” Despite myself I laughed. Jette did not. “She beat my sister more after her accident than before, as if it were Jeannie’s fault she was hurt. Grand-père quit his practice to help care for Jeannie, but really, it was to prevent my mother from killing her own child. Even my father couldn’t take it and shot himself in the field of sunflowers.”

  Jette turned her back from her family and I knew it was to keep them from seeing her tears. I placed my arm around her, and she melted into my side.

  “Is that why she hates yellow so much?” I asked.

  “Non. She hates yellow because it was our mother’s natural hair color and ours, for that matter. Toward the end, when her brutality was finally diagnosed as schizophrenia, Maman wore her hair wild. It hung like blond weeds almost to her waist. Both Jeannie and I would have nightmares about that hair. The poor girl never got over hers.” She sniffled, blew her nose into a tissue from her purse, and brightened. “Grand-père would be so proud. He was afraid Maman would break her. That’s why he left Jeannie the house and all the surrounding lands, so she’d always have somewhere safe.”

  “She told me it was your house.”

  She laughed, the first time since her story began. “That’s because she is stubborn and insists the kids should have room to run around. The house, the grounds, and everything on it belong solely to her. We must get ten inquiries a year from people wanting us to sell. It’s worth a fortune.”

  I whistled at that bit of information, the first good news I’d heard that day. Delayed insight hit me, however, and I asked, �
��What about you? Why didn’t he leave it to both of you?”

  “I told you, he left me his practice in Marseille. Very lucrative, even after he retired.” She gave me a wide grin. “My husband owns nothing but his signature on a prenuptial agreement. Wait until his new girlfriend finds out about that.”

  We shared a robust laugh and then sat in silence the rest of the way until Dark and the kids rejoined us. As if on some unspoken cue, we all began to pack up and headed to the house. In the car, with the exuberant children asleep in the back, Dark spoke. “Did Jette scare you away from marrying into our family?”

  “Don’t be silly, Jeannie,” Jette answered. “Foss is like Grand-père.”

  I wasn’t certain what that meant, but it seemed to be the right answer. We rode the remainder of the journey with my girl’s arms wrapped around my waist.

  ***

  “So, are you in love with my sister yet?” Dark asked.

  “Madly.”

  “Good, maybe you’ll listen to her.” She turned to her older sibling. “Tell him I am medically incapable of riding on a tandem bike.” Her lip was poked so far out I feared she’d get it tangled in the bike’s spokes.

  “Your hips are doing fine, and Foss will do all the pedaling if you wish. A little exercise is good for you.” She approached her sister and placed a hand on her back. “We bought this for you. It even has a place for your cane.”

  “Vichy traitor,” Dark said, with a sneer and a hiss.

  “Communist,” Jette responded, smiling. “Your future husband wants to take you on a romantic bicycle ride along your glorious estate. I would think you would want to show off your home.”

  “It’s not my estate. It belongs to Jean-Louis and Camille.”

  Jette looked at me and threw up her hands. “So stubborn. I think maybe you picked the wrong sister.”

  I winked at her and signaled for the kids to come over. “Okay, you two,” I said in my improving French, “you are in charge as this is your estate. Who do you think should show me around?”