“Come again,” he offered, seeing me to the door. “If you’d like.”
Françoise was still knitting, my stepfather still reading. He looked up at me, nodded, and went back to his book. “There’s potato soup,” Françoise said, indicating the kitchen, and I was sorry that I hadn’t been there to help her prepare dinner. I ate a bowl because of the baby, but every bite filled me with shame.
A little while later, the doorbell rang and Françoise jumped up and smoothed her hair.
“That will be your young man,” our stepfather said, and I was confused for a moment, thinking he meant Rémy. It was Grégoire, of course, the man Françoise would marry. She had never mentioned him to me.
* * *
Every day, Rémy and I sat quietly on the sofa in his living room. We must have done other things, but from those first weeks I remember only the silence of his apartment. I’d imagine Yvonne on the other side of the door, as if, at any moment, she’d burst through. Beautiful Yvonne! She looked exactly like Françoise, with her long dark hair, her black eyes, but there was something about her—her posture, like a dancer’s, her long hands, and her fearlessness—that made her the beauty, and Françoise, with her shoulders slightly curved, the sweet one. Beauty and Kindness. Yvonne insulted the nuns openly at school, mimicked the Germans behind their backs, refused to obey our stepfather or our mother. “Why can’t I go to Paris?” she demanded, when I left home to prepare for the conservatory. “Why Geneviève and not I?” It was ridiculous—I was eighteen, she was barely fifteen, and there was nothing in particular she wanted to study. And yet, it seemed perfectly reasonable: she was bold and capable, and, as I’ve said, I was just an odd duck, shut away in my room for hours. She’d throw open my door, flop down on my bed, and tell me what she wanted. My pen or my hair ribbons, my little white cardigan. “Yvonne,” I laughed. “What will I wear, if I give you my cardigan?” “My school vest,” she said, pretending to vomit. “Tell me a story, then, if I can’t have your cardigan. Something to console me for the barrenness of my existence.”
I laughed again. “You tell a story, Yvonne. Yours are the best.”
She sighed. “Once I ran away with a boy on a bicycle.” All her stories began that way.
“What was his name?”
“Nicolas? Bertrand? He never told me, but we rode to the tip of Spain. I sat on his handlebars the whole way, and then we took the ferry to Tangier. In Morocco, he traded me for one hundred camels, and then he bought me back for ninety-nine, and we rode our lone camel all the way to Cape Hope.”
* * *
Françoise dug through the rubble for weeks. Dirt, stone, beams, her hands bloody, her fingernails broken off. That’s what I imagine, at least, since she never spoke of it, and neither did our stepfather. He told us only that the bombs had fallen at 1:30 on June 6, that it had taken sixteen days to find the remains, that he’d managed to secure two coffins, so they would not have to go in a mass grave. They had found our mother and grandmother on the very first day; it was Yvonne who took so long, and what they found of her fit in a child’s suitcase.
Rémy said even less about the war. I don’t know if he was arrested with his parents and escaped, or if he had already fled by then. I started to ask him once, and he drew back as if I’d hit him. I never mentioned it again. He didn’t want to hear my stories, either. “That’s all finished,” he explained. “It serves nothing to speak of it.” But his voice was so gentle that I felt as if he knew everything.
The first time he touched me, apart from shaking my hand, we’d gone out to walk and he took my arm. It was raining, an ugly, spitting rain, and he covered me with his jacket, steered me back inside, and put the kettle on. I imagined Yvonne’s voice, its sweet, wild lilt, he bought me back for ninety-nine, and I started shaking.
He felt my forehead, but of course, I had no fever.
“I should go,” I said.
He touched my arm. “Stay.”
“It would break Yvonne’s heart.”
“I didn’t know Yvonne,” he said.
“She loved you.”
“She was barely more than a child,” he said.
I burst into tears, and as I sat there, crying, he undid my blouse, took off my shoes, and when we made love, it was nothing like it had ever been with Peter. I remember only light, as if we did not even have bodies.
And then I was back with Peter, in the shocking late-summer heat, with the cars honking and the cash registers ringing and the neighbors inviting me for Jell-O and bridge games. I could have learned to play bridge, I suppose, but I could not bear the cold sugary tea and tiny Wonder Bread sandwiches.
I wrote Rémy to tell him I was carrying Peter’s child and I told Peter, too—I could hardly hide it any longer—and I feigned a miserable pregnancy to avoid going out. But the truth is, I loved being pregnant that first time. When my daughter was born, I named her Yvonne. She goes by Evie, but her birth certificate reads “Yvonne.”
* * *
This might be my metro station. There are nine stops between my apartment and Rémy’s, but I forgot to keep count—and now they’re closing the doors. Be careful, little rabbits. “Was that—?” “No, Madame,” a woman says, too brightly, before I’ve even named the station. “Two more stops. I’ll tell you.” When his rheumatism was not so bad, Rémy used to come to me.
Sixty-five years. That’s how long we’ve been together, Rémy and I. I used to dread September, but now I stay in Paris until the day before Thanksgiving. Such a terrible holiday. All those plates of dry turkey and canned cranberry jelly, just as you are served in a hospital. Marshmallows in the sweet potatoes! But the children still ask for stories, and that is always nice.
“There were so many air raids,” I’ll say. “After a while, we stopped bothering to run to the basement.” When the children were small, I could feel their breathing soften, as if I were singing them a lullaby. “We’d simply run to our mother’s bed, and then, finally, we stopped even doing that. We were too tired to be afraid anymore, and we slept through the sirens like babies.
“By ’44, the Germans were arresting anyone they suspected of Allied sympathies. And all the Jews, of course, even the ones who’d been French for generations. When the Allies were closing in, and the Germans had caught every Jew they could find, they fled the city. The Allies knew the Germans were gone, but they bombed us anyway. They had to, you see, to disrupt the Nazi communications. Your aunt Françoise, she was just fifteen, and very hungry, but she lifted stones all day after the house was bombed.”
Once, I told a different story: “My mother—oh, if you had known her!—she was very different from me. Very strict.” They laughed. “And very hardworking. Of course, during the war, we all had to work. Digging potatoes, turnips, carrots. Skinning rabbits and sewing the pelts into coats. My mother could skin five pelts in the time it took me to kill a single rabbit. She was a round, serious woman and she did not tolerate foolishness. But before my father died, before she married my stepfather, she had an affair. Yes, an affair!” I had learned this from Tante Chouchotte, on her deathbed. It was still new to me, the fact of my mother’s secret life. “With a doctor, a Jewish doctor. My little, round mother, who went to mass every day, who’d slap you if you cried about anything.”
“Far out,” Polly, my youngest, said. “Grandma was ahead of her time!” She was sixteen, desperate for a boyfriend. I was about to tell them that my mother’s lover was their grandfather, killed at Auschwitz. Daniel Delasalle, the man I called Papa, who died of diabetes when I was five, was no relation. Tante Chouchotte had held my hand, white hair fanned out on her pillow, her face so gaunt that I could almost glimpse the girl she’d been—those high cheekbones and gray eyes, like my mother’s. “Docteur Naquet,” she said. “Do you remember him?” I didn’t. “A terrible womanizer,” she smiled, “but a very brave man. He was in the Resistance. You must remember him.” I shook my head, wondering if she was making it up. I remembered having the measles and the doctor comin
g to the house, though I couldn’t picture the doctor’s face, but there had been a rumor during the war that Chouchotte was hiding someone, a Jew. Perhaps this same Docteur Naquet.
“Geneviève,” Tante Chouchotte said. “Listen to me. You don’t need to keep checking your children for signs of diabetes. Docteur Naquet was strong and healthy—strong enough to seduce a churchgoer like your mother and a dozen other women.”
“My mother? How?”
“I don’t know how to say it any more clearly, but it shouldn’t be difficult to understand. You have your Monsieur Schwarz after all.” I was surprised she knew about Rémy. She slid over in the bed so I would lie next to her. “You have an uncle,” she continued. “A gynecologist. I introduced you to him once, a lovely man. Apparently he was saved from the camps by a painting. I don’t really know—it made no sense at all when he told me.” We were still holding hands, lying together in her big bed. I could smell her breath, the musty, fermented breath of the very old. “I wanted you to know because—” But she had lost her train of thought, murmuring now about horses, a leak in the roof, her bathing suit. If she had not mentioned Rémy, I would have dismissed everything she’d told me. If I’d not suddenly remembered a stranger in Tante Chouchotte’s apartment, kissing me hello. Docteur Naquet. My uncle.
I wanted to call the children on the telephone and tell them right away about my mother, my father, their great-uncle. I didn’t think of them as grandparents, only as Maman, Papa, the Docteurs Naquet. But if my father was not my father, my mother was not my mother. The woman who slapped me when I cried, who said a rosary every night, who lifted the covers on her bed for me—my soft-bodied, stern, devoted mother, dead for thirty years. Who was she? Who was the man who could seduce her, even for an hour?
I did not call the children. I waited until I was back in America, and then Polly said Far out, and I thought, we will never be able to communicate. Years later, I did tell them, when they were older and ready to start their own families. To my surprise, they were very kind. Pete Junior said it must have been a shock, and he put his hand on mine. “You’re half Jewish,” Evie said. “Thank goodness no one knew.” I blushed; for a while, that was Rémy’s nickname for me: my beautiful half Jew, ma belle demi-juif.
That was all so long ago—Tante Chouchotte on her deathbed, Polly’s excitement about my mother’s sensibilities. When I think of my mother now, I remember only the warmth of her bed; I can just picture Docteur Naquet’s hand shaking a thermometer.
Polly has stopped saying Far out, except as a joke, but I don’t tell her what’s truly funny: how every generation thinks it has invented sex.
Just once, I nearly told the children about Rémy. They were fighting about whether or not I should continue driving, and I wanted them to understand—something—but I caught myself in time, my heart pounding.
* * *
Impossible to remember Rémy’s bright, red-haired innocence! His politics veer to the right now, it’s horrifying to listen to him, and his apartment has turned into a fussy old man’s bachelor pad.
And yet, the sight of him—there, on the sidewalk, in a sunny rain shower, waiting for me (I don’t remember the train stopping, the escalator up to the street)—his softly drooping face, his jowls and his stubble, cane in one hand and umbrella in the other, the stains on his shirt!
“Come, Rémy. You shouldn’t be standing out in the rain like this.”
Let’s go to bed, I think, and watch the shadow of your curtains ripple across the room. It’s enough to feel your old body in my arms, my old body in yours. Enough to have found you down by the river.
Acknowledgments
I have been lucky beyond all measure in writing this book. Enormous thanks to my editors, the gifted and visionary Laura Brown and the incredibly generous Terry Karten; my brilliant agent, Alexa Stark; my kind and extraordinarily wise first readers—Judy Goldman, Susan Monsky, Darnell Arnoult, Katey Schultz, and Tommy Hays. I’m stunned by my good fortune in getting to work with all of you.
Huge thanks to everyone at HarperCollins—Jonathan Burnham, Christine Choe, Tracy Locke, Joanne O’Neill, Leah Carlson-Stanisic, Christina Polizoto—and to Jacqui Daniels and SallyAnne McCartin at McCartin-Daniels.
To Jessi and Chris Grass, Adrienne and Atticus Stovall, Jim Grant, Nicolette DeWitt, Giancarlo Toso, Sebastian Swann, Bethany and Lily Rountree, Laurie Smithwick, and my current and former students and colleagues at the Table Rock Writers Workshop, the Great Smokies Writing Program, and Appalachian State University—thank you for everything you have taught me.
To Larry, who makes everything possible—no words suffice.
Deep gratitude also to the North Carolina Arts Council for its support, and to the editors of the following publications, where portions of this novel first appeared in slightly different forms:
Five Points: “The Sex Appeal of the French”
The Alaska Quarterly Review: “The Phony Mother”
Drafthorse: A Lit Journal of Work and No Work: “The Ransom Ring”
Witness: “The Jew & the German”
What Writers Do: An Anthology of the Lenoir-Rhyne Visiting Writers Series: “Liberation”
About the Author
Abigail DeWitt is the author of the novels Lili and Dogs. Her short fiction has appeared in Five Points, Witness, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has been cited in Best American Short Stories, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has received grants and fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Tyrone Guthrie Center, the McColl Center for the Arts, and the Michener Society.
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news of our loved ones. Copyright © 2018 by Abigail DeWitt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover images © Ildiko Neer / Trevillion Images (woman); Liubomir Paut-Fluerasu / Aracangel (skyline); © Mikhail Pogosov / Shutterstock (stamp); © Pobytov / iStock / Getty Images (texture); © 94clover / iStock / Getty Images (texture); © Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty Images (smoke)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-283473-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-283472-0
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