As she fell asleep that night Lavinia saw how severely she had miscalculated the degree of difference between deliverance and damnation. It had been hubris to think that she could find an equilibrium in an inherently unequal situation, to balance the hours of delight with the days of desolation. It seemed particularly naïve to have believed that the object of a great love must necessarily be worthy of it, or that she could trust the pull of her body to choose the right direction for her life.
Lavinia wondered why it surprised her to find that one could love someone long after one ceased to like them, or that the heart, like the body, could snag on a bramble that only dug deeper the more one tried to shake free. It was a thought that would return to her with the force of a blow, months later when she saw a pigeon caught on the barbed wire lacing the Hôtel Lutetia, where the Gestapo set up headquarters.
She remembered Mavis saying in a barely credible Brooklyn accent, “When it comes to love, you never get what you pay for….” and it had always made Lavinia smile. At the time Lavinia had thought Mavis was a cynic but now she saw how innocent Mavis actually had been. The problem wasn’t that love might be overpriced; it was that it could bankrupt you. It could take as much as you had, down to your last breath.
In all the literature Lavinia had read at school, the message had been clear: love was not for the squeamish. When she tried to think of an exception, nothing came to mind. She was sure there were exceptions, but she couldn’t think of a single one. Lavinia wondered how she had missed it, written her papers on the use of simile, or classical allusions, ignoring the larger caveat, as if employing a fop to do the work of the warrior.
But Lavinia was practical; if there was no turning back then she would press forward. She wrote to Gaston immediately, without any further illusions about her ability to stop seeing him.
Dearest Gaston,
I can still smell you on my skin. I can still feel you inside me. There were times last week, during the endless rain when I would have welcomed the worst excoriation just to hear your voice. Let’s kiss until we can’t remember why we used our mouths for anything else. I have longed for such little things—to feel your fingers laced with mine, or smell your cologne.
In September of 1939, when communication with America was cut off, Lavinia felt powerless for the first time in her life. Great Britain, France and Poland had effectively stopped all telephone service between New York and Europe following Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Even exchanges between diplomatic representatives and their home governments were restricted and, in England, severed.
Now it meant nothing to be a Gibbs. Harold had tried to warn her but the Gibbs family had been so steeped in privilege that Lavinia had been unable to imagine circumstances beyond which her family could prevail: they knew everyone; they were people for whom exceptions were made. Even abroad, even in banishment, even with the forfeiture of status and its attendant perquisites, she had enjoyed the psychological comfort of connections if not the material comfort of them.
Her family had been in Washington and Wall Street for so long they had acquired the kind of power that creates its own prestige. Nothing was ever too much further than a favor someone could do, no matter how loath one was to ask it, no matter what obligations or encumbrances it implied. That was the unspoken safety net she’d taken for granted; that was what she lost when connections were cut off.
It didn’t matter with whom she’d danced at which Christmas party or sat next to at which event. It didn’t matter that her father knew Jean-Jules Jusserand, who had been the French ambassador in Washington for twenty-two years and close with Teddy Roosevelt. Her father would delight dinner guests with the story of how Jusserand and Roosevelt swam naked across the Potomac, except the Frenchman kept on his gloves, “in case we meet a lady.” None of that mattered now. Now she was nothing more than a metic, a Greek term the French had borrowed to express their xenophobia, and designate aliens with no rights. Fate had burned her ships, investing her love for Gaston with even greater value.
War is a great leveler, Ambrose had said on the only occasion he spoke of his participation in the Great War. His tour of duty had been brief, no more than ten months, but it had taken almost twice as long for him to be all right again. At the time, Lavinia had assumed Ambrose’s comment was personal, an explanation for his breakdown. It was in keeping with her mother’s terse assessment, “The more brittle, the more easily broken,” and her father’s comment, “There is no shame in life knocking you down as long as you get up again.”
Within the first few days of war it was obvious to Lavinia that Ambrose had meant something else entirely: he’d meant that war, like weather, spits on all men alike, and erases temporarily even the distinctions men make among men. It was a powerful thought, not only because it made her feel a deeper affinity for Ambrose, but because she knew that the sense of camaraderie that bound together everyone in an air raid shelter was rare and fleeting and came at a terrible price. It was an irony that Lavinia relished in the huddled damp cellar of her building, sharing a blanket with Madame Luberon on her right and Madame de la Falaise on her left.
There was something exhilarating too about feeling needed as opposed to just useful. Lavinia’s days were not just full, they were worthy. At first, she worked with Mrs. Frobisher and Lorraine Tyson, coordinating the English Speaking League and several church organizations. Lavinia’s efficiency was quickly noted and she was plucked from the haphazard crews of volunteers to work with Mrs. Aiken, a ruddy-faced Brit, at the Croix Rouge.
Because Lavinia was practical and organized and made decisions quickly, she was given what seemed to her undeserved responsibility. Often the work she did was tedious, but she felt ennobled by it. It mattered. The only other thing that had made her feel that way had been her love for Gaston. Now each reinforced the importance of the other. Mr. Gibbs had warned his children about the dangers of gambling. There comes a moment, he said, when a player starts to feel so much is at stake he can’t fold no matter how bad a hand is dealt. “Married to the kitty,” her father called it. As a little girl it had sounded lovely to Lavinia to be married to a kitty, like something from a fairy tale.
It was no longer possible for Lavinia to receive bank drafts, which had been among the difficulties Harold had foreseen in his warning. In addition to the money she had in her checking account, she had savings, enough for close to a year if she was frugal. Before the dollar dipped, her father’s stipend had been sufficient to allow her to live comfortably and still save at the end of each month, which she had done with Gibbsian discipline in the hope of eventually buying an apartment.
She also had the salary she’d earned working for the Feydeau estate in the five and a half months when Gaston was still her employer, before he became her lover. Lavinia had never spent the packets of banknotes he’d sent tied up in the yellow ribbon of pastry boxes. She had put the money, uncounted, in a hatbox, where she had also kept his letters until she burned them, a gesture she now regretted with wincing frequency.
It was at night that Lavinia was frightened. Even before curfew, the streets were empty, and darkness, when it came, was complete. Sounds seemed magnified; the low rumble of propellers in the distance was enough to know what kind of plane would pass, and how soon and whether or not it was a Stuka. Fear had acquired a new vocabulary. Alone in bed, her heart galloped long after the shriek of the siren had passed, and Lavinia sometimes would get up and put her coat on over her nightgown and sit, Boswell in her lap, on the landing of the stairs, where she could hear the muffled sound of coughing coming from Monsieur Vedrian’s apartment and the creak of Madame Braun’s floorboards when she paced. It was comforting in the darkness, and helped calm her enough to go back to sleep.
Céleste took ill again and retreated to La Rêveline, taking her cadre of servants with her. Paris was emptying and shops were closing; only a handful of bus lines were still running and it was no longer possible to get the blond tobacco Lavinia liked, not even on the black m
arket. Mrs. Aiken told Lavinia that so many children had gotten lost or separated from their parents in the rushed flights depleting villages and clogging roads, the Croix Rouge had been asked to assist. “How do you lose a child?” Lavinia asked. “How do you lose thousands and thousands?” Mrs. Aiken corrected.
At the Gare Saint-Lazare, while Mrs. Aiken tried to find the supply of typewriter ribbons that was supposed to have arrived, Lavinia tried not to stare at the wounded being unloaded from the trains. Gaston was neither wounded nor away; his military exemption (Lavinia assumed it had to do with his limp) and his wife’s extended absence had made it possible to return to a more domestic arrangement. When Céleste regained her health and one by one, inexorably, the servants left, she talked of rejoining Gaston in Paris. “Paris is no place for you now,” Gaston told Céleste.
For the first time in almost a year, Lavinia and Gaston had a routine again, and it gave her a sense of security that seemed to make up for the rest of the world unraveling. Since the beginning of the war, they’d met in an apartment on which Gaston’s bank had foreclosed. Gaston had copied the key for Lavinia, and just to be able to unlock the door behind which he waited had added an authenticity to their ersatz life together in which she basked.
Before Gaston left for La Rêveline to visit Céleste, he’d kissed Lavinia’s nose, saying, “I’ll be back, I promise. The only thing in the world I want is here,” he’d said. He’d given her an extra coupon book and a liter of olive oil, things scavenged from vacated apartments that had made their way to the black market. It wasn’t even considered stealing: it was thrift, letting no resource be wasted. “Take care of Paris till I get back,” he’d told her. “I’m leaving you in charge.”
Lavinia looked at one of the boys on the platform who had paused to adjust his crutches. His head was bandaged in white gauze, like a turban, jeweled with a bright red ruby improperly centered. His lips were trembling and a bead of blood leaked down his forehead from under the bandage. It made Lavinia queasy to watch it. Only the night before she had told Gaston, “I have never been more in love. Despite everything. Right now, this very second, I’ve never been more full.”
If war imposed its own constraints, it also allowed them less rushed time together, intensifying the sense of abandon with which they met and the sense of abandonment after they parted.
Lilacs were still in bloom when the German Panzers crossed Metz. Lavinia could feel the press of panic in the air, like the choke of pollen when the plane trees come into flower, making it hard to breathe. It was primitive, instinctual, an awareness of vulnerability an animal has even in its sleep. It was akin to the claustrophobic feeling she had when she wore her gas mask during drills, but, unlike the mask, there was no way to remove it. The roads were thick with the last wave of people heading away from the approaching army.
Along the embankments were scattered items that had become too heavy or cumbersome to complete the journey. Left in the grass or by a ditch, familiar objects were jarringly out of place and took on a forlorn, disconcerting quality. Mrs. Aiken remarked that it reminded her of the work of Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist, whom she’d met once at a vernissage, and he had not been wearing any socks. To Lavinia, there was something heartbreaking about the objects and painfully intimate. These were the things people couldn’t leave behind, which made it all the more terrible when they did. Lavinia didn’t say anything though: it seemed wrong to be moved by abandoned bric-a-brac when men were dying in fields farther north.
Lavinia was also with Mrs. Aiken when she saw the old woman in the wheelbarrow. They were returning from the airfield at Le Bourget, riding in the back of a military transport vehicle Mrs. Aiken had arranged to take them as far as the banlieu. Shutting her eyes in the sun, it felt to Lavinia almost like a hayride, bumping along a back road, with the wind on her face.
“What a glorious day,” Mrs. Aiken volunteered. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was ‘a day for lingering and love.’ That was the expression we used growing up,” she added, with a blush, “for days like this. Ones that make you want to be lazy and foolish.”
As they sped around a turn, their driver honked and swerved, jostling them off balance. Receding behind them they could see an old man steering a teetery wheelbarrow through the dust they left in their wake. The wheelbarrow was rusted but it had been lined with a quilt and pillow and looked like a prehistoric perambulator, containing in its belly the slump of a tiny old woman with some belongings piled on her lap.
“Now there’s love for you,” Mrs. Aiken said. Lavinia nodded but she was thinking about the haunted expression frozen on the old woman’s face. It was a face in which were reflected all those cast-off treasures they’d had passed along the road, the miscellany of things too precious to leave, but, ultimately, too heavy to carry. The old woman looked as if she were doing the calculation of her weight and his love and the distance they could cover before she too was left in the shade on a grassy shoulder of a secondary road.
After Dunkirk, Cinzano no longer advertised itself as the optimist’s drink, or took care to specify its French fabrication. Italy declared war on France and the Germans bombed Paris. The 15th and 16th arrondissements and Auteuil were hit, as well as the airports at Le Bourget and Orly. There was an acrid smell of smoke in the air and it permeated everything: Lavinia’s clothes, her hair, her dreams.
“It’s the stink of defeat,” the baker said when he gave Lavinia her bread ration. “You can’t see it yet. But you can smell it,” he said, tapping the side of his nose with a finger smudged with flour. “And you can feel it here,” he said, indicating his liver. Within two weeks, German troops entered Paris.
Lavinia listened to de Gaulle’s broadcast from London at Mrs. Aiken’s apartment, sitting on a scratchy divan with a pair of Siamese cats and a woman named Thérèse, who cried softly, wiping tears from her face with the back of her hand.
“She’d been like that for days,” Mrs. Aiken told Lavinia in the kitchen. “Since Dunkirk. She doesn’t understand how lucky she is that her family’s boat was too small to help in the evacuation. Still, you have to admire her for wanting to go.”
The kitchen was filthy and as she talked, Mrs. Aiken killed a cockroach, mashing him against the counter with a dirty plate. “I’m never here,” she explained, gesturing at the mess. There were people, Lavinia realized, who found their genius at the very times most others lost their way. Mrs. Aiken was like an Olympic athlete for whom the work of a lifetime was compressed into a brief and noble struggle. It was hard to imagine her going back to the tedium of the life from which she claimed to have sprung.
Mrs. Aiken opened a tin of imported shortbread cookies she’d obviously been hoarding. “If General de Gaulle couldn’t stem her tears, maybe these will.” Mrs. Aiken was not someone Lavinia would have befriended under other circumstances but months of war had made Lavinia appreciate her. Barbara Aiken did not go to pieces no matter what. She reminded Lavinia of home at a time when it was hard not to be homesick.
Lavinia wondered if Gaston had heard the speech. He was out of town at La Rêveline and had been away for the bombing. Lavinia alternated between being grateful he was safe and feeling he should have been with her.
Like love, war elongated time and then compressed it. It had its own logic and rules. Occupation, Lavinia discovered, was just a debased version of war: all of the privation with none of the sense of purpose or hope. It brought out extremes. Adversity didn’t create character, Lavinia saw; it revealed it, like sycamore trees, Lavinia thought, when the bark was peeled away, exposing the trunk beneath, stark and vulnerable. She understood too how it happened that someone became a person you could no longer recognize. It happened incrementally, while you were looking elsewhere, focusing on something other than the lights going out, bulb by bulb, until suddenly you were in the dark.
“Just because someone betrays you doesn’t mean they don’t love you,” Madame Luberon said. She had been crying and her face was striated with the wo
bbly lines of tears darkened by eyeliner. “Everything gives under pressure,” Madame Luberon said, her voice raw, stripped of emotion. She held a bouquet of twigs in one hand and bent to collect others the wind had scattered across the courtyard.
“It’s just a question of how much pressure and how it’s applied,” Madame Luberon insisted, snapping a twig to demonstrate.
Madame Luberon leaned her face so close Lavinia could see the shadow of a moustache above Madame Luberon’s lip.
“Humans are no different,” she continued in a ragged voice. “And it has nothing to do with love, believe me. If the choice is between sentiment and survival, sentiment becomes a luxury. Just like that,” she said, snapping her swollen fingers. Her eyes welled up with tears as she turned away. “Everything gives under enough pressure. It’s a law of nature,” Madame Luberon repeated.
Lavinia learned from her neighbor, Monsieur Vedrian, that Martin Luberon had spent the weekend at the Hôtel Lutetia, where the Gestapo had set up headquarters. After two days of “room service,” Martin Luberon had informed on his twin brother, Michel, who ran a small counterfeit operation selling ration cards and transit permits, with a sideline in smuggled hams.
Upon release, Monsieur Luberon had gone directly to the Pont Royal, and jumped. Lavinia was aghast. It was a terrible story in a hundred ways. It was also the first time the war had touched someone she knew. The war had not just permeated her world; it had entered her home.
“What a waste,” Monsieur Vedrian added, and then he leaned away from Lavinia and spat vigorously into the street. Most people had lost weight since the war began, but Monsieur Vedrian looked particularly shrunken. His collar gaped at the neck and Lavinia could see his Adam’s apple bobbing vigorously under the stubble on his stringy neck. It made him look fiercer, like an old rooster, angry eyes and a scrappy demeanor puffing up the last few feathers.
Twilight Page 17
