The Keeper of Happy Endings(33)

She lets go of my hand and closes her eyes, settling into her pillows with a long, spongy sigh. I linger briefly, digesting all that has passed between us, wishing it could have come sooner, stunned that it’s come at all. The silence stretches. I stand, then turn to go.

“Leave him with me,” she calls softly, her voice thin and childlike. “Just for a little while.”

I close the locket and press it into her palm, curling her fingers around it, then bend down to place a kiss on her forehead. It’s an act I’ve never performed before—and will never perform again.

The next morning, I enter her room to find that she has slipped away. She lies quiet against her pillows, her face pale in death. But beautiful, too, as if slipping her skin has at long last freed her to be happy. Her hand lies open against the sheets, the locket and her rosary lying loose in her palm. I put the rosary in her bureau, then fasten the locket around my neck. The weight of it between my breasts feels foreign. My father. A stranger. But I’ve made a promise, and I will keep it.

I feel no surprise at finding her gone, only a dull wave of sadness as I pull the bedroom door closed behind me. I knew in my bones that our talk last night was meant to be a kind of goodbye.

As usual, Maman has had the last word.





FOURTEEN


SOLINE

We do not create love from thin air, using philters or glamours or any other manner of manipulation. We do not create love at all. We merely shepherd its expression and assure its survival.

—Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch

3 March 1943—Paris

I have closed the shop for good, not that anyone noticed.

Maman was buried quietly in a cardboard casket covered with cloth, because there was no wood for a proper coffin. Flowers appeared on the stoop, small posies tied with bits of ribbon or twine. And of course, the letters—dozens of envelopes pushed through the shop’s letter box, heartfelt remembrances from brides Maman helped find happiness over the years. So many seeming miracles, accomplished with a handful of stitches and a little bit of magick.

I’ve saved some of the letters, bundling them together with a length of ribbon. They’re Maman’s legacy to me—a collection of her happy endings. It helps to read them now and then, to know she will be remembered. But life must go on. Death is everywhere these days. On the radio and in the papers, in the camps and on the battlefields, the prisons and field hospitals. To most, Esmée Roussel is just one more missing face in the queues, but I feel her absence keenly.

For as long as I can remember, she has been the voice in my ear, directing my work, shaping my thoughts—shaping me. And with her gone, I suddenly feel unshaped. I’ve never been much more than Esmée Roussel’s daughter. Suddenly, I’m not even that.

After years of clandestine work, I have finally finished my dress—a Soline Roussel original—but there seems little point in starting another. As Maman predicted, there are no brides in Paris because there are no grooms. Unless one counts the boche, which I do not.

My life has simply lost its rhythm. I have no one to cook for, sew for, care for, and I’m at a loss to see what comes next. My world, never more than a few miles wide, has shrunk to a handful of rooms, with entire weeks passing when I do not venture outside. But my hoard of supplies has dwindled alarmingly. It is time to rejoin the living in the food queues.

It’s a drizzly Wednesday morning. I grab my umbrella and my ration cards and head to the shops. It’s a meat day, and the queue at the butcher’s is already spilling out into the street, thin faces all in a row, sharp with hunger and mistrust. I take my place among them, sharing my umbrella with the woman behind me.

It’s impossible to ignore the talk rippling up and down the queue. Murmurs of diphtheria and the tuberculosis that killed Maman. Children with rickets. Babies born too weak to survive. People dropping dead of starvation in Poland. And the question no one speaks aloud—how long before it’s us?

But worse than the threat of hunger, for me at least, is the smothering weight of boredom. I need something to fill my days, some way to be useful again, or I’ll run mad. A few of the couture houses are still open: Lelong, Grès, Schiaparelli. But they’re dressing the Nazi wives now, and Maman wouldn’t approve of me having a hand in that. Not that I’d ever get my foot in any of those doors. Sadly, I haven’t the slightest idea what else I might be fit for.

And then one morning, I ride Maman’s old bicycle to Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of the city, to trade two skeins of lace—more prized than beef on the black market and twice as hard to find—for some butter and a handful of eggs. I’m near the American Hospital when a trio of ambulances grinding up the street sends a shiver through me. Sirens aren’t uncommon on the streets of Paris—far from it—but I don’t think any of us has gotten used to that jarring, plaintive wail. We all know what it means. More butchered men. More widows.

I watch, transfixed, as they pass through the hospital gate and into the large front courtyard. There’s a clamor as the sirens die, a bustle of slamming doors and swarming uniforms as the drivers spill out to unload their cargo.

Hospitals all over France are overflowing. We’ve all heard the horror stories: doctors performing amputations from sunup to sundown, nurses so overwhelmed they often collapse from lack of sleep, volunteers changing linens and manning bedpans—anything to lighten the load.