The Postmistress of Paris(22)

With nothing left to do, she woke the next morning, checked for the answer from T she knew could not possibly have arrived yet, and took Peterkin to stroll on the promenade and dig in the sand.

A week later, with no word back yet from T, a low rumble woke Nanée—a sound she knew without ever having heard it. She jumped out of bed, pulled on slacks, scooped up the sleeping Peterkin, and ran down to a lobby lit by a single lamp at an empty reception desk.

From here, the stomp stomp stomp of boots on pavement was deafening, and still the boy slept.

She joined the frumpy hotel clerk in the doorway, her back to the rooms where she had, in years past, danced and drunk champagne and flirted with men in tuxedos, with no idea that that time might ever end.

She held Peterkin more closely as she watched an endless stream of vehicles and tanks and German guns pass on the road, German soldiers marching in orderly formation, tall and fair, clean-shaven, and perhaps handsome if you didn’t know they were horrid. She breathed in the slightly sour smell of Peterkin’s hair and his scalp, this sleeping child who was not her own, who would never be. She nuzzled her face to his and whispered—to him or to herself or to whatever god might be watching over them, although that was hard to imagine—“And so they have arrived.”





Part II


TWO MONTHS LATER

September 1940

The Villa Air-Bel came into our lives, first as a house out of town for the Bénédites and myself . . . The Surrealists who found themselves in the region soon flocked around Breton for afternoons and evenings of talk and games . . . Strangely enough, we rarely referred to it as Air-Bel, or the villa, but called it the chateau, which was a gross exaggeration and had no business on the lips of such a democratic left-wing bunch, anyway.

—Mary Jayne Gold, Crossroads Marseille, 1940





Thursday, September 5, 1940





MARSEILLE


On the promenade in Marseille, where Nanée had always bought postcards, peanuts, and Eskimo Pies, a single peddler’s hoarse voice offered a newspaper no one wanted to read. France had accepted peace under onerous terms: the Germans kept two million French prisoners of war, extracted heavy financial reparations, and split France in two. Germany controlled the north and the Atlantic seaboard while Vichy prime minister Philippe Pétain, as authoritarian as Hitler and beholden to him, called for a “new moral order” in the south, replacing the French motto “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” with “Travail, famille, patrie”—work, family, homeland—by which they meant to shame any woman who had ever dared bob her hair or take a drink or a job or a man to her bed. Nanée had taken advantage of the new Nazi interest in getting foreigners away from the Atlantic ports to finally return Peterkin to T, who was in Tours by then to find Danny’s mother, having left Dagobert with the adoring children up in La Bourboule. Nanée caught a freight train to collect Dagobert, her car, which T had taken back there, and her trailer of possessions. But she couldn’t bear to return to Nazi-occupied Paris, so she came instead to rat-infested, brothel-laden, relentlessly sunny Marseille.

She meant to arrange a Pan Am Clipper from Portugal or, failing that, a ship on which she would have to pray German U-boats would respect neutrality. When it came time to leave France, though, she couldn’t fathom what she would do back in the States. Would she move into the Evanston house with Mother and Misha? Live alone at Marigold Lodge? Stay in New York in hopes of contributing somehow to the war effort despite her country’s stubborn isolationism and her own complete lack of skills? So she renewed her foreign-resident permit and stayed in this city in which every language was spoken, all the refugees from Stalin’s purges and Hitler’s sweep through Europe crowding the city’s hotels and cafés and streetcars, along with the Spahis and Zouaves and Senegalese soldiers who’d fought with the French, now trying to make their way home.

With the better hotels already full, she counted herself lucky to find a dark little room at the Continental, too near the old port’s ugly transporter bridge and fishing boats to be elegant, even without its faded blue wallpaper flowers of a type never seen in actual soil. But the room did have—along with a tarnished brass bed, three torturously straight-backed chairs at a pale wooden table, and a single tired pink lamp—a private bathroom with that ultimate of luxuries: a claw-footed tub.

She set the photograph of her father and herself on the dresser, propped beside it the art photograph of the woman seeming to swim in murky water, On Being an Angel, and littered the room with her books. She stored tins of meat, biscuits and chocolate, and bottles of whiskey and wine in the armoire, on the top shelf of which she stashed her Webley. And she paid an exorbitant price for a three-band radio with a splintered walnut case, chipped Bakelite knobs, and a perfectly intact brass double-needle dial she could tune to the BBC news.

Her friend Miriam Davenport saw her name on a list at the American consulate, and in no time they were living in each other’s pockets. Miriam couldn’t be more different from Nanée. She wore her ash-blond hair parted from forehead to nape and plaited into two braids tied together atop her head like a cartoon milkmaid rather than a Smith College graduate in France on a Carnegie scholarship. Her laugh was too loud, and her clothes hung poorly. She was engaged; she’d come to Marseille in search of a way to get her fiancé out of Yugoslavia. Like Nanée, she’d lost her father, but while Nanée’s daddy had left a fortune, Miriam’s left only debts.