The Postmistress of Paris(81)

“I suppose the moon is bright enough to light our way out to visit Madame LaVache.”

He pulled Luki to him again and hugged her tightly, suddenly desperate. To leave, yes. To get this child somewhere safe.

“THIS COW WILL be awfully confused, us coming to haunt her in the dark,” André said, but it was clear in the way he said it that the adventure amused him. Edouard trooped with everyone across the uneven field toward the little milking shed and Madame LaVache, Aube and Peterkin continually asking Luki if she still had the sugar cube, and teaching her to call to Madame LaVache, “Woooo, cow!” Jacqueline admonished Aube again and again to watch for cow patties—impossible to do in the moonlight—before Varian found one with his foot. As they neared the fenced enclosure and the shed, a dark mound rose. Ah Madame, we disturb your slumber.

The cow looked friendly enough, but she was nearly five feet tall at the withers and weighed well over a thousand pounds, and she had those little horns too, and there really wasn’t much to that rail fence. The old girl never failed to stand docilely as the children approached, though, her pure white face now nearly glowing in the moonlight, her funny brown ears sticking straight out the side from her massive and comical head.

Luki stretched out her arm and opened her palm so that the sugar cube sat there as an offering. The cow took one slow, small step forward to bridge the divide, then stretched her neck over the fence and gently tongued the sugar cube into her mouth.

Luki laughed and laughed.

The cow stood there, watching her. Surely that was a cow-smile on the animal’s face.

Then Aube and Peterkin were on either side of Luki, petting Madame LaVache’s long white face and wet pink nose, as untroubled by those horns as if they were simply another set of ears.

“Who ever knew a cow could be such a gentle creature,” Nanée said. “She could teach my mother a thing or two.”

Edouard wondered what Nanée’s mother was like. Her family. Her home. Why she was here in France, risking her life. He ought to be the one staying here. He ought to be taking photographs to show what was happening in the camps and in the streets. Nanée was like the woman in the cape who had so fascinated him. Or better. She took messages to hidden refugees. She went to internment camps to free men like him. She’d gone over the border into occupied France to rescue a girl she’d barely met, while he’d stayed here on the excuse that he didn’t want to put Varian and those who helped him at risk. It was the same reason he didn’t take photos. But the truth was, they were already endangering themselves. The truth was, it was Luki he was unwilling to endanger. He knew revealing the truth of what the Nazis were doing here was more important than any one girl’s happiness, even than any one girl’s life. But he couldn’t bring himself to risk Luki.

THE CHILDREN HAD been put to bed, even Luki fast asleep now, her bedroom door open so that she could call to Edouard if she needed him. They’d brought the radio upstairs to the library so that she could see him as the adults visited. It was a clear night, and Danny found them the Boston station.

“May I have this dance?” Edouard asked Nanée.

She put a hand in his, her other on his shoulder. He set his own hand at her waist. Her hair was still wet from the bath she’d taken after the visit to Madame LaVache, while he had tucked Luki in and sung to her, and sat there for the longest time just watching her sleep.

“You smell good,” he whispered, and he pulled her closer. Citrus and verbena, from the soap she said Varian had brought from Portugal.

André Breton, dancing with Jacqueline beside them, raised an eyebrow.

Edouard danced Nanée away from him, toward the open door to Luki’s room.

“She calls you an angel sometimes,” he said.

“I’ll tell you about that tomorrow, when I’m competent to string words together.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Of course you’re exhausted. I ought to let you go to bed.”

“I’m not tired,” she said as unconvincingly as Luki had when he’d tucked her in.

He smiled a little, his heart light for the first time in forever. “Thank you for bringing Luki back to me.”

She looked up at him. I missed you, he thought. He wanted to kiss her, but not here, not in front of everyone. Bing Crosby sang on the radio about wanting to be with someone as the years come and go.

Edouard whispered to Nanée, “Do you ever think about going home?”

She set her head on his shoulder and swayed with him to the music coming all the way from Boston, all the way from the far side of the world.





Part IV


   DECEMBER 1940

   The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

   —Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind





Sunday, December 1, 1940





VILLA AIR-BEL


It was Sunday. Salon day. Voices drifted up from the belvedere, the guests arriving, with Edouard and Luki not even quite dressed. They’d slept through breakfast, but Madame Nouget brought them a tray with bowls of thin porridge, ersatz coffee for him, and milk for Luki—which she was quite devastated not to have coaxed from the cow herself. He pulled on his jacket and tie, then fixed a ribbon Aube had given Luki into hair lighter than her mother’s, but with the same luster and wave. She smiled her gummy smile, one of her bottom front teeth loose. She could read now too. She could write. Already, he had missed so much.