The Postmistress of Paris(96)

“I didn’t even free him,” she repeated.

“It was still a brave thing you did, Nan. Brave and selfless. Giving yourself to that man there. You were saving a man’s life.”

“I didn’t give myself to him.” Wanting to tell T, to set down her anger and her shame.

“But . . .”

Nanée watched as T, reflected in the window, held the suit to her chest.

“I don’t mean to . . . I’m sorry. I just . . . I thought you had sex with him. I thought that’s how you got Edouard’s release.”

Nanée kept her gaze focused on their reflections as T stood, looking from the suit jacket in her hands to the cold fireplace where it might have burned. “Pffft,” she said after a moment, that handy little noise she’d learned from the French girls, a way to dismiss something you lacked the words to address.

T set the suit on the bed, came to stand beside her, and put her arms around her. “Oh, Nan,” she whispered.

Her body felt so slight, her friendship so warm.

“I’m sorry,” T said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .”

She put one hand on each cheek then and made Nanée meet her gaze, the way she had done with Peterkin when she said goodbye to him in Brive, when she needed him to know how much he was loved.

“I promise you, Nan, that isn’t your shame.” She wiped a tear from Nanée’s cheek. “That’s his shame. It’s all his.”





Saturday, December 7, 1940





VILLA AIR-BEL


Nanée stood at her bedroom window, staring out into the moonlight on the plane trees and the belvedere and the garden, trying not to think of the Robert Piguet suit in her armoire, her suitcase packed now with her own things and Luki’s, which would be less dangerous in her possession than in Edouard’s. In the quiet of the late night, she remembered that first time she’d listened to the quiet here, out on the belvedere with Miriam and T.

If Edouard didn’t come tonight, that would be his choice. His daughter. His decision. Luki still wanted her mother to return from heaven. He would have to decide what was right for them all.

Just when she had decided that he wouldn’t come, that that would make her decision easy—whatever they had was over; there would be no last night together, and if she went back to the United States she would be going alone—his quiet knock sounded on her door.

The shadow of Edouard entering, closing the door behind him. Not climbing under the covers like he usually did, but sitting silently at the edge of the bed.

“I’m over here,” she said.

He looked toward her voice, but didn’t speak. In the silence, a train whistle sounded far in the distance.

“Can I ask . . . ,” he said finally. “It’s more than I can ask, but . . .”

Yes, she wanted to say.

“Anything,” she said.

He stood and came to the window, and tucked a small bundle of paper in her hands—his letters.

“Take Luki?” he whispered. “If anything happens tomorrow, leave me behind, but please take Luki? Make her go with you.”

“Edouard, nothing is—”

“She isn’t Jewish,” he said. “You will be at no real risk. Let Luki believe you’re an angel. Let her think anything that will convince her to go with you, to get to the United States, to be safe.”

She reached to his face in the moonlight, his skin as damp with tears as hers had been with T.

He leaned forward, kissed her forehead, and left, closing the door as silently as he’d come.





Sunday, December 8, 1940





VILLA AIR-BEL


Nanée stopped halfway down the stairs to the entry hall, where everyone was saying goodbye to Edouard and Luki. The girl’s hair was tucked into two tidy caramel braids. Nanée wondered how many men knew how to braid a little girl’s hair.

This is real, she thought. They were leaving.

Dagobert trailed at her side, not on a leash.

As T looked up, Nanée tried to see herself as she did. Her new traveling case in hand—very like the old one she’d left at Madame Dupin’s tomb—with Luki’s things and her own, including her own espadrilles. “In case Hans and Lisa need your help getting them out; you’ll need the better foothold on the stony paths,” Varian had said when he gave them to her, although when he’d told everyone at the breakfast table that Edouard and Luki were indeed leaving that morning, he hadn’t mentioned Nanée. She wore her gray coat unbuttoned and, underneath it, the blue suit with the soft yellow pinstripes that she hadn’t believed she could ever wear again. She would trade them for the trousers, flight jacket, and scarf in her traveling case when they arrived at the Fittkos’ in Banyuls.

She took the last stairs carefully, remembering Rose sprawled on the entry floor, André lifting the maid and carrying her up to her room, herself on her knees, cleaning up, and the postcard she’d found on the floor, suggesting Berthe was in Brittany. She fingered the things in her own coat pockets. How empty the house would seem without Luki’s gentle giggle, without the trace of developing chemicals, the occasional sound of a shutter when you least expected it, the apology that forever followed, Edouard’s gentle voice saying he was only documenting this life, that he didn’t know what he would do with the photos but that he needed to take them.