The Winemaker's Wife(98)

She picked David up and went inside. Just beyond the entrance sat a young secretary, who looked up expectantly. “May I help you, madame?”

“I am here to see Samuel Cohn,” she said confidently.

“Whom should I tell him is here?”

Inès’s heart fluttered. “An old friend,” she said, and though the secretary pursed her lips at the vague response, she still slipped into the office behind a closed door, emerging a moment later to tell Inès that she could come in.

Inès didn’t believe in miracles until she rounded the corner and saw a familiar figure—looking just as he had the last time she’d seen him—standing behind a grand desk. His eyes widened in recognition, and he hastily told his secretary that she could go.

“Inès Chauveau?” he asked, crossing from behind his desk to kiss her cheeks. He examined her in disbelief. “It can’t be! I was told that you had died!”

“Well, I did, in a way. I am Edith Thierry now.”

“But the real Madame Thierry—”

“—is dead,” Inès finished softly, and then as Samuel’s brow creased with confusion, she added, “And this is my son, David.”

“Pleased to meet you, monsieur,” David said politely, just as she had taught him to do, and then he tugged on her dress. “Maman, may I have my airplane now?”

“Of course, my dear.” Inès handed David his toy, and he sat down on Samuel Cohn’s floor and began to swoop it through the air, making engine sounds under his breath, while Inès told an astonished Samuel the whole story—from what had happened to Michel and Céline, to her adoption of Edith’s name. He in turn told her about how he and his sister had been smuggled across the Swiss border with the help of a Dutch couple and had spent the remainder of the war safely in Geneva.

“You saved my life,” Samuel concluded. “And my sister’s. I owe you everything.”

“You owe me nothing,” Inès said quickly. “But I was hoping that nonetheless, you might be willing to help me with a situation that might prove a bit complicated.”

“I am at your service, whatever you need.”

And so Inès explained about how the Maison Chauveau had passed to her, and that she wanted to leave it to David, for it was his by right. “Perhaps it has been taken and sold already,” she said. “Maybe I am too late. But if there’s a chance of saving it, is there anything you can do so that ownership rests with me with David as my heir? It is, after all, his rightful inheritance.”

“It will indeed be complicated,” Samuel said with a sigh, “but I will do absolutely everything I can. Of course we’ll need to establish a proper trail of paperwork officially making David your son, too. But considering the way so many records were lost or destroyed in the war, it shouldn’t be difficult to plant a few pieux mensonges, white lies. So you plan to return to Ville-Dommange, then?”

“No. I cannot. I need to start over somewhere new. Maybe Paris, maybe even America. But there are too many memories for me here, and who knows what would happen if people realize that Inès Chauveau is alive? I cannot risk it, for I am all David has.”

“I’m sorry,” Samuel said, “that it has come to this.”

Inès looked away. “It is my fault.”

Samuel smiled sadly. “We all make mistakes. It is the war that turned those mistakes into losses that will last a lifetime. So we must keep moving forward, mustn’t we? It is the only way.”

? ? ?

Inès always intended to tell David about his past, but as the years went by, she lost the courage again and again. By the time they had relocated to New York, she had so fully become someone else—a French divorcée named Edith Thierry—that time only made the truth more difficult, more elusive. What would her son say when he learned that she was not really his mother? That she had indeed been responsible for his real parents’ deaths? That she had taken him away from his ancestral home simply because she could not live with herself anymore?

Still, she knew she owed him honesty. Once, when he was seventeen, a senior in high school, she’d found a bottle of 1940 Champagne Chauveau in a specialty wine store on West Seventy-Second Street and bought it, though it had cost a small fortune. But it had been a sign; it had been the last vintage Michel and Theo had finished together before the world fell apart. All of them—Inès and Céline, too—had played a part in making the wine that year, and as Inès popped the cork in the living room with shaky hands, she felt as if she were holding something that belonged to another age, another reality.

She drank as she practiced telling David everything. Even though the 1940 harvest had been so terrible, the bubbles were fine and elegant, the wine itself buttery as brioche, with a crisp, lemony edge and just the faintest traces of caramel and chalk. It was perfect, a masterpiece, an ode to the land, to the cellars, to the winemakers. Céline had been right about this vintage; they had managed to make something beautiful from the chaos. Michel would have been so proud, and as she drank sip after perfect sip, she closed her eyes and imagined returning to Ville-Dommange, finding Michel there tending the cellars. His hair would be gray by now, his face lined, and he would embrace her and tell her that he knew it had all been a mistake, and that he forgave her.