The Paris Library(85)

“Clues.” I wanted to discover the things Odile would never tell. I grabbed books from the shelves, hoping to find another photo, a love letter, a diary. The forbidden was exciting. And how else do you find things out? Don’t snoop. You’ll get yourself into trouble. I felt a soup?on of guilt, but continued to flick through the pages.

“You might not know Odile as well as you think. What if she was in love with a Nazi?”

I remembered the photo of the “Library Protector.” He hadn’t been bad looking, for a Nazi. I shook my head. “No way! She was in the Resistance, cracking codes hidden in books. I bet she was in love with one of the resisters, oh, and maybe he was killed on a secret mission.”

“She didn’t laugh for a whole year,” Mary Louise added on to the story. “But then she saw Mr. Gustafson, and he helped her smile again. How’d they meet, anyway?”

I took a guess. “He parachuted into France and was shot down by the enemy. He was taken to the hospital, where she volunteered once a week.”

“But when she met him, she volunteered every day.”

We studied Odile’s wedding photo. Mouth tight, she looked at the camera. Buck stared down at her, his eyes dumb with love.

“Can’t you see him lying in the hospital bed, gazing up at her in adoration?” I asked.

“And she liked him, too, but she couldn’t say, because back then, women had to pretend to be shy.”

“Definitely.” I imagined Odile in a beret, defying the Gestapo the same way she stood up to Dad. I bet she hid Jews in her apartment.

“If Odile had hidden Anne Frank, she’d be alive today.”

“Totally,” Mary Louise said. “Let’s see what else she has!”

We left the books in a heap and headed to the bedroom. Mary Louise disappeared into the closet. “A jewelry box! Bet it’s full of rubies from an old lover!”

I followed her inside. Both of us barely fit. My cheek brushed against the sleeves of Odile’s blouses. On a peg, a black lace nightie—something so sensual that just seeing it made us blush—shimmered. Buck’s gun was propped up in the corner. We shouldn’t have been in Odile’s bedroom, in her closet, in her things. I knew that. But I couldn’t stop caressing her cashmere cardigans, folded like they were still in the store.

Mary Louise pointed to a white box on the second-highest shelf. I grabbed it, and she opened the gold clasp.

“It’s not locked,” I marveled.

“Bummer.” She held up a bunch of paper.

“Maybe they’re love letters!”

This was what I’d hoped for, a piece of Odile’s past, penned by a beau. Buck or someone else, someone dashing and foreign. The paper was crisp as bacon and yellowed with age. I grabbed the first page. Its feminine, flowing handwriting resembled Odile’s. Not from a lover, then. The French wasn’t easy to understand. The letter was full of words like “cavort” that I’d seen once and long since abandoned in the back of my brain.


Paris

12 May 1941

Monsieur l’Inspecteur:

Why aren’t you looking for undeclared Jews in hiding? Here is the address of Professor Cohen at 35 rue Blanche. She used to teach so-called literature at the Sorbonne. Now she invites students to her home for lectures so she can cavort with colleagues and students, mostly male—at her age!

When she ventures out, you see her coming a kilometer away in that swishy purple cape, a peacock feather askew in her hair. Ask the Jewess for her baptism certificate and passport, you’ll see her religion noted there. While good Frenchmen and women work, Madame le Professeur sits around and reads books.

My indications are exact, now it’s up to you.

Signed,

One who knows



Hatred from forty-five years ago rose from the page. Was this why Odile wouldn’t talk about her past, because the words were so ugly?

I felt as if I were standing in a snow globe that someone had shaken, only the pieces inside weren’t glued down, and everything swirled around—the brick house, the lamppost, the stray cat, the police car. We all went careening with the snow that was not snow, just jaundiced scraps of paper, decaying confetti that I’d made from the letter.

Mary Louise smacked me. “Why’d you rip it up?”

“What?” I said, still dazed.

She pointed to the scraps at our feet. “She’ll find out for sure. We’re in trouble.”

Nothing made sense anymore. “I don’t care.”

The photo of the “Library Protector” flashed into my mind. Odile kept it with pictures of loved ones. Maybe she’d dated the Nazi, and maybe she’d helped him in his work. After all, she’d never returned to France, and her family never visited. Maybe they’d disowned her.

“What did the letter say?”

I didn’t want her to know how horrible people were. I didn’t want to share my suspicions about what Odile had done. If she wasn’t the one who wrote that letter, why did she have it?

“What’d it say?” she repeated.

“I didn’t understand.”

“That’s okay.” She patted my back. “Maybe you don’t speak French as well as you think you do.”

We’d found the clue I’d wanted. And now… I felt cold. And sick to my stomach.