The Room on Rue Amélie(101)
Slowly and with great effort, I get down on one knee and offer her my hand. I did this fifty-five years ago when I asked her to marry me, and I know she realizes I’m asking her to trust me one last time. I guide her down beside me, gently, until we’re lying side by side among Ruby’s poppies, staring up at the sky, which is just turning the deep cornflower blue of early twilight. I can see the first star of the evening flickering above us.
“Remember the first time I held you in my arms this way?” I ask.
She sighs. “I was fourteen. Ruby was asleep, and you appeared in the courtyard outside my window on the rue de Lasteyrie.”
I smile into the darkness and wipe away a tear. “You were crying. You insisted you were all right, and I reminded you that it was okay not to be.”
“I remember.” Her voice is fading, and it takes all my resolve not to beg her to stay with me a little while longer. But that would be for me, not for her.
“It’s okay now too.” I nuzzle her neck and pull her close to me, curling my body around hers just like I did on that night. “I told you then that you had to hold on to hope, my darling girl.”
“And I did. For all these years, Lucien.”
“Good.” I breathe into her hair, inhaling the scent of her. “Then just hold on a little longer. Hope will carry you home.”
“I love you,” she murmurs, so softly that I can barely hear her.
“I love you too.” And just like that night so many years ago, I know that the comfort of my body against hers has soothed her. She melts into me, and as I stroke her hair and murmur “Je t’aime,” again and again, the night closes in, and I can feel her slipping away.
“Ruby,” she murmurs, her voice full of hope and love, and then she smiles softly, and she’s not breathing anymore. I know she’s already made the crossing, and that somehow, Ruby is there to take her home. Peace settles over me as tears fill my eyes.
“Good-bye, my love,” I whisper. I know that one day soon, I’ll see her again.
I struggle to my feet, and in the waning light, I gently lift my sweet Charlotte into my arms for the last time and begin the long walk down the hill, across the fields of poppies.
Author’s Note
While researching World War II connections to Florida for my 2016 novel, When We Meet Again, which is set partially in the Sunshine State, I came across the extraordinary story of Virginia d’Albert-Lake, a Florida woman who married a Frenchman in 1937, moved to Paris, and ultimately worked with the Comet escape line in 1943 and 1944 before her arrest and imprisonment at the infamous Ravensbrück concentration camp. Like Ruby, the heroine of The Room on Rue Amélie, Virginia initially had the option to return to the States and decided against it. She felt compelled to help.
From the start, I felt a kinship with Virginia, who died in 1997 at the age of eighty-seven. I never knew her, but the paths of our lives overlapped many times, albeit decades apart. Like me, she moved with her family from the middle of Ohio to St. Petersburg, Florida, when she was a child. Like me, she was published for the very first time in the St. Petersburg Times. Like me, she lived in the Orlando area as a young woman and then fell head over heels in love with Paris. She even lived in the same Paris arrondissement where I once lived, just over a mile from my old address. I was drawn to her story and fascinated by the idea of an American woman choosing to stay in Paris during the war so that she could help save lives. The idea for the character of Ruby was born.
Virginia’s diary survived the war and was published in 2006 as An American Heroine in the French Resistance (Fordham University Press), providing me with a wonderful jumping-off point for the story of the fictional Ruby Henderson Benoit, who, like Virginia, couldn’t sit idly by with the world at war. In a 1993 interview in the St. Petersburg Times, Thomas Yankus, a pilot shot down over France in 1944, said of Virginia, “There we were, walking into this apartment after some pretty hairy experiences and being greeted by this beautiful woman who said, ‘Hi, fellas, how’re you doing?’ She had no fear whatsoever.” I envisioned Ruby as that kind of woman too.
Creating Thomas, Charlotte, Lucien, and the other characters who populate The Room on Rue Amélie took a lot of research too, and I’m indebted to many authors who chronicled the war years in Paris so well. The heartrending Journal of Hélène Berr—often compared to Anne Frank’s diary—was very useful in helping me to understand the sentiments of Jews in Paris as the war dragged on, as was Jews in France During World War II by Renée Poznanski. Caroline Moorehead’s A Train in Winter, Ronald C. Rosbottom’s When Paris Went Dark, and Alan Riding’s And the Show Went On were great resources for understanding life in Paris in the 1940s. First Light by Geoffrey Wellum and Survival Against All Odds by John Misseldine were fascinating firsthand accounts of what the war was like for RAF pilots who flew missions over the Continent. And The Freedom Line by Peter Eisner, Little Cyclone by Airey Neave, and The Shelburne Escape Line by Réanne Hemingway-Douglass, and many newspaper features, helped me to understand the Allied escape lines through France and how they operated. It’s important to note, however, that while based heavily on the Comet, Shelburne, and Pat O’Leary escape lines, the escape routes in this book are fictionalized.
I’m also indebted to the kind folks at the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, as well as to Sarah Helm for her illuminative book about Ravensbrück.