“Exactly, and—”
“And that’s all I can do. I can’t risk getting into trouble, helping somebody else’s family. I’m sorry, but I can’t. To protect my children, to keep my children safe, that’s all I care about.”
“Well,” said her grandmother. “Well.”
Daisy couldn’t bring herself to look at Grandmère. That look of pity and frustration, she couldn’t stand it this time. Instead she dragged her gaze along the wall until she found the curio case in the corner, old-fashioned not in the elegant way of the rest of Grandmère’s furniture, but brown-legged and lined in faded burgundy velvet. She stared for a moment at the little halo of light on the glass cover. “I know I’m disappointing you. I know you wish I were like her.”
“Like whom?”
“Like my mother. But I’m not a heroine. I am not capable of doing miraculous deeds. I just want to stay alive. I want my children to stay alive.”
“And your husband?”
Daisy shrugged and returned her gaze at last to Grandmère’s face, which was more tender than she expected. Maybe she was getting soft in her old age. Then Daisy caught the books with the corner of her eye and thought, Maybe not.
“Pierre works to protect us,” she said. “Everything he’s doing, he does to protect us.”
Grandmère put her hand on the arm of the sofa and hoisted herself upward, and it occurred to Daisy that this everyday action seemed to cost her grandmother a little more effort than it used to. But there was nothing stiff or measured about Grandmère’s movements as she walked down the room, following the exact line of Daisy’s earlier gaze, until she came to the display case. Instead of unlocking the glass lid, however, and taking out the talisman within—something an astonished Daisy had seen her do only a handful of times, her entire life—she stuck her hand underneath the case, palm upward, and pulled open a small, unmarked drawer.
“What’s that?” Daisy asked.
Grandmère drew out a piece of paper and walked back to the sofa. She set the paper on the table and resumed her seat, without saying anything, until Daisy felt morally obliged to sit down, too. She looked at the paper, and at Grandmère, and her eyebrows rose.
“My dear Daisy,” said her grandmother, straightening her dress around her knees, “we are none of us safe, don’t you realize that? When they come for one of us, they come for any of us, all of us.”
“Grandmère, my heart breaks for the Jews, it does. Why, Madame Halévy and her sweet children, across the street, it doesn’t bear thinking of. The Nazis are monsters, worse than monsters—”
“Darling,” said Grandmère, “darling, don’t you understand? Haven’t you ever guessed?”
An icicle seemed to have found its way inside Daisy’s stomach, where it melted slowly and leached its coldness throughout her middle. “Guessed what?” she whispered.
Grandmère nodded to the paper that lay between them atop the sofa table. “Did it never occur to you? Minnie Gold of New York City, rich as Croesus, weds the Comte de Courcelles of Picardy, France. Are you really so naive?”
Daisy, her mouth dry, her stomach cold, wished for another glass of cognac. Instead she reached out and grasped the corner of the paper and held it before her, fluttering until she took the other side with her left hand to hold everything steady, hold the world steady. She didn’t read it, however. She didn’t need to. She was not so naive, not really.
“You’re a Jew?” she whispered.
“Naturally I am. I haven’t been to synagogue since I was a girl, I confess, but you see the family tree before you. And there is nothing on that page, dearest Daisy, that an industrious public official couldn’t discover for himself, if he had the curiosity.”
Daisy set the paper back down on the table and looked up. “Pierre can save you. Pierre—”
“Pierre is interested in nothing but his own neck, my dear, which is something I tried to tell you from the beginning. If Pierre can secure his own standing among his masters, he will happily sell his wife’s grandmother to them. With a red bow tied on top of my head.”
“But he can’t! To accuse you would be to accuse me, his own wife. His own children!”
“Ah,” said Grandmère. “You’re beginning to see the situation.”
“He wouldn’t do it.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t. But I doubt he’d be able to stop those who would. He’s a minor official, nobody important, no matter how much he thinks he ought to be. And the Nazis have begun to get serious about this business of hunting down the Jews in France. Maybe they’ve run out of prey in Germany and need their sport, I don’t know. But we’ve heard that—”