The swiftness and precision of her answer surprises me. “What happened?”
“He finished his schooling. It was time to go home.”
“Home?”
She closes her eyes, wincing. “Berlin.”
Her anguish is palpable and so uncharacteristic. Perhaps because I thought her incapable of such feelings. “I’m sorry he left you, Maman.”
Her eyes open slowly, dark and bottomless. “It was me,” she whispers. “I ended it.”
“You? Why?”
“He wanted me to go back to Germany with him, to marry him. But your grandmother forbid it. Even when I told her there was going to be a baby.”
“Because of the shop?”
“Because of the war,” she replies quietly. “Erich was a German. A boche, as they were known then—and still are, I suppose. My mother never forgave them for the Somme. So many of our boys were killed there, slaughtered in the trenches by the thousands. She couldn’t forgive it. Many couldn’t. She said marrying a German would bring far more shame than a bastard child.”
“So that was it? You just let him leave?”
She nods, pulling in a phlegmy breath. “His parents were dead, and his sisters had gone to live with an aunt while he attended school. It was time to go back to his responsibilities. I could have made him stay,” she whispers thickly. “If I had told him about you, he would have stayed.”
I stare at her, stunned. “You never told him you were pregnant?”
She turns her face away. “It would only have made things harder for us both. We had . . . responsibilities.”
I blink at her, trying to understand. It isn’t that I’ve missed having a father—you can’t miss what you’ve never had—but her argument makes no sense. “What could be more responsible than marrying the father of your child?”
“It wasn’t as easy as that. There was the shop to think about. I couldn’t leave Maman with only Lilou to help. Not when I knew she wouldn’t stay. Even when we were girls, my sister had one foot out the door. And then there were the stories—all the broken Roussel hearts, the ones who defied the rules of our calling and suffered for it. Maman said mine would be next and that when it happened, I couldn’t come back.” A pair of tears squeezes from between her clenched lids, leaving thin silver tracks in their wake. “I would be on my own—like my mother was after Lilou was born.”
“So you kept your secret and broke Erich’s heart instead.”
“I was afraid.”
The admission brings a lump to my throat. “And you never saw him again?”
She shakes her head, slowly, painfully. “I had a letter once, begging me to reconsider. I was afraid I would weaken, so I threw it in the fire. Lilou was livid with me. She never understood duty. And I . . .” Her eyes drift from mine. “I never understood anything else.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say softly, because I am. But I’m angry too. That I’d never had the chance to know this man who told stories with his violin or the woman my mother had been then, the one who’d fallen in love with a stranger on a street corner. I would have liked that woman. But the years have transformed her into someone else—into an unhappy echo of the very mother who had forced her to deny her heart. It seems a terrible irony as I sit listening to her story, and I wonder if she realizes it, too, and if that’s why she’s decided to tell me her story.
“It must have broken your heart to let him go,” I say gently. And then a thought suddenly occurs. “Is that why you’re telling me now, because you want me to help you find him?”
Her tears come suddenly and noisily, like a dam breaking, and I can’t think of anything to say. I have no experience in offering her comfort and I’m apparently doing it badly. “I’m so sorry, Maman. Whatever I said, I’m sorry.”
“He was Jewish,” she sobs raggedly. “Erich Freede was Jewish.”
I stare at her, struggling to connect the words with the anguish in her eyes. It takes a moment, but finally I understand. A Jew. In Germany.
“The Nazis,” I say quietly. “Mon dieu.”
She closes her eyes, dragging in another sob. “The stories . . . The camps . . . I can’t bear to think of it.”
I glance at the locket in my hand, recalling the day one of Maman’s clients shared her account of Kristallnacht, how she had closed the shop and gone to her room and not come out until morning. And how, when she heard about the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup on the radio, she had wept uncontrollably and refused to eat for days. She hadn’t been crying for humanity; she’d been crying for Erich Freede, because she’d never stopped loving him.