Just when she had decided that he wouldn’t come, that that would make her decision easy—whatever they had was over; there would be no last night together, and if she went back to the United States she would be going alone—his quiet knock sounded on her door.
The shadow of Edouard entering, closing the door behind him. Not climbing under the covers like he usually did, but sitting silently at the edge of the bed.
“I’m over here,” she said.
He looked toward her voice, but didn’t speak. In the silence, a train whistle sounded far in the distance.
“Can I ask . . . ,” he said finally. “It’s more than I can ask, but . . .”
Yes, she wanted to say.
“Anything,” she said.
He stood and came to the window, and tucked a small bundle of paper in her hands—his letters.
“Take Luki?” he whispered. “If anything happens tomorrow, leave me behind, but please take Luki? Make her go with you.”
“Edouard, nothing is—”
“She isn’t Jewish,” he said. “You will be at no real risk. Let Luki believe you’re an angel. Let her think anything that will convince her to go with you, to get to the United States, to be safe.”
She reached to his face in the moonlight, his skin as damp with tears as hers had been with T.
He leaned forward, kissed her forehead, and left, closing the door as silently as he’d come.
Sunday, December 8, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Nanée stopped halfway down the stairs to the entry hall, where everyone was saying goodbye to Edouard and Luki. The girl’s hair was tucked into two tidy caramel braids. Nanée wondered how many men knew how to braid a little girl’s hair.
This is real, she thought. They were leaving.
Dagobert trailed at her side, not on a leash.
As T looked up, Nanée tried to see herself as she did. Her new traveling case in hand—very like the old one she’d left at Madame Dupin’s tomb—with Luki’s things and her own, including her own espadrilles. “In case Hans and Lisa need your help getting them out; you’ll need the better foothold on the stony paths,” Varian had said when he gave them to her, although when he’d told everyone at the breakfast table that Edouard and Luki were indeed leaving that morning, he hadn’t mentioned Nanée. She wore her gray coat unbuttoned and, underneath it, the blue suit with the soft yellow pinstripes that she hadn’t believed she could ever wear again. She would trade them for the trousers, flight jacket, and scarf in her traveling case when they arrived at the Fittkos’ in Banyuls.
She took the last stairs carefully, remembering Rose sprawled on the entry floor, André lifting the maid and carrying her up to her room, herself on her knees, cleaning up, and the postcard she’d found on the floor, suggesting Berthe was in Brittany. She fingered the things in her own coat pockets. How empty the house would seem without Luki’s gentle giggle, without the trace of developing chemicals, the occasional sound of a shutter when you least expected it, the apology that forever followed, Edouard’s gentle voice saying he was only documenting this life, that he didn’t know what he would do with the photos but that he needed to take them.
Dagobert nuzzled her leg as if he sensed what was to happen here, that she would, as she had in Brive, take this child and leave him behind.
Gussie shyly offered Nanée his lucky copy of L’envers et l’endroit. “Carry it under your left arm, not your right,” he said.
“But you still need the luck yourself.”
“Knowing you’re carrying it will bring me more luck.”
“Gussie—” Nanée kissed his cheek, unable to finish giving voice to her thoughts. If she were ten years younger and had half an ounce of sense, she would fall for him.
“Are you ready?” she asked Luki.
The girl nodded. Solemn. Resolved. How devastating that a child so young had to know so much of the ugliness of the world. When Nanée was Luki’s age, she’d slept in a four-poster bed draped in lace, with no idea that anything in the world would interrupt her night, much less her whole life. She chose each morning from a closet full of clothes, and played on the sands of Lake Michigan, and read any book she wanted, and learned French from her governess. She summered at the beautiful Marigold Lodge that was now hers, and spent long days on the family yacht, and never gave a thought to the milk she drank. And yet her father had never braided her hair. A life of wealth and a life of riches aren’t always the same.