Nanée wondered if there wasn’t some way to back up from this beast of a bureaucrat and race around him.
“By the time I get permission from the French,” she insisted, “the armistice will be signed. Any permission the French granted me today might be no good tomorrow.”
The nasty little functionary responded, “Then you might ask yourself why you continue to sit here rather than hurrying on to inquire with the French authorities.”
AT THE FRENCH prefecture of Bayonne, Nanée presented her single passport as if it were all that could possibly be needed for her to leave for America with a young French boy. The man across the desk examined it like a jeweler looking through a loupe at a fake.
“Of course you may have an exit visa anytime,” he said.
Nanée gave him Peterkin’s name with her own.
“I’ll need to see the boy’s passport,” he said.
How was it that now, when they ought to be a mess of panic, the French authorities were showing a remarkable ability to stick to no as the answer to anything? But she couldn’t risk offending this lout’s fragile French pride.
She explained that Peterkin had been separated from his mother in the flight from Paris—a story she could tell with the confidence of a woman speaking the truth.
He would have none of it.
“Peter has an aunt in Maine who will take him in,” she explained. “Surely you don’t want to keep an American boy in France during a war.”
“But the war is over, mademoiselle.”
Nanée lowered her gaze, as ashamed as she could manage. She whispered, “The truth, sir, is that he’s my son.”
He eyed her ringless fingers.
“Only mine. The father has no idea of him.” Avoiding the word illegitimate, which would leave him thinking less of her. Less sympathetic. Less willing to help.
“You will have to prove that also, mademoiselle.” The last word spit out in distaste.
For heaven’s sake, was she really stuck with the only absolute prude of a man in all of France?
She didn’t wait for him to explain what she already knew—that even illegitimate children were issued birth certificates.
BACK AT THE hotel, she sent a telegram she hoped would reach T. She had failed. They would have to meet up somewhere so she could return Peterkin to his mother, although she had no idea how she would manage that. The trains weren’t running, and she had no car, nor any certainty that she would be allowed to take Peterkin anywhere.
With nothing left to do, she woke the next morning, checked for the answer from T she knew could not possibly have arrived yet, and took Peterkin to stroll on the promenade and dig in the sand.
A week later, with no word back yet from T, a low rumble woke Nanée—a sound she knew without ever having heard it. She jumped out of bed, pulled on slacks, scooped up the sleeping Peterkin, and ran down to a lobby lit by a single lamp at an empty reception desk.
From here, the stomp stomp stomp of boots on pavement was deafening, and still the boy slept.
She joined the frumpy hotel clerk in the doorway, her back to the rooms where she had, in years past, danced and drunk champagne and flirted with men in tuxedos, with no idea that that time might ever end.
She held Peterkin more closely as she watched an endless stream of vehicles and tanks and German guns pass on the road, German soldiers marching in orderly formation, tall and fair, clean-shaven, and perhaps handsome if you didn’t know they were horrid. She breathed in the slightly sour smell of Peterkin’s hair and his scalp, this sleeping child who was not her own, who would never be. She nuzzled her face to his and whispered—to him or to herself or to whatever god might be watching over them, although that was hard to imagine—“And so they have arrived.”
Part II
TWO MONTHS LATER
September 1940
The Villa Air-Bel came into our lives, first as a house out of town for the Bénédites and myself . . . The Surrealists who found themselves in the region soon flocked around Breton for afternoons and evenings of talk and games . . . Strangely enough, we rarely referred to it as Air-Bel, or the villa, but called it the chateau, which was a gross exaggeration and had no business on the lips of such a democratic left-wing bunch, anyway.
—Mary Jayne Gold, Crossroads Marseille, 1940
Thursday, September 5, 1940
MARSEILLE
On the promenade in Marseille, where Nanée had always bought postcards, peanuts, and Eskimo Pies, a single peddler’s hoarse voice offered a newspaper no one wanted to read. France had accepted peace under onerous terms: the Germans kept two million French prisoners of war, extracted heavy financial reparations, and split France in two. Germany controlled the north and the Atlantic seaboard while Vichy prime minister Philippe Pétain, as authoritarian as Hitler and beholden to him, called for a “new moral order” in the south, replacing the French motto “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” with “Travail, famille, patrie”—work, family, homeland—by which they meant to shame any woman who had ever dared bob her hair or take a drink or a job or a man to her bed. Nanée had taken advantage of the new Nazi interest in getting foreigners away from the Atlantic ports to finally return Peterkin to T, who was in Tours by then to find Danny’s mother, having left Dagobert with the adoring children up in La Bourboule. Nanée caught a freight train to collect Dagobert, her car, which T had taken back there, and her trailer of possessions. But she couldn’t bear to return to Nazi-occupied Paris, so she came instead to rat-infested, brothel-laden, relentlessly sunny Marseille.