They sat at a long table dragged out onto the belvedere for the warm November evening, Miriam’s last with them. The antique tureen Madame Nouget had filled for the occasion with vegetables sculpted to look like a meat roast sat empty now, surrounded by wine bottles from which André kept refilling glasses as they played his favorite interrogation game. She wanted to tell him to turn his overbearing, overinsightful, overinsistent prying back on himself. But that was just her exhaustion talking, and she didn’t want to ruin Miriam’s last evening.
She rested a hand on Dagobert’s head in her lap and whispered, “Hitler! Hitler!” and he barked the way he did, and they all laughed, their faces open and warm and happy as they sat in the semidarkness of moonlight, splashes of electric light spilling out through the French doors. How carefully Nanée tended to André’s ego, and Varian’s too, playing this game because both men loved the excuse to ask probing questions of others without ever answering any themselves. Truth, André called the game, but Nanée and T and Miriam secretly called it Sexual Confessions. That seemed the real truth André meant to get at. Nanée paid the expenses of the chateau; you’d think that would gain her some respect, but she was wise enough to understand that men who needed what you offered them tended to be less likely to respect you, not more. That was what had been going on the night before, too; the commandant had needed to believe he didn’t need anything he couldn’t have.
The commandant, she thought of him as now, stripping him of his name as if that might strip away her anger. She was trying so hard to shake it off for Miriam’s sake, but she was awash in it, in the loss of Miriam’s company, in the fear that her friend would never even get to Yugoslavia, or be unable to get out. In the loss of Daddy on this very day and her own inability to become the woman he wanted her to be. In her failure to save Edouard. Why in the world had she felt she should be the one to save him? Why had she imagined she could? Edouard, who’d drawn that head in flight goggles and a gilded birdcage that both was hers and wasn’t, who even before they met had taken photos that made her feel understood.
“But were you?” André repeated as the laughter settled back into more pouring of wine. “Your father’s favorite?”
You spied on your father? Did you spy on anyone else?
“I’m not sure Daddy had a favorite,” she said, fingering her scarf just to confirm it was still there, still hiding her neck. She wished she had the excuse of getting a sweater against the growing evening chill, but she already had her favorite cashmere—a sweet pink, the color of innocent girlhood—draped over her shoulders. André didn’t mean to make her uneasy. Already Nanée had come to recognize the peculiar look he turned on people he meant to make uncomfortable. The way he studied her before each careful, probing question was softer and kinder, yet as impossible to resist. She ought just to peel off her skin and lay it out on the table; he could see right into her mind and her heart.
He waited. He was good at that. Remaining silent. Waiting for more.
“That would suggest Daddy cared about who we were rather than how we reflected on him,” she said finally. Bitter words. Why had she said them? Was it even true?
“And how did you ‘reflect on’ your father?” André asked.
Nanée smiled as she might have if Daddy were there. Evanston Rules: a young woman must always tuck negative feelings out of sight. The odd thing was that some part of her wanted to answer André’s question. She didn’t want anyone to hear, but she felt somewhere deep inside a compulsion to answer.
“I was a good girl,” she said.
André laughed. They all laughed. She’d meant them to, and yet the answer was also the truth.
“Were you really?” André’s tone suggested that he did, in fact, believe her. He was so good at this. No one walked away from a game of Truth with André without having spilled their guts. He knew, somehow, what was true and what wasn’t, and he believed he was doing you a service, that the truth really would set you free.
Nanée looked out across the dark landscape, the stars fading to nothing in the night mist nearer the sea. “Yes. In Evanston, I was a good girl.”
André responded provocatively, “For your father?”
“Really, André!” Jacqueline said.
“I fear it’s more common than we imagine,” André said. “But I take it from the shock on Nanée’s sweet face that the answer is no.”