She wrote frequently—of her hurried wedding, her husband’s heroics over the skies of France, and her work as a nurse in the hospitals. She wrote too, very recently, that she was expecting a child. She knew, of course, that I wanted to be with her for the birth, but understood why I couldn’t be.
I wished I understood it half as well. Feeling as if I were in exile, having left people I loved to fend for themselves, I was rambling around in my husband’s family summer cottage . . . still waiting for him, as promised. Which is why, when his cable came at the end of June, I tore it open with irritation, suspecting that Willie was going to postpone his trip home yet again.
Instead, his cable brought me to my knees. I sank down, obliterated, reading the letters again and again, hoping somehow to make them spell out something else. Still, they always said the same thing.
OUR DEAR VICTOR IS GONE
LED IN ACTION
I AM RETURNING TO NEW YORK ON NEXT SHIP
There on my knees, one hand over my mouth, I rocked, absorbing this until the shock gave way to sobs. Oh, I’d never deceived myself about the danger. Never let my high-minded talk blind me to the blood price. Nor did I suppose, even for a moment, that my nephew would be safe because he had a good name, a good nature, and was so adored. Still, my sense of loss was so profound I couldn’t get off the floor.
My darling nephew would never stir up hornets’ nests again, would never paint a watercolor or design a building, would never have a sweetheart or a child. I would never see his wide toothy grin again . . .
Do you realize fully what you’re doing, you vociferous criers-out in the cause of humanity, you members of the Lafayette League and other mushy beldames who make themselves a party to murder?
The words of that long-ago leaflet billowed up inside me until I tasted ashes. I wasn’t one of those society ladies in England handing out white feathers to shame men into the fight. But I was trying to shame a whole nation into war, and if I got my way, how many more American boys like Victor would die?
PART
THREE
THIRTY
MARTHE
Chavaniac-Lafayette
Summer 1942
Grief is like thick morning fog.
You breathe it, swim in it, drown in it—or at least you want to drown, but for some damned reason, you keep living, breathing, walking. One foot in front of the other even though you can’t see the path ahead. You tiptoe, and so does everybody else . . .
—poor thing. Fiancé died in a German prison camp. Typhus.
Without Henri Pinton, she’s got nobody now.
—why didn’t she marry him before he went?
Good question. Why didn’t I? I could’ve given Henri, and myself, a few weeks of wedded bliss before he got called up to his regiment. We wouldn’t have even had time to know if it was a mistake. We could’ve rented a little house in the village and enjoyed playful mornings in bed—Henri was always like a kid in a candy store when I let him touch me, like he thought he was getting away with something, even though he was always the one to stop. Since the rationing hadn’t started yet, we could’ve had coffee at the village café with a warm pastry, and when I came home from teaching, he’d be studying by the fire with a baguette, a crock of butter, and maybe a little salted ham.
Hey, blondie, he’d have said, and then we could’ve listened to the radio and argued about dirtied dishes in the sink. It wasn’t the life I’d dreamed of, but we could’ve been happy for all the time we had left. All the time we’d ever have, and I wasted it.
I could’ve had his baby. Now there’ll never be another little gap-toothed boy with Henri’s dark eyes and dark hair. He died, not in battle, but of some disease that he was probably trying to help others fight, and now he is gone like he never existed—he’s left nothing behind but a few photographs and a brokenhearted mother. And me . . . whoever I really am.
Just a nobody from Chavaniac.
“Drink up, Marthe,” Anna says, popping off the cap of a bottle of cold soda pop and trying to coax me to drink by the castle’s pool, where we supervise kids splashing and swimming on a hot day. I can’t figure out where she got the bottle of soda, but she’s been like a persistent herding dog since Henri’s death, nipping at my heels.
You have to eat, Marthe.
—get just a little sleep. Just close your eyes for a few minutes.
—sunshine is just the thing. Dr. Anglade says so!
Well, Dr. Anglade might be shocked to hear it, but sunshine isn’t a cure for grief. The sun just blinds me and sets off that strange buzzing in my ears that makes the sound of the children laughing and playing all seem very far away. Even the soda is tasteless as it slips down my parched throat. What I need is a real drink. The baron keeps a hidden stash of liquor in the cellar—quite a collection of top-shelf hooch—and I’ve been nipping from it on a nightly basis.