So what else is new? I don’t feel bitter about it. I’m grateful for everything he’s done. I realize now more than ever all the ways people have cared for me and about me. And all the ways in which I’ve been ungrateful and held them at arm’s length—even Yves, who makes it hard to do. But maybe there was a reason for my prickliness in the grand scheme of things. Maybe it’s so that when I’m taken down, I don’t drag anyone I care about with me . . .
* * *
—
I’m bleary-eyed and running late the next morning, when Madame LeVerrier tells me Anna wants to see me in the library. I find her sitting behind the big walnut desk that used to be her father’s. The baron’s pipe is just where he left it, as if she wants to pretend he isn’t gone and her mother with him. We think it was the efforts of the baroness that got him transferred to the less horrific prison at Tyrol, where he’s locked up with defendants he testified against in the Riom Trial. The baroness believes they’re all being held as hostages—more valuable alive than dead for the moment.
She won’t rest until they’re free. In fact, Anna and I both believe the baroness might be making clandestine trips to Algeria, where we have reason to believe her son-in-law, Henry Hyde, is now operating as an American intelligence officer.
“Madame Travert,” Anna says in greeting, hanging up the phone. Then she gives a harried shake of her head. “I’m sorry—I don’t mean to be formal, Marthe. I really don’t know how to act these days . . .”
I can’t blame her. We’ve both changed so much since we smoked together in the attic listening to music on Madame Beatrice’s old windup gramophone. I remember giving her a bouquet and curling up with her under the blankets, and comforting each other through the loneliness and cold. It’s only a memory now, though.
In the end, I couldn’t tell her about my feelings or forgeries. And maybe closeness can’t survive so many secrets . . .
“People still see me as an upstart,” she’s saying, and I realize Anna isn’t struggling to know how to act around me. She’s wondering how to make people respect her authority as the new interim president of the preventorium. Madame LeVerrier was too old, and we’d have rioted under the leadership of Faustine Xavier, so of those of us left, Anna was the natural choice. Now she confides, “I think the Germans have taken Dr. Anglade.”
My guts turn to water. “What—why?”
If they suspect him of hiding Jewish kids, if they interrogate him—
“He went to consult on a case and sent back a worried note that there was a chance he might be . . . more or less conscripted into service to tend the wounded at the front. He was due back last night, but he hasn’t returned.”
Merde! I don’t know what to do for poor Dr. Anglade. How much more of this are we supposed to take? I try to stay calm. We’re losing our managing physician, but I’m also losing a coconspirator. Thanks to Dr. Anglade, Gabriella Kohn has been with us since ’41. A different physician might send her away. Should I have advised Monsieur Kohn to smuggle his kids out through Switzerland when the border was safer?
“I don’t know how to hold the preventorium together without Dr. Anglade,” Anna says plaintively.
“You’ll find a way,” I say, as if I’m not anxious too.
She touches the cross she wears. “Maybe I’ll buy a donkey cart and go from farm to farm to buy food. Maybe raise some pigs to sell them for medicine or have the boys boil clothes in the courtyard to save on laundry costs.”
“There, you see? You’ve always got a new idea, so we’ll muddle through,” I say, as much to convince myself as her. “We have so far, haven’t we? Between frigid winters and food shortages and running low on medicines and bandages, blankets, and everything else . . .”
Anna brightens a little. “You know, my relationship with Maman has never been easy. I’ve always thought of my father as the only war hero in the family, but I’m starting to realize my mother’s work was important too. And she’s trusting me to keep this place running, so I want to make her proud.”
“Well, if it matters what I think, you’re doing a good job.”
Anna gives me a grateful, but pained, smile. “Will you still think so if I tell you some of our boys are climbing out of their sickbeds to join the maquis?”
I know this already. Oscar has been teaching boys to fight with sticks in the yard and to pretend they’re maquisards robbing collaborators for supplies. The other day he and Daniel stole the truck and drove off with a merry band of boys to join the Resistance. But they were all back by supper because they didn’t want to miss another meal. They could’ve been captured or killed for such a stunt, but there’s not much we can do to stop it. “C’est la guerre.”