“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Marthe, after facing down the Gestapo, you’ve nothing to fear from my little committee!”
Of course, nothing Madame Beatrice ever does is little. Trapped on this side of the ocean during the war, she ginned up her rusty old war relief machinery despite being laid up with various ailments. She’s due for a second decoration, and even now, she’s preparing to send almost fifty cases of children’s clothing, surgical supplies, and other provisions to the preventorium. So when I see her open her pocketbook, I tell her, “I can buy my own hat! I’m not a penniless urchin anymore.”
“Oh, I know you’re a married woman now with a nickel or two to rub together, but buying you a hat is the least I can do after all the trouble I caused. I’m really very sorry, you know . . .”
She’s been apologizing for my birth record almost from the moment I set foot on American shores. It seemed simpler to say you were born in Paris, she explained, telling me the whole story. I didn’t know what the rules might be for foreign children after the war, and I didn’t want anyone questioning your citizenship or your right to be cared for at Chateau Lafayette.
Not so different, really, from what I did in forging all those documents for Jewish children. But today she says, “I’ve fibbed so often on my own official records, I can scarcely remember what’s true anymore. If I’d chosen another life, another marriage, I might have been Minerva Furlaud. Writing that name down was my way of saying good-bye to what might have been . . . with Max, and with you. I never dreamed it could harm you, but I should have. I hope you can forgive me, darling.”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” I say, and I mean it. I’m more grateful for her than I can ever express, and it pains me to see how frail she’s become. I take her shaking hands and say, “But I do wonder . . .”
“Argentina,” she says.
“What?”
“You’re going to ask what happened to Maxime. He married an American woman. A sculptress, actually, isn’t that an interesting coincidence? A relation of the Chapman family, in fact. They have two boys who must be grown now . . .”
She turns her head wistfully, and I catch the scent of her perfume. She still wears L’Heure Bleue, and knowing how much she loved Maxime, I say, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, I’m not, darling,” she says, squeezing my hands. “I lived the life I wanted to live. I had the wonderful good fortune to watch my sons become men and see children like you grow up and thrive. And though Willie and I remained on good terms until he died, men have never stopped wooing me. In fact, I’m spending this summer with the distinguished Saint-John Perse . . .”
That’s the nom de plume of a Nobel Prize–winning poet the world knows better as Alexis Leger—a French diplomat who opposed the Vichy regime. “You cradle-snatcher, you . . .”
Her bright blue eyes gleam. “Stuff and nonsense! Alexis and I are precisely the same age, give or take a year or seven. As for Max, maybe we can get word to him and see if there’s anything he remembers that could help reveal your true identity.”
“Maybe,” I say, having long since returned to her the man’s pictures and love letters. “On the other hand, I think I’ve finally got a pretty good idea of who I am. Anything else I discover isn’t going to change that.”
“There’s the spirit,” she says.
That night I tell the committee about my experiences in war-torn France; I’m ashamed to say the crimes weren’t committed only by Germans, that French people were complicit. And I can’t think back on the past five years without believing that we’re all at least a little guilty. For remaining neutral, for appeasing, for turning a blind eye, for refusing to help.
For looking out for me, myself, and I . . .
After the applause dies down, Madame Beatrice says, “Our values must be defended in partnership with our democratic allies—not just here, but everywhere. It’s a lesson that’s taken us at least three wars to learn; I hope it’s not a lesson we ever need to learn again.”
We lunch the next afternoon at the Vanderbilt Hotel—a scene of faded elegance. Madame Beatrice lost the hotel, and most everything else, during the Great Depression, but she wants to show off her bas-relief frieze. I study it, admiring what must have been backbreaking work, even in her prime.
“I couldn’t even attempt it today,” she says with a sigh. “My hands aren’t steady enough. That’s why I took up writing books about interesting women. But not even my shaky hands show more clearly the passing of time than the fact that I’ve already conditioned my mind to taking orders from Anna about the preventorium. What a shock to hear it has become her calling! And yet, quite fitting in a way, as she is a child of both America and France.”