I never imagined Anna would want to stay on as president of the preventorium, even now that her husband has been released. But she’s dedicated herself to the place, and I truly admire her for it. Keen for gossip, Beatrice asks, “I’m sure I’ll hear it from Emily when she comes to visit for our long-awaited reunion—but I must know, what’s he like, this son-in-law of hers?”
I laugh. “Nothing I would have expected. Anna’s husband is a bit of a philosopher—quite religious. After five cold winters in a German POW camp, he now dreams of starting an orange grove in sunny Morocco.”
Truthfully, I’ve never seen Anna so happy. One night soon after he returned, I saw him bend to light her cigarette with the glowing tip of his, and I was struck by the memory of her doing the same for me all those years ago in the attic. She’d pulled me into an intimate moment, and I was caught there for five years.
But I realize now, it was a moment too crowded . . . her husband was always there.
I don’t long for her anymore. I’ve let that go. I’m happy for her.
I’m happy too for Sam, who is now running for mayor of Chavaniac. For Madame Pinton, who has started official proceedings to adopt Josephine and Gabriella Kohn. I’m happy for Madame Simon, whose newspaper articles helped expose the Vichy regime, and whose son-in-law miraculously survived the concentration camps. The baroness is soon to be decorated for her own work in two world wars. I’m even happy for the baron—who will be released any day now.
I’m happy for myself too. My life in New York is everything I ever wanted. Swank parties in fashionable neighborhoods. Rides on ferries and elevated trains. Hot dogs and soft drinks in Coney Island. Museums and musicals, and art house cinema.
It’s all a bit much for Yves, but he doesn’t complain.
One warm night, when we’re smoking cigarettes on our apartment’s iron fire escape, listening to the traffic below, I ask, “You don’t miss your little house in France?”
“It’s good to be somewhere different for a while.”
While I’ve been working on a series of sculptures made out of black volcanic stone—a child carving herself out of the rock, then that same child helping to carve another out, and then another—he’s been working at a private detective firm to help Jewish families in New York locate missing persons from the war. There are millions of shattered families he wants to put back together. He says he needs to put them back together, as if in penance.
He also needs somebody like me—somebody to slug his arm and muss his hair and push him into new and uncomfortable adventures. And I need him because he’s no saint; he’s something solid to hold on to, someone who feels like home. Someone who loves me, cracks and all . . .
Maybe it’s because we fought a war together. Because we know things about each other no other person on earth, man or woman, would ever understand. That’s an unbreakable bond.
It doesn’t have to be love, Yves once said.
But it is.
And why not?
I daydream sometimes about having a kid with his soulful brown eyes and my spunk. I don’t know how that would work, but Yves says we’ve got time to figure it out . . .
At the end of the war, we’re in Times Square with everybody else. Bells are ringing; sailors flood the streets and kiss nurses. Colorful confetti rains down on us as more than half a million people of every complexion pour out into the streets, holding up newspapers with victory headlines, waving hats and flags, lifting one another in the air, and breaking open bottles of wine and beer.
Thanks to General de Gaulle, we French can say this is our victory too. And Yves hoists me on one shoulder so I can see over the crowd. Exhilarated, I want to laugh and cheer that it’s over. But of course, it never is. It’s an eternal battle, fought generation after generation, and maybe all we can ever do is keep fighting, which takes more courage by far.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I began this project because I wanted to tell the story of America’s French Founding Mother, Adrienne Lafayette—wife of the immensely likable marquis de Lafayette, without whom the United States would not have won her independence. But when I learned that the Lafayettes’ castle at Chavaniac served as a sanctuary for Jewish children during the Holocaust, having been purchased, renovated, and repurposed by Americans, I knew this really was a story about the Lafayette legacy. How the torch was passed to new generations who made Chavaniac a sanctuary for orphaned children and orphaned ideals that lit the way for humanity through three of history’s darkest hours.