Not like you, Marthe, she means. You could never be content as the wife of a country doctor, cooking and sewing and raising livestock on this farm.
I try not to wonder if she’s right; instead, I remind myself that if I’d married Henri before he mobilized, she’d be in the place of a mother to me now. Softening her is probably a lost cause, but I give it a try. “I brought something for you.”
I hand her a little sketch of Henri. One I drew on his sixteenth birthday when he still had a gap between his teeth. The drawing is precious to me, but I feel like he’d want his mother to have this one. And, taking it, she almost smiles. “I’ve heard you’re drawing for those rich LaGrange ladies with their big hats now.” I start to remind her that it was rich ladies with big hats who saved us both from certain poverty, but before I can get a word in, she grinds out, “I didn’t put my husband in the ground so the Boche could steal my country and bring back feudal days with nobles in the castles again!”
I almost laugh at this absurd gripe, because the current situation in France is a dark tragicomedy. Our royalist fringe is propping up the old Marshal, who now has more power than any French king going back for centuries. Still, Anna and her family never act like their noble titles are anything more than honorary. “The LaGranges aren’t like you think.”
“Fat aristos?” asks Madame Pinton, gulping her tea. “I heard they fled the country like émigrés at the start of the war . . .”
She flings both aristos and émigrés like the insults they’ve been ever since the French Revolution, and I have to explain, “They didn’t flee at the start of the war. They were in America because the baron was on a mission to get Roosevelt to sell us warplanes.”
“And how did that turn out?”
I grind my jaw, wondering if she’s just determined to be petty! “My point is, they could’ve stayed in America. Instead, they came back to keep the preventorium running. We’re doing good work there.”
“Teaching children to bow and scrape to the Nazis while your baron makes deals with his friends in Vichy . . .”
He’s not my baron, and I didn’t come here for an argument, but she’s asking for one. “That’s rich coming from the woman who has a picture of the Marshal over her stove!”
Madame Pinton glowers, leaving me to try to make sense of nonsense. Maybe she thinks the Marshal is playing some kind of double game. That only his advisors in Vichy are wicked. Who knows what she thinks, or what anyone else thinks? Lately public opinion is like a surreal painting, where contradictory beliefs and prejudices melt together like Dalí’s clocks.
I think Madame Pinton is ignorant and muleheaded. She grunts as if she thinks the same about me, and would like to be rid of me. Truthfully, I’m just as eager to go, but when I get up to leave, I hear wailing from upstairs in the wood-beamed loft. “Is there—is that a child?”
Madame Pinton folds her arms over herself and calls up, “It’s all right. You can come down. Like I said, it’s only my son, Henri’s, girl.”
A family comes down from the loft. The father—a man wearing a tricolor pin on his collar—introduces himself as Uriah Kohn. He’s trying to quiet the sobbing, curly-haired kid he’s got over one shoulder. There are two older children too, a coltish brunette wearing thick knee socks, whom I judge to be about thirteen, and a boy—only a little younger—who hasn’t quite grown into his big ears.
“I’m Marthe Simone,” I say.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” says Monsieur Kohn shamefacedly. “This is my son, Daniel,” he says, reaching to give a quick mussing-up of the boy’s hair over his too-big ears.
The boy grins at me.
Then the father glances to the coltish teen. “My daughter Josephine.”
The crop-haired Josephine does not grin; I can tell she hasn’t decided if I’m worth knowing, and I like her for that. Then the father presses his lips to the forehead of the crying kid in his arms, who is racked by a worrisome, rattling cough. “This is my little Gabriella. It’s her sixth birthday, but she’s not so happy today.”
I can see that. Her cheeks are rosy from crying, and her wild hair is matted with tears. I notice her skin is also glistening. “She looks feverish.”
“It comes and goes,” her father replies.
Working with frail children on a daily basis, I know that a cough—even a fever—isn’t necessarily anything to panic about, but the scabby lesion on Gabriella’s ear sends a prickle down my spine, because I’ve learned the telltale signs of tuberculosis. “She needs to have that looked at.”