1941

I gripped the edge of my file cabinet drawer. “What is it, Roger?”

“I just heard, Caroline. They found Paul’s and Rena’s names on an arrest roster.”

Paul arrested?

“Thank you for not telling me in front of Pia.” I kept the tears at bay, but my manila files swam in a blur. “Any word on Rena’s father? He lived with them in Rouen.”

“Not yet. I check the sheets every hour. You know, of course, we’ll do whatever it takes to track them.”

“At least we know they’re alive, right? On what charges were they arrested?”

“Wish I knew. Our London intelligence is spotty. No destinations listed, either. There’s more, C. Three million German troops have begun marching into Russia.”

“What about the nonaggression pact?” Hitler was a lying madman, but every new reversal came as a fresh slap.

“Hitler ignored it, C. The Bear is not happy.”

Roger loved referring to the Soviets as “the Bear.” It did seem an apt name.

“Hitler’s taking whatever he wants. This doesn’t bode well for us.”

He didn’t have to say it. Before long, Hitler would own half the world. Would England be the next to go?

“I’m sorry about all this, C.”

Roger seemed genuinely sad. Perhaps he regretted not acting on Rena’s behalf.

I barely functioned that day, numb with what-ifs.

What if Paul had stayed here, safe in New York? What if I’d pushed Roger more to wrangle Rena a visa?

To complicate the day, I received a call informing me that Betty Stockwell Merchant had delivered a seven-pound baby boy she named Walter, after her father. Though work was busy, I snuck away at lunch to visit her at the hospital. I was desperate to see the baby, though I’d been stuffing down jealousy since I’d heard the news, along with a few jelly doughnuts. I hoped a change of venue would clear my head. It would be nice to share my concerns about Paul with Betty.

I bought Betty’s favorite parrot tulips on the way to the hospital, not that she needed more flowers. Her suite at St. Luke’s looked like Whirlaway’s stables at the Kentucky Derby, flowers in great sprays, a horseshoe of roses, and carnations on an easel with a sash across it reading CONGRATULATIONS! In a vase, two dozen roses dyed baby blue hung their heads in shame.

“Thank you for the tulips, Caroline,” Betty said. She lay propped up with down pillows in her custom hospital bed, lovely in a pink satin bed jacket and matching turban. “You always know what I like.”

A nurse came in with the baby, her crepe soles silent on the tile. Seeing him pushed my troubles to the background.

“Go ahead and hold him,” Betty said with a wave in our direction. The baby settled in, warm against me, swaddled tight. His fists were balled under his chin, his face prizefighter swollen. Little Walter would have to be pugnacious to survive parents who got along best when in separate time zones.

“I know it sounds ungrateful, Caroline, but I’m not ready for a baby,” Betty said. She held a hankie to one tear duct.

“How can you say that, dear?”

“I told Phil I didn’t want a child this soon, but he didn’t listen. And after all I’ve done for him. I wore golf shoes for that man.”

“You’ll be a wonderful mother.”

“The service is excellent here, Caroline,” Betty said, brightening. “Better than the Plaza; I’m telling you. They were bringing the baby in at all hours, and I had to tell them to keep him in the nursery. They specialize in infants.”

“What a beautiful baby,” I said.

I stroked his fist, petal soft.

Walter stretched in my arms, and his eyelids fluttered in a baby dream. I felt the familiar ache and the tears welling up. Not now.

“Now we just need to get you a husband and a baby, Caroline. In that order.”

“I’m done with all that,” I said.

“Have you started borrowing your mother’s underwear yet? No, right? Then you’re not done.”

The nurse came and took Walter, as if Betty had pressed the call button under her dining table for the maid. I held on to him until the last second before handing him to the nurse. My arms felt cold and empty as I watched them go.

“Roger told me today that Paul and Rena were arrested,” I said.

“Oh no, Caroline. I’m so sorry, dear. Do you know where they were taken?”

I stepped to the window, arms folded across my chest.

“No one knows. To a Paris jail or some transit camp probably. I don’t know what to do.”

Outside the window, down in the park, a boy tried to fly a kite, but its bottom bumped along, refusing to lift. The tail is too heavy, I thought. Just take off the tail.

“How terribly painful for you, darling,” Betty said.

“I can’t work.”

“I’m having a luau party when I go home. Help me plan it. Or you could be my bridge partner for the Vanderbilts’ party. I’m playing with Pru, but she’ll gladly step aside.”

“I can’t think about parties, Betty. I need to find out where they’ve taken Paul.”

“Let it go, C. It’s all terribly sad, but you’ll never have a normal life with Paul Rodierre.”

“Who’s to say what’s normal?”

“Why do you always take the hard way? You and David could have—”

“David left me.”

“He would have married you if you’d been around more. A ten-city theater tour doesn’t strengthen a relationship. Men like to be the center of your world. Now that you’re more settled, you need to hurry up and get married and have children. A woman’s eggs disintegrate, you know.”

Just the mention of eggs floating inside me, fragile and microscopic, made me wince.

“That’s ridiculous, Betty.”

“Tell that to your ovaries. There are eligible men all over New York, and you’re chasing one in a French jail.”

“I have to get back to work. Would it kill you to be sympathetic? We’re talking about people’s lives.”

“I’m sorry you don’t want to hear it, but he’s not quite our class, dear.”

“Our class? My father made his own way in life.”

“After his parents sent him to St. Paul’s.”

“With all due respect to your brother, being pampered by one’s parents fails to build character.”

“That coming from a woman who was dressed by maids until she was sixteen. Oh, let’s be practical about all this, Caroline. It’s not too late, you know…”

“To what? Save my reputation? Marry someone I can’t stand just to have a luau partner? You may have the baby and the husband, but I want to be happy, Betty.”

Betty picked at the satin hem of her blanket. “Fine, but don’t cry to me when this ends badly.”

I turned and left, wondering how I could have such a friend who didn’t give a fig for my true happiness. I didn’t need Betty. I had Mother. That would have to do for now.

There was no earthly way I would give up on Paul.

—

LATER THAT WEEK, Roger told me the consulate could no longer help me fund the comfort packages I sent to France. The postcards and letters kept coming from the French orphanages, requesting help in the nicest possible way. How could I turn them down? I didn’t dare ask Mother for money from her household account. Since Father had died, she’d been on a short leash. For a while, I hoped for a miracle, but then realized where I needed to go.

Snyder and Goodrich Antiques.

Years before, Mother had actually hinted we might consign some of the less used silver and donate the proceeds to charity. I wasn’t surprised, for she’d inherited Mother Woolsey’s inclination toward charity along with her sterling. She never measured our worth in troy ounces, so I knew we wouldn’t miss a few oyster forks that hadn’t been touched since the Civil War.

I’d never part with the dinner forks, of course.

The Snyder and Goodrich Antiques Shop was just far enough downtown to be discreet, located next to a thriving little shop that sold realistic hairpieces. Everyone acted differently once they ended up at Snyder and Goodrich, selling their family heirlooms to support a rummy uncle or an overdue tax bill. Betty’s second cousin, whose husband went to jail for tax evasion, swallowed a bottle of pills the day her wedding china went down to Snyder and Goodrich. She recovered, but her reputation never did.

Those with buckets of money to spare didn’t care a fig about appearances. After spring cleaning, they’d send a liveried chauffeur or uniformed housemaid down to S&G with the items to be disposed of. A dingy Hamadan carpet. Limoges finger bowls.

Mother never kept a chauffeur for the city, and our few maids left on staff were up at The Hay, so one morning I took a roll of oyster forks from the pyramid of rolled Pacific cloth bundles in the silver closet at the apartment and delivered them myself. Mr. Snyder would no doubt be glad to see the Woolsey silver.

I stepped through the shop door into a haze of cigar smoke. Inside, one got the impression there were more glass cases in that room than in the entire Museum of Natural History. The walls were filled with floor-to-ceiling cases, and more ran around the perimeter of the room, counter high and a body’s length from the wall. All showed the linty evidence of fresh Windexing and stood choked with household artifacts arranged according to category: swords in ornate, tasseled sheaths; coins and paintings and legions of matching stemware. And the sterling silver and silver plate, of course, in separate cases, kept a discreet distance apart.

A trim man, well into his sixties, stood at one of the waist-high cases. He’d spread out pages of The New York Times there and was polishing a silver caviar set atop them with his wooden matches, orange sticks, and polishing rags arranged in a ring around an article. I could read the headline upside down: HITLER BEGINS WAR ON RUSSIA, WITH ARMIES ON MARCH FROM ARCTIC TO THE BLACK SEA; DAMASCUS FALLS; U.S. OUSTS ROME CONSULS.

The man introduced himself as Mr. Snyder, unfurled my felt roll, and extracted one oyster fork, as gently as one extracts saffron from a crocus. With his jeweler’s loupe to one eye, he examined the Woolsey family crest atop it. Mr. Snyder would no doubt be impressed with that coat of arms, extraordinary in sterling: two filigreed lions in silhouette holding the crest aloft, above it a naked arm, shinbone in hand, rising from a medieval knight’s helmet.

Mr. Snyder read the words inscribed on the band of the crest: “Manus Haec Inimica Tyrannis.”

“It’s our family code. It means ‘This hand with shinbone shall only be raised in anger against a tyrant or tyranny itself.’ ” How could Mr. Snyder not be eager to have such history in his shop?

“What is your best price?” I asked.

“This is not a tag sale, Miss Ferriday—Clignancourt flea market is that way,” he said, pointing in the direction of Paris with one tarnish-blackened finger.

Mr. Snyder spoke excellent English with just a trace of a German accent. Though his name sounded English, he was of German extraction. I assumed Snyder was once spelled Schneider and was anglicized for business reasons. After World War I, transplanted Germans had been the targets of American prejudice, though that tide had turned recently in the United States, and many Americans were decidedly pro-German. The name Goodrich had probably been added to make the store sound British, for there was no evidence of a Mr. Goodrich.

Mr. Snyder felt the oyster fork all over as a blind man might feel a face, flexed the ends of the tines, then huffed a breath onto it.

“Tines not stretched. That’s good. Hallmark is clogged. Have these been dipped?”

“Never,” I said. “Only cotton wool and Goddard’s.”

I fought the urge to curry favor with a smile. With the French at least, smiling was a tactical error, a sign of American weakness.

Mr. Snyder took the four-sided end of a wooden matchstick and twirled it in the hallmark. The pink of his scalp, which shone through his thin white hair, matched the polish on his rag.

“Good,” Mr. Snyder said. He waved a finger at me. “But always leave silver tarnished, and polish as you need it. Tarnish protects it.”

“The silver belonged to my great-grandmother Eliza Woolsey,” I said. I was surprised that I suddenly wanted to cry.

“Everything in here belonged to someone’s great-grandmother. I’ve not taken a lemon, sardine, cherry, or oyster fork in five years, never mind your twelve. No market for them.”

For someone who proclaimed the benefits of tarnish, he kept his own sterling well shined.

“Maybe I’ll try Sotheby’s,” I said.

Mr. Snyder began rolling up the brown cloth. “Fine. They don’t know a bouillon spoon from a nut scoop.”

“The Woolsey silver is featured in the book Treasures of the Civil War.”

He waved one hand toward the case behind him. “That Astor punch bowl is from the French Revolution.”

Mr. Snyder changed his attitude once I switched to his native tongue. For the first time, I was happy Father had insisted I learn German.

“The book also mentions a loving cup which belonged to my great-grandmother Eliza Woolsey,” I said, forcing the German past tense of “belong” from some deep recess.

“How do you know German?” he asked with a smile.

“School. Chapin.”

“Is your loving cup sterling?” he asked, continuing in German.

“Yes, and gold. Given to her by the family of a young corporal she nursed at Gettysburg. He would have died from his wounds were it not for Eliza, and they sent her the cup with a lovely letter.”

“Gettysburg, a terrible battle. Is the cup engraved?”

“To Eliza Woolsey with deepest gratitude,” I said. “It features the god Pan on the front holding baskets of gold flowers.”

“Do you still have the letter?”

“Yes, it details the corporal’s escape from the swamps of Chickahominy.”

“Good provenance,” Mr. Snyder said.

I would have taken a bullet rather than part with that cup, but the story softened Mr. Snyder enough for him to make me an offer on the forks.

“Forty-five dollars is my best,” he said. “Sterling hasn’t recovered since the difficulties.”

It had been more than ten years since Black Tuesday. By 1941 our economy was on the mend, but some people could still not bring themselves to say the word “depression.”

“Mr. Snyder, you could melt them down and make seventy-five dollars.”

“Sixty.”

“Fine,” I said.

“You are a pleasure to work with,” Mr. Snyder said. “The Jews come in here like they are doing me a favor.”

I pushed myself back from the counter.

“Mr. Snyder, I am sorry if I gave you the impression I would tolerate any kind of slur. I don’t know how they do things in Germany, but I don’t do business with anti-Semites.”

I rolled up the brown cloth with my forks inside.

“Please, Miss Ferriday. I misspoke. Do forgive me.”

“This country was founded on principles of equality and fairness, and you would do well to remember that. I don’t think it would help your business to have people think you harbor negative feelings toward any one group.”

“I certainly will remember that,” he said and gently pulled the forks from my hands. “Please accept my deepest apologies.”

“Apology accepted. I don’t hold grudges, Mr. Snyder, but I do hold the people I do business with to high standards.”

“I appreciate that, Miss Ferriday, and I’m sorry I offended you.”

I left Snyder and Goodrich that day with renewed optimism and enough cash in my pocket to post both my comfort packages and a case of donated Ovaltine. I comforted myself with the idea that sometimes one must make a deal with the devil in order to help those in need. I’d done business with an anti-Semite, but it was in the service of the beleaguered.

Thanks to Mr. Snyder, fifty parentless French children would know they’d not been forgotten.