“Oh, heavens, I missed you!” Madame Natalia stood at the door of her little house, arms wide. “The trip went well?”
Dahlia dropped the box of gift chocolates she was carrying and ran to her. “I missed you, too,” she said, hugging Natalia fiercely. Her pink dress glowed against the faded ochre of the house. She smiled at me over her shoulder, her little face radiant with joy.
I picked up the chocolates and tucked them under my arm and smiled at the two of them. It was good to be back. New York had been noisy and crowded; Poughkeepsie held nothing for me. Every place I had visited—the lake, the movie house, Platt’s department store, where I had first sold perfume—had felt lifeless, as if I had been a ghost visiting my own past. Grasse was the present. Grasse was home.
A month after I returned, Jamie sent a letter written on stationery from Tastes-So-Good Bakery. There was a smear of grease at the bottom and I sniffed at it, inhaling the vanilla and cinnamon of childhood. The grease holding the scents had turned rancid during the letter’s weeks of travel. Jamie wrote mostly about Lee, who, according to the local gossip, had left Egypt without Aziz, and was to spend the summer in France. She was staying in Paris at the Hôtel Prince de Galles, if I wanted to get in touch.
I didn’t. The past had been pushed into a box, and that box pushed into a corner. I wanted it to stay there, and to stay closed. I was worried about Jamie, though. He was getting married soon, yet his letter was all about Lee.
A second letter from Jamie arrived in the autumn. He enclosed a photo of him and Clara in their wedding clothes, she in frothy white with a fishtail hem swirled at her feet, he in a black tuxedo with a too-tight collar, smiling gamely for someone else’s camera.
“Who’s that?” Dahlia asked, grabbing for the photograph. She was in school for the first time that autumn, and wore the new blue and yellow uniform even when she didn’t have to. She loved going to school, just as I had. Children who are unhappy at home frequently prefer school to home. Dahlia was lonely. No siblings, no father, just me and Natalia.
She studied the photograph, squinting a bit at it. I reminded myself to have the doctor check her eyes. “It’s the man we met in Poughkeepsie,” she said. “At Grandmama’s wedding. You went out with him in the afternoon and when you came back, you looked sad. I saw you through the window.”
I had left Dahlia with Momma’s upstairs neighbor, that day of the party. “I couldn’t have been that sad. I was going to see you in a few minutes.”
Dahlia just rolled her eyes at me and studied the photograph some more.
“I don’t like her dress,” she said. “And the man looks stupid.” That was her new word. Everything, from her morning mug of milk with a spoonful of coffee mixed in to the story I would tell her at bedtime, was stupid.
“It will pass,” Natalia always said, looking up from her knitting. “Nicky went through a similar phase.”
We had reached a stage in our friendship where she was simply Natalia, not Madame, and she felt free to criticize me, which she did often but not unkindly. Dahlia had begun calling her Grandmama and Natalia did not discourage her.
In that letter, Jamie also wrote about Lee. She had been in Cannes visiting Picasso that summer. Man Ray had been there, and an artist we hadn’t met, an Englishman, Roland Penrose.
“Bet they had a swell time,” Jamie had scrawled. “I bet those parties were wild. I wonder if Man Ray had his gun with him.”
Lee had been just a few hours away from me, but it might have been the other side of the moon. I had Dahlia, and my work with the perfumers, and the pleasantness of those evenings in Nice with Nicky. If, deep inside, a spark still simmered, a longing for the old friendship with Lee, of that first love with Jamie, for those heady café evenings blue with cigarette smoke when we argued everything from leftist politics to academy painting standards, well, then, I did my best to ignore that spark.
After her stay in Cannes, Lee returned to Cairo and Aziz, to duck shoots on an oasis, trips to souks and pyramids, cocktails at Shepheard’s, the women in pearls and black satin, all those very rich and bored people waiting, and not knowing what they were waiting for. Perhaps once in a while they discussed Mussolini’s intentions in northern Africa.
One of Lee’s more famous photographs from that time is “Portrait of Space,” taken during a desert expedition, with her camera shooting out through a torn screen to a distant and empty horizon. The rip in the screen is shaped like a nomad’s tent, bedraggled by wind and heat, and the bare landscape has a menacing quality. Many of the photos Lee took in Egypt are empty of people, suggesting her state of mind: loneliness and discontent. Paris, for both of us, was a long time ago.
• • •
Jamie stopped writing. I had no more news from him, no news about Lee, and Momma’s letters from California were about the movie stars she had seen on the streets or going by in their chauffeured automobiles: Ann Sheridan, Jack Benny, Joan Crawford, Cary Grant. She underlined Cary Grant three times and added exclamation points. Some days in quiet Grasse I felt isolated and restless. Other days I felt at peace and tired in a healthy way from chasing after my daughter.
Dahlia kept growing ever prettier, ever taller, as seasons passed. With that athletic American build inherited from her father she towered over many of her friends. She looked older than her age and one day I remembered that Lee had been only seven when she was raped. Lee, too, had been taller, prettier. I didn’t sleep well after that. For a month I wouldn’t let Dahlia out of the house unless I was with her, not even to walk to school.
Finally, Natalia took me aside. “I had a son, not a daughter, but still I know a mother’s fear,” she said, touching the cross she always wore. “You must protect her, yes. But you cannot suffocate her like this.”
“I had a friend. When she was very young, something awful happened to her.”
“I understand. Yes, we will be careful. But Dahlia has friends and a protector here in addition to you. Her godfather is Monsieur LaRosa, remember. Keep her away from the butcher, though. He likes to touch girls. Otherwise, she is safe.” Natalia raised her eyebrows. I realized I never saw children in his shop, only lines of unsmiling housewives glaring at the skinned rabbits and legs of pork and lamb hanging from ceiling hooks. They all knew.
“Okay,” I said. After that, I let Dahlia go to school and come home alone, as the other children did. But never did I send her to the butcher shop, not even when she was old enough to carry money and run errands.
Just a few months after this conversation, in the late summer of ’39, Hitler invaded Poland.
That evening Madame LaRosa unexpectedly and uncharacteristically tapped on a window in our sitting room rather than politely knocking at the door. Natalia gave me a cross look and told me to open the window. She had been listening to a music program on the radio.
Dahlia and I were sitting at the table, struggling with the multiplication tables. I had been trying to reassure my daughter that the multiplication tables could be memorized, it just took time and practice. Dahlia, unconvinced, chewed the eraser end of her pencil and made faces at me. She let her new glasses slip down her little nose and crossed her eyes. She hated the glasses and I didn’t like them either. She looked older with them. She was growing so quickly. When I looked at her I wanted to stop the clock, stop the seasons, keep her small and safe.
“Look,” Madame LaRosa said through the opened window, holding up a newspaper. “War.”
“Come in, Louise,” Natalia said. “Don’t stand in the street like a hoodlum.”
No one could have looked less like a hoodlum than Madame LaRosa, with her neat chignon pinned at the back of her neck, her sprigged dress with its lace collar. She was flattered by Natalia’s suggestion that she might be youthfully dangerous, and when she let herself in through the front door, there was an unusual spring in her step.
“We must make preparations,” she said. “Albert says that now Hitler has gone into Poland, France will declare war on Germany.” She sat and fanned herself with the newspaper, thinking, and that suggestion of youthful excitement vanished. Her face grew serious, sad. “Thank God my Albert is too old to be called up.”
Natalia made the sign of the cross. We were both thinking of Nicky, hoping that he, then fifty-two, would also be too old.
On September 3 France declared war, as Monsieur LaRosa had predicted. Natalia, normally reluctant to use the telephone we had installed in the hall, called Nicky every day for a week and each time it was the same message: No, he hadn’t been conscripted. Too old, I could hear him shout over the line.
“We will make preparations,” Natalia said the next week, when I was packing for a trip to Nice. “Tomorrow, you will ask Nicky what he thinks.”
I had no idea what preparations were made for a war. I knew how to soften and knead together little pieces of soap to make one larger piece and how to thin cream with milk to make it go further and how to line thin-soled shoes with newspaper to make them warmer in cold weather. All children of the Depression knew those things. But war? War was the panther, his mouth open, ready to spring at the throat. How did you prepare for that?
“I think Mother is right,” Nicky told me the next day. “Don’t trust it. The government thinks they can make this go away by ignoring it. They are wrong.”
Nicky and I were sitting in the café of the Hôtel Negresco, his favorite spot when he wanted to get away from his own little hotel, to see what other menus were offering, who was bartending, what the favorite cocktails of the season were. Everyone knew him, everyone gave him special treatment, and our wine was always “on the house.”
I had spent the afternoon with a series of clients from department stores in America and Germany who were already ordering for spring shipments. The war was in the north—it hadn’t reached us yet—and I couldn’t think past the fact that my new heels were too tight and that Nicky looked like he was putting on weight.
Inside, a band was playing a tango. I could hear the clatter of crystal glasses, soft conversation, and women’s laughter dance in and out of the notes of the music. The world was all soft air and fragrance and music and the pleasant weight of Nicky’s hand on mine. War seemed a different reality altogether, the witch’s house in an otherwise beautiful and enchanted forest.
“Buy sacks of flour and sugar,” Nicky said, breaking our silence. He was preoccupied that night. “And eiderdowns. Make sure the coal cellar is full. Tell Mama to wall up some of the best wines in the cellar, and her good jewels.” He said it casually, as if he were making a list for market day. “Would you like to dance, Nora?”
The tango ended and the band played something slow and sweet. We danced, and his arm was tight around my waist.
“If you want to go home, back to America, this is the time,” he said. “Soon, it will be too late.”
“Maybe when the school year is finished,” I said. “It would be too difficult to take Dahlia out of her classes now. Too upsetting. Besides, this feels like home to me. Mr. and Mrs. Simmons aren’t leaving. Why should I?” The Simmonses were an elderly couple who spent half the year in Nice, in Nicky’s hotel, and the other half in Paris. Originally from Chicago, they liked to buy me a coffee and have a chat when I was in town and their conversation was full of quaint phrases and gossip from many years before.
“It is different for them,” Nicky said. “They are old. You are young, and you have a child to think of.”
“My child is happy here. And so am I. We’ll stay here. My adopted country.”
“Brava,” Nicky said, holding me even tighter. “I just thought I should tell you. This will get serious.”
The words meant little to me, who had never experienced war except as a horror that happened elsewhere, as shown in the newsreels of the Great War and the Spanish Civil War. It only became real for me when Dahlia came home with a gas mask dangling from her book pack. One had been handed out to every schoolchild in France. My daughter tried it on to show it off and changed from her beautiful child-faced self to a gnome with an insect face. “For when the Bosche gas us,” she explained.
“I don’t think that will happen in Grasse,” I said, trying to reassure myself more than my child. Even so, Natalia and I swept and scoured a portion of the cellar and stored away candles, matches, blankets, a basket of preserved foods, and jugs of water. Our own private bomb shelter.
Natalia selected the best wines from her cellar, some bought many years before when Monsieur Hughes had still been alive, and we bricked them behind a false wall in the shelter. “A song,” she sighed, reading the labels and handing me the bottles, one by one. “He bought them for a song. Nicky says that when the war comes, and after, they will be worth much. I can’t imagine the vineyards with no one working in them. Nicky says there won’t be any grape harvests for a few years. He says there will be nobody to pick the grapes.”
We filled the coal bin, stocked up on extra bags of flour and rice when we could get them. Prices had already skyrocketed because others were doing the same.
All that planning for disaster made me want some lightness, for Dahlia if not for myself, so I bought cloth and made a new dress for her, sunshine yellow wool, with flounces at the hem and on the straps. The skirt billowed so much she looked like a flower when she spun around in it. For myself, I bought a copy of Vogue for the first time in years, to see what Paris made of all this preparation. And there it was, in black and white, in full-page advertisements: the war as seen by the fashion industry—chocolate boxes shaped like gas masks; dresses shaped like parachutes with dozens of pockets so that you could grab items you might need on your way to the bomb shelter.
Over the next few months, two and a half million other Frenchmen were put into uniform and sent up to the German border. In Grasse, Monsieur Bonner’s two eldest sons went. We were glad to see them go. After Natalia’s warning I looked harder at that family and thought there was too much of the father in the sons, and judging by the silence and the stern faces of the other customers, they felt the same way.
Pierre Morgan, who was not really quite right in the head and spent his days making strange little drawings on any paper he could find, was also called up. We all wondered how they could ever train addled Pierre to hold a gun instead of a pencil.
Nicky did not come home for Christmas that year. We put up a little tree in our sitting room and set gifts under it, but Nicky called and said he couldn’t leave Nice. Too busy. Nor did he come for New Year’s. I wondered if there was a new woman, if he had fallen in love with someone, and was startled to experience a strong pang of jealousy. What we had wasn’t love, not exclusive love, but still, I had come to depend on him.
“Nora,” he said over the phone, after he had finished a call to his mother. “I miss you.”
“Do you?” My voice was a little reproachful.
He laughed. “The supreme compliment. You are jealous. After all this time.”
“No, I’m not.”
“All the times you could have been, you were not. Now that there is truly no reason, you are. Perhaps it is American logic. I have to go to Lyon, Nora. I will be spending a few weeks there.”
Weeks. In all the time I had known him, he had never spent more than a few days. He said Lyon was chilly and impersonal compared with the sunny friendliness of Nice, and that the men who stayed in the Lyon hotel cared only about business. “Silk and steel,” he complained. “That’s all they think about.” The guests in the Nice auberge, like him, were pleasure seekers.
“What are you doing in Lyon?” I asked.
“Business,” he said brusquely. “My love to Dahlia.” He hung up.
“Monsieur Nicky?” Dahlia said, squinting up from her homework. The temper tantrums and tears were things of the past. Dahlia had grown calm, even-tempered, and usually cheerful. She was a happy child, but she did not like sharing her maman.
In May, Germany invaded France. They broke through the Maginot Line in the north with such force, such speed, that the French soldiers had no choice but to throw down their arms. Natalia, Madame LaRosa, and myself were sitting around the radio listening to the BBC when they made the announcement. Blitzkrieg. We heard the word for the first time. It was just dusk and we were sitting in the semidark of Natalia’s curtained parlor. All three of us made the same gesture: we dropped our knitting and put our hands over our mouths.
“What is it?” Dahlia came into the room, pushing her glasses back up onto the bridge of her nose.
“The Germans are in France,” Natalia said.
Dahlia scratched at a scab on her leg. “Are they coming here?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.” Natalia crossed herself. We sat on into the evening, pretending to listen to the music from the radio, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. When the radio concert ended, Natalia went to the piano and replayed the piece, slowing the pacing of it, making it a dirge.
On the evening of June 10 the BBC announced that the Germans had entered Paris. A swastika flag flew over the Hôtel de Ville. I tried to imagine the Café Dôme filled with German soldiers, armed, sitting where Jamie used to sit, under the T of tabac.
The week after the Germans marched into Paris, I went to Nice and found the city overflowing. I could barely elbow my way down boulevard Victor Hugo.
Parisians had fled the city by the thousands, heading south. This flood of humanity merged with refugees from Belgium and Holland, and the roads and boulevards had turned to slow-moving parking lots, filled with cars and bicycles and even horse carts piled with pots and mattresses and trunks. I thought of Man Ray and Picasso and wondered if they were somewhere in this tide of humanity and for the first time in many months I wondered where Lee was. Not in Paris, I hoped.
I bumped my way through the crowd and found Nicky in the lobby of the hotel, poring over the register with his desk clerk.
“Tell Madame Lowe she must share her room with another woman. We will find a suitable guest and put a cot in the room,” I overheard. “No more singles, everyone must double up. And put two cots in the office as well.” He looked up and his face wore an expression I did not recognize. Worry. Fear. Anger. All mixed. Quickly, he thought to smile at me, to reassure me.
“Nora. Go upstairs, darling. I’ll be with you soon.”
I carried my overnight case and perfume sample case upstairs and waited, glad for Nicky’s spacious and quiet rooms at the top of the hotel. I switched on the radio and heard France’s new prime minister, Marshal Pétain, saying that the hostilities between France and Germany were ended. It was over. There would be no more war for France.
People were shouting in the streets, dancing without music. When I went back downstairs, bottles of champagne were being passed around in the hotel lobby.
“Better the Germans than the Communists,” said old Mr. Simmons, waving his glass at me. “Won’t be so bad, I suspect.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Nicky said, appearing at my side. It was the first and last time I heard him be rude to a guest.
Mr. Simmons glared down his long nose and went into the bar to find his wife.
“The old fool,” Nicky said. “They’ll find our so-called peace carries a high price.”
We sat that evening on the Hôtel Negresco patio, not just because it was a warm summer evening, but because the dining room was completely packed. There were so many refugees from the north that eight people were seated at tables meant for four and others ate standing; when they were finished, they went off to sleep in their cars or on the beach because there were no more beds to be had in Nice.
Nicky and I had a private table outdoors through professional courtesy and his having passed a large note to the waiter. That evening was the first and the last time I heard the word “resistance” from Nicholas.
“Listen, Nora,” he said. “I need you to pay attention. Maman will not understand, and you must pay attention from now on to keep her and Dahlia and yourself safe.”
Nicholas signaled to the waiter and ordered a second helping of steak and potatoes. His suit was already tight around his waist and he caught me looking at his vest, where the cloth stretched around the strained buttons.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We will all have plenty of opportunity to slenderize in the months to come. Finish your steak. You may not have another one for quite a while.” The waiter brought his second plate and Nicky and the waiter exchanged a glance I could not read, even though I was already paying attention.
“He will be gone soon,” Nicholas said, “Most of the young men will be. And France will be divided. Eat, Nora.”
Just as he was finishing his second helping, he looked up and I followed his gaze to where a man had just stepped onto the patio. He had dark hair combed straight over his forehead and his eyes never stopped moving over the crowd, watching, searching. He saw Nicky and came to our table. In the years to come I would remember this moment, this innocent little wave of greeting: when Jean Moulin, the leader of the French Resistance, came to our table. He wasn’t yet wearing the scarf around his neck that would become his trademark, the scarf that would hide the scar from his failed suicide attempt after he had been captured and tortured by the Gestapo the first time. He did not survive the second capture and torture.
“The steak is good?” he asked Nicky, not looking at me.
“Good enough,” Nicky said. That was all. The air became electric around them, filled with hundreds of unsaid words. Nicky gave him a packet, and the stranger left as quickly as he came.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“Nothing that need interest you. Let’s dance, Nora. Don’t talk. Enjoy the music.”
I found myself wishing, that evening, that I had never known Jamie, that I had been heart-whole when I had met Nicky. I felt at home in his embrace, safe and wanted. Love isn’t really about what we think of the other person, but how we feel about ourselves when we are with that person. With Jamie I had been too young, too naive, too clinging. With Nicky I was confident and content with life as it was. It wasn’t a grand passion, but it was a livable one, and perhaps that was better.
But, I told myself, if I hadn’t known Jamie, I wouldn’t have Dahlia. And life was unimaginable without her.
Soon would come rationing and hunger, bombers flying overhead. German and Italian soldiers, tanks rolling down our streets. Resistance. But that night we were still waiting for those things to come. We drank too much and Nicky whispered words in my ear to make me laugh.
In between his jokes and murmurs he began to give me instructions. Buy as much perfume from the factories as my capital would allow. It, like everything else, would soon be in short supply. There would be a shortage of glass and labor, and without those the perfume industry would be crippled. Were the good wines walled up in the cellar? Maman’s pearls hidden? Keep your radio tuned to a German channel at all times. If you listen to the BBC, tune it back to the German channel immediately after. He smiled as he told me these things and anyone looking at us would have thought we were discussing the new summer fashions.
“Why buy perfume?” I asked. “No one can afford it anymore. Who will buy it?”
“Soon, German generals and colonels will come here. They will take French mistresses and will buy gifts for them. Don’t overcharge them. They will not forgive or forget. Sell as much as you can, as quickly as you can, because soon they will simply take it and pay nothing.”
Blackout was already in effect by then: no lights, not even candles, allowed in case they might be spotted from overheard, or from the ocean. When the last light of the evening was gone, we made our way, in darkness, upstairs to his rooms, hearing laughter and shouts and moans from the street as others made their unlighted way back to rooms, homes, cars, wherever they were spending the night.
“You know,” Nicky said that night, as we were undressing in the darkness, “if you weren’t such a good mistress, I would be tempted to marry you and make you my wife. Maybe when this is over, you should speak with Dahlia. I know you would want her permission.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, pressing up against him under the cool sheets.
“Good,” he said.
Were we engaged? Was it that simple? It had been so complicated with Jamie and in the end the complications had defeated us, the worries, the jealousies, the betrayals. Maybe, I thought, beginning the slow drift into sleep, this is how it’s supposed to be. Easy. Friendly. But was it really enough? Marrying Nicky when I still thought of Jamie seemed like a cheat.
Lee had separated sex and love, I remembered. Perhaps I could separate love and marriage.
• • •
When I returned to Grasse after that June weekend, the boys that had gone off as soldiers to the front had been demobbed and sent back home, the butcher’s sons, André and Paulo, among them. The ones just back gathered in listless groups on street corners and in cafés, whispering, waiting, some of them visibly wounded, on crutches, faces puckered with burn scars or emptied pant legs flapping over missing limbs. André and Paulo had not a single wound between the two of them, and there was whispering about that, how they had hidden in the backs of trucks to avoid the fighting.
I followed Nicky’s instructions closely in the following months, putting all my cash into perfume and other goods that might eventually be bartered. Other merchants were doing the same, acquiring and selling off stock at a dizzying pace, trying to keep one step ahead of the rationing, the shortages, the eventual outright theft of our goods by the Germans.
The Gypsies called these years the “great disappearing.” That was what it was like. Every week something different and vital disappeared from our lives. Our wheat, wine, cheese, fruit, were all sent to Germany. The Nazis forbade the fisherman to take out their boats and fish disappeared from our tables, so that soon we were living on “tomatoes and sunshine,” as people bitterly said. Trust among neighbors evaporated like water from salt fields, leaving behind suspicion.
As Nicky had said would happen, the men began to disappear. Some were sent as forced labor to work camps and factories in Germany; others became resistance fighters who went into the hills and forests or the secret cellars of Lyon to fight against the Nazis and against what Vichy France had become: a country of collaborators, who believed better the Germans than the Russians, and this would be over soon, and it wouldn’t be that bad, if we just went along.
One evening in 1941, on the Negresco patio, I ran into one of Man’s occasional models, a red-haired girl named Marie-Louise. I was not friendly at first—I had spent the day demonstrating perfume samples to my new buyers, all German officers who were sending them to mistresses, French girls in Paris. The experience had left me sour. But Marie-Louise was in a talkative mood and didn’t care if I wanted to listen or not.
She spent an hour filling me in. Lee and Aziz were still officially married—Marie-Louise stressed “officially”—but Lee was in England living with the art collector Roland Penrose and Aziz was in Egypt. It was a matter of time before they were divorced, if Lee managed to survive the war.
“Why wouldn’t she?” I asked, not liking Marie-Louise’s tone.
“She takes awful chances, Man says. Running around with her camera, photographing even when the air raid sirens are going off. Man says she’s going to become a war correspondent. She’s tired of fashion shoots. She’s photographing for Vogue again, but taking pictures of the war.”
That was Lee. Climbing to the top of the tree, taking every risk that presented itself. I felt a shiver of fear for her. “Where’s Man?” I asked.
“Paris. But not for long.” Man had left Paris when the Germans entered, but like most of the refugees, he had returned soon after. That was in the early part of the war, before the laws against Jews had been passed, before the trains to the camps began, and when Parisians, even Jews, thought they would be left alone. The next time Man left, it would be many years before he would return to Paris.
Pablo was still in his studio on the rue des Grand Augustins, Marie-Louise reported. In Paris, all the theaters and restaurants were open, but they were filled with Germans. Marie-Louise sighed and downed her whiskey. She herself was trying to get a laissez-passer to go back to Paris, where she had been hired to appear in a musical revue, but it was tough; the passes to get through the demarcation line between occupied and Vichy France were not easy to obtain.
“I should never have come to Nice,” she complained, and got up to stumble to the bar for another refill. By then the waiters had been replaced by waitresses and the girls of Nice did not give good service to the haughty Parisian girls who were stranded there.
“You were friends with Lee Miller?” Nicky asked, taking Marie-Louise’s chair. He had appeared out of nowhere, walking very silently for such a heavyset man. “They say she is taking some very good photographs of the Blitz in London.”
“She was always handy with a camera, and in the darkroom,” I said, and my tone made Nicky look at me hard and raise an eyebrow.
The ocean was streaked orange and violet with the colors of the sunset. Seagulls called overhead. Even the seagulls looked newly skinny, I thought. “When you go back to Grasse tomorrow, leave the side door unlocked when you go to bed,” Nicky said. “Leave what food you can on the table. You will have visitors, two people, and no one, especially Maman, is to know about this. They will be gone by the time you get up in the morning. We are moving them to Switzerland.”
It happened as he said. The next day, around one in the morning, when Grasse was in darkness, I heard the side door open. Natalia and Dahlia were asleep. I listened, ear to my closed door. Two voices, very soft conversation. A spoon fell once. And in the morning, before dawn, they were gone. I got up earlier than usual to clean up their dishes, to put away the pillows and blankets from the floor of the pantry.
This happened several times in the following months. Nicky never explained; I never asked. Once, in the morning, there was blood on the floor. I cleaned it up as best I could, but it stained the tile, so I made up a lie about cutting my finger on the butcher knife to tell Natalia.
“That was a lot of blood from a little cut,” she said, peering at the floor. “Perhaps we should put a rug over the stain. Just in case.”
In case the police should get suspicious and decide to search the house, she meant. Nicky’s mother was more aware of what was going on than her son gave her credit for.
France was divided, and so were we, in Grasse and in other towns. There were households like ours, which listened to the BBC each evening, reports from London, and from de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French. Ours was not the only home that sheltered faceless midnight visitors. But there were other households that belonged to the right-wing Parti Populaire Français, people who attended meetings where they used the Nazi salute as a greeting and who ferreted out names and locations of resistance fighters to give to the police.
Sometimes, when I was standing on line to buy the few eggs or ounces of meat our coupons allowed, a man or a woman would glance at me and look quickly away and I would wonder, is that the person I must not know about for their own safety and mine? Or is that a person of whom I must beware?
Nicky gave me a name, Varian Fry in Marseille. “He is from the Emergency Rescue Committee of New York,” Nicholas said. “If anything happens, someone will come to you and give you that name. You can trust them.”
• • •
Dahlia and I had our first fight, that Christmas.
One morning, I was changing the sheets on Dahlia’s bed. The air was cold and I was worried she would catch a winter fever that was going around, and had decided to wrap her pillows in flannel.
Something rustled, and when I shook the pillow, a copy of Libération fell out of it. It was a resistance newspaper, and strictly forbidden. That word had new and frightening meanings under the Vichy government.
I burned it in the stove and waited for Dahlia to come home for lunch.
At noon I heard her fling her schoolbag on the table just inside the door.
She came into the kitchen and gave me her usual hug and I could feel her shoulder bones through her sweater, as delicate as a bird’s bones. All our children were too thin. The food we grew, the milk and cheese from the cows and sheep we pastured . . . most of it was sent to Germany and we lived on rations.
Because there was no more baby fat on her, Dahlia looked older than her age. Her cheekbones slanted across her face and there were dark hollows under them although she was only eight.
She grew stiff in my embrace, and pulled out of it. “You’re angry about something,” she said.
“I found the paper hidden in your pillow.”
She sat at the table and pulled a hunk of bread from the loaf. The bread was gray with additives, sawdust and who knew what else? The baker wouldn’t say, was afraid to say. He used flour authorized by the military police.
“It’s only a paper, Momma,” she said.
“A forbidden paper, published by the resistance fighters. Do you know what would happen to you, to us all, if it were found in this house? Do you think they wouldn’t question a child? You think they wouldn’t?” I raised my hand to slap her for the first time, and stopped just at the last second, when my hand was an inch from her face.
She looked at me, and the separation began, when my child was no longer exclusively mine, when she began to belong to something larger. There was a flicker in her eyes of anger and rebellion, and then a curtain fell over her face. The openness of childhood disappeared. Her face was unreadable.
I was the one who wept, not Dahlia. “Never bring that paper into the house. Promise,” I pleaded.
“Can we eat now?” She did not look at me, but out the window. Our neighbor, Madame Orieux, was hanging her quilts to air and stood framed in her own window, looking at us, her head tilted to its good side: she heard better in her left ear than her right.
When Dahlia looked back at me, it was as if we had changed places. See what you’ve done, her gaze said. Spoken so loudly, so indiscreetly, in front of that woman next door.
“You think I don’t know,” Dahlia said quietly so we couldn’t be overheard. “About the people who come at night and leave before morning. You tell me nothing, and then accuse me of keeping secrets. Why do you never talk about my father?” She stuck out her bottom lip and was again my child, my little one.
She ignored the bowl of soup I put in front of her.
I leaned against the sink, thinking what to say, what not to say. This was the moment I had dreaded for years and there was no going around it or over it. I had to walk right through it.
“He was an American. A boy I knew. We went to Paris together, before I came here to Grasse.”
“Poughkeepsie,” she said, remembering our trip there years before. “Why didn’t you marry him?”
“He was in love with someone else.”
She looked up, confused, still young enough and innocent enough to believe that if you loved someone, he was bound to love you back.
“Does he know about me?” she asked.
“We separated before you were born.”
“So I know about him, and he doesn’t know about me.” She spooned her soup, her eyes thoughtful.
• • •
For Christmas, we put up boughs of evergreens and made presents for each other, and I also gave Dahlia her first bottle of cologne, a light fragrance suitable for a young girl.
Dahlia unwrapped it from its brown paper and turned it over and over in her hands, opening the flacon.
“Don’t you want to try it, sweetheart?” I coaxed, seeing my daughter but remembering my mother.
“At school, they say you are selling perfume to the Germans,” Dahlia said, looking up at me with her huge, serious brown eyes. “Is this one the German officers buy?”
“No. This is one I do not show them.” I felt cold, not just because it was December and we had only a small fire in the old tile stove.
“They are recruiting children?” I accused Nicky the next time I saw him, the weekend after New Year’s. “This great organization of yours uses children?”
“I didn’t give her the papers. Someone from her school must be distributing them.”
“Not my child,” I said through gritted teeth. Vichy France was thick with police commanded by Germans, Frenchmen in blue uniforms and brown shirts, outcasts from the Far Right and released prisoners who tortured and assassinated those in the resistance.
“Children in occupied France are taking even greater chances,” Nicky said. “They cross the demarcation lines on their bicycles to carry messages. They go where adults cannot.” He closed the door firmly behind us, because I had accosted him in his office behind the reception desk instead of waiting for a more private moment upstairs.
“Not my child,” I said again, pulling on his arm, forcing him to look at me. “She is all I have.”
“All?” he said, quietly. “What about me? What about France, this country you said you love so much?”
I didn’t have to say it again; he saw it on my face. Dahlia was everything, the reason I worked hard, the reason I sold perfumes to Germans I detested, the reason I had stayed in Grasse where she was growing up safe and protected by me, Natalia, Monsieur and Madame LaRosa. She was my gravity, my center. Nothing mattered but her safety, her happiness.
That night I slept on the far side of his bed, not letting him touch me.
I thought of leaving France, but by then, it was too late. Pearl Harbor had been bombed and the United States had entered the war; I was no longer a member of a neutral nation, no longer able to travel openly. The first convoy of Jewish deportees had been sent from Vichy to Germany and the true horrors were beginning. Even those who had once supported Pétain and the armistice with Germany now feared the future.
“Get us out of here, Nicky,” I said the next morning.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It is time. I will make arrangements. I will keep your daughter safe, Nora. I promise.”
Arrangements took time and there was a priority list of people needing to leave France. Others were in immediate danger: they would be shot if seen on the street, tortured if captured. We had to wait, he said.