EPILOGUE

MARTHE

New York City

March 1945

My first plane ride.

My first trip to America.

My first semester at Parsons School of Design, courtesy of an art scholarship awarded on the basis of my wartime portfolio—not only sketches, but sculptures combining styles and eras.

My first days in New York are spent dodging taxicabs and getting neck strain from staring up at skyscrapers like a rube. Having lived my whole life in rural France, the noise, the lights, and the hustle of New York streets make it hard to think.

Madame Beatrice says that might be part of the charm . . .

She lured me here with both the art scholarship and an ulterior motive. Now, leaning on her cane in the entryway of a stylish Manhattan shop, she says, “Darling, when going to war, one should begin with a new hat!”

She has me try on a black satin pillbox with dotted veil, but when I choose a beret, she pats my cheek with an age-spotted hand and says, “How French, darling. Very fitting. I do believe the committee will hang on your every word.”

She’s now vice chairperson of the National Citizens Committee in Aid of the United Nations War Crimes Commission. She’s pressuring President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to maintain serious cooperation with the Allied war crimes commission in bringing Nazi war criminals to justice.

Eleanor’s husband is sympathetic, she explained. But like all presidents, he needs to be prodded!

She always calls the president Eleanor’s husband and rattles off the first names of congressmen and ambassadors who are personal friends. As she does so, I’m all nerves. I’m having second thoughts about appearing before her committee, and I tell her so.

“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.”

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.