Lilac Girls

  I became like a drug addict, the withdrawal from Paul hellish. No sleep, no appetite. Why could I not move on to a higher purpose? So I would remain unmarried, alone for the rest of my life. Worse things had happened to people.

  It didn’t help that letters from Paul choked our letter box. Mother lobbed each one into a basket in the living room with a labored stage sigh. More than once I flipped through them admiring Paul’s handwriting and held a few to the light. But why read them? It would only prolong the agony.

  I felt like Paris had cheated on me. We’d both been dealt a blow, but only she was recovering, starting to rebuild and clear the rubble. If the fashion industry was any indication, Paris was back, already holding elaborate fashion shows in the grand haute couture houses and magazine shoots against backdrops of ruined buildings, while I was still reduced to tears by a crippled pigeon or an old fruit man with three wormy apples arranged on a towel to sell.

  —

  MONTHS PASSED. I WOKE one November morning and vowed to immerse myself in work and not think of Paul even once more that day. There were no new letters in the basket, and fortunately there was still much to be done in Paris since rebuilding was in full swing. Turning oneself to the misfortunes of others is the best way to dispense with personal troubles. Hadn’t Lord Byron himself said, “The busy have no time for tears”?

  Gasoline remained in short supply, so Parisians still rode their bicycles everywhere. Things like plates, matches, and shoe leather were still in short supply, not to mention decent food. Workers continued to cultivate beans and potatoes on the Esplanade des Invalides with horse and plow, but there were few eggs to be found, and ridiculously long lines formed at the bread and butcher shops at the hint of a rumor that a few scraps were available.

  Mother secured a supply of old K rations from a friend at the military post exchange store to supplement our diets. Each cardboard rectangle held a miniature American breakfast: a tin of diced ham and eggs, Nescafé coffee, cellophaned crackers, a pack of Wrigley’s gum, and a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. It was a miracle our boys had stayed alive to fight in spite of those breakfasts, but any food was precious then.

  Mother volunteered for the ADIR, the National Association of Deportees and Internees of the Resistance, a new organization that helped women deportees returning from Nazi concentration camps get back on their feet. These “lucky” women often had lost everything. Their husbands and children. Their homes. To make matters worse, the French government focused on the men who returned, military men especially, but any males who’d survived the war. Somehow the returning women were an afterthought.

  I volunteered here and there as well. Since so many children in Paris lacked coats, Mother and I appealed to Le Bon Marché department store to allow us to set up a donation station just outside the store’s doors and they agreed. They carted out coatracks and folding tables to the cordoned-off area, and Mother and I hung donated children’s coats by size. The price of admission into our little shop was one child’s coat. A parent could choose from any of our coats and jackets in a larger size, and the donated garment was cleaned and redistributed. Le Bon Marché even advertised our event, running a grim little photograph of Mother and me at the bottom of their newspaper ad.

  We chose a perfect sunny November day to set up, when all of Paris was out to see what fashions the stores held for the coming season. Dior had debuted his revolutionary New Look, with its nipped waists and full skirts, that spring, and Paris was abuzz about what he’d unveil next. It was hard not to feel optimistic that day, with the scent of roasting chestnuts in the air and the one-man band in the adjacent park playing a lively version of “Le Chaland qui passe.”

  Soon people queued up and crowded in. Mother had left me in charge, for she’d already achieved field marshal status in the post–World War II French charitable world and had gone to oversee a soup kitchen on the other side of town. I was thrilled, for I desperately needed a new mission of my own. Besides, I’d become good at picking the perfect coat for a child. The key was in the coloring. This was Paris after all. A yellow coat on a sallow child was almost worse than no coat at all.

  The coat exchange was packed by midmorning when I realized I’d never opened my ration box. Before I could reach for it, an elderly woman approached me.

  “Excuse me, Mademoiselle, would you assist me, please?”

  She was gaunt but had the bearing of a countess, well dressed in her wool skirt and cardigan and clean white gloves. She wore a faded pink Hermès Saumur scarf fastened with a jeweled partridge brooch, the belly of which was a South Sea pearl. Even in dire circumstances, or perhaps because of them, the women of Paris continued to pull themselves together with unexpected touches, still subscribing to the fashion truism that too much simplicity is timid. In one hand the woman held a white paper package, a malacca walking stick hooked over her wrist. In the other she held the leash of an ebony-colored standard poodle. It was a magnificent animal and, like its owner, thin but beautifully groomed.

  “I have brought a coat,” she said.

  I took the package, broke the cellophane tape, and lifted out the coat, releasing a musky scent of rose and lavender. I’d seen many lovely garments that day, some with hand-embroidered flower plackets and enameled buttons or glorious rabbit fur linings, but this coat was in a category all its own. Cashmere? It was the color of a robin’s egg and surprisingly heavy, but soft and lined with quilted white satin.

  “Thank you for your donation, Madame. Please choose another. We have many good coats, perhaps maybe none as fine as this one—”

  “It is lined with goose down. It was made for my granddaughter. Never worn.”

  “Help yourself to the rack. What size is your granddaughter now?”

  The woman smoothed her hand down the dog’s neck. Upon closer inspection, I saw she’d misbuttoned her cardigan, giving her sweater a cockeyed skew. Her jeweled brooch was missing a diamond. Sold or lost?

  “Oh, she is gone. Taken with her mother and brother years ago now. My daughter and one of our maids had been printing leaflets in our pantry.”

  The underground.

  “I’m so sorry…” My sight blurred. How could I comfort others if I couldn’t control my own emotions?

  “I kept it thinking she might come home, but then they took me. Can you imagine? What would they want with an old woman? My housekeeper kept my dog in Saint-Etienne while I was, well, away. He’s my family now.” She shook her head, unable to continue, then straightened. “Perhaps someone can use the coat?”

  I returned the coat to the wrapping. “Thank you, Madame. I will make sure it finds a good home. There is hot coffee inside.”

  She laid her gloved hand on mine for a long moment, the cotton warm and smooth. “Thank you, dear.”

  I pulled a card from my pocket. “This is the ADIR, a charity my mother supports. They help women coming back from, well, from the camps. Run by women who were deportees themselves, out of one of their apartments. Near Le Jardin du Luxembourg.”

  “Thank you, Mademoiselle.” She took the card and turned.

  “Wait, Madame.” I pulled my K-ration box from beneath the table. “I have an extra. Would you like it?”

  She eyed the box. “Oh no, dear, give it to someone more—”

  “Please take it.”

  “Well, I do have a neighbor—”

  I smiled. “A neighbor. Good then. I’m glad it will be well used.”

  The woman tucked the box under her arm and made her way out of our little coat exchange, jostled and pushed by the crowd.

  There were many such stories that afternoon, and by day’s end I was ready to rest, but the crowds only grew larger. To make things worse, the temperature dropped, making me all too aware of my own coatlessness. Mother had mistakenly added our own coats to her donation piles and carted them off, and as a result I had no outerwear of my own. The wind picked up, blowing coats off their slippery wooden hangers.

  I stooped to retrieve a jacket
and stopped short as I stood. I couldn’t miss Paul in the crowd, taller than most, working his way toward me. My first instinct was to dive into the crowd myself and avoid seeing him, but who would man the booth? He’d in all probability moved on by now, I thought. Adjusted to his new life. Forgotten me.

  As he came closer, it was hard not to notice he looked good in his aubergine velvet jacket. He had been eating, it seemed—still thin but finally filling out.

  Paul made his way to me, both of us jostled about by the crowd. He held out a small tweed coat the color of ripe wheat with a wilted tricolor ribbon pinned to the breast. I took it, careful not to touch him. One touch and I’d be back into it all, and the pain would return. It might even be worse.

  “Remember me?” he asked.

  It had been almost two years since we’d last seen each other at his kitchen table.

  “Thank you for your donation, Monsieur. Please choose another.”

  It was Pascaline’s coat, of course. Thin and light. A wool-cotton blend? The sleeves had been let down twice, leaving lines, dark as graphite, around each cuff, and two lovely little patches had been sewn into the warp of the tweed with tiny, regular stitches. Rena.

  “I’m sorry you have to talk to me, Caroline. You obviously don’t want that.”

  “We have many good coats—”

  “Would you please look at me?” He passed the fingers of his free hand across his lips. Paul nervous? That was a first. The velvet at the elbow of his jacket was worn. Had Rena not cared enough to mend his too?

  Paul reached for my arm. “It’s been terrible without you, C.”

  I stepped away. Was he acting? He was good at that, after all.

  “You are free to choose any coat…”

  Why could I not stop babbling about coats?

  Paul stepped closer. “I’m in a bad way, Caroline.”

  If he was acting, he was doing a remarkable job. He clearly hadn’t slept anytime recently. Overcome, I turned and held a coatrack to keep it from toppling over in the breeze.

  Paul grabbed my wrist and turned me toward him. “Did you even read my letters?”

  I shook off his hand. “I’ve been busy. You should see the apartment. Mother’s been boiling cottons on the stove—”

  “If you would just read them, you’d know—”

  “You should see her on a stool stirring the pot with a canoe paddle.”

  I turned away and straightened the coats. He followed.

  “So this is it? We’ll never be together again?” He stood taller for a moment.

  Misery looked good on Paul. Unshaven, messy, lovely misery. I buttoned a tiny pink coat.

  Paul stepped back. “I had to see you when I read you’d be here. Hitchhiked all the way from Rouen.”

  “You’d better start back soon. It looks like rain.”

  “Is it someone else? I’ve heard you were with a man—”

  “What?”

  “Holding hands. At Café George. You’re well known, Caroline. Word gets around. You at least owe me an explanation.”

  I’d lunched with one of Mother’s admirers, a bearded count from Amiens twenty years my senior. Disconsolate that Mother had little time for him, he’d spent half the lunch with my hand in his, pleading for me to intervene, keeping me from my vichyssoise.

  “How can you be so unfeeling, Caroline?”

  “Unfeeling?”

  “I still can’t even work, and you go about your do-gooding here as if I’m no one to you.”

  Do-gooding? I felt my Irish temper rise up my back in warm prickles despite the cold. I turned to face him.

  “How unfeeling were you when you decided to have a child?” I said.

  “You knew I was married—”

  “Incompatible, Paul. You said children complicate things, remember? ‘No place for that in an actor’s life’?”

  “Things happen. Adults deal with them. Unless they’re rich and spoiled—”

  “Spoiled? Really? Is it spoiled to give up my own happiness for that of a child I don’t even know? Do you have any idea what it’s like waking up every morning knowing you and your family are together and I’m alone? Don’t talk to me about unfeeling.”

  It wasn’t until he opened his jacket and wrapped me in velvet that I realized I was shaking.

  “Be sensible, Caroline. When will either of us find what we have again?”

  “True,” I said into the cotton of his shirt. “You may be the only man left in Paris.”

  He laughed and pulled me closer.

  “I miss you, C.” His heavenly scent surrounded us, cocooned in that jacket, his fingers interlocked at the small of my back. I’d missed that musky essence of pine and leather. He brushed his lips against my cheek.

  “Come and get something to eat,” he said. “Even over that terrible band, I can hear your stomach growling. A friend of mine has a place in the Latin Quarter you’ll love. He’s made an apple tart. With real crème fraîche.”

  How wonderful it would be to slide into a bistro booth with Paul, the leather seat allowing us to sit hip to hip as so many lovers before us had done. The offerings would be meager, but there would at least be warm bread and wine. We’d talk about everything. Which crème fraîche is best? From southeast or southwest France? Which new play should he do? How much he loved me. But then what? He’d go home to his family and leave me worse than before.

  “I’ll come to New York,” Paul said, his lips soft against my ear. “It will be like before.”

  I felt his chest against me, only the silk of my dress and the cotton of his T-shirt between us.

  “You can’t just leave here, Paul.”

  Even if he didn’t have a family, it could never be like before. The world was so different now.

  Paul stood back, held me at arm’s length, and smiled his most dangerous smile. “I need to get back to New York. Broadway’s rebounding, you know.”

  I pulled away and shivered as the wind ballooned the skirt of my dress. Was he using me to escape his new responsibilities? Did he want me or just relief from family life?

  “C’mon, C. We could do something together. I’d consider Shakespeare. Let’s talk about it at dinner.”

  I felt a drop of cold rain on my hand. I would have to move the coats under the overhang of the store.

  “You need to get back to your family, Paul.”

  Paul stepped back. “You’re infuriating.”

  “You’re a father.”

  “But I love you—”

  “Love your daughter. If you don’t, I’ll have given you up for nothing. So act if you have to, and soon you’ll find you mean it.” I touched his sleeve. “It’s not that hard. Just be there. When she wakes in the night afraid. If she stumbles at school.”

  “Rena doesn’t want me there—”

  “Your daughter does. She wants you to teach her to sail a boat, show her off in the park. You don’t know how powerful your love is, Paul. Without it she’ll fall for the first boy who says he loves her, and he’ll shatter her for good.”

  “Why throw away everything we have? It’s ridiculous, your pilgrim ethics.”

  “Puritan,” I said.

  “I don’t think I can do it.”

  “You can. Funny thing about grief: It gets easier with practice.”

  I held out a white package.

  “This coat’s perfect,” I said. “A bit large, but she’ll grow into it.”

  “I love you, C. And I’m stubborn too, you know.”

  “Love her, Paul. If not for you, then do it for me.”

  “You’re going to wake up one morning and know you’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  I suppressed a smile. Like every morning?

  Paul stared at me for a long moment, then slipped off his jacket and draped it across my shoulders. He wore only an old white T-shirt underneath, threadbare in parts. It was a prewar shirt, no doubt, for it hung somewhat loosely, but the sight of Paul in it, even thin as he was, caused more than one woman in t
he booth to stare.

  “This always looked better on you,” he said.

  The satin lining of his jacket felt good against my skin, still warm from him.

  Paul kissed me on both cheeks and took the white package. I smoothed the flap of one velvet pocket in my fingers, soft as a cat’s ear.

  I looked up just in time to watch Paul’s beautiful back as he retreated through the crowd, and then I turned and pushed the racks out of the rain.

  —

  IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, Paul sent a few more letters, and I tried to distract myself with volunteering. At least I had Mother, though she would not be with me forever. Our life became reduced to a routine well known to those in homes for the aged—tea with Mother’s friends, the conversation revolving around inflamed sacroiliacs; the odd errand at the embassy for Roger; and church choral concerts.

  They were pale days, one indistinguishable from the next, so a visit from a friend of Mother’s one morning threw me for a loop. Mother had told me a friend of hers named Anise Postel-Vinay, who’d been arrested while working for the French underground during the war and held at Ravensbrück concentration camp, was stopping by our apartment. Anise and friends had founded the ADIR. Though Mother was uncharacteristically evasive when I asked for details, I agreed to this favor, expecting Anise to appear at our apartment asking for gently used clothing or canned goods.

  That day, Mother, midway through her unfortunate poncho phase, was sporting a red-checked, caftanesque affair she’d resurrected from somewhere when Anise arrived. Parisians stared when Mother wore that poncho, as if picturing it where it belonged, flung over a café table under a plate of good cheese.

  The doorbell buzzed, and Mother showed Anise in. Two men followed behind carrying a canvas stretcher on which a woman lay wrapped in a white cotton blanket.

  “Dear God,” I said.

  Anise, a handsome, no-nonsense woman, planted herself on our living room Aubusson and ran the fingers of one hand through her cropped hair.

  “Good morning, Mme Ferriday. Where should the men take her?”