Mabel assured me that wasn’t true, but soon she started encouraging me to get up out of bed more often, and dress, and walk. “This will all be good for you, Luc,” she promised. She walked with me to the refectory, where the women ate at long tables. She led me to the courtyard and to the gardens, covered over with the first snowfall. I carried Chaffre’s little Madonna in the pocket of my dressing gown. Around my wrist, I still wore that tattered ribbon. More and more, Mabel left me to struggle alone with my buttons and socks. “Ah, but you can’t stay here forever.”
And I didn’t. There came a day when I put on my uniform again, hating every centimeter of wool. Where I tightened a scarf around my chin to cover as much as I could. Where I left behind all of those Scottish voices and boarded a train to Paris.
Not knowing where else to go, I went to Uncle Jules’s apartment. Véronique had a new paramour, a poet with delicate hands and an unpredictable temper, but she had me wait down across the street while she sent him away for the night.
“You can’t stay,
I ate by the fire in a brocade dressing gown. The heat on my bare toes, the silk sliding on my arms, the curve of the painted bowl, all was almost too comfortable.
Véronique sat by me with a bottle of Château Margaux from Uncle Jules’s secret store. “You look as though you could use a rest.” She poured me wine, which warmed me down to my fingers. I hadn’t had a drink in months. “I wasn’t sure if I’d see you again, Luc.”
The last time I’d seen her had been early in the war, on a rare leave to Paris. I’d been in my uniform and had stopped to bring her a bag of medlars from the trees at Mille Mots. She’d brushed aside the bag of fruit and exclaimed over me instead. Her
My skin ached beneath the silk of the borrowed dressing gown and I wondered if she’d do the same again tonight. But she said, “How Jules would fret over you. Does it hurt much?” and I knew she only saw my torn face. While she kept my wineglass refilled, she stayed on the sofa and didn’t invite me up.
I finished eating and dressed. I would rather walk the streets than spend the night on her rug, feeling pitied.
“When you’ve settled, you can come for Demetrius and Lysander. Feathers make Edgar sneeze.” She pressed on me one of Edgar’s old suits, a bottle of wine, and Uncle Jules’s wristwatch. It was a Santos-Dumont, something she’d bought him for his fiftieth birthday in a flurry of making him a “man of the age.” My wrists had grown thin, but I tightened the band as best I could and thanked her with a kiss on the cheek. She pushed a handful of change into my pocket. “It isn’t much, but if you come in the morning, after Edgar has left for the café, I can give you more.” For all her shallowness, Véronique was generous.
That night I moved from park to park, from doorway to doorway, drinking straight from my bottle of too-expensive wine. Bleary, cold, I realized halfway through the night that it was my birthday.
The next morning, with head aching, I stood again in front of Véronique’s building, unsure whether her poet friend was still in, unsure whether I wanted her pity. As I paced the distance between pavement and door, Maman found me.
“Véronique said you would be here.”
Maman was a smudge of color in the gray of wartime Paris. She wore pale green. She was the fresh of a meadow. I swallowed down the sudden lump in my throat. “Maman.”
She looked suddenly uncertain standing there on the pavement. “You didn’t tell me you were in Paris. If Véronique hadn’t sent me a telegram last night…” She eyed me up and down, at my civilian clothes, and took a step forward. “You’re not fine, are you? She said you…”
I took a deep breath and unwound the scarf from my face.
At my raw skin, exposed, she flinched.
Inside, so did I.
“Oh.” She turned her head away.
“This is why I didn’t tell you.” Choking back a ragged breath, I wrapped the scarf around again. “I knew it would upset you.” I tied it in a knot, right under my chin.
“Oh no,
I didn’t know whether I appreciated the lie or not. I kept the scarf tight across my face; she didn’t ask me to take it off.
“I was attacked,” I said.
She swallowed deeply.
“It was Bastille Day and we had prisoners, German prisoners, that we were guarding.” The rain against the doorway, the narrowing eyes, the blade across my cheek and through my shoulder. “They fought their way out. It was fierce, it was messy, and there wasn’t anything we could do.”
Her face flickered through emotion like a moving picture. Sorrow, fear, anger, finally settling into pity. “At least you are alive, my Luc.”
