May 7, 1995
Somewhere over France
The lights in the airplane cabin come on suddenly.
I hear the ding! of the announcement system. It tells us that we are beginning our descent into Paris.
Julien leans over and adjusts my seat belt, making sure that my seat is in the locked, upright position. That I am safe.
“How does it feel to be landing in Paris again, Mom?” I don’t know what to say.
* * * Hours later, the phone beside me rings.
I am still more than half asleep when I answer it. “Hello?” “Hey, Mom. Did you sleep?”
“I did.”
“It’s three o’clock. What time do you want to leave for the reunion?” “Let’s walk around Paris. I can be ready in an hour.”
“I’ll come by and pick you up.”
I ease out of a bed the size of Nebraska and head for the marble- everywhere bathroom. A nice hot shower brings me back to myself and wakens me, but it isn’t until I am seated at the vanity, staring at my face magnified in the light-rimmed oval mirror, that it hits me.
I am home.
It doesn’t matter that I am an American citizen, that I have spent more of my life in the United States than in France; the truth is that none of that matters. I am home.
I apply makeup carefully. Then I brush the snow-white hair back from my face, creating a chignon at the nape of my neck with hands that won’t stop trembling. In the mirror, I see an elegant, ancient woman with velvety, pleated skin, glossy, pale pink lips, and worry in her eyes.
It is the best I can do.
Pushing back from the mirror, I go to the closet and withdraw the winter white slacks and turtleneck that I have brought with me. It occurs to me that perhaps color would have been a better choice. I wasn’t thinking when I packed.
I am ready when Julien arrives.
He guides me out into the hallway, helping me as if I am blind and disabled, and I let him lead me through the elegant hotel lobby and out into the magic light of Paris in springtime.
But when he asks the doorman for a taxi, I insist. “We will walk to the reunion.”
He frowns. “But it’s in the Île de la Cité.”
I wince at his pronunciation, but it is my own fault, really. I see the doorman smile.
“My son loves maps,” I say. “And he has never been to Paris before.” The man nods.
“It’s a long way, Mom,” Julien says, coming up to stand beside me. “And you’re…”
“Old?” I can’t help smiling. “I am also French.” “You’re wearing heels.”
Again, I say: “I’m French.”
Julien turns to the doorman, who lifts his gloved hands and says, “C’est la vie, M’sieur.”
“All right,” Julien says at last. “Let’s walk.”
I take his arm and for a glorious moment, as we step out onto the bustling sidewalk, arm in arm, I feel like a girl again. Traffic rushes past us, honking and squealing; boys skateboard up the sidewalk, dodging in and out amid the throng of tourists and locals out on this brilliant afternoon. The air is full of chestnut blossoms and smells of baking bread, cinnamon, diesel fuel, car exhaust, and baked stone—smells that will forever remind me of Paris.
To my right, I see one of my mother’s favorite pâtisseries, and suddenly I remember Maman handing me a butterfly macaron.
“Mom?”
I smile at him. “Come,” I say imperiously, leading him into the small shop. There is a long line and I take my place at the end of it.
“I thought you didn’t like cookies.”
I ignore him and stare at the glass case full of beautifully colored macarons and pain au chocolat.
When it is my turn I buy two macarons—one coconut, one raspberry. I reach into the bag and get the coconut macaron, handing it to Julien.
We are outside again, walking, when he takes a bite and stops dead. “Wow,” he says after a minute. Then, “Wow,” again.
I smile. Everyone remembers their first taste of Paris. This will be his.
When he has licked his fingers and thrown the bag away, he links his arm through mine again.
At a pretty little bistro overlooking the Seine, I say, “Let’s have a glass of wine.”
It is just past five o’clock. The genteel cocktail hour.
We take a seat outside, beneath a canopy of flowering chestnut trees. Across the street, along the banks of the river, vendors are set up in green kiosks, selling everything from oil paintings to old Vogue covers to Eiffel Tower key chains.
We share a greasy, paper-wrapped cone of frites and sip wine. One glass turns into two, and the afternoon begins to give way to the haze of dusk.
I had forgotten how gently time passes in Paris. As lively as the city is, there’s a stillness to it, a peace that lures you in. In Paris, with a glass of wine in your hand, you can just be.
All along the Seine, streetlamps come on, apartment windows turn golden. “It’s seven,” Julien says, and I realize that he has been keeping time all along, waiting. He is so American. No sitting idle, forgetting oneself, not for
this young man of mine. He has also been letting me settle myself.
I nod and watch him pay the check. As we stand, a well-dressed couple, both smoking cigarettes, glides in to take our seats.
Julien and I walk arm in arm to the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge across the
Seine. Beyond it is the Île de la Cité, the island that was once the heart of Paris. Notre Dame, with its soaring chalk-colored walls, looks like a giant bird of prey landing, gorgeous wings outstretched. The Seine captures and reflects dots of lamplight along its shores, golden coronas pulled out of shape by the waves.
“Magic,” Julien says, and that is precisely true.
We walk slowly, crossing over this graceful bridge that was built more than four hundred years ago. On the other side, we see a street vendor closing up his portable shop.
Julien stops, picks up an antique snow globe. He tilts it and snow flurries and swirls within the glass, obscuring the delicate gilt Eiffel Tower.
I see the tiny white flakes, and I know it’s all fake—nothing—but it makes me remember those terrible winters, when we had holes in our shoes and our bodies were wrapped in newsprint and every scrap of clothing we could find.
“Mom? You’re shaking.”
“We’re late,” I say. Julien puts down the antique snow globe and we are off again, bypassing the crowd waiting to enter Notre Dame.
The hotel is on a side street behind the cathedral. Next to it is the Hôtel- Dieu, the oldest hospital in Paris.
“I’m afraid,” I say, surprising myself with the admission. I can’t remember admitting such a thing in years, although it has often been true. Four months ago, when they told me the cancer was back, fear made me cry in the shower until the water ran cold.
“We don’t have to go in,” he says. “Yes, we do,” I say.
I put one foot in front of the other until I am in the lobby, where a sign directs us to the ballroom on the fourth floor.
When we exit the elevator, I can hear a man speaking through a microphone that amplifies and garbles his voice in equal measure. There is a table out in the hallway, with name tags spread out. It reminds me of that old television show: Concentration. Most of the tags are missing, but mine remains.
And there is another name I recognize; the tag is below mine. At the sight of it, my heart gives a little seize, knots up. I reach for my own name tag and
pick it up. I peel off the back and stick the name tag to my sunken chest, but all the while, I am looking at the other name. I take the second tag and stare down at it.
“Madame!” says the woman seated behind the table. She stands, looking flustered. “We’ve been waiting for you. There’s a seat—”
“I’m fine. I’ll stand in the back of the room.”
“Nonsense.” She takes my arm. I consider resisting, but haven’t the will for it just now. She leads me through a large crowd, seated wall to wall in the ballroom, on folding chairs, and toward a dais behind which three old women are seated. A young man in a rumpled blue sport coat and khaki pants— American, obviously—is standing at a podium. At my entrance, he stops speaking.
The room goes quiet. I feel everyone looking at me.
I sidle past the other old women on the dais and take my place at the empty chair next to the speaker.
The man at the microphone looks at me and says, “Someone very special is with us tonight.”
I see Julien at the back of the room, standing against the wall, his arms crossed. He is frowning. No doubt he is wondering why anyone would put me on a dais.
“Would you like to say something?”
I think the man at the podium has asked me this question twice before it registers.
The room is so still I can hear chairs squeaking, feet tapping on carpet, women fanning themselves. I want to say, “no, no, not me,” but how can I be so cowardly?
I get slowly to my feet and walk to the podium. While I’m gathering my thoughts, I glance to my right, at the old women seated at the dais and see their names: Almadora, Eliane, and Anouk.
My fingers clutch the wooden edges of the podium. “My sister, Isabelle, was a woman of great passions,” I say quietly at first. “Everything she did, she did full speed ahead, no brakes. When she was little, we worried about her constantly. She was always running away from boarding schools and convents and finishing school, sneaking out of windows and onto trains. I thought she
was reckless and irresponsible and almost too beautiful to look at. And during the war, she used that against me. She told me that she was running off to Paris to have an affair, and I believed her.
“I believed her. All these years later, that still breaks my heart a little. I should have known she wasn’t following a man, but her beliefs, that she was doing something important.” I close my eyes for a moment and remember: Isabelle, standing with Gaëtan, her arms around him, her eyes on me, shining with tears. With love. And then closing her eyes, saying something none of us could hear, taking her last breath in the arms of the man who loved her.
Then, I saw tragedy in it; now I see beauty.
I remember every nuance of that moment in my backyard, with the branches of the yew tree spread out above our heads and the scent of jasmine in the air.
I look down at the second name tag in my hand.
Sophie Mauriac.
My beautiful baby girl, who grew into a solemn, thoughtful woman, who stayed near me for the whole of her life, always worrying, fluttering around me like a mama hen. Afraid. She was always just a little afraid of the world after all that we had lived through, and I hated that. But she knew how to love, my Sophie, and when cancer came for her, she wasn’t afraid. At the end, I was holding her hand, and she closed her eyes and said, “Tante … there you are.”
Now, soon, they will be waiting for me, my sister and my daughter.
I tear my gaze away from the name tag and look out at the audience again. They don’t care that I’m teary-eyed. “Isabelle and my father, Julien Rossignol, and their friends ran the Nightingale escape route. Together, they saved over one hundred and seventeen men.”
I swallow hard. “Isabelle and I didn’t talk much during the war. She stayed away from me to protect me from the danger of what she was doing. So I didn’t know everything Isabelle had done until she came back from Ravensbrück.”
I wipe my eyes. Now there are no squeaking chairs, no tapping feet. The audience is utterly still, staring up at me. I see Julien in the back, his handsome face a study in confusion. All of this is news to him. For the first
time in his life, he understands the gulf between us, rather than the bridge. I am not simply his mother now, an extension of him. I am a woman in whole and he doesn’t quite know what to make of me. “The Isabelle who came back from the concentration camp was not the woman who’d survived the bombing at Tours or crossed the Pyrenees. The Isabelle who came home was broken and sick. She was unsure of so many things, but not about what she’d done.” I look out at the people seated in front of me. “On the day before she died, she sat in the shade beside me and held my hand and said, ‘V, it’s enough for me.’ I said, ‘What’s enough?’ and she said, ‘My life. It’s enough.’
“And it was. I know she saved some of the men in this room, but I know that you saved her, too. Isabelle Rossignol died both a hero and a woman in love. She couldn’t have made a different choice. And all she wanted was to be remembered. So, I thank you all, for giving her life meaning, for bringing out the very best in her, and for remembering her all these years later.”
I let go of the podium and step back.
The audience surges to their feet, clapping wildly. I see how many of the older people are crying and it strikes me suddenly: These are the families of the men she saved. Every man saved came home to create a family: more people who owed their lives to a brave girl and her father and their friends.
After that, I am sucked into a whirlwind of gratitude and memories and photographs. Everyone in the room wants to thank me personally and tell me how much Isabelle and my father meant to them. At some point, Julien settles himself along my side and becomes a bodyguard of sorts. I hear him say, “It looks like we have a lot to talk about,” and I nod and keep moving, clinging to his arm. I do my best to be my sister’s ambassador, collecting the thanks she deserves.
We are almost through the crowd—it is thinning now, people are making their way to the bar for wine—when I hear someone say, “Hello, Vianne,” in a familiar voice.
Even with all the years that have passed, I recognize his eyes. Gaëtan. He is shorter than I remember, a little stooped in the shoulders, and his tanned face is deeply creased by both weather and time. His hair is long, almost to his shoulders, and as white as gardenias, but still I would know him anywhere.
“Vianne,” he says. “I wanted you to meet my daughter.” He reaches back for a classically beautiful young woman wearing a chic black sheath and vibrant pink neck scarf. She comes toward me, smiling as if we are friends.
“I’m Isabelle,” she says.
I lean heavily into Julien’s hand. I wonder if Gaëtan knows what this small remembrance would mean to Isabelle.
Of course he does.
He leans close and kisses each of my cheeks, whispering, “I loved her all of my life,” as he draws back.
We talk for a few more minutes, about nothing really, and then he leaves.
Suddenly I am tired. Exhausted. I pull free of my son’s possessive grip and move past the crowd to the quiet balcony. There, I step out into the night. Notre Dame is lit up, its glow coloring the black waves of the Seine. I can hear the river lapping against stone and boat lines creaking.
Julien comes up beside me.
“So,” he says. “Your sister—my aunt—was in a concentration camp in Germany because she helped to create a route to save downed airmen, and this route meant that she hiked across the Pyrenees mountains?”
It is as heroic as he makes it sound.
“Why have I never heard anything about all this—and not just from you? Sophie never said a word. Hell, I didn’t even know that people escaped over the mountains or that there was a concentration camp just for women who resisted the Nazis.”
“Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over. Your sister was as desperate to forget it as I was. Maybe that was another mistake I made—letting her forget. Maybe we should have talked about it.”
“So Isabelle was off saving airmen and Dad was a prisoner of war and you were left alone with Sophie.” I know he is seeing me differently already, wondering how much he doesn’t know. “What did you do in the war, Mom?”
“I survived,” I say quietly. At the admission, I miss my daughter almost
more than I can bear, because the truth of it is that we survived. Together. Against all odds.
“That couldn’t have been easy.”
“It wasn’t.” The admission slips out, surprising me.
And suddenly we are looking at each other, mother and son. He is giving me his surgeon’s look that misses nothing—not my newest wrinkles or the way my heart is beating a little too fast or the pulse that pumps in the hollow of my throat.
He touches my cheek, smiling softly. My boy. “You think the past could change how I feel about you? Really, Mom?”
“Mrs. Mauriac?”
I am glad for the interruption. It’s a question I don’t want to answer.
I turn to see a handsome young man waiting to talk to me. He is American, but not obviously so. A New Yorker, perhaps, with close-cropped graying hair and designer glasses. He is wearing a fitted black blazer and an expensive white shirt, with faded jeans. I step forward, extending my hand. He does the same thing at the same time, and when he does, our eyes meet and I miss a step. It is just that, a missed step, one among many at my age, but Julien is there to catch me. “Mom?”
I stare at the man before me. In him, I can see the boy I loved so deeply and the woman who was my best friend. “Ariel de Champlain,” I say, his name a whisper, a prayer.
He takes me in his arms and holds me tightly and the memories return.
When he finally pulls back, we are both crying.
“I never forgot you or Sophie,” he says. “They told me to, and I tried, but I couldn’t. I’ve been looking for you both for years.”
I feel that constriction in my heart again. “Sophie passed away about fifteen years ago.”
Ari looks away. Quietly, he says, “I slept with her stuffed animal for years.”
“Bébé,” I say, remembering.
Ari reaches into his pocket and pulls out the framed photograph of me and Rachel. “My mom gave this to me when I graduated from college.”
I stare down at it through tears.
“You and Sophie saved my life,” Ari says matter-of-factly.
I hear Julien’s intake of breath and know what it means. He has questions now.
“Ari is my best friend’s son,” I say. “When Rachel was deported to Auschwitz, I hid him in our home, even though a Nazi billeted with us. It was quite … frightening.”
“Your mother is being modest,” Ari says. “She rescued nineteen Jewish children during the war.”
I see the incredulity in my son’s eyes and it makes me smile. Our children see us so imperfectly.
“I’m a Rossignol,” I say quietly. “A Nightingale in my own way.” “A survivor,” Ari adds.
“Did Dad know?” Julien asks.
“Your father…” I pause, draw in a breath. Your father. And there it is, the secret that made me bury it all.
I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste all that was.
Antoine was Julien’s father in every way that mattered. It is not biology that determines fatherhood. It is love.
I touch his cheek and gaze up at him. “You brought me back to life, Julien. When I held you, after all that ugliness, I could breathe again. I could love your father again.”
I never realized that truth before. Julien brought me back. His birth was a miracle in the midst of despair. He made me and Antoine and Sophie a family again. I named him after the father I learned to love too late, after he was gone. Sophie became the big sister she always wanted to be.
I will tell my son my life story at last. There will be pain in remembering, but there will be joy, too.
“You’ll tell me everything?”
“Almost everything,” I say with a smile. “A Frenchwoman must have her secrets.” And I will … I’ll keep one secret.
I smile at them, my two boys who should have broken me, but somehow saved me, each in his own way. Because of them, I know now what matters, and it is not what I have lost. It is my memories. Wounds heal. Love lasts.
We remain.
