Halfway down the block, she opened the wrought-iron gate and descended three steps. A short cement ramp ran alongside them. Some people said sheer perversity made Horace Field go on living in a brownstone. If he and Hannah had moved to an apartment building, he could have whizzed from street to lobby to elevator with ease. Others insisted his remaining in the house he’d grown up in proved he wasn’t the cynic he pretended to be. Charlotte had a third explanation, though she’d never mentioned it to anyone, not even Horace, especially not Horace. The doorman and elevator operators in those apartment buildings would have fallen over themselves trying to assist a man in a wheelchair, and not merely for Christmas bonuses. They were, by and large, a respectful lot, at least on the surface, and many of them had been in the war. Horace could not have tolerated that. The solicitude would have embarrassed him. The condescension would have infuriated him. So he’d built the ramp for the steps outside the brownstone and installed an elevator inside.
She closed the gate behind her, crossed the flagstone enclosure blooming with planters of orange and yellow mums that glowed in darkening evening, and pulled open the wrought-iron and glass door to the foyer.
Later, when she thought about the incident, she’d blame it on the letter she’d thrown in the wastebasket. She wasn’t thinking of it at that moment, but it must have been lurking in her unconscious. There was no other explanation for her hallucination.
A woman was standing with her hand to her head, her fingers pointing to her temple as if they were the barrel of a gun. Suddenly Charlotte is back in the cold dank hall of the house on the rue Vavin. The concierge’s eyes, hard and black as lumps of coal, follow her and Vivi across the shadowy space. Just as they reach the stairs, the concierge in that old apartment house where her memory has transported her moves her finger at her temple as if she is pulling a trigger. “Après les boches,” she hisses, and the words scald like steam.
Then another night, and this is shortly before the Liberation, when Charlotte is carrying Vivi in her arms, the concierge steps out from the loge to block her path. Standing only inches away, she raises her cocked-pistol hand not to her own temple but to Vivi’s forehead. “Après les boches,” she croons, as if she is singing a lullaby, and pulls the imaginary trigger.
Charlotte grabbed hold of the doorknob and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was back in the elegant little foyer with the black-and-white-tiled floor, watching a woman who was not her former concierge but must be one of Hannah Field’s patients tugging her hat into place in front of the gilt-framed mirror. The woman turned from her reflection, nodded to Charlotte, pulled open the heavy outside door, and disappeared into the night.
Charlotte went on standing in the foyer, suddenly sweating in her trench coat, though she hadn’t bothered to button in the lining that morning. She hated herself for the fear, but she hated the woman, too, for bringing it back. Après les boches. The phrase was always lying there in the murky polluted depths of her unconscious, just waiting to rise to the surface. That and the other expression that was even more chilling, but she wasn’t going to think of that.
She started up the stairs. She rarely used the elevator in the house. It always seemed like an invasion of Horace and Hannah’s privacy. Besides, the American habit of descending on anything other than one’s own legs struck her as self-indulgent. And she liked the exercise. She was glad the gauntness was gone. She’d read somewhere that the average Parisian had lost forty pounds during the Occupation. But she didn’t want to put on too much weight.
When she reached the first landing, it seemed gloomy. She looked up. One of the bulbs in the overhead fixture was out. That was uncharacteristic. Hannah ran a tight ship. She glanced back down at the entrance hall. It was cast in shadows. And the woman had been standing half turned away as she adjusted her hat. Anyone could have mistaken the woman for someone else.
* * *
They sat basking in the glow of the white-sprigged yellow wallpaper that Hannah had chosen for them before they’d moved in. Most landlords, Charlotte had since learned, would have slapped a coat of paint on an apartment in preparation for a new tenant and let it go at that, but as Hannah had often said since she’d met Charlotte and Vivi at the ship that morning almost nine years ago, they were more than tenants. Horace had known Charlotte’s father before the war, and Hannah was looking forward to having a child in the house. So she’d wallpapered as well as painted, taken Vivi shopping for curtains and a rug, and even replaced the old dying refrigerator with a new model. Charlotte hadn’t realized it at the time because all she’d seen at first was America’s abundance, but she knew now that Hannah’s managing to get her hands on a new appliance so soon after the war was a testament to her resourcefulness.
The wallpaper pattern Charlotte and Vivi sat basking in was called Innocence. Where but in America, Charlotte thought, would people believe they could shroud a room in naïveté? Nonetheless, she admired Hannah’s taste.
The mirror over the mantel was tilted so she could see the reflection of the two of them sitting at the small table angled between the fireplace and the swinging door to the kitchen, her in the shirt and trousers she’d changed into to cook dinner, Vivi still in her school uniform. The wallpaper was so sunny, the light from the wall sconces and lamps so soft, they really did seem to be basking in radiance. Then Vivi spoke.
“How come you never talk about my father?”
“Why don’t you ever talk about my father?” Charlotte corrected her. She wasn’t stalling for time. At least that wasn’t her only motive.
“Why don’t you ever talk about my father?” Vivi asked.
The question wasn’t new. Vivi occasionally asked about the father she’d never known. But this was the first time she’d framed it as an accusation. Or did Charlotte hear it that way only because of the imaginary encounter with the concierge in the foyer?
“I talk about him. I talk about him all the time. What do you want to know?”
She shrugged. “What was he like?”
Charlotte thought about that for a moment. Now she wasn’t stalling. She was trying to remember. But it was like trying to capture the feeling of a fever dream after your temperature is back to normal. After the whole world’s temperature is back to normal. Sometimes she wondered if they would have married if the war hadn’t come, if he hadn’t been called up, if they hadn’t felt time bearing down on them, if they hadn’t seen themselves as actors in a tragic play or movie. Would her skin have gone so hot at his touch in less heated times? Would they have been able to hold each other with tenderness rather than desperation? She didn’t regret any of it. She was grateful for what they’d had. And without Laurent, she would not have Vivi. But the haunted intensity was not something you could tell a child.
“He had an original mind,” she said finally.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I was never bored with him. More than that, I was dazzled by him. He saw things other people didn’t, made connections others didn’t.” This was better. She was getting the hang of it.
“What else?”
“He had a finely calibrated moral compass.”
“A what?”