“A well-developed sense of right and wrong.”
“Oh.”
This clearly was not what Vivi was looking for.
“He would have been proud of you.” Charlotte tried again.
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re smart. He cared a lot about that. And pretty.” Vivi made a self-deprecating face. “He cared a lot about that, too, at least in women. And you have a moral compass, too.”
“I do?”
“You care about other people. You try to do the right thing.”
Vivi considered that for a moment. “Sometimes I’m not sure what the right thing is.”
“You’re in good company there.”
“Even when you’re a grown-up?”
“Especially when you’re a grown-up.”
“But you said my father knew.”
Charlotte thought about that. Laurent had had principles and scruples, but he hadn’t faced many choices. One of the advantages, perhaps the only advantage, of dying young. She wasn’t about to tell Vivi that. “He did his best,” she said.
Vivi took a bite of her omelet, finally. “Tell me more about him.”
Charlotte sat thinking. She was an editor. She dealt with words and images and stories all day. Surely she could create a father to capture Vivi’s imagination.
“He was over the moon when you were born.”
“I thought he wasn’t there when I was born.”
She is alone in the bare white room, more alone than she has ever been in her easy cossetted life. The nuns come and go at intervals, but the nuns are no help. At least, they are no comfort. She is on her own. We are born alone and we die alone, Laurent used to say. We also give birth alone, she wants to tell someone, but there is no one to tell. Laurent is off at the front, though in this rout no one knows where the front is. The nuns and other patients sob as the radio, taken over by the Germans, blares that the French army is nothing more than a rabble with no idea in which direction to flee. Her mother died three years ago. Charlotte still hasn’t got over the unfairness of the timing. She’d been a rebellious child, closer to her iconoclastic father than her more conventional mother, but just as she’d begun to know the vulnerable woman behind the exquisitely dressed, irreproachably behaved public persona, her mother had succumbed to a rapid and virulent cancer. Her father, a leftist publisher who was a friend of the Jewish socialist prime minister Léon Blum, barely got out before the Germans marched in. He hadn’t had to be told that his name was on their list. Laurent’s elderly parents are safe, she hopes, in the South of France. They’d wanted her to go with them, but she was afraid of delivering the baby on the road. Besides, what if Laurent somehow finds his way home? She has to be there for him. She’d refused to go with Simone for the same reason. “In that case, I’ll stay with you,” Simone said, but Charlotte was adamant, and in the end Simone didn’t put up much of a fight. They’d been friends, almost like sisters, they always said since neither of them had one, from the days when they’d played together as little girls in the Luxembourg Gardens, but now Simone had her own child to worry about. She’d taken three-year-old Sophie and left, too. Even the local tradesmen had fled. She’d seen them as she’d made her way on foot to the hospital, people hijacking taxis, tying their possessions to automobiles, piling wagons with beds and pots and pans, portraits of ancestors and cages full of canaries and parrots. She doesn’t understand that. Dogs and cats, yes, but birds, when the city is hemorrhaging, when the world is coming to an end? Ashes rain down from the sky. Smoke stings her eyes and sears her nose and throat. The government offices and foreign consulates and embassies are burning their records.
Then, she doesn’t know how much later, Paris goes silent. She hears the hush in the intervals when she stops screaming. The lack of sound is thunderous. The city cannot be this still. No automobiles, no horns, no cacophony of human voices. She lies there, thinking she is dreaming. That is the only explanation for the silence. Then she hears the birds. She’s not dreaming. She’s dead. Why else is a nun hovering, her wrinkled gray face smashed out of shape by the tight wimple, telling her it’s all over. So Laurent and she were both wrong. There is an afterlife, and it’s silent, antiseptic smelling, staffed by nuns who appear harried but not unkind.
Only later when they put Vivi in her arms does she realize that she’s not dead, and the city is silent because it’s empty, and she has a daughter. The terror closes in. Before this, she had only her own survival to worry about. Now she looks down at this small purple-faced package and knows the meaning of responsibility. Suddenly she understands her mother’s caution. Her childhood had been lived in a less dangerous time, but there is no such thing as safety. The dread grows worse as the newspapers begin to publish again, and she reads the ads. Mothers looking for babies who have gone missing in the stampede. People searching for someone, anyone, to claim lost infants whose only answer to questions of who they are and where they come from is a single bleating plea. Maman.
She stays in the hospital for how long, a week, ten days? Long enough for the city to start to stir again, but the noises are new and unrecognizable. The first uproar sounds like an avalanche or hurricane, nature wreaking its vengeance. She asks the young nun, the one whose face swims pale and thin inside her wimple, what she is hearing. “Boots,” the nun says. “Every day they stage a parade down the Champs Élysées. Complete with a military band.” Sure enough, Charlotte recognizes the strains of music beneath the roar of the unnatural disaster. “You can hear it everywhere. In case we don’t remember they’re here,” the nun adds.
It’s not only the parade. The boots are all over the city, pounding sidewalks, punishing cobblestones, kicking in doors, stomping through buildings, even here in the hospital. They go from ward to ward, room to room. When they come to the mothers and babies, they are polite, even avuncular. One stands beside her bed. He asks for her papers. She hands them over. His glance is cursory. He hands them back. Then, just as she is about to exhale in relief, he leans over and cups Vivi’s head in his big hand. It’s lucky she’s frozen with terror. Otherwise she would slap his hand away.
Gradually people begin to return. Simone comes back with Sophie in tow. Many other friends do as well, but some cannot or do not. Josephine, who was in Portugal visiting a man she’d fallen in love with when the border was closed, is trapped in safety; Bette is teaching in Grenoble; Laurent’s parents remain in Avignon; her own father keeps moving; or so she has heard about all of them. There is little or no postal service to or from the unoccupied zone.
“How do you know he was over the moon,” Vivi insisted, “if he’d already left for the war?”
Caught in the lie. “Letters, of course. He was the one who named you.” That at least was true. “I wanted to call you Gabrielle, but he wrote saying you had to be Vivienne.” If you were a girl, she didn’t add. “You had to be life.”
Vivi sat with her fork in midair, staring at her mother. “You mean he knew he was going to die?”
“He was in the army. He knew it was a possibility. That’s why you were so important to him. To both of us.”