And here stood the long ago forgotten dream before me, brought back to life in the flesh, struggling valiantly with his French while the two sergeants looked on expectantly. “Il faut…” he said in an expectant way as if hoping for more to follow. “Il faut …” but nothing else came.
“Can I help major?” I stepped into the breach as the three men turned to face me. Without waiting for a reply, I began speaking to the French sergeant. “My friend, it is a question of sufficient food for these men.”
“But yes, Mademoiselle.”
“You see, they are very young and very hungry and very big and they have come a long distance over the ocean.”
“It is understood.”
“Moreover, the trains that travel on from here will undoubtedly be late.”
“Undoubtedly, Mademoiselle.”
“That makes necessary for more than one meal while on the train.”
He considered this statement with his head cocked to one side. “Eh .. well.”
In a low voice I asked the American sergeant, “Two meals or three.”
“Make it three,” he said. “Them Frog trains …”
The French sergeant had weighed the matter and reached a conclusion. “These Americans go now to a camp for training. Therefore, nothing presses. They will not go at great speed. They will move only when the rails are clear. Eh well --- two meals.”
“No three. They insist on three.”
“My God. Such hunger is formidable.”
“And a meat ration for each man every time he eats,” the American sergeant demanded.
I repeated his order. I was beginning to enjoy myself, but the entire time I could feel those blue eyes staring at me. Was he remembering that one evening? I dared not look at him.
“Meat. Three times. How they eat these Americans. If they must pour all their money into their stomachs, what to do? It is they who pay for it. Eh .. well.” He gave the major a ceremonious salute and walked away. The American sergeant also saluted and walked away in the other directios.
The major, yes it was Matthew, stood looking after them smiling and shaking his head. “Thanks. My French is strictly schoolroom, if that. If I needed to say that my grandmother’s aunt wears a large wooden ring in her nose every Tuesday, I’d have known just how to do it. You can really speak French.”
I nodded, staring. I obviously held no memories for him. Which was just as well. If that brief meeting had even held any import for me, it no longer did. I was another person now, and I assumed he probably was too.
“Well, you really saved the day here. Thanks again.” His eyes held mine for a moment longer than necessary but there was still no recognition in them. I was a stranger to him, so there was nothing more to be said. His eyes. Still that blue of far off horizons. And he had learned to fly for there were the wings glinting on his chest.
“Well --- goodbye,” he said, turning around to head towards the troop compartments at the back of the train.
“Goodbye” I replied and walked off rapidly down the platform my quickened steps, taking me away from the past and into my chosen future.
I found Rosie in the next car at the window waving frantically. “For goodness sake Val, hurry and get in. I’ve had an awful time holding your seat. Whatever were you doing?”
“I’m really sorry Rosie,” I said making a production of storing my bag and settling myself in my seat. But Rosie was no longer listening, taken up with the excitement of a wartime train station, and the jerking motion of the train as it began to pull out of the station.
I rested my heated cheek against the winter cold of the compartment’s glass, and looked out at the gathering gloom of a winter’s late afternoon. Dreams. I had been raised in a household of unrequited dreams. It was hard to say from this distance whether Mamma or Papa’s dreams had been the most damaging. Perhaps I was discovering that my own dreams might have done just as much damage.
When I thought of Mamma it was always in her bedroom, reclining on the couch over in the corner, alone in its dimly lit depths. That is where she would be after dinner when she retired with one of her frequent headaches, a still, distant figure.
Her disappointment had leached into our lives. She had given up on me early, my large frame, gangly limbs, and flaming red hair a disappointment from the beginning. It was to Trixie she had turned her attention after Arthur’s death, beautiful, sparkling Trixie. But her attention was restricting, cloying, making her want to hedge her beautiful daughter about with rules. Disappointment is a quiet, bitter emotion that I did not fully understand until after my mother’s death.
Nanny and I had been cleaning out her drawers when I had found a scrapbook at the bottom of her bureau with pictures and clippings from the paper about her and Papa. There had been one picture in particular of “Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Cameron Winthrop” at some ball. Mamma had looked positively radiant, and Papa had been looking at her with obvious pride and enjoyment, an expression on his face that I had never seen before. They looked at peace with one another; my father’s arms resting lightly around my mother’s waist, her head thrown back slightly looking into his eyes.
I looked at the dates on the clippings – all before Arthur’s death. That dancing couple had dissolved into the two armed camps that became our home, Mamma resting all her disappointed hopes in Trixie, and Papa hoping to reach his dreams by offering up his next son on the altar of steel. I had figured in no one’s dreams. For the first time I realized that I might have had the best of a bad bargain.
It was late before we reached the Hotel d’Iena in Paris. Supper eaten; we were heading up to our rooms. “What a meal and what a dining room,” said Rosie rubbing her arms in a futile attempt to get warm. “If we keep eating this way I’ll be starved to death before I’m assigned and frozen beside. What is that tasteless stuff they call war bread? I thought the French were known for their baking.”
They certainly had been on our family trips to Europe. I thought of the deep cups of café au lait in the mornings accompanied by flakey croissants, and the crusty bread with soft centers that accompanied the soup course of so many dinners. This was definitely a different time and different place from the France of my girlhood. Memories came flooding back. Shopping. The grand couturiers, smart salons and parading models. “Will madame see it a la main ou sur la jeanue fille?” Tea at Rumpelmaiers’s, biscottes, brioches, cakes crowned with whipped cream and candied cherries. “That’s the Comtesse de Grandville – at the next table,” Mamma would whisper, meaning a plump old lady carrying a long-handled parasol. And the chic young women with rigidly beautiful faces. One I remembered, carried in her muff a rare dog no bigger than a chipmunk that, from time to time, she held up to her cheek, kissing it on the mouth. “Don’t look,” Nanny said while Mamma laughed uneasily and nodded toward a man sitting with a beautiful woman at a table. “See there – a typical boulevardier.” He was like a man of wax, wearing striped trousers and a cutaway coat with a flower in his buttonhole. I had been slightly repelled, but I still enjoyed looking.
That was during the day, but there were also the nights. Sometimes we went to the opera. Not Nanny, then, but Mamma and Papa with Trixie and I dressed in our best gowns and James pressed into service as our escort. There would be the excitement of the play and the costumes and the singing, the massing of crowds in the foyer, doors opening ceremoniously and the promenade of the audience to their seats – the audience almost more a show than the stage, the women beautiful in satin and jewels. In the intermission men would rise and face about, staring through opera glasses, searching the house for people at which they wished to look. And often they would stare at Mamma, and she would not even blush, but would hold her head high, knowing that she was being admired. I always thought of her then as the Paris Mamma, as the Chicago Mamma did not shine in quite that way.
I sighed as I got in my pajamas, settling down in the window seat to look out at the dark city. Rosie, the blankets over her head still attempting to get warm, was already breathing deeply, sound asleep. I had not really left my past behind after all, for that was not possible as much as I might wish it. Some of it had come with me to Paris. Paris and Mamma, Papa, James and Trixie – all old friends. Tomorrow I would see one of them again, but without the others. Instead I would be surrounded by people who had none of my memories. Suddenly I did not want that. It was unreasonable, but I must see Paris alone, tonight. I must look at all of those memories again and then put them away in a mental box not to be opened again.
I rose from the window, and almost without realizing what I was doing, began to put on my uniform again. It would not take me long to give my private greeting and farewell to that long ago Paris before I met it in the morning with a whole set of new people. I would walk as far as the Pont Alexandre III and stand there with the city all around me and the Seine flowing under my feet. I would look out at the towers of Notre Dame. I would face in all directions and breathe the air from Montmartre, and the bookstalls on the left bank, and the shops on the Rue de Rivoli. I would remember it all and then perhaps gain absolution for……..But that I would not remember that.
I quickly put on my overseas cap, buttoned and belted my uniform topcoat, and took the key slipping it into my pocket, its large size and heavy wooden tag making a lump there. The key was going to be a problem. If I turned it in to the clerk at the desk, I would have to ask for it when I came back, and he would know that I had been out alone and for how long. I would have to keep the key with me, and somehow slip through the lobby unnoticed.
Unbidden came Nanny’s voice down through the years, “The kind of women who are out alone on the streets at night are not ladies and the men are not gentlemen.” But as I looked back at her admonition, I could see now that she had not been including me in that declaration. While looking and speaking to both of us, it was Trixie alone that she had been warning. Did she think that I did not need the warning? Or was it only that I was not pretty enough to have to protect against the unknown out on the night streets? In fact I realized for the first time, as I descended the stairs eschewing the loud, creaking lift, that Nanny had been Mamma’s lieutenant in her on-going battle to throw a barrier between Trixie and the world she wanted to inhabit, no matter what the cost.
The lobby was empty, the clerk was drowsing behind his counter as I raced silently across the stone floor and out into the Paris night, my guilty conscience making my heart race. I walked quickly down the street and around the corner, my whole attention focused on who might be behind me, ready to call me back. It was not until I was almost upon them, that I noticed a group of American officers standing in a bunch at the door of a tired looking French hotel. I stopped with a jolt, and crossed the street midway, hoping the Red Cross insignia on my hat had not been noticeable. Taking a deep breath I headed for the Seine, lengthening my stride to put as much distance as possible between myself and the hotel, my heart beating in my ears.
I had gone a block when I sensed that I was being followed, the footsteps getting closer and closer. Suddenly the well-known Paris of my girlhood seemed sinister and frightening. A male voice came out of the darkness.
“May I ask you a question?”
I stopped and turned around. There stood Matthew Brandt.
“I owe you for your translation skills at the train station. Can I pay you back by being your escort for the evening?”
There was still no recognition in his eyes. I was not someone from his distant past, but only from yesterday. In a way it was a relief to be done with that long ago boy from Wyoming and the awkward girl in the too small dress with the blue sash. But I was not at all sure that I wanted this new Matthew to intrude on my farewell to Paris.
“I’m sorry,” I said and moved away from him. “I’m just going for a walk ---- to refresh memories.”
“This is my first view of Paris and I can think of nothing better than to see it with an expert.”
“I’m planning to walk – by myself.”
He smiled. “Don’t let these wings deceive you. I was trained as a doughboy. Professional walker you know.”
I smiled back in spite of myself. “Well, I’m going to Notre Dame.” Notre Dame? I had not even dreamed of going that far alone. “It’s more than two miles from here.”
He nodded, a smile still lurking around his mouth as he said in a mock formal voice, “The guidebook regards it as a must for tourists.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer the Folies Bergers or a Montmartre tavern?” I tried to sound cold, but even in my own ears I could hear the smile.
“Positive. On to Notre Dame.”
My steps slowed in my confusion, and before I knew it he was walking beside me staring straight ahead but with a smile playing about his lips. I too looked resolutely forward, the silence broken only by our footsteps echoing into the darkness of the famous city of lights, now war-blackened, dark and a little forbidding. In spite of myself I was glad for the company as we strode on in silence to the Etoile, and then turned and headed down the Champs Elysees. The dark city seemed forbidding in a way it had not in family visits, but it could not hide the remembered Paris completely. The white shadow, tall and massive behind us was the Arc de Triomphe built by Napoleon to celebrate his victory at Austerlitz, and the scene of many triumphal military parades since. Even our hotel was a remembrance of Napoleon and his victory over the Prussians at Jena. Farther down the gently sloping avenue we marched through the Place de la Concorde, and I could hear my French tutor’s voice rising from the past.
Monsieur Cortot had been my one victory on our last trip to Europe. While Mamma and Papa had had one reason for that year abroad, I had decided that this was to be as close to higher education as I would ever get. Somehow the thought of a French tutor had an elegance that covered the fact that I might actually learn something. Mamma concentrated on the fact that my proficiency in French would improve, but I felt her hidden reason was that she and Trixie could enjoy the feminine delights of French couturiers without my unappreciative, dour presence.
Monsier Cortot had commented as we walked through the Place on the way to a lesson at the Louvre, “This is the place of great concord of the French people where we all meet and are one.” I thought rebelliously it was more the place that showed what I now thought was the great divide in the French history between admiring royalty and manning of the barricades of the French revolution. At one time this place had held the statue of a king, and at another time a king and his queen were beheaded to cheering crowds. But I had kept my thoughts to myself. Even with a tutor, it was a lady’s place to always defer to the male, a rule I kept in the interests of keeping my hard-won instructor.
Suddenly Matthew broke the silence beside me. “Can’t you just hear the jeering of the mob and the squeaking wheels of the tumbrels bringing their victims to the guiotine?”
I turned to him in surprise. He in turn smiled down at me in amusement, “I might never have been here before, but I do read you know. History is open to everyone.”
I felt my face flame as I realized I was thinking of the Wyoming ranch boy which he could have no way of knowing I knew. And I also discovered to my chagrin, I was making the same assumptions about that childhood that most of the society in Chicago to which I belonged would make. Perhaps I was just as torn in my own way as the French, torn between my acts of rebellion and my oh-so-proper upbringing.
In silence we passed the Tuilleries, the beautiful park which I remembered under the sun of a Paris summer, but now dark and gloomy, then the Louvre in which I had spent hours with Monsieur Cortot. With a sudden exhilaration totally of the present, I picked up my pace and Matthew lengthened his stride along with mine.
“Don’t you love walking at night?” I said suddenly into the quiet. I had never felt so alive, so aware of everything around me.
“Yes, this is a happy ending for me. I spent all day on the train from Bordeaux wondering what I would do with my one night in Paris.”
“Just one?”
“Yes, I go out tomorrow, and the last thing I wanted to do was to spend the evening in my hotel with everyone else from the American Expeditionary Force wondering how we were going to win this thing. That’s for tomorrow. Tonight is for walking”
“If you only have one evening maybe you had better tell me what you would like to see. Maybe something other than Notre Dame.”
“No, Notre Dame is fine. It isn’t really the place anyway, it’s the company. I could not believe my eyes when my American translator came out of the dark like a vision. In spite of your attempts at secrecy, I knew at once it was the green-eyed Red Cross girl from the train station.”
Thank goodness for the darkness. I could feel the warmth creep up my neck and into my cheeks, although I willed it to stop.
Now we were at the Pont Alexandre III, where I had planned to stand alone savoring Paris and remembering. But I was not alone now, and I found with a sudden joy that I was more interested in the present that in the past. I pushed on towards the cathedral.
“Why did you join up?” Now it was his turn.
“It was a way out.”
“Out of what?” He looked over at me.
“What I was in.”
He seemed to accept my curt answer, and we walked on in silence again until the towers of Notre Dame loomed over us. With a light touch from Matthew’s hand the giant doors of the cathedral swung open, and we were in the hushed silence of the interior. I walked over and touched one of the massive pillars that reached up into the vaulted darkness, my hand caressing the cold stone. I had been here before, of course, but not in the silence and enfolding dark of nighttime. That visit had been in the day, even though the summer sun had not penetrated very far into the coolness of the cathedral. It had looked big in the light of day, but now at night it loomed over us, the vaulted ceiling lost in the gloom of night. I had been entranced at the history the stones had encompassed, and had walked slowly around drinking in its medieval atmosphere. Trixie had been only slightly interested, pushing us to finish so that we could get to the dressmakers to see how her new gown was progressing.
“Our life is all old, old, old,” she had protested when I wanted to stay longer. “I just want to live in the present, and the present is parties, and people, and conversation. Please let’s go.” And we had gone.
Now I found that Matthew’s hand was beside mine on the pillar.
“These have been here for ages,” he said more to himself that to me. “And in one moment they could all come tumbling down around us. Who can say that they will not be destroyed in the next few months?”
The ghosts of Paris rising about me had made me forget the vicissitudes of the current war. Monsieur Cortot had loved to regale me with tales of the “evil Bosch” and the courageous Parisians who had held out against the Prussians for five months in the siege of Paris in 1870. He would quote with much Gallic enthusiasm from a contemporary of the time who said, “The Frenchmen of 1870 are the sons of those Gauls for whom battles were holidays." I would be caught up in his descriptions of the brave citizens on the barricades, and the severe shortage of food which forced Parisians to eat rats, dogs, cats, and horses. Even Castor and Pollux, the only pair of elephants in the Paris zoo, he would tell me with a flourish, were not spared. What he failed to tell me was, after five months of deprivation and battle, the city fell to the Germans who took their turn in a victorious march through the Arc de Triumphe.
I felt a sudden wave of uncertainty wash over me. “Could we lose this war?” I asked, my voice sounding small in the echoing cathedral.
“We might,” he said walking towards the front of the church. “The French and British have already taken so many casualties, and though we Americans are fresh, we know darn little about what we are doing.”
I followed him up the aisle, hurrying to keep up with his long strides. “Look at me. I’m a major in the Aviation Section, Signal corps. My command is a squadron, and to date I have never seen one. In the whole United States there isn’t one squadron of fighting planes. And the rest of the AEF is no better off. The majors have never commanded a battalion and the generals have never seen a division assembled in one place ever.”
“What will we do?”
“Learn by our mistakes, I guess. And how many lives will that cost? What price will we pay before everyone stops doing what they individually wish? And who will be the lucky follow who will get to bend them to the task at hand?” A look of great bitterness settled on his face, his mouth becoming a thin hard line, his eyes far away.
I stood silent, my old feeling of awkwardness suddenly assailing me when he turned suddenly and as if shaking himself and said, “Enough of that. That’s not what this evening is all about. Let’s walk some more.”
We went out into the night heading back towards the hotel. “Do you want to know the best kept secret in the AEF?
“Probably not,” I said glad for the lightening of the mood.
“My age.”
“Your age?”
“Sounds silly I know, but it’s hard to be the tough guy with people who are your own age, or even older. Sometimes I think they will see right through me to the one-room-school-house boy form Wyoming.”
“Is that where you were educated? I asked pretending ignorance. In my mind’s eye I could see a weathered clapboard building filled with worn desks at which sat a handful of children of different ages. Then I thought of my schooling and the knowledge which I loved, and the social life I did not.
“In my case I just shot through school. I’ve always been a reader – a book in my saddle bag.” He laughed with a depreciating gesture of his hands. “I even let a flock of sheep wander all over the countryside while I read my first Dickens. At twelve they didn’t know what to do with me so I was sent into town to high school. Then I won an appointment to West Point. The Army got me young, but they didn’t care.”
He did not know that I could picture that young man on his way east to his new life, the shoddy blue jacket, the upright watchful figure at dinner. I reached back for my dreams, and found them completely gone. What I was now bore no relation to that girl who had sat at our dinner table with a younger sister in a beautiful yellow dress.
He stopped suddenly and turned to me. “I’m hungry. How about a snack?”
I felt confused and out of my depth. A restaurant, bright lights blotting out the secrecy of the night. I did not want that. “But ... but I already had dinner,” I said hesitantly, hating how tongue-tied I sounded. Some things would never change.
“But that had to be hours ago.” He bent his arm in a mock gesture. “Madam would you consent to accompany me to that little place across the street?”
I looked over at a battered door under a swinging sign that said Au Soleil d’Or and my heart leaped. All my assurance came flooding back. “I’d love to.” And I meant it. I’d never been in that sort of restaurant, the kind I had read about in books on student life in Paris, and I had always wanted to. Once I had suggested it to Mamma, but it had been considered one of my crazy ideas. Nanny had said, “What will that child think of next.” Even Trixie had said that some people liked germs with their food. But now I would have my wish.
Matthew opened the door, a faint glow coming out to light us in. The tiny interior, knee deep below the sidewalk, was lighted by candles and contained only two tables, a few chairs and two people. An old man dressed in a smock sat in a corner. A gray haired woman rose as we came in.
“M’sieur et dame?” She had a kindly face. Her bony hands clung to a shawl draped about her shoulders. The rest of her small thinness was lost under a vast heavy skirt that touched the floor.
“I know well how late it is.” I spoke gently in French as the woman reminded me somehow of Nanny. “But would you be so good as to give us something to eat?”
“But certainly --- yes, m’sieur et dame.” Her keen eyes shuttled back and forth between us, curious, appraising.
“Anything will do.”
“An omelet perhaps?”
“Perfect --- and hot chocolate?”
“Oh that.” The woman waggled a finger. “One cannot get such a thing.”
Matthew who had been following our conversation with frowning intensity reached into his pocket and produced a large chocolate bar.
“Ah monsieur, with that one can make two cups and there will remain a great deal.” Smiling, she vanished through a small door in the rear.
“Off to the kitchen,” said Matthew. “And I’ll bet it’s just like this room --- painfully old, painfully shabby and painfully clean. And I’ll bet out of the kitchen comes a wicked omelet.”
“So you know what we’re having. Your French is showing great improvement.”
“Under your guidance.” He bowed elaborately.
He helped me off with my coat. Finding neither hooks nor hangers he piled our coats on a chair, his coat underneath, then mine and then his cap on top of my coat. I remembered with a start Nanny hanging up his worn blue coat in James’ room. Now it was a uniform, the majors’ leaves glinting. Ellis Avenue was another world.
The old woman returned. She brought two huge plates. On each one an omelet, golden and shapely, and a mound of fried potatoes. She poured two cups of foaming chocolate, cutting chunks of bread from a round loaf. She smiled at us in triumph, satisfied with her prowess.
“M’sieur et dame, bon apetit.” She joined the old man in the corner and they both whispered and cast glances in our direction.
My appetite had been sharpened by the walk and Matthew’s must have been as well for we both cleaned our plates, Matthew commenting that our hostess would be able to put his plate back on the shelf without washing it.
“M’sieur et dame?” The woman had crossed back over, and stood beside us holding the remaining half of the chocolate bar.
I started to take it from her but Matthew shook his head. “No, tell her to keep it.”
Carefully I tore off the tin foil, folded the edge and held the remaining chocolate out to the woman. “The major says for you.”
“Merci, m’sieur et dame. Grand merci.” She looked from one to the other of us and asked a quick sharp question. I answered quickly. “It is well,” the woman said happily, and padded back to her corner, where the old man repeated, “It is well.” The two seated themselves nodding and smiling together.
Matthew leaned across the table, his eyes amused, a smile playing on his lips. “Did that little old woman raise a question as to our moral status?”
“She asked if we were engaged.” Much to my fury I found myself blushing.
“Well, are we?” his smile now full.
“Hardly. You – you might even be married.”
“Well, I’m not. Are you?”
“No. I told her you were my cousin.”
He laughed. “So that’s the word that saved us. Cousin.”
“But you don’t know how conventional they are. They wouldn’t understand my being out alone. She’s such a nice little woman.” No less than Nanny or Mamma would have understood it. But Trixie would have enjoyed the tale of this evening to the fullest. How I wished she were here to share it with.
My face was still burning, when Matthew learned over and patted my hand. “Hey, it’s alright cousin. Just don’t let her know about the wooden ring of our mutual aunt.” He began to laugh and then I joined him, the wonderful feeling of release and mutual understanding that I had felt only once before at a long ago dinner table. Still laughing we went out into the night, the way back seeming much too short.
At the door of the Hotel d’Iena we paused.
“Goodbye cousin,” he said. “Your reputation being what it is, I’ll have to leave you here. Thanks for your company and the tour of Paris.” And he turned on his heel and was gone into the war-darkened city before I could think of what to say. Once again he had come into my life and once again he had disappeared as if he had never been. And this time I would make nothing more of it than it was – an enjoyable, slightly illicit evening with a man in Paris. I had more important things ahead of me.