Lilac Girls (17 page)

A
s spring approached, the situation in France grew more desperate. Every morning by ten, the consulate reception area was already jammed and my schedule full. The Nazis stomping all over Paris had thrown those French citizens stranded in New York into the depths of despair and, often, dire financial circumstances, something we were powerless to assuage. Under strict orders from Roger not to offer my own funds, I could provide chocolate bars and a shoulder to cry on but little else.

One morning I set one of Betty's shoe boxes on my desk and began assembling an orphan package. There'd been no new word from Paul. I tried to stay occupied to stop the dark thoughts, anything to tamp down the ache in my chest.

“You've got a full schedule,” Pia said, as she dropped a pile of folders on my desk. “First up, your high-society friends who don't take no for an answer.”

“That doesn't narrow it down, Pia.”

“I don't know. Pris-something and her mother.”

It was Priscilla Huff, a leggy blonde who had been a year behind me at Chapin. Flawless in a blue Mainbocher suit, she was uncharacteristically friendly. Electra Huff, an only slightly less trim version of her daughter, followed and shut the door behind her.

“What a chic little office you have here, Caroline dear,” Mrs. Huff said.

“I'd like to adopt a French child, Caroline,” Priscilla said, as if ordering Chateaubriand at the Stork Club. “I'll even take twins.”

“There's a waiting list for the few children waiting for adoption, Priscilla, but Pia can help you with the paperwork. You'll just need your husband's signature.”

“How is Roger Fortier?” Mrs. Huff asked. “Such a lovely man, your boss.”

“Well, that's the thing, Caroline,” Priscilla said. “I'm not married.”

“Yet,”
Mrs. Huff said, browsing the silver frames on the mantel. “There are two offers pending.”

I set a clean pair of oatmeal-colored socks into the shoe box. Two offers pending? What was she, a two-acre parcel in Palm Beach with privacy hedge?

“It takes two parents to adopt, Priscilla.”

“Mother's French is excellent. I'm
plus que
fluent as well.”

Priscilla had the French language requirement down. She'd beaten me in the French essay contest every year. The fact that their cook prepared an elaborate
bûche de Noël
for the class each Christmas didn't hurt, since our French teacher, Miss Bengoyan, the sole judge, had a well-known sweet tooth. Why did I want a cigarette so badly?

“I understand, Priscilla, but I don't make the rules. These children come from tragic circumstances, as you can imagine. Even two parents can have a difficult time.”

“So you send packages to orphaned children but turn down a perfectly good home? I can offer a child the best of everything.”

Maybe. Until the next bright, shiny object came along.

“I'm sorry, Priscilla. But I have several appointments this morning.” I walked to my file cabinet.

“Word is,
you
are adopting,” Priscilla said.

“You hear many things these days,” I said.

“Seems some can go around the regulations,” Mrs. Huff said, adjusting one glove.

“I lost my father when I was eleven years old, Mrs. Huff. Growing up fatherless is a terrible thing. I wouldn't do that to a child.”

“More terrible than no parents at all?” Priscilla said.

I shut the file drawer. “It is a moot point, I'm afraid. There just are not that many French children to adopt.”

Priscilla pouted, and I stifled the urge to throttle her.

“I thought there were ships of orphans arriving daily,” she said.

“No, very few, actually. After the
City of Benares
—”

“City of
what
?” asked Priscilla.

Mrs. Huff reached for her bag. “Well, if it's money you need. I heard you and your mother had to pull out of the Meadow Club…”

I sat back down in my desk chair. “We sold our Southampton house, Mrs. Huff, and we summer in Connecticut now, so we've no need for the club, and no, you can't just buy a
child,
Priscilla. If you read a newspaper now and then, you'd know the
City of Benares
was a British passenger ship, carrying one hundred English children sent by their parents to Canada to escape the London bombings. En route from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia—”

Mrs. Huff placed two hands on my desk and leaned in. “We're interested in a
French
child, Caroline.”

“Four days into the journey, the children, ages four to fifteen, were in their pajamas, ready for bed…” I felt the tears coming.

Priscilla folded her arms across her chest. “What does this have to do with adopting a French—”

“A German submarine sank the ship, Priscilla. Seventy-seven of the hundred children on board drowned. As a result, all child evacuation programs have been brought to an abrupt halt for now. So I'm terribly sorry that you ladies won't be buying a child today. And now I must ask you to leave immediately. I'm very busy at the moment, in case you didn't notice the packed reception area.”

Priscilla checked her stocking seams. “No need to get snippy, Caroline. We're only trying to help.”

Pia knocked, entered in the nick of time, and showed the Huffs out, just missing Roger, who came to stand in my doorway.

“You'll be happy to know I've granted you a higher security clearance, Caroline.”

I opened my drawer and arranged a row of new Hershey's bars, hoping Roger wouldn't notice my shaking hands. “Whatever for?”

“We've known for a while there are transit camps all over the free zone. They've been herding in foreigners. Jews mostly, but not exclusively. Now there are reports of transports out to camps in Poland and other places. I was wondering if you could take it on.”

I swiveled to face Roger. “Take on what, exactly?”

“We need to figure out where they're going. Who. How many. What they've been arrested for. I'm tired of telling people I don't know what's happened to their families.”

“Of course I'll do it, Roger.”

I would have access to classified information, a ringside seat to the events in Europe. No more having to wait for
The New York Times
to get the news. Maybe some new intelligence would surface about Paul.

“It's hard to ask this of you with no paycheck in return.”

“Don't worry about it, Roger. Mother and I are fine.” Truth was, Father had left us comfortable, but we still had to watch our pennies. We had a few income trickles, and a few assets we could sell. And there was always the silver.

When we closed for lunch that afternoon, I ran downstairs to the Librairie de France bookstore just off the Channel Gardens, borrowed every atlas they had, went back to my office, and lunged into a whole new world of classified information. British reconnaissance photos. Confidential documents. Pia dumped files on my desk, and I lost myself in research about the camps. Transit camps in the free zone. Gurs. Le Vernet. Argelès-sur-Mer. Agde. Des Milles. The surveillance photos were disturbing, detailed, and voyeuristic, like peering into someone's backyard.

I organized the camps into folders and soon discovered a whole new classification in addition to transit camps.

Concentration camps.

I taped a map to my office wall and peppered it with pins as we were notified of new camps. Roger fed me the lists, and I kept track. Soon Austria, Poland, and France were dotted with red pins, as if sick with scarlet fever.

Months went by without another letter from Paul. With the Nazis running roughshod over France, it was hard not to imagine the worst. Roger passed on news from abroad. At first the French had adopted a wait-and-see attitude about the Germans. As Nazi officers requisitioned the best restaurant tables, Parisians did their best to simply ignore them. Paris had been occupied before, after all. They seemed to be hoping it would all go away.

Never particularly good at taking a hint, the Nazis started requisitioning the best charcuterie and wine for themselves and announced their plan to relocate Paris's entire fashion industry to Hamburg. After all this, and once the Nazis started rounding up French citizens with no warning, we received reports that said small resistance groups had started to crystallize here and there in Paris and distribute anti-German leaflets, laying the groundwork for an effective intelligence network. Less than a week after we received these first reports, there was a sharp increase in reports of underground activity all over France.

I
HAD MY ORPHAN WORK
to keep me busy, and Mother was a tireless partner for the cause. One evening I pulled everything out of the guest-room closets at the apartment searching for garments we could dissect and transform into orphan clothes, while Mother stitched together the few decent pieces of material we had.

The guest room was a curious combination of Mother and Father, for it had once been his study and retained a masculine air with its striped wallpaper and ebonized partners desk, but had later become Mother's sewing room and bore the remnants of her projects: tissue-thin amber dress patterns flung about; padded Wolf dress forms of assorted sizes, unfortunately growing less wasp-waisted over the years.

I hauled out Mother's rummage sale bags and our winter woolens, scrounging for soft scraps of material. I've never shown aptitude for sewing, and it's just as well since it's ruinous to good posture, but Mother was a brilliant seamstress. She sat at her sewing machine, head bent over the old black Singer, her hair white in the lamp's arc of light. Once Father died, her dun-colored hair had turned the color of Epsom salts almost overnight. She had cut it short, started wearing mostly riding clothes, and put her rouge away. She'd always loved her horses and was more comfortable with a currycomb than a silver one, but it was sad to see such a beautiful woman give up on herself.

We listened to war news on the radio as we worked.

April 19, 1941. While Belfast, Northern Ireland, sweeps up after a heavy Luftwaffe raid, London has suffered one of the heaviest air raids of the war to date. As German troops advance into Greece, Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis takes his own life, and the British evacuate Greece.

“Oh, do turn it off, Caroline. There's so little hopeful news.”

“At least we've stuck a toe in the war.”

Though still officially a neutral nation, the United States had finally begun sea patrols in the North Atlantic.

“To think of Hitler running about what's left of the Parthenon,” Mother said. “Where will it stop?”

I slipped a seam ripper into the tin sand pail Mother used as a catchall for bobbins and scissors and felt metal meet grit. There was still sand at the bottom of it, from the beach at Mother's family's Gin Lane cottage in Southampton. Such a lovely beach. I could see Mother and Father there—she in black bathing costume, he in suit and tie, wrestling with his newspaper in the wind, the salt air pricking at my lungs. At night, in the chiaroscuro of the vast living room, I would pretend to read, one cheek to the cool linen sofa, and watch them play gin rummy, laughing and drinking each other in.

“Let's go out to Southampton, Mother. A change of pace will do us good.” We had sold the Gin Lane cottage by then, but Betty still kept a house there.

“Oh no, it's full of New Yorkers now.”

“You're a New Yorker, Mother.”

“Let's not bicker, dear.” She avoided the beach. It brought back memories of Father for her too.

“I suppose we can't leave now anyway. The orphanages will be desperate for warm clothes once the weather turns colder.”

“You can still post your comfort boxes through the mail?”

“The Germans encourage people to send help for the orphans and even to those in transit camps. Keeps costs down for them.”