When he had sought her out just before the ceremony began, he had seen that she was not entirely surprised to see him—even though she started a bit when she first looked into his face. The ceremony was impressive and moving, he thought, particularly the flyby by the Belgian Air Force, and the priest making the sign of the cross on his father's engraved name. After the ceremony, she asked him to come to her house for a cup of coffee. And it was then, in her kitchen, with a weak sun slanting through the windows, that she'd begun her story—with her low voice and her accent.
She'd been talking for hours.
When she finished, it was some minutes before he could speak.
“Why did Henri kill the German guards?” he asked quietly.
She turned sideways in her chair, crossed her legs. She had one elbow on the table still; in her other hand, she held a glass. “I did not know th$$ until after the war. The war was terrible for Henri. He was afraid, as I am telling you. I think he wished to show to himself he had the courage.”
She took a small sip of wine.
“After the war,” she said, “I am discovering that when Antoine is escaped from The school, Henri is stopped. He is tortured, or I think he is threatened with the torture, and when he is let go and he returns to Antoine, he has … turned. Yes?”
“A spy,” Tom said. “A double agent.”
“Yes. He is making the bargain: His life and my life for the information.”
“You said there are no bargains,” he said quietly.
“Yes, and I am correct in this. The Germans, they shoot Henri before the war is over, when he has given them the pilot and helped to make the new escape line. And when he is not telling them where the pilot was hidden.”
“He never gave them you.”
“No.”
“But you were picked up.”
“Yes. For the interrogation. But I have not the execution.”
“You went to Ravensbrück.”
She was hard of hearing in her left ear, and when Tom spoke she turned her head so that her good ear was toward him.
“No. That day I am telling you of I am put into a truck. But this truck is last in the convoy, and is something wrong with it, and is not starting. So we are taken off and put back in the Old Antwerp Prison. I was very disappointed that day, but later I see that I am having the luck after all. I stay in Antwerp Prison for three months more, and then I am taken to Antwerp train station for the deportation, and at train station all the women I am with, we are let go. I have never know why.”
Tom looked around at the room they were in. The castiron stove was still intact, but the cabinets and appliances were white and new and distinctly European; they fit together like an expertly designed puzzle. The stone floor, he guessed, was probably the same as had been there in his father's day, and behind the white cabinets was a wallpaper with small bouquets in a seemingly random pattern. Had that been the paper when his father was in this room? On the marble mantel were a crucifix and two silver candlesticks.
He was sitting with one hand on the lace cloth. He couldn't hide his curiosity. He lifted up the cloth and felt the table with his fingers. He pushed the cloth farther back. The table was oak and scarred.
Across the table, Claire Daussois turned back towa$$$ him, put down her glass, and brought her folded hands to her mouth. She seemed to be studying him, making a decision.
After a time, she stood up.
“Would you like to meet my daughter?” she asked.
He sensed it was not really a question. She waited for him to stand, and indicated he should follow her. The narrow corridor into which she led him was darkened, but he was aware of an elaborate wallpaper of street scenes, a crucifix on the wall, and a shallow bookcase with framed photographs. She stopped at the threshold of a room, softly called a name, and said a few words. He heard a television in the background. Gently, Claire pushed open the door. She held the door back and leaned against it, an invitation to him. He turned and looked into the room.
The woman in the chair had his father's face and his eyes. The resemblance was so acute, he felt a stab of pain, as though he'd stumbled into a room and found his father still alive. He put his fist to his mouth.
Her hair was cut short and graying slightly, the way dark blondes tend to do. She was sitting in a rocker, her hands folded in her lap, and when she looked at him, her face melted into a sweet and girlish smile—the smile of a child. Her eyes were guileless with that unique color Tom had seen only in his father; and those eyes, combined with the smile, suggested to him a serene spirit. Though she wore a sweater and a pair of slacks, he had the sense that she was wrapped in a cocoon, and he thought it was perhaps that sense of being surrounded and protected that gave her a nunlike quality.
“This is my daughter, Charmaine. Charmaine …” Claire spoke up when she addressed her daughter. “This is Tom Brice.”
He walked to where the woman was sitting. The images from the TV screen were flickering in the window beside her. She held a hand up to him, and he took it. He could see, even though she was sitting, that she was nearly as tall as he was. Her face was pale and smooth, untouched by the years.
“Bonjour,” he said.
The woman looked a bit flustered.
“She is not speaking very much,” Claire said from the doorway.
He held her hand longer than he needed to. He was bewildered to realize that all the years he'd been alive, she had been alive. Here. In this house. She was forty-nine, he quickly calculated. Three years older than himself. His sister. His half-sister. He bent down and kissed her on the cheek.
She colored instantly and shyly withdrew her hand. Like a child might, she put the flat of her palm on the place where he had kissed her. She murmured something he couldn't make out and looked toward her mother.
“They are starving me in the prison,” Claire said. “When she is in the womb.”
There was a chair behind Tom. He backed up to it and sat down. Claire came and stood beside him. Charmaine turned her attention back to the silent TV screen.
“I’m …” He couldn't continue.
“Yes,” said Claire. “I know.”
“He never knew he had a daughter,” he said slowly.
“When the war is ending, we are trying, all of us$$$ to put those years as far behind us as we can.”
“When my father was liberated from the POW camp,” Tom said, “they brought him out on a stretcher. They shipped him straight home.”
It seemed almost more than Tom could take in. And he knew that if he thought about the sadness of it—of his father never having known he had another child—he would not be able to remain in that room.
“You've been alone all this time?” he asked Madame Daussois.
“Oh no,” she said quickly, leaning against the wall. The room was small. It had a daybed, the TV, a lamp, a dark oak armoire, a table tha$$$Tom could see doubled as a tray. Another crucifix. “I am raising the boy, Jean, along with Charmaine.”
“He never told me, when I met him today at the ceremony, about finding my father in the woods.”
“No. He would not. Is not his way. He is beautiful child growing up. His father is shot after the war, and his mother is leaving the village. And then I am meeting a man, a teacher, from Charleroi, and we are married. We are on holiday in Spain this month, and at first I am not coming to the ceremony. There are many bad memories, and there are some persons in Delahaut who remember Henri as traitor. And though I am living here and am well remembered for what I do in the war, is best, I think, I do not come to the ceremony. But then I change my mind. I am wanting too much to see the monument. And to have the chance of meeting you. My husband is still in Spain.”
She looked at Tom and then looked down. She wrapped her arms around herself.
“I have something,” she said.
She left the room and returned with a photograph in a silver frame. She handed it to him.
It was a picture of his father in a white shirt with a poorly knotted tie. His evasion photo, Tom guessed.
“I am keeping this,” she said. “Sometimes I am showing it to Charmaine and telling her the man is her father. I am never holding the truth from her or from anyone.”
She took the photograph from him, flipped it over to its back to remove the frame. In the backing was another photograph. She offered this picture to him as well.
“It's my mother,” he said with some surprise.
Claire almost smiled and nodded her head. “He is marrying her, then. I am thinking this.”
He looked at the young woman in the picture—his mother a half-century ago. Had his father once told her about Claire Daussois? Or had she somehow guessed?
“They are loving each other?” Claire asked.
“Yes,” he answered, “I’m sure of it.” He gave her back the photograph. “They broke his arm in prison camp,” he told her. “After he went back to America, he flew cargo planes for a while, and then worked as a flight instructor at a small airport near where he grew up. It was hard for him to keep a job, though. He had problems with his lungs as a result of the prison camp. He died in 1960 of pneumonia. Actually, his name isn't on a marker anywhere but here.”
She held the pictures to her chest with both hands. “I have never know,” she said, “if your father is all this time thinking it is me who is betraying him. And I am always sorry about this.”
“I’m sure he didn't believe that,” Tom said quickly
She made a small movement toward the door. It was late, nearly midnight. But he didn't want to leave the room.
“I always knew that the war had changed my father,” he said, “but I was just a boy when he died, and I never really knew why. My mother died in 1979. Luckily the invitation somehow made its way to me.”
“I’m glad.”
“May I come back someday?” he asked. “To see …” He tilted his head toward the woman in the rocking chair, who, all the time that Claire and he had been speaking, had watched the TV screen. He could not yet say her name.
“Yes, of course,” Claire said. “You are welcome always.”
Tom stood up and walked to where his half-sister sat. He touched her on the shoulder and said goodbye. She looked up at him and smiled again, but didn't speak. He wanted once again to kiss her, but he didn't.
Outside her room, Claire and Tom made awkward progress toward the door.
“You have children?” she asked.
“Yes, I have two boys. But I’m divorced.”
“What do you do?”
“I teach high school English—in the town where my father grew up.”
“You don't fly?”
“No.”
“When you are coming here next time, you must bring your boys. Charmaine is aunt?”
He nodded.
“Oh,” she said suddenly. “I am forgetting. On your father's plane is drawing with the name of the plane,
Woman's Home Companion.
When the plane is crashing, as I am telling you earlier, I am hearing of this drawing, and your father is saying he will tell me what it is, but then he is taken ….”
“Woman's Home Companion,”
Tom said. “It was the name of a popular magazine then.”
“Yes. And the drawing?”
How was he to describe the drawing to this Belgian woman? His father had told him when he was twelve, and he had blushed furiously at the time.
“Have you ever seen much of the nose art that was on the war planes then?” he asked.
“Yes. I know these drawings. They are like cartoons, yes? And the women, they are not wearing too much clothes.”
“Well. Yes. But in this drawing …” He stopped, trying to think of a way to put this. “It's a picture of a man's …”
He waited.
“Oh,” she said suddenly, getting it.
“A very large …?”
“Ah, yes,” she said, nodding. She looked a bit shocked.
“Woman's Home Companion,”
she repeated thoughtfully. Then she put her hand to her mouth and looked at him. She began to laugh. It was a wonderful laugh—tickled and scandalized at once. The laugh lit up her face, and he saw that she was beautiful.
He laughed with her, but what he was really thinking about was of all the things our fathers couldn't tell us.
A
NITA
S
HREVE
is the author of several internationally bestselling novels, among them A
Wedding in December; Light on Snow; All He Ever Wanted; Sea Glass; The Last Time They Met; Fortune's Rocks; The Pilot's Wife,
which was a selection of Oprah's Book Club;
The Weight of Water,
which was a finalist for England's prestigious Orange Prize;
Resistance; Where or When; Strange Fits of Passion;
and
Eden Close.
She is a recipient of the PEN/L.L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction.
L
OOK FOR THESE OTHER BESTSELLING NOVELS BY
A
NITA
S
HREVE
A
LL
H
E
E
VER
W
ANTED
“There is something addictive about her literary tales of love and lust …. Shreve is a master at depicting passion's ferocious grip.” —
—USA Today
S
EA
G
LASS
“Shreve has the ability to hook you from the first page, and not let go until the final word.”
—Washington Post Book World
T
HE
L
AST
T
IME
T
HEY
M
ET
“A flat-out, can't-put-it-down page-turner …. A riveting story that teases and confounds as it moves back in time from the end to the start of a love affair.”
—Chicago Tribune
F
ORTUNE'S
R
OCKS
“Fortune's Rocks
kept me reading long into the night—and found me back at it right after breakfast …. Shreve renders an adolescent girl's plunge into disastrous passion with excruciating precision and acuteness.”
—Boston Globe
T
HE
P
ILOT'S
W
IFE
“From cover to rapidly reached cover,
The Pilot's Wife
is beautifully plotted, tensely paced, and thoroughly absorbing.”