Page 20 of The Velvet Hours
Alight drizzle was falling when I left my grandmother’s apartment. The hours had evaporated between us as I listened closely while she took me back nearly forty years, to when she first had held the priceless strand of pearls in her young hands.
But now, as I stepped outside her building and walked toward the Métro, I noticed an unfamiliar amount of commotion. Men and women were huddling on street corners, and gripping newspapers. From the cafés I could hear the radios blaring. I stopped for a moment and bought a paper from a boy on the corner. The front page, in large black and white letters, announced Hitler’s latest advancement. Germany had invaded Poland. A photograph of him on the pulpit, his hand raised and his face twisted with rage, cemented my feelings of dread. Grandmother’s apartment slipped away from me as I hurried home.
I ran up the stairs of our apartment and found refuge inside,quickly taking off my sweater and placing my bag and newspaper down on the kitchen table. Outside, I could hear the patter of rain striking the iron balcony.
I had just walked to the stove and lit a match under the burner to boil some water when my father came through the door.
“Solange?” He had not been as lucky as I with the rain. He stood there, drenched. Hanging from his hand was a newspaper, the pages soaked through.
I could hear how worried he was just by the sound of his voice.
“Yes, I’m here...” I walked toward him. He was peeling off his wet suit jacket.
“So you’ve heard, then...”
“Yes. But what does it mean?”
I watched as he considered my question. His eyes were closed. I could see the pink circle of skin where his hair had thinned.
“It means Hitler has his eyes on far more than just Austria and the Sudetenland.” His face looked ashen and I felt a shiver run through me.
He gestured toward the radio and I went at once to turn it on.
We pulled out our chairs and sat down at the dining room table.
That evening we ate with hardly a word between us. The radio broadcast the news that Germany had violated its previous agreement and had invaded Poland.
“This will mean another world war.” Father shook his head. “All those lives lost in the last one, and now another with hardly a reprieve.” His eyes darkened and sorrow washed over him. “I don’t think France can endure another battle against the Boche,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “But I think the next headline we will hear shall be that we have no other choice than to declare war.”
The brutality France had endured during the last war had been so extreme that there wasn’t a Frenchman in the country who didn’t fear the possibility of another conflict. The German army hadbrought us to our knees. The trench warfare had been horrific. Many of my classmates were born never knowing their fathers or having one who was maimed.
I knew little about my father’s experience in the Great War except for a few bits and pieces, most of which were told to me by my mother. I knew he had spent the last months of his deployment in a military hospital near Verdun administering morphine to hundreds of wounded soldiers. He never spoke of these men, whose wounds and amputations no doubt required his constant attention. But I knew, having heard him cry out from nightmares during my childhood, that he carried his memories of these shattered men deep inside him. And it was on those nights when these men and their wounds returned to him, thatMamandid her best to soothe my father back to sleep.
In some ways, I believed my mother had saved him from his secret pain. That she had brought light back into a life that would have remained shut and otherwise dark.
She had told me the story of their courtship in various chapters over my childhood. I knew they had met in the months just after the war in a small bookshop off the Boulevard Saint-Germain. She was holding a copy ofMadame Bovarywhen his shoulder struck against hers. She had been so caught off guard by their collision that she lost her grip on the novel and it came tumbling to the ground.
“Beware of rat poisoning... ,” he said, referencing the novel as a shy attempt to make light of an awkward situation.
It seemed her laughter bolstered his bravado, and they spent the next hour looking through the labyrinth of bookshelves together. My mother, for popular nineteenth-century novels. My father, for treatises on natural remedies and cures.
It wasn’t until after her death, when I studied my notebook and tried to see beyond their quiet courtship and marriage, that I searched for clues that would reveal his true feelings for my mother.
I closed my eyes and recalled how, shortly after my mother’s death, I had found him standing in front of her bookshelf, his hands deep within his pockets. He stood there staring at the apparent disorganization, never once trying to reconfigure anything on the shelves. He simply left her collection just as she had maintained it, embracing what was left of her spirit in the varied bindings on the shelves. And as that memory came flooding back to me, I saw clearly the depth of his love.
***
Neither my father nor I spoke as the radio blared news of Germany’s latest invasion.
My father’s face was grave. I watched as he placed his head in his hands. For much of my life, my head had been crowded with words. But now they escaped me.
When I left him to go to my room, he was still sitting at the table listening to the broadcast be repeated time and time again.
That night, when I went to bed, my thoughts wandered back to my grandmother. I had never seen a radio in her parlor. Nor a newspaper on the table. I wondered if she had even heard the news about the invasion. And if she did, whether it would affect her at all.
9.
Solange
