The coat exchange was packed by midmorning when I realized I’d never opened my ration box. Before I could reach for it, an elderly woman approached me.
“Excuse me, Mademoiselle, would you assist me, please?”
She was gaunt but had the bearing of a countess, well dressed in her wool skirt and cardigan and clean white gloves. She wore a faded pink Hermès Saumur scarf fastened with a jeweled partridge brooch, the belly of which was a South Sea pearl. Even in dire circumstances, or perhaps because of them, the women of Paris continued to pull themselves together with unexpected touches, still subscribing to the fashion truism that too much simplicity is timid. In one hand the woman held a white paper package, a malacca walking stick hooked over her wrist. In the other she held the leash of an ebony-colored standard poodle. It was a magnificent animal and, like its owner, thin but beautifully groomed.
“I have brought a coat,” she said.
I took the package, broke the cellophane tape, and lifted out the coat, releasing a musky scent of rose and lavender. I’d seen many lovely garments that day, some with hand-embroidered flower plackets and enameled buttons or glorious rabbit fur linings, but this coat was in a category all its own. Cashmere? It was the color of a robin’s egg and surprisingly heavy, but soft and lined with quilted white satin.
“Thank you for your donation, Madame. Please choose another. We have many good coats, perhaps maybe none as fine as this one—”
“It is lined with goose down. It was made for my granddaughter. Never worn.”
“Help yourself to the rack. What size is your granddaughter now?”
The woman smoothed her hand down the dog’s neck. Upon closer inspection, I saw she’d misbuttoned her cardigan, giving her sweater a cockeyed skew. Her jeweled brooch was missing a diamond. Sold or lost?
“Oh, she is gone. Taken with her mother and brother years ago now. My daughter and one of our maids had been printing leaflets in our pantry.”
The underground.
“I’m so sorry…” My sight blurred. How could I comfort others if I couldn’t control my own emotions?
“I kept it thinking she might come home, but then they took me. Can you imagine? What would they want with an old woman? My housekeeper kept my dog in Saint-Etienne while I was, well, away. He’s my family now.” She shook her head, unable to continue, then straightened. “Perhaps someone can use the coat?”
I returned the coat to the wrapping. “Thank you, Madame. I will make sure it finds a good home. There is hot coffee inside.”
She laid her gloved hand on mine for a long moment, the cotton warm and smooth. “Thank you, dear.”
I pulled a card from my pocket. “This is the ADIR, a charity my mother supports. They help women coming back from, well, from the camps. Run by women who were deportees themselves, out of one of their apartments. Near Le Jardin du Luxembourg.”
“Thank you, Mademoiselle.” She took the card and turned.
“Wait, Madame.” I pulled my K-ration box from beneath the table. “I have an extra. Would you like it?”
She eyed the box. “Oh no, dear, give it to someone more—”
“Please take it.”
“Well, I do have a neighbor—”
I smiled. “A neighbor. Good then. I’m glad it will be well used.”
The woman tucked the box under her arm and made her way out of our little coat exchange, jostled and pushed by the crowd.
There were many such stories that afternoon, and by day’s end I was ready to rest, but the crowds only grew larger. To make things worse, the temperature dropped, making me all too aware of my own coatlessness. Mother had mistakenly added our own coats to her donation piles and carted them off, and as a result I had no outerwear of my own. The wind picked up, blowing coats off their slippery wooden hangers.
I stooped to retrieve a jacket and stopped short as I stood. I couldn’t miss Paul in the crowd, taller than most, working his way toward me. My first instinct was to dive into the crowd myself and avoid seeing him, but who would man the booth? He’d in all probability moved on by now, I thought. Adjusted to his new life. Forgotten me.
As he came closer, it was hard not to notice he looked good in his aubergine velvet jacket. He had been eating, it seemed—still thin but finally filling out.
Paul made his way to me, both of us jostled about by the crowd. He held out a small tweed coat the color of ripe wheat with a wilted tricolor ribbon pinned to the breast. I took it, careful not to touch him. One touch and I’d be back into it all, and the pain would return. It might even be worse.
“Remember me?” he asked.
It had been almost two years since we’d last seen each other at his kitchen table.
“Thank you for your donation, Monsieur. Please choose another.”
It was Pascaline’s coat, of course. Thin and light. A wool-cotton blend? The sleeves had been let down twice, leaving lines, dark as graphite, around each cuff, and two lovely little patches had been sewn into the warp of the tweed with tiny, regular stitches. Rena.
“I’m sorry you have to talk to me, Caroline. You obviously don’t want that.”
“We have many good coats—”
“Would you please look at me?” He passed the fingers of his free hand across his lips. Paul nervous? That was a first. The velvet at the elbow of his jacket was worn. Had Rena not cared enough to mend his too?
Paul reached for my arm. “It’s been terrible without you, C.”
I stepped away. Was he acting? He was good at that, after all.
“You are free to choose any coat…”
Why could I not stop babbling about coats?
Paul stepped closer. “I’m in a bad way, Caroline.”
If he was acting, he was doing a remarkable job. He clearly hadn’t slept anytime recently. Overcome, I turned and held a coatrack to keep it from toppling over in the breeze.
Paul grabbed my wrist and turned me toward him. “Did you even read my letters?”
I shook off his hand. “I’ve been busy. You should see the apartment. Mother’s been boiling cottons on the stove—”
“If you would just read them, you’d know—”
“You should see her on a stool stirring the pot with a canoe paddle.”
I turned away and straightened the coats. He followed.
“So this is it? We’ll never be together again?” He stood taller for a moment.
Misery looked good on Paul. Unshaven, messy, lovely misery. I buttoned a tiny pink coat.
Paul stepped back. “I had to see you when I read you’d be here. Hitchhiked all the way from Rouen.”
“You’d better start back soon. It looks like rain.”
“Is it someone else? I’ve heard you were with a man—”
“What?”
“Holding hands. At Café George. You’re well known, Caroline. Word gets around. You at least owe me an explanation.”
I’d lunched with one of Mother’s admirers, a bearded count from Amiens twenty years my senior. Disconsolate that Mother had little time for him, he’d spent half the lunch with my hand in his, pleading for me to intervene, keeping me from my vichyssoise.
“How can you be so unfeeling, Caroline?”
“Unfeeling?”
“I still can’t even work, and you go about your do-gooding here as if I’m no one to you.”
Do-gooding? I felt my Irish temper rise up my back in warm prickles despite the cold. I turned to face him.
“How unfeeling were you when you decided to have a child?” I said.
“You knew I was married—”
“Incompatible, Paul. You said children complicate things, remember? ‘No place for that in an actor’s life’?”
“Things happen. Adults deal with them. Unless they’re rich and spoiled—”
“Spoiled? Really? Is it spoiled to give up my own happiness for that of a child I don’t even know? Do you have any idea what it’s like waking up every morning knowing you and your family are together and I’m alone? Don’t talk to me about unfeeling.”
It wasn’t until he opened his jacket and wrapped me in velvet that I realized I was shaking.
“Be sensible, Caroline. When will either of us find what we have again?”
“True,” I said into the cotton of his shirt. “You may be the only man left in Paris.”