“Father’s introducing me to movie people,” Leena said.
“Au revoir, Caroline.” Paul kissed me on each cheek, the familiar scratch of his beard, my hair shirt. “How about you write me back this time? At some point, even I give up.”
“You haven’t changed,” I said.
He smiled. “I guess somewhere in a corner of our hearts, we are always twenty.”
Paul disappeared into the crowd, and I felt the old rip of him leaving, but this time it was a little easier somehow. Had that just happened? Paul’s daughter had invited me to Paris?
I escaped into a cab after a bellboy heaved my gift bag into the trunk, its contents already earmarked for charity. As the cab drove off, I caught a glimpse of Paul in the crowd and felt a rush of retrouvailles, another one of those words that do not translate into English, which means “the happiness of meeting someone you love again after a long time.” I hugged myself there in the back of the cab, fine with going home alone.
Would he write? Maybe. I might even write back if I had time.
—
THE FOLLOWING DAY I took Rosemary Gaynor’s advice and called Norman Cousins, famed editor of the Saturday Review, hoping to chat with him for a moment in his office. Perhaps have him mention the Polish women in his magazine. He suggested I come by that afternoon.
I sat in the reception area paging through the newspaper. I turned to the society page by habit and saw a full page of photos of the April in Paris Ball. Just under a picture of Marilyn Monroe and the British ambassador, his gaze fixed upon her décolletage, was a photo of Paul and me. I just about fell off my lobby chair. Though his tuxedo was cut in the European style, a bit too nipped at the waist, and my train was soiled, we did make a reasonably handsome couple. The caption read: Miss Ferriday and Paul Rodierre, back on Broadway?
I was still reeling from seeing the photo when the receptionist ushered me down a hallway past oversized prints of Saturday Review covers in aluminum frames to a conference room. Norman had gathered his staff at the long conference table, a yellow legal pad at each place.
“Nice to meet you, Caroline,” Norman said, as he stood to greet me. It was impossible not to be charmed by his old-fashioned good looks and generous smile. Though even the simplest bow tie can be most unbecoming on the wrong man, Norman wore his madras butterfly with aplomb. “You have our undivided attention for a whole five minutes.”
Norman went to the far end of the room and leaned against the wall. I was thrown for a moment to be in the presence of such a distinguished editor, known around the world. All at once the butterflies in my stomach would not settle, and my mouth went dry. I summoned Helen Hayes’s advice, which had always helped me onstage: “Don’t be boring. Use your whole body.” I drew myself up and started strong.
“Mr. Cousins, since you and your wife have raised a considerable amount of money for the Hiroshima Maidens—” I paused and looked about the room. Norman’s staff was anything but attentive. They fidgeted with their watches and pens and wrote on their pads. How could a person communicate with such a distracted audience? “I thought you might be equally interested in this group of women in similar circumstances.”
“These are Polish women?” Norman asked, playing with his handheld tape recorder.
“I’m afraid I can’t continue without your full attention, Mr. Cousins. I need to use the little time we have effectively, you see.”
Norman and his staff leaned forward, all eyes on me. I had my audience.
“Yes, Polish women, Catholics, political prisoners arrested for their work with the Polish underground. Held as prisoners at Ravensbrück concentration camp, Hitler’s only major concentration camp for women, and used for medical experimentation. There was a special Doctors Trial at Nuremberg, but the world has forgotten the victims, and there’s been no help or support for the ones who survived.”
Norman averted his gaze and looked out the window to the taupe stone rectangles and water towers of Gotham that filled the view ten stories up. “I don’t know if our readers will be up for another campaign so soon, Miss Ferriday.”
“The Hiroshima project isn’t even off the books yet,” said a man built like a pipe cleaner, his Dave Garroway glasses at least two sizes too big for his face. I knew him by sight as Walter Strong-Whitman, a man who attended our church, though we’d never been introduced.
“These women were operated upon in a complex series of experiments,” I said.
I passed a series of eight-by-ten glossies around the table and watched the staffers’ faces as they passed each photo on to the next person, revulsion turning to horror.
Norman stepped to the table. “My God, Caroline, these barely look like legs. This one is missing whole bones and muscles. How can they walk?”
“Not well, as you can imagine. They hopped about the camp. That, in part, is why they were called the Rabbits. That and the fact that they served as the Nazis’ laboratory animals.”
“How did they even make it home to Poland?” Norman asked.
“However they could. The Swedish Red Cross rescued some. Some were sent home by train when Russians liberated the camp.”
“What are their immediate needs?” Norman asked.
I stepped closer to Norman. “They are having terrible trouble in Poland, behind the Iron Curtain with little access to modern medical care and no help from the German government.”
“The Iron Curtain,” Mr. Strong-Whitman said with a laugh. “We have no place messing with all that—”
“West Germany has compensated other deportees, but not the Rabbits, since they don’t recognize Communist Poland as a country. Some have died from the simplest conditions we can cure here.”
“I don’t know, Caroline,” Norman said. “The Russians aren’t cooperating with anyone these days.”
“Why should these girls have to suffer because their oppressors won’t allow them to leave the country?”
“Murphy got into East Germany for the United Airlines story,” one young staffer said.
“This might work as a travel piece,” said a woman in a handsome houndstooth jacket.
“The Pan Am client might help,” said another.
“This is a terrible idea, Norman,” Strong-Whitman said. “We can’t go to our readers for every little thing, on the dole for this and that. Our readers couldn’t care less about Poland.”
“Why don’t we find out?” I said.
“This is a literary magazine, Miss Ferriday,” Strong-Whitman said. “We can’t be expected to cover the pet charity story of every clubwoman in New York.”
Clubwoman? I took a deep breath.
“You can maintain high standards and still aid the disadvantaged. Norman has proven that with the Maidens.”
“We can run a piece in Lifestyle and offer an address for donations,” Norman said. “Nothing too fancy, mind you. Maybe a page.”
“This country’s charitable muscle has atrophied,” Strong-Whitman said. “It has been how many years since the war ended? Twelve? No one will give.”
“What address should we print?” asked a young woman with a steno pad.
“The Hay, Main Street, Bethlehem, Connecticut,” I said.
Were they really doing this? Every muscle relaxed.
“Sure you want mail sent to your home address, Miss Ferriday?” the woman asked.
“How’s the post office in Bethlehem?” Norman asked. “Can they handle some extra mail?”
I thought of our postmaster, Earl Johnson, white as Wonder Bread in his summer pith helmet and khaki shorts, often thrown by a misspelled surname.
“Why, it’s first-rate,” I said. “They are inundated with mail every year, since everyone wants the Bethlehem stamp cancellation on their Christmas cards. Our post office can handle this.”
“Bethlehem it is,” Norman said. “Congratulations, Caroline. Let’s see if we can bring your Rabbits to America.”
—