Nanée was surprised how quickly they settled into life together at Villa Air-Bel. Each morning, Madame Nouget or T or one of the others took the children to milk the clandestine cow they had acquired, named Madame LaVache-à-Lait for the gallons she produced daily. T—and after the Bretons arrived, Jacqueline too—gave their children big cups of milk each morning, still warm from the cow. They set aside another cup for each child for bedtime, so that even with the rationing—a half pound of pasta and six ounces of rice per person per month, ten ounces of meat and four of fats and cheese per week, and eight ounces of bread per day, all tallied on cheap paper ruled liked bingo cards—they wouldn’t go to sleep hungry. They shared the rest of the milk with the neighborhood mothers who showed up each morning with jugs in hand, generosity born of concern for the children, but also some small insurance against anyone reporting the illegal cow.
Most mornings, Nanée and T and Miriam lingered together out on the belvedere over cups of ersatz, a nice-sounding word to describe a pale liquid brewed from acorns and twigs or, if you were lucky, roasted chicory root or barley made barely tolerable by a little grape-juice sweetener. Rose cleaned up, and Madame Nouget did the shopping, an hours-long chore given the scarcities resulting from so much of France’s food going to the German war effort. A Spanish girl named Maria cared for Peterkin and for Aube Breton while André wrote in one of the greenhouses or the library, the only room in which they kept the fire lit all day, and Jacqueline laid out her paints, and everyone else took the trolley into the CAS office. Varian had taken so quickly to Danny that he’d already made him his chef de cabinet, in charge of the office, and the key person for locating refugees. T, with her flawless French and English, worked with them too.
They gathered again at seven for communal dinners at which the food might be meager but the company never was. Afterward, they read newspapers and listened to the radio, often until the BBC signed off with a rousing rendition of “God Save the King,” for heaven’s sake. They played made-up games, the favorite a simple listing of the ten people you most liked to fantasize being dead. They sang together, with Varian at the piano and Gussie singing enthusiastically. And if the night was clear enough, they returned to that Boston jazz station and rolled up the rugs and danced.
THE VERY DAY the Bretons moved into “the chateau,” as they’d taken to calling the shabby old place, the Surrealists in the area got wind of it and began dropping by at all hours to pay homage to the founder of their movement, forever interrupting André’s work. His solution was to send Gussie to spread the word that he would receive visitors only at a salon he would host, the first of which would be on La Toussaint, the French All Saints’ Day, a holiday meant to honor the poor old saints who didn’t merit their own special day. Anyone who cared to visit was to come between noon and seven to pray to the good saints of the arts, whoever they might be, through food and wine and games.
That morning—a Saint Martin’s summer day, November but still warm enough for shirtsleeves—they set tables and chairs out on the belvedere, with white tablecloths, dishes, and silverware for the scant repast Madame Nouget was able to muster, and quantities of wine. Also long pads of paper, colored pencils and crayons and drawing pens, scissors and paste, and old magazines for the games André meant for everyone to play.
Danny climbed up a ladder Nanée held for him and out onto a branch of a tree. Nanée climbed to a lower rung and handed a painting up to him. Some of André’s friends planning to attend this first salon had contributed works of art the two were now to hang from the trees. Danny took hold of the twine attached to the canvas, leaving the painting itself in Nanée’s hands while he tied the twine around a branch.
“All right,” he said.
“Are you sure it’s secure?”
He gave her a look.
“It’s a Miró, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “I’m not going to be the one to tell André I dropped it ten feet onto rough stone and I’m very sorry but it’s now worthless, never mind how much money it might have fetched to help refugees.”
She carefully let the painting go. It hung at a slight angle, but the ladder was too precarious for her to straighten it, and anyway, she rather liked the tilt.
From this height, she spotted Varian sitting with Dagobert, seeking his advice about whether he ought to get his own dog. Dagobert was as often with the children or one of the others as with Nanée now, as if he’d grown from a toddler always wanting his mother into a teenager who preferred his friends. And his best friend was, oddly, Varian.
Jacqueline Breton appeared below, her bangle bracelets jangling as if to announce the arrival of the mobile she handed up to Nanée—small, dangling black-and-white photos taken by Man Ray, who’d managed to flee Paris for Los Angeles. No color at all, not like the Calders Nanée loved, mobiles first envisioned in Mondrian’s Paris studio thanks to light playing over colored cardboard tacked to the wall much like, Nanée imagined, the sunlight now reflecting from the colored glass adorning Jacqueline’s blond hair.
“A bit of art actually meant to be hung,” Jacqueline said, seeming so much more mature than Nanée even though they were the same age. Because she was married to André, who was fifteen years their senior? Because she was the mother of a five-year-old?
“I think we need to hang you, Jacqueline,” Nanée said, meaning to compliment her hair, but sounding like a complete idiot. “I mean, you look like a work of art yourself.”
“Of course if someone bid on me, we would have to sell me,” Jacqueline answered brightly. “But then you never know. I might just make a fine whore!”
Even as Jacqueline turned back toward the house, Nanée said to Danny, “I have an idea how to get Edouard out of Camp des Milles.”
Danny grinned. “‘Edouard’? That’s awfully chummy, isn’t it?”
Danny had returned late the night before from a trip to Camp des Milles, where he’d managed to bribe one of the guards to allow him to see the list of prisoners. Several of the men on Varian’s list were indeed being held there, including Max Ernst and Hans Bellmer, as was Edouard Moss. “Who is Edouard Moss?” Varian had asked. Moss was well-known in Europe, but not well enough known in the United States to have made Varian’s list.
“We could threaten to go to the press if they don’t release him,” Danny said now. “It worked for Lion Feuchtwanger.”
“Even my mother, who rarely reads, has read The Oppermans,” Nanée said. “Edouard Moss is not Lion Feuchtwanger.”
Madame LaVache-à-Lait mooed somewhere in the distance. They were trying to teach her not to, since she was illegal, but it turned out she was even less compliant than Dagobert.
“We could get a group of artists to raise his visibility, like the French PEN club did for Walter Mehring,” Danny suggested. PEN had written so many letters insisting on the release of Mehring that the writer had been freed.
“That was before Vichy and surrender on demand,” Nanée said. “There aren’t too many people more likely to be on a Gestapo list than Edouard Moss.” Remembering again the individual hatreds Moss photographed that somehow struck more absolute terror in any decent heart than shots of vast Nazi crowds or military parades: the girl saluting Hitler; the man having his nose measured; the son cutting his Orthodox father’s beard. Such ordinary people. They might be you.
With the mobile affixed to the branch, she again descended the ladder, chose another canvas from the stack leaning against the trunk, and climbed the ladder again.