“Madame LeClair?”
She looked through the doorway to the large front parlor where, to her astonishment, she saw Suzanne Levy seated beside her brother, Georges, both of them reading books. She gasped and took a few steps toward them, catching the children in her arms as they threw themselves at her, all of them talking over each other. Finally, they wriggled out of her grasp and stood grinning at her.
Both had sprouted since she had seen them last, and Georges, who was now nearly thirteen, stood nearly as tall as Elise. Both children looked malnourished, dark circles under their eyes, hair hanging in strings around their narrow faces. But they were here, and they were alive. “Georges,” she whispered, reaching out to touch his face, and then his sister’s. “Suzanne.”
“Is it really you, Madame LeClair?” Suzanne said. “Where is Mathilde? How are Madame Foulon, and Lucie and Claude and Alphonse?”
The jubilation of finding the children was replaced immediately with a deep swell of grief, and Elise put her hands over her mouth to keep a sob in as she tried to force a smile. Georges and Suzanne had already seen too much sadness, and with their own mother still missing—which she must have been, if they were here in the orphanage—they didn’t need to shoulder her grief, too. “Mathilde did not survive,” Elise managed to say without breaking, though she could hear the wobble in her voice. “There was a bomb…”
And then, despite her best effort, she was crying, and Suzanne’s arms were around her waist, pulling her into a tight hug. After a moment, Georges wrapped his arms around both of them, and they stood like that for a full minute, drawing comfort from each other.
When they pulled away, Elise explained what had happened to the bookstore, adding that Juliette and Lucie had disappeared.
Suzanne stared at Elise in disbelief. “And Madame Foulon left no word for you?”
Elise could only shake her head. “I assume she thought I had died, too. There isn’t a day I don’t think of her, though, and worry for her and for Lucie.”
“I am sure she thinks of you, too,” Suzanne said.
Elise wiped her tears away and forced a smile. This was, after all, a joyous reunion, even with all they’d lost. The children had, like Elise, survived the war against the odds.
“Madame LeClair?” Georges asked after a moment. “Have you had any news of our mother?”
His voice was high with hope, and Elise hated that she had to let them down. “I have been checking often, but there are many people still missing. I feel certain that she will return for you.” She didn’t know why she had said it, for she had begun to lose hope that Ruth Levy was still alive. The sadness in Georges’s eyes was deep as an ocean, and in that moment, Elise made a decision. “Come, children. I will sort things out with the OSE, and we will go to my apartment. You will be safe with me until your mother comes home.”
Suzanne accepted this with a teary nod, and after Georges nodded his assent, too, Elise went off to speak to the woman in charge of the orphanage, who would push back because Elise was not Jewish, but who would have to see that the children would be loved and that she would promise to honor their past and their heritage until their mother returned.
* * *
Georges and Suzanne slipped easily into Elise’s life, sharing the room that had once been Olivier’s studio. It would have been easier to give them Mathilde’s old room, but Elise couldn’t bear to change a thing about it. Each night, when sleep eluded her, she crept into her studio and by candlelight added clouds or stars or wisps of smoke to the sky, keeping it alive and ever changing. Georges and Suzanne seemed to understand that more than anything, Elise needed to continue living in the past.
They told her that they’d spent most of the latter half of the war on a farm in Saint-Agrève, where they helped out with chores along with two other children, and were rewarded with a warm place to sleep, food to eat, and false papers that declared them Christian. Their mother’s choice to send them away had saved them.
As the summer rolled on, Elise bought them new clothes, cooked for them, and promised that she would enroll them in school in the autumn, but they were all living in a fog of grief. She could never take the place of their mother, and they could never fill the gaping hole in her heart that Mathilde had left behind. They were puzzle pieces that didn’t fit and never would. But she could give them her love, and by late that summer, they were a family, cobbled together from the remnants of loss, glued fast by grief.
Elise wrote sixteen letters to Constant Bouet in New York, inquiring after the works that had disappeared from her apartment, but he never replied, and by late July, the funds Monsieur Vasseur had given her had nearly run out.
“I must go to the gallery,” Elise said one day over a meager breakfast of bread and preserves. It was still impossible to obtain real coffee, but she’d found a grocer who sold a convincing duplicate made of acorn and chicory, and with a bit of milk, it was possible to swallow it.
Georges took a gulp of his small glass of milk. “We are out of money, aren’t we?”
Elise looked away. “It’s nothing for you to worry about,” she said lightly. The children had already been forced into early adulthood; she couldn’t bear the thought of burdening them with this, too.
“I will find work,” Georges said, sitting up a little straighter.
“You are thirteen, Georges.” She reached across the table and put her hand on his. “Please, don’t worry. I will come up with a solution.”
The obvious answer was that she should sell the apartment. They didn’t need a space this large, and it would fetch them enough to keep them comfortable for some time. But that would mean losing her last physical connection to Mathilde, the place she’d brought her newborn daughter home to, the place she’d nursed her, the place she’d imagined the future she would have. She couldn’t do it.
After breakfast, she walked confidently to the Galerie Constant Bouet, noting that Olivier’s paintings still hung in the window. Just before eleven in the morning, Monsieur Vasseur arrived to open up, and when he saw her, he stopped and stared.
“Madame LeClair,” he said, his smile tight. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I’m supporting two children now, and I’m afraid I’m nearly out of money,” she blurted out, not bothering to sugarcoat it. “I need a job, Monsieur Vasseur. Is there any chance I could work here as an assistant?”
“I do wish I could help you.” He frowned. “But Madame LeClair, this gallery is hanging on by a thread. People simply do not have the funds, or desire, to acquire art at the prices we reasonably ask.”
“Can’t you offer my husband’s paintings for a bit less?”
He looked horrified. “And sell off the last remaining works by one of Paris’s greatest artists for a song? Surely not, Madame LeClair.”
She bristled at his description of Olivier, whose ego would have ballooned at such words. Olivier hadn’t been considered one of the city’s greatest artists while he was alive; it seemed unreasonable that death should elevate him. “Please, I’m begging for your help,” she said.
Monsieur Vasseur studied her skeptically for a long moment. “You are an artist, too, yes? I believe Monsieur Bouet said as much.”
“I was.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Madame LeClair, artists don’t simply cease to be.”
“But when their hearts are broken, things change, you see.”
“With all due respect, Madame LeClair, grief has shaped some of our greatest artists. They simply learned to harness that pain.” He said it clinically, as if creating art from a well of sadness wouldn’t be like poking oneself in the eye again and again. “What is your medium?” He looked hungry now, a predator sniffing out a potential source of income.
“I was a wood-carver.”
“Well, do you have any of your old pieces for me?” He took a step closer, his eyes gleaming. “I could evaluate them to determine their merit. You are not known like your husband, but perhaps the cachet of the LeClair name…”
So she would be sold not on the basis of her talent but on the strength of her dead husband’s famous name. It rankled her, but it mattered little, for there were no works of art to be handed over anyhow. “When our apartment was looted, they took everything.”
“Yes, of course, all your husband’s paintings. You’ve said this.”
“And nearly all my carvings, too.” Her heart ached as she thought of Mathilde’s face, sculpted again and again, pieces she had never sold for they were too personal.
“They took your work?” He seemed to be evaluating her. “So the Germans saw something in you. They thought your work was worth bringing home to their führer.”
She didn’t say anything; his obvious surprise was insulting, as was the fact that he was only looking at her this way now because German thugs had found her work desirable.