The Levy family sailed for America on the first Wednesday in June.
“We’ll write to you, Madame LeClair, we promise,” Georges said, squeezing her hands and then kissing both of her cheeks.
“Will you come to visit us? In America?” Suzanne asked, her eyes wet as she hugged Elise goodbye.
“I will one day,” Elise said, though she wasn’t sure the words were true. Still, she would miss the children terribly, and she knew she would regret it if they had become adults by the time she saw them again. Time moved too swiftly, too relentlessly. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you need?”
“Elise, you have given us more than enough,” Ruth said. She put a hand on each of Elise’s arms and looked into her eyes as Suzanne stepped back. “You kept my children safe and helped bring me back to life. You have already given me the greatest gift anyone could give.”
“You have done the same for me,” Elise said. “You gave me a place to belong.”
Ruth waited until Elise was looking at her again. “We will always be your family, my friend. Always.”
Elise nodded, too choked up to reply, and then she watched as Ruth, Georges, and Suzanne, the only people she had left in the world, turned and walked toward the ship that would bring them to a new life, one that did not include her.
She took the train back to Paris the next day and went straight to Monsieur Vasseur’s gallery on her way home. “Ships,” she said when he opened the door to her. He looked at her blankly, but she pressed ahead. “If I could sculpt great ships, the kind that take souls away from us, would you be able to sell them?”
In his eyes, she could see his mental calculations unfolding. “I believe I could. People like ships.”
“Good.” She was already imagining the way her hands would find the vessels in the grain of the wood, the way she would make the passengers wisps with wings. The sculptures would represent the actual departing of people—like the Levy family—to another land, but also the crossing from this world into the next, and the irreversible movement of time, passengers moving forward with the tide whether they like it or not.
“Madame LeClair?” Monsieur Vasseur interrupted her train of thought, and her attention snapped back to him.
“Yes?”
“Are you all right?”
She forced a smile. Just as she changed blocks of wood into something different, perhaps she could shape herself, too, chiseling the edges, stripping away the grief. “Perfectly fine, thank you,” she said. “I’ll have some new work for you next week.”
“Very well.” Monsieur Vasseur smiled back at her, but he couldn’t hide his concern, and Elise turned away quickly before she had to face her reflection in his eyes.
She knew, even before she had ascended the stairs to her apartment, which now lay silent and empty, that the first piece of wood would transform in her hands to become the ship that had carried Juliette and Lucie away, wherever they were.
Maybe if her hands could find them in the wood, there was still hope. She had to know what had happened to Mathilde—what her last months had been like, whether she’d died alone, whether she’d missed her mother—but more than that, she needed to make sure Lucie was all right.
Five years earlier, Elise had shown up at Juliette’s door and begged her friend to protect Mathilde. It was more than anyone should ask, but Elise hadn’t had a choice. Juliette had said yes without hesitation, and even through the fog of her own grief, Elise had known then that she was making a pact that could never be broken. Juliette had been there to help her child; Elise would always owe the same to Lucie.
The girl would be seven years old now, four years older than Mathilde would ever be. She was still out there, still alive, and Elise wouldn’t be able to rest until she found her and made sure she was all right.
PART III
Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.
—DANTE ALIGHIERI, INFERNO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
September 1960
Until the day Ruth Levy walked in and ruined everything, Juliette Foulon had managed to build a life that was exactly the way she wanted it to be.
Well, not exactly, of course. Exactly would have been living a life where Paul, Antoinette, and her boys were still alive. Claude would be twenty-five now, Antoinette, twenty-four, and Alphonse, twenty-three. Juliette couldn’t imagine them as adults, and it hurt too much to force herself to try. They were forever frozen in her mind at the ages they were when they were taken from her. Claude would always be eight, and when he came to her now, dancing on wisps of light, his smile was just as bright as it had been in the seconds before the bomb fell. Alphonse had just turned six when he died, and he would forever stay that way, innocent and laughing. Antoinette would always be an infant, so tiny she could nearly fit into Juliette’s palm, and sometimes, Juliette held out her hand to catch the sunshine streaming through the windowpanes and imagined that the warmth there was the weight of her sparrow daughter.
And Paul. Oh, her Paul. Fifteen years her senior, he would be sixty-three now, his skin creased with time, his laugh lines deeper. She could hardly imagine it. But she had aged, too—impossibly, she was forty-eight, two years older than Paul had been when he died—and each time she saw herself in the mirror, she looked quickly away, rejecting the passage of time. But she could not forget that she was seventeen years and an ocean away from her buried family. All she had now were Lucie and memories of a life that no longer existed.
She had remarried, not for love, but because that was what her mother had done, what she herself was expected to do. She had become quite adept at doing what was expected, and she found it easier than trying to chart her own course. It was, she supposed, one of the things that had appealed to her most when Arthur Lawrence Wolcott, a wealthy industrialist old enough to be her father, had proposed marriage four months into her stay in New York.
She and Lucie had moved in with her aunt Sally—her father’s sister—who lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The old woman hadn’t been too pleased to have them, but for goodness’ sake, she had a three-bedroom apartment just a few blocks from the park, and she was living there alone. She let them know at every opportunity what an inconvenience it was to have two quiet, shell-shocked houseguests, and that she expected them to move out just as soon as Juliette found work. But Juliette found Arthur first, and that had been that.
Arthur later told her that he’d been drawn to her when he spotted her hurrying across the park one day because she was so effortlessly beautiful, a knockout without even trying. She remembered it differently; she’d been wearing the only nice dress she owned and was on her way back from yet another unsuccessful job interview. No one, it seemed, wanted a shopgirl on the wrong side of thirty.
Arthur stopped her as he passed and asked spontaneously if she would care to accompany him to lunch, and because she hadn’t eaten since the previous day, she said yes, though she didn’t know him from Adam.
“My husband died,” she found herself telling him over a tender steak at an upscale French bistro on East Sixtieth, where he’d brought her after she told him she’d spent years living in France.
“I’m very sorry. He died in the war, I imagine?”
She’d nodded, looking down so she would not need to explain.
“A hero, then, God rest his soul. My wife passed, too,” Arthur said. “I’ve been surprised to find myself quite lonely since she’s been gone.”
“You should know I still love my husband,” she blurted out, already feeling guilty for accepting a free steak under false pretenses. “And I have a daughter.”
He’d chewed thoughtfully before saying, “Children can be amusing.”
Later, when he’d called her aunt’s apartment to ask her on another date, she had been perplexed. “I told you how I feel about my husband, though.”
“Yes, but I suppose we all come with complications,” he’d said. “And to be frank, Juliette, I’ve had the love of my life. Now, I’d simply like someone to have a nice meal with once in a while. You strike me as an intelligent woman, and that’s something I value.”
She hadn’t known what to say to that, but he had clearly taken her silence as a tacit agreement, for in the weeks to come, he wooed her with flowers and fine dinners, and he had even brought dolls for Lucie to play with and chocolates for her to eat. He proposed marriage on a snowy day in January, on a carriage ride through the park.
“But I’ve told you, Arthur, I still love my husband,” she had said quietly.
“And I still love my wife. But they’re both gone, Juliette, and I enjoy your company. I have the means to give you a good life, you know.”