Madame Levy’s expression was far away as she glanced in the direction of the register, now hidden behind shelves. “She was different then, Lucie.”
Lucie’s eyes felt suddenly damp, and she was torn between defending her mother and bursting into tears at the idea that someone understood that things hadn’t always been this way. She settled for a quiet bit of honesty. “I remember.”
The truth was, she didn’t recall much of her life before the blast at all—but she remembered her mother’s warmth, her hugs, her love. It all felt different now, and sometimes, Lucie wondered if she had dreamed the before, conjured from air a mother who laughed and whose eyes sparkled with pride and affection. But she knew that woman had existed, for there were glimmers of her here and there, always when she talked about the other children.
Claude and Alphonse, whom Lucie had only foggy memories of, must have walked on water, and Antoinette, though she’d lived only thirteen days, had been born a saint. Lucie knew by now that there was nothing she could say or do to live up to memories that grew shinier and more golden with each passing year.
She’d been just three years old when their lives were blown apart. She remembered tumbling into bed with the other children between their mother and their jovial father for story time. She remembered the feel of being sandwiched between all those warm bodies, tickled by Claude, teased by Alphonse, kissed on the top of her head by her father, having her hair smoothed lovingly off her forehead by her mother. She remembered the smell of the store: paper and wood, mixed with the faint scent of her father’s musky cologne. She remembered the tinkling bell that announced the arrival of customers, the knotty wood of the floorboards, the sound of Mathilde’s giggles when they played with dolls together in the corner of the children’s section.
She was not allowed to speak of Mathilde, though, and her mother acted as if the other girl had never existed. She blamed the LeClairs’ daughter for the deaths of the other children; if Papa had not scooped her up, he would have reached the boys, her mother had said more than once. Claude and Alphonse would still be alive.
But how could she possibly know that? And if Claude and Alphonse had lived, would Lucie have died? Is that the outcome her mother would have preferred? Lucie had the sense that her mother’s answer to that question would have been yes. Sometimes she caught her mother staring at her, the look in her eyes not one of maternal love but rather of sheer disappointment.
“I’m sorry,” Madame Levy said now, her tone gentle, and Lucie realized she’d been silent for far too long, lost in her own thoughts. “I’m sorry that things have changed so much. Your mother, I think she is very broken.”
“Yes,” Lucie agreed, looking at the floor and feeling a surge of guilt at her disloyalty.
“She is not alone in this. Many people who lost everything in the war have had trouble moving forward. But I know she loves you very much, dear. A mother’s love never goes away, even if circumstance sometimes forces it into hibernation.”
Lucie smiled slightly at this, the idea that her mother’s love for her would one day reemerge after a long winter’s sleep. It was impossible. “You said you know Madame LeClair?” Lucie asked, changing the subject.
Madame Levy smiled. “She gave us a home after the war. Her kindness, even in the midst of her own pain, made all the difference to my children and me.”
“She is all right?” Lucie asked. “It must have been terrible for her to find out that Mathilde did not survive.”
Madame Levy’s smile was sad, distant. “I do not think she has recovered from it. I’m not sure a mother ever does.”
Saddened by the thought, Lucie changed the subject. “What happened to you during the war, Madame Levy?” Lucie asked. Rapt in horrified attention, she fought tears as Madame Levy told a sparse story of being deported to a camp in Poland while her children moved from safe house to safe house.
“I’m so sorry that such things happened to you,” she whispered when Madame Levy finished her story, and she knew the words were terribly inadequate. She had read about concentration camps in school, but she had never known someone who had endured such things. Had her mother been so lost in her own grief that she had never stopped to consider what had happened to her old friend? “I’m very sorry I didn’t know,” she added.
“My dear, you were just a child.” Madame Levy paused. “Do you remember Madame LeClair well?”
Lucie tried to conjure an image of the woman, but she couldn’t do it. She shook her head. “I remember Mathilde,” she said. “She was a sister to me.”
“You were very young when her mother left her with your family.”
“My mother doesn’t like me to talk about her.” She swallowed, guilt thickening her tongue. She didn’t know what was making her speak against her mother this way, only that it felt like a relief to tell someone who had known them.
“It is hard to hold on to childhood memories we are forbidden from having,” Madame Levy said after a moment. “You should know, though, that Madame LeClair is a very kind woman who is broken, much like your mother is, but in different ways.”
Lucie couldn’t imagine that there were many other ways to break, for it seemed that her mother had shattered in every manner possible. But she felt truly sorry for Madame LeClair, who had lost everything, too. “Is she… stuck in the past? Like my mother is?”
“Not exactly. I think Madame LeClair is drowning in regret. She believes that if she had brought Mathilde with her, Mathilde would still be alive today. She feels she made the greatest mistake any mother could make. And there is no way to reason with her, to remind her that she acted out of love and out of a fierce desire to protect her child, and that she couldn’t have known what would happen.”
“None of us see the past as clearly as we should,” Lucie said, and Madame Levy nodded vigorously. “Will she… will she be all right?”
“I think the letter from your mother will help. Being granted the chance to close the door on the past lets a person begin to move forward.”
Lucie thought about this. Is that why her own heart ached the way it did? But how could she move on from the past when it surrounded her every day? Being in this bookstore—where her mother demanded she work to pay for her classes at Hunter College—was like pouring salt on a wound constantly forced open, but it was all she’d known for the past fourteen years, since Lucie’s stepfather, Arthur, had agreed to finance this endeavor. She wondered sometimes whether Arthur realized how strange this all was, but he preferred to remain removed from the goings-on of his family. Perhaps it was easier to let insanity continue to unfold around you if you looked the other way.
“Monsieur LeClair, Mathilde’s father,” Lucie said after a long silence. “Did you know him, too?”
Unbeknownst to her mother, Lucie had taken some art classes in school, and one of them, which focused on modern European art, had used an Olivier LeClair painting of a winged woman rising from the ashes, reaching for a stone tablet, as a case study in political statement through art. It was part of the Liberté, ?galité, Fraternité series that he had painted before Germany invaded France in 1940. She hadn’t spoken up in class, hadn’t volunteered the fact that she’d held Olivier LeClair’s daughter’s hand while she died, but she had felt a surge of pride that she was even tangentially connected to such a legend. The French-owned art gallery down the street from the bookstore featured several LeClairs, too, all going for exorbitant prices, and Lucie had become a fixture at their window, gazing at the artwork and wondering if she, too, could one day create such emotionally charged masterpieces.
“No, I didn’t. By the time I met Elise, I think they were moving in different orbits. He was very involved in his politics, and she wanted only to protect their daughter.” Madame Levy’s voice was heavy with sadness. “You know, Elise is an artist, too. I think that perhaps for many years, his star outshone hers, and so she let hers dim. But she is very talented, perhaps more so than he was, even if she doesn’t know it.”
Lucie’s eyes widened. “She has exhibited her work, too?”
“No, dear. I wish she would, but she has no belief in her own talent, and I think that holds her back. She sells basic pieces in Paris to support herself, but I think perhaps she is still punishing herself for the past. She makes beautiful works of art, but she keeps them to herself.”
“I would like to meet her one day,” Lucie said, but she immediately regretted the words. Her mother would never allow it. Besides, Madame LeClair was a continent away, and who was to say that she would be any more accepting of Lucie’s artistic ambitions than her own mother was?
“I think she would like that very much, my dear girl.” Madame Levy smiled. “After all, she knew you many years ago. Now, would you be so kind as to show me the children’s section? I have the fondest memories of my own Georges and Suzanne playing there in the old store when they were small.”