Page 11 of One of Them

Her grief over her mother’s absence grew smaller but heavier, more compact.

It burrowed deep inside her, a small, hard nugget of pain that she tried to numb by acclimating to her new life in New York.

At least she spoke English—her parents had made sure of that—and Greenwich Village was not altogether unlike the Rive Gauche, filled with small shops, cafés, and bars.

Their neighbors were actors and artists, poets and writers.

Her father talked about opening a gallery; he said this would be a good place for it.

Delia enrolled in the Little Red Schoolhouse on Charlton Street.

She excelled there, as she always had, and even made friends, though she told them her mother had died.

It was just easier that way; they didn’t need to know the truth.

She and her father heard news about the war they had left behind, but they weren’t shunned as they had been in Paris, and they didn’t feel they were in danger.

Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

The United States joined the war, and now there were food shortages and ration cards to deal with them.

People on their block tended victory gardens behind their houses, and joined together to collect scraps, paper, tin, and rubber.

Soon enough Delia started seeing blue stars in many of the windows, indicating that someone who lived there had gone to fight.

First it was just a few, then more and more appeared.

A tall, lanky boy next door, George Frost, had knocked on their door when they first arrived, offering a coffee cake on a flowered plate.

“My mother told me to bring this.”

Delia took it from him; the cake was still warm.

“She wanted to say welcome to the neighborhood.” But instead of leaving, he remained where he stood, looking at Delia. He was older than she was—sixteen or seventeen—with fine light-brown hair and crisp features that looked as if they’d been carved with a penknife.

“Thank you so much,” she said.

“Let me know if you and your dad need help with anything, especially anything in the backyard.”

“Do you keep a garden?”

He nodded enthusiastically. “We’ve got flowers, and a little vegetable patch too. Also herbs.”

“Sounds nice.”

“You can see it from your yard,” he said. Some of his hair had fallen across his forehead, and to her own surprise, Delia felt an urge to brush it away; she had never thought about touching a boy like that before. “Or you can come over sometime.”

“I will,” she said. “Thanks again.”

After that, she made a point of looking at the Frosts’ well-tended garden.

Their own garden was overgrown, even wild, but Delia had no patience for cultivating it.

Looking at George Frost’s garden was horticulture enough for her.

Delia also kept track of his comings and goings, so she came to know the small, fluffy dog George walked regularly.

With its pointed snout and plume of a tail, it was fairly ridiculous, as was the way it pranced along, as if on perpetual tiptoes.

Although the dog yapped incessantly and was known to growl and even nip, George seemed devoted to it, something Delia found endearing.

He always smiled when he saw her and sometimes stopped to chat.

She had the thought—hope?—that he might ask her on a date.

But that was silly; he would think she was too young, wouldn’t he?

She never had the chance to find out because one day a blue star appeared in the window of his family’s house—that meant he’d enlisted or been drafted.

She found herself looking at that window regularly; she was hoping the blue star wouldn’t be replaced by a gold one, the symbol for a soldier who’d been killed.

She also realized she no longer heard the little dog yapping; maybe the family had given it away.

Annoying as the dog had been, she found herself hoping that was the case, and not that it had died.

By springtime Delia noticed that the entire garden had been abandoned, with plants either withered and dead or else growing out of control.

Every night Delia and her father sat together listening to the radio’s news from Europe.

Unlike the French, the English would not cooperate with the Nazis, and so London was bombed week after week, month after month.

Mussolini allied himself with Hitler, and then Hitler turned around and attacked his allies in Russia.

In the midst of all this chaos, where was Sophie?

Was she even alive, and if so, did she know her husband and daughter had left Paris without her?

These questions tormented Delia, but there was no one to ask, no way to find out.

And so their lives went on. She continued to do well in school; Simon opened a gallery on Cornelia Street that, though moderately successful, never seemed to develop the same cachet as his gallery in Paris.

Maybe it was because he was different now—less charming, less engaging.

And he drank too much. Delia began to help out at the openings, pouring the wine and chatting with the people who attended.

Her father retreated, grateful, it seemed, to let her assume the dominant role.

At first she pitied him, but pity turned to disdain, and then disdain calcified into anger.

Why wasn’t he more interested in looking for his wife?

The years passed. Delia moved on to Elizabeth Irwin High School and began to think about college.

Thoughts of her mother were always there, often lacing her dreams, but they no longer dominated.

Then on a warm spring day, the news broke that the war in Europe was over.

Over! The Germans had surrendered unconditionally.

Hitler was dead, by his own hand. Paris had been liberated, London was ecstatic.

Delia was in school when the city erupted; classes were canceled, and she and all her classmates rode uptown to Times Square to join in the massive parade.

People in the packed streets were laughing, singing, even dancing.

Strangers pumped each other’s hands and kissed.

Confetti rained down, and Delia smiled as she brushed it from her hair.

She and her friends stopped for ice cream along the way, and the woman behind the counter wouldn’t take their money, but insisted on piling their cones with sweet, cold scoops.

But when she got back to the house on Eleventh Street, her elation faded.

Simon had slept through the entire day, and when he emerged from his room—disheveled and no doubt drunk—it took him a moment to understand what she was saying.

Exasperated, she turned on the radio so he could hear it for himself.

Even when he did finally comprehend what had happened, it didn’t have much of an impact.

“We can start looking for Maman,” she told him. “Maybe we can even go to Paris.”

“I don’t ever want to see Paris again.”

She looked at her father with something bordering on disgust. How could he say that when, for all they knew, Sophie was still there?

Well, if he wasn’t going to take any action, she would.

Without telling him, she began writing to anyone whose address she remembered and who had known her mother—there was Yvette, who had lived nearby on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, and Marie-Pierre, who lived near Saint-Sulpice.

She also found the receipt for all the artwork that had been in the gallery and wrote a letter to the storage company.

Weeks later, that letter came back, with the words ADRESSE INCONNUE —address unknown—stamped on the front.

Yvette wrote back to say she hadn’t heard from her mother since before the war, and Marie-Pierre didn’t write back at all.

The elation Delia had felt in May slowly dried up as spring turned into summer; it was especially hot that year, with record high temperatures that kept Delia home and glued to the fans she had set up all around the house.

The war in Europe was over, but the fighting continued in Japan until that morning in August when the United States dropped an atomic bomb, first on Hiroshima, and then three days later, on Nagasaki.

The enormity of the devastation seemed to pierce through the cloud of inertia that had enshrouded her father; he pushed the newspaper with its shocking headline in her direction, his face wet with tears.

All those people—old women, new mothers, babies, men with canes, in wheelchairs—incinerated instantly.

He got up and came to put his arms around her, and even though she was still angry with him, she let him comfort her.

He was all she had. This was followed by a few days during which she felt close to him and again brought up the subject of her mother.

It had been five years since she’d seen her; so much must have happened in that time.

Unless of course Sophie was dead— a thought she tried to keep at bay.

“Don’t you care anymore?” she asked her father. “Don’t you at least want to know?”

“I did care,” he said, clearly measuring his words.

“But you don’t anymore?”

“You know who your mother was,” he said. “She could wear you out. She wore me out.”

“Is that it? You’re worn out? You’re done with her?”

He nodded, reached for the pipe with which he’d lately replaced his habitual cigarettes, and lit it. The tobacco smell was too sweet, almost sickening.

Delia thought about this. Was she finished too?

Done with her mother? She didn’t think so.

She might not have been ready to return to Paris—not yet—but she didn’t want to be in New York either and decided to apply to colleges that were elsewhere.

She needed to be out of this house, away from her father and her constant disappointment in him.

And when the acceptances came in, she decided on Vassar, largely because she liked its campus—serene, gracious, beautiful. She would be able to breathe there.

It was shortly before she was scheduled to leave for Poughkeepsie that the letter arrived from Paris.

It was from Marie-Pierre—she’d written back after all.

Delia stared at it for a moment before tearing it open.

She brought the thin, blue onionskin sheet to where her father sat in the parlor and began to read aloud.

Dear Delia,

How long it’s been since I have seen you; you were a child when I last did but I imagine you are all grown now, a lovely young woman just starting out in life.

I could tell from your letter—you sounded so mature and poised.

Your mother would have loved to see the person I know you have become.

But this can never be. I was told by people who were there that your mother was killed.

She had been living in Paris and working for the Resistance.

Even though Sophie was an American, she felt so allied with the French, and her disgust for the Nazis was so all-consuming, that she felt compelled to join in on this effort.

She understood the risks she was taking and was willing to accept them, but she wouldn’t have wanted to put you or your father in any danger, she was very clear about that; she was relieved you were out of the country and glad you were safe.

I’m not sure who betrayed them, but it was either late in 1942 or early in 1943.

I heard that they, along with some of the other members, were discovered and shot.

I know what a shock it will be to read this, and I am sorry to have to be the bearer of such terrible news, but maybe it is better that you know than spend the rest of your life wondering.

I hope and pray that you and your father find peace and happiness; your mother would have wanted that too.

By the time Delia had finished reading the letter, her face was slick with tears.

Sophie was dead. Shot. How had it come about?

When and where? The questions were so loud in her mind that they seemed to be howling.

She looked at her father, ready to go to him, to seek comfort in his arms, but his face showed no emotion.

“Papa,” she began. “Papa, I know you were angry with her, that she hurt you... but she was murdered... Can’t you forgive her now, Papa? ”

“If only she hadn’t left...” He took a few deep, heaving breaths. “I could have kept her safe,” he said. “The tickets... for the train, for the boat...” He looked at his hands as if the tickets were in them. Then he turned away and began to weep.

Delia went over and put her arms around him. But there was no consolation there, not for him, not for her. The war might have ended, but its devastation would live inside them. It had taken her mother and transformed her father. She thought again about Vassar; she couldn’t wait to go.

And now, here she was, in the fall of her sophomore year.

She still nursed a private, searing grief at her mother’s death, but along with it was an enormous sense of liberation.

At Vassar, no one knew about Sophie’s horrific end.

Delia could be just another student, unmarked by the tragedy, at least not externally.

The little snubs and slights of her classmates were rendered harmless.

The girls on her floor, Midge, the philistine who had been her roommate—all immaterial.

But then there was that one who seemed different from the rest—Anne Bishop.

She’d even broken away from that little pack she moved in and joined Delia at dinner one night.

Delia told herself she didn’t care about making friends, that she was fine on her own.

But it wasn’t true. She’d been a popular girl back in Paris, and she missed being part of a group, just as she missed Gaby and how close they’d been.

There seemed little hope of replicating that here at Vassar; she felt estranged from almost everyone she’d met.

Maybe Anne could be a friend. Once Delia had formed the thought, it took on a concrete shape, a form of its own. She’d pursue the possibility, see where it led, and if it turned out to be a dead end, so what? She’d lost so much already; there was hardly anything left to lose.