“Welcome to Lisbon, Mr. Moss,” the man said. He smiled down at Luki, then pulled a beautiful brass key from one of the wooden pigeonholes and offered it to her.
“With your permission, I’ll send word to our mutual friend Mr. Fry that you and Miss Moss have arrived,” he said to Edouard. “And so often these days our guests collect mail for others. Shall I be directing packages and mail under any other names to you?”
Edouard allowed that the clerk might watch for anything arriving for his friend Henri Roux.
“Ah yes, I believe . . .” The clerk opened a drawer and flipped through some envelopes and sheets of paper. “Here it is.” He set a telegram on the reception desk, addressed to Henri Roux. “It arrived from Marseille this morning. I’ll trust you to get it to your friend.”
Sunday, February 2, 1941
MARIGOLD LODGE, MICHIGAN
Edouard sat with Luki on the big log Nanée had told him about, the “log sofa,” looking out to the lake, to this new shore in the red morning light.
“Sometimes I lose what Mutti sounded like,” Luki said, “but I can remember when she sings to me.”
Edouard listened to the lapping of the waters of Lake Macatawa, frozen only at the shoreline despite a thick new snow quieting the ground and the willow trees.
“And sometimes I can’t remember exactly what she looked like,” Luki said. “I can’t remember which face is Mutti and which is the angel.”
Edouard set a hand on the wool hat on her head, unsure whether to correct her, to say “Nanée,” or simply to let it go.
“Maybe it’s like with the Lady Mary,” she said, “or like the three gods who are all the same. Reverend Mother’s gods that aren’t ours.”
He thought: Nanée is doing god’s work under any definition of god, or none at all.
Next week, he was to go to Ypsilanti, where the Ford Motor Company was building a facility to assemble airplanes. He was to photograph the construction for his first assignment in this new life. The following week, his photos capturing what it meant to be among the six hundred guests of the Vichy government in the not-so-deluxe accommodations of the SS Sina?a would run. They would appear in a major magazine here in the United States, where they might change minds and hearts.
“After the angels don’t need her anymore,” Luki said, “do you think they could give her back to us?”
Edouard studied her inquisitive face. “Who?”
“Tante Nanée.”
“Would you like that?”
Luki nodded.
He touched a finger to the telegram from Nanée that had been waiting for Henri Roux in Portugal, which he kept now in his shirt pocket with the letter Luki had written to him at Camp des Milles. It isn’t too much to ask.
“I hope so,” he said. “I think so.”
He looked out to the stretch of willow trees and the lake, imaging the young girl Nanée once was here, summers spent reading up in the trees. He closed his eyes, remembering Nanée’s neck stretched out in the zinc tub at Villa Air-Bel. The curve of her back at the edge of her bed as he painted those fleurs-de-lis. Her square shoulders in her leather flight jacket as she headed back down the mountain, toward Banyuls-sur-Mer and the train back to Marseille, the trolley back to Villa Air-Bel.
“Yes,” he said. “I believe we will get Nanée back.”
In the silence, he picked up the kangaroo pair that Luki had dropped to the ground when they first sat down. He brushed the snow off and handed them to her. She wound up the smaller kangaroo and set him free to play—a waltz, which the Viennese claimed as their own.
“We might go back to France when it’s safe for us to do so,” he said.
“Tante Nanée could sing with us on the dreaming log.”
Edouard hugged her close, imagining too what Nanée might be doing now. It was afternoon in Marseille. She would be out making deliveries for Varian, winding her way through the filthy alleyways of the Panier to some refugee holed up there, as he had once been. Maybe she’d finished early and was back at the chateau, stooping low to receive Dagobert’s slobbery love. Filling the tub and sinking into the water. Maybe it would be a clear night, and Danny would find that Boston station, and she would dance to music from over here, from this world that was hers, and was now Luki’s and his too.
“Someday she will take flying lessons,” Luki said.
“Nanée?”
Luki gave him a look, so much like Elza. “Pemmy! And me too. Do you think Tante Nanée would teach me to fly?”
He unwrapped the white silk flight scarf from the kangaroo’s neck, then tipped his daughter’s chin up so that he could look into her deep-sea eyes. He wrapped the scarf once around her neck, loosely, leaving long tails that caught in the wind.
“I believe she would love that.” He pulled her close, to keep her warm, and himself too. “My Moppelchen,” he said.
Together they watched a plump little cardinal land on a willow branch hanging just above them, bright red against the white lace of tree branches. The bird tilted its head, its little black face observing them curiously. It chirped once, a delightful sound, then lifted off into the sky, floating gracefully over the lake.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Here are a few things that are true about Mary Jayne Gold, the American heiress whose real courage inspired that of my fictional Nanée: She grew up in an Evanston mansion and summered at Marigold Lodge in Western Michigan, went to finishing school in Italy, and flew a red Vega Gull (which did not in fact have a stall horn). She was friends with Danny Bénédite, who really did use his position with the Paris police to arrange French residency permits for refugee artists. She stayed in France after Hitler invaded, and fled Paris with Theo Bénédite, and tried to get their son out of France by claiming him as her illegitimate child. After the armistice, Mary Jayne went to Marseille, intending to leave France. She instead stayed, and joined Varian Fry’s effort to help refugees, contributing her time and thousands of dollars. She rented a place called Villa Air-Bel, where she lived with, among others, the Bénédites, Fry, the Bretons, and Dagobert. They hosted salons there at which they played Surrealist games and hung art from the trees.