ZOË!” I YELLED. “For God’s sake hold your sister’s hand. She is going to fall off that thing and break her neck!”
My long-legged daughter scowled at me.
“You are one hell of a paranoid mother.”
She grabbed the baby’s plump arm and shoved her back onto her tricycle. Her little legs pumped furiously along the track, Zoë hurdling behind her. The toddler gurgled with delight, craning her neck back to make sure I was watching, with the overt vanity of a two-year-old.
Central Park and the first tantalizing promise of spring. I stretched my legs out, tilted my face back to the sun.
The man at my side caressed my cheek.
Neil. My boyfriend. A trifle older than me. A lawyer. Divorced. Lived in the Flatiron district with his teenage sons. Introduced to me by my sister. I liked him. I wasn’t in love with him, but I enjoyed his company. He was an intelligent, cultivated man. He had no intention of marrying me, thank God, and he put up with my daughters from time to time.
There had been a couple of boyfriends since we had come to live here. Nothing serious. Nothing important. Zoë called them my suitors, Charla, my beaux, in Scarlett-like fashion. Before Neil, the latest suitor was called Peter, he had an art gallery, a bald spot on the back of his head that pained him, and a drafty loft in Tribeca. They were decent, slightly boring, all-American middle-aged men. Polite, earnest, and meticulous. They had good jobs, they were well-educated, cultivated, and generally divorced. They came to pick me up, they dropped me off, they offered their arm and their umbrella. They took me out to lunch, to the Met, MoMA, the City Opera, the NYCB, to shows on Broadway, out to dinner, and sometimes to bed. I endured it. Sex was something I now did because I felt I had to. It was mechanical and dull. There, too, something had vanished. The passion. The excitement. The heat. All gone.
I felt like someone-me?-had fast-forwarded the film of my life, and there I appeared like a wooden Charlie Chaplin character, doing everything in a hasty and awkward way, as if I had no other choice, a stiff grin pasted on my face, acting like I was happy with my new life.
Sometimes Charla would steal a look at me and say, “Hey, you OK?”
She would nudge me and I’d mumble, “Oh, sure, fine.” She did not seem convinced, but for the moment she let me be.
My mother, too, would let her eyes roam over my face and purse her lips with worry. “Everything all right, sugar?”
I’d shrug away her anxiety with a careless smile.
A GLORIOUS, CRISP NEW YORK morning. The kind you never get in Paris. Sharp fresh air. Stark blue sky. The city’s skyline hemming us in above the trees. The Dakota’s pale mass, facing us. The smell of hotdogs and pretzels wafting through the breeze.
I reached out my hand and stroked Neil’s knee, eyes still closed against the sun’s increasing heat. New York and its fierce, contrasted weather. Sizzling summers. Freezing white winters. And the light that fell over the city, a hard, bright silvery light that I had grown to love. Paris and its damp gray drizzle seemed to come from another world.
I opened my eyes and watched my daughters cavort. Overnight, or so it seemed, Zoë had sprouted into a spectacular teenager, towering over me with lissome strong limbs. She looked like Charla and Bertrand, she’d inherited their class, their allure, their charm, that feisty, powerful combination of Jarmond and Tézac that enchanted me.
The little one was something else. Softer, rounder, more fragile. She needed cuddling, kissing, more fuss and attention than Zoë had demanded at her age. Was it because her father was not around? Because Zoë, the baby, and I had left France for New York, not long after the birth? I did not know. I did not question myself too much.
It had been strange, coming back to live in America, after many years in Paris. It still felt strange, sometimes. It did not yet feel like home. I wondered how long that would take. But it had happened. There had been difficulty. It had not been an easy decision to make.
The baby’s birth had been premature, a cause for panic and pain. She was born just after Christmas, two months before her due date. I underwent a gruesomely long C-section in the emergency room at Saint-Vincent de Paul Hospital. Bertrand had been there, oddly tense, moved, despite himself. A tiny, perfect little girl. Had he been disappointed? I wondered. I wasn’t. This child meant so much to me. I had fought for her. I had not given in. She was my victory.
Shortly after the birth, and just before the move to the rue de Saintonge, Bertrand summoned up the courage to tell me he loved Amélie, that he wanted to live with her from now on, that he wanted to move into the Trocadéro apartment with her, that he could no longer lie to me, to Zoë, that there would have to be a divorce, but it could be quick, and easy. It was then, watching him go through with his longwinded, complicated confession, watching him pace the room up and down, his hands behind his back, his eyes downcast, that the first idea of moving to America dawned upon me. I listened to Bertrand till the end. He looked drained, wrecked, but he had done it. He had been honest with me, at last. And honest with himself. And I had looked back at my handsome, sensual husband and thanked him. He had seemed surprised. He admitted he had expected a stronger, more bitter reaction. Shouts, insults, a fuss. The baby in my arms had moaned, waving her tiny fists.
“No fuss,” I said. “No shouts, no insults. All right?”
“All right,” he said. And he kissed me, and the baby.
He already felt like he was out of my life. Like he had already left.
That night, every time I rose to feed the hungry child, I thought of the States. Boston? No, I hated the idea of going back to the past, to my childhood city.
And then I knew.
New York. Zoë, the baby, and I could go to New York. Charla was there, my parents not far. New York. Why not? I didn’t know the city all that well, I had never lived there for a long spell, apart from my annual visits to my sister’s.
New York. Perhaps the only city that could rival Paris because of its complete and utter difference. The more I thought about it, the more the idea secretly appealed to me. I didn’t talk it over with my friends. I knew Hervé, Christophe, Guillaume, Susannah, Holly, Jan, and Isabelle would be upset at the idea of my departure. But I knew they would understand and accept it, too.
And then Mamé had died. She had lingered on since her stroke in November, she had never been able to speak again, although she had regained consciousness. She had been moved to the intensive care unit, at the Cochin hospital. I was expecting her death, gearing myself up to face it, but it still came as a shock.
It was after the funeral, which took place in Burgundy, in the sad little graveyard, that Zoë had said to me, “Mom, do we have to go live in the rue de Saintonge?”
“I think your father expects us to.”
“But do you want to go live there?” she asked.
“No,” I said truthfully. “Ever since I’ve known what happened there, I don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to either.”
Then she said, “But where could we move to then, Mom?”
And I replied, lightly, jokingly, expecting her to snort with disapproval, “Well, how about New York City?”
IT HAD BEEN AS easy as that, with Zoë. Bertrand had not been happy about our decision. About his daughter moving so far away. But Zoë was firm about leaving. She said she’d come back every couple of months, and Bertrand could come over, too, to see her, and the baby. I explained to Bertrand that there was nothing set, nothing definitive about the move. It wasn’t forever. It was just for a couple of years. To let Zoë grasp the American side of her. To help me move on. To start something new. He had now established himself with Amélie. They formed a couple, an official one. Amélie’s children were nearly adults. They lived away from home and also spent time with their father. Was Bertrand tempted by the prospect of a new life without the everyday responsibility of children-his, or hers-to raise on a daily basis? Perhaps. He finally said yes. And then I got things going.
After an initial stay at her house, Charla had helped me find a place to live, a simple, white, two-bedroom apartment with an “open city view” and a doorman, on West 86th Street, between Amsterdam and Columbus. I sublet it from one of her friends who had moved to Los Angeles. The building was full of families and divorced parents, a noisy beehive of babies, kids, bikes, strollers, scooters. It was a comfortable, cozy home, but there, too, something was missing. What? I could not tell.
Thanks to Joshua, I’d been hired as the New York City correspondent for a hip French Web site. I worked from home and still used Bamber as a photographer when I needed shots from Paris.
There had been a new school for Zoë, Trinity College, a couple of blocks away. “Mom, I’ll never fit in, now they call me the Frenchy,” she complained, and I couldn’t help smiling.
NEW YORKERS WERE FASCINATING to watch, their purposeful step, their banter, their friendliness. My neighbors said hi in the elevator, had offered us flowers and candy when we moved in, and joked with the doorman. I had forgotten about all that. I was so used to Parisian surliness and people living on the same doorstep barely giving each other curt nods in the staircase.
Perhaps the most ironic thing about it all was that despite the exciting whirlwind of a life I now had, I missed Paris. I missed the Eiffel Tower lighting up on the hour, every evening, like a shimmering, bejeweled seductress. I missed the air sirens howling over the city, every first Wednesday, at noon, for their monthly drill. I missed the Saturday outdoor market along the boulevard Edgar-Quinet, where the vegetable man called me “ma p’tite dame” although I was probably his tallest feminine customer. Like Zoë, I felt I was a Frenchy, too, despite being American.
Leaving Paris had not been as easy as I had anticipated. New York and its energy, its clouds of steam billowing from its manholes, its vastness, its bridges, its buildings, its gridlock, was still not home. I missed my Parisian friends, even if I’d made some great new ones here. I missed Edouard, who I had become close to and who wrote to me monthly. I especially missed the way French men check women out, what Holly used to call their “naked” look. I had gotten used to it over there, but now, in Manhattan, there were only cheerful bus drivers to yell “Yo, slim!” at Zoë and “Yo, blondie!” at me. I felt like I had become invisible. Why did my life feel so empty? I wondered. As if a hurricane had hit it. As if the bottom had dropped out of it.
And the nights.
Nights were forlorn, even those I spent with Neil. Lying in bed listening to the sounds of the great, pulsating city and letting the images come back to me, like the tide creeping up the beach.
SARAH.
She never left me. She had changed me, forever. Her story, her suffering, I carried them within me. I felt as if I knew her. I knew her as a child. As a young girl. As the forty-year-old housewife who crashed her car into a tree on an icy New England road. I could see her face, perfectly. The slanted green eyes. The shape of her head. Her posture. Her hands. Her rare smile. I knew her. I could have stopped her on the street, had she still been alive.
Zoë was a sharp one. She had caught me red-handed.
Googling William Rainsferd.
I had not realized she was back from school. One winter afternoon, she had sneaked in without me hearing her.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked, sounding like a mother coming across her teenager smoking pot.
Flushed, I admitted that I’d looked him up regularly in the past year.
“And?” she went on, arms crossed, frowning down at me.
“Well, it appears he has left Lucca,” I confessed.
“Oh. Where is he, then?”
“He’s back in the States, has been for a couple of months.”
I could no longer bear her stare, so I stood up and went to the window, glancing down to busy Amsterdam Avenue.
“Is he in New York, Mom?”
Her voice was softer now, less harsh. She came up behind me, put her lovely head on my shoulder.
I nodded. I could not face telling her how excited I’d been when I found out he was here, too. How thrilled, how amazed I’d felt about ending up in the same city as him, two years after our last meeting. His father was a New Yorker, I recalled. He had probably lived here as a little boy.
He was listed in the phone book. In the West Village. A mere fifteen-minute subway ride from here. And for days, for weeks, I had agonizingly asked myself whether I should call him, or not. He had never tried to contact me since Paris. I had never heard from him since then.
The excitement had petered out after a while. I did not have the courage to call him. But I went on thinking about him, night after night. Day after day. In secret, in silence. I wondered if I’d ever run into him one day, in the park, in some department store, bar, restaurant. Was he here with his wife and girls? Why had he come back to the States, like I had? What had happened?
“Have you contacted him?” Zoë asked.
“No.”
“Will you?”
“I don’t know, Zoë.”
I started to cry, silently.
“Oh, Mom, please,” she sighed.
I wiped the tears away, angrily, feeling foolish.
“Mom, he knows you live here now. I’m sure he knows. He’s looked you up as well. He knows what you do here, he knows where you live.”
That thought had never occurred to me. William Googling me. William checking out my address. Was Zoë right? Did he know I lived in New York City, too, on the Upper West Side? Did he ever think of me? What did he feel, exactly, when he did?
“You have to let go, Mom. You have to put it behind you. Call Neil, see him more often, just get on with your life.”
I turned to her, my voice ringing out loud and harsh.
“I can’t, Zoë. I need to know if what I did helped him. I need to know that. Is that too much to ask? Is that such an impossible thing?”
The baby wailed from the next room. I’d disturbed her nap. Zoë went to get her and came back with her plump, hiccupping sister.
Zoë stroked my hair gently over the toddler’s curls.
“I don’t think you’ll ever know, Mom. I don’t think he’ll ever be ready to tell you. You changed his life. You turned it upside down, remember. He probably never wants to see you again.”
I plucked the child from her arms and pressed her fiercely against me, relishing her warmth, her plumpness. Zoë was right. I needed to turn the page, to get on with my life.
How, was another matter.
I KEPT MYSELF BUSY. I did not have a minute to myself, what with Zoë, her sister, Neil, my parents, my nephews, my job, and the never-ending string of parties Charla and her husband Barry invited me to, and to which I relentlessly went. I met more new people in two years than I had in my entire Parisian stay, a cosmopolitan melting pot that I reveled in.
Yes, I had left Paris for good, but whenever I returned for my work or to see my friends or Edouard, I always found myself in the Marais, drawn back again and again, as if my footsteps could not help bringing me there. Rue des Rosiers, rue du Roi-de-Sicile, rue des Ecouffes, rue de Saintonge, rue de Bretagne, I saw them file past with new eyes, eyes that remembered what had happened here, in 1942, even if it had been long before my time.
I wondered who lived in the rue de Saintonge apartment now, who stood by the window overlooking the leafy courtyard, who ran their palm along the smooth marble mantelpiece. I wondered if the new tenants had any inkling that a little boy had died within their home, and that a young girl’s life had been changed that day, forever.
In my dreams, I went back to the Marais, too. In my dreams, sometimes the horrors of the past that I had not witnessed appeared to me with such starkness that I had to turn on the light, in order to drive the nightmare away.
It was during those sleepless, empty nights, when I lay in bed, jaded by the social talk, dry-mouthed after the extra glass of wine I should not have given in to, that the old ache came back and haunted me.
His eyes. His face when I had read Sarah’s letter out loud. It all came back and drove sleep away, delving into me.
Zoë’s voice dragged me back to Central Park, the beautiful spring day, and Neil’s hand on my thigh.
“Mom, this monster wants a Popsicle.”
“No way,” I said. “No Popsicle.”
The baby threw herself face forward on the grass and bawled.
“Quite something, isn’t she?” mused Neil.
JANUARY 2005 ALSO BROUGHT me back, again and again, to Sarah, to William. The importance of the sixtieth commemoration of Auschwitz ’s liberation made every headline around the world. It seemed that never before had the word “Shoah” been pronounced so often.
And every time I heard it, my thoughts leaped painfully to him, to her. And I wondered, as I watched the Auschwitz memorial ceremony on TV, if William ever thought of me when he, too, heard the word, when he, too, saw the monstrous black-and-white images of the past flicker across the screen, the lifeless skeletal bodies piled high, the crematoriums, the ashes, the horror of it all.
His family had died in that hideous place. His mother’s parents. How could he not think of it, I mused. On the screen, with Zoë and Charla at my side, I watched the snowflakes fall on the camp, the barbed wire, the squat watchtower. The crowd, the speeches, the prayers, the candles. The Russian soldiers and their particular dancing gait.
And the final, unforgettable vision of nightfall, and the railway tracks aflame, glowing through the darkness with a poignant, sharp mixture of grief and remembrance.
THE CALL CAME ONE May afternoon, when I was least expecting it. I was at my desk, struggling with a new computer’s whims. I picked up the phone, my “yes” sounding curt even to me.
“Hi. This is William Rainsferd.”
I sat up straight, heart aflutter, trying to remain calm.
William Rainsferd.
I said nothing, dumbstruck, clutching the receiver to my ear.
“You there, Julia?”
I swallowed.
“Yes, just having some computer problems. How are you, William?”
“Fine,” he said.
A little silence. But it did not feel tense, or strived.
“It’s been a while,” I said lamely.
“Yes, it has,” he said.
Another silence.
“I see you’re a New Yorker now,” he said, at last. “Looked you up.”
So Zoë had been right, after all.
“Well, how about getting together?” he asked.
“Today?” I said.
“If you can make it.”
I thought of the sleeping child in the next room. She had been to day care this morning, but I could take her along. She wasn’t going to like having her nap interrupted, though.
“I can make it,” I said.
“Great. I’ll ride up to your part of town. Got any ideas where we could meet?”
“Do you know Café Mozart? On West 70th Street and Broadway?”
“I know it, fine. See you there in half an hour?”
I hung up. My heart was beating so fast I could hardly breathe. I went to wake the baby, ignored her protests, bundled her up, unfolded the stroller, and took off.
HE WAS ALREADY THERE when we arrived. I saw his back first, the powerful shoulders, and his hair, silver and thick, no longer bearing any trace of blond. He was reading a newspaper, but he swivelled around as I approached, as if he could feel my eyes upon him. Then he was up on his feet, and there was an awkward, amusing moment when we didn’t know whether to shake hands or kiss. He laughed, I did, too, and he finally hugged me, a great big bear hug, slamming my chin against his collarbone and patting the small of my back, and then he bent down to admire my daughter.
“What a beautiful little girl,” he crooned.
She solemnly handed him her favorite rubber giraffe.
“And what’s your name, then?” he asked.
“Lucy,” she lisped.
“That’s the giraffe’s name-,” I began, but William had already started to press the toy and loud squeaks drowned out my voice, making the baby shriek with glee.
We found a table and sat down, keeping the child in her stroller. He glanced at the menu.
“Ever had the Amadeus cheesecake?” he asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s positively diabolical.”
He grinned.
“Hey, you look fabulous, Julia. New York certainly suits you.”
I blushed like a teenager, imagining Zoë looking on and rolling her eyes.
Then his mobile rang. He answered it. I could tell by his expression it was a woman. I wondered who. His wife? One of his daughters? The conversation went on. He seemed flustered. I bent over the child, playing with the giraffe.
“Sorry,” he said, tucking the phone away. “That was my girlfriend.”
“Oh.”
I must have sounded confused because he snorted with laughter.
“I’m divorced now, Julia.”
He looked straight at me. His face sobered.
“You know, after you told me, everything changed.”
At last. At last he was telling me what I needed to know. The aftermath. The consequences.
I did not quite know what to say. I was afraid that if I uttered one word, he’d stop. I kept busy with my daughter, handing her her bottle of water, making sure she didn’t spill it all over herself, fumbling with a paper napkin.
The waitress came to take our orders. Two Amadeus cheesecakes, two coffees, and a pancake for the child.
William said, “Everything went to pieces. It was hell. A terrible year.”
We said nothing for a couple of minutes, looking around us at the busy tables. The café was a noisy, bright place, with classical music emanating from hidden speakers. The child cooed to herself, smiling up at me and at William, brandishing her toy. The waitress brought us our food.
“Are you OK now?” I asked tentatively.
“Yes,” he said, swiftly. “Yes I am. It took me a while to get used to this new part of me. To understand and accept my mother’s history. To deal with the pain of it. Sometimes I still can’t. But I work at it, hard. I did a couple of very necessary things.”
“Like what?” I asked, feeding sticky bits of crumbled pancake to my daughter.
“I realized I could no longer bear all this alone. I felt isolated, broken. My wife could not understand what I was going through. And I just could not explain, the communication between us was nonexistent. I took my daughters to Auschwitz with me, last year, before the sixtieth anniversary celebration. I needed to tell them what had happened to their great grandparents, it wasn’t easy and that was the only way I could do it. Showing them. It was a moving, tearful trip, but I felt at peace, at last, and I felt my daughters understood.”
His face was sad, thoughtful. I did not speak, I let him do the talking. I wiped the baby’s face and gave her more water.
“I did one last thing, in January. I went back to Paris. There’s a new Holocaust memorial in the Marais, maybe you know that.” I nodded. I had heard of it and planned to go there on my next trip. “Chirac inaugurated it at the end of January. There’s a wall of names, just by the entrance. A huge, gray stone wall, engraved with 76,000 names. The names of every single Jew deported from France.”
I watched his fingers play with the rim of his coffee cup. I felt it hard to look him fully in the face.
“I went there to find their names. And there they were. Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynksi. My grandparents. I felt the same peace I had found at Auschwitz. The same pain. I felt grateful that they were remembered, that the French remembered them and honored them this way. There were people crying in front of that wall, Julia. Old people, young people, people of my age, touching the wall with their hands, and crying.”
He paused, breathed carefully through his mouth. I kept my eyes on the cup, on his fingers. The baby’s giraffe squeaked but we hardly heard it.
“Chirac gave a speech. I did not understand it, of course. I looked it up later on the Internet and read the translation. A good speech. Urging people to remember France’s responsibility during the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup and what followed. Chirac pronounced the same words my mother had written at the end of her letter. Zakhor, Al Tichkah. Remember. Never forget. In Hebrew.”
He bent down and retrieved a large manila envelope from the backpack at his feet. He handed it to me.
“These are my photos of her, I wanted to show them to you. I suddenly realized I didn’t know who my mother was, Julia. I mean, I knew what she looked like, I knew her face, her smile, but nothing about her inner life.”
I wiped the maple syrup off my fingers in order to be able to handle them. Sarah, on her wedding day. Tall, slender, her small smile, her secret eyes. Sarah, cradling William as a baby. Sarah with William as a toddler, holding him by the hand. Sarah, in her thirties, wearing an emerald ball dress. And Sarah, just before her death, a large color close-up. Her hair was gray, I noticed. Prematurely gray and oddly becoming. Like his, now.
“I remember her as being tall, and slim, and silent,” said William as I looked at each photo with growing emotion. “She didn’t laugh much, but she was an intense person, and a loving mother. But no one ever mentioned suicide after her death. Ever. Not even Dad. I guess Dad never read the notebook. No one did. Maybe he found it a long time after her death. We all thought it was an accident. No one knew who my mother was, Julia. Not even me. And that’s what I still find so hard to live with. What brought her to her death, on that cold snowy day. How she made that decision. Why we never knew anything about her past. Why she chose not to tell my father. Why she kept all her suffering, all her pain, to herself.”
“These are beautiful pictures,” I said at last. “Thank you for bringing them.”
I paused.
“There’s something I must ask you,” I said, putting the photos away, gathering courage and looking at him at last.
“Go ahead.”
“No harsh feelings against me?” I asked with a weak smile. “I’ve been feeling like I destroyed your life.”
He grinned.
“No harsh feelings, Julia. I just needed to think. To understand. To put all the pieces back together. It took a while. That’s why you never heard from me during all that time.”
I felt relief sweep over me.
“But I knew where you were all along.” He smiled. “Spent quite some time keeping track of you.” Mom, he knows you live here now. He’s looked you up as well. He knows what you do here, he knows where you live. “When did you move to New York exactly?” he asked.
“A little while after the baby was born. Spring 2003.”
“Why did you leave Paris? If you don’t mind telling me…”
I gave a rueful half smile.
“My marriage had fallen apart. I’d just had this baby. I couldn’t bring myself to live in the rue de Saintonge apartment after everything that had happened there. And I felt like moving back to the States.”
“So how did you actually do it?”
“We stayed with my sister for a while, on the Upper East Side, then she found me a place to sublet from one of her friends. And my ex-boss found me a great job. What about you?”
“Same story. Life in Lucca just didn’t seem possible. And my wife and I…” His voice trailed off. He made a little gesture with his fingers as if to say farewell, bye-bye. “I lived here as a boy, before Roxbury. And the idea had been passing through my head, for a while. So I finally got ’round to it. I stayed at first with one of my oldest friends, in Brooklyn, then I found a place in the Village. I do the same job here. Food critic.”
William’s phone rang. The girlfriend, again. I turned away, trying to give him the privacy he needed. He finally put the phone down.
“She’s a little possessive,” he said, sheepishly. “I think I’ll turn it off for a while.”
He fumbled with the phone.
“How long have you been together?”
“A couple of months.” He looked at me. “What about you? Are you seeing someone?”
“Yes, I am.” I thought of Neil’s courteous, bland smile. His careful gestures. The routine sex. I nearly added it was not important, that it was just for the company, because I could not stand being alone, because every night I thought of him, William, and of his mother, every single night, for the past two-and-a-half years, but I kept my mouth shut. I just said, “He’s a nice person. Divorced. A lawyer.”
William ordered fresh coffee. As he poured out mine, I noticed, once again, the beauty of his hands, his long, tapered fingers.
“About six months after our last meeting,” he said, “I went back to the rue de Saintonge. I had to see you. To talk to you. I didn’t know where to reach you, I had no number for you and couldn’t remember your husband’s name, so I couldn’t even look you up in the phone book. I thought you’d still be living there. I had no idea you’d moved.”
He paused, ran a hand through his thick, silver hair.
“I read all about the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, I’d been to Beaune-la-Rolande, and to the street the stadium was on. I’d been to see Gaspard and Nicolas Dufaure. They took me to my uncle’s grave, in the Orléans cemetery. Such kind men. But it was difficult, hard to go through. And I wished you’d been there with me. I should never have done all that alone, I should have said yes when you asked to come along.”
“Maybe I should have insisted,” I said.
“I should have listened to you. It was too much to bear alone. And then, when I finally went back to the rue de Saintonge, and when those unknown people opened your door, I felt you’d let me down.”
He lowered his eyes. I set my coffee cup back in its saucer, resentment sweeping through me. How could he, I thought, after all I’d done for him, after all the time, the effort, the pain, the emptiness?
He must have deciphered something in my face because he quickly put his hand on my sleeve.
“I’m sorry I said that,” he murmured.
“I never let you down, William.”
My voice sounded stiff.
“I know that, Julia. I’m sorry.”
His was deep, vibrant.
I relaxed. Managed a smile. We sipped in silence. Sometimes our knees brushed against each other under the table. It felt natural, being with him. As if we had been doing this for years. As if this was not just the third time in our lives we were seeing each other.
“Is your ex-husband OK about you living here with the kids?” he asked.
I shrugged. I looked down at the child who’d fallen asleep in her stroller.
“It wasn’t easy. But he’s in love with someone else. Has been for some time. That helped. He doesn’t see the girls much, though. He comes here from time to time, and Zoë spends her vacations in France.”
“Same thing with my ex-wife. She’s had a new child. A boy. I go to Lucca as often as I can to see my daughters. Or they come here, but more rarely. They’re quite grown up now.”
“How old are they?”
“Stefania is twenty-one and Giustina, nineteen.”
I whistled.
“You sure had them young.”
“Too young, maybe.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I sometimes feel awkward with the baby. I wish I’d had her earlier. There’s such a gap between her and Zoë.”
“She’s a sweet baby,” he said, taking a healthy bite out of his cheesecake.
“Yes, she is. The apple of her doting mother’s eye.”
We both chuckled.
“Do you miss not having a boy?” he asked.
“No, I don’t. Do you?”
“No. I love my girls. Maybe they’ll have grandsons, though. She’s called Lucy, then?”
I glanced across at him. Then down at her.
“No, that’s the toy giraffe,” I said.
There was a little pause.
“Her name is Sarah,” I said quietly.
He stopped chewing, put his fork down. His eyes changed. He looked at me, at the sleeping child, said nothing.
Then he buried his face in his hands. He remained like that for minutes. I did not know what to do. I touched his shoulder.
Silence.
I felt guilty again, felt as if I had done something unforgivable. But I had known all along this baby was to be called Sarah. As soon as I had been told it was a girl, at the moment of her birth, I had known her name.
There was no other name my daughter could have had. She was Sarah. My Sarah. An echo to the other one, to the other Sarah, to the little girl with the yellow star who had changed my life.
At last he drew his hands away and I saw his face, wrecked, beautiful. The acute sadness, the emotion in his eyes. He was not afraid of letting me see them. He did not fight the tears. It seemed that he wanted me to see it all, the beauty and ache of his life, he wanted me to see his thanks, his gratitude, his pain.
I took his hand and pressed it hard. I could not bear to look at him any longer, so I closed my eyes and put his hand against my cheek. I cried with him. I felt his fingers grow wet with my tears, but I kept his hand there.
We sat there for a long time, till the crowd around us thinned, till the sun shifted and the light changed. Till we felt our eyes could meet again, without the tears.