The Lost Girls Of Paris. Pam Jenoff
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your parents?” she couldn’t help asking.
“I vas separated from my father at Vesterbork.” Westerbork was a transit camp in Holland, Grace recalled from a family they had helped weeks earlier. “My mother hid me vith her for as long as she could in the vomen’s...” He paused, fumbling for a word. “In the barracks, but then she was taken, too. I never saw them again.”
Grace shuddered inwardly, trying to imagine a child trying to survive alone under such circumstances. “It’s possible that they survived,” she offered. Frankie’s eyes flashed above the boy’s head, a silent warning.
Sammy’s expression remained unchanged. “They vere taken east,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact. “People don’t come back from there.” What was it like, Grace wondered, to be a child with no hope?
Grace forced herself to focus on the practicalities of the situation. “You know, there are places in New York for children to live.”
“No boys’ home,” Sammy replied, sounding panicked. “No orphanage.”
“Grace, can I speak with you for a moment?” Frankie waved her over to the corner, away from Sammy. “That boy spent two years in Dachau.” Grace’s stomach twisted, imagining the awful things Sammy’s young eyes had seen. Frankie continued, “And then he was in a DP camp for six months before managing to get here by using the papers of another little boy who died. He’s not going to go to another institution where people can hurt him again.”
“But he needs guardians, an education...” she protested.
“What he needs,” Frankie replied gently, “is a safe place to live.” The bare minimum to survive, Grace thought sadly. So much less than the loving family a child should have. If she had a real apartment, she might have taken Sammy home with her.
Frankie started back toward the boy. “Sammy, we’re going to start the process of having your parents declared deceased so that you can receive payments from social security.” Frankie’s voice was matter-of-fact. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, Grace knew. He was helping a client (albeit a young one) get what he needed.
“How long vill that take?” Sammy asked.
Frankie frowned. “It isn’t a quick process.” He reached in his wallet and pulled out fifty dollars. Grace stifled a gasp. It was a large sum in their meager practice and Frankie could hardly afford it. “This should be enough to live with your cousin for a while. Keep it on you and don’t trust anyone with it. Check in with me in two weeks—or sooner if things aren’t good with your cousin, okay?”
Sammy looked at the money dubiously. “I don’t know ven I can repay you,” he said, his voice solemn beyond his years.
“How about that drawing?” Frankie suggested. “That will be payment enough.” The boy tore the paper carefully from the notepad and then took the money.
Watching Sammy’s back as he retreated through the doorway, Grace’s heart tugged. She had read and heard the stories in the news, which came first in a trickle then a deluge, about the killings and other atrocities that had happened in Europe while people here had gone to the cinema and complained about the shortage of nylons. It was not until coming to work for Frankie, though, that she had seen the faces of the suffering and began to truly understand. She tried to keep her distance from the clients. She knew that if she allowed them into her heart even a crack, their pain would break her. But then she met someone like Sammy and just couldn’t help it.
Frankie walked up beside her and put his arm on her shoulder. “It’s hard, I know.”
She turned to him. “How do you do it? Keep going, I mean.” He had been helping people rebuild their lives out of the wreckage for years.
“You just have to lose yourself in the work. Speaking of which, the Beckermans are waiting.”
The next few hours were a rush of interviews. Some were in English, others she translated using all of the high school French she could muster, and still others Frankie conducted in the fluent German he said he had learned from his grandmother. Grace scribbled furiously the notes Frankie dictated about what needed to be done for each client. But in between meetings, Grace’s thoughts returned to the suitcase she had found at the train station that morning. Why would someone simply have abandoned it? She wondered if the woman (Grace assumed it was a woman from the clothing and toiletries inside) had left it inadvertently, or if she knew she wasn’t coming back. Perhaps it was meant for someone else to find.
“Why don’t we break for lunch?” Frankie asked when it was nearly one o’clock. Grace knew he really meant that she should take lunch, while he would keep working, at most eat whatever she brought back for him. But she didn’t argue. She hadn’t eaten either today, she recalled as she started down the stairs.
Ten minutes later, Grace stepped out onto the flat rooftop of the building where she liked to eat when the weather permitted. It had a panoramic view of Midtown Manhattan stretching east to the river. The city was beginning to resemble one big construction site, from the giant cranes building glass-and-steel skyscrapers across Midtown to the block apartments going up on the edge of the East Village. She watched a group of girls on their lunch hour step out of Zarin’s Fabrics, long-legged and fashionable, despite the years of shortages and rationing. A few even smoked now. Grace didn’t want to do that, but she wished she fit in just a bit. They seemed so sure of their place. Whereas she felt like a visitor whose visa was about to expire at any moment.
Grace wiped off a sooty windowsill and perched on it. She thought of the photos in her purse. A few times that morning, she’d wondered if she had imagined them. But when she’d gone into her purse to fish out some coins for lunch, there they sat, neatly wrapped in the lace. She had wanted to bring them with her and have another look over lunch, but the roof tended to be breezy and she didn’t want them to blow away.
Grace unwrapped the hot dog she’d bought from the vendor, missing the egg salad sandwich she usually packed. She liked a certain order to her world, took comfort in its mundaneness. Now the whole apple cart seemed toppled. With last night’s misadventure, she had moved just one piece out of place (admittedly a very big one, but a single piece nonetheless) and now it seemed that everything was in complete disarray.
Turning her gaze uptown, her eyes locked on the vicinity of a certain high rise on the East River. Though she couldn’t see it, the elegant hotel where she had spent the previous night loomed large in her mind. It had all started innocently enough. On her way home from work, Grace had stopped for dinner at Arnold’s, a place on Fifty-Third Street that she had passed dozens of times, because she didn’t have anything in the shared icebox in the boardinghouse kitchen. She had planned to ask for her meal to go, broiled chicken and a potato. But the mahogany bar, with its soft lighting and low music, beckoned. She didn’t want to sit in her cramped room and eat alone again.
“I’ll have a menu, please,” Grace said. The maître d’s eyes rose. Grace made her way to the bar trying to ignore the looks of the men, surprised to see a woman dining alone.
Then she noticed him, a man at the edge of the bar in a smart gray suit, facing away from her. He had broad shoulders and close-cut, curly brown hair tacked into place with pomade. A long-forgotten interest stirred in her. He turned and rose, his face lifting with recognition. “Grace?”
“Mark...” It had taken a second for her to place him so far out of context. Mark Dorff had been Tom’s college roommate at Yale.
More than Tom’s roommate, she realized as the memories returned. His best friend. Though two years older than Tom, Mark had been a constant presence among the sea of boys in navy wool blazers at events, and at the homecoming dances. He had even been an attendant in her wedding. But this was the first time they had really spoken, just the two of them.
“I didn’t realize that you were living in New York,” he remarked.
“I’m not. That is, sort of.” She fumbled for the right words. “I’m here for a time. And you?”
“I’m