Deadly Grace. Taylor Smith
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Wickham had met young Sylvie Fournier in Normandy during the First World War and had utterly lost his heart to her. They’d married after the war, but sadly, my grandmother had died in an influenza epidemic when my mother was just a toddler. My mother, like me, had grown up an only child.
“There’s no one left to speak of on my father’s side,” she said. “He only had one sister, and she died years ago, never married. On the other side—your grandmaman’s family—well, there were the uncles in France, of course, but they’re gone now. As for les cousins,” she added, her French pronunciation flawless, her nose wrinkled in distaste, “I made very sure to lose touch with them the moment I grew up. A right obnoxious bunch, they were.”
I smiled. She’d told me once about the awful teasing she’d suffered at the hands of the horrible Norman cousins with whom she’d spent her summers as a child. They were the reason my mother spoke fluent French, however, heard first at her doomed mother’s breast, then fine-tuned during those childhood summers spent with the uncles and their families. And years later, in fact, when she was sent back into France to work with the Resistance, my mother adopted Grandmaman’s name, Sylvie Fournier, as her nom de guerre.
“What about old friends?” I pressed.
A small crease appeared on her high forehead. Her hair was probably already in the process of turning from its original honey-blond to silver-white at this period of her life, although I can’t remember clearly. But that evening, I’m sure, she would have been wearing it as she invariably did, smoothed back from her face and rolled into a neat chignon at the base of her skull. When she rose in the morning, it flowed like a soft, golden storm halfway down her back, but she would never have thought of leaving it down during the day.
Her tiny pearl stud earrings matched the single strand at her neck, and she was wearing a peach twin set, I remember, the cardigan draped around her shoulders, cape style. As she pondered my question, she crossed her wrists over her chest and tugged the cardigan closer, as if she’d felt a sudden chill. As the air between us shifted with her movement, I remember, a subtle hint of her perfume, Ma Griffe, wafted from her chair to my corner of the living room sofa.
“It’s been a long time, dear,” she said finally. “The war changed everything and there’s no going back. It’s better to leave some things locked away in memories.”
In my mother’s voice that night, I imagined I heard the whispering ghosts of all the people she’d lost to the war. Her beloved father, of course, killed in 1941 by the German bomb that destroyed his printing press in Dover. I also knew, because I’d only recently dragged it out of her, that she’d once been engaged to another man, long before she met my father—long before the U.S. had even entered the war. He’d been a British naval lieutenant, but he had died early on in the war.
There had to have been countless other friends and comrades, too, from her youth and from those nearly five long years of war, most of which she’d spent working as a British special agent, first in England, then in France. English spies. French Resistants. And, of course, Joe Meade, the dashing American flyer with whom she’d fallen in love, married and conceived a child, and then lost just weeks before I was born.
I can only imagine that the spirits of all those departed souls haunted my mother—that night and to the end of her days.
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