The girl was wondering if she was supposed to know what the Commies were. She had learned not to ask. She was not expected to be ignorant.
“Communists,” the younger brother whispered. He was sometimes kind.
Usually she could find something in a word that helped her to its meaning—an echo of another word, perhaps. But this time she ran through the possibilities without learning anything: come, communal, union. She began to perceive that this was another of those words no one discussed because they all feared it. It was like a disease no one mentioned because that might make it contagious. Fear, their father had said in one of his speeches, fear is the greatest menace to what we are trying to accomplish here, in France, and the girl made the connection: to mention something dangerous is to spread it, like the plague. She felt, for the moment, satisfied.
“I thought they’d keep her in Rome because of her friendship with the Pope—she’s an RC, children,” the mother explained. The girl knew the initials were a kind of soft drink, and once again she was baffled.
“The Pope’s turned out to be a weak reed,” the father explained, “absolutely useless to us in this case, as he was during the war.”
The girl had seen a portrait of a pope at the convent school—a stretched-out, greenish figure in a red robe—and so she could imagine quite easily that under that robe there was only a reed.
“I don’t know what Henry Luce will make of it, though,” the father went on to the mother, privately, this time, since the three could not be expected to understand. “He was awfully set up by her appointment.”
“Maybe his rag will turn against the Dems,” the snorter said rashly.
The father turned to stare at him. “It couldn’t be turned any further than it already is.”
The snorter was abashed, and began to wipe his mouth with his napkin as though, the girl thought, he could wipe away his unwise words.
“They’re both quite common,” the mother concluded, “like their magazine,” and signaled to Jean to take the soup bowls away.
He rattled them onto a tray perched precariously on a corner of the table. On other Saturdays, Dominique in her small white apron had helped him, but Dominique was gone for reasons the girl imagined although she kept them to herself. Once, in the kitchen, she’d seen Dominique sitting on Jean’s knees.
That provided the clue. Common was a certain kind of behavior, and in a moment of wild imagining, she saw the sick American woman perched on the Pope’s red knees.
Jean hauled in a heavy silver platter with a mound of meat on it and slid it across the table to land in front of the father. He asked something no one could understand, then offered the father a long leather box, opening it to reveal a knife and fork of superior size.
The father stood to carve, turning up his white cuffs, but the meat was obdurate and made him sweat. He swiped at his face with his blue silk handkerchief, then bent to the task again while Jean stood to one side, watching. The father tried to slice, then went to hacking, and the portions Jean passed around the table were rough and ragged. It was lamb, nearly red, a strange sight.
“I’m writing my menus for them in French, with the dictionary,” the mother said. “It doesn’t make a bit of difference. They fix what they want to fix.” The girl remembered seeing the cook, a column standing over her stove. It did not seem likely written words could reach her.
The meal ended quickly and they all went their ways, the tall house absorbing each one. Upstairs, with the governess, someone was crying.
The girl found her roller skates in the closet under the stairs—the stairs where she’d seen her parents’ dinner guests, going up and down. She carried the skates out to the sidewalk. The iron gate clanged behind her and she dreaded ringing later to rouse the concierge to let her back in, but there was no way around it. She had to get out, into the air.
It was still foreign air, gray and dense.
Since they had always lived in the country, she’d never had a place to learn to skate; dirt roads wouldn’t do. Now she lurched and stumbled, her eyes on her toes. The skate wheels made a fearful noise on the rough cement. At the corner, she nearly collided with a couple and felt their stares. She was too old, she knew, to be learning to roller-skate.
She pushed on toward the massed dark greenery of the great park. Its depths held a lake where she’d once rowed the children in a wooden boat rented for the occasion. She had never rowed before, but she learned quickly although the rough wooden oars blistered her palms.
She planned to skate all the way to the lake. Stares pursued her as she stumbled across the avenue.
In this country, she was strange, as was the rest of the family. They were not strange, at home. There were loungers there, like her brothers, sad children, and even a few tall, thin, pale asparagus-girls, devoured by unanswerable questions : what is life?—that kind of thing.
Here, families were tight knots, and each twist and turn of each knot was like all the others. And they were dark—so dark! Not dark-skinned, of course; that was at home. But dark-haired, their sleek, soft short hair often covered by scarves, veils, tight hats. They had dark eyes that were peering, intent, and did not reward curious glances. Their clothes were dark, too, shriveled-looking, the women’s skirts not even covering their pale, pointed knees.
She knew they had seen things and done things she could never imagine. She remembered the bullet-pocked walls of the government building that ran along the Boulevard of the Saint in the Fields, and the bunches of flowers, left beneath inscriptions where people had been shot. MORT POUR LA FRANCE. She could almost see the bodies lying along the sidewalk as she skated, but not really. She had never seen a dead body. It seemed a grievous lack.
Lately she’d begun to understand why the girls at the convent school teased her, or simply stared. She was too yellow and gold, and she knew nothing. Sometimes they gathered around her in the muddy courtyard and asked her questions she couldn’t answer, so she said yes, or no, at random; she knew those two words, in French. Usually her answer drew a trail of laughter.
She entered the deep foliage of the park, skating toward the pond. At the school, Mass was said twice a day, morning and evening—a mysterious meal. The students hurried to the chapel across the courtyard in the freezing dawn and dusk. Inside, they were shepherded in waves by a nun to the altar; when she clapped her hands, the wave, briefly, knelt. The girl glared in concentration at the girl nearest her, imitating each move. “You must pretend,” her mother had told her. “You must fit in.”
Next each wave was herded onto benches facing the altar, where a priest intoned. He stood with his back to them; she seldom saw his face. His eyes were fixed on the big gold crucifix with the naked man nailed to it; she tried not to look at the blood, glittering in the light of many candles.
The words were in Latin, a language she understood a little, gratefully, from school at home: Gallic wars. This was of course different. At one point, they all lightly struck their chests. Then the priest raised a disk and a gold cup.
The chapel air was dense, stuffy; a cloud of nuns breathed at the back. Not the scrubbing sisters in their long coarse aprons, but the queen nuns in tall white headdresses and long, rustling skirts. Sometimes the girl felt so faint she thought she was dying—the plumes of incense seemed to smother her—but she never fell down, as some did. Her pride sustained her; she would not be carried out. And the business never lasted very long. Afterward they were herded back into the blue dawn or the gray twilight.
Now she was skating past a great white statue of a naked man. Sooty rain had streaked his shoulders and thighs; he wore a massive grape leaf. His meaty hands, dangling by his sides, reminded her that she was very hungry; the lunch had been even less satisfying than the lunches at school—the