Chapter Two #3
“Oh, Melanie. I’m not so sure that’s true.
” How he wished that Melanie’s parents were still alive.
They would know what to say, wouldn’t they?
But they’d both died in their seventies, several years before.
Henry was all Melanie had left, and he felt wildly ill-equipped to handle anything related to love, since he’d secretly spent a lifetime writing love songs for the woman he’d lost, rather than for the dutiful wife who’d given him a beautiful son and a wonderful life.
In a way, he was no better than Gilles. “You must be honest with him, Melanie.” This, at least, Henry was sure of.
“You must tell him that you know about the affair. And you must listen very carefully to how he responds. You’ve sacrificed so much to make this marriage work. It’s his turn to bend.”
“And if he doesn’t want to?”
“Then he’s a fool who doesn’t deserve you.”
She sniffled a few times and then smiled slightly, a real smile this time. “I’m glad you’re here, Grandpa Henry.”
“I’m glad I’m here, too.”
As she put the car in gear and pulled back into traffic, he snuck a look at her. She still seemed sad, but it was as if the light inside her had been turned back on, even if it was shining only dimly.
“So,” Melanie said after several minutes of silence as she and Henry crossed into Paris on the road from the airport. “Did Grandma Betsy know about Celeste?”
“Yes,” Henry said, for he hadn’t believed in keeping secrets from one’s spouse.
But he hadn’t told Betsy the whole truth.
He hadn’t said that Celeste was forever in his heart, only that there had once been a girl he’d loved in Paris, but that she had died.
Betsy had accepted this as part of Henry’s past.
“How did you know her, anyhow? I know you were stationed in France during World War II, but you never talk about it.”
They were nearly to Melanie’s home near the Jardin du Luxembourg, and Henry paused for a moment to collect his thoughts before he spoke.
“I was a gunner on a B-17 shot down in northern France in 1943,” Henry said, watching Melanie closely.
“The pilot, copilot, navigator, flight engineer, and two other gunners were killed in the crash, may they rest in peace.” He could still see the still and lifeless face of the pilot, a farmer’s son from Kansas named Roy Little, all these years later.
“Somehow, I survived, along with another gunner, the bombardier, and the radio operator. We deployed our parachutes in time and were able to hide in a nearby barn. We split up, thinking that it would be easier to avoid detection that way.”
“I never knew any of this, Grandpa Henry,” Melanie said, her voice hushed. “I had no idea you’d been shot down.”
He nodded, surprised at how hard it was to tell this story all these years later.
“The others were all found by the Germans, but I was lucky enough to be picked up by the French Resistance and sent along an escape line to Paris. I was supposed to be moved quickly on to the next stop. Instead, because there had been a betrayal on the line, I was held in place for nearly a month, which was unusual. It was Celeste who sheltered me during that time. She was eighteen years old; her mother had died when she was young, and her father was a military officer who’d been killed in May 1940 when the Germans breached the French border.
Her uncle, her only living relative, was a prisoner of war. She was all by herself.”
“She worked for this escape line?”
“She was part of the underground. She sheltered pilots from time to time, until 1943, when she was betrayed by someone on the line and arrested.”
“This was after you left?”
“Yes.” It had been the greatest regret of Henry’s life.
He had, for years, blamed himself for her death.
If he had insisted upon staying in Paris rather than being sent over the Pyrenees, could he have saved her?
He had to recalibrate his whole life, his whole sense of self, now that he knew she had lived, after all.
“I received word that she had been sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. I went back to Paris after the war, hoping against hope that she had survived, and I met her uncle, who told me she was dead and that I should forget about her if I knew what was good for me.”
Melanie put a hand over her mouth. “But why would he do that?”
“Maybe he feared I would take her away to America and he’d never see her again.
Or maybe he thought I’d be a reminder of all she’d lost. I may never know his motives.
But I believed him, of course, and I could not forgive myself for leaving, you see.
It took me a very long time to put all of it behind me.
In fact, I’m not sure I ever entirely did. ”
“That’s why it took you so long to marry Grandma Betsy after the war.”
“Yes.”
“And you loved her? This Celeste?”
Henry swallowed the lump in his throat. “Very much so.”
Melanie pulled the car into the underground car park on the rue Soufflot, near the apartment she shared with Gilles. She didn’t say anything until after she had steered the car into a spot and cut the ignition. “Then you should go to her.”
“I will,” Henry said. “But first, I’ll be right here with you as you talk to Gilles.”