59. Angelique
June 1965
New York City
Lizzieand I walk along Madison Avenue. The New York City sidewalk is busy with people bustling to their jobs or the next tourist site they want to visit. The honking of car horns adds to the backdrop of the city noise, so different from the quiet in Maple Ridge, Oregon.
Unlike everyone else, we’re not in the same rush. We’re here to absorb the atmosphere, to mark off another city we wanted to visit.
Lizzie stops and looks up at the tall skyscrapers. New York City. The city of dreams. At one point, she aspired to be an actress and work on Broadway. But in the end, she decided an American history degree was more practical.
“It’s so different here compared to being in a small town,” she observes. Not a single vowel or consonant mark her English beginnings. “New York City is groovy. Maple Ridge is dull.”
Four years after the war, we immigrated to America—California, specifically—where I used my French and German skills as a translator in my secretarial job. Eventually, we moved to Maple Ridge. It was the town Johann had dreamed of moving to one day. The place is as beautiful as he imagined it would be. It’s the only place where my heart has felt settled.
“It is different.” I smile at Lizzie—the name having more meaning than she could ever imagine. Lizzie was the nickname RAF pilots gave the Lysander during the war. I thought it was only fitting to shorten her name—Elizabeth—to that because a Lysander had rescued us from occupied France so we could begin our life anew. My daughter has grown from being a scrawny, malnourished baby into a beautiful, spirited twenty-one-year-old.
“But I’ve lived in a number of cities and small towns,” I tell her, “and I still think Maple Ridge is the best place of all.”
We start walking again.
Lizzie tosses her long blond hair over her shoulder. “I can’t figure out why you would think that. There are places full of history and incredible architecture…”
She didn’t major in architecture, but I know what she means. Maple Ridge is a new town by most standards. It lacks the historical architecture of the northeastern states that she’s drawn to. It lacks the historical architecture found in Britain and Europe—her heritage, even if she doesn’t know the truth behind that.
“What can I say? Maple Ridge has a special place in my heart,” I tell her.
She makes a sound that has me smiling on the inside. I recognize it. I’m about to be lectured by my headstrong, romantic daughter.
“Auntie, how can you say that? You haven’t even found a man there to fall in love with.”
My breath draws in slightly at the word Auntie, but not enough for Lizzie to notice. Twenty-one years and it still hurts—has done so from the first time she called me that.
I never got to experience the joy of her calling me Mummy. Instead, I got to witness her use the word in reference to Hazel’s photo. Sometimes, I would pretend Lizzie was saying it to the other woman in the picture. Me. The woman who fell in love with her soul mate, only to lose him to the senselessness of war.
Lizzie has never commented on how she looks more like me than the other two people in the photo I took from Hazel and Charles’s bombed house.
“There’s more to life than falling in love with a handsome stranger,” I remind her. The gold pendant Johann gave me presses warmly on the skin over my heart.
My love for him hasn’t dimmed since I fell for the man who was supposed to be the enemy. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about him.
“Have you ever been in love?” Lizzie gives me a questioning side glance.
“Once. A very long time ago.”
Her eyes widen. My love life has never been up for discussion. That’s not to say she hasn’t tried to push me to find someone. When she was younger and realized she was the only girl in her class without parents, she wanted me to find her a daddy like all her friends had.
“Who?” she asks.
“You didn’t know him. It was during the war.”
Lizzie is familiar with the war that cost her the love of a father she never got to know. I’ve talked about him. But she believes Charles was her father—only he’s not the man I describe. The man she knows in her heart to be her father is all Johann.
She makes an exasperated sound. “Auntie, that ended almost twenty years ago. You don’t get only one love in your lifetime.” She walks around a young couple who stopped to take a photo of the New York Life Building.
I smile at her. “You do when he’s your soul mate.”
“There’s no such thing as soul mates. Gosh, do you realize what a bummer that would be if there was only one love for you out there, and he died, and you could never experience love again?”
I chuckle, the volume barely noticeable against the New York City hustle. A cab drives past, honking. “I thought you were the romantic. I’m the practical one.”
“I am. But that’s just sad to believe you can’t love again if your so-called The One is dead.”
I hitch my shoulders. “I guess you’re right.”
“Glad you think so. Does that mean you’ll give love another try?”
“We’ll see. It’s not as if I have found anyone who has captured my heart.”
“That’s because you live in a small town with no possibilities.” She makes a funny face, her eyes—Johann’s eyes—going cross-eyed.
This time I laugh, the sound hearty, carefree, full of life. “You might be right about that.”
It’s not as though I haven’t met men over the past twenty years who have shown interest in me. But I am also not the same woman who went off to war, ready to serve her king and country. That woman went through so much while living in France during the Nazi occupation. She still struggles with frequent nightmares that have her waking in the middle of the night, gasping for air. She keeps expecting the Gestapo to show up at the house and drag her away to interrogate her.
I wiggle my fingers—the ones Christian damaged. Even after all these years, my hand is not the same as it once was. The war might have ended for most people almost twenty years ago, but for those of us who lived in the heart of it, the memory never goes away. It lurks in the dark corners.
But I was lucky. I am alive. So many SOE agents perished at the hands of the Nazis. So many lives were changed due to the sacrifices we made. Changed for the worse and changed for the better. We helped pave the way so D-Day could happen. We helped pave the way so the war could end with the Allies the victors.
“Oh, look at that dress.” Lizzie grabs my hand and pulls me to the shop window that shows off a simple pink sheath dress hanging on the mannequin.
“It’s pretty.” I scan my surroundings, my body tense for no reason. The reaction is another souvenir from my time in occupied France. While it’s not as bad as it once was, every so often I feel like I’m back in Paris, watching out for the Milice and collaborators. The sensation is worse in big cities. Another reason I prefer Maple Ridge. The memories of the Gestapo don’t taunt me as often there.
A man and two women are strolling towards us. The younger woman, who looks to be five or six years older than Lizzie, glances at the window with the dress.
My daughter turns to me, her expression bright with excitement. I recognize it. Lizzie is a talented seamstress, a gift she inherited from her Austrian aunt. Johann once told me Anja had a special knack for designing and sewing beautiful dresses. That expression means Lizzie is thinking of how she can replicate the dress for herself.
A small sound from the direction of the man and the two women has me turning my head. The man stares at Lizzie as if he’s seeing an apparition.
He says something to the older of the two women. Her eyes shift to my daughter and go wide. Her mouth forms a perfect “O.”
Something about the man and woman tug at a recollection buried deep in my mind, but I don’t know why. They’re about my age, but they aren’t anyone I’ve recently met.
Their gazes move from Lizzie to me and recognition flares in their eyes. The pair closes the distance between us, and the younger woman, who appears oblivious to their conversation, continues walking to the window where Lizzie is standing.
“I’m so sorry,” the man tells me, a slight accent staining his words. It’s weak, but there’s a quality about it that makes me think he once lived in Austria or possibly Germany. “I don’t mean to be rude, but your daughter…well, she looks so much like someone we once knew.”
“She’s not her, though,” the woman says before I can correct him and tell him Lizzie is my niece. “Anja died during the Second World War. And she was a few years older at the time than your daughter.”
At the name, it’s as if the world has leapt back in time, and I’m standing outside of Jacques’s barn, watching Johann talking to the young family. I look between the pair. “Oskar? Margrit?” Their names are whispered, the feel of them rough against my throat.
And now I’m not the only one back in occupied France. I can see it in Oskar’s shocked expression. “Angelique?” My cover name stumbles past his lips.
Lizzie hasn’t notice what is happening behind her. She and the other woman—who, if I am right, is Sonja—are busy chatting about the dresses in the window.
I step away from them, not wanting Lizzie to overhear our conversation. “My real name is Iris,” I tell Oskar and Margrit, keeping my voice low. “Angelique was the name I used while I was with the resistance.” I’m not allowed to talk about the real reason I was in France, but they knew me from that time, and they know my role in helping them escape to England. There’s no reason to pretend I don’t know who they’re talking about. “That is my daughter—but she has grown up believing I’m her aunt and not her mother, even though I am the one who has loved and raised her. It was simpler that way.”
This is the first time I have spoken the truth to anyone. Even the SOE was more than happy to pretend I hadn’t given birth in France. The truth tastes both bitter and sweet on my tongue.
I keep telling myself one day I’ll be honest with Lizzie, but when is a good time for that? I lied to her to protect her. I’m still protecting her by not revealing the one person she has trusted all this time has lied to her about her parentage. But the fact is, the British Official Secrets Act I signed still prohibits me from telling her the truth I want her to hear. The truth about her father. The truth about my time in France.
A timeless silence stretches around us as they digest my words. It’s Oskar who is the first to state what they both have pieced together. “She’s Johann’s daughter, isn’t she?”
I nod, my heart aching at the sound of his name on someone else’s lips.
It must show on my face because Margrit’s expression turns to one of sadness and grief. “You loved him.”
It’s not a question, but I nod again all the same. “Very much. He died while fighting with the French maquis. He lived long enough to meet his daughter, Anna, whom he loved very much. She and I escaped to England soon after.”
I check that Lizzie is still preoccupied with the dress. “My sister, like me, was English. She and her baby were killed when the Germans bombed their home a short time before Anna and I returned to England. And since my brother-in-law was also dead…I took my niece’s birth certificate and let the world believe that Anna is my niece…”
The sorrow in Oskar’s and Margrit’s eyes tells me they understand my reason for doing what I did, although they don’t know the full extent of why I had to lie about Lizzie’s parentage. They escaped Austria and France and Hitler’s assault on the Jewish population, but the anti-Semitic attitudes didn’t stop on the southern side of the English Channel. Even now, it’s rampant in America. The negative stigmas that disabled people face and the racism against people of color both remain strong in this country.
Hitler and his National Socialist Party might be dead, but the hatred and ignorance he fanned the flames for are very much alive twenty years later.
Perhaps Lizzie wouldn’t face the same level of condemnation now about her father being a German soldier as she would have when the post-war wounds were still fresh, but I’m not sorry for the choice I made. If I hadn’t signed the Official Secrets Act, my decision to pretend she was my niece would still have been the right choice at the time. She was an innocent child, the one thing right with the world.
She was proof that out of so much anger and hate, something beautiful could bloom.
“We always wondered what happened to Johann.” Pain, sadness, and relief play tug-of-war on Oskar’s face. “We tried to locate him after the war, but we found no records of what happened to him. We were able to learn that his sister and mother died, but nothing beyond that.” He looks at Lizzie. Hope blossoms alongside the pain. “Are you living in New York City?”
“No, we live in Maple Ridge, Oregon.”
Oskar’s mouth shifts into a wide smile, and an unmistakable amusement gleams in his eyes. “Is it as beautiful as he dreamed it would be?”
“Very much so. He would have loved it.”
“There is so much about America he would have loved.” Oskar’s smile falters. “We owe you so much, Iris. If not for you, we probably would never have survived. I hope we can stay in touch this time. I would love to get to know my best friend’s daughter. She might never find out about my true link to her, but I would still love to be there for her. Just like you and Johann were there for my family and me.”
“I would love that,” I say, fighting back the tears I haven’t shed in so many years. “I would love that so much. Thank you.”
Oskar and I hug. And then I hug Margrit. Hug the remaining links to the man I loved, the links to the world we have since left behind.