“Mother,” Tim said, “if you’d given me a second, I was trying to figure it out.”
“Here he comes, here he comes.” Mrs. Parrish picked up her fork and took a large bite of roast boar.
Tim set down the popgun.
“Guten Abend.” The man’s face was pasty and taut; he wore a sort of smile that seemed stretched into place. He bent slightly from the waist, and Tim stood. The man extended a hand, the red grape rolling in his palm.
“Gehört das Ihnen?”
“I’m sorry,” Tim said. He lifted his chin, his eyes scanning the room for a steward. Everyone was hiding; everyone was busy, Mrs. Parrish chewing furiously. “I don’t understand.”
“Ihre Waffe zu haben scheint Befeuert. Ihre Gun. Diese Gun. Ja?”
“I’m sorry.” Tim looked at Mary Frances, whose hand covered her mouth. “It was an accident.”
“Ein Unfall. Ein Spiel. A game, yes?” The German smiled again, letting the grape roll onto the table next to Tim’s plate. “Kraft durch Freude.”
He bowed again, and Tim repeated the German back to him, Kraft durch Freude, as it seemed to solve the problem. He repeated it to himself, then repeated it again to a passing steward whose sleeve he caught.
“‘Strength through joy,’ sir. It is a common feeling in Germany now, that we will find strength through joy.”
“Of course,” Tim said.
“I am really terribly embarrassed,” Mrs. Parrish said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s all right, Mother. Your Nazi was very understanding. And they did hand out the guns.”
But neither Tim nor Mrs. Parrish went back to their meals. Mary Frances realized they’d been surrounded by these Germans for the entire crossing and yet she hadn’t spoken to any of them, no more than a nod in the passageway, an acknowledgement on deck. It was, in fact, their ship.
Slowly, the twittering cabin boys became less of a spectacle. The whistles and catcalls died away, the Germans pushing back from their tables with their goblets of cherries, making their way back to the lounge, to the bar, to other rooms on other decks. Mary Frances and the Parrishes stayed put, and slowly the cabin boys came out of hiding, shaking the needles from their hair.
Tim ordered another bottle of wine. The cabin boys began dismantling the forest. The stewards cleared the platters of food to the kitchen, snapped clean white linens over the empty tables for the morning’s service. There seemed to be a pall settled over them now. None of them were willing to be the first to stand and break it, and they sat there long after their wine was just sips in their glasses. The stewards had finished with their work, a line of white-jacketed young men at attention by the kitchen door, ready for the Americans to take their leave.
* * *
They lay in her cabin long after saying good night, the pitch of the ship beneath them. Mary Frances wanted to ask him if he was scared, but it seemed such a silly question now, after all they’d done. All she seemed to have were silly questions.
“Tim?”
His breaths were deep and even.
“What happens tomorrow?”
“Well.” He rolled onto his side, his lips next to her ear. “We strike land. We make land travel to Paris. A train, I think. They have beds there too, but I’m not sure we will have the time to make use of them.”
“It will be different.”
“So serious.”
She didn’t say anything, and he didn’t try to see her face.
“Yes,” he said finally. “It will be different, for us. Than this.”
“Everything feels a bit more possible at sea.”
* * *
When the ship docked, they took the train from Cherbourg to Paris, through the wet, gray countryside. Mrs. Parrish seemed unsettled; she spoke to Tim with a surprising intimacy, as though Mary Frances were not there.
“I have real doubts, Timmy. I may well be too old for a journey like this one.”
“That’s ridiculous, Mother.”
Mrs. Parrish made a sound.
“You just got off the ship and have now hurtled yourself off again. You’re still catching up. You need a nap, a meal, and then we’ll see who can stop you.”
Tim crossed his legs, nonchalantly snapping open the paper his French was nowhere near good enough to read. It was interesting to see him bolstering his mother; she wondered where he had learned to do what he did to people. Everybody took his encouragement.
“I could go to the club car,” Mary Frances said.
“No, dear, it’s fine. The porter will be around shortly. Surely there are porters.”
“It’s no trouble. Those days on the ship have caught up with my appetite. I’m always hungry now.”
“You do look it, dear, healthier. Still, Timmy, fetch the porter.”
Tim folded the paper. “Of course.”
He slid back the pocket door, brushing against her knees only the barest bit as he passed through. Mrs. Parrish had such firm ideas about what was for her to do, what was for Tim, what she could do alone, and what she needed his escort for. Mary Frances was still learning her place and the expectations therein. She found herself wanting to lean over the rails to test them.
“If I may ask,” she said, “what’s the matter?”
Mrs. Parrish cut her eyes at Mary Frances, suddenly a much younger woman, capable of far more than prattle and worry.
“Years ago,” she said. Then she gave a sigh, the rest of what she was remembering trailing off. “I’m old, dear. Who wants to be old?”
“But you’ve looked forward to this trip for so long.”
“And now I won’t have it to look forward to any longer.”
Mrs. Parrish turned to the window, the countryside whipping past. Mary Frances followed her gaze, dizzy with the speed at which they traveled. She remembered taking this exact route with Al on their honeymoon, on their way to Dijon by way of Paris. They’d gone to the club car, and she ordered her first French meal, good bread, good ham and butter, a bottle of champagne, and they’d eaten, so happy across from each other, she felt as if she would burst.
When Tim returned, both women sat with their chins in their hands, unreachable in their own places. He opened the French newspaper again and stared at the words until they ran together, blottish, swelling blackness, the opposite of clouds. He could tell fortunes by this newspaper, but he could not read it, and he had no idea what had happened in this compartment while he had been gone.
* * *
At the hotel desk, they were holding mail for Mary Frances, a letter from Al and two from Edith. It was cold in Whittier, and with Anne and the children away, with Mary Frances away, and Rex completely flummoxed by his new editor, Edith had nothing to do. I miss you, Dote, she said. There is nothing so fine as our talks when I start to feel the blurries waiting in the wings.
Mary Frances took the other letters to the bar. She ordered a whiskey, then another after that, smoked a cigarette and then another after that. In all her travels, even when she and Al had lived in France, this was the first time she’d ever felt so distant from her family. By the time she reached Al’s letter, all she was good for was skimming it.
Tim pulled out the chair beside her, ordered a beer. “This hotel is quite modern,” he said. “Perhaps all of Paris is modern now.”
“Your mother will be disappointed.”
“My mother is indefatigable. She knows no French disappointments.”
Mary Frances tucked her letters into her purse, to read another time when she did not feel stretched so thin.