An Owl's Whisper (33 page)

Stan pushed away from the table and was already at the door when Waxman called, “Chandler, hold on. Gimme my damn note back.”

As he bolted through the quiet darkness, Stan’s brain raced as fast as his feet.
Damn it, Waxman, don’t you think I’ve wondered, too? ’Bout how Eva knew? Well, it’s not like I can just ask. Hell, I can’t stand to even think about it.
Recalling his old man saying, “Kid, don’t ask how sausage gets made,” Stan crumpled the note and threw it into a trashcan.

Without official duties, Stan could spend his days with Eva, and he gladly let that pleasure push sticky questions about geese with teeth from his thoughts. And of them, February 14, 1945 was the most pleasant of all. Bookended by cold, wet weather, that Valentine’s Day was bright and unseasonably warm. Like school kids, Eva and Stan practically skipped the route of their morning walk, and it seemed that the whole of Liege poured outdoors to greet them. When they got to
du Point de Vue
,
Madame
Hélène had a picnic packed for the lovers.

On the university grounds, Stan and Eva found an old bench on a grassy knoll overlooking the Meuse. Their lunch basket was stocked with sandwiches of sausage and cheese on crusty rolls, bitter salad leaves, hard-boiled eggs, and bottles of Jupiler beer. After stuffing themselves, the warmth of the sunshine was narcotic. Stan laid out his jacket for Eva to lie on. He watched her stretch like a cat and lie on her back to nap. Drowsy though he was, he had to watch her for a moment: Blond hair lolled out on OD wool. Face made mysterious by the dark glasses she wore. Arms crossed over ribs, cradling breasts. Skirt, zebra-bold black and white stripe, fanning out from her waist. He gazed at Eva until he could fight sleep no more, then he lay on his side next to her. When he held her hand and nestled his lips to her ear, Eva smiled in her sleep. Stan was smiling too as he drifted off.

When he woke up, Stan saw Eva sitting next to him, knees pulled up against her chest, gazing over the river.
Ain’t this somethin’ to wake up to?
But before he said anything, before she noticed he was awake, he saw the tracks of tears on her cheek. It startled him, and he popped up on his elbow.

Seeing Stan stir, Eva turned her head and brushed away her tears with the back of her hand. She coughed. “At last sleeping beauty awakens. I thought I might need to call a princess to kiss you back to life.”

“Find another princess when the best one of all is here next to me?”

Eva forced a smile. “Hardly a princess.”

“Honey, what’s wrong?” He knew her well enough not to expect much of an answer.

But she surprised him. “Stanley, so many bad memories live here. So much evil has happened. The war won’t let me go even after it’s moved on.” She fell silent.

Stan felt like she was a million miles distant, and he hated it. He shuffled ideas like a dealer does cards then stood, facing her. He stood and took her hands in his, intensity etched on his face. “Eva, if it’s what you say, if bein’ here’s the problem, why don’t you come back to Hooker County with me? The war can’t touch you there.” Without releasing her hands, without breaking his gaze, Stan dropped down on one knee. “What I’m tryin’ to say is, will you marry me, honey? It’s a new land, and I’d love you forever.”

Eva peered into his eyes. “You would, wouldn’t you?” She looked off. “A new land, a new start.” She tumbled that prospect through her mind for a moment. “But would it be fair to you?” She seemed to be asking herself the question.

Stan’s eyes opened wide. “Fair to me? God, it would be the fairest, the best thing ever for me. Don’t you get it? You’re the most important thing in the world to me!” He raised his hands in dismay. “The only thing.”

“But you don’t know what I really am.”

“Whatever you
were
doesn’t matter. I only care what you are. What you are to me. Listen, you’re what got me through in the Ardennes. You’re my dreams, my hopes.” He held her hands and wouldn’t go on until she looked at him. “I got no future without you.”

“But what if smoke from the past smudges that future black?”

“Honey, I’m talking about a future—a new life—a whole world away. So far away the past can’t find it.”

Tears filled Eva’s eyes. “Stanley my love, I want more than anything to say yes, for I too have no future without you.”

“Then for Christ’s sake, say it!” Stan boomed.

Eva felt like she was teetering on a log. “What if I say I would be yours as long as it is fair to you. As long as it doesn’t hurt you. But if being yours ever comes to threaten you—” Her eyes bored into his. “—then I will be gone. Could you have me on those terms?”

“Of course I could, ’cuz I know it’ll always be fair to me.”

“You’ll understand then, if ever I’m gone, that I had to go? Had to protect you?”

Stan nodded.

Eva took his hands in hers. “Say it.”

Stan squeezed her hands. “I
will
understand.” He kissed them. “But I ain’t worried.”

Eva’s resistance toppled like a spun-out top. She nestled his neck and whispered, “Okey-dokey. If you’ll have me that way, then, Stanley, I say yes.”

Holding each other, their laughter and tears frothed up like warm champagne.

Eva said, “Now I have two favorite English words,
Okey-dokey
and
yes.
And I got to say both in one breath.” A moment later she turned intense. She kissed Stan passionately. “Let’s return
Madame
Hélène’s basket. Then I want more kisses like that one.”

The fire in her voice ignited another inside Stan. He kissed her and slid his hand under her skirt. “Kisses and maybe something else?”

Eva grabbed his hand and looked around, giggling. “Good things come to the patient.”

“That’s me,” said Stan. “After all, even the Army says I’m still a patient.”

Eva jumped up, smoothed her skirt, and pulled Stan to his feet.

He took her arm in his and charged ahead like the cavalry. “
Allez, a du Point de Vue!”

Eva laughed. “These French-speaking Americans, they make my knees soft!”

Giovanna’s Sin

With Eva’s
yes
, Stan petitioned the Army for permission to marry. His request had to buck up the chain of command all the way to Army Group level. He had to plug away at his desk job with hospital supply and wait. The green light came on April 19.

Eva and Stan married in Liege’s
Hôtel de Ville
, a few blocks from the
Place de la République Française. Madame
Ducoisie attended with her cousin.
Madame
Hélène and four of the regulars from
du Point de Vue
were there, as were Stan’s doctor and two GIs. When Stan was surprised Henri hadn’t made it, Eva told him, “Uncle’s business hit some angry rocks about the time the December fighting started. He told me he’ll travel to make the repairs but no one hears from him since. Such a pity.”

The magistrate who conducted the civil ceremony was a stooped old codger with hollow cheeks and a vulture’s beak of a nose. After the wedding, he told
Madame
Hélène, “Makes me ill! Americans abducting our girls like this.”

He’d have been better off keeping his opinions to himself. Within two minutes she’d told the whole wedding party. Hearing it, Stan patted the breast pocket of his Eisenhower jacket. “Had a one-ton coal ration card in here to tip the old bird. Now I reckon it’ll just stay put.”

Stan and Eva spent three days honeymooning at the hotel
Le Relais
in the resort town of Spa. Soon afterward, orders came for Stan’s return to the States for discharge. The question became how to get Eva there, too, since there was no civilian transatlantic travel that summer. With hundreds of European war brides whose GI husbands were about to ship home, this was a big problem. In May 1945 the European Command announced they would
secure civilian liners for the transport of spouses of discharged US servicemen to CONUS ports of entry and from there convey to the residence of record of said serviceman. The costs of such conveyance will be borne by the War Department.
The timing of Eva’s passage had not yet been set on June 6 when Stan kissed her and climbed onto a train in Liege to begin his trip home.

After Stan’s departure, Eva stayed with
Madame
Hélène. On July 28 she received official US Army correspondence, with documents of authority attached, instructing her to report on August 11 to the US Embassy in Paris. The letter indicated that from Paris, she would travel to Mullen, Nebraska via LeHavre and New York. A duplicate letter went to Stan, who by then had been a civilian back home in the Sand Hills for almost a month.

Early the morning of August 10, Eva took a train to Paris. Shortly after noon, stepping through a swirl of steam on platform six of the city’s
Gare du Nord
, she spent her first breathless seconds in the City of Light. If only Stanley were here with me, she thought. She skipped toward the platform’s head, her body rotating so that her valise swung out like an orbiting moon. Gazing at the metal skeleton and translucent glass of the high ceiling and the pigeons fluttering there, Eva felt she might float up to them.

She took a room in the unpretentious
Hôtel de Milan
, located just outside the station on
Rue de Saint Quentin
. Behind the reception desk was the hotel owner, who with great formality introduced herself as
Madame
de Bœuf. Jewels of saliva glistened at both ends of her frown. Clicking noises came from inside her mouth, as if she was eating hard candy. When she jumped off her stool to fetch the room key from a set of hooks on the back wall, she nearly disappeared behind the counter, so dwarfish was she. Her shuffle over and back with the key seemed almost simian. Like a judge warning a felon getting off on a technicality, she admonished Eva to mind the hotel rules as she handed over the key.

“
L’hôtel de Bizarre,
” Eva whispered as she walked from the reception desk. With a glance back at her hostess, she pushed her valise into the tiny lift and then slipped in next to it through its slight doorway. She ascended to the fourth floor, the ancient contraption complaining all the way. Then it was down a dark and constricted hallway, with its perceptible lean to the left, to her tiny room with creaking floor and stained wallpaper. It smelt of stale sweat and smoke. But it was perfect: It was Paris.

Eva had twenty hours before she was to check in at the embassy the next morning. And she had things to do.

She rode a bus to the city center, the
Île de la Cité
. She spent the afternoon seeing things she had before only dreamed of. Things in books. Things she might never see again. She took in
Notre-Dame
and
Sainte-Chapelle
, spent an hour in the
Louvre
just to say she’d beheld poor, armless Venus and smug Mona, and walked the
Champs-Élysées
to the
Arc de Triomphe
. Eva drank
café nature
outdoors on the boulevard and wrote Stan a note on a postcard of the
Arc,
being sure to mention,
A cute Frenchman and a dozen GIs asked to buy me drinks today. I turned them all down.

Tired from her early train travel and the afternoon of walking, Eva took the Metro back to
Hôtel de Bizarre
for a nap. About 9:00 p.m. she was ready to go out again, now for a nighttime view of the city from the steps of the
Sacré-Coeur
basilica on
Montmatre
.

Eva took the Metro to
Anvers,
the station at the foot of the long stairway up
Montmatre
. As she left the station, she passed under the wrought iron
Metropolitain
sign. She stepped onto the street and turned to view the famous
Art Nouveau
styling. With its swan’s neck ironwork running up to flowerlike light fixtures, the archway seemed familiar. It took her a moment to realize the Metro entryway wasn’t her old friend; it was Mother Catherine’s. Mother used to tell the girls about riding the Metro in Paris as a child, about the graceful
panneau d’entrée
of the original stations. Eva remembered Mother’s old souvenir picture book of Paris, the one she loved showing the girls. The one Eva herself so loved. As she remembered it, the photo on the cover had been a Metro entrance–perhaps even
Anvers
, the very one she stood before now.

Standing under Mother’s archway, Eva saw the plainness of her frock turned golden by the light enveloping her. She touched the metal, still warm with the evening’s heat. A train passed below and she felt the ironwork vibrate. Alive. Mother Catherine was with her. She knew it. And she knew what the miracle meant—it was time for the two of them to make their peace. “Mother, ones who love can hurt each other. Can hurt each other so much.” She raised her trembling arms and sobbed. “It was that way for us, wasn’t it?”

Eva reached out and stroked the
panneau
tenderly. “Oh, Mother, if you know my heart, you know there was never a minute, not a second, that I did not love you. I forgive everything. Caspar forgives. And you—can
you
forgive?” She wiped her tears with her sleeve. “I only dare ask now because you protected my Stanley in the Ardennes. Mother, please believe that I never intended the bitter fruit of my treachery. Never dreamed they would hurt you…murder you. You, the one who was, is still, mother to me. How could I? And the little ones in the vault? I meant them no harm. The weasel told me the children would just be sent away.” Eva closed her eyes. “I was so naïve.” She gazed up into the light. “I only wanted you to lose what you cared about as much as I did my Caspar. So you’d know how it hurt.” Eva embraced the
panneau
, clinging as if it were hope itself. “Mother, I beg you. Forgive your daughter on this threshold of her new life.”