a depth-charge. For a moment, he thought he might vomit his supper on the floor, but he didn’t.
There were other glasses, different colors. Wine, he could recognize and stayed away from. His parents often served him abondance with his meals, mixing a centimeter of wine into a large tumbler of water, but he didn’t like the stuff’s coppery flavor.
He sniffed a few more glasses and settled on one shaped like a balloon and smelling like baba au rum. He swallowed its contents without gagging. A third glass, he knew, contained Pernod. He liked the ornate blue, green and silver label on the bottle and always watched when his father fixed one. The distinctive anisette aroma filled his nose, so he drank three large swallows of that too.
He slid under the big Napoleon III couch, then stretched out. The ceiling panels swayed slightly like gentle waves, and that was very restful. He stared at them for a while, decided he was still thirsty and finished the Pernod. He thought a big chunk of dark chocolate might go well with the anisette so he found the box from Belgium his mother kept on the piano and ate a few of those. Soon he was thirsty again.
Now the choice of beverages appeared limitless, so he sampled one, grimaced, and spit it back into the glass. Something honey-colored caught his eye. It smelled vaguely of oranges, which tasted good with chocolate. It was smooth and the tang filled all the spaces beneath his tongue and between his teeth. He got drowsy and knew he should go to bed but his legs were thick and rubbery and he decided it would be a lot of trouble to take his clothes off, so he didn’t. He curled up on the couch. He thought again about the potato gun and giggled at the remembered image of Oncle Yves jumping at least a foot off the floor when the potato bullets hit him in the back of the thighs. He fell asleep in mid-laugh, trying to stifle the sound so he wouldn’t wake his parents.
In the morning, Maman found him. She was not angry, and she didn’t preach. She had Mathilde fix him tea with a dash of rum, which he drank happily—three cups—before falling asleep again. Mathilde offered to make tea for Maman as well, but Maman said she preferred a glass of water with her morning pills.
Papa was more worried and didn’t seem to care much for Maman’s remedy. There’d been drinkers in his family, he told Jeanot with a serious look in his eyes. His older sister was a sequestered drunk. He’d dealt with intoxicated soldiers during the war, and had come to realize there was no greater danger to groups or individuals than someone incapable of holding his liquor.
Jeanot listened, but his head hurt and it was hard to pay attention.
There was a lot of whispering back and forth, with Mathilde for once taking Maman’s side. “A drink never hurt anyone,” she said, though she seldom drank herself. “Where I come from, you start the day with a little white wine, and it carries you through the worst weather. Everyone knows that. Leave the boy alone; there’s no harm done.”
By the time Jeanot felt well enough to stand, trundle to the bathroom, puke, dress and make his way to the street with Mathilde, it was nearly mid-afternoon. The school day was almost over, and though his eyes hurt from the sunlight, he felt the evening had, all in all, been a success.
Later, he helped his Oncle Répaud walk Soldat, the three-legged dog, ran an errand for his Tante Jacqueline, spent an hour in the cellar rearranging his magazines and covered three sheets of paper with doodles. He started a poem but couldn’t quite make it rhyme or move the way he imagined it should, so he gave that up. He wished he could be a poet like Minou Drouet, the 8-year-old genius who had recently been featured in Paris Match. It galled him that a girl could get that much recognition doing something he should be able to do. He was, after all, very good at placing words next to one another, not that it impressed anyone. When Minou Drouet did it, everybody noticed. Even his teacher at the école maternelle had said Minou was an enfant prodige, a one-of-a-kind and didn’t she wish she had students like Minou instead of a bunch of slow-witted children who couldn’t remember how to spell ‘Napoléon?’
Chapter 3
A dark intimidating corridor led to the kitchen and toilet. Often, Jeanot secretly peed in the bathtub to avoid going into that corridor, or he crossed his legs and held his breath.
At one end of the apartment were three rooms rented to Captain Walker, his pregnant wife, and their daughter, Trudy. They’d moved in after the end of the war. Grand-père Leopold had loaned the apartment to Jeanot’s parents shortly after their son’s birth and thought the modest rent the American family paid might help Jeanot’s family make ends meet. The Americans’ rooms were furnished with a mad mix of Grand-père’s most worn antiques: Louis XVI Bergères chairs painted red with scarlet upholstery, a sagging Art Nouveau sofa upholstered in fading velvet, and upright gas lamps poorly converted to provide electrical lighting.
Trudy fascinated Jeanot. She was six and he’d never seen a girl that looked even remotely like her. For one thing, she took a bath every single night, and the thought of that much hot water devoted to one small body boggled his mind. He took a bath twice a week usually following his two sisters, Madeleine and Françoise, when they came to spend the day and use the facilities. When it was his turn, the water was already grey and mucky with a ring of spent soap and grime around the tub.
Also, Trudy was blond. She was really, really blond, as if someone had painted her hair bright gold and the paint hadn’t dried yet. She always wore white, spoke only English and was a snob, ignoring him with studied disdain whenever he happened to be standing by the bathroom door as she came from her bath wrapped in a fluffy pink towel.
Once, he asked his Maman, whom he knew dyed her hair from mousy brown to Hollywood blonde, if Trudy dyed her hair too.
“Nobody in Paris has hair that yellow! It can’t be real!”
The announcement seemed to perplex his mother. “Vraiment? I don’t know. Maybe in America the sun is different. It does things to children’s hair. Ask your Papa.”
Jeanot never did. Hair dying, he was certain, was not a subject on which his Papa would have extensive knowledge.
Trudy’s father, the Captain, was a pale stout man with close set squinty eyes. Jeanot rarely saw Trudy’s mother. According to Papa, she was adjusting poorly to foreign lands, their people, foods, languages, and habits. Whenever Jeanot caught a glimpse of her, she looked feral and frightened. Once, turning a corner, Jeanot surprised her as she carried a load of hand laundry back to their rooms. The woman yelped something incomprehensible and dropped everything on the floor. Jeanot helped her gather the clothing and sheets, taking the opportunity to pocket a pair of Trudy’s panties for later inspection.
The American couple paid part of their rent by buying goods at the American PX for Jeanot’s parents. There were things at the PX rarely found in French stores or, if available, so expensive they belonged to the world of fantasy. Papa got shoes, big black squashers he kept meticulously shined, and Maman had a steady supply of Pall Mall cigarettes in royal red packs. There were boxes of Tide, Johnny Walker whiskey, Ivory soap, pancake mix that, water added, made somewhat edible crêpes, potatoes the size of small dogs and strange, tasteless red sausages served on buns so soft they might be cake. Jeanot got underwear with a slot to pee through and a toy Colt 45 with a black plastic belt and holster. Even Madeleine and Françoise got stuff from the PX: bras with reinforced cups, an accurate-to-the-nanosecond metronome for Madeleine, an Olivetti portable typewriter for Françoise who, barely seventeen, was heading off to England to train as a “bilingual secretary.” Jeanot understood that meant she could perform boring menial tasks in both French and English. The culture in Grande Bretagne was nothing like American culture, he’d been told, and didn’t interest Jeanot at all.
Jeanot had never actually been to the PX, so the mysterious market open only to US citizens became, in his imagination, everything
