nodded. “I’ve been studying French since we decided to come here. Oh, but this is horrid! They were mostly widows! How in the world could anyone be so depraved?”
Frederick was piqued. “You never told me you spoke the language.”
Easter didn’t look up. “‘Speak’ is hardly the word, dear. The seamstress taught me a few words during the fittings. I thought it would be appropriate. I didn’t want us to be like those dreadful American couples who are incapable of uttering the simplest phrase in another language. What if I have to go to the bathroom? I’ll have to ask someone. Look at him! Doesn’t he look like the devil himself?”
The grainy photo showed a man of middling stature being escorted by two burly policemen. He was balding, wore a sharply barbered beard that grew to a point and a waxed mustache. He was glaring straight into the camera. “Look at those eyes,” Easter said. “Murderous!”
Frederick frowned. He found the bathroom comment inappropriate. Easter continued to read aloud.
“His name is Henri Désiré Landru, and he is denying everything, but the police say they have proof. They found the remains of burned human bones in his villa! Those poor women! And it says he is married, with children!”
Frederick sighed. “I’m not sure this is the best way to begin our travels, talking about such things. Look at this scenery!” He tried to divert her attention.
She glanced out the window. “Farmland. Very exciting. It says here police found the names of 358 women with whom he corresponded. He apparently preyed on older ladies. They think he may have hypnotized them!”
She lowered the paper, folded it and reached for his hand. “Yes, we are in France and it’s lovely. I’m sorry Frederick. You’re absolutely right.” She smiled, kissed him on the cheek. “There are certainly more edifying things to talk about than a deranged murderer.” She shook her head, frowned. “But think of it, 358 women!”
The train was chugging through a wide field dotted here and there with leafless trees. In the distance, Frederick saw the steeple of a church, a barn, a farmhouse. The train flashed by a youth in knickers holding a stick and driving a trio of thin cows. The boy waved at the train.
“We’re in France,” Frederick said.
Easter lowered the paper and folded it. “Yes, we are.” She smiled. “This is a wonderful trip! I’m sorry I was so ill on the ship, and I promise things will be better from this moment on.”
An hour from Paris, the train ground to a halt. Frederick looked out the window and saw a military convoy passing by. “I think those are American boys!” They were. Throughout the train, compartment doors opened and men and women leaned out, cheered and applauded. Frederick struggled with the window but couldn’t free it. Easter said, “I think they took the leather pull-straps to make belts for the soldiers…”
The line of men trudged past the train and disappeared around a curve in the road. Easter thought they looked very young, like the children she saw playing stickball in her Chicago neighborhood.
“Well,” said Frederick. “It’s nice to see the natives are friendly.”
Easter didn’t respond but pressed closer to him.
Chapter 7
James Johnson stared at the sketch; the sketch stared back. He stood, moved both the easel and canvas closer to a window.
The eyes were wrong. They failed to convey the young man’s cavalier good looks, his daring and courage. Instead, the face showed a certain cruelty, a hint of rudeness in the lips and cast of the mouth. James tore a blank sheet of newsprint from a pad and, with a stick of charcoal, drew a new chin, softer lips, a thinner, more muscular throat.
From the apartment’s open front door came a brief knock, a throat clearing. “C’est votre frère? Your brother, yes?”
Johnson turned, nodded and smiled.
Monsieur Hippolyte Lefebvre came twice daily, at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., and though he rarely had correspondence of importance or interest, Johnson always welcomed the man’s arrival.
The mailman was almost a foot shorter than Johnson but stood erect as a stake. For the first few months, M. Lefebvre had not been communicative, regarding the American artist more as a peculiarity of time and place than as a human. Johnson was a Ricain, a madman who had chosen wartime France over Philadelphia for unclear reasons that reflected what the mailman called “la folie américaine.”
Over time the two had become friends, or, at least, close acquaintances. M. Lefebvre’s, “Bonjour, Monsieur Johnson!” brightened the expatriate’s day. The little facteur made the effort to pronounce Johnson’s name as well as he could, though he failed to understand why there was an h between the o and the n. Plying him with an ocean of café-crème, Johnson had learned amazing things.
M. Lefebvre knew, for example, that the younger sister of Mademoiselle Gauthier, across the hall and down, was not a sister at all but a daughter, the issue of Mlle. Gauthier’s brief encounter with an American Army captain in 1904. This, Johnson decided, accounted for Mlle. Gauthier’s mother/sister aloofness when he accidentally met them in the hallway. The daughter/sister kept her eyes averted, but once flashed an irreverent grin when her mother/sister was not looking.
M. Lefebvre also knew that Monsieur Dupont, the dour baker at the nearby boulangerie, was conducting an affair of the heart with Madame Ribaud, owner of the flower shop across the street. Mme. Ribaud was far older than the 30-ish M. Dupont, a round, triple-chinned man, the product of his doughy environment. She, in turn, looked much like the pressed and faded flowers in her window display.
Then there was the Delâtre family, who had a boy, 6 years old now, with a head as large as a medicine ball, supported by complex braces attached to his waist and back. M. Lefebvre was friends with the Delâtre’s maid, a country girl from Auvergne, who told him the boy was kept in a small room beneath the servants’ stairway and fed only mashed potatoes and boudin sausage.
Of course, Mesdemoiselles Clothilde and Henriette, who lived in the apartment directly above Johnson’s, were not sisters at all, but followers of Lesbos. With a disapproving look, Mr. Lefevbre told of the magazines the women received, publications singing the praises of same-sex love.
M. Lefebvre knew all this and more. The facteur had a Parisian way of erasing any doubt concerning his veracity: a raised eyebrow, a slightly curled upper lip, a deprecating hand gesture which might be effeminate anywhere else, but in Paris obviated the need for explanations.
The mailman was learning English from a thin, brown-cover book he kept in his satchel. He was proud of his growing vocabulary and had asked Johnson to write down one new word a day, which he repeated as he walked his mail route.
Yesterday the word was “chip.” There had followed a bilingually complex conversation, and the mailman twice threw up his hands in despair and disgust as Johnson enunciated the differences between chip, ship, cheap, sheep, and cheep. To the postman’s French ear, the five words sounded exactly the same. So did bore, boor and boar. Big, bag, beg, bog and bug tortured him. His lips generated grimaces that did nothing for his pronunciation. He found English grotesque yet fascinating.
Pepper, paper, peeper and piper. The more confusing the word, the longer M. Lefebvre lingered over his coffee. Johnson had thought to enter the dark domain of George Bernard Shaw’s ghoti, where gh may be an ef,
