“So far.” Stall could not keep the grim note from his voice. “You were telling me about going back to Paris.”
“You’re thinking I looked for your girl, but I didn’t. I just wanted to stay in the place where we stayed. I knew you’d met someone, but I didn’t know who she was. I wanted to sleep in the same seedy little flop and see the sights again, see if I could hold my liquor a little better the second time around.”
“So how did you . . . ?”
“She came looking for me. Or rather for someone who might know you. The owners of the pension told her you’d been there with another GI. And when I showed up again, they called her. It was about a month after you . . . spent some time with her, and you know what a girl knows after a month goes by.”
“She told you she was pregnant with my child?”
Vane looked at Stall for a long time. “Imagine how tough that was for her, Tom. She was only fifteen. Did you know that when you got involved with her that way?”
What could he say? He had not known. She had seemed far older than her fifteen years and seven months. Maybe war, occupation, did that to young girls, made them look and act older than their years. Stall had seen boys in combat become old men in a few days. He said, “No, I didn’t know. I suppose I thought she was at least eighteen or nineteen.”
“And that would have been all right?”
Vane’s face was blank. Stall saw no reproach in his eyes and heard none in his voice. He said, “Yeah, I suppose so. In a foreign country. In wartime. The French were . . .”
“More sophisticated than we were?”
“Sure.”
“Not Brigitte.”
There it was. The first sign of Frank Vane’s anger. Something in his eyes that said he had known the girl well, the girl Stall had known for only two days. The girl Stall had loved for two days.
And yes, he had told Brigitte he loved her, and he had meant it. And when the army had ordered him home, he had promised himself he would see her again, had imagined it like a scene in a movie, getting off the train at the Gare du Nord and walking with his musette bag over his shoulder, the handsome veteran with the slight limp (actually, the only proof of his wound was a scar the size of a dime behind his thigh) making his way up the street to the little pastry shop where her parents toiled for a modest living, and surprising her there, the beautiful girl who had waited for him, had spurned all the blandishments of men to wait for him, and Brigitte looking up from the napoleons she was making and smiling with a dot of flour on her pretty nose.
And what happened then? What happened after the girl with the flour on her nose looked up and smiled? It was the question Stall could never answer. And it was the want of an answer that kept him from going back to find Brigitte, and as the years passed, it was the never going back that made him forget her little by little until the night when he asked himself, as he lay beside the sweetly sleeping Maureen, if he had ever really loved Brigitte, and the answer came whispering out of the darkness: I don’t know.
Frank Vane said, “Brigitte was not sophisticated. She was a kid trying to act more grown up than she really was, and she was caught up in all that excitement, all that freedom after four years of occupation. Didn’t you notice how thin she was, or was that something a man could ignore in the throes of passion?”
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