“I never knew him either,” he told Julie. “My father was killed at the very end of the war in Europe.”
“He was killed in the war, then? He was a soldier?”
“He was in fact the maire of the town of Bellerive.”
“You never told me he was the mayor,” Camille said.
“So what’s in the trunk?” Julie asked.
“I have not opened it yet. I have been waiting for you.”
“Oh my God, I can’t believe you waited. Let’s open it.” Julie was all over the trunk. She and Camille tipped the cardboard crate on its side and slid the trunk out onto the floor. It was old and battered, the kind of thing people stored in the attic or basement and then forgot. “Is it locked? How does it open?”
He held out a letter in shaky handwriting. “Madame says the key was long lost. We’ll have to break in like thieves.”
“Cool.” Julie was all over that, too.
Camille stood back, deeply intrigued. It was the same feeling she had in the darkroom the moment an image came to light. Anticipation. Discovery. A twinge of fear.
They cut the rusty lock in the center of the lid, then pried open the latches on the side. The lid was stuck, and it took the three of them and several sprays of lubricant to get it open. Finally, the lid yielded with a rusty grind of hinges.
The smell of dust and age and dried lavender filled the air. The trunk was lined with peeling paper, raining dry flakes onto the floor. There was a tray in the top section, which was filled with a collection of the ordinary and the prosaic—yellowed linens, hand-embroidered with floral sprigs and edged with lace, wrapped around a matching vanity set of a hand mirror, comb, and brush.
Julie took each item out and set it aside. “Papi, do you recognize any of this stuff?”
“No.” Henry shut his eyes. “That scent—the lavender. It takes me back. My aunt Rotrude used to sprinkle the linens with lavender water as she was ironing them.”
“Rotrude? That’s a weird name,” said Julie.
“She was my father’s sister. She’s the one who raised me at Sauveterre. By the end of the war, it was just the three of us—Rotrude, her daughter Petra, and myself.”
Through the years, he’d given Camille only snippets of his boyhood. His aunt, he’d said, was not a pleasant person. His cousin Petra was ten years older than he was, and after he left France, they had lost touch. Both women were long gone by now.
They went through the items one by one—old clothing, books and maps, a few tools, French magazines from the 1940s, a handmade knife from Opinel. Camille studied a cloth badge of some sort. It was a torch with wings, frayed at the edges as if it had been sewn to something else. There were three ancient volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories in English.
“Did someone speak English in the house where you grew up?” Julie asked.
“No,” said Henry. He opened one of the books, and there was a frontispiece that said From the Library of Cyprian Toselli. “I don’t recognize that name,” he said, and put the books aside. He pulled out a yellowed wall calendar from 1945 and studied the image at the top. It appeared to be a colorized photo. “Here is the town where I grew up. Here is Bellerive.”
Camille and Julie moved in close. The top of the calendar depicted a pretty hill town that appeared medieval in character. Crowning the hill was a church rising from the middle, like the center of a flower, its roof of overlapping slate surrounding a grand steeple. The tiny streets spiraled downward to a cliff-topped shore where the river flowed into the sea. It was a typical wide-angle shot, and the hand-coloring romanticized the seascape and sky, giving it a dreamy look.
While Camille and her father gazed at the calendar image, Julie summoned up present-day images on her phone. The town appeared as charming and bucolic in the present as it had in the past, tucked amid the craggy, sun-drenched landscape of the Var. “It looks almost the same,” she said. “When was the last time you went there, Papi?”
“I left the village in 1963,” he said.
“And you never went back,” Camille said. He’d never had much to say about his early life, offering her only the sketchiest of details. “That’s . . . wow. Did you ever feel like visiting?”
“No. Sometimes I miss the countryside, the food and the pace of life. At my age, I am feeling nostalgic, perhaps.”
“Check it out,” Julie said, brandishing an oversized envelope. On the front someone had scrawled, photos—Henri Palomar. As she undid the envelope clasp, she said, “Wasn’t that your name before?”
He nodded. “I prefer the American version—Henry Palmer.” Then he frowned at the envelope. “That is Rotrude’s handwriting.”
Julie took out the photos, and her eyes lit up. “Pictures of you, Papi!”
Camille leaned forward, as fascinated as Julie. He had come to America with almost nothing, least of all pictures and memorabilia from the past. The oldest one was dated 1948. It showed a little boy with huge eyes and a mop of curly dark hair, framing a face that was oblong, with high cheekbones, an adorable nose, and unsmiling lips. He stood beside a teenage girl in a school uniform, her hair in two blond braids.
“That would be my cousin Petra,” he said.
“Look how cute you were,” Julie said.
“But so serious,” Camille said, studying the shot. In her work, she was trained to inspect a photograph with a detective’s eye. What was happening the moment the camera’s aperture blinked open? Henri had a chastened look, his lips soft, his lash-fringed eyes vaguely ashamed, as if he’d just been caught doing something wrong. His shoulders were slightly hunched, his hands were in the pockets of his dungarees, and there was a small bit of space between him and the girl beside him, as if they were loath to touch each other.
“I can see a bit of Julie in this sweet little boy,” Camille said. They both shared a certain vulnerable look, maybe because they had both been hurt by the world at a tender age. She scanned the background of the picture—a pitted stone wall, some straggling plants, a broken gate, and a large building. She wondered what Finn would make of it. Then she chided herself for letting her mind wander to Finn.
There were only three more photos. She wished there were more. Did no one care to take pictures of this lovely little boy?
A school photo showed a grinning Henri, a missing front tooth indicating he was probably six or seven. Then there was a picture of him in a long robe, walking in a line of similarly garbed boys and girls.
“Graduation?” Julie asked.
“Church confirmation,” he said. “It was a big deal back then.”
Camille noticed a shadow under one eye, and the lid was puffy. “Looks like you were in a fight.”
“Does it?” He shrugged. “I don’t recall.” His mouth twitched slightly, and he passed a finger over the somber, wounded face of the boy in the processional. Camille wondered what memories the photo sparked.
“There’s one more,” said Julie, studying a picture of a heavyset boy standing in front of the same broken wall. “Is this you, Papi? It doesn’t really look like you.”
He glanced at the yellowed print. “Yes, that is me. I was probably about your age, or perhaps a year or two older.”
In that final photo, he looked like a different child. His clothes were ill-fitting, his haircut terrible, and there was a distant look in his eyes. He appeared extremely uncomfortable—and overweight. Camille had only ever known her father to be slender and quite ridiculously handsome.
He smiled at Julie as if reading her mind. “I went through a chubby phase. This was when I was known as Bouboule.”
“What’s that mean?” she asked.
“Tubby. Butterball.”
Julie stared at the boy in the picture. “I’ve heard worse.” Then she picked up a thick cardboard folder bound with twine. On the front was a label that read Lisette. “What do you suppose is in this?” She untied the string and peeked inside. “More photos! Maybe these are pictures of your mother,” she said, taking out the large collection.
The photographs depicted a small town and countryside. There were close-ups of random objects and landscapes of farms, hills, and a river to the sea, fishing boats, faces, open-air markets, stone-built sheds and huts, scenes of daily life.