"All the Ways We Say Goodbye," Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, Karen White

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

Burrowing into Books

“All the Ways We Say Goodbye”

Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, Karen White

March 28, 2020

“After I’d had my little nap, I realized that we already

said everything we needed to say to each other, and our goodbyes.”

                                                                                               All the Ways we Say Goodbye, 2020

 This is the third novel by these three collaborating New York Times best-selling authors. Each is a master of historical romance. They diligently research and write well. Good fiction – and these women are exemplary – adds to one’s knowledge by humanizing historical events.

As with their preceding novels, this has three story lines, each written by a separate author. The story begins in April 1964 when we meet Babs (Barbara) Langford, age 38, at her home, Langford Hall in Ashprington, on England’s southeast coast. Her husband Kit (Christopher), whom she married in 1945 when he returned from the war, died a few months before the story begins; her children are off at school. The families (hers and Kit’s) were close, so she has known Langford Hall since childhood. (Readers might recognize the name Langford. Robert Langford, Babs father-in-law, was a writer of spy novels who survived the sinking of the Lusitania and appeared in the authors’ second novel, The Glass Ocean.) While Babs knows little of her husband’s World War II service, she knew he worked with the French underground.

She receives a letter from an American, Andrew (Drew) Bowdoin, a young Boston lawyer seeking information about his father who had been with the OSS in France and who had known and liked Kit. Drew’s father, who is sick, had been discharged under a cloud; he had been accused of stealing a well-known – and valuable – talisman. The son wants to clear his father’s name before he dies. So, Babs agrees to meet him at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. She brings with her a letter that for nineteen years she had kept from her husband, a letter addressed, “My Darling Kit” and that ended “…and know that I will always love you. Always, La Fleur.” The odyssey to Paris, she reasons, might benefit her as well. Who was La Fleur?

We are then taken back fifty years, to September 1914. The Great War had begun in August. Paris was not occupied but was threatened. We meet Auriélie le Courcelles in her mother’s apartment at the Paris Ritz. Her mother, a wealthy Jewish American, Wilhelmina (Minnie) Gold, had married the Comte de Courcelles in 1895. They had since separated, with Minnie living in an apartment at the Ritz and her father, Sigismund, in his ancestral home, Château de Courcelles, in northern France near the Belgium border. In a moment of spontaneity, Auriélie snatches the talisman (a piece of cloth that had been dipped in the blood of Joan of Arc and now encased in jewels) and drives her fiancé Jean-Marie d’Aubigny, to the front. According to an ancient myth, the talisman, if in the hands of Demoiselle de Courcelles, will lead France to victory. Instead of returning to Paris, Auriélie makes her way through war-torn France to her father’s ancestral home near Picardy. The castle has stood unconquered since the 14^th Century. It was now occupied by a German unit led by Major Hoffmeister. Included in his entourage is a young Prussian officer, Lieutenant Maximillian von Sternburg, whom Auriélie had met at her grandmother’s apartment before the war began; Max plays a key role in the story.

We next leap to occupied Paris in 1942. Daisy (Margarite) Villon is the daughter of Auriélie. As her mother had died during the Spanish influenza (but not before returning the talisman to her grandmother’s apartment), Daisy was raised at the Ritz by Grandmère. While much of the book is told through Babs, Daisy is, in many respects, the principal character, from conception in 1915 to death in 1964. Before the start of the story, Daisy married Pierre Villon, with whom she had two children, Madeline and Olivier. Pierre is an obsequious, minor government functionary who becomes a Nazi collaborator. Daisy, meanwhile, meets M. LeGrande, a British spy operating under a pseudonym, and begins to run errands for the Resistance. Her disgust with Pierre, in assisting the German occupiers and facilitating the deportation of French Jews to Germany, drives her into the arms of LeGrande. Despite her heroism and fame as a resistance fighter, Daisy had always lived in the shadow of her grandmother and under the specter of her mother hovering nearby. LeGrande reassures her with words that echo in the final chapter about Babs: “You’re Daisy, astonishing and irreplaceable. A formidable woman.”

Without giving away the story, we learn how these lives are woven together. We learn about paths people choose, and what happens when honor collides with the need to survive. We see abject poverty in occupied French villages in 1914 and the compassion of one German officer. We feel the fear of Parisians in 1942 and laud the dedication of the resistance. We also learn of the bravery of that same German officer we had met twenty-eight years earlier. The constant in the story is the Paris Ritz, the luxurious hotel built in 1898 on a foundation of stability and permanence, capable of containing the chaos outside. We meet characters, like the ever-present but mysterious Precious Dubose and Prunella Schuyler who, like Robert Langford, survived the torpedoing of the Lusitania. We read of war-time romances, when no one could be sure if they would live through the night – and how they all had, at some point, to say goodbye. The story is unwound in its final pages, as Babs and Drew discover truths about the past and each other.

While I am more interested in the historical aspects of these novels than the romance, I admit that the latter adds color to the former. Human traits and emotions are timeless. While I could never imagine my grandparents (or even my parents) romantically involved, I know they had to have been. My children and grandchildren, I am sure, feel the same about us. Aurélie’s love for Max von Sternburg provides an unexpected dimension to the German occupation of France during the Great War. And the married Daisy’s love affair with LeGrande in 1942 speaks to the complications of German occupied Paris, of the deviousness of collaborators and the bravery of the resistance. Fallible humans adapt to situations for which they cannot prepare – unforeseen crises beyond their, and our, imaginations.