The Keeper of Happy Endings

After her mother’s death, Soline is aimless. There is hunger, death, and sickness everywhere in Paris. She realizes that it’s time to rejoin the living and is on her way to barter fabric for food when she comes across the American Hospital on the outskirts of the city. There, she is swept up into the activity of the hospital as ambulances of wounded soldiers arrive and finds herself unable to leave and suddenly wants to help where she can. Unlike Paris, which has “fallen under a kind of spell since the Nazi’s arrived, as if the city itself has gone into hibernation, hoping to sleep until the nightmare is over” (111), the hospital is a flurry of action and purpose. An ambulance driver mistakes her for a volunteer, and she is thrust into helping and taken under the wing of a former salon client’s mother, Adeline. An ambulance driver who helps Soline when she gets sick over the sight of blood leaves her with his handkerchief—his initials, A.W.P., are embroidered on the corner.

Soline and A.W.P. (Anson William Purcell) meet again a week later. Soline is still volunteering and has found her footing at the hospital, giving sponge baths, delivering meals, and writing letters. She learns that Anson left Yale to join the American Field Service as an ambulance driver rather than go into the Navy, which disappointed his father, a wealthy yacht builder from Newport, Rhode Island. Anson and his younger sister Cynthia, known as Thia, lost their mother when they were children. As their flirtation continues, Soline knows that she should be cautious but already feels drawn to him. Adeline warns her that attachments are “dangerous things in wartime” (121). Soline’s favorite duty is writing letters for soldiers who can’t write them, knowing that the letters provide hope to the loved ones waiting back home.

After Rory’s abrupt exit, Soline surprises Rory at her apartment one morning with pastries. She wants to hear Rory’s story, telling her that she feels that they are kindred spirits, connected by their pasts and wounds. Rory feels it, too—“[t]he eerie overlap of Soline’s story with her own” (128)—and tells Soline about Hux and her attempts to cope with the loss through books with happy endings. They discuss the parallels in their lives—Soline with Anson, and Rory with Hux—and whether it’s better to have closure and know that the one you love is lost or to hold onto hope that they are still alive. Soline urges Rory to keep faith that Hux is alive and to hold him in her heart. Rory shows Soline her guest room studio, and Soline is impressed by the intricacy of Rory’s art and her abilities with hand sewing the fabric of her textile works. Though Rory downplays her art, Soline tells her that “[a]dding beauty to the world isn’t vanity […] It’s a calling” (134).

Soline’s visit interrupted Rory’s weekly brunch with Camilla, so Rory fakes being sick and instead cleans her apartment and plans to grocery shop for the first time in weeks. Her mother shows up unexpectedly to bring soup, so Rory comes clean and tells her about Soline’s visit. Rory’s decision not to go back to school, her talk of her own art, the new relationship with Soline, and opening the gallery prompt Camilla to question what is going on with Rory recently. The conversation leads to a discussion of Camilla’s family and her strict upbringing and difficult relationship with her mother. Rather than feeling loved, Camilla states that she was groomed, “trained to live up to the position that I’d been given as a Lowell, to do and be exactly what was expected of me” (142). Rory finds commonality in those family tensions and pressures and wonders if these revelations mean that the two could find common ground in their shared experiences.

After her visit with Rory, Soline reflects on the start of her relationship with Anson and the date when they shared their first kiss. Work at the hospital was long and tiring. Often their only time together was in stolen moments in between duties, where they told each other about their lives and grew closer. Soline remembers these moments on nights when she returns to the shaving kit, smelling his cologne and weeping over her lost dreams. She says that she used to think of herself as “a kind of historian—le gardien des fins heureuses—the keeper of happy endings. Except for my own, of course. But I was happy for a while—we both were—at a time when there was very little happiness to go around” (146). With the war raging on around them, by the end of the summer of 1943, Soline and Anson were in love.

Tensions rise in the hospital as the Germans grow suspicious that hospital workers are aiding in the Resistance. At the hospital, everyone is on guard, fearful that there is a spy in their midst who is providing information to the Nazis. Nevertheless, the work at the hospital continues as the war rages on: “The soldiers keep coming, every day, a steady stream. Wounded. Broken. Hollowed out” (150). Soline fears that Anson is growing distant, as he has become evasive and vague with her. He is constantly looking over his shoulder and disappears for days at a time. One day, she sees him huddled with a nurse on the stairs and they pass a note between them. Assuming that she will catch them together, Soline follows Anson into the basement to confront him. Instead, she finds that he is working for the Resistance by helping to smuggle injured Allied airmen out of France using forged identity papers and into Spain, England, and the States. Despite Anson’s protests, Soline begs him to let her be a part of the Resistance.

Soline joins the Resistance, feeling that it gives her “a fresh sense of purpose, a way to feel less a victim while the Nazis overrun our city” (157). It also deepens her connection with Anson through their shared cause. Anson transports the men out of Paris and into a network of safe houses over the Pyrenees and into Spain, while Soline is a courier, passing messages back and forth in code with other Resistance workers. She reports to a gruff woman named Elise, and after two weeks of training she has her first new assignment to retrieve a pouch of papers from The Painter, who is the person in charge of forging the fake death certificates and identity papers for the smuggled airmen. She successfully completes her mission, but when she returns to the hospital, Anson has not yet come back from his assignment. She fears that he has been killed or captured, but he arrives back and informs her that the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, knows where she lives. He promises to meet her at her apartment that night.

Anson is exhausted when he arrives at Soline’s apartment and wearily tells her that he was stopped by the Gestapo while on his mission and that they know about the hospital’s part in smuggling airmen. They intimidated Anson by threatening to come after Soline, and he devises a plan to save her so that he can continue his resistance work while keeping her safe. He tells her that he’s sending her to the United Stated to stay with his father, and he plans to marry her when he returns. Though she is afraid, Soline accepts that she must leave France. They sleep together for the first time, and then Soline wakes before dawn to pack. She retrieves the wedding dress that she’s been sewing for herself and weaves a charm into it. She takes only her dress box, the rosary beads, and the locket with her father’s face in it.

Soline and Anson say goodbye. They exchange keepsakes—the shaving kit from him and Maman’s rosary beads from her—to remember one another. They make promises to exchange them when they reunite. Soline is suddenly aware that she may never see Anson again and feels that there shouldn’t be any secrets between them. She feels compelled to tell him about her family’s craft, but he shushes her and says that she can tell him her secret when he gets home. She thinks about how significant Anson has become to her: “This man I have known for a handful of months has become the most important thing in my life, as necessary as the air that I breathe or the blood in my veins” (178). She meets up with her contact and rides off with Anson’s image burned into her mind.

Rory and Camilla’s relationship has been strained ever since Rory missed brunch to visit with Soline, and Soline remains a tense subject between the two women. After making her usual Friday calls to her contacts to see if there is any word on Hux, Rory goes to her mother’s house to make amends. She is persuaded into joining dessert with two of her mother’s society friends, Vicky and Hilly. Rory is reminded of being a child during her mother’s parties and feeling forced to perform piano pieces for her all of her mother’s guests despite feeling frozen with fear. She acquiesces to Camilla’s request to join the ladies but only out of obedience. The conversation turns to Rory’s gallery opening and then to Soline, and the friends push Rory to invite Soline to join their arts council. Camilla is resistant to the idea, which evolves into an argument with Rory as she leaves. Rory tries to express her fondness for Soline, telling her mother, “She sees me. Not the way she thinks I should be but the way I am. Maybe that’s why I like her so much” (187). Rory remains unsure why her mother dislikes Soline.

Rory goes to visit Soline and solicits her comfort and advice. She is worried about Hux not making it home and whether she is opening the gallery for the right reasons—as a means to indirectly make him proud or attempt to move on with her life. She’s concerned that she’s making a mistake, but Soline gives her some guidance about grief: “You were a person before Hux came into your life. And you will go on being a person even if he leaves it. […] The question is what kind of person you’ll be. What will you do with your life, your dreams, your art?” (192). Soline describes how she “couldn’t just lie down and die” after losing Anson and having to rebuild her life (192). She then begins to tell Rory about being part of the Resistance and having to start completely over when she arrived in America.