Work Text:
The Fundamental Things Apply
If there had been no War, Yvonne Marie would have been a stenographer, or perhaps gone to normal school and taught five years old their letters and numbers at Ecole Maternelle. Yvonne was so pretty and warm-hearted, and she loved children. Maman hoped that someday she would marry one of the nice young men with jobs who vied to take her to the cinema to watch the American films she loved. The young couple could get a little flat in Avignon, not too far from their parents, and visit each family on alternate Sundays. Soon enough the babies would come. Oh, perhaps Yvonne would dream of romance and adventure while she washed the supper dishes, but she was her Maman’s daughter-a sensible girl- who knew how to take care of the fundamental things. Tragic romance and high adventure belonged on celluloid, not in real life.
But that was before the War came, picked their family up like Dorothy’s house and landed them in this desert city, this place as strange as Oz,- Casablanca. Well, Yvonne and Maman were there. Anyway. Papa put them on the train from Avignon to Marseilles with the family silver in a trunk and Gran’mere’s diamond earbobs sewn into the lining of Yvonne's skirt. He said he’d join them as soon as he could. But that was nearly two years ago, and not even his little girl believed that Papa was coming anymore. –Just as well, perhaps-the cholera had seen to it that there was no Maman for him to meet.
So Yvonne starts to work at the prefecture of police as a file clerk. She puts her hair in a snood and buys smart day dresses like the ones Ginger Rogers wore in Kitty Foyle. She draws a seam in eyebrow pencil up the back of her legs the way the other girls do. It’s hot during the day, and she wants to conserve her precious silk stockings.
At first she’s too naïve to understand what Captain Renault wants from her, until one of the typists takes her aside in the washroom and whispers in her ear. But before he can cut her out of the herd, Renault gets distracted by the parade of women through his office, all of them more sophisticated and glamorous than little Yvonne Marie.
The other girls in the office tell Yvonne she should get out more. So in the evenings, when she gets tired of her shabby room, used books, and the wireless, she starts going to Rick’s Café. Everybody goes to Rick’s. She watches the women there, and learns to set her hair, make-up her face, and drink champagne cocktails. She buys silky evening gowns, and starts to give men smoky looks from under her kohl and mascara. Sometimes they look back.
One night she’s sitting at a table near the bar when the piano man plays a song Fred Astaire once sang to Ginger Rogers. Yvonne remembers sitting next to Papa-or was it Jean-Pierre- and watching them at the cinema. The film was Shall We Dance, she thinks- and she sings along in her husky sweet soprano.
The way your smile just beams
The way you sing off key
The way you haunt my dreams
No they can't take that away from me
Yvonne is still fresh and pretty, and her English is charmingly accented. People crowd around her and bring her drinks and ask her to sing again. So the piano player sits her down on a stool next to him and they take requests for the rest his set.
Rick hears the commotion and asks Sam if she’s really that good. Sam says she is, and so Rick offers Yvonne a job singing at the café two nights a week. And soon she has friends there
There’s Abdul, doorman, who makes sure she gets the right cab driver to take her home. There’s Emile the croupier, who talks to her about home and Carl, the headwaiter who tries to give her fatherly advice, and looks at her sadly and shakes his head when he thinks she doesn’t see. She tells Carl about Papa, and catches a few hints that there’s more of a Resistance in Casablanca than it seems. Somehow she doesn’t feel called upon to share this with the other girls at the Prefecture.
There’s Sam, the piano player, who calls her ‘Miss Vonnie’, and talks to her about Jazz and America. And of course there’s Sascha the crazy Russian-darling Sascha who tends the bar and tells her she’s beautiful and makes her laugh. He winks at her and smiles that lopsided smile and says “Yvonne- I loooove you.” Yvonne sometimes wonders if it’s true.
But Yvonne falls in love with Rick. Of course she does. And Rick falls, more than in lust and less than in love with her. Her inexperience surprises him, but Yvonne still believes in love and she’s sure she can make Rick happy. She just knows she can.
Rick sets her up in a smart little flat near the market district. But Yvonne has a nagging feeling that she's not the first woman to live here, and she did inherit her mother's practical streak. So she doesn’t quit her day job and she squirrels money away under a loose floorboard in her closet. She supposes that she’s a demimondaine, now- a woman of the world, just like Greta Garbo in Camille. But sometimes, on the nights when Rick doesn’t come to her, she wonders what Maman would say.
Rick is not an easy man to love. Sam comforts her when Rick goes to the Blue Parrot, Signor Ferrari’s bar, to visit a girl who works there. “’You’re a sweet woman, Miss Vonnie, but Mr. Rick, he’s a bitter man,” Sam says. ”And sometimes a bitter man wants to take himself a bitter woman.”
Sam is also the one who warns her that there is one song she must never sing, no matter how many patrons want to hear it. When Yvonne asks why, puzzled, Sam takes her to a quiet spot in the back when they get their break.
“Sit down a spell, Miss Vonnie “ he says and he tells Yvonne as much as he thinks she needs to know about Paris and about her-Ilsa Lund. He warns her never to let on to Rick that she knows.
Yvonne thinks this is all very well and good, but she’s worried about her cross-town rival-she doesn’t see Ilsa’s ghost as much of a threat. Ilsa left him, the fool, and even if Rick is carrying a torch for her-like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights-Ilsa’s never coming back. Besides, soon Yvonne has a secret that will make Rick forget both of them once and for all. She’s missed, twice and the crisp day dresses and silky evening gowns are beginning to get a little snugger. Shyly, Yvonne confides in Marguerite, the guitarist. Marguerite takes her to a doctor who confirms her suspicions-she’s pregnant.
She tells Sam when she comes into work that night. “Oh, Miss Vonnie” he says and squeezes her hand. But he has troubled, troubled eyes.
She still hasn’t told Rick about the baby when it all goes to hell.
Rick has been terse and distantwith her lately. She’s not his petted, indulged baby anymore and she suspects that he’s been spending the nights when he’s not with her down at the Blue Parrot. When she tries to talk to him at the café, they have a fight-and he tells Sascha to bundle her out the door like yesterday’s news. Upset as she is, Yvonne doesn’t miss the nod and headshake Sascha exchanges with Abdul. It was bound to happen, the gestures say. Not the first time.
She gets into the cab and cries in Sascha’s arms all the way back to her flat. Sascha kisses her cheek but goes back to the café to work. Yvonne hangs up her dress, then she sits on her closet floor to count her money. She wonders how long she and the baby can live on it.
And that's the night she walks through the café door-Ilsa Lund, as beautiful as the day star. And it’s over from that point on. There are significant looks exchanged, and whispers that stop when people see her. Clearly, something is happening but the grown-ups don’t think Yvonne Marie is a big enough girl to be told. Some friends, she thinks, the hell with all of them. Yvonne accepts a date with one of the German officers who come and go at the Prefecture and walks into the café with her head up and her pale cheeks rouged.
That night is the night when Victor Lazlo, all of Yvonne’s friends, and most of the patrons drown out the Germans singing Die Wacht am Rhein with their rendition of La Marseillaise.
Yvonne Marie sings with tears in her eyes and thinks about home, and about Maman and Papa. She puts her hand over her belly and thinks about the world she wants her son or daughter to grow up in. Soon she slips out the back and hails a cab that takes her home alone.
And now Rick is gone and the café is closed. Sam says that he didn’t leave with her and somehow Yvonne believes him. The Prefecture is in uproar after Major Strasser’s death and Captain Renault’s disappearance. Hard faced men in SS uniforms question Yvonne about her relationship with Rick, and she wonders how far it will go. They aren’t cardboard villains like the gangsters in Scarface, these people mean business. She’s read enough of the typed-in-triplicate orders she files to understand they’ll stop at nothing. Yvonne clutches her hand in fear over her child, afraid of what they may know.
The next day she gets off work at the Prefecture and finds Sascha waiting for her. He has a bouquet of flowers in his hands and a shy smile on his lips. He wonders if she is free for dinner? They sit in a small bistro and he looks over his shoulder before he tells her that he and Sam are leaving for Brazzaville. Somehow Signor Ferrari and Carl-the black market and the Underground-are both involved. It seems best that she doesn’t ask any more questions. So being no fool these days, she doesn’t.
Then Sascha clears his throat and looks at her without grinning or joking,for once.” Yvonne” he says, “I love you. I could take a wife on my passport.”
She starts to shake her head but she remembers Sascha’s warm smile- and the cold eyes of the SS men.
“Did Sam tell you?” she asks softly.
“Yes,” he answers, and says nothing more.
And Yvonne knows, finally, that she really isn‘t Scarlett O’Hara, but that tomorrow surely is another day. The next night, Sam and Sascha meet her in the alley behind her flat. They all drive through the night to Brazzaville in Rick’s abandoned Oldsmobile.
Sam stays long enough to see them to get married, and then he leaves in search of Rick. Sascha and Yvonne never hear from him again. They move back to France after the War is over, and open a small restaurant, raise a family. And if their firstborn has dark hair and brown eyes, well, so did Yvonne’s Papa.
Sometimes, when she’s doing up the dishes, Yvonne Marie thinks back to her brush with romance and adventure. And then she smiles, at how much better off she is. Because, she knows, the fundamental things apply