“And you shouldn’t be sad,” she said. She pushed away and walked across the room, shift trembling about her hips, and she opened a dresser drawer. She withdrew something, and she looked at herself in the mirror as if wanting to catch herself in the act of going a step too far.

She returned to the bed. She gazed at the pair of finger puppets mournfully, and passed them to him, resigned as if she were handing him a revolver with one bullet in it. The French, with their wellspring of such things, had a name for gifts like hers: les jouets pour les jouets, toys for the toyed-with. Because, for the most part, if you weren’t an amused woman of Paris, they truly had tremendous sentimental value.

They looked tiny and soft in his palm. “What are these?”

She cuddled against him and explained that the provenance of the dolls was crucial: they had to be given, never purchased. They proved that somewhere a girl loved you. Not of course in this case, she said, for she and he were beyond such things—she looked to see if he understood the twinkle in her eye—but look at the puppets again, she continued. Made of cotton batting wrapped in cloth, worn around the neck like a religious medallion, they came in a pair, a boy and a girl, attached by a single frail-looking string.

The dolls were French, and, as with all things French, the parable behind them was about love. There had been an air raid, a crowd had fled to the shelter, only two survived: these two lovers. Or, when a different message was being sent: an air raid, and these two died hand in hand. In either case, the story was about the melancholy, redemptive power of l’amour.

Lee heard all this delivered in her dry tone, which reminded him faintly of the film magazines he’d read so long ago. Every word she spoke suggested a different, entirely opposite meaning, but she was being neither ironic nor diplomatic, yet something entirely beyond his experience: jaded.

“And what do you think?” she finally asked.

The posture of the dolls was perplexing to him—given that there was a war on, and the dolls were meant to reassure men that their girls would always be true, shouldn’t the boy and the girl look equally in love? Shouldn’t the girl—her name was Nanette—not be so evasive-looking, so ready to prance out of town at the slightest breeze? Shouldn’t the boy have a less ready-to-be-disappointed look on his face? How soothing was that for a man going to the front?

“Really, Corporal, what do you think?” she whispered, eyes drifting closed.