1948: Grandpa Arthur describes my mom

Sylvie Jacqueline "Jackie" Byland née Lubinski,
age two or three.

    In a letter from 1948, my grandfather described how his children were doing, to a friend back in France*:

    She [Liliane] is eight and a half years old. Her English is nothing like her parents'. She speaks it without the slightest accent. Some French. It's good, but she lacks some complex vocabulary. And Dad is an absolute dictator, who totally forbids bilingual “salads”. Each language must stay pure.

    Sylvie is two and a half years old. Made (according to Dad) in France. Delicate, without appetite, a loud voice, and in perfect health. She is allowed a bilingual salad. 

--Arthur Lubinski to Dr. Jean Planas, July 29, 1948 

    I cracked up when I saw this, because Arthur obviously knew his middle daughter well, and except for the bilingual salad part, it's all still true, more than 7 decades later.   Mom is slender, doesn't eat much, and has always been healthy as a horse. And she has never had any difficulty making herself heard when she wants to. ❤️

Arthur Lubinski with my mom
seven months after immigrating to the US.

* Elle [Liliane] a huit ans et demi. Son anglais n’est pas comme celui de ses parents. Elle le parle sans le moindre accent. Som français. C’est bon, mais de mots compliqués lui manquent. Et papa est un dictateur, un absolu, qui interdit totalement la salade bilingue. Chaque langue doit rester propre.

Sylvie a deux ans et demi. Fabrication, d'après père en France. Frêle, sans appétit, voix haute et en parfaite santé. À elle la salade bilingue est permise. 

--Arthur Lubinski au Dr Jean Planas, 29 juillet 1948

1948: Arthur writes a letter to his commander

     I'm working on transcribing and translating a letter my grandfather wrote to his Maquis commander back in France, about 18 months after my family immigrated here. As I work on these documents, I'm amazed at how well my grandfather's voice comes through in his letter, even given my poor French and (probably) clunky machine translations.

    The man could write.  Take a look at the following excerpt:

    I'm very happy here. My lab rolls from one drilling site to another, all by itself. After some initial difficulties, I now have three surveyors who know their stuff and have perfect professional ethics. I therefore devote myself almost exclusively to the research work that fascinates me. Before emigrating, I feared that I would become a small cog in a huge gear train. I thought the entire face of America was like the butcher shops of Chicago (Duhamel's "Scenes from a Future Life") or the Ford assembly lines in Detroit. Instead, I found here a greater freedom than I have ever had.

--Arthur Lubinski to Dr. Jean Planas, July 29, 1948 

     *See below for the original French.

    It is striking how much hope is in his letter, and how positive he was, but what he didn't say is as important as what he did. Grandpa didn't mention his family's struggles to get by (starting over in a new country is expensive). He touched on the fact that his job took him from drilling platforms (even a few early offshore sites) to oil wells all over the American South and Southwest. He liked the job, which served as a crash course in petroleum engineering, but hated that it kept him away from his family for weeks at a time.  And I believe he was exaggerating when he said that he was devoted exclusively to fascinating research, though that became true later.

    

    He actually liked the job so much that he asked my grandmother if she would consider living in a camper, so she and their daughters could accompany him as he explored the Southwest.  My grandparents had been separated by war for most of 1944, and Grandma was used to being self-sufficient. She knew Grandpa would eventually find a job that would allow him to stay in Tulsa, and that the separation would be temporary.  So she said no, as she wanted a stable home for their girls, preferably one with good schools and near her brother (who was her only surviving relative - so far as she knew, the Holocaust erased everyone else). 

    Grandpa referenced someone named Duhamel in the excerpt, and I had to look that one up. In 1930, Georges Duhamel published a book called Scènes de la vie future, or in English, America's Menace: Scenes from a Future Life.  Like Dr. Planas, Duhamel was a French medical doctor who served in World War I.   In 1929, Dr. Duhamel visited the United States, arriving in New Orleans and traveling north along the Mississippi, then pausing for significant visits in Chicago and New York City.  

    His hosts introduced him to various aspects of America, trying to give him a genuine sense of the country.  He saw the slaughterhouses and the elevated train in Chicago, mass production in giant factories, and the subways of New York City. They also introduced him to our cultural influences, taking him to see museums,  architecture, movies, and sporting events.  He was impressed by our ingenuity and technical innovation, but horrified by our soulless consumerism and puritanical morality (he visited during Prohibition).  It doesn't surprise me that Arthur wasn't deterred by Dr. Duhamel's book.  As an engineer, he would have valued the booming industry and the efficiency it described.  

    Interestingly, I found a copy of Duhamel's book for $750. It's a first edition and is inscribed to H. G. Wells, of all people. I found myself wanting it for no good reason, because, damn, that's so cool (no, I didn't seriously consider buying it).  If you'd like to read more about the book, which many people consider to have planted the seeds of anti-American sentiment in Europe, this is the French Wikipedia page about it (I have my browser set to automatically translate).  The page is worth reading -- it makes many good points about American culture, but because this is my home, the scales weigh differently for me than they did for Duhamel. And if you are really interested, you can find the book in English on the Internet Archive, although you'll need to create an account to access more than the flyleaf and table of contents.

    And finally, it's fascinating to me that Grandpa worried about being insignificant here in the US, but happily didn't find that to be true.  I think most Americans know they are small cogs in a big wheel, but Grandpa was curious, hardworking, highly educated, and brilliant. And most importantly, he wanted to work somewhere that needed men like him, men who could point out a problem and then be given the freedom to solve it.  Even to a cynical American cog like myself, "I found here a greater freedom than I have ever had," gives me joy.

* Je suis très heureux ici. Mon labo roulant d'un chantier de forage à une autre jonetiance tout seul, Après quelques difficultés de début, j’ai maintenant trois orienteurs connaissant leur métier et ayant une conscience professionnelle parfaite. Je me dévoue donc presque exclusivement aux travaux de recherche qui me passionnent. Avant d'émigrer je craignais que je ne devienne ici une petite roue d’un immense train d'engrenages.. Je pensais que l'entier visage de l’Amérique est comme les boucheries de Chicago (“Scènes de vie Future“ de Duhamel) ou, les chaînes de Ford à Detroit. Au lieu de-tout cela, j’ai trouvé ici une liberté plus grande que je n'ai jamais eue.

--Arthur Lubinski au Dr Jean Planas, 29 juillet 1948

1934-1947: Where my grandparents lived during the war (the good and the bad)

 I know of eight places where my grandparents lived in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. I've found the addresses in my grandfather's writing, in letters from his brother-in-law, from archivists who looked them up in city records, and historian friends who traced previous owners of properties (when I knew the actual names of the people they lived with, but not the location of the property).  This doesn't count places my grandfather lived separately from my grandmother (when he was in the maquis, for example).

Of those 8 places (in chronological order)

• One is the apartment where my grandparents were probably living when they got married in 1935. I don't know when they moved in, or how long they lived there, only when they moved out (and into their next apartment). 
• One is the apartment in Brussels they were living in when my aunt was born and war broke out. They moved there on August 24, 1937, and moved out when they escaped from Belgium in the fall of 1941.
• One is farm in France where they lived for several weeks in June 1940 as refugees prior to the fall of Belgium and France, before returning to their apartment in Brussels.  I know what town they were in, but that's all.
• One Brussels address is almost certainly fake, or rather, it was a real address, but they never lived there.  They supposedly moved into the apartment 5 months after they'd escaped Belgium. I'm guessing it was some sort of false forwarding address (and I have evidence they were in France when they moved in according to Belgian city records).
• One early address in France is unknown, and I doubt I'll ever identify it.  Grandpa told me they lived in three places in Beaumont-lès-Valence, but only ever described the one where they lived for several years. He refused to talk about the other two.
• I identified one of the two Beaumont addresses Grandpa refused to discuss through letters he sent and received from an American consulate in Vichy, France. However, the address is incomplete by modern standards, identifying only the name of the homeowner and the town.  In those days "Chez Mouriquand, Beaumont-lès-Valence, France," was enough to get a letter to the right person.  My historian friend was able to identify that it was a farm and its physical location, but after the war, the farm was sold and developed into the Le Granges neighborhood, and we don't know which house is the one where they stayed.
• The third Beaumont address is one where they lived for about three years. It had been a disused cottage on a farm, originally at 11 Rue des Faures. The cottage was torn down after the war, and the farm has also been developed into housing, but the stone well they used for water is still there (and is considered a historical landmark). 
• The first address in Valence where they moved not long after the liberation of France (probably in late 1944 - I have a letter dated from December of that year, mentioning that they had moved). It was a tiny apartment. I got that address from letters he received from his brother-in-law in America, and it's also listed on my mother's birth certificate. From other letters, I know they were still living there in May 1946, but I'm not sure when they moved out.
• The final address in Valence where they were living when they immigrated to the US in early 1947. They lived there less than a year.

1946-1947: The Lubinskis' last apartment in France

    Sometime after May of 1946, my grandparents moved out of the tiny apartment on Rue du Parc and into 19 Boulevard Maurice Clerc in Valence, where they lived until early February 1947. Grandpa didn't go into much detail, but this is how he described their two homes in Valence:

    In Valence, we lived at two other residences ... The first where your mother was born. And later, after, we moved into a more spacious, pleasant apartment. 

    Rather matter-of-fact. I only found the address because my grandfather listed it as his permanent address on a form he filled out in February of 1947 when going through customs at La Guardia in NYC:

Grandpa's Customs and Immigration form
Click to enlarge any photo.

    There were streetcar rails running very close to the buildings, and a park or green space was located on the other side, so the light coming into the apartment would be dappled. I found a couple of historical photos of the street on old postcards, but I'm unsure of the year they were taken.   

Maurice Clerc Blvd Postcard
Source: itoldya archives

Maurice Clerc Blvd Postcard
Source: itoldya archives

    The apartment faces slightly south of east, which means that early morning sun would blast in through the windows, particularly in the winter.

Red pin is #19.
The building is fairly deep front-to-back

Google Streetview photo from 2018. The brown door
is #19. I wonder what floor they lived on?
Note the black shelter in the left foreground.

A better view of the black shelter.

    I love the balconies. But I can just imagine my grandmother fretting about the safety of my mom and Aunt Lilly.

Google Streetview photo from 2024 showing cafe seating out front.
I wonder if Grandpa parked his car there, too?

    I couldn't find any photos of the inside of #19, but there's a hotel with rooms to rent just a couple of blocks away, at #5.  

The building with the reddish-orange balcony at left is #5.
#19 is pretty far to the right. It's a darker tan building with balconies,
just past the black shelter noted above.

    Except for this photo showing the view from #5, the interior photos aren't helpful as it's a different building, and it's been thoroughly modernized (though it's quite lovely):

View from 5 Blvd Maurice Clerc
Source: Hotels in Valence

    It's strange to know that my mother lived there, although she has no memory of it (she was only 14 months old when they left France).

1945: The Lubinskis moved to Valence

    After France was liberated in 1944, my grandfather demobilized from the maquis, and went to work for the French government, putting his engineering skills to use, helping to rebuild and repair buildings damaged by war. They even provided him with a car to use, and gasoline rations so that he could get around.  He was in charge of the Valence area, so they moved from Beaumont-lès-Valence, into an apartment in Valence, at 9 Rue du Parc, 26000 Valence, France.  Today, there is a city building right across the street, but it was built later.  

    The street was very narrow, and my grandfather didn't park the car in front of the apartment. Rather, he kept it about 1/2 mile away (0.8 km) under a carport. 

Number 9 is the dark tan building on the left, with a balcony.

    I don't know exactly when they moved into this apartment; I found a letter dated December 10, 1944, in which Grandpa provided their new address.  According to my mother's birth certificate, they were still living there when my mother was born exactly one year later, and my Uncle Paul would have visited them there at least once.

    I also don't know exactly when they moved out of this apartment - I have letters sent to that address dating from May 1946.  I suppose they might have moved out of the apartment before then, and the letters forwarded to their new address, but that doesn't seem likely. Right after the war ended, it was hit-or-miss getting letters into or out of France (right after their area was liberated, my grandparents sent seven postcards to my Uncle Jake in America, letting him know they were OK). But this was 18 months later, and I believe that by that point, it only took a couple of weeks for letters to get across the Atlantic. 

August 1944: Arthur's fairytale castle

Source: Dr. Michel Planas, History of the 4th Company, p. 41

 

    We established our camp in a rich and huge château facing the plain at the foothills in Combovin ...

    The 4th Company returned to the château in the foothills. The château belonged to a “collaborator” with the Vichy government and we did not care too much about the annoyance we caused to his family. I have rigged up my radio in a huge ball room, among marble statues and columns in front of a picture window overlooking the fields gently sloping toward the Rhone River 10 miles to the West.

    The next day a patrol brought four Americans, who escaped after their tanks were destroyed in a battle. Thereafter Americans, became everyday visitors in the château. Intelligence officers, airfield building engineers and many others used to come and see us. 

--Arthur Lubinski, c1974

    We cross PEYRUS and will settle in the farms south of CHATEAUDOUBLE ... We return to Chateaudouble where we arrive around 10 p.m. and receive the first contact of an American car machine gunner. 

--Michel Planas, 1955

    My mother found a handwritten account of his time in the maquis in Grandpa's personal effects after he died in 1996, and filed it away; 25 years later when I started on this project, she passed it to me.   I believe he wrote it during the summer of 1974, while his oldest child was dying from complications of multiple sclerosis.   During the war, he and my grandmother had worked so hard and suffered so much in their struggle to survive, and they won; saving themselves and their daughter from the Nazis.  But, 30 years later, in the midst of safety and prosperity, he couldn't protect his little girl from a deadly disease.  It was obvious even to five-year-old me that losing her wrecked our family.

    Grandpa never told his children about the castle, and when I recorded him in 1988, he didn't mention it then either.  I'm guessing he didn't find it relevant - it was just a place to sleep, albeit much nicer than most of his FFI accommodations.

    It took me a while to figure out which chateau it could be. For one thing, I had assumed "château" meant mansion, when a closer translation is actually "castle."  Additionally, there are two towns in France named "Châteaudouble": one in the Drôme Department and one in the Var Department, both located in southeastern France.   Dr. Michel Planas's map above confirmed it was the one in Drôme.  The term translates to "double-castle" or "two castles," which has a certain amount of romance.  When I remembered to use French search terms, and did an image search for "chateau de chateaudouble drome," it came right up.

    The castle in question is square with a courtyard in the center, and two square towers and two round ones. You can see it from Chateau Road which runs just behind the stables/gatehouse:

Source: Chateaux de France

    Note: Click on any image to enlarge it.

    The gatehouse (the building immediately adjacent to the road) is called "La Salle des Dragons" or "Hall of Dragons," which is evocative of a George R. R. Martin novel. Dragon is a cognate between the two languages, but in French, "dragon" refers both to the mythical animal and to dragoons:

French dragoon of the Volontaires de Saxe 
regiment, mid-18th century

    Originally, dragoons were mounted infantry that carried firearms, but unlike traditional cavalry units, they dismounted to fight. The term "dragoon" originated from a type of blunderbuss pistol called a dragon.  Because the gatehouse was originally the stable for the castle, I think a more accurate translation would be "Dragoon's Hall," or perhaps "Dragoon's Barracks."

    Based on my grandfather's description, I think the ballroom must have been situated between the two round towers on the back of the castle, which faces west:

Google Maps
Round towers are on the west side of the castle, and it
is 10.61 miles/17.1 km to the Rhone River.

View toward the west.
Source: Patrice Besse Real Estate

    For the longest time, I couldn't find any photos of the interior, but eventually I stumbled upon real estate listings for the castle when it was put up for sale in the fall of 2023.  The asking price was a cool  €3.0 million ($3.4M).  

    As I went through the real estate photos, I kept Grandpa's description of westward-facing picture windows, marble columns, and statues in mind, paying particular attention to what was visible through the windows, and the dining room seems like an excellent candidate for Grandpa's ballroom:

The view from the door/window looks like it might be westward.

    That looks like it overlooks "the gently sloping fields toward the Rhone River, 10 miles to the west." I'm not concerned with a lack of statues, which can be moved.  I don't see any columns, though they may not be visible in the picture, or perhaps he was referring to the vertical gray wainscoting.  My guess is that he would have set up his radio in the window on the right.  Good lord, those polished stone floor tiles are lovely.   

Grandpa's radio window in the back left?
Source: Patrice Besse Real Estate

    More details - the "radio window" had internal shutters, and was in the corner next to an interior door and a fireplace. And look at that painting:

Source: Patrice Besse Real Estate

    Here's a view of the west side of the castle. I'm fairly certain the exterior doorway in the ballroom (dining room) isn't the one nestled against the right tower, but is just to the left of that. I think the radio window is the one to its left, located in the middle of the three that are easiest to see. 

West side of the castle. Note the mountains toward the east.
Grandpa always talked about how exhausting they were.
Source: Patrice Besse Real Estate

    Other details in the above picture: a significant retaining wall is visible in the foreground, with a few statues along its length.  There is also a pit or pool (possibly a fountain?), and nestled against the building, there is a terrace or patio with some (probably modern) lawn furniture, though I'd guess something like it existed at the time.

Terrace with outdoor furniture.  Radio window in the center.
Source: Patrice Besse Real Estate

Fountain pit and statuary along the retaining wall.
Source: Patrice Besse Real Estate

    Here's a little YouTube video with a photo collage and some AI-generated narration, but it gives a pretty good sense of what the place looks like, both inside and out.:

    I could be wrong about this being the castle Grandpa described, but there is pretty strong evidence that supports it:

• This place is almost exactly 10 miles (10.61 miles using the measure distance feature in Google Maps) from the Rhone River, just like my grandfather said.
• There are picture windows with a westward view that matches his description ("in front of a picture window overlooking the fields gently sloping toward the Rhone River")
• According to both Grandpa Arthur ("A few days later, on August 31 or September 1") and Michel Planas ("17 août-31 août"), they were in Châteaudouble during the time period in question. They also both describe returning to the castle or town, and American visitors.
• The "ballroom" of my grandfather's description seems to fit the quite large dining room in the modern photos, and it has picture windows like he described.  

The evidence against it is pretty weak:

• The (apparent) lack of marble columns and statuary inside the ballroom, though there are statues on the property and many other trappings of significant wealth, and Grandpa could have been speaking poetically. Other features of the room could match his description if he misremembered the details after 30 years (columns vs. wainscoting), or if the columns were there, but not visible in the photo.

    I'd love to know more about the owner of the chateau in the 1940s who may have been named Bourg (some sites call the castle "Château du Bourg," though that name could be much older -- or newer -- than the name of the owners in the 1940s). According to my grandfather, the castle was commandeered from a Vichy collaborator, and if I could confirm this, it'd be another very strong piece of evidence in favor of this castle.  However, I have no wish to harm the descendants of the 1940s-era owners, so I doubt I'll bother to research their political leanings.

Bibliography: 

• Planas, Michel. History of the 4th Company 2nd Battalion FFI of Drôme or; Three Doctors from the Same Family in the Maquis. 1955.
• Youtube video of Châteaudouble
• Patrice Besse Real Estate listing for Châteaudouble (lots of pictures!)
• Right Move Real Estate listing for Châteaudouble (pictures are greyed out on the main page, but if you click on a picture it launches a slide show, and they are in full color there).
• Lovely photo in a Flickr photostream, that includes the early history of the castle.
• Castles of France entry for Châteaudouble

1942-1944: The tiny, uncomfortable farmhouse they called home

    My grandfather described the place where my grandparents and aunt lived in hiding for several years to me, and it didn't sound like a very pleasant place to live:

    In Beaumont-lès-Valence, we ... were living in a house, a home several centuries old. Which was not used for a long, long time. It had one room, and the floor was hard dirt and the roof was covered with straw.  Well it was a thatched roof; very primitive. Of course no water. There was a well outside, where you had to turn a lever, had a chain to go down pick up water. So we didn’t have any hot water. We had hardly cold water which we took from the well. And one time Roma pulled out of the deep well, a rat. It was not pleasant. We boiled the water before drinking.

    And the non-threshed [grain]… I don’t know how to say it in English. We put in our old, centuries-old home; we took it in the attic, and in the attic, I was threshing it with a stick. Then, at nighttime, the grain which I got, I put in a buggy, which I pushed by myself a couple of miles to the mill, and the miller took half for himself, and half he gave back to me in form of flour. And I got flour to Roma, and Roma made bread by herself ... And there was no range, no electric range, no gas range. She baked it on a stove in which wood was burning. 

    And to get wood, I was cutting the trees, and with an ax, I was getting sufficiently small pieces to be burned. And then they were not burning very well because they were not dry. I had no time to wait a year before using them.

    So, in winter, our temperature inside was eight degrees centigrade in our small room – if I take eight degrees, and I multiply it by one point eight, and add 32, I will get the temperature – 46 degrees [Fahrenheit].

--Arthur Lubinski, 1988

    The cottage was owned by Léon and Élise Auvergne, and I'd always envisioned that it was tucked on some forgotten corner of their farm, but I think that it was actually just across the yard from the main house, though I can't be sure. After the war, the farm was sold and developed into a town neighborhood, and now looks very different than it did in the 1940s when it was rural farmland.

    Michel, my French historian friend was able to track down the address: 11 Rue des Faures, Beaumont-lès-Valence, France.   

    The cottage was torn down, and I'm not sure which of these houses is the main house, but the stone well mentioned above is still there, which you can see in the picture below:

Click to enlarge. Note the well in that little flower bed.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/M4F8Jfx4tLZkpSR77

When Aunt Lilly was a teenager, she wrote down some of her early memories of France, and her stories do describe the area a little bit:

     I remember two of my many revolting hobbies. The first was finding, imprisoning and later torturing huge snails. The second and more worthwhile hobby was raising rabbits. On a warm afternoon while I was walking through the sunlit fields behind our house, gathering various plants to feed my nine rabbits, I heard a terrible explosion nearby. Upon arriving home in hysterics I was told that a bomb had been dropped a few miles away. We quickly sought shelter underground and before long the attack was over with no harm done in our immediate vicinity.

    She would have been only four years old when the rabbit story took place (I believe it occurred during the bombing of Valence on August 15, 1944)

    I looked through my grandparents' photo album for images that might show the cottage or at least the yard, but my grandparents, like all first-time parents, focused on their child so there are few strong clues in the photos.   Click on any of the photos to enlarge.

I'm guessing the dog belonged to
the Auvergnes, as none of my family's
stories mention a dog

Toys!  That picture would have been
taken around Aunt Lilly's 4th birthday.

Playing in the dirt. 
Is that the Auvergne home, or the cottage in the background?

Grandma and Lilly outside.  That looks like a picnic table?

Playing in the grass. Lilly raised rabbits,
and collected herbs to feed them, so
maybe that's where she did her foraging?

1934-1937: My grandparents' first apartment

 

Rue de la Victoire 155, 1060 Saint-Gilles, Belgium. 
155 is the red brick building, left door.

    I don't know precisely when my grandparents moved into this apartment, but they moved out on August 24, 1937, in order to move to the apartment on Avenue de Mai, where they were living when WW2 broke out in western Europe.

    There are family stories surrounding what I believe is this apartment: Arthur and Roma lived together before they got married, which I suspect was pretty scandalous for the time.  Grandma had returned to Poland for a year (probably due to a lack of funds?), but she returned to Belgium in the fall of 1934 to complete her final year at University, and I think that's when she moved in with Grandpa. It made sense - he had graduated a few months earlier, and was presumably working and could afford the rent.

    When they eloped on January 12, 1935, their landlady gave them a little reception when they returned from the Brussels Town Hall, with a nice spread of wine, cheese, and sausages, and as a further wedding gift, told them they could take as many hot showers as they wanted for a week (evidently she complained about my grandmother's overly long showers as it was expensive to heat the water).  Grandma graduated with a degree in accounting six months later.

    Despite living together in this apartment to reduce expenses, they were quite broke when they got married. According to family lore, they couldn't afford rings, so their parents gave them some gold jewelry to be melted down to create their simple wedding bands.  Grandpa had wanted to give Grandma a diamond ring, but that was just impossible, so she told him to never mind, that someday in America, he could buy her a big diamond.

    Decades later, on a trip back to Belgium to visit family, they did buy a biggish diamond, and as a child, I was always fascinated by Grandma's ring. After she died in 1999, I inherited it, and I still wear it today.

Revolution, wars, rape, brutality, intrigue: 1980s romance novels were not for the faint-of-heart

"Revolution, wars, rape, brutality, intrigue, it was difficult to put the book down."

S-----, Goodreads reviewer.                     

    The year was 1983, and I picked up my first romance novel from a rotating wire rack near the check-out lane at Aldi. It was Highland Velvet by Jude Devereau, and while not the book reviewed above, the description is actually pretty spot on for Devereau's Velvet series.  

    I was 14 at the time, and loved the book despite a domineering, jealous hero who forces his bride (whom he's just met) to wear a different wedding dress, spanks her (and not the sexy kind), and beats her dog (who understandably doesn't appreciate someone hurting its person), before seducing her, taking her virginity while giving her a mind-blowing orgasm, all in one day, very early in the book.

    The book gets much better, though. The hero grows, overcomes his jealousy, and realizes she's a better leader of her clan than he is. Eventually, he steps into a role not unlike the King's Hand in the world of George R. R. Martin and follows her lead, acts in her stead, ensures her orders and plans are carried out, stuff like that. He remains an aggressive man, but rather like one of Elizabeth I's generals, loyal to his queen. 

    I was well into adulthood before I realized just how fucked up many romances were, and how most of the time, I'd just accepted it all and didn't question the tropes of the time. Later, I was able to recognize the brutality for what it was, not just because I was older and wiser, but also because modern trends in romance had mostly moved away from brutal heroes, which made it easier to recognize just how terrible many 1980s "heroes" and plots really were. 

    But in the 1980s, it was common for books to include:

• Teenaged heroines (most commonly about 17). Seriously, they would have been considered too young for marriage even at the time. It is a myth that women typically married younger than about 20, at least in European households or colonial America.  A quick internet search suggests that other cultures were similar, but that there have always been exceptions where girls married younger.
• Heroes who were about 30, give or take a couple of years.  Nice age difference, huh?
• Paternalistic, controlling heroes who spank their wives, and we're talking domestic abuse here, not kink, and yeah, such abuse probably was realistic in the context of historical romances, but ... gross.
• Drop-dead gorgeous main characters with perfect bodies and intact white teeth. Heroines had tiny waists and flat bellies, slender arms and legs, big boobs, perfect heart-shaped asses. Male characters were just as impossible. They had wide shoulders, narrow hips, good cheekbones, and a thick head of hair. Lots of heroes had dimples and cleft chins, but they all sported heroic-sized penises with excess length and girth. Their chests also rippled with muscle, and only rarely did they have lifestyles that would account for such bodies (medieval romances were an exception - knight-heroes had to train to manage fighting in 50 pounds of armor, and that did tend to build muscle). 
• Sexual assault either by the villain, but foiled by the hero in the nick of time, or by the hero himself. A couple of decades later, I tossed one book aside when the heroine was almost raped for the third time (such lazy writing). I suspect rape was more common historically than it is today (though it's still far too common), but I don't really want to read about sexual violence in my romantic fiction. When I immerse myself in a book, I either become the heroine or she becomes a beloved friend, and it's painful to read about brutalization in either circumstance.  As a trope, sexual assault has thankfully become far rarer.
• Sex trafficking.  I've read several books where the woman was sold into marriage or a harem, and several more where the man kidnapped the woman and forced her into a sexual relationship (and later marriage).
• Forcible seduction.  She doesn't want it or like him, but he -- against her will -- aggressively kisses her, then grabs her butt to pull her in close enough to feel his erection, then she ... is overcome by lust and gives in.  Sexual assault with a happy ending, I guess?  

    Modern romances include heroines who are at least 20, but frequently in their mid-to-late 20s. They are less likely to be perfect and more likely to be quirky scholars, outcasts, or wallflowers. Heroes might still be dictatorial (at first), but are unlikely to assault their lovers. Fewer pure alpha jerks and more true partners and friends.  Heroes still have muscular physiques, though modern authors are slightly better about including training and exercise to account for their six-packs. They also still have hero-sized cocks. Some things never change, I guess?

    The first 80s trope to lose its sexiness was the aggressive-against-her-will kiss, because it actually happened to me, and the reality of it ruined the fantasy. I was 20, he was 18, and after walking me back to my dorm, I unlocked and opened my door. I turned back around to face him and say good night just as he dove toward my face.  It wasn't sexy or romantic; it was kind of scary -- it would have been easy for him to push me into the room, kick the door closed, and then ...? I reflexively shoved him away from me with both hands before his lips touched mine, though it was a close thing.  I'd pushed with enough force that he stumbled back a step, and I saw the surprise cross his stupid, drunken face.  He departed a few minutes later without attempting any further unwanted actions, and I was careful to pick only sober people to walk me home after that.

    Anyway, there was one book that was so egregious that I recognized its terribleness even when I was 15 or 16.  I did finish it, but I was so offended by one scene in particular that I took the unprecedented step of throwing the book away.  Decades went by, and I eventually forgot the title and author or the characters' names. What I did remember included:

• Takes place in the 1700s or maybe 1800s.
• Heroine is a Russian princess smuggled to the USA and raised in secrecy (presumably for her protection, maybe?). She has no idea of her background as she was an infant when smuggled out of Russia. (I now know that is a "lost princess" trope.)
• I think she had blonde hair, and he had black hair, maybe?
• Book cover was a pretty classic bodice-ripper, I think.   
• Hero is a Russian prince (I think?) who comes to the US to fetch her back to Russia.
• Their ship was attacked by pirates in the first half of the book, toward the beginning, I think.
• She is taken prisoner/hostage by the pirates. All the women but her are raped by the pirates, and she is traumatized to the point of incoherence that it will happen to her.
• When the prince rescues her and the surviving members of their party from the pirates, he, um rapes her with a belaying pin to teach her a lesson that rape is survivable, and to “help” her get over the trauma, that she is strong. To quote Resident Alien, "this is some bullshit."
• At some point, they become intimate (in a non-rapey way), but she (I think?) returns to the USA to have their kid, and he has to find her again. That’s when the happily ever after part happens.

    I only rarely thought about the book (maybe every year or two or five), and occasionally I did internet searches to try and identify it, but was never successful until yesterday, when I hit upon asking AI the following question: 

I'm looking for a historical romance book published in the 1980s that features a lost Russian princess. It takes place in the 1700s or 1800s, and it includes an attack by pirates.

    It responded: 

"Based on your description—a historical romance novel published in the 1980s featuring a lost Russian princess, set in the 1700s or 1800s, and including a pirate attack—Yankee Princess by Maggie Osborne appears to be a strong match. Published in 1988, this novel follows Nicole Duchard, a young woman from colonial Boston who discovers her true identity as a Russian princess. During her journey to Russia, her ship is attacked by pirates, leading to a series of adventures involving court intrigue and personal transformation."

    Ding-ding-ding, we have a winner! 

    It was actually first published in 1982, not 1988 as it says above.  You can read the entire AI answer (along with several other suggested possible books) here.  My memory of the cover and the physical descriptions were spot on, though:

Note how she is leaning away from him,
and her arms are behind her, not around his neck.

    From reading the page on Goodreads (and the top review), I had forgotten a bunch of the plot after the pirate attack and its aftermath:

• She was "forced to suffer the degradations and ravages of an auction-block marriage."
• She was a "long-lost, secret royal love child," and her "lineage threatened the throne of Catherine the Great."
• She landed in the midst of bloody serf uprisings and cruel Siberian exiles.

    I also didn't misremember the "for her own good" rape aboard the ship. More than one reviewer obliquely mentioned it, with phrases describing Dimitri as likable, "with the exception of one incident on board the ship."  Another reviewer said, "There are lots of wtf moments."  The quote at the top of this article was also from a review of this book, though I strongly disagree with her four-out-of-five-star rating.  That's all right, though - and I'll try to stop yucking her yum.

    It's worth noting that I don't recall thinking the book was poorly written, exactly. The author's prose must have been decent, or I wouldn't have bothered to finish it. I was more hardcore about finishing books when I was a teen (nowadays, I'm too impatient to waste my time finishing bad books) but bad prose, and scenes not properly leading to the next would have been enough to quit a book even then.

    In the end though, the plot contained too many invisible hypothetical exclamation marks: Secret love child! Catherine the Great and the Imperial court of Russia! Pirates! Auction-block marriage! Serf uprisings! Revolution! Brutality! Intrigue!  

    It's as if the author asked, "What's Going To Happen NEXT?!?"  instead of just, "so, what happens next?" 

    I can forgive a crazy plot (William Goldman did a wonderful job with his 1973 book The Princess Bride, because it was delightfully satirical, funny, and didn't take itself seriously), but I couldn't accept a "hero" that rapes the heroine, and I just couldn't believe that the heroine would forgive him.  Stockholm syndrome aside, how does someone forgive that? 

    And his actions are not heroic; they are violent and perverted. We (rightly) lock people up for doing what he did.

    I know that women do sometimes love men who mistreat them, readily forgiving even the most brutal of treatment, but usually it takes a fair amount of grooming, isolation, and abuse.  But the book doesn't bother with the necessary long-term manipulation that would allow for that forgiveness. He kidnaps her from the only life she's ever known, assaults her, and then they fall in love.  I'd more readily believe she'd ... Stab him in the eye with a fork!  Or slip some poison into his brandy! but that would shorten the story considerably.  In the end, I suppose that grooming, isolation, and abuse just aren't romantic enough.

The Coffee Shop

 Prompt - The Coffee Shop (20 minutes): Go to a local coffee shop, order your favorite drink, and write a story inspired by an incident in the coffee shop before you finish your drink.

***

    The coffee shop had that industrial look with a warren of exposed ductwork and lights dangling here and there from suspended tracks. 

    There were the usual tall tables that let my short legs dangle uncomfortably, and my feet fall asleep if I left them too long.  It was May, and the fake Christmas tree was still up, though it was decorated with plain white lights and white silk roses. 

    As I sat there alone, facing the counter with its display of baked goods, I watched the people come and go in groups, urging the women in their parties to go first, getting their treats and coffees, and moving along.  One man accompanied his wife, pushing an oversized baby carriage with a bored toddler who looked at me and grinned. I gave the child a half-smile and waved. She waved back.  The wife carried an infant in a sling.  Two babies in two years. I didn’t envy her.

    “You first, honey,” the man said, placing a hand lovingly on her lower back, gently nudging her toward the counter. 

    She smiled tiredly but nodded. “I’ll have a latte and a caramel roll,” she said, speaking loudly to be heard on the other side of the plastic barrier.  

    “Two percent or skim?” the barista asked.

    “Do you have whole?” 

    “Yes.”

    “Then that’s what I want.”

    Her husband ordered, though I didn’t hear his choices because the toddler had decided to escape the giant baby stroller and was squirming out from straps that held her in place.  The parents didn’t notice as she climbed out and wandered toward the Christmas tree. She gently reached out a finger to touch the twinkly lights.

    “It’s hot,” I told her.  

    She ignored me and reached out a finger and touched a light, then jerked her hand back.

    “Put it in your mouth,” I said and poked a finger in my mouth to demonstrate. The toddler followed suit, but to my surprise, she didn’t cry.

    The barista handed the coffee and treats to the husband, and he paid, then looked down and realized his daughter had flown the coop. There was an instant of fear in his eyes, then he relaxed when he saw the little girl at the Christmas tree.

    “Happy Mother’s Day,” I told him.

--May 14, 2023

Notes:  I was indeed at Duluth's Best Bread bakery and coffee shop in downtown Duluth on Mother's Day that year. The family I observed really did come in, but in real life, the kid stayed in the stroller. I also embellished a lot of the details (like what they ordered, and how tired the mom was).