Helen Button

Winner of the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts.

Daughter of a Collaborationist. Housekeeper to Gertrude Stein. An ordinary woman lives through extraordinary times.

In this dual timeline narrative, a young French housekeeper lives out the years of World War II near Vichy France with her famous employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Decades later, she returns to France from the United States, finding that a fateful decision she made as a young woman echoes in the present in unexpected ways.

In the years leading to Nazi occupation, young siblings Hélène and Guillaume Bouton, reluctant newcomers to the village of Bilignin, France happen upon new friends-their eccentric neighbors Gertrude Stein, and her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas. Dubbed "Helen Button" by Stein because she is half-American, Hélène-the stepdaughter of a French Vichy officer-grows up in a tense climate of advancing war. In 1939, war begins. Hélène, now eighteen years old, returns to France from a visit to the United States. To escape her fretful alcoholic mother and oppressive household, she takes a position as a bonne femme (housekeeper) for Stein and Toklas. When a careless remark by Stein seems to doom a young Jewish boy, Isaiah, brought into safety by the Resistance, Hélène's friendship with the couple becomes strained. Increasingly distressed by Gertrude's unusual political affiliations, Hélène and her lover, Resistance fighter Milo Fourche, begin to spy on the writer through her work. One night near the war's end, Milo learns the Gestapo plan a brutal attack on a nearby safe house for Jewish children. Hélène has the chance to intercept, which could save Isaiah's life, as well. Instead, the consequences of that fateful night will take Hélène a lifetime to face down.

Carol Roh Spaulding is the author of Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories, winner of the 2022 Flannery O'Conner Award for Short Fiction from University of Georgia Press and 2024 recipient of the Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal for Short Fiction. Her stories and articles have won several awards including a Pushcart Prize, Notable Mention in Best American Essays 2019, the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, Ploughshares Cohen Award for Best Story of the Year, the Katherine Anne Porter Award for Short Fiction from Nimrod International, and the David Nathan Meyerson Award for fiction from Southwest Review. She is a professor at Drake University in Des Moines and lives with her husband in Granger, Iowa.