by Russ Rymer
II
THE WOMAN MANNING the reception desk of Rouchard et Associés, Avocats, struck me instantly as a sort I’d met a thousand of and never once been inclined to like, maybe in small part because none of them has ever been the least inclined to like me either. “Oui?” she said by way of welcome, without looking up from a ledger, her tone tinged slightly with some odd extra quality—was it incredulity? Was she aghast at the sheer effrontery of my stepping through the door? I gave my name and she warmed up enough to chide me, or at least to chide (the implication was blatant) “those people who don’t think to make an appointment.”
“Just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I rejoined, but to myself, for she’d already sped from the room to fetch her boss.
In the abrupt abeyance of hostilities, an oddly domestic commotion arrived at my ear—a buzzy little incantation, like the creak of a porch swing or a deck of cards being shuffled and reshuffled, that I identified, after a moment, as the quiet musings of a bird in a birdcage, though where the cage was, I couldn’t tell. Looking down at the receptionist’s abandoned desk, the too-many-times-polished veneer not worth polishing beneath the vase of fading Jour des Morts chrysanthemums, I saw that she hadn’t been reading a ledger but making one, in the old French banker’s style, scribing a grid of columns and rows onto the blank pages of a leather-and-clothbound accounts book, using a ruler and a ballpoint pen. Her desk held no computer monitor, no Minitel. The telephone—the very beast I’d been pestering from afar, for I had rung Rouchard’s number again in the morning, fruitlessly, several times, before heading over to happen to be in the neighborhood—was an ancient black lump of Bakelite with a rotary dial. The newest object that I could spot that might have cost a penny was a twenty-year-old correctable Selectric set on a gray metal typewriter stand. The little bird chirped, and its voice was like the dry, careful setting down of cards in a convalescent wing that once was part of my rounds. The obsolescent wing, the other interns called it, a room where patients who’d worked so hard and paid so much to secure a few extra minutes of life ran out the clock with hearts and gin rummy, and time filtered in through the yellowed drapes and settled like dust on anything that stopped. I felt my certainties plummeting.
Daniel, when did my first impressions turn so traitorous? You remember how I relied on them, how whatever I sensed at the outset would always turn out to be true. By now my old clairvoyance has become a game of bait and switch, and the shine of bright promise turns out to be gilt in the long run, and my monsters do something human as often as not. Indeed, when the receptionist returned, I no longer saw a gorgon but a long-faithful lover fiercely defending her companion’s final dignities, knowing her battle was lost.
The man who emerged with her had a hint of a shuffle in what was left of his stride, and an air that said he accepted his own fate genially. Monsieur Rouchard was stooped and impeccably mannered, his coat impeccably tailored to the bulge of a dromedary back, his yellow bow tie deliriously askew beneath an iodine goiter, his gray eyes clear amid the moles and liver spots of a face that was no longer handsome, though it had been. The tinge I’d heard in his secretary’s voice was outrage.
“Docteur!” he exclaimed, and his speech still had a deep, young timbre. “Enchanté. May I get you a café? A tea? Nothing? Please excuse our mysterious note. For someone so prominent, you are not so easy to track down, non? Not with what we had to start with, which was not even a name. Finally, we reached your university and learned our good fortune, that you are already on your way to us!”
He took my arm and steered me toward an alcove off the lobby, a space just big enough to accommodate a half-couch, a couple of chairs, and a diminutive coffee table, and also the phantom birdcage, inside of which a trio of orange-faced finches busied themselves flitting from peg to perch. “Now, tell me,” Rouchard was saying, “do you have a late aunt from Ohio who then moved to Fort Worth?” I did indeed, though I had to give this a moment’s thought, for I couldn’t possibly picture her. She was storied in our family, but the only time she and I had met, I’d been too young to remember.
“She was not actually my—”
“Blood relation, just so,” he said. “But do you recall her name? . . . Yes, Bettina, of course. And her sister, Alice, is your mother, legal mother, deceased also, can you remind me when? . . . A decade ago. Well, you see, we are like the surgeon, we must be sure we have the right patient.” He glinted with the pleasure of it. “Now, my last question. What do you know of a gentleman named Byron Manifort Saxe? Nothing? Nothing at all. I see. Sit down, please, and let me tell you why we are searching for you so eagerly.”
Byron Saxe, he explained, was a Parisian pensioner who had recently suffered a medical catastrophe that put him first in a hospital and soon thereafter in a cemetery, prior to which transition he had composed a will leaving an estate that Rouchard’s firm was still engaged in assessing, not having checked all possible channels, but that seemed to consist primarily of a single item of property, an apartment his parents had purchased for him fee simple in the spring of 1933 and in which he had resided without interruption, except for one notable sojourn, ever since, and that he had bequeathed, along with its contents and whatever else in the way of assets the lawyers might be able to find, to me.
“To whom?” I asked.
“To you, madame,” he repeated.
“Then there’s clearly been a mistake.”
“Non, madame.”
“But I told you, I don’t know this man.”
Among the finches, a scuffle broke out, with a flurry of wings and a spatter of scattered seed, but no sooner had it commenced than it resolved itself, and the satisfied chiding took up where it left off.
“Unimportant,” Rouchard said, “since evidently he knew you.”
The first reaction to bubble up through my disbelief was anger. I’m not sure where my hostility rose from (though I can say that in this one instance, my shopworn clairvoyance was still spot on). Partly, it annoyed me that the attorney addressed this final sentence not to me, but to my left hand, a common indiscretion. You remember my disfigurement, my compass-rose scar with its talent for fascinating children. All children and some few adults, though the adults were generally of a ruder sort than this one. At any rate, my answer retrieved his gaze. “I’m sorry,” I said to him. “I must decline to accept this, this . . .”
“Gift,” Rouchard said, finishing my protest, and the light in his clear eyes steeled into something less amenable. “But let me assure you, Doctor, this is no gift. You have been appointed sole executor of the estate of one Byron Saxe, who may not have had much in the way of possessions or, let us conjecture, family, but who was nevertheless a legal person and who has conferred on you a legal obligation, which we will help you adjudicate. We have gone ahead with a necessary step and publicized his death in the proper journals so that any other claimants may have their chance to come forward. Due diligence will require some interlude, and then we will have documents for you to sign—there is quite an amount of paperwork involved, his instructions being elaborate, if I may say. I am glad, in the meantime, that coincidence has placed you here in Paris, so you can begin to put affairs in order. The first thing you need to do is visit the apartment, which I understand may be in less than commendable shape, owing to the nature of his disaster, but which has a number of his things in it, such as they are.”
And with that he placed, in my left hand, a key.
Getting from rue Delembert across the river to the address Rouchard supplied me with was not so difficult a task, except for the condition I imposed on myself of giving the slip to the man who could most easily get me there. Drôlet was waiting outside. I hadn’t intended to employ him that morning; hadn’t even imagined, as I ate my room-service egg and toast and made my call to the hospital and my calls (in vain) to the Bakelite lump on the secretary’s desk, that the driver would be around. But hardly had I exited the Clairière’s elevator and begun my trek across the lobby than he m
aterialized in front of me. “You wish us to go, madame?” he inquired.
Well, no, not us. But there he was, so we went. The car was a godsend, I confess. It was drizzling out. How blessed I was, headed for my rendezvous, not to have to rely on the fabled patience of a Parisian cabby as I slowly scanned the façades of buildings for the door bearing Rouchard’s number. And how relieved I was, coming back out of Rouchard’s office, not to face the daunting implausibility of hailing a return cab in the rain, vacant public Peugeots being as magically water-soluble in Paris as empty yellow Checkers in Manhattan. So I was feeling kindly toward Drôlet and his conveyance as I hopped back in and he asked me where to go next.
Kindly—but I still wished to give him the slip. As I looked down at the memo paper covered with Rouchard’s scribblings, caution whispered that this location wasn’t one I wanted the world, or at least my chauffeur, to know about just yet.
“Hotel, please,” I answered.
“As you wish,” Drôlet said, and something about the tone of his consent, the hint of ironic distance, the temperature-less control, affirmed my decision. I would think better of him, with time. Now, I had a momentary urge to throw acid on all his virtues: the absurd professionalism, the compliant pliability that so thinly veiled a resolute contempt, his confident familiarity with a world that seemed out to confound me at every turn. I upbraided myself that my tempest had more to do with jet lag than Drôlet. Or maybe I wasn’t accustomed to servants, only students and patients, and the specter of obedience deranged me. Or maybe it was just that, after Rouchard and Saxe, I had no tolerance left for even one more mysterious stranger in my life.
Whatever its source, my annoyance had the happy effect of sealing me away from everything. I was securely, familiarly alone. The Mercedes accelerated, turned, turned again, and as we twisted our way out of the quiet neighborhood and into the havoc of the bigger streets, I snuggled into the leather as into a nest. The greater the chaos outside, the calmer and more sequestered I was in my rolling cloister, defended by Drôlet’s guardhouse silence and the sentinel raindrops coursing down the tinted glass. My mind cleared. I let all that had just happened sink in.
Or, let us conjecture, the lawyer had said, family. Could he know how fraught the word was? Did he understand my impoverishment? Of course he did—at the very least, he knew that I was a foundling. Whatever he had been able to ascertain about the deceased apartment owner—which didn’t appear to be much—he’d vetted the heir quite thoroughly. He’d even resurrected old Bettina, my gadabout, globetrotting black sheep of a Quaker elder aunt. He must have known how absolute my solitude was.
There was something, though, Rouchard had no way to comprehend: the security I’d established within that solitude. I grieved—still grieve—the loss of Alice. She and Roy, my “legal” father, were far more than legal in their parenting, were parents complete and entire, and their collegial home and the whole collegiate world of two esteemed professors (he the classicist, she the mathematician) exceeded every need and want a child growing up could have. You knew them, Daniel. Did I ever begrudge them their due? I still can feel the tug at my waist as Alice cinches, from behind, the ribbon of my communion dress, the rough grasp of intensely interlocking gratitudes. I’d arrived in her life when she’d reached an age when she’d given up wishing for children.
When Alice died—two years after Roy did, Daniel, and sixteen years after you—I found a consolation to assist me through my grief, a stance: I exulted in my invulnerability. I offered fate no more hostages. No parent of mine was going to get sick and need care; no child of mine would lose her way and need rescue. Where could hazard attempt to invade such a life? There was no one around me to leave the door ajar, to forget to latch the latch.
Though now it seems I’d left more than a door unattended. A whole side of my life, of which I’d had no inkling, was gaping to the elements, and through that gap had walked a man as parentless, spouseless, childless (as Rouchard took pains to stress), sisterless, brotherless, cousinless, loverless—as solitary—as myself.
Was that how he had recognized me, this Saxe person, whoever he was, through the kinship of our kinlessness? Let us conjecture. The question was more than a perplexity. The experience of being recognized by a stranger unsettled me. Not because I didn’t know who he was—quite otherwise. I had a panicked intimation that I didn’t know myself, had been oblivious to my own existence, for here I’d been given notice that there was something essential about me an unknown man had known but I had not. Still did not! The stranger who could explain it all was dead.
Did I really desire the explanation? Obviously, anyone else would. Offered the key to her life, with an apartment thrown in for good measure, she’d not be so quick with the “I must decline!” Never mind avarice: Where was my curiosity?
Anyone else wasn’t me, though—hadn’t that always been true! The futures of these anyones had surely grown seamlessly out of uninterrupted pasts. The progress of their young, budding lives hadn’t been determined by a decision at some crucial point, a decision made, a decision carried out, the juncture of the carrying-out still evident in the invisible scar of psychic sutures, like the line in the bark of a grafted tree. For me, as not for them, the offer to unseal the past, to expose the full inheritance, was not a blessing I could blithely accept. What horror might lie beyond the curtain? I traced, with a fingertip, the edges of the other—the not-so-invisible—scar, the cicatrix clasped like a round pink barnacle to the back of my left hand, the surface of which always felt beneath my touch like the face on an antique cameo. It was a villainous face on a cameo of abuse. No. Only the bravest adoptee could welcome such an offer without a hesitation in the heart.
I deliberated over this as the Mercedes angled deftly through the snarl until, as we approached a great wide circle, our advance was cut off by a rapid flash of moving color and a thump so loud it wasn’t drowned out by Drôlet’s “Merde!” The car lurched, and I grabbed the back of the front seat to keep from landing on the floor. “Conard!” Drôlet yelled as a crowd of runners dodged around us across the road, noisily, for many of them were blowing whistles, flowing through the traffic as heedlessly as loose leaves driven before a great wind, and a couple of them ended up bouncing over Drôlet’s hood. They bounced well, fortunately; fortunately, we hadn’t been going very fast. One of the two never lost stride and evaporated into the confusion; the other one did a somersault and tumbled out of sight beside us. I leaped for the door—this drew a further ejaculation from Drôlet—and then nearly fell myself, for we hadn’t quite stopped when my heel hit the pavement.
A delivery van screeched to a halt behind us; its driver laid on the horn. I squeezed between bumpers and knelt beside the person we’d collided with just as he pushed himself up onto his knees. He wore jeans and boots and a wool cap and was pillowed in layers of shirts and jackets; a brown bandanna masked his face. I grabbed an elbow to help him to his feet, and the bandanna slipped its knot, and it was then I saw that it wasn’t a man at all. She was russet-haired, young like the others. The expression in her copper eyes was caught crazily—seized—between two extremes, opposite realities, like those frames in a film where one scene dissolves into the next and for a moment the overlap forms a single image. Her eyes and her cheeks were flushed with elation and fear and exertion, the excitement of danger, a residue of anger. Intruding on that was a grave still gaze of watchfulness. Could I call her gaze recognition? It was exactly such for me, one of those moments when amid the haste of everything else, everything comes to a stop. The two of us knelt on the wet pavement in the canyon between two automobiles, she in her boots and her road-soiled jeans and me in my dress and my overcoat, bathed—amid the blaring horns and receding keening of whistles and pounding of footsteps—in silence, and for some expanse of time briefer than a second, that was all there was, that silence, and then elation won, and haste reclaimed her and she pushed me away and was gone.
I stood and looked out over the sea of cars fro
zen in their odd array, bobbing at rest like boats in a harbor, and then they all moved forward a few yards and halted again, as though the tide had turned. The Mercedes remained where it was. Drôlet’s door was open and I couldn’t see him—had he run for help? Was he coming around to find if I was okay?—but then I spied his coattails. He was doubled over, popping up and down, searching between and under cars, until at last he stood, triumphantly gripping a chrome hood ornament. He held it aloft like a scepter and smiled, and I smiled back.
I could hardly hate him at the moment. I’d gained my own souvenir, a brown rumpled square of cloth, and when I bent to pick it up, my eye settled on something else for which I felt a sudden and overwhelming and unexpected fondness: the oil-marbled cobblestones of a rainy Parisian street. I’m here! I thought to myself. Here! Standing where American professors of anesthesiology so rarely get to stand, in the middle of lanes on l’avenue de la Grande Armée!, and when Drôlet ushered me back into the sedan with a ceremonial flourish of the Mercedes logo, I waved him off with my bandanna and told him, no, I’d walk. From the distance, I could hear the sirens of the police vans racing in reinforcements and caught on a gust of the vaguest breeze the faintest ghost of tear gas. I extracted my bag and my umbrella from the car and slammed the door and zigzagged toward the curb through the idling maze like a last straggler hoping to catch up.
III
BEFORE I COULD TURN the key, but after I’d inserted it in the lock, I was swept by a strange compulsion to check my hair and smooth my dress, as though someone might actually greet me, might be at home to usher me graciously into the life of Byron Manifort Saxe. Perhaps a welcome feast had been prepared! I’d already dutifully wiped my shoes on the doormat, the entrance’s only amenity, and knocked, timidly, and then again, less so. There was no bell. My shoes were soggy. The outfit I had chosen for consulting with a lawyer had turned out to be not so smart for a foul-weather crosstown hike. I had pictured this as my leisure day, one in which I would recover from travel and act the tourist, take a saunter, sit in a café, get reacquainted with the city: an uncomplicated day à Paris, avec moi-même, since I had myself to myself for the moment, before my official duties closed around me and I had to start thinking professionally. Already, I was scheduled to be at the hospital on Saturday, and for a Sunday brunch with Willem. Well, at least I’d achieved the moi-même part by getting rid of Drôlet, but I was hardly alone with Paris. My adopted mission clung to me like an overzealous chaperone. It was a condition unbefitting a flâneur.