“You’re very good with Diego,” Mr. Valera says. “If he doesn’t make it in time, he’ll be disappointed to have missed you.”
“I don’t know about that. Nothing ruins a child’s fondness quicker than finger exercises.”
“Except for the finger exercises, he likes you. And the memorizing. He complains a blue streak about that.”
“Good,” I say, smiling. There was a hint of doubt in Mr. Valera’s voice—could any teacher too well liked also be effective?—but I wield both the carrot and the stick.
Diego shows up breathless, only ten minutes left in the lesson time, and I still make him start with his exercises before we move on to any of the pieces he likes. Then I feel bad, and stay twenty minutes late to give him a full lesson. The younger Mr. Valera has arrived home by the time we finish, and I overhear him and his father discussing quietly in the kitchen whether or not he’s brought enough food for supper to invite me to stay.
“I should be going,” I say loudly, and nudge Diego down from the piano bench.
He tears off into the kitchen, then returns with half again as much payment as usual. He hands it to me and leans for an instant hard into my side. Startled, I put an arm around him, and we have a strange half-hug until Mr. Valera appears from the kitchen and Diego breaks away.
“For the wait,” Mr. Valera says of the money, walking me to the front door.
“You don’t have to.”
“We’d like to,” he says. “Thank you for staying.”
I’ve been avoiding asking about Diego’s mother, but as we linger in the doorway I wonder if I’m supposed to, if my reticence seems uncaring.
I am just about to inquire when Mr. Valera asks, “Do you have children of your own?”
My body goes rigid. I’ve never been electrocuted, but that’s the feeling I imagine, the same feeling the question always gives me. No one has asked it of me in a long time. I heard it less often once I began to look more like a grandmother than a mother, which happened many years ago. More recently I’ve started looking less like a pink-cheeked, tart-baking, robust sort of grandmother and more like the kind of fragile, cobwebby woman you perch on the end of a sofa during social events and hope doesn’t tip over. No one wants to get her started with chatter out of fear that she might never hush, about her past joys, her many ailments, all the departed darlings, or enemies, she’s survived.
“No,” I tell Mr. Valera, and nothing more.
Cherbourg or Le Havre? I didn’t want Joseph’s first experience of life outside Bellenau to be Cannu’s self-important hospitality or Fortin’s ascetic welcome. He had been to both places before, as well as on other short excursions, but he’d never spent any extended time away from the estate.
I asked Joseph if he had an opinion. Not about the wild, eventual lives we’d fantasized, but a next move. We needed a place to go while we waited for the inheritance to be settled, I told him.
What about Paris? he asked.
“What do you know of Paris?” We’d been there exactly twice, once for a strained visit with Alfred and Eugénie when he was an infant, which he wouldn’t remember, and once for Conrad’s wedding to Mathilde, two years earlier.
“Everyone always wants to live in Paris.”
“Not everyone,” I said, but he’d given me an idea. Were my Paris relatives any worse than our other options?
I wrote to my father and Eugénie, wondering if they might be able to accommodate us for a short stay. Very short, I promised both them and myself—just until Joseph’s inheritance was settled. Once I had their invitation, which felt genuinely welcoming and not just polite, I spoke to Cannu in private one evening, after Joseph had gone to bed. I thought he’d be pleased that I was doing my part to hasten the sale and remove us from his care. But his face was instantly stormy.
“It wouldn’t be fair to either Joseph or Albertine, to abscond with him like this.”
“I’m not ‘absconding’ with him. He’s my son.”
“Albertine is very fond of Joseph. He’s her only remaining relative,” Cannu reminded me.
“He has relatives in Paris, too.”
“That you think so little of he’s barely met them.”
“I’d like to change that.”
“Do you? Or do you just want their charity?”
This struck true, and I almost sputtered. Cannu’s opposition was a surprise. I’d expected his approval, which I’d hoped would pave the way for a loan to allow us to leave. Now I didn’t know how to bring up the money.
I wasn’t sure if it was good luck or bad when Cannu then brought it up himself. He supposed I would need money, he said, even if I had secured a place to stay.
A small advance on Joseph’s inheritance would be useful, I agreed carefully.
Cannu grunted that he would set up a hearing in Le Havre. “Don’t leave before that.”
I hadn’t envisioned anything so official, but if Cannu wanted to do this through the courts, perhaps that was all to the good. That way there would be a formal record of what we’d already received, and would later be owed.
“It’s only Paris,” I said, trying to be reassuring. “It’s not as if I’m taking him to the far side of the world.”
Many of the women at the resettlement center arrive without husbands or working-age sons, and I never know how much to ask about what has happened to their men. Perhaps the women wish to speak and would like to know someone cares enough to ask. But usually their faces are dour, walling off whatever happened to them back in Poland. The resettlement center provides some assistance, and the Argentine government arranges for a handful of nights in one of the designated immigrant hotels. But after those run out the women are left to piddling occupations—often laundry and sewing—that don’t generate enough to raise a family. I worry for them, fear they’ve come from the frying pan to the fire, but they make it clear they are relieved to be here, and I understand that the frying pan was worse than what I am able to imagine. It wasn’t like this when I started volunteering at the resettlement center thirty years ago. We served a flood of families, complete with husbands and sons, often only stopping off in Buenos Aires on their way to one of the agricultural colonies.
Because I can give piano lessons only when the children are out of school for the day, I’ve learned to fill my mornings with other things. Ideally paying things, like teaching classes at the French Institute, but when the priest at San Isidro told me a resettlement center in the parish needed volunteers, I was idle enough and curious enough to pay a visit. Now I teach Spanish there two mornings a week—survival Spanish, nothing fancy. There’s a social room where the refugees gather to drink tea and pick through piles of donations. There’s a teacher’s room where the donations—food, coats, shoes, toiletries—are piled and sorted. We are the most reliable donors to our own campaigns. I’m embarrassed by my contributions of the little gifts my pupils’ families give me: the handkerchiefs cross-stitched with music notes, the pair of potholders printed with composers’ silhouettes, the three separate ashtrays with golden music notes around the edges. I do not smoke, have never smoked. Everyone can tell which items in the bins are mine, and everyone can see how useless they are. But keeping them turns my room into a stage set full of obvious props, as if I am not so much living my life as playing a role in a pantomime.
The flood of immigrants is a trickle now; no one can get a visa. The refugees who do arrive have traveled long, circuitous routes, sometimes through other South American countries, and I wonder whether they’ll find here whatever kept them pressing on to Argentina. They linger longer in the social room than their predecessors did in the years before the war, clutching the cups of weak tea. I used to apologize for the bad tea, but then the women felt obliged to correct me, to say no, no, how good it tastes. How grateful they are. Now I say nothing.
For decades the same wall clock kept time in the social room, but recently I took it down. When the center was quiet I could hear it ticking, and in all the years I’ve
been coming here the room has never been as quiet as it’s been since the war began. I had never noticed the ticking of the clock before, but as soon as I did it drove me to distraction.
“How are the women supposed to know what time it is now?” some of the other volunteers asked me.
“They don’t care,” I said. “They’ve got nowhere else to be.”
A mother comes with a boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, although many of the children who arrive turn out to be older than they look, their bodies stunted by want. He spends an hour folding sheets of newspaper into shapes. Not vehicles or animals, just shapes, squares that get smaller and smaller until he can barely fold the paper anymore, or triangles whose corners he creases with his fingernails to make as sharp as possible. I once found a book about paper-folding at Bellenau, not in the library but on the ratty bookshelf in the old nursery. Joseph and I spent hours with it on rainy days, creating frogs, cranes, horses, dragons, a ball you could puff air into and swat around. I even ordered special paper, an expense at which Cannu rolled his eyes when it showed up on the household ledger.
I pick up a piece of newsprint and try to remember how to make some of the animals. I keep scrambling the steps, and the paper is too thin to hold the necessary creases. But finally, in a kind of muscle memory, my hands take over as if I’m playing a familiar piano piece, and I manage to produce a ball. The boy comes over to sit beside me, a little warily.
I blow up the ball and hand it to him. “For you,” I say in Spanish, unsure how much he speaks.
He turns it over and over in his hands, inspecting it from every angle. He swats it up into the air, twice, three times, catches it again. Then he hops off his chair and scoops a new piece of newsprint off the floor and thrusts it at me. “Learn me,” he says.
My heart starts splitting—that I have something he wants, and that what he wants is to be able to make paper balls for himself and not need me anymore. I am a mother again for just a moment, at the very crux of motherhood. “What is your name? How old are you?” I ask, as I begin a new ball and he follows my folds.
“Oskar,” he says. “Ten.”
Joseph’s age, when we left Bellenau. The last time my son was mine. The boy is far too small for ten. I can’t stop staring at him, and remembering, and my head gets in the way of my hands and I can’t make another ball come out right. We wreck an entire newspaper in the effort, and he is gentle in his disappointment. I am one more in a parade of people who have failed him, and he recognizes that this failure is, in the great scheme of things, minor.
“I’ll remember again,” I say. “I’ll practice and remember.” I can tell this doesn’t quite make sense to him, but he blames his own lack of Spanish. How does one practice remembering?
Like this. Like this:
I would have walked straight into the lion’s den completely unaware were it not for telegrams from both Fortin and my father asking urgently what in the world Cannu intended. Those gave me enough warning to panic, but not enough to prepare. The single wise thing I did was to beg Alfred to bring someone with him who could wait with Joseph outside the courtroom in Le Havre. I knew enough to guess that I didn’t want him there listening, and that if Albertine came I wouldn’t want Joseph waiting with her.
I was not prepared for how terribly frail my father seemed. He was not young, I reminded myself, but he certainly hadn’t looked like this at Conrad’s wedding. His suit hung from him, his skin was sallow, his thinning hair lank. He was clearly ill and hadn’t told me, nor did he tell me then—not in so many words.
He shrugged off my concern. “We’re here for you and Joseph,” he said. “Let’s see what there is to be done.”
He’d brought Eugénie, and as soon as I saw her I realized I had hoped for Conrad or Eric, but I was grateful even so.
Because Cannu was Joseph’s only remaining male relative on the Lafosse side, he was able to appoint whomever he wanted to his half of the Family Council. He showed up with two business associates from Cherbourg who had never met Joseph or me. The pretext for convening the Council was the inheritance: I’d been a suitable choice of guardian when Joseph was an infant, needing milk and a loving pair of arms. But now that he was ten, soon to be a man of means? He would need guidance in investment and self-discipline, in shaping his education and habits and in preparing for a profession.
“It may be no fault of her own,” Cannu said, “but Madame Lafosse does not have a suitable degree of experience to adequately advise her son in any of these areas.”
“I have a great deal of self-discipline,” I said stiffly, and then proved it by saying nearly nothing for the next hour.
My father and Fortin offered testimonials, but it became agonizingly clear that Alfred barely knew me, and still thought of me as the little girl he’d discarded. Fortin said many kind things, but under prompting from the justice of the peace he admitted his disapproval of Joseph’s too-casual education and my too-casual discipline, and agreed that under his own guardianship I’d had no opportunity to develop skill in the management of funds.
Deep inside I laughed—a man who hadn’t even wanted me to have a purse? He would have taught a boy, I thought bitterly. He would have taught a boy all these things.
I thought the fact that Cannu was married to the recipient of the other half of the Lafosse inheritance posed an obvious conflict of interest, but apparently even this did not concern the justice as much as my personal shortcomings. Everyone in the room could guess the outcome by the time testimony was finished. Even if we split down the middle—and by this time I wasn’t at all sure that my own great-uncle intended to vote for me—the justice of the peace, as the tiebreaker, would side with Cannu, who had assured him I would continue to play an “appropriate” role in my son’s life. “One suited to her sex and her abilities,” he said.
With helpless rage I stared at him, at the triumph bubbling up in his face under its veneer of solemn responsibility.
“Before a vote,” Fortin said to the justice, like a man sliding through a door before it closes completely, “may I propose an alternate arrangement for consideration?” He suggested a split in responsibilities, with the financial trusteeship assigned to Cannu and the physical guardianship assigned to himself.
“To you?” I said aloud, shocked.
“I think it’s appropriate,” Fortin said to the justice, not to me, “that our side of the family continue to play some official role in his upbringing. I’ve been part of the boy’s life since he was an infant, and I’d be honored to continue to guide his spiritual and intellectual formation.”
The justice called Fortin and Cannu up to confer with him privately. My father put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed, not comfortingly but tightly, almost painfully. This is the best you’ll be able to do, I imagined him saying. Don’t ruin it.
The final result was a 4–2 vote stripping me of any legal right to my own child. My father alone voted with me, in favor of my retaining sole guardianship. I wondered if it was love or loyalty or fear of my further disapproval. Did it matter? He would be dead within the year, and I wished later that I’d thanked him better. My father had been his most loving self on one of the worst days of my life, and I had trouble giving him his due.
Cannu, Fortin, and Cannu’s two friends all voted for the last-minute arrangement to divide financial and physical guardianship between Cannu and Fortin. Since it wasn’t a tie, the justice didn’t vote, merely confirmed the Council’s decision.
We all filed out of the courtroom. Albertine rose eagerly from her seat across the lobby from where Joseph sat on a bench, playing cards with Eugénie. Albertine and I both started walking toward him. We watched each other, quickened our paces. I nearly ran.
“No,” I said, when I got to him first, and squeezed his shoulders tightly, too tightly, just as my father had squeezed mine only minutes before.
“Maman?” Joseph said.
“He isn’t yours.”
Albertine looked from me to Cannu
and back again. Cannu, still walking across the room to join us, shook his head slightly, and Albertine’s confusion appeared to deepen. Had she planned on walking him directly out of the courthouse to her home in Cherbourg, without any of his books or toys, without even a change of clothes? I didn’t think I could be more afraid than I’d been in the courtroom, but I started to shake.
We all went to lunch together, God help us, because Cannu and Albertine were pretending the day was a completely objective, dispassionate effort to best prepare Joseph for adult life, and I was pretending to be an objective, dispassionately responsible woman who, despite her apparently manifold failings, could be entrusted with her own child. Fortin and I hadn’t had an opportunity to speak privately, and I had no idea what he was pretending, or what he planned.
My father picked at his food, and Eugénie hovered over him. Joseph confided to the table his desire to earn back Bellenau someday, and Albertine smiled approvingly.
“You’ll need an awful lot of money for that,” Cannu said, and I could tell he didn’t for an instant think it would be possible, but Joseph nodded solemnly. “You’ll need to start taking life much more seriously if you want to be successful.”
Joseph nodded again at Cannu’s apparent wisdom. It was a look a boy might give a father, and I closed my eyes so as not to see it, then left them closed so long that the table rustled in concern and Joseph asked if I was all right.
Once I had a moment with Fortin in private, much later that day, I slapped him across the face. Neither of us could believe I’d done it. I held the offending hand tight against my stomach, counted the bones of my corset with my fingertips, and tried to stop them trembling.
“I’m not taking him from you,” Fortin said. “I did it so you could keep him.”
“You couldn’t have suggested me?” I asked. “For physical guardianship? I hadn’t realized they could be split.”
The Vexations Page 27